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It smelt sweet there with her in the little bed. Agaat’s breath, her little body smell sweet nowadays. All the sores and ringworms have healed, the bad teeth have been pulled, she eats well and sleeps well, has regular bowel movements, has a bath every evening. Not at all as hunched up and bewildered as at first. Sweet, like a little rabbit. And then there was also the twig of fennel that she’d picked this afternoon that I’d put in a little jar next to her bed. I picked a leaf and crushed it between my fingers and smelt it and made her smell it too. Dreamy the little eyes were in mine, they half closed from the aroma. If she were to say something, I thought to myself, it would be because she was almost asleep.

I wanted to press her to me. But that’s against the rules.

Twenty to nine

And then!

My hand trembles to write it.

Then I bent down and whispered in her ear.

What did I say to her?

Ten to nine

I’m so hungry, I’m so thirsty, I said, because you don’t want to talk to me and I know you can talk, because I hear you, through the hole in the door, how you talk to yourself in bed and I see your lips move and I wonder what you’re saying.

I knelt by the bedside.

Perhaps you can say your new name for me?

I blinked with my eyes to ask, big please!

Twenty past nine

Why is it taking me so long to write it up? I’d rather just think about it again and again. It’s too precious! It’s too fine! Words spoil it. Who could understand?

I held my ear right next to her mouth, a good ten minutes long I breathed in her little fennel breath.

I imagined the tip of her will as the rolled-up tip of a fern. Did I say it out loud? That she should also imagine it? A tender green ringlet with little folded-in fingers?

I bent it open with my attention.

Then it came into my ear, like the rushing of my own blood, against the deep end of the roof of her mouth, a gentle guttural-fricative, the sound of a shell against my ear, the g-g-g of Agaat.

I felt faint, lowered my head on her chest.

Fast asleep she was when I lifted my head. I must have slumbered off myself. Had I dreamt it all?

When I got up, she opened her eyes. I opened my mouth to say her name.

Then she also opened her mouth.

Then we said her name at the same time. Sweet, full in my mouth, like a mouthful of something heavenly. Lord my God, the child You have given me.

Ten o’clock

Still I have the feeling of satiety. Now still as I’m writing here, hour upon hour, I feel it, a tingling fulfilled feeling through my whole body, as I imagine it must feel to suckle a child. Can it be that you feed someone else and feel replete yourself with it?

Perhaps it’s the mere fact that she could go to sleep with me so close to her that makes me feel like this.

It’s the first time in my life that I understand it like this, the impersonal unity of all living things. It doesn’t matter who is who. The speaker and the listener. The shell and the sea, the mother cat and the human hand that stirs her blind litter, the wind and the soughing pine, the dry drift and the flood. It’s one energy. We are one, Agaat and I, I feel it stir in my navel.

17 March 1954

Agaat spoke to me again! Admittedly through a closed door, but still! First we played the knock-knock rhyme, on either side of the door, I say the words and she knocks the rhythm.

She looks for her man

and she looks for her child

her patience is thin

and her eyes are wild

she knock-knocks!

she knock-knocks!

knock-knock!

knock-knock!

By the second verse I hear another voice beneath mine.

She knocks with her body

To know if she can

Who has eaten

Her child and her man?

Knock-knock, knock-knock.

Then I remained quiet and Agaat actually started the third verse on her own, rapidly on the in-breath.

Her hunger is great

and her blood is thin

she keeps her heart

on a drawing pin.

Who’s speaking? I ask behind the door.

Me.

Who’s me?

I am me and you are she.

What’s her name?

Agaat.

Agaat who?

Agaat Lourier.

Who is she?

Crawled out of the flea-blanket!

Where does she come from?

Oupa rode a pig!

18 March 1954

Back room door open on a chink. We sit on either side of it on the floor. We sing, we talk, rhymes, songs. Not real sentences yet, but better than nothing. She’s evidently taken in everything, literally every word that I’ve taught her up to now, she can’t be retarded! Everything but. Just Jak that’s nasty. Coon kindergarten, he calls out when he hears us.

20 March 1954

If she doesn’t want to talk to me properly face to face, she doesn’t get food and she stays in her room. That’s the rule. Two days now.

21 March 1954

Back in the corner with the knuckle in the mouth. Ashen-faced, her moles look black. I simply lock her up. She must be taught to obey me. I send Saar to empty the pot. I say at the door what there is to eat. But she must ask properly in a full sentence what I must dish up for her. I’ve run out of patience.

22 March 1954

After three days without food it came at last: ‘May I please have jelly with custard.’

Word for word, said after me, on the in-breath, whispered, eye cast down.

Jelly is for independent people, not parrots, I said. And you look into my eyes when you talk to me, otherwise I don’t hear you.

Gave her a crust of dry bread. Mouth a sour slit, chin out, hungry enough, ate the bread to the last crumb. Obstinate little blighter!

23 March ’54

Caught Saar smuggling food to the back room this afternoon. Keeping key in my bra now. Won’t allow my discipline to be subverted here.

24 March ’54

Breakthrough! At last! Lift the clapper of the slot, up she jumps, dances on one leg, claps hands, sings along gulp-gulp.

Little turkey jumps over the ditch

Little turkey runs from the witch

Then I left the door open, so wouldn’t the little saucebox follow me to the kitchen with the tin plate from the bread. Sits down on the chair, says Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we eat, words swallowed. Couldn’t help laughing. Ate a big plate of food. Let go the spoon when I wasn’t looking, stuffed it in with the hands. Let her be for the time being. Jelly and custard afterwards. What do you say when you’ve eaten food? Blinks slowly with the eyes, head to the front, thank you very much, softly on an in-breath, as if she’s scared I’ll steal her breath. In any case sounds more like imitation than sincerely meant. How does one teach somebody sincerity? What comes first? Sincerity or words of sincerity? But that’s in the future, such distinctions. First just win her confidence to breathe fearlessly in the presence of her benefactor, blink in and out with the eyes, open and closed!