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I blink my eyes to say: You’re too touchy! One can’t do anything without your taking offence! I don’t want to eat! I’m not ready for your fragrant favours!

She ignores me. I blink my eyes.

I say again: I don’t want to! I’m not ready!

She pretends not to see. She puts the bib on my chest, she pulls and plucks at it. She bends her head.

Bless us oh Lord and these thy gifts, she prays.

She scoops the first teaspoon half-full of pumpkin.

Now she’ll watch my breathing, bring the spoon into my mouth, tilt it towards the back where she can get hold of my swallowing reflex. I look at her, I look at the spoon, I look at the mirror.

For what are you looking like that, Ounooi?

Ounooi. For the sake of bread and bougainvillea!

She looks where I’m looking in the mirror, its edges brimming with bougainvillea, suspended in a tree-lined landscape. There’s a flash.

Birds, tiny birds, white-eyes that fly away from the fig tree I can’t see, that grows just around the corner. That I, Lord, can’t see. The early figs at the top ripe bells. The first light-green figs on a plate arranged with a flare of purple bougainvillea, that was how I served them, for the season, to mark it, to celebrate it, midsummer on Grootmoedersdrift. My figs.

Hmm, says Agaat, we must see if there are any figs yet, the tree around the corner here is dragging its branches on the ground this year.

She suspects something, she swivels her neck, she keeps on looking with me in the mirror. Determined to twist my arm to eat. The windmill must turn, the thresher must churn. The pumpkin must in.

And the bougainvillea, it’s flowering as if it’s never going to stop.

Is she taunting me? Does she think I must take my cue from it, from the flowers, from the wheat, from the bread?

I have ears to hear, I flicker, how many more times are you going to say it today? Since when do you expect me to compete with bougainvilleas? But she doesn’t look at me.

She keeps on looking away at the stoep door. I see her neck, the neck of Agaat from the side with the constellation of dark moles, and the row of hairpins securing the white cap.

Slowly she turns her head back, careful on her perch to get the best from the moment, focused on putting me in a place where I’ll submit and blink my eyes to say, yes I will eat, you may approach with your teaspoon, Agaat, depress it slowly on the tip of my tongue and slide it firmly upwards all along the middle to halfway, so that I have less work to do, and I will swallow what you have prepared for me. So nourish also our souls.

But I don’t do it. The fragments of green in the mirror are a reproduction, a repetition of another plan, in another format. As a map is of a place. If I can get her to grasp the analogy. Mirror, map, reproduction, repetition.

I press my gaze against the front of Agaat’s white cap. As if it’s a sail and my will a wind.

I look past her at the mirror and then quickly at the wall next to my bed. At the mirror, at the wall. From the fragmented garden to the off-white surface of the wall. From what is lacking in the reflected summer to what is lacking on the despoiled wall, an image, a hill farm on a flat plan, suspended by its loop from the picture rail. To and fro I look, to and fro, with the white-eyes that flash in the mirror, around the invisible corner, to the invisible fig tree. Agaat, don’t you see then, the unseeable, this goodly frame the earth, don’t you see it, quartered by the compass, east west south north! The yard, the dam, the mountain, the drift!

Slowly she retreats from me. She places the teaspoon on the saucer’s edge. She slides off her high perch next to my bed.

Lower the girl, she says softly on a held-in breath through her teeth.

To and fro she looks, as I looked, I flicker my eyes all the time. She looks at me, she looks where I’m looking, she nods slowly.

Mirror, mirror, she says, is it bothering you? Seen too much? On the wall? Seen it all?

That’s a start! I signal. You’re warm! That’s excellent progress! Yes, I signal, yes Agaat, you’re