Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [251]
Had she misunderstood me?
Not that she always wanted to help me.
She often looked on passively at my struggle to get to the bathroom. It was the last of my exertions. I could exert myself.
Perhaps she thought it was good exercise.
If I wanted to bath at seven o’clock it took me ten minutes to the bathroom with the Viking Strider. With the four-prong stick, six months later, it already took much longer. The walking frame in the end meant half an hour of wrestling. When I started preparing myself and the first stumbling sounded on the floorboards, Agaat started singing Onward Christian soldiers.
She didn’t always feel like bathing me. She hoped that I’d give up halfway and hobble back to my room. The points of the walking sticks, the stilts and castors of the walking frame all kept snagging on everything. It exhausted me, the bumping and the getting stuck, the manoeuvring around corners.
The bathroom door was the last door that she’d unscrewed, as if there she’d wanted to retain a barricade to the very last.
Against my nakedness, I thought.
How did she think she was going to avert it all?
Keep nicely to the middle, or watch out for the telephone stool, Agaat called from the kitchen. And a while later, as if she didn’t know exactly how I was getting on: Where have you got to now, Ounooi? Passage cupboard? Spare room? Growth rate?
As if I could shout a reply.
The ‘growth rate’, the pencil marks just before the bathroom next to the door frame of the children’s room. There where Agaat made Jakkie stand every August and with a pencil marked above his head how tall he was. Would it still be there? Or would she have scrubbed it off in the great scrub-lust that took hold of her when we’d cleared up the house? Scrub-lust and paint-lust. Sanitised for my sake.
Two rows of marks. The other was past the bathroom over the passage threshold, where the ceiling became lower, at the end of the passage, there where the light cast only a dim glow.
You could see it properly only when the light of the back room itself was on.
But nobody ever switched on a light there any more.
The door was shut.
No need to unscrew it either.
Nobody ever ventured there any more.
At one stage I used the closed door at the end of the passage as a lever. To help me negotiate the turn to the right at the bathroom door.
Then I focused on the copper letter-slot in the door.
Exactly at eye level.
It worked on me like a ray of fire.
It motivated my lame body. Eventually I had to turn my head away, and then my body, with a great lifting of one side of the walking frame, more than I had to lift it simply to move forward one pace with my dangling feet. I had to swing the frame through the air, at least a quarter of a turn, to position myself to enter by the bathroom door.
With the neckbrace I could no longer look back, but I knew that Agaat was leaning backwards on the kitchen table to look down the passage.
That’s what she always did when I moved anywhere during that time.
I could feel what she was thinking.
When I’d almost made my way through the bathroom door, she came down the passage to the tune of Oh ye’ll tak’ the high road and I’ll tak’ the low road. And brushed past me through the doorway to run the water. And then past me again to fetch the towels.
When the water was running, I had to see to it that I got myself into the bathroom in time because I had to ring the bell around my neck to signal that the bath was full. The bell that she’d hung there with the words: Give the cow a bell to keep her out of the ditch.
I had to lift one arm from the walking frame, or detach it from the elbow support, to ring the bell. One, two tinkles I could manage.
If the copper letter-slot caught my eye, if I stood there for too long facing the dead door before I could manage the great about-turn, Agaat marched past behind me, furious, on her heels, and opened the bath taps all the way and went out by the back door with a slamming of the screen door and stayed away as long as was necessary to create a situation.
A few times the bathtub