Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [31]
I wait for her voice, for her to say something like: I will think what it can be, I will find it out, just give me a chance, in the end I always riddle it out.
But she says nothing, slides something cold under my hand.
Joke.
The finishing touch to the scene.
It’s the hand-bell.
You ring your little bell, and I’ll ring mine.
Relentless, her memory.
Perhaps I can let the bell roll away over the bedspread, make it fall off the bed.
Now you just stop your snivelling, says the glance she flings at me. She draws the curtains completely, all but a chink, walks out with brisk steps.
In the front room the grandfather clock chimes eight o’clock. I hear Agaat opening the glass door of the clock and winding it. From the tempo of the winding I can tell she knows I’m listening. She turns slowly, so that I can hear the cogs clearly, the spring, how it coils in on itself.
Time flies, that’s what the shutting of the clock’s glass door means.
Clink, she puts the winding-key down behind the pediment of the clock.
Tchick, is her next sound.
It’s the sideboard’s dark little door. You can weep yourself blue, but your time you’ve had, is what it says.
Consider it well, says the shutting. Tchick.
Elegant symmetry, Agaat, that opening and shutting of yours in the front room. You can’t resist it. The emptying and the filling.
Time that streams away backwards, time that ticks on ahead, time being wound up for the running down.
There, behind the little blue books, lie the maps that I want to see.
And you may have dominion over my hours that you count off there and apportion with your devious little snake-hand and your white casque in front of the clock face, Agaat. But there is also space, cartographed, stippled, inalienable, the mountains, the valleys, the distance from A to B, laid down in place names for a century or two or three, Susverlore or Sogevonden, farms Foundlikethis or Lostlikethat.
Would she be able to see the sheaths, there where she’s bending over now? How many books would there still be blocking her view? There was a third pile. Of that we’ve read nothing yet. Would that be what’s blinding her?
With a mouth full of peppermint I lie here.
What am I supposed to do if I’m not allowed to cry? Crying is a last capacity in my depleted demesne. It’s something that can still come forth from me, something other than pee or poo or condensation. These three. She would want to measure and weigh them, absorb my sweat in a vapour-cloth, and store it in the cool-room. I can see it on her face when she removes my excretions. That I exude something tangible, has great persuasive force. Why then is she so indifferent to my tears? For them she would be able to develop a unique index. Salinity, sob-factor, specific gravity of grief. She would be able to taste, connoisseur that she is: The taste of guilt, the essence of almonds in my tears, and craving and confusion, tincture of eucalyptus, trace of fennel. Now is the time when she should be improvising with me, instead of nursing me singlemindedly, but she can’t grasp it. Once upon a time she could, but she taught herself not to. I taught her not to.
I listen to Agaat setting the rest of the day’s duties in train. She hands out orders in the kitchen. Her tone is authoritative, she speaks slowly and with emphasis. When she’s finished, there’s an immediate acceleration of activity. The screen door bangs. That would be Lietja going to fetch the cream and the milk for the house from the dairy, and the milk for Dawid’s clan, to put it in bottles in the big refrigerator till this evening. There, that’s the door of the small storeroom scraping open.
Do I remember the smell of fine chicken-meal? Can I count the steps from the backyard to the chicken run?
Agaat will go and feed the chicks, and then she’ll return and fill a few bottles from the milk left over in the buckets. She