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By Root 723 0

air, looking up at hr little arm as if it’s a stick. Walking stick? Fencing-foil? Then again held still in front of hr, palm turned down palm turned up. Judgement? Blessing? Over the hills over the valley along the river? A farewell ritual? Where would she get it from? So weird it all is I can’t put the images out of my head I think of it all the time. Why up there? What could she have wanted to see? Can imagine well what it would have looked like in the moonlight the river between the trees the grazing on the valley-side the moon-grey hills on the south-eastern side & here & there a clearing so that one can see the great plain stretched out behind. Nothing that she hasn’t seen many a time before.

Could the binoculars have been playing tricks upon me? Hr arm a pointer? Pointing-out pointing-to what is what & who is who? An oar? A blade? Hr fist pressing apart the membrane & the meat as if she’s dressing a slaughter animal? But not a sheep, as if she’s separating the divisions of the night. Or dividing something within herself. Root cluster.

Far-fetched, Milla! Your imagination is too fertile for your own good. But surely one couldn’t think it up. A. in hr working clothes in the moonlight in the middle of the night doing a St Vitus’s dance. I could surely not have dreamt that. There must be a simple explanation. Perhaps she’s working herself up to running away. I suppose I’ll get to the truth of the matter one day. Must go & see perhaps the suitcase is back.

7

A broad sheaf of light spills into the room, light that I know well, the yellow light of late afternoon. Ten to five? It’s somewhere between the quarters, stray time. The alarm clock is hidden behind a box of tissues titled Inspirations.

But something is different. The opening is not in the middle of the swing doors as always aligned with the door knobs, the curtains have been drawn so that the opening is slightly to one side of the glass doors. And the gauze lining hasn’t been drawn as usual, it’s been swept back over the white cord that runs above the door frame, it’s been pushed away behind the curtain. I can make out the garden through the slight distortion of the little old glass panels in the stoep doors.

But it’s not only the gibbous glass. It’s the light itself inside the room that quivers. It’s filled with something, a restorative rippling, pellucid, watery, beckoning.

From where this light? What can lend such a quality to this chamber of death that I know in every last detail? Over which my eyes wander daily, filled as it is with the signs of my end, the nursing-aids that promise no recovery, that are applied to the polite dismantling of my body, to the daily cleansing of my limbs, four, my three axils of armpit and pudendum, the clefts of finger toe and buttock, the crannies behind my ears, the hollow of my navel, the subsidences above my collarbones, my head with its seven holes, the little bottles of pills for the relief of my spit, my tears, for the singing in my ears, for my wasting spasmodic muscles, the instruments for the measurement of my remaining reflexes, for the notation of the statistics of my going hence.

What an ado about nothing every day!

What a farce!

Pastime, Agaat calls it sometimes. Respite. Of late she’s taken to reading me poems from the collections circulated by the South African ALS support group. Who will get them after me? Such recyclable frail-care books, it’s as good as bequeathing your coffin to the next candidate for one day’s lying-in-state.

And now in the midst of so much attrition, the light comes and announces itself in my room like an unfamiliar word. Like a word that you recognise as a word but of which the meaning just evades you. Sculp. Scullogue. Scuggery. Scuffle-hunter. Agaat’s and my dictionary games. What will she play with me now, now that words fall ever more into disuse in this room? Light-and-shadow chess? Trompe l’oeil?

Now I know what it is! It’s the dressing table!

It’s turned differently, at an angle towards the stoep side. The two side panels have been adjusted. Like the wings