Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [318]
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.
A nightmare it was. Had still considered a tour of the Overberg, a few tape recordings in the townships, all the old places once more, the farms and little towns with the odd names of which I try to tell people in Toronto. Entertainment for Vermaaklikheid, Le Fleuve Eternel for Riviersonderend. Rather just let be.
I do admire our Good Lord for his aesthetic flair in creating a world that is at one and the same time both heaven and hell. Who wrote that? Konrad? The Garden Party. Ma’s funeral obsequies, posies wherever you look, the garden in full flower, around it the summer drought.
Discrepancy, a gritty feeling ever since I set foot on land. The trip from the airport, the light glaring white, the blaze that blinds one. Arid red lands next to the road, black shadows of bluegums, pit dams with yellow condensation-rings, a last slimy dreg at the bottom. It’s always been like that. When and where did my romantic yearnings originate? Deserted farmyards, neglected buildings, rusty bits of machinery.
My standards have shifted, of civilisation, of human dignity. Drove for a long time behind an open lorry, full of labourers being carted to town for their Saturday shopping. Crush in the main street. Stayed in my car, stared out of my eyes. Boundary-maintaining body language if ever. Drunkenness in the streets of Swellendam. Your mother’s cunt! the coloureds yell at one another, unmistakable the inflection. Hurrying through them the whites with quick little steps and stolid faces.
As if from behind three-inch glass, suddenly it was there, the old realisation. I don’t belong here.
Have been away for too long.
More than a decade.
Perhaps too short.
Gaat didn’t twitch a muscle. Her cap was higher, more densely embroidered than I remembered it, spectacles on her nose. For the rest she was as always, perhaps a bit stouter, her chin pushed far out, her steps energetic, her soles squelching on the wooden floor. Apartheid Cyborg. Assembled from loose components plus audiotape.
The funeral food made me sick, the quantities, and then after that a whole week’s recycling till Gaat had it put out in enamel dishes for the workers. The children falling upon it before the adults could even get to it. Agaat letting fly with a cane among them.
Can’t stop thinking about it. An abundance that never suffices, as always on Grootmoedersdrift. And everything sweet. Sweet sweet-potatoes, sweet pumpkin, sweet stewed fruit, sweet yellow rice, sweet peas, banana salad in yellow condensed-milk mayonnaise.
The undertaker, pudgy little fingers, chatty, his theme the embroidered shroud: Genesis and Grootmoedersdrift in one, a true work of art, must have taken a lifetime, every stitch in its place.
Relieved after all that I was too late. Couldn’t have stomached it. Agaat herself sewing Ma up in the fully embroidered gown, Agaat lifting Ma into the coffin, placing the hand-splint that she wrote with in the last years in the coffin as well and screwing down the lid. Nobody else was allowed to touch her, according to the undertaker.
And then also the diaries, perhaps that’s what’s bloating my stomach. Like sheep dip. Takes a while to be excreted into the bloodstream. Was asking for it. Perhaps I should be grateful. Perhaps its effect is more like inoculation against smallpox.
Two days after the funeral. The yard still after the midday meal. Me naked on my bed in the spare room, the heat pressing on my chest.
Gaat’s white apron hanging from the hook behind the kitchen door. The big apron pocket, Agaat’s marsupium in which she stows her keys. Stuck my hand in there, goose pimples all over, a scoundrel, naked in his deceased mother’s house.
The key to the only room in the house that was locked, the only room in all the house that had a door. New hinges but no explanations.