Tralalee tralaley! Tralalee tralaley!
I feel as if I’m going to faint. I close my eyes. I concentrate on a point above my nose. The crepe-sole shoes approach down the passage.
I must, I must march all the way to death.
Aitsa, says Agaat, look at the old mare sweating. Now we’ve really got you going, seems to me.
A hand lands lightly on my shin. Sweet as a dove.
I open my eyes. Thunder and lightning. Bring the pan!
Yes, I’m bringing it, don’t rush me now, you make me wait for hours every morning.
Bringthepanthepan!
So, Ounooi, have you seen yet what I brought you this evening? A surprise. All this time I’ve been thinking there’s something that you want to see but I kept missing it. And so it was this all the time? Am I right? All the time? The maps? Yes or no?
Panpanpanpan!
The maps please, from out there in the sideboard, right under your nose. That’s what you’ve been asking all this time? Am I right, yes or no, Ounooi? There I go carrying in just about the whole yard in here and it’s just down the passage in the sitting room where all this time I’ve forgotten to look.
Butter couldn’t melt. Lying without turning a hair. There she stands with the pan in the air, the white cloth over the arm.
Yes, Agaat, you’re right. So put the ridges under my arse instead of your holy of holiest pan. From Bot River to Heidelberg, the municipalities, the districts, the regions. Unroll it under me, keep the edges together, and watch me make a sewerage farm out of them. And if the local is too lowly for you, bring the seven continents so that I can shit them into oblivion for you one by one. What does it matter in any case? Fold the water map into a little boat, set the contour map for a sail. Caulk the holds with pulp from Grootmoedersdrift. Then I sail away on my last voyage in it.
Up to my chin in shit.
Once and for ever put in my place.
Would that satisfy you?
Hey hey hey! Convulsion-kick! The animal’s just about had it but it’s the kick that hurts most!
Keep your damned pan then. Stick it up your own arse. Rather give me the Republic and its provinces, the whole South, then I’ll darken for you the Light of the Word that the Dutch supposedly brought here on the Dromedaris. You’re excellent proof of what a bad idea it was. Your name may be holy, but your soul, Agaat, is at times as black as the hearth out of which you crawled. Don’t you have any mercy? Have you now decided it’s time for me to paddle-paddle through shit to the underworld? Time for those who came to play God the Creator over you? Have you now decided there’s no remedying this confusion and this gibberish? Well, be comforted. The last trump is being sounded.
Here it comes. Here I lie, I can do no other. Covered whiter than snow or not.
Don’t carry on so, Ounooi. You’re not a child, good heavens!
Just in time. The enamel is cold under my buttocks.
She pinches her nose with one hand, pulls over the sheet with the other. Oh say can you hear, she says on a bated breath, the thunder almighty?
She picks at the little pink bows. Zirrts, the maps roll open. All along the picture rail, two full walls.
Zirrts, zirrts, zirrts, she says, as she unties them. Prrts, prrts, prrts, she mimics the sounds emanating from me. O’er the veld it comes wafting wide, she says.
She gestures with wide-open arms at the exhibition. Everything is there, even the house plans and the schemes for the landscaping of the garden. Graphs, tables, indexes.
Right, says Agaat, how shall we go about it?
Leave me in peace! Get out! Out!
No, come on now, come, come, since when can you do only one thing at a time? The way you’re carrying on, you’ll need a second pan at any moment in any case, I’m not getting out of here now. But I’m also not going to stand around here wasting my time, of that you can be sure.
Agaat turns on her heel swiftly. Right turn. Tchi! goes her sole on the wooden floor. With quick brisk steps she stalks out. Parade ground. She yanks open the broom cupboard in the passage. It sounds as if everything inside is falling out. The broomsticks roll over the floorboards. They are kicked aside. Salute and halt on the big cymbals! She returns with the feather duster. Parade baton.
And this is Japie, she says. She turns it around, a grey shock of feathers. I smell house dust.
With swift strokes she presses the point of the stick on the maps. They’re the regional maps.
My stomach loosens in spasms and cramps. Over the rim of the pan. I can feel it. I can smell myself. I close my eyes.
Come now, what’s this nonsense? Open your eyes and look where I’m pointing. If you knew how many sleepless nights I had because I couldn’t figure out what on God’s earth you could want from me!
I open my eyes. Please, I ask.
What’s this please all about now? Enough of please, thank you! Blink your eyes when I press on the right place, I suspect somewhere on these maps is a spot, a weak spot or a soft spot that you want to visit again.
Hooikraal? Tygerhoek? Boschjesmansrug? Adderskop? Holgat? Van Rheenenshoogte? Lindeshof? Wolvelaagte? Varslug? Blydskap? Rietpoel? Jongensklip? Infanta? Ockertseinde?
All the battle sites. Farms, stations, towns. Beach hamlets. Wheat storages. Settlements. Train junctions. Kraals, corners, ridges, heads, holes, heights, bowers, plains, named after hay, after tigers, after bush-men and adders, long-forgotten van Rheenens and Lindes, after wolves, after fresh air and joy, after stones and pools, after distant princesses, after the end of some unfortunate Ockert. Of some of them I’ve never heard. She’s inventing half the names. I can’t see all the way to where she’s pointing. I don’t trust it. My own stink is in my nostrils. Acrid, grassy. Green manuring.
Come now, Ounooi, do your bit, it’s not for nothing I struggled and exhausted myself guessing and slaved away trying to satisfy you. Perhaps you’d like to inform me as well what we’re looking for here on these maps? So far from your bed? You can rest assured I won’t give up. I don’t give up and you don’t give up. That’s our problem, the two of us!
She settles the cap more firmly on her head, as if she’s heading into a wind. She changes hands, takes the stick in the crumpled paw, grabs a blue booklet with her strong hand, fans it before her face.
Got, but what a stink you can crap!
She strips the sleeve of her bad arm up all the way to the elbow. As if she’s preparing to grab a snake behind the neck. She looks straight at me.
All the better to show you, my child. She shakes the little arm at me. The handle of a mincing machine.
It’s the first time that Agaat has ever pushed up her right sleeve for me like that. It’s the first time that she’s sworn in front of me, with her mouth at any rate, and at me. She watches me watching the arm. The same thickness all the way, a thin rod with a wrong-way-round elbow.
Vadersgaven? Vinkelrug? Blink one eye if I’m getting warm, right? Blink both eyes quickly if I’m cold, do you understand me?
What does she want me to understand? The names, of fathers and fennel, mean nothing to me. I signal, no, heavens, have done, are you mad? I close my eyes.
Open your eyes, Ounooi, or I’ll fit you out with matchsticks, I’ll stick your four lids up and down with plasters before you can blink an eye. Look here, here, here. Have you been here? have I? What would we have wanted there? We know our place, don’t we? Where’er we walk.
Remhoogte? Bobbejaankrans? Perdekop? Slangrivier? Rotterdam? Bromberg? Heights, rock faces, hills, rivers, dams, mountains, commemorating baboons, horses, snakes; a topographical and zoological gibberish.
You know what, Ounooi, now that you’re shitting yourself so gloriously over there, I suddenly feel like a little glass of sherry. The one of which you always pour me a bit when we make trifle. What do you say, would you mind? It’s almost Christmas in any case. O come all ye faithful! Unto us a child is given! And apart from that, we have something to drink to, it seems to me. Here in our small corner!