Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [6]
At first she thought I wanted her to read to me. She smirked. It wasn’t reading-aloud time. It wasn’t even breakfast time yet, before eight, right after she’d wound the grandfather clock in the front parlour, right after I’d heard the door of the sideboard go tchick and she came in here with her little book.
She’d already marked the bit she wants to read tonight, the corner of the page emphatically dog-eared.
The blue booklets on the pile all seem thicker than they are because of all the dog-ears. Sometimes she says I have to guess which bit it’s going to be. Then she says she could never have guessed everything she was going to read there. But sometimes she opens the book on her lap and recites what’s written there, long stretches. As if they were rhymes, or a lesson. Then she asks me if it was good like that, whether I can remember when it happened.
As if I can reply.
She always checks to see whether she’s left anything out, marks it with her red pen.
How long ago would she have started learning it by heart? Or does she invent bits as she goes along?
As if I can remember everything exactly as I wrote it there. Thirty, thirty-six years ago!
She tore out my inscription in the front of the first booklet and fixed it on the reading stand right up against my nose. As directed by the Almighty God, it says there, next to the other text which she wants me not to lose sight of. The table of my sickness. The table of symptoms, medicines and therapies.
She never removes them from there, the two sheets.
As if the one should be a constant reminder to me of what I’m suffering from.
As if the other is proof that everything she reads to me from the little books was written by myself.
As if the two documents belong to the same order of truth.
I’m sick of staring at the two tattered pieces of paper every time she removes my book or magazine from the reading stand and packs it away. Sick of having to listen too, because she spells it out aloud for me, presses her finger on it, on the table, on the dedication.
Symptom: constipation.
Medicine: Pink Lady.
Therapy: Exercise, increased intake of fluids.
As if I can do Canadian Air Force exercises.
As if, in these barren regions, there is anything that can quench my thirst.
As if medicine can help. You take medicine to get better.
The writing on the torn-out page doesn’t even look like my handwriting to me.
As directed by the Almighty God, Ruler of our joint Destinies and Keeper of the Book of Life . . .
I was young. And it was not the first entry. The real beginning of it all I never wrote down.
Never felt up to revisiting those depths.
Not after I’d found out what I’d brought upon myself.
Where, in any case, does something like that begin? Your destiny? Where does it begin?
The ‘dedication’ I thought up much later, when things were going well for a while, just after Jakkie’s birth. Then I inscribed it in the front of the first booklet on the inside of the cover. Date and all, 14 September 1960.
Now she wants to come and force it down my gullet. My unconsidered writing, on an empty stomach in my sickbed, and to come and confront me with my constipation. What’s the sense of that?
As if I can protest.
As if I can eat.
Breakfast.
Can one call it breakfast?
I have no choice but to swallow it.
I heard her talk in the kitchen. Dawid was there and Julies and Saar and Lietja. They were waiting for Agaat to come and issue the order of the day. At eight o’clock sharp they have to fall in. They were talking loudly. Agaat was in a hurry. She wanted to go and silence them. They fall silent when they hear her approach.
I pointed with my eyes, the box, the box.
Just wait a while now, she said, later. She didn’t catch my drift.
Do as I say, I gestured.
Now who’s carrying on agn so ths mrning, she said.
A new thing, the speaking without vowels. Mocking me. Nastier than Jak ever was about the diaries.
She moved the bridge closer over the bed, brought the reading stand and set it up.
Do you want to read your covenant once more? Just can’t get enough of it, can