Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [62]
Like Christmas, it’s flowering, says Agaat again.
She lifts her hands, pat-pats at her cap.
Right out of the tin . . .
I make room, I give her a chance. I look at the reflection in the mirror, look with Agaat who doesn’t know that I’m looking with her. She will see the whole garden, framed in the purple. For me it’s carved up and jumbled together in fragments in the three panels, bits of the flowerbeds. The central panel is brighter than the other two. The one that broke long ago. For eleven months now the mirror has been standing in the same position with its panels at the same angle. I know the content of the reflections, I try to imagine the bits left out, the avenues of agapanthus that must by now be in full bloom, the borders of gillyflowers and wild pinks and snapdragons and purple and white petunias that Agaat sowed and had planted in the late spring, in the early summer, so that I might still experience it, and the people who will come for my funeral.
She came in September and held in front of me the packets of summer bulbs and seeds.
Choose, she said, I’ve bought ten packets of everything and ordered 500 bulbs from Starke Ayres.
Everything, sow everything, I gestured, sow everything, it’s my last garden.
There I was right, I could see, she wanted to sow everything, her eyes shone. She blinked quickly and turned round and for three days on end sowed seeds and planted bulbs and walked singing and whistling round the house so that I could hear where she was working, and at mealtimes came and told me three beds of white gladiolus at the back and purple dahlias in the middle and right in front purple and white sweet alison. And in-between fennel for fragrance and for the fine feathers of foliage and for the yellow flower-heads that will mitigate the strictness of dahlias and gladioli and break the purple and white.
Tobacco flower, Californian poppies, and common poppies, and Queen Anne’s lace for delicacy, and in the dry beds sunflowers and zinnias and painted ladies high and low. Would she not have drawn a plan? Would she have done it free-hand this time? Somewhat more carelessly, extravagantly, more higgledy-piggledy than usual? For the music? For the departed?
There must be a show garden in flower out there.
A bower of beauty.
She’s watered it every day. From early every morning I can hear the sprinklers go tchip-tchip-tirrr over the lawns. Until the sun heats up at nine o’clock and then again in the evenings when the plants have regained their composure after the scorching of the day.
Agaat knows how to make a garden grow.
This evening if there’s no wind, if I’m lucky, if her mood continues to soften, she’ll open the stoep doors. For me to smell everything that’s in bloom. Perhaps by following her movements, by concentrating on her intentions, I’ll have my way. Perhaps I’ll manage to usurp her will on the sly, and keep it warm in me, without her even noticing that I have it, meld it with mine so that we can have one will for these last days.
Smell the world! Take the scent, all along the flowerbeds and further along the boundary fences! Show me the outlines! Fetch the maps from the sideboard!
She catches my gaze in the mirror, catches me out in a calculation, in a fantasy. I see the indignation leap in her face, her eyes narrowing. I should have kept my eyes shut. When she turns round her mien is neutral, but the battle continues, I can hear it in her heels.
I didn’t mean it like that! Please!
She adjusts the bed so that I sit up straight, she fits the neckbrace. Her hands are cold