Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [49]
My meat is unfairly distributed over my bones. The weight of my skeleton is my only honesty. My meat makes me cry.
I see the contours of my feet under the cover. My feet are logs. The tension has deserted my toes. My feet look like knees, my knees look like wodges, like half-loaves, my hip-bones form ridges and in-between is a basin. My chest inclines towards me, on either side of my breastbone there’s been nothing but folds of skin for a long time now. I remember the weight of my breasts, the shadow of my breasts.
Now light plays around me, a clod in a field, a shallow contour. It gradates itself over my heights and depressions, a crafty modeller. The cover is white, the shadows blue. The light sketches the railings of my bed around me like a barred cage. I am a skeleton within a skeleton, a crate in a truck, but I still have time, in me is my time, my wasting flesh preserves my time within me.
One should consist entirely of bone when the dying starts. But an animated skeleton. A skull full of flashes, a hand that hinges like a railway signal. One gesture must be granted you over the creatures that are permitted to die in innocence. And then you have to step back into line.
Darknesses slip along the skirting boards, light rings out over the floorboards, over the chrome, over the piles of white linen, over the jars and tubes and cloths. Stipples and stripes and spots. What is the time? I don’t want to know. In the front room the grandfather clock ticks.
My room limns itself from hour to hour, completes itself every day. My room is a perverse painter. I am the still-life. The fold in the cloth, the turned-open book.
I page myself to the outside. The sounds of the last harvest come to inscribe themselves in me.
It must be just before afternoon, time to unload the morning’s harvest and to make repairs and to draw breath, to rinse the itchy chaff and the straw from the eyes. The combine harvester that went out this morning comes droning back up the yard. The driver calls: Open up! The door slides open scuffing on its rollers, on its track of steel set into the threshold, the engine echoes darker with the rolling-in under the roof. Here comes the first tractor now, I can hear it’s pulling a wagon full of bales. The second tractor is hauling a wagon full of sacks, it’s labouring harder. To judge by listening, it sounds like a year of hefty weights.
They’re shouting in the yard. They call: Carry in, carry in! Grab hold! It’s Dawid and Kadys and the new man, Kitaartjie. I hear a bakkie. That must be Thys coming to cast an eye. Towards the back in the caverns of the shed there’s a ting-tinging of ball-peen hammers. I know the sound. They’re clinking new blades onto the red harvester’s cutting-rod. The hay must be strong because the blades hop, the blades wear out.
Perhaps they can carry me out into the yard one more time, on a stretcher. They can fit my neckbrace and strap me in and stand me up under the wild fig-tree. So that I can see. So that I can smell the dust, so that I can see the black plume of diesel fume spurting from the tractor, so that I can assess the swing of the wagon on the drawbar, and count the bales as they are carried into the shed, and count the stalks on the back of the bearer, praise the one who will break open a bale before my feet so that I can see the density, the power, and the glory, the one who shall know to gather me a handful from the centre and press it against my cheek.
Somebody must bring the small scale before me and hold it up in the air until the hand stops quivering.
A bushel of Daeraad I want to see weighed, a bushel of Kleintrou, a bushel of Sterling.
And somebody must stand in front of me and take a mouthful of Vondeling and chew it for me and look into my eyes and I want to see the pupils contract as the grains crack open, and hear soft singing while the molars grind, hey ho, hey ho, yoke the oxen now. And as the cud starts to bind, I want to see the eye start to shine.
And somebody must bring a coop of chicks and enfold