Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [305]
A fireplace, this bed, a stealthy little smoke arising.
A frock in which to bury me.
Sulphured conservation cloth.
Tried on and tried out.
A rat is what I smell!
I see it’s now been hung here next to my bed on top of the maps. Washed and ironed and starched. The white embroidery is luminous. If one were to turn it over, all the threads on the other side would be sewn back and tied down and worked away. Otherwise it wouldn’t be Agaat’s work.
I would like to ask, ag, if I could speak I would now like to ask: Do you remember how Jakkie used to sit by you when he was small? He just couldn’t believe that a picture could emerge from under the needle.
How do you do it, Gaat?
Do you remember how he persisted?
You couldn’t really answer his question.
You fetch it and stretch it and tie it together, you said, you prod it and prick it, you slip it and snip it, you slide it in cotton-thread frames, you hold it and fold it, you pleat it and ply it, you bleach it and dye it and unravel again, you stitch on the stipple, you struggle with pattern, you deck it and speck it in rows and in ranks, in steps and in stripes and arches and bridges, and crosses and jambs of doors and of dams, you trace it and track it and fill it and span it and just see what’s come of the cloth, a story, a rhyme, a picture for the pillow, for the spread on the bed, for the band round the cuff, for the cloth on the table, for the fourth dress of woman.
Will Jakkie still see me in it, Agaat? Will he remember me in it one day? Laid out and dressed in the Glenshee?
I think I recognise the weft. So it’s true what she said? My great present to her for her first embroidery lesson? For one day when she will have mastered the art?
My eyes are drying out. Will she add drops once more so that I can try and make out everything she’s embroidered there? So many tiny details, in places it looks like musical notation. A piece of sheet music? What could it be? If Agaat could compose? A symphonic tone poem?
Or programme music, like Carnival of the Animals? An aria for two female voices and farm noises?
But no, it’s not as pretty as that. Here around the central portion it looks like a page from a manual, a guide to dying, a do-it-yourself book with illustrations, all the information in captions around the body embroidered there in the coffin position, the hands already folded on the chest. A woman in a frock in a woman in a frock I’d be.
Ounooi, says Agaat, your people have come to say goodbye to you. In one hand she has something, I can’t see what it is. The Bible? With the other hand she beckons down the corridor. I hear the clicking of dogs’ toenails on the floorboards.
What must I see? To whom is she beckoning there at the other end of the passage? Come! Come! The dogs? Boela and little Koffie? Who? There at the door? Who’s there? Dawid, Julies with the drag-foot, Saar, Lietja, Kadys, a few well-grown young ones, a few little ones. All in Sunday best, a smell of cheap soap in the room, satin ribbons in the little girls’ hair, their mothers in floral scarves, the men with their hats in their hands.
So these are all the ones I’ll be farming on with here on Grootmoedersdrift, Ounooi, says Agaat.
Her voice is factual. As if she’s leading evidence. She’s showing them, I’ve been alive all this time, three years long in this bed. She shows I’m now moving on. She shows the reins, at the moment of changing hands.
Good morning, um, says Dawid. His cool light-green gaze rests in mine for a moment. He doesn’t know which one of my eyes to peer into. He rotates his hat in his hand.
Oumies, says Saar, we’ll look well.
Oumies was good to us, says Lietja. We will, we will . . . stay here under Agaat.
The message is clear. I see how they look at each other, how they assess it, the new order. We’ll have to see. We’ll just have to make the best.
I see the hands of the adults resting on the shoulders of the children.
Look children, look, that’s what it looks like.
The children are standing dead still, the little girls in their still