Agaat shifts her weight on the stool. The boards creak in the passage. She is quiet for a long time. Would she be patting her cap to make sure that it’s seated properly? Would she be concentrating on the floorboards?
No, says Agaat, she would never, she’s too obstinate, she wants to do it herself.
I’ll watch well, Nooi Beatrice, you know don’t you, we know each other, the ounooi and me, we’ve come a long way together. She only wants me here.
No, I understand her, Nooi, she still wants to see everything, she wants to hear, I know, she still wants to taste and everything.
No, I just know. No, she can’t, not a word, but I look at her then I know.
Yes, Nooi, please, Nooi. As early as you can, yes, Nooi. Eight o’clock, half past eight. There’ll be breakfast here for you, Nooi.
Yes, by twelve we’ll be back.
First to the co-op, yes, Dawid must get things, parts for the combine harvester that he has to keep in order, yes, and sacks.
Baling wire, yes, there’s enough, the railway bus delivered.
A bit of a squeeze everything, yes, and the harvest is late this year, but I knew it would be around Christmas sometime, so my side is ready.
Yes, so now we can only wait. .
Agaat’s voice sounds tired.
Yes, yes, only to town, as I say, Nooi. We have to deliver things. No, the eggs and the milk. Pumpkins. Onions too. And I must exchange the videos. But the story films upset her, now I keep to nature films. National Geographic, yes.
That’s right, Agaat, butterflies, bats, killer whales. Juicy bribes for the neighbour’s wife.
Agaat rubs out an insect on the passage floor with the point of her shoe.
Yes, Human and Pitt, she says.
Quickly she speaks now.
Yes, that’s here already, it’s standing in the shed. They want to come and do it here. Yes, they say it’s better at home when somebody has been lying for such a long time already.
Dominee, yes, he phones regularly and asks, yes, Mrs Dominee as well, but Ounooi doesn’t want them here, nor the elder.
I do the service.
I do it, yes. I pray and I read when she feels the need, and I sing.
Yes. It will be here on the farm. In the graveyard here.
Yes, it’s been dug for a long time. Next to her mother’s. Wire netting over it so that things can’t nest in it.
Weeded, yes. Whitewashed, too, the wall. Everything tidy. I sowed a few painted ladies seeds there, they’re nicely in flower now.
Who? Jakkie? Last time he still said he was coming. It’s snowing there, he says it’s lying thick. Tomorrow I’m sending him a telegram so that he has it, black on white.
He’s working, yes till just before Christmas, they don’t have a holiday now.
No, it’s arranged. Everything’s arranged. So will you please come tomorrow, Nooi? Thank you very much, Nooi. Till tomorrow then, Nooi. Thank you, Nooi. The same to you, Nooi.
I beg your pardon, Nooi?
No, doctor says he thinks less than a month, Nooi, perhaps a month.
No, Nooi, yes, Nooi, we can only hope for the best, Nooi. Well, that’s fine then, Nooi. Till tomorrow, Nooi. Goodbye, Nooi.
Tsk, Agaat sucks her teeth.
I don’t hear her replace the receiver.
The board next to the telephone stool creaks as she comes upright and then it creaks again as she sits down again. Then it creaks again. Then she replaces the receiver with a soft click. Then it clicks again as she lifts it.
Is everything in order, Agaat?
She slams the phone down hard on the cradle. The receiver falls off, I can hear it banging against the wall as it swings from its cord.
Tring, goes the telephone. Again the receiver is slammed down.
She walks down the passage with loud confused steps. She walks past the kitchen door, she walks blindly into the sitting room. She kicks over something there. She sets it upright. It falls over again, metal on wood. Other things fall. Thud, it goes, thud, thud, thud. She’s back in the passage. She wants to come to me, but she can’t. She’s dragging something, wires across the floor.
What do I hear? A groan, a curse, a sob?
Two doors slam. The kitchen door, the screen door. And then another one, the outside room’s.
A dog barks.
What else do I hear? Windows are slammed shut, stiff copper catches violently pulled over the lip of the window frame, and then opened again.
Curtains are yanked shut, too far so that half of the window is exposed again. Plucked to and fro, two rings come undone.
I understand, Agaat. It was too much. Your voice, your words, your news, your request, it was too much for you to hear.
I see you. You’re standing in your room, you’re standing and you can’t stand any longer. You bend at the middle and you bend at the backs of your legs, your back hunches, you crawl forward over the linoleum. You take the poker, you pull out the grate. You crawl into your hearth, white cap first. You go and lie with your knees pulled up in the old black soot. You make yourself heavy and you make yourself dense and you sink away under the concrete with your fist in your mouth.
How can I blame you for wanting to vanish, Agaat? That you want to get away from me, away from the tyranny of me? More inescapable than ever, now that I can say or do nothing, now that I myself am floundered, and am immoveable as the stones. I would want to open myself to you and take you up into myself and comfort you. But I cannot, because I am your adversary exactly because I am as I am, mute and dense, and you are looking for a safe refuge from me. Under your own stones.
How can I accompany you to where you are now? At the heart of the hearth, under the soot, where you want to conceal yourself, under the foundations, under the stone strata, where they are blue, where you find a crevice into which to disappear, and haul in the block of stone on top of you, so that you can be occluded, with your arm over your head, with your fist in your mouth? Until nobody searches for you any more, to draw you out, to split you into parts and stretch you over spars and to infuse you and to chafe you and to rap you till you scream, till you sing, till you dance to their tune? Till you feel time click shut behind you and everything else falls silent, in your mouth no taste any more save the clean chalky tang of lime and scale?
So that I can come to be there with you, with my hand on your hip bone, with my hand on your shoulder tip to wait with you in the dark. For them to be rendered white and tidy, your bones, one by one, your clavicle, like a rudder, like an ensign, your shoulder blades like fans, your ribs shiny spokes, inside them a cleared hold, with every mast and beam caulked and planished in the dense rock face, the rock that retreats before your entry, a small fanfare. So that you can come to rest with all that is yours fixed and impermeable like pitch, your sails furled.
How can I be with you while you become a fern, a jaw of something inchoate, a keel, a beckoning nodule that flows in the grain of stone?
I shall go and lie with my head in that corner, with my ear on the place where the last trace of you lingered. I shall draw the suppurate stain of you into my nose, careful that you should not mark me, so that you shall be free of me, and free of yourself, a fume, a dark blemish that mists over the stone on which I am lying with my cheek.
Open at page 221, Agaat said. Her voice was clear. She put the old Farmer’s Handbook on your lap. End of October it was, 1960, the year of the botulism.
Ask me from the beginning, she said, ask me all the symptoms, and all the cures, ask me trick questions, I’ve learnt it all, I know everything now, I’ll never make a mistake again.
Never mind Agaat, you wanted to say, but your voice wouldn’t come. You sat there crying but she struck up and launched into her lesson. She wanted to force you upright. In spite of the battle between you, or for its sake, because how was she to fight you if you were weak? How was she to hate you?