Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [316]
Don’t fall into the hole, there are bats down there, I’ll be back just now, you whispered before you turned the catch and hooked in the latch. An image flitted past your eyes, of the child trying to crawl to the light ahead through an encrusted pipe poppling with human turds. You rubbed your eyes to get rid of the image. The pit didn’t have an open sewer to the outside.
You had to keep your head and act, as fast as you could.
You knew Jak would be in the living room with your mother.
Be there in a minute! you called as lightly as you could and ran down the passage to the bathroom where you had a lightning-quick bath and disinfected the cut on your knee. You went through the bathroom cabinets and found ointment and plasters. You rifled through your mother’s medicine bottles. You slipped three sleeping pills and a bottle of valerian drops into the pocket of your dressing-gown. Rubbing your wet hair with a towel you stepped into the silence of the living room and through the towel planted a kiss on Jak’s cheek. He just stared straight ahead. You babbled through it all.
Heavens, Jak, you must have driven like the wind and then almost into the irrigation furrow, did you see where your front wheel is?
Milla, he said.
Where is . . .? your mother asked.
She’s waiting in the back, you called over your shoulder, we’re just about ready.
You crammed your suitcases and put them out in the passage. You threw on a dress and drew a comb through your hair, a touch of lipstick, a splash of perfume and ran down the passage to the backyard.
And now, now I’m dosing you for the road before there’s more trouble than there is already.
That’s what you said even before you’d got the toilet door open.
You held the dropper of valerian at the ready and on entering grabbed the child, clamped fast her head, forced open her mouth. You felt something snapping in you over the way you were treating her. The only remedy, you told yourself. You pinched shut her nose so that she had to swallow the sleeping pill as well. You rubbed her gullet hard. You could feel the little rings of cartilage under your fingers.
Swallow, you hissed, swallow so that you can calm down, swallow, I’m not taking any more nonsense from you.
forehead of flame eyes of soot mouth from which glowing coals crumble roaring of flames lamenting and wailing cast me in a hearth of ice press my front in the snow roll me into a snowball one side of me the other side of me my cold and my hot my wet and my dry who can reconcile my moieties? neither glue nor thongs nor balm nor coalescence nor grafting nor oculation nor welding through my head runs a crack no sentence is completed no wisdom gained nothing more to swallow my teeth are loose my tongue abscised with exhaustion an apple of glass falls from my mouth oh last lip and jaw of woe oh last dream in mistletoe before the pitch may enfold me
is there then a last scream coming from me?
whose are the hands here around my belly squeezing my breath in and out? whose warm weight supporting me from behind and from below? gathering me from the front? rescuing me from the moieties dreamt? who collects my parts? who splints my neck in a straight line and lifts my chin so that my gullet should not become entangled in itself? who gently parts my shoulders like wings? who places a knee between my knees so that I should not cleave to my own flesh? who is a buoy beneath me so that I should not sink from my own weight not perish? in what body am I sustained as in a crib? tilted as in a cradle? who breathes beneath me as if I’m lying on a living bedstead my pulse ignited with another pulse my breath to the rhythm of another my insight capsulated in sturdy scaffolds my sentences erected on other sentences