Could the binoculars have been playing tricks upon me? Hr arm a pointer? Pointing-out pointing-to what is what & who is who? An oar? A blade? Hr fist pressing apart the membrane & the meat as if she’s dressing a slaughter animal? But not a sheep, as if she’s separating the divisions of the night. Or dividing something within herself. Root cluster.
Far-fetched, Milla! Your imagination is too fertile for your own good. But surely one couldn’t think it up. A. in hr working clothes in the moonlight in the middle of the night doing a St Vitus’s dance. I could surely not have dreamt that. There must be a simple explanation. Perhaps she’s working herself up to running away. I suppose I’ll get to the truth of the matter one day. Must go & see perhaps the suitcase is back.
7
A broad sheaf of light spills into the room, light that I know well, the yellow light of late afternoon. Ten to five? It’s somewhere between the quarters, stray time. The alarm clock is hidden behind a box of tissues titled Inspirations.
But something is different. The opening is not in the middle of the swing doors as always aligned with the door knobs, the curtains have been drawn so that the opening is slightly to one side of the glass doors. And the gauze lining hasn’t been drawn as usual, it’s been swept back over the white cord that runs above the door frame, it’s been pushed away behind the curtain. I can make out the garden through the slight distortion of the little old glass panels in the stoep doors.
But it’s not only the gibbous glass. It’s the light itself inside the room that quivers. It’s filled with something, a restorative rippling, pellucid, watery, beckoning.
From where this light? What can lend such a quality to this chamber of death that I know in every last detail? Over which my eyes wander daily, filled as it is with the signs of my end, the nursing-aids that promise no recovery, that are applied to the polite dismantling of my body, to the daily cleansing of my limbs, four, my three axils of armpit and pudendum, the clefts of finger toe and buttock, the crannies behind my ears, the hollow of my navel, the subsidences above my collarbones, my head with its seven holes, the little bottles of pills for the relief of my spit, my tears, for the singing in my ears, for my wasting spasmodic muscles, the instruments for the measurement of my remaining reflexes, for the notation of the statistics of my going hence.
What an ado about nothing every day!
What a farce!
Pastime, Agaat calls it sometimes. Respite. Of late she’s taken to reading me poems from the collections circulated by the South African ALS support group. Who will get them after me? Such recyclable frail-care books, it’s as good as bequeathing your coffin to the next candidate for one day’s lying-in-state.
And now in the midst of so much attrition, the light comes and announces itself in my room like an unfamiliar word. Like a word that you recognise as a word but of which the meaning just evades you. Sculp. Scullogue. Scuggery. Scuffle-hunter. Agaat’s and my dictionary games. What will she play with me now, now that words fall ever more into disuse in this room? Light-and-shadow chess? Trompe l’oeil?
Now I know what it is! It’s the dressing table!
It’s turned differently, at an angle towards the stoep side. The two side panels have been adjusted. Like the wings of a thing flying forward, and stumbling the last stretch, yearning to catch up with something, to capture.
There’s a view of the garden in the mirror, but sharper, clearer than a garden can be. My garden I see there, cut out on three levels, abounding with detail, the most alluring prospects.
It’s cornflowers I see, deep blue cornflowers in the one wing and in the other wing a cascade of long bent stems of light-blue agapanthus. And crepusculating on the central panel, in a pool of jacaranda shade, the voluptuous powder-blue heads of hydrangeas in full flower.
Cautiously I sip at it, choking with emotion would spell the premature end of this story. Could Agaat have started understanding me, at last! If it wasn’t coincidence, if she could get that far merely on the basis of eye signals, endless possibilities remain ahead, then I mustn’t spoil it now with an attack of sentimentality.
The mirror reveals a perfect result. The best I’ve ever experienced the garden. This is how I had always imagined the north-east side could look. I planned it in terms of all the different shades of blue in the catalogues. This is how I imagined it. Blue perennials, iris, agapanthus, hydrangea, bushes of kingfisher daisies, annuals sowed in the low borders every year, first for the winter plain blue pansies and forget-menots that started coming up by themselves in tract upon tract and then ageratum for spring, and after that for summer, cornflower, cornflower, and again cornflower. Because of blue one can never have enough in the barren yellow and brown of summer and also not in winter when it must help the rains to fall as the old people believed.
Now Agaat has arranged it for me in mirrors, a vision. How shall I know whether she reacted to my request or if it was mere chance?
Or could she have been planning it for a long time? First the emptying out of my room, the drawn curtains and now the light, the restoration of colour and objects? So that I, as I am drained of myself, can fill up with what is outside myself, as the poet says? So that something can start floundering upstream in the run-off? You never know with Agaat. She is witched. Sometimes I think she’s playing games with herself, and I’m a mere excuse for her inventions.
In the beginning she arranged fresh flowers in the vases every day, as she knew I liked it, but then Leroux apparently said we should beware of dust and pollen and insects.
That was Agaat’s story.
Perhaps she’s sorry now, wants to make up for it now.
As always at this time of the day shadows are playing on the wall next to my bed, but now there are lively stipples of light, points of blue, a general tint of agapanthus cast on it by the mirror.
A multiplied garden.
One visible through the window, one in the mirror, one on the wall.
How long could it have taken her? How many times of walking to and fro, softly so as not to wake me?
Perhaps she flew, changed herself into a dragonfly. Or a wasp. Landed on my pillow, her head in line with mine, to see through my eyes, and then back to adjust the angle, the angle of the dressing table, the angle of the three panels in relation to me, to one another, to the cornflowers, to fit everything together. One degree to this side or that side could lose the hydrangeas, could include a chunk of brown stoep wall instead of a bed full of blue flowers.
And then there are still the maps, Agaat, what must I do to get them? Heaven and earth it would seem you would move in order to have me buried in a cheerful and contented state. You’ll see to it that I’m not left here impaled like a grasshopper on a thorn.
Poor Jak. What makes me think of him now?
Perhaps he’s wandering around restlessly. Perhaps he’s approaching now through the wattles to see what’s become of me. For him it was all so sudden. One two three, I’m coming! Premature! No time for second thoughts. His mouth was gaping with it, his eyes as big as saucers. Good Lord, now I have an urge to laugh! Our father who art in heaven, that I want for breath to laugh! Earlier Leroux thought it was one of the symptoms of my bulbar paralysis, these uncontrolled fits of laughter of mine, but they were always about Jak. It was always about that trajectory. What goes up must come down, there’s no escaping that. But the curve of the arc differs from case to case. As I got progressively sicker, I started wondering more and more whether it would be better to go like him, and then I always started laughing.