There must be a show garden in flower out there.
A bower of beauty.
She’s watered it every day. From early every morning I can hear the sprinklers go tchip-tchip-tirrr over the lawns. Until the sun heats up at nine o’clock and then again in the evenings when the plants have regained their composure after the scorching of the day.
Agaat knows how to make a garden grow.
This evening if there’s no wind, if I’m lucky, if her mood continues to soften, she’ll open the stoep doors. For me to smell everything that’s in bloom. Perhaps by following her movements, by concentrating on her intentions, I’ll have my way. Perhaps I’ll manage to usurp her will on the sly, and keep it warm in me, without her even noticing that I have it, meld it with mine so that we can have one will for these last days.
Smell the world! Take the scent, all along the flowerbeds and further along the boundary fences! Show me the outlines! Fetch the maps from the sideboard!
She catches my gaze in the mirror, catches me out in a calculation, in a fantasy. I see the indignation leap in her face, her eyes narrowing. I should have kept my eyes shut. When she turns round her mien is neutral, but the battle continues, I can hear it in her heels.
I didn’t mean it like that! Please!
She adjusts the bed so that I sit up straight, she fits the neckbrace. Her hands are cold and swift. She puts the tray down hard on the bridge.
I blink my eyes to say: You’re too touchy! One can’t do anything without your taking offence! I don’t want to eat! I’m not ready for your fragrant favours!
She ignores me. I blink my eyes.
I say again: I don’t want to! I’m not ready!
She pretends not to see. She puts the bib on my chest, she pulls and plucks at it. She bends her head.
Bless us oh Lord and these thy gifts, she prays.
She scoops the first teaspoon half-full of pumpkin.
Now she’ll watch my breathing, bring the spoon into my mouth, tilt it towards the back where she can get hold of my swallowing reflex. I look at her, I look at the spoon, I look at the mirror.
For what are you looking like that, Ounooi?
Ounooi. For the sake of bread and bougainvillea!
She looks where I’m looking in the mirror, its edges brimming with bougainvillea, suspended in a tree-lined landscape. There’s a flash.
Birds, tiny birds, white-eyes that fly away from the fig tree I can’t see, that grows just around the corner. That I, Lord, can’t see. The early figs at the top ripe bells. The first light-green figs on a plate arranged with a flare of purple bougainvillea, that was how I served them, for the season, to mark it, to celebrate it, midsummer on Grootmoedersdrift. My figs.
Hmm, says Agaat, we must see if there are any figs yet, the tree around the corner here is dragging its branches on the ground this year.
She suspects something, she swivels her neck, she keeps on looking with me in the mirror. Determined to twist my arm to eat. The windmill must turn, the thresher must churn. The pumpkin must in.
And the bougainvillea, it’s flowering as if it’s never going to stop.
Is she taunting me? Does she think I must take my cue from it, from the flowers, from the wheat, from the bread?
I have ears to hear, I flicker, how many more times are you going to say it today? Since when do you expect me to compete with bougainvilleas? But she doesn’t look at me.
She keeps on looking away at the stoep door. I see her neck, the neck of Agaat from the side with the constellation of dark moles, and the row of hairpins securing the white cap.
Slowly she turns her head back, careful on her perch to get the best from the moment, focused on putting me in a place where I’ll submit and blink my eyes to say, yes I will eat, you may approach with your teaspoon, Agaat, depress it slowly on the tip of my tongue and slide it firmly upwards all along the middle to halfway, so that I have less work to do, and I will swallow what you have prepared for me. So nourish also our souls.
But I don’t do it. The fragments of green in the mirror are a reproduction, a repetition of another plan, in another format. As a map is of a place. If I can get her to grasp the analogy. Mirror, map, reproduction, repetition.
I press my gaze against the front of Agaat’s white cap. As if it’s a sail and my will a wind.
I look past her at the mirror and then quickly at the wall next to my bed. At the mirror, at the wall. From the fragmented garden to the off-white surface of the wall. From what is lacking in the reflected summer to what is lacking on the despoiled wall, an image, a hill farm on a flat plan, suspended by its loop from the picture rail. To and fro I look, to and fro, with the white-eyes that flash in the mirror, around the invisible corner, to the invisible fig tree. Agaat, don’t you see then, the unseeable, this goodly frame the earth, don’t you see it, quartered by the compass, east west south north! The yard, the dam, the mountain, the drift!
Slowly she retreats from me. She places the teaspoon on the saucer’s edge. She slides off her high perch next to my bed.
Lower the girl, she says softly on a held-in breath through her teeth.
To and fro she looks, as I looked, I flicker my eyes all the time. She looks at me, she looks where I’m looking, she nods slowly.
Mirror, mirror, she says, is it bothering you? Seen too much? On the wall? Seen it all?
That’s a start! I signal. You’re warm! That’s excellent progress! Yes, I signal, yes Agaat, you’re on the right track! Now just think further! Now just think: map on the wall, think flat earth, think pictured palm of hand, think life-line, think fingerprint!
Agaat gives me her eyes. I look deep into them, I take hold of her eyes with mine, I bend them to the door, down the passage, all the way to the front room, to the sideboard next to the wall, to the quivers lying there, behind the photo albums. I close my eyes slowly and keep them closed. I gather a sheaf, from behind her apron, from out of her chest. I see a great sailing ship tacking against the wind with billowing sails. Keel-deep in the waving wheat she comes towards me, hill crest after hill crest, disappearing in the troughs, every time bigger as she reappears till I can hear her apron creaking in the swells and can make out her figurehead, the profile of a Fate, the jaw set to brave without retort the storms that she has predestined.
Only when it really dawned on him that he was going to be a father, did Jak start treating you slightly better. You didn’t altogether trust it. It was the eighth month of your pregnancy and all of a sudden you were being showered with all kinds of gifts, an LP with saxophone music which, it must be said, didn’t do much for you, Wonderland by Night, perfume by Elizabeth Arden, a new tea set. He even took you into Swellendam for Die Heks by Leipoldt which an amateur dramatic company was staging. Not that he’d given it much thought, but you appreciated the effort.
You had to listen to his fantasies of how the child would look just like him, what sterling blood flowed in the de Wet veins and how he was going to bring him up to be strong and fit just like his father, a gentleman farmer. In the evenings he drew plans of toys that he wanted to build for the child. Kites from which one could hang, aeroplanes, rockets that could really take off.
You asked, what if it’s a little girl? In his family, Jak said, the firstborn was always a boy.
You watched this husband of yours in the evenings as he washed his face and brushed his teeth, standing stooped over in his underclothes. Sometimes as he removed the towel from his face, it seemed to you as if he was going to cry. Sometimes you found him paging through one of your books on the night-table and shutting it quickly when he saw you looking. At night he left the stoep room and came and lay behind your back like a little boy. In the mornings when you woke up he was gone.