Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [77]
I smell it, Agaat.
Ai, Ounooi Ounooi, say Agaat’s eyes. She looks away. My face is too much for her. She divides it up into manageable fragments. Under my nose she mops up a drop, from my forehead she whisks away something that’s not there. She puts another teaspoonful of egg into my mouth.
I eat a highway through the double-yolk.
It’s a wind-still evening. Agaat has opened the swing doors so that I can hear the yard-noise of milk cans and the returning tractors and the closing of shed doors.
Now it has gone quiet. Now I hear only the sprinklers and the pump down by the old dam, that Dawid will go to switch off at ten o’clock. Closer by is the twilight song of thrushes and Cape robins, a light rustling every now and again in the bougainvillea on the stoep, a few slight sleeping sounds of the small birds, sparrows, white-eyes, that settle there for the night in the centre of the bush.
On the mirror an abstract painting is limned, midnight-blue like the inside of an iris, with the last dusk-pale planes and dark stains from which one can surmise that the garden is deep and wide, full of concealed nooks, full of the silence of ponds, full of small stipples of reflected stars on the wet leaves, full of the deep incisions of furrows. Green, wet fragrances of the night pour into the room, from water on lawns and on hot-baked soil and dusty greenery.
I smell it, Agaat. Everything that you have prepared before me.
She removes the spray of roses in the little crystal vase from the tray and places it next to my bed on the night-table with the candle.
Had enough? Was it good? Are you feeling better now? No way you could have gone to sleep on such a hungry stomach.
She clears away the tray, switches off the main lights.
Now how about warm milk, with sugar and a drop of vanilla?
That’s good, later, I gesture.
On her way out she takes her embroidery out of the basket. She looks in the little blue book lying on the chair. She reads the last page and sighs. She searches through the pile, pulls out another. She puts it down on the embroidery. I can always tell when she wants to give up the reading, when she becomes disheartened with it. But these are her two projects. She doesn’t leave a thing half-done. Especially when she doesn’t yet know how it is to end.
The candle casts a glow on the wall next to my bed. In it stirs the shadow of the crepuscule in the glass vase. Longer and shorter stretch and shrink the buds. The air freshens from the window. It billows the gauze lining at the open doors outwards and inwards. The flame stirs, casts a silhouette of stems on the wall, crystal and water and tiny air bubbles trouble the light. Doubly magnified in the shadow on the wall where he perches in the rose twigs, front feet clasped together, I see the praying mantis.
She wouldn’t bring a thing like that in here without intention. The most exemplary motionless creature she could think of. Little hands folded in prayer. The green membranous wings like coat-tails draped over the abdomen, the triangular head with the bulbous eyes.
I look at the mirror. I see the candle flame and its yellow glow, the shadows, the coruscation of the water, the vase, the rose, the spriggy limbs of the praying mantis. These then are the things reflecting in the three panels where the garden has now darkened. When the flame stirs, the shadows dance, the reflections of the shadows dance, the supplicant raises its front legs in the rose.
Does a mirror sometimes preserve everything