Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [75]
Roll them all up together, tie them with string, I said to Agaat, and put them in the sideboard with the photo albums. They belong with our records.
It can’t be long now before she remembers it.
The garden hangs suspended, shimmering, in the mirror, a blue cradle, a nest dandled in the afternoon light. I hear a rustling. In the mirror I see a veil of mist irrigation slowly precipitating over the flowerbeds. The leaves scintillate, the stems start bending as the flower-heads grow heavier, my garden in all its glory.
The back door opens. Quarter past five. Agaat has been to collect the eggs before the skunks can carry them off. I can hear from her footsteps that she’s carrying a precious cargo, the round-bellied basket with straw in the bottom. I can imagine how it was. Grope-grope under the puffed up bibs of the lay-away chickens. Softly clucking the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, so that they shouldn’t take fright, the close watching of the hen, her austere yellow-rimmed bead-eye, because she can be vicious and peck the hand that’s pilfering her eggs. Amongst the prickly-pear trees Agaat would have gone to look, behind the chicken run, under the pomegranate bushes, in the quince avenue, next to the old orchard. All the lay-away places she would have traced.
She carries the basket to the pantry, she takes the egg cartons off the shelf to fill them. How the good hand takes the red-brown eggs, the dunnish dust-brown ones, the small-yolked ones one-by-one out of the basket and assesses them, the largest apart, for selling in town, how she eases them into the little hollows, large ends downwards, half-dozens full. A quarter-hour chimes. From the time it takes, I guess that there are more than a dozen eggs today. Now she will write the date on the box, as we always did. What day would it be today?
A map of days, a calendar, that I have and that she writes on every day. But I can’t see that far any more. And what do I care for time? One day is like another in this decoction she has devised for me. Purgatory according to Agaat.
There was peace and tranquillity after Jakkie’s departure, after Jak’s death, for the first time in a long while on Grootmoedersdrift. Not an obdurate eye, not a hunched shoulder, and the mouth gentled for a change, the lips often livened up with a smile. How long was it, the truce? Five, six, seven years? Until I got sick, but the first year, year-and-a-half, while I could still move myself, with my walking sticks, with the walking frame, in the wheelchair, then still it was all love and harmony. I could hardly believe it, sheer bliss, I thought, Freuden sonder Zahl, to enjoy my old age with her. When did it change? When I could no longer speak, when I could no longer write, when I became completely helpless and had to come and lie here? Was it that that released the poison? That I was more dependent on her than I’d ever been? I’ve always been that, from the beginning. But with every step of my retrogression it felt to me she was becoming more rancorous, more furious. Had she pent it up all those years?
I hear her going back to the kitchen, I hear the water from the tap, that’s for filling the kettle for coffee. Her late-afternoon coffee so that she can remain awake for the evening shift. The silence while she drinks it. I can feel her thinking something, considering