Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [78]
A floating feeling takes possession of me, to and fro I look between the shadow picture on the wall and the reflection in the mirror. A story in a mirror, second-hand. About what was and what is to be. About what I have to come to in these last days and nights. About how I must get there over the fragments I am trying to shore. I step on them, step, as on stones in a stream. Agaat and I and Jak and Jakkie. Four stepping-stones, every time four and their combinations of two, of three, their powers to infinity and their square roots. Their sequences in time, their causes and effects. How to join and to fit, how to step and to say: That is how I crossed the river, there I walked, that was the way to here. How to remember, without speech, without writing, without map, an exile within myself. Motionless. Solid. In my bed. In my body. Shrunken away from the world that I created. With images that surface and flow away, flakes of light that float away from me so that I cannot remember what I have already remembered and what I have yet to remember. Am I the stream or am I the stone and who steps on me, who wades through me, to whom do I drift down like pollen, like nectar, like a fragrance, always there are more contents to be ordered into coherence.
Through the open doors I smell the night ever more intensely. It permeates my nose like a complex snuff. Can one smell sounds? I hear the dikkops, from a northerly direction. Christmas, christmas, christmas, they cry in descending tones, christmas comes. The yard plovers cry as they fly up, a disturbance at the nest? The frogs strike up, white bibs bulging in the reeds. Under the stoep a cricket starts filing away at its leg-irons. Here next to my head something prays in the void. That I may be permitted to make the journey one more time, on stippled tracks for my eyes, pursuing place names that are dictated to me, the last circuit, a secret, a treasure that neither moth nor rust can destroy, a relation, a sentence hidden amongst words.
Suddenly I see Agaat. In the dark door-cavity with the tray in her hands. She’s watching me from the shadows, I can’t make out her face, just the cap, a small white tomb in the air.
Would she sometimes simply be curious, an onlooker at a fainting incident in the street, a visitor to a cage in which a snake is shedding its skin? How would I ever know? How could I hold it against her? How would I want her to look at me here where I am lying?
I close my eyes. I thought she’d already left for the kitchen. I wouldn’t, after all that, have dared look around again. Not if I had known she was still there. I hear her walk down the passage, turn round, walk back slowly. She’s in the spare room. She stands still.
I count to twelve before she moves again. I hear her put down the tray in the kitchen but then none of the usual, the sounds of clearing the tray on the work surface, of scraping leftovers into the bin, filling the washbasin with water, washing and drying and packing away dishes, taking her own plate out of the warming oven, the sound of the kettle being filled for her tea, pulling out and pulling up the kitchen chair and then, as always, the silence as she eats her evening meal. None of this I hear.
She walks around the house, every now and again she stops, a few paces to this side, a few paces to that, and then stops again. In the dining room, in the living room, in the sitting room, in the entrance hall I hear the floorboards creak and then again down