Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [37]
At the beginning of winter she carried in the stretcher for the first time from the storeroom. Too flimsy for her to my mind, she’s filled out these last few years. Since she’s been looking after me she no longer works so much around the house and in the garden. Dig here, scrub there, I hear her handing out orders.
At night I don’t hear her stir. She sleeps like a ramrod on that bier. I can see it before me. On her back with the hands on the chest. The sleep of the vigilant. Twice a night, once before midnight and once after, she comes and stands by my bed in the dark on bare feet. She is not officially awake. Nor am I, I pretend to be asleep. Sometimes of late she then goes out at the back and stays away for an hour or longer.
I don’t hear her go into the back room. Where on earth would she roam?
There’s the first stirring now. The stretcher creaks as she stretches to reach the switch of the passage light. She takes one gulp of water from her mug. The enamel krrts on the floor as she sets it down. Another creak as she swings her legs off the little bed. A swish as she puts on her housecoat over her nightdress. A squeak and a bang as she folds the stretcher, a shuffling as she slides it into the second broom-cupboard next to the bathroom.
She walks down the passage. Thud, thud, thud, go her bare feet on the boards. She unlocks the kitchen door, talks to the dogs, closes the lower door behind her again. The screen door squeaks, the screen door slams, seven paces, the outside room’s door is opened, the lock, the bolt, the lower door that scuffs on the linoleum. Washing and dressing is what she’s going to do. Use the bathroom in the house, I try to get through to her, but she pretends not to understand me.
Koffie and Boela make whimpering sounds. I hear them paw the lower door of the kitchen. She no longer allows them in my room. On Leroux’s advice, she says.
I don’t believe her. From the day that she started to read from the booklets, she forbade them here. As if she wanted to be the dog herself.
She cannot abide to see other life in my room.
Just as little as she can abide the idea of moving into the guest bedroom and to stay in the house decently with me. Why not? There’s more than enough space here, I gesture, but there’s no getting her to understand.
I miss the dogs. Always when they came galloping in here, I felt as if I was still somebody’s owner. First with the front paws on the bed’s edge, wet muzzles pressed in under my hands, smell of dog bodies in my nose, laughing mouths and panting breaths, a whole warm brown fur-covered life here over my white covers. With their wag-tails they whisked the air into life here in the room in the mornings. After a while they would calm down and settle on the little mat by the glass door next to Agaat’s chair, and I would look at how their eyebrows twitched as they watched me for a while and how they at length would sigh and go to sleep. I could watch them like that until they started dreaming, till the hind legs started kick-kicking, and the little muscle started twitching in the forepaw and the lip started quivering with a muted growl. Chasing rabbits.
Now it’s only Agaat’s chair there in front of the glass door. There she sits and embroiders during the day if she has time, if she feels well-disposed towards me, and in the evenings until I fall asleep.
It’s a big cloth. She’s been working at it ever since I’ve not been able to move, all of eleven months. Started it a long time ago, it seems, because one side had already been thoroughly worked when she brought it in here the first time. I often signal with my eyes, let’s have a look, but she pretends not to see. Now the first light darts through the chink in the curtain onto the embroidered cloth where she put it