Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [304]
It took half an hour.
First the colour returned. Some were orange and white and black, others yellow and black and blue. Then one stirred, then another, then two, three, till the whole wall seemed to be breathing with wings opening and shutting.
See, I signalled to her with my eyes, you didn’t want to believe me!
Then she smiled.
I remember the day. She must also be able to remember it, she read it out, quite recently, from my diary. February, 28 February 1954. Would she still be able to remember it? Her fingertips on the lashes of my upper lid?
That was the first time I saw her smile. With the chin drawn in and an inward pinching of the little lips, a reluctant smile, but it was a smile. I looked away not to embarrass her further. But I remember thinking it was a miracle. I saw more colours than there in fact were because everything was swimming before my eyes. First one butterfly flew up, then two, three, then all together in a cloud shimmering over our heads before they eddied up next to the quince avenue, and then in amongst the trees of the old orchard.
Now it’s my turn. My upper lash is pulled up, fingertips pull down the lower lid. My eye is lost, I can’t find the seeing-slit.
Up, Agaat whispers, look up!
She presses on my eyeball, light rolling movements upwards.
Come, eye, come!
There it is!
I see you!
And I see you!
In the staring eye she puts some drops. The lids of the other one she sticks open, above and below, with strips of plaster. At first her eyes are only on her hands where she’s working. She takes her time. I wait for her to look at me again. Both my eyes feel stretched open slightly too wide.
I must look to her like an extremely surprised person.
That brown case full of my things, remember? It was as if I’d buried it there yesterday. As if it’d been sulphured.
I can’t close my eyes to listen better. I must look at her, her face is right above mine. She looks at me as one would look at a dam full of water. She doesn’t prick through my cornea. She doesn’t penetrate me with a blunt object. She doesn’t fish in vain for the end of the rainbow.
She’s accepted that it’s beyond her, me and my dying.
She smiles at me.
I see my reflection in her eyes.
Everything is still there, she says, exactly as you packed it. Clothes, boots, ribbons. And shells and eggs and stones and bones, my lists, my story books, everything. Only the insects have disintegrated, and the pressed flowers are a bit ragged. And look here, even my sack with which I arrived here on Grootmoedersdrift. Do you remember? In the beginning you hid sweets inside for me.
To get me going.
I was terribly timid, wasn’t I?
And just see what else is inside!
Agaat places something against my cheek before I can see what it is.
Feel, she says, there’s nothing as soft as a moleskin.
She nestles it in my neck.
Even my wheel and my stick, she says.
She pushes the point of the stick into the rim of the wheel, rolls it over the covers over the incline of my body. I can feel it tracking over the skin of my belly.
Down the road to open the gate for me so long, with her white ribbons fluttering and her white bobby socks and her green dress. And her wheel and her stick.
My eyes can’t stay open like this for too long. You must be able to blink. And the mountains freeze in that moment. It’s life that passes in the blinking of an eye. While dying itself can last for an eternity.
Poor Jak. Never had time to pose. Flew through the air. Shrike-spiked on a branch. Never looked back. Stayed stuck in the drift.
Would I have preferred it like that? Instantaneous? Without deferment?
And Agaat, how would she prefer it if she could choose? On impact rather than this clearing-up and fitting-in, this emptying-out and filling-in, this never-ending improvisation? Hip-up hop-down in slow motion? With the bellows-book opened wide to blow out one long sustained blast of air, to keep the ember alive for as long as may be necessary?
What have we left of all that? Of all