She turns away for the punchline, pronounces it as if it’s the most normal of sentences.
It’s not as if you can squirm or scream.
She rinses her strong hand in the bowl of water.
Only the gums and palate to go. That you like, don’t you?
She dips her fingers in the peppermint mouthwash. She puts her thumb and forefinger on either side of my mouth. She massages my gums, first the lower and then the upper. She looks out of the stoep door while she does it. The rhythm of the massaging action calms her. She becomes more tranquil. Her fingers move more gently, more kindly on my gums. Then it becomes caressing. Forgive me, ask the fingers, I also have a hard time with you, you know.
Now she’s not looking at me. You can’t talk, say the fingers. How in God’s name must I know what you want? For days now you’ve been nagging at me about something you want. I don’t know what it is! I can’t hear what you’re thinking!
More passionate the movement becomes. Agaat curses me in the mouth with her thumb and index finger. Bugger you! I feel against my palate, bugger you and your mother. I didn’t ask to be here!
I read her sign language with the membranes of my mouth, eyes closed.
If I could rub some speech into your mouth, then I’d do it, you hear! You’d better watch your step with me! You’d conk out without me! You’re conking out as it is, I can’t help it. And it’s I who conk out, I’m actually the one who suffers here.
She takes her hand from my mouth. Long strings of drool she draws out. She takes off the gloves. Slap, slap, they fall into the bin. She wipes my face, the tears from my cheeks.
Thank you, I signal briefly.
You’re welcome, says Agaat.
She turns her back on me. She tidies the things on the trolley. She looks at her watch. Suddenly she’s in a hurry. She draws the curtain with quick little plucks, arranges the covers over me.
I lie with my eyes shut. My mouth feels numb. Better that she should not see my eyes. Better that she should not think now that I’m asking her something. I’m waiting for her hand on my shoulder. That would mean: We do what we can, as well as we can, you and I, and: I’m not going far.
I wait for her voice, for her to say something like: I will think what it can be, I will find it out, just give me a chance, in the end I always riddle it out.
But she says nothing, slides something cold under my hand.
Joke.
The finishing touch to the scene.
It’s the hand-bell.
You ring your little bell, and I’ll ring mine.
Relentless, her memory.
Perhaps I can let the bell roll away over the bedspread, make it fall off the bed.
Now you just stop your snivelling, says the glance she flings at me. She draws the curtains completely, all but a chink, walks out with brisk steps.
In the front room the grandfather clock chimes eight o’clock. I hear Agaat opening the glass door of the clock and winding it. From the tempo of the winding I can tell she knows I’m listening. She turns slowly, so that I can hear the cogs clearly, the spring, how it coils in on itself.
Time flies, that’s what the shutting of the clock’s glass door means.
Clink, she puts the winding-key down behind the pediment of the clock.
Tchick, is her next sound.
It’s the sideboard’s dark little door. You can weep yourself blue, but your time you’ve had, is what it says.
Consider it well, says the shutting. Tchick.
Elegant symmetry, Agaat, that opening and shutting of yours in the front room. You can’t resist it. The emptying and the filling.
Time that streams away backwards, time that ticks on ahead, time being wound up for the running down.
There, behind the little blue books, lie the maps that I want to see.
And you may have dominion over my hours that you count off there and apportion with your devious little snake-hand and your white casque in front of the clock face, Agaat. But there is also space, cartographed, stippled, inalienable, the mountains, the valleys, the distance from A to B, laid down in place names for a century or two or three, Susverlore or Sogevonden, farms Foundlikethis or Lostlikethat.
Would she be able to see the sheaths, there where she’s bending over now? How many books would there still be blocking her view? There was a third pile. Of that we’ve read nothing yet. Would that be what’s blinding her?
With a mouth full of peppermint I lie here.
What am I supposed to do if I’m not allowed to cry? Crying is a last capacity in my depleted demesne. It’s something that can still come forth from me, something other than pee or poo or condensation. These three. She would want to measure and weigh them, absorb my sweat in a vapour-cloth, and store it in the cool-room. I can see it on her face when she removes my excretions. That I exude something tangible, has great persuasive force. Why then is she so indifferent to my tears? For them she would be able to develop a unique index. Salinity, sob-factor, specific gravity of grief. She would be able to taste, connoisseur that she is: The taste of guilt, the essence of almonds in my tears, and craving and confusion, tincture of eucalyptus, trace of fennel. Now is the time when she should be improvising with me, instead of nursing me singlemindedly, but she can’t grasp it. Once upon a time she could, but she taught herself not to. I taught her not to.
I listen to Agaat setting the rest of the day’s duties in train. She hands out orders in the kitchen. Her tone is authoritative, she speaks slowly and with emphasis. When she’s finished, there’s an immediate acceleration of activity. The screen door bangs. That would be Lietja going to fetch the cream and the milk for the house from the dairy, and the milk for Dawid’s clan, to put it in bottles in the big refrigerator till this evening. There, that’s the door of the small storeroom scraping open.
Do I remember the smell of fine chicken-meal? Can I count the steps from the backyard to the chicken run?
Agaat will go and feed the chicks, and then she’ll return and fill a few bottles from the milk left over in the buckets. She’ll feed the hanslammers, give them all a turn at the teat, for the smallest the longest, while she softly tells him or her everything.
Behind the drawn curtains I can hear the stoep furniture being moved. That is Saar. Tock, goes her broom, tock, tock, as she sweeps the corners of the stoep. Tock, tock, tock. There’s her face now in front of the chink, an oblique section of Saar, headscarf, many-coloured apron. Of the chink in the curtain, if she spots it, she takes no notice. Her gaze terminates against the little glass panes of the swing-door. I might as well not have been here.
Soil is everything, you said to Jak, healthy soil yields healthy animals and healthy people.
You were on the fallow land where OuKarel Okkenel and his son had harvested the previous November. It was your first March together on Grootmoedersdrift, 1948. You stepped on the spade, a chunk of the crust broke loose, you picked up a handful of soil, rubbed it, let it sift through your fingers. The fine grains that become slightly clayey in rainy weather, you’d known it from childhood, knew what it smelt like when it got wet.
It was ten o’clock in the morning. The sun was blazing down on your head. You’d with difficulty got Jak to accompany you. The previous day you’d had to negotiate with OuKarel.
You and your clan stay on on the farm, Karel, you said, I’ll pay you a wage, but we’re now going to sow ourselves.
Ai, Kleinnooi, OuKarel said. You saw how wrinkled he was. He stood there crumpling up his hat in front of him. I thought my Dawid-boy. .
You interrupted him. Dawid can stay on if he wants to work, oldster, you said, but I’m saying the sharing is over, we’re going to farm professionally here now, you plough in the wrong way, the soil washes away, we’re going to start ploughing with rippers on the contour.