Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [254]
The gate is closed, the road is white, the way is back and forward. And even further back to its undiscoverable beginning.
When she lets go of the iron ring, she’ll bring both hands to her head. She’ll press her cap closer to her head.
I’ll be there, Agaat. For a moment there’ll be a smell of fennel. I’ll touch the white embroidered edge of your cap with new fingertips. Just so that you’ll wonder, along the rippling of your gills: What Christmas breeze now?
And I tell you: To notice a breeze there where you’re standing will be a new beginning, a fern-tip of courage, a thimbleful.
But what will I be able to do about the motherless dust, about the empty road beyond the gate, the barren summered world around Grootmoedersdrift, the white heat, the ashen fallow-fields, the sheep with their snouts on the scale, their lips scavenging for the dry pods of vetch? What would I be able to do about the dry little pit-dams, the black shadows of bluegums, what about the white eviscerate boulders on the Heidelberg plain, the black rocks in the Korenland River?
It will feel too large and lonely for you. You will step back from the gate. You will turn round. The yard, the house, will feel too small. Small and deserted and inexorable. You will want to shut your eyes. You will open them again. You will want to crawl into your hearth. You will crawl out again. You won’t know what you’re about. You’ll go round the back, past the sheds to the backyard. Your feet won’t feel as if they belong to you, your steps will feel too long, your legs too loose. The milk-can there next to the screen door will seem to you like a thing you’ve never known. You will lift its lid by the chain and let go of it again. You will push open the door of the little creamery. The smell will drain you of your strength. With the front end of your cap against the separator’s cool shiny chrome you will stand for a while. Blindly you’ll feel for the handle and start turning till the high keening sound is released and you feel the vibration against your forehead.
Oh, my little Agaat, my child that I pushed away from me, my child that I forsook after I’d appropriated her, that I caught without capturing her, that I locked up before I’d unlocked her!
Why did I not keep you as I found you? What made me abduct you over the pass? What made me steal you from beyond the rugged mountains? Why can I only now be with you like this, in a fantasy of my own death?
Why only now love you with this inexpressible regret?
And how must I let you know this?
See, in the twilight I lead a cow before you, a gentle Jersey cow, the colour of caramel, the colour of burnt sugar, she smells of straw and a cud of lucerne. I place your hands on her nose, your palm on her lips. You are the eye-reader. There it is, bucketfuls of mercy in those defenceless pupils. I bring you in the vlei to the whitest arum lily rolled up. Take it by its ragged edge and whistle. It will open as the poet says with star-light in its throat. Here a bokmakierie hiccoughs in the wild mallow, all love contained therein, too much to endure. Just smell the buchu, and imagine the soft wet winter that will once more penetrate the soil. Let yourself be consoled, Agaat, now that language has forsaken me and one eye has fallen shut and the other stares unblinkingly, now I find this longing in my heart to console you, in anticipation, for the hereafter.
Am I vain in thinking you will miss me? That you will long to look after me, to wash me and doctor me and dress me in my bed, your last doll with whom you had to play for four years? Who is consoled by the thought that you will long for me as I was at the very end? Which me, which one of my voices will you want to commemorate? Look well, listen well, you will know when I depart. If you are sleeping, you will be woken up by it.
Who is it that clasps the irons of the gate for one last time, that lifts the ring to go out? Who hesitates there by the bars of the cattle grid, who inclines the neck slowly there where the noonday sun falls between the rails? What hoofs are