Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  He is leaning out of the window of their flat in Johannesburg. Dusk is falling. Out of the distance a car comes racing down the street. A dog, a small spotted dog, runs in front of it. The car hits the dog: its wheels go right over the dog’s middle. With its hind legs paralysed, the dog drags itself away, yelping with pain. No doubt it will die; but at this point he is snatched away from his perch at the window.

  It is a magnificent first memory, trumping anything that poor Goldstein can dredge up. But is it true? Why was he leaning out of the window watching an empty street? Did he really see the car hit the dog, or did he just hear a dog yelping, and run to the window? Is it possible that he saw nothing but a dog dragging its hindquarters and made up the car and the driver and the rest of the story?

  There is another first memory, one that he trusts more fully but would never repeat, certainly not to Greenberg and Goldstein, who would trumpet it around the school and turn him into a laughing stock.

  He is sitting beside his mother in a bus. It must be cold, for he is wearing red woollen leggings and a woollen cap with a bobble. The engine of the bus labours; they are ascending the wild and desolate Swartberg Pass.

  In his hand is a sweet-wrapper. He holds the wrapper out of the window, which is open a crack. It flaps and trembles in the wind.

  ‘Shall I let go?’ he asks his mother.

  She nods. He lets it go.

  The scrap of paper flies up into the sky. Below there is nothing but the grim abyss of the pass, ringed with cold mountain peaks. Craning backwards, he catches a last glimpse of the paper, still bravely flying.

  ‘What will happen to the paper?’ he asks his mother; but she does not comprehend.

  That is the other first memory, the secret one. He thinks all the time of the scrap of paper, alone in all that vastness, that he abandoned when he should not have abandoned it. One day he must go back to the Swartberg Pass and find it and rescue it. That is his duty: he may not die until he has done it.

  His mother is full of scorn for men who are ‘useless with their hands’, among whom she numbers his father, but also her own brothers, and principally her eldest brother Roland, who could have kept the farm if he had worked hard enough to pay off its debts, but did not. Of the many uncles on his father’s side (he counts six by blood, another five by marriage), the one she admires most is Joubert Olivier, who on Skipperskloof has installed an electric generator and has even taught himself dentistry. (On one of his visits to the farm he gets toothache. Uncle Joubert seats him on a chair under a tree and, without anaesthetic, drills out the hole and fills it with gutta-percha. Never in his life has he suffered such agony.)

  When things break – plates, ornaments, toys – his mother fixes them herself: with string, with glue. The things she ties together come loose, since she does not know about knots. The things she glues together fall apart; she blames the glue.

  The kitchen drawers are full of bent nails, lengths of string, balls of tinfoil, old stamps. ‘Why are we saving them?’ he asks. ‘In case,’ she replies.

  In her angrier moods his mother denounces all book learning. Children should be sent to trade school, she says, then put to work. Studying is just nonsense. Learning to be a cabinet-maker or a carpenter, learning to work with wood, is best. She is disenchanted with farming: now that farmers have suddenly become rich there is too much idleness among them, too much ostentation.

  For the price of wool is rocketing. According to the radio, the Japanese are paying a pound a pound for the best grades. Sheep-farmers are buying new cars and taking seaside holidays. ‘You must give us some of your money, now that you are so rich,’ she tells Uncle Son on one of their visits to Voëlfontein. She smiles as she speaks, pretending it is a joke, but it is not funny. Uncle Son looks embarrassed, murmurs a reply he does not catch.

  The farm was not meant to go to Uncle Son alone, his mother tells him: it was bequeathed to all twelve sons and daughters in equal portions. To save it from being auctioned off to some stranger, the sons and daughters agreed to sell their portions to Son; from that sale they came away with IOUs for a few pounds each. Now, because of the Japanese, the farm is worth thousands of pounds. Son ought to share his money.

  He is ashamed of his mother for the crudeness with which she talks about money.

  ‘You must become a doctor or an attorney,’ she tells him. ‘Those are the people who make money.’ However, at other times she tells him that attorneys are all crooks. He does not ask how his father fits into this picture, his father the attorney who did not make money.

  Doctors are not interested in their patients, she says. They just give you pills. Afrikaans doctors are the worst, because they are incompetent as well.

  She says so many different things at different times that he does not know what she really thinks. He and his brother argue with her, point out the contradictions. If she thinks farmers are better than attorneys, why did she marry an attorney? If she thinks book learning is nonsense, why did she become a teacher? The more they argue with her the more she smiles. She takes so much pleasure in her children’s skill with words that she concedes every point, barely defending herself, willing them to win.

  He does not share her pleasure. He does not think these arguments funny. He wishes she would believe in something. Her sweeping judgments, born out of passing moods, exasperate him.

  As for him, he will probably become a teacher. That will be his life when he grows up. It seems a dull kind of life, but what else is there? For a long time he was going to become an engine-driver. ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ his aunts and uncles used to ask. ‘An engine-driver!’ he would pipe up, and everyone would nod and smile. Now he understands that ‘Engine-driver’ is what all small boys are expected to say, just as small girls are expected to say ‘Nurse’. He is no longer small now, he belongs to the big world; he will have to put aside the fantasy of driving a great iron horse and do the realistic thing. He is good at school, there is nothing else he knows of that he is good at, therefore he will stay on at school, moving up through the ranks. One day, perhaps, he will even become an inspector. But he will not take an office job. How can one work from morning to night with only two weeks’ holiday a year?

  What sort of teacher will he make? He can picture himself only dimly. He sees a figure in sports jacket and grey flannels (that is what men teachers seem to wear) walking down a corridor with books under its arm. It is only a glimpse, and in a moment it vanishes. He does not see the face.

  He hopes that, when the day comes, he will not be sent to teach in a place like Worcester. But perhaps Worcester is a purgatory one must pass through. Perhaps Worcester is where people are sent to be tested.

  One day they are assigned an essay to write in class: ‘What I do in the mornings.’ They are supposed to write about the things they do before setting off for school. He knows the kind of thing he is expected to say: that he makes his own bed, that he washes the breakfast dishes, that he cuts his own sandwiches for lunch. Though in fact he does none of these things – his mother does them for him – he lies well enough not to be found out. But he goes too far when he describes how he brushes his shoes. He has never brushed his own shoes in his life. In his essay he says you use the brush to brush the dirt off, after which you use a rag to coat the shoe with polish. Miss Oosthuizen puts a big blue exclamation mark in the margin next to the shoe-brushing. He is mortified, prays that she will not call him out in front of the class to read his essay. That evening he watches carefully as his mother brushes his shoes, so that he will not get it wrong again.

  He lets his mother brush his shoes as he lets her do everything for him that she wants to. The only thing that he will not let her do any more is to come into the bathroom when he is naked.

  He knows he is a liar, knows he is bad, but he refuses to change. He does not change because he does not want to change. His difference from other boys may be bound up with his mother and his unnatural family, but is bound up with his lying too. If
he stopped lying he would have to polish his shoes and talk politely and do everything that normal boys do. In that case he would no longer be himself. If he were no longer himself, what point would there be in living?

  He is a liar and he is cold-hearted too: a liar to the world in general, cold-hearted towards his mother. It pains his mother, he can see, that he is steadily growing away from her. Nevertheless he hardens his heart and will not relent. His only excuse is that he is merciless to himself too. He lies but he does not lie to himself.

  ‘When are you going to die?’ he asks his mother one day, challenging her, surprised at his own daring.

  ‘I am not going to die,’ she replies. Her voice is gay, but there is something false in it.

  ‘What if you get cancer?’

  ‘You only get cancer if you are hit on the breast. I won’t get cancer. I’ll live forever. I won’t die.’

  He knows why she is saying this. She is saying it for him and his brother, so that they will not worry. It is a silly thing to say, but he is grateful to her for it.

  He cannot imagine his mother dying. She is the firmest thing in his life. She is the rock on which he stands. Without her he would be nothing.

  His mother guards her breasts carefully in case they are knocked. His very first memory, earlier than the dog, earlier than the scrap of paper, is of her white breasts. He suspects he must have hurt them when he was a baby, beaten them with his fists, otherwise she would not now deny them to him so pointedly, she who denies him nothing else.

  Cancer is the great fear of her life. As for him, he has been taught to be wary of pains in his side, to treat each twinge as a sign of appendicitis. Will the ambulance get him to hospital before his appendix bursts? Will he ever wake up from the anaesthetic? He does not like to think of being cut open by a strange doctor. On the other hand, it would be nice to have a scar afterwards to show off to people.

  When peanuts and raisins are doled out during break at school, he blows away the papery red skins of the peanuts, which are reputed to collect in the appendix and fester there.

  He absorbs himself in his collections. He collects stamps. He collects lead soldiers. He collects cards – cards of Australian cricketers, cards of English footballers, cards of cars of the world. To get cards, one has to buy packets of cigarettes made of nougat and icing-sugar with pink-painted tips. His pockets are full of wilting, sticky cigarettes that he has forgotten to eat.

  He spends hours on end with his Meccano set, proving to his mother that he too can be good with his hands. He builds a windmill with sets of coupled pulleys whose blades can be cranked so fast that a breeze wafts across the room.

  He trots around the yard tossing a cricket ball in the air and catching it without breaking his stride. What is the true trajectory of the ball: is it going straight up and straight down, as he sees it, or is it rising and falling in loops, as a motionless bystander would see it? When he talks to his mother about this, he sees a desperate look in her eyes: she knows things like this are important to him, and wants to understand why, but cannot. For his part, he wishes she would be interested in things for their own sake, not just because they interest him.

  When there is something practical to be done that she cannot do, like fixing a leaking tap, she calls in a Coloured man off the street, any man, any passer-by. Why, he asks in exasperation, does she have such faith in Coloured people? Because they are used to working with their hands, she replies.

  It seems a silly thing to believe – that because someone has not been to school he must know how to fix a tap or repair a stove – yet it is so different from what everyone else believes, so eccentric, that despite himself he finds it endearing. He would rather that his mother expected wonders of Coloured people than expected nothing of them at all.

  He is always trying to make sense of his mother. Jews are exploiters, she says; yet she prefers Jewish doctors because they know what they are doing. Coloured people are the salt of the earth, she says, yet she and her sisters are always gossiping about pretend-whites with secret Coloured backgrounds. He cannot understand how she can hold so many contradictory beliefs at the same time. Yet at least she has beliefs. Her brothers too. Her brother Norman believes in the monk Nostradamus and his prophecies of the end of the world; he believes in flying saucers that land during the night and take people away. He cannot imagine his father or his father’s family talking about the end of the world. Their sole goal in life is to avoid controversy, to offend no one, to be amiable all the time; by comparison with his mother’s family his father’s family is bland and boring.

  He is too close to his mother, his mother is too close to him. That is the reason why, despite the hunting and the other manly things he does during his visits to the farm, his father’s family has never taken him to its bosom. His grandmother may have been harsh in denying the three of them a home during the war, when they were living on a share of a lance corporal’s pay, too poor to buy butter or tea. Nevertheless, her instinct was right. His grandmother is not blind to the dark secret of No. 12 Poplar Avenue, namely that the eldest child is first in the household, the second child second, and the man, the husband, the father, last. Either his mother does not care enough to conceal this perversion of the natural order from his father’s family, or else his father has been complaining in private. Whatever the case, his grandmother disapproves and does not hide her disapproval.

  Sometimes, when she is caught up in a quarrel with his father and wants to score a point, his mother complains bitterly about her treatment at the hands of his family. Mostly, however – for her son’s sake, because she knows how close the farm is to his heart, because she can offer nothing to take its place – she tries to ingratiate herself with them in ways he finds as distasteful as her jokes about money, jokes that are not jokes.

  He wishes his mother would be normal. If she were normal, he could be normal too.

  It is the same with her two sisters. They have one child each, one son, over whom they hover with suffocating solicitude. His cousin Juan in Johannesburg is his closest friend in the world: they write letters to each other, they look forward to holidays together at the sea. Nevertheless, he does not like to see Juan shamefacedly obeying his mother’s every instruction, even when she is not there to oversee him. Of all the four sons, he is the only one who is not wholly under his mother’s thumb. He has broken away, or half broken away: he has his own friends, whom he has chosen for himself; he goes out on his bicycle without saying where he is going or when he will be back. His cousins and his brother have no friends. He thinks of them as pale, timid, always at home under the eye of their fierce mothers. His father calls the three sister-mothers the three witches. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble,’ he says, quoting Macbeth. Delightedly, maliciously he echoes his father.

  When she feels particularly bitter about her life in Reunion Park, his mother laments that she did not marry Bob Breech. He does not take her laments seriously. Yet at the same time he cannot believe his ears. If she had married Bob Breech, where would he be? Who would he be? Would he be Bob Breech’s child? Would Bob Breech’s child be him?

  Only one piece of evidence remains of a real Bob Breech. He comes across it by chance in one of his mother’s albums: a blurred photograph of two young men in long white trousers and dark blazers standing on a beach with their arms around each other’s shoulders, squinting into the sun. One of them he knows: Juan’s father. Who is this other man? he asks his mother. Bob Breech, she replies. Where is he now? He is dead, she says.

  He stares hard into the face of the dead Bob Breech. He can find nothing of himself there.

  He does not interrogate her further. But, listening to the sisters, putting two and two together, he learns that Bob Breech came to South Africa for his health; that after a year or two he went back to England; that there he died. He died of consumption, but, it is implied, a broken heart may have contributed to his decline – a heart broken because of the dark-haired, dark-eyed, wary-looking young scho
olteacher whom he met at Plettenberg Bay and who refused to marry him.

  He loves to page through his mother’s albums. No matter how indistinct the images, he can always pick her out from the group: the one in whose shy, defensive look he recognizes himself. In her albums he follows her life through the 1920s and 1930s: first the team pictures (hockey, tennis), then the pictures from her tour of Europe: Scotland, Norway, Switzerland, Germany; Edinburgh, the fjords, the Alps, Bingen on the Rhine. Among her mementoes there is a pencil from Bingen with a tiny peephole in its side allowing a view of a castle perched on a cliff.

  Sometimes they page through the albums together, he and she. She sighs, she says she wishes she could visit Scotland again, see the heather, the bluebells. He thinks: My mother had a life before I was born, and that life still lives in her. He is glad, in a way, for her sake, since she no longer has a life of her own.

  His mother’s world is quite different from the world of his father’s photograph album, in which South Africans in khaki uniform strike poses against the pyramids of Egypt or against the rubble of Italian cities. But in his father’s album he spends less time on the photographs than on the fascinating pamphlets interspersed among them, pamphlets dropped on the Allied positions from German aeroplanes. One tells the soldiers how to give themselves a temperature (by eating soap); another pictures a glamorous woman perched on the knee of a fat Jew with a hooked nose, drinking a glass of champagne. ‘Do you know where your wife is tonight?’ asks the subtitle. And then there is the blue porcelain eagle that his father found in the ruins of a house in Naples and brought back in his kit-bag, the eagle of empire that now stands on the mantelshelf in the living room.

  He is immensely proud of his father’s war service. He is surprised – and gratified – to find how few of the fathers of his friends fought in the war. Why his father rose to no more than a lance corporal he is not sure: he quietly leaves out the lance when he repeats his father’s adventures to his friends. But he treasures the photograph, taken in a studio in Cairo, of his handsome father sighting down a rifle barrel, one eye closed, his hair neatly combed, his beret tucked in regulation fashion under his epaulette. If he had his way it would be on the mantelshelf too.