Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [319]
The silence with that key in my hand, heavy as before the offering up of prayer, before the laying on of hands, before the sprinkling of the forehead, like those silences of my childhood, the town church, the re-echoing coughs in the pews. The roof ticked with the heat, the floorboards in the passage creaked under my feet. My heart beating. The same feeling I had as a child when I slipped away in the afternoons to the outside room. To be with Agaat, with her soft body in the nightdress where she was taking forty winks, her smell of starch and Mum.
Dark it was in the room. Locked the door and stood still to accustom my eyes.
Ma’s room. For a moment it was just like always. Drawn curtains, an atmosphere of aches and pains, an aroma of grievance, of anxiety. Meine Ruh ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer. Soft radio music. Midday concert. But this time it was quiet.
And there before me: A high bed piled with pillows, a dark stain on the top one, objects dangling from the ceiling. Chrome railings, benches, chairs, steel frames. Cramped it felt, the walls covered in stuff. Installation for percussion. Shadows shifting behind the curtains.
That’s the way it was. As always. More questions than answers.
Her voice! Muted, from somewhere. Some things don’t have reasons, Jakkie, some things just are the way they are. And you don’t have to believe everything you’re told. There’s a lot of ill will. There are old wives’ tales.
Walked through the room with long strides, plucked open curtains, unlocked and threw open stoep doors. There were too many smells, of cloth and upholstery, and dry grass and vanilla, medicine, disinfectant, soap, breath, a sweetish miasma of mortality.
Turned round, surveyed the room. The afternoon light on the floor, points of light on chrome and glass. Trumped. Ali Baba’s cave. Not quite an accurate simile. The murky realm of mothers, rather. Monstrous specimens everywhere. Samples of some weird mnemonic.
Dresses and hats, mirrors, watches, maps, photos, yellowed diagrams, pieces of paper scribbled over with lists of phrases: I wish, I fear, I hope, I dream. Question marks, exclamation marks, a chart with the letters of the alphabet: V is Canaan’s vine bearing bunches so black, the explorer returns with a bunch on his back.
Ran my hands over everything, over the feathers, the seeds, ears of wheat in an old ginger-beer jar, scraps of paper pinned to the curtains.
One by one I picked up the objects and put them down again, the skull of a buck, of a baboon, a lizard’s skeleton, a ram’s horn, a trocar and cannula.
Cranked once the meat-mincer screwed down to the end of a table. The empty metallic sound on wood. The mills of God.
There were my varnished birds’ eggs in a bowl, the old binoculars in their leather case with the red lining, Oupa’s old telescope with which Ma taught me and Gaat about the stars.
The moon and the stars, that’s about all that was missing from that room.
There were butterflies pinned to green felt, a copper pestle, the blue Delft birth-plate, now in my suitcase, a spade, a tarred rope, a combine blade, a dried-up sheep’s ear, a horseshoe, three droppers, a wire spanner, a bag of compost, jars of soil samples, a wire clipper, a Coopers dosing-can for sheep medicine, a rusty sickle.
Not quite pictures in a gallery.
Also a worn brown suitcase, lichen around the locks, set up on the arm rests of a straight-backed chair right next to the bed, full of mouldering bits of cloth and paper and bone, a few marbles. Musty. Corpus delicti. Lifted it off and sat down in the chair, dizzy.
It was Gaat’s handiwork, unmistakable. Miss Havisham in the death chamber.
What would I myself have selected to commemorate my mother? So vaguely present in my life, compared with Gaat.
Definitely more than commemoration had happened there. To judge by the placing of the chairs, a kangaroo court rather. And me there naked amongst the deceased props a nude figure in a Kienholz environment. He would be jealous of it. Homunculus in the skull nursery.
At last I could get up. Simply had to go and see what the dark