Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [302]
7 July 1960
Can’t find the right book heavens things go so fast nowadays & it’s so difficult to keep one’s wits about one through it all. Would rather not page back too much here. A.’s childhood & growing up. Feels like a lifetime since I last wrote in this one. Changed into a different person in the span of six months. Lord be thanked no longer nauseous. Just swollen ankles & heartburn in the mornings.
Had a situation again with Ma this weekend. First it was J. & his dog-kicking & then Ma presumed to preach to me about men. No she says I must send the story of J.’s battering into the world via the housemaids & especially A. I ask you the child my messenger to somebody like B.! Why must I listen to a single word she says? After she kept poor Pa under her thumb all his life with hr prescriptions. The worst is that that I’d left the outside room that I’d prepared for A. open by accident after I’d shown Ma all my preparations there & that Saar of course took the gap when she came in in the late afternoon for the milk & went in there. Clearly inspected everything to the last detail & then she was prancing around the kitchen with a spiteful expression & provoking A. with a so-called ‘secret’ & that after all the trouble I’d taken to work there only at night when everybody was asleep. Had succeeded so well in hiding it from A. till now. So I took Saar aside & tried to talk to her about it. Wouldn’t she just interrupt me & answer me all cheekily: Never ever I won’t tell her anything about it Mies & if she notices anything I’ll say it’s my room. I’ll say I’ve done now with my hotnot hut down there next to the drift & its leaking roof & the mosquitoes that eat me alive at night. It’s me who’s going to stay in the back here a nice soft bed & a mirror & a stove & tea & rusks & a white cap & a white apron just like the maids in the Royal Hotel.
Lord what kind of trouble we can expect from this again. If you think you do right by one then the same thing is a wrong to somebody else.
20
Agaat’s footsteps, they’re different from when she wants to open the curtains, wants to open the stoep door. They’re always different when she’s setting her mind on opening my eyes. The tread of somebody who has a book in hand and is too burdened by the contents to read it to its conclusion, and yet feels obliged, compelled. Even though the ending is predictable and has been foreseen for too long.
That’s what it felt like the last few times when she opened my eyes. She couldn’t look at me.
But today it feels different. Have I at last been brought back to normal proportions? I’ve always felt too big and always too much in this bed, her expectations of me far too high. I’ve allowed myself to be influenced by that. Made my life, her life, more difficult than was necessary.
But today it is different.
Whom did I become for her overnight?
Suddenly she’s no longer measuring herself by me.
I wait for her to open my eyes for me. What can I give her to study? My blue irises, my motionless eyeballs, the white of my sclera, the black of my pupils? Not much more than that. That is what has remained.
When she left here in the night, last night? she closed both my eyes, the sleeping eye that she distended before the meal and the stare-eye that I can no longer blink or shut, caulked my limbs as if I were a ship, smeared pitch between my planks before she set sail in the embroidered garment.
Did I dream it? The white cap, the white gown at the black wrought-iron gate, the white ring-wall? The taking-off of the shoes?
Did I see it? The gliding passage between the headstones, the feet in the heap of black soil, the sinking away up to the ankles?
A ritardando on loamy clods, lento, lento sostenuto, then the looking down and the hesitation, the lowering into the hole, for a moment only the cap, a mainsail above the waves.
Did I invent it?
And when at length she was lying flat on her back in my grave there in the old family cemetery, was the night then a star-filled rectangle, the Bear and the Scorpion,