It’s of no use to anybody if you drive yourself to the brink of exhaustion, Agaat. Remember, you’re the only care-giver here. If you also collapse, we have an even bigger crisis on our hands. Do the necessary. Spare yourself, cut out the frills. See to it that you eat regularly, get enough sleep, go for a walk in the veld, in the mountains. You can’t hold her. She’s withering away, every day a little more. You must accept. You must resign yourself. It’s time. Nobody can battle against death.
They’re out on the stoep, down the steps, the boot clicks open, slams shut again. The engine idles. Last instructions, inaudible directions, a car door slams, lights swivel across the yard.
Then Agaat calls the dogs back into the yard, she removes the doorstop, closes the front door. She puts something down on the floor. It sounds like deep-sea diving equipment. She rustles something in the passage.
She comes into the room with a rolled-up length of cloth, tied with bows in three places.
Ai mercy, the doctor, she says, he’s a meddler.
She looks at the wall.
Ounooi, it’s only your breath.
She brings a chair.
You have a lack of breath.
The cloth has a piped seam that is threaded onto a bamboo rod. One of those that we used to train tomatoes. Tomato-rod. There’s a string attached with a loop and a picture hook. She smoothes the seam with one hand, so that the cloth is in the centre of the rod.
Shall I take off the mask now?
The simplest question on earth. From the start. So shall I break the eggs for you? Shall I fasten your dress? Wipe your bottom? Hand you the walking sticks? Bring the walking frame? Push the wheelchair?
Crank up the bed? Farming as usual. Milking, slaughtering, shearing, harvesting.
She climbs onto the chair. Measures the length of the string. Fits the hook to the picture rail.
You don’t like things near your face, do you, Ounooi.
She picks loose the first bow, bethinks herself, looks at me.
And you look like something from Mars with that thing on your face.
Mars. On the brink of Mars. Don’t waste your breath, I flicker at Agaat. One with too little breath in this room is enough.
Wait, she says. She gets off the chair. First things first. Then the surprise.
Agaat has a sequence. There is nothing, she believes, that so reassures and motivates for the execution of a difficult task as the knowledge that you will be rewarded for it. She smiles at me. The you’ll-never-guess smile.
Poor Agaat. What has my life been? What has her life been? How can I ever reward her for daring to come this far with me here on Grootmoedersdrift? How does one compensate somebody for the fact that she allowed herself to be taken away and taken in and then cast out again? And to be made and unmade and remade? Not that she had a choice. I even gave her another name.
First the mask, says Agaat. When it comes off, I’m going to press you lightly on the chest, Ounooi, don’t get a fright. Gently up and down. You blink with you eyes, I follow you. I learnt it from the doctor just now, it’s to assist your muscles. So that you can breathe. Come, let’s first sit you up a bit more.
Agaat aims to adjust the bed so as to get me more upright. She doesn’t want to take her eyes off my face. Her foot searches for the pedal, her hands grope for the screws.
Oh, oh, she starts singing, softly, on an intake of breath. But the white-throat crow doesn’t follow, plummets into emptiness, Agaat’s face crumples, her cap wilts, her mouth gapes, wounded.
A little bundle of bones and feathers she drops, down through the blue and the white of the skies, the brown horizon a whirling haze, down, down, black-and-white, a rushing, before she comes to herself and opens her wings and the air buoys her up and she can fly again.
Agaat’s foot finds the pedal, her hand finds the wing nut. The bed erects itself with a hissing sound and a light shock.
She puts my arms next to my sides. Wings that can no longer fly.
Go from here to great Tradouw, she resumes on the right note, the crow taken for granted, skipped, omitted from the text, but without loss, because a song that we both know can tolerate that all too well.
Flying high and turning low.
What kind of cloth could it be that’s hanging there rolled up? Agaat’s décor for the great breathing-scene? It would be the first handmade decoration to hang in my room again after she carried everything out of here.
Went there fast and came back slow.
She unclasps the buckle of the mask behind my head. And the elastic over my nose. One hand is on my chest pressing lightly and rhythmically and letting go. It’s the weak hand. It feels like a bird perching on me, smaller than a crow, bigger than a finch, a starling perhaps. The starling helps me breathe.
There we are, in for a penny, in for a pound. Blink at me, Ounooi, blink with your eyes whether you’re managing.
She fixes my eyes while the strong hand puts aside the mask. The strong hand replaces the weak one on my chest. Bigger than a finch. Strong shiny wing-beat.
White-throat crow.
From here. To the wall, to what is hanging there.
Now, says Agaat, now I reckon we’ve got you going full-steam ahead again.
The hand pumps lighter and lighter all the time, until it gives only the smallest pulse. Then I’m on my own.
Agaat contemplates my solo flight.
You can be satisfied, Agaat. Visibility poor, plenty of tailwind, but I log them, one by one, the turbulent nocturnal hours, the hours of stormy flight, I know, the landing lights are on, I blip clearly on and off on the radar screen.
She ignores me. How are the slimes feeling? she asks.
Clear, open, thank you.
Did I knock you too hard?
Her voice is low.
My back feels like tenderised steak, the skin of my ribs as if I’d leant for hours on end against a running baling-press.
Don’t exaggerate, says Agaat. She smiles on my behalf.
Now I’m going to clear up here and then you can see what I’ve hung up for you.
Agaat puts on the soft neckbrace. EasyHead. She swivels my head into position for a good view. She supports it on both sides with pillows. She turns the bedside light to the wall. She pulls it out to its full extent and tilts it so that the shade looks like the head of an eager spectator. She gets onto the chair again. A horizon arises. Black seam of the house coat, white seam of the apron, folded-over white socks, brown calves of Agaat, crêpe-soled shoes of which both heels are slightly worn down at the back. Dig-in and hang-in hocks, tug-of-war heels.
Doctor says I must be careful not to upset the ounooi, so that the ounooi can carry on breathing nice and evenly.
From up there on top of the chair comes Agaat’s voice, slightly strained as she stretches to arrange the cloth, but with the mockery directed at the doctor, at how he thinks our relationship is, at how he thinks she addresses me.
Now I’ve chosen something to send you to sleep restfully. Now you look at it till your eyes fall shut.
She unties the other two ribbons.
The cloth unrolls with a shuurrr. It radiates down on me.
The great rainbow.
An embroidery experiment, from the time Jakkie went to high school in Heidelberg, when Agaat had to conjure away the empty time.
Everybody thinks they know what a rainbow looks like, she said, but when it’s from close by like this, they’ll wonder what they’re seeing.
I remember the start of it, impossible, I’d said, a waste of time, why don’t you rather make something one can use, but she’d just looked at me.
She anaesthetised herself with the work, for hours on end, in the mornings on the front stoep, before the arrival of the moment that she lived for, three o’clock, when she heard the chug and the squealing brakes of the school bus and she could run to go and fetch Jakkie at the drift, sometimes on the other side of the drift at the road, the time that she could sit with him while he ate, the hours that she could bend over his homework with him, and could learn with him about the French Revolution and the World Wars and the Boer War and he taught her everything that they sang at school, Ne’er your children need ask who are true, O God of Jacob.