Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [73]
There’s a view of the garden in the mirror, but sharper, clearer than a garden can be. My garden I see there, cut out on three levels, abounding with detail, the most alluring prospects.
It’s cornflowers I see, deep blue cornflowers in the one wing and in the other wing a cascade of long bent stems of light-blue agapanthus. And crepusculating on the central panel, in a pool of jacaranda shade, the voluptuous powder-blue heads of hydrangeas in full flower.
Cautiously I sip at it, choking with emotion would spell the premature end of this story. Could Agaat have started understanding me, at last! If it wasn’t coincidence, if she could get that far merely on the basis of eye signals, endless possibilities remain ahead, then I mustn’t spoil it now with an attack of sentimentality.
The mirror reveals a perfect result. The best I’ve ever experienced the garden. This is how I had always imagined the north-east side could look. I planned it in terms of all the different shades of blue in the catalogues. This is how I imagined it. Blue perennials, iris, agapanthus, hydrangea, bushes of kingfisher daisies, annuals sowed in the low borders every year, first for the winter plain blue pansies and forget-menots that started coming up by themselves in tract upon tract and then ageratum for spring, and after that for summer, cornflower, cornflower, and again cornflower. Because of blue one can never have enough in the barren yellow and brown of summer and also not in winter when it must help the rains to fall as the old people believed.
Now Agaat has arranged it for me in mirrors, a vision. How shall I know whether she reacted to my request or if it was mere chance?
Or could she have been planning it for a long time? First the emptying out of my room, the drawn curtains and now the light, the restoration of colour and objects? So that I, as I am drained of myself, can fill up with what is outside myself, as the poet says? So that something can start floundering upstream in the run-off? You never know with Agaat. She is witched. Sometimes I think she’s playing games with herself, and I’m a mere excuse for her inventions.
In the beginning she arranged fresh flowers in the vases every day, as she knew I liked it, but then Leroux apparently said we should beware of dust and pollen and insects.
That was Agaat’s story.
Perhaps she’s sorry now, wants to make up for it now.
As always at this time of the day shadows are playing on the wall next to my bed, but now there are lively stipples of light, points of blue, a general tint of agapanthus cast on it by the mirror.
A multiplied garden.
One visible through the window, one in the mirror, one on the wall.
How long could it have taken her? How many times of walking to and fro, softly so as not to wake me?
Perhaps she flew, changed herself into a dragonfly. Or a wasp. Landed on my pillow, her head in line with mine, to see through my eyes, and then back to adjust the angle, the angle of the dressing table, the angle of the three panels in relation to me, to one another, to the cornflowers, to fit everything together. One degree to this side or that side could lose the hydrangeas, could include a chunk of brown stoep wall instead of a bed full of blue flowers.
And then there are still the maps, Agaat, what must I do to get them? Heaven and earth it would seem you would move in order to have me buried in a cheerful and contented state. You’ll see to it that I’m not left here impaled like a grasshopper on a thorn.
Poor Jak. What makes me think of him now?
Perhaps he’s wandering around restlessly. Perhaps he’s approaching now through the wattles to see what’s become of me. For him it was all so sudden. One two three, I’m coming! Premature! No time for second thoughts. His mouth was gaping with it, his eyes as big as saucers. Good Lord, now I have an urge to laugh! Our father who art in heaven, that I want for breath to laugh! Earlier Leroux thought it was one of the symptoms of