but far enough on vlei and hill,
and best below the wind
for their bleating not to be heard by their lambs.
A child as is well-known,
can tell her mother’s voice from a thousand others,
and from as far away as four full miles.
And furthermore, as lambs are really stupid,
and huddle together against the fence,
and stampede themselves into a heap in one corner of the camp,
you must let a few old-ewes walk with them.
I tried to turn my eye up, downwards, sideways, but for the first time it was stuck, totally unyielding in its socket and I had to keep looking at her. I relaxed my focus, tried to haze out the image. But under the white cap the brown smudge of Agaat’s face kept looming, distorted, rippling, like an underwater statue singing.
The motherly full-mouthed sheep
will disinterestedly
calm the little weanlings,
and lure them to the grazing and to water
so that they do not lose condition.
Carefully to milk out the bereaved ewe,
is on the other hand your duty,
the more so if you have been blessed
with an abundant season.
When the song was done, she wrenched back her arm into its sleeve and went and sat in the Redman Chief, strapped herself in, clicked shut the buckle and started reading from a blue booklet. Only her lips moved. When she saw I was looking at her, she pressed the knob, grabbed the steering column and turned the chair, a soughing right-about turn. Only the high black back I could see, the chrome grips on either side, the deeply treaded black rubber of the back wheels. Only a whispering I heard from time to time from behind the backrest, moaning sounds, as if the chair had a life of its own.
Could I have dreamed it all? The snuffling, the forward and backward manoeuvring of the chair, the leisurely turnabouts, first this way round and the other way round? The fluttering of pages, the tearing sounds, the groaning, the sighing? The backward recline setting, the forward incline setting, the automatic rocking function, at a small angle, just lightly to and fro, to go to sleep? To relieve the bodily aches of the seated?
Did I think it all up? Such a bare shoulder you could surely not dream up? Such a chair? There it looms in the middle of the room, a throne of black leather and chrome, the embroidery heaped up on the seat. Like a burnished throne.
I’m not dreaming now, I’m wide awake. It’s morning, I smell the garden, I see the hydrangea arrangement. I remember. Over there in the corner stands the duster where Agaat has just put it down.
PR•A•Y, I spelled.
Pray, she repeated, with the trace of a question in it. She’s waiting for me to speak more. How can I explain why I want a prayer to be said? A way in it is, a snare. How else am I to find out what she’s turning over in her mind? Where she went to in the night?
Three times I was aware of her standing next to my bed in the dark. After the last time I heard her go out at the back. But I didn’t hear the outside room’s door open. It was the door of the storeroom. I heard something fall, a clattering of spades and tools, a muffled exclamation. And then nothing, only the wind, and floating on it a rumour, an image, an intimation of discord, of lamentation, of a beating of the breast, the white cross straining across shoulders, screams in the night, against the red stones, in the red dust of summer, a shaking of the firmament, a star shower, a dark glow from the mountain, a weal across the eye, across the cheek, a burning grey bloom, but not my own tears. Old as the bloom on black-ripe Christmas plums it was, soft and powerful. I heard the dogs bark, in the distance, high up, from across the river, from the direction of the mountain. Boela’s bark, Koffie’s bark, upset, deranged, a barking after whatever possesses human beings.
Pray for me, Agaat, pray for whatever possesses human beings. Pray for the last plum season that I shall live to see.
You can’t prescribe people’s prayers.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.
Lead us not into temptation. And forgive us our trespasses.
How simple that sounds, but who leads whom and who trespasses against whom here?
Why create a temptable human being?
Forty days in the wilderness! Here it is, marked down for me in the calendar. 6 November to 16 December. The calendar is clamped fast to the reading stand, over the commission, over the symptoms and their futile bygone treatment.
Forty days. All the kingdoms of the world, if thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine. That she read from the Bible. When? Yesterday afternoon?
If thou therefore wilt worship me, shall be thine? What’s that supposed to mean? Does she think she’s Beelzebub?
I have two days left to make a full forty. How many quarter-hours is that? I can’t count any more, the dark and the light hours, the ray of sun on the altar. Sixteen December is circled. The Day of the Covenant, the Day of Reconciliation.
An affirmative calendar! Can anybody be so deliberate! So pathetic? So literal! Or is it pure coincidence? Is everything that’s happened here pure coincidence? Is it only I who dreamed up the causes and the effects, the reasons and the grounds? And she who rearranged them? Because without that one cannot live and cannot die?
Pray for me, Agaat, wipe the grey bloom from my cheek, from your cheek. There is a possibility of lustre. The black-ripe fruit. The sweet moisture. Wipe the bloom on your sleeve. Let there be radiance.
What are you doing there in front of the mirror?
Are you verily rolling up your sleeve in front of me again?
Why the exposure all the time? What am I supposed to see that I haven’t seen yet? I know it, don’t I. Your deformed arm. I brought you up, didn’t I?
Your right sleeve, up, further up, over that shrunken hand of yours. Over that thin straight little forearm, bare as a crowbar? The round elbow a length of bent copper tubing? A brazen snake in the desert? Are you raising it above me? Your black sleeve, rolled up as far as your armpit, for a clean blow, for a straight strike? At which part of me are you going to aim? Are you going to penetrate me with it? Through the heart? With the same arm that made me pity you in the first instance?
One shouldn’t pity deformities! Every deformity is a weapon, a lever, the seat of power and devastation.
Is that what you’re trying to get across to me?
She holds the arm athwart her face. She turns it, moves it down. A fencing foil. One pace back she takes, one pace forward. Dip at the knees! Up jerks the shoulder!
Before the railings of my bed.
As on the moonlit night of the burial of the heart.
As in the Tradouw with the umbilical cord that jerks, the rope from which the child is suspended.
As before the sick bull in the holding pen.
As before the foaming waves of Witsand in the black bathing costume.
Low she keeps.
High she aims.
Does she want to charge?
Does she want to kneel?
Does she want to be assumed in glory?
What convulsion of self-exposure, what furious salutation is this?
No, she puts her knuckle in her mouth.
She takes her knuckle out of her mouth. She has broken the skin. Blood flows from it.
On this fragrant morning before my unbalanced gaze she prays.
Lord God in heaven, comes her voice.
Hear me!
Foot-rot!
Stinking smut!
She dips her head, the white cap casts a splash against the mirror.