Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [262]
It was a fantasy you couldn’t sustain for long, so mendacious, so banal was it. It was what one read in bad novels. In such a book Agaat would then have had a band of supporters, a claque of hand-clappers and whistlers, a villain with a feather in his hat who could egg her on.
No, it couldn’t be like that. She would creak and rustle as she stepped out of her stays and, square in her full-length petticoat, hand on her side, glared at the cap, at the apron, glared at the black dress, lying in a heap there on the floor. She would drape herself in her nightgown like a toga and betake herself to her bed in grim and magisterial dudgeon.
You wanted to soothe yourself with these images. You knew none of it really fitted. There was no sportiveness and there was no self-importance either.
You knew how it would really be, as if you yourself knew the steps.
It would be quiet there. The linoleum on the cement would scrunch sandily under her feet. It would smell of soap and starch, of freshly ironed laundry. The bare light bulb would cast its shadow on the floor, in the hollowed-out seat of the collapsed easy chair. The embroidered cloths would radiate starkly from the walls, Moses in the burning bramble-bush, Elijah in his chariot of fire.
Perhaps she would switch off the light and first sit still for a while in a chair to think over the day?
Perhaps she would light a little fire to ponder by?
But you knew that even that was your own wishful thinking.
There was not then, at that stage, any space between Agaat and Agaat.
She was in preparation for Jakkie’s arrival and Jakkie’s departure.
She was living outside herself, leaner, sharper, like somebody the day before she leaves on a journey, the suitcases all packed, the usual routine scaled down and intense.
In that room.
There everything would be tidy and bare and rustling.
Rapidly she would wash, rapidly dry herself, thoroughly as in an institution, without dawdling, without a single gesture of self-cherishing. Everything would be in its place, as if for inspection. No tarrying, no reflection.
She would switch off the light at the door and wait in the dark for a moment until she could see again. Barefoot she would walk to the bed, hitch up her nightdress, get onto the bed with one knee first, worm in under the tensed sheets, without burrowing them loose, find a hollow for her head.
Would she lie open-eyed in the dark, first with her face to the window onto the yard? Would she lie looking at the glow of the moon through the curtains? Through a chink? At a star?
No, she would turn round on the other side, with her face to the wall.
And then with a sigh, a sigh you’d want to allow her, she’d close her eyes to sleep.
You thought all these things. All the time in that period before Jakkie’s birthday you thought about Agaat.
How did it come about then that that July of all Julys you once again forgot her birthday? For the third time?
waterchair coalblack hoisting sound at high C soap-resistant insulated rustfree synthetically upholstered so as not to scratch the bathtub weight limit 200 kilos for stouter fatter cripples but a thin one a light-weight to hoist her a joke to let down a doddle to bathe her child’s play on a double-decker bench minus armrests screwed to the water’s edge lower than the wheelchair so that she can slip effortlessly into it aquasitz by julius bach as one would expect from germans seatbelt neckring hydraulically we row along row along press the button then she rises up derricked over the edge and then again lowered to the bottom a light shock adjust the backrest lie back relax unlike the inner tube on which she gyrates on the whirlpool what is that she hears? a demonstration lesson? doctor unpacking bench again agent of bach in africa? but he left a long time ago! what does she hear in the dead of night? over and over the hoisting sound up and across and down seventy times seven times? she takes to her ibot mute medium cruise down the passage who’s there all alone in her bath? neck clamped in