Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  He remembers wrestling with Eddie on the lawn. Though Eddie was only seven months older than he, and no bigger, he had a wiry strength and a singleness of purpose that always made him the victor. The victor, but cautious in victory. Only for a moment, when he had his opponent pinned on his back, helpless, did Eddie allow himself a grin of triumph; then he rolled off and stood at a crouch, ready for the next round.

  The smell of Eddie’s body stays with him from those bouts, and the feel of his head, the high bullet-shaped skull and the close, coarse hair.

  They have harder heads than white people, his father says. That is why they are so good at boxing. For the same reason, his father says, they will never be good at rugby. In rugby you have to think fast, you can’t be a bonehead.

  There is a moment as the two of them wrestle when his lips and nose are pressed against Eddie’s hair. He breathes in the smell, the taste: the smell, the taste of smoke.

  Every weekend Eddie gave himself a bath, standing in a footbath in the servant’s lavatory and washing himself with a soapy rag. He and his brother hauled a dustbin below the tiny window and climbed up to peek. Eddie was naked but for his leather belt, which he still wore around his waist. Seeing the two faces at the window, he gave a big smile and shouted ‘Hê!’ and danced in the footbath, splashing the water, not covering himself.

  Later he told his mother: ‘Eddie didn’t take off his belt in the bath.’

  ‘Let him do what he wants,’ said his mother.

  He has never been to Ida’s Valley, where Eddie comes from. He thinks of it as a cold, sodden place. In Eddie’s mother’s house there is no electric light. The roof leaks, everyone is always coughing. When you go outside you have to hop from stone to stone to avoid the puddles. What hope is there for Eddie now that he is back in Ida’s Valley, in disgrace?

  ‘What do you think Eddie is doing now?’ he asks his mother.

  ‘He is surely in a reformatory.’

  ‘Why in a reformatory?’

  ‘People like that always end up in a reformatory, and then in jail.’

  He does not understand his mother’s bitterness against Eddie. He does not understand these bitter moods of hers, when things almost at random come under the disparaging lash of her tongue: Coloured people, her own brothers and sisters, books, education, the Government. He does not really care what she believes about Eddie as long as she does not change her mind from day to day. When she lashes out like this he feels that the floor is crumbling beneath his feet and he is falling.

  He thinks of Eddie in his old blazer, crouching to hide from the rain that is always falling in Ida’s Valley, smoking stompies with the older Coloured boys. He is ten and Eddie, in Ida’s Valley, is ten. For a while Eddie will be eleven while he is still ten; then he will be eleven too. Always he will be pulling level, staying with Eddie for a while, then getting left behind. How long will it go on? Will he ever escape from Eddie? If they passed each other in the street one day, would Eddie, despite all his drinking and dagga-smoking, despite all the jail and all the hardening, recognize him and stop and shout ‘Jou moer!’

  At this moment, in the leaky house in Ida’s Valley, curled under a smelly blanket, still wearing his blazer, he knows that Eddie is thinking of him. In the dark Eddie’s eyes are two yellow slits. One thing he knows for sure: Eddie will have no pity on him.

  Eleven

  Outside their circle of kinfolk they have few social contacts. On the occasions when strangers come to the house, he and his brother scuttle away like wild animals, then sneak back to lurk and eavesdrop. They have pierced spyholes in the ceiling, so that they can climb into the roofspace and peer into the living room from above. Their mother is embarrassed by the scuffling noises. ‘Just the children playing,’ she explains with a strained smile.

  He flees polite talk because its formulas – ‘How are you?’ ‘How are you enjoying school?’ – baffle him. Not knowing the right answers, he mumbles and stammers like a fool. Yet finally he is not ashamed of his wildness, his impatience with the tame patter of genteel conversation.

  ‘Can’t you just be normal?’ asks his mother.

  ‘I hate normal people,’ he replies hotly.

  ‘I hate normal people,’ his brother echoes. His brother is seven. He wears a continual tight, nervous smile; at school he sometimes throws up for no good reason and has to be fetched home.

  Instead of friends they have family. His mother’s family are the only people in the world who accept him more or less as he is. They accept him – rude, unsocialized, eccentric – not only because unless they accept him they cannot come visiting, but because they too were brought up wild and rude. His father’s family, on the other hand, disapprove of him and of the upbringing he has had at the hands of his mother. In their company he feels constrained; as soon as he can escape he begins to mock the commonplaces of politeness (‘En hoe gaan dit met jou mammie? En met jou broer? Dis goed, dis goed!’ How is your mommy? Your brother? Good!) Yet there is no evading them: without participating in their rituals there is no way of visiting the farm. So, squirming with embarrassment, despising himself for his cravenness, he submits. ‘Dit gaan goed,’ he says. ‘Dit gaan goed met ons almal.’ We’re all fine.

  He knows that his father sides with his family against him. This is one of his father’s ways of getting back at his mother. He is chilled by the thought of the life he would face if his father ran the household, a life of dull, stupid formulas, of being like everyone else. His mother is the only one who stands between him and an existence he could not endure. So at the same time that he is irritated with her for her slowness and dullness, he clings to her as his only protector. He is her son, not his father’s son. He denies and detests his father. He will not forget the day two years ago when his mother for the one and only time let his father loose on him, like a dog let loose from its chain (‘I’ve reached the limit, I can’t stand it any more!’), and his father’s eyes glared blue and angry as he shook him and cuffed him.

  He must go to the farm because there is no place on earth he loves more or can imagine loving more. Everything that is complicated in his love for his mother is uncomplicated in his love for the farm. Yet since as far back as he can remember this love has had an edge of pain. He may visit the farm but he will never live there. The farm is not his home; he will never be more than a guest, an uneasy guest. Even now, day by day, the farm and he are travelling different roads, separating, growing not closer but further apart. One day the farm will be wholly gone, wholly lost; already he is grieving over that loss.

  The farm used to be his grandfather’s, but his grandfather died and it passed to Uncle Son, his father’s elder brother. Son was the only one with an aptitude for farming; the rest of the brothers and sisters all too eagerly fled to the towns and cities. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the farm on which they grew up is still theirs. So at least once a year, and sometimes twice, his father goes back to the farm and takes him along.

  The farm is called Voëlfontein, Bird fountain; he loves every stone of it, every bush, every blade of grass, loves the birds that give it its name, birds that as dusk falls gather in their thousands in the trees around the fountain, calling to each other, murmuring, ruffling their feathers, settling for the night. It is not conceivable that another person could love the farm as he does. But he cannot talk about his love, not only because normal people do not talk about such things but because confessing to it would be a betrayal of his mother. It would be a betrayal not only because she too comes from a farm, a rival farm in a far-off part of the world which she speaks of with a love and longing of her own but can never go back to because it was sold to strangers, but because she is not truly welcome on this farm, the real farm, Voëlfontein.

  Why this is so she never explains – for which, in the end, he is grateful – but slowly he is able to piece the story together. For a long spell during the War, his mother lived with her two children in a single rented room in the town of Prince Albert, survivi
ng on the six pounds a month his father remitted from his lance corporal’s pay plus two pounds from the Governor-General’s Distress Fund. During this time they were not once invited to the farm, though the farm was a mere two hours away by road. He knows this part of the story because even his father, when he came back from the War, was angry and ashamed of how they had been treated.

  Of Prince Albert he remembers only the whine of mosquitoes in the long hot nights, and his mother walking to and fro in her petticoat, sweat standing out on her skin, her heavy, fleshy legs crisscrossed with varicose veins, trying to soothe his baby brother, forever crying; and days of terrible boredom spent behind closed shutters sheltering from the sun. That was how they lived, stuck, too poor to move, waiting for the invitation that did not come.

  His mother’s lips still grow tight when the farm is mentioned. Nevertheless, when they go to the farm for Christmas she comes along. The whole extended family congregates. Beds and mattresses and stretchers are set out in every room, and on the long stoep too: one Christmas he counts twenty-six of them. All day long his aunt and the two maids are busy in the steamy kitchen, cooking, baking, producing meal after meal, one round of tea or coffee and cake after another, while the men sit on the stoep, gazing lazily over the shimmering Karoo, swapping stories about the old days.

  Greedily he drinks in the atmosphere, drinks in the happy, slapdash mixture of English and Afrikaans that is their common tongue when they get together. He likes this funny, dancing language, with its particles that slip here and there in the sentence. It is lighter, airier than the Afrikaans they study at school, which is weighed down with idioms that are supposed to come from the volksmond, the people’s mouth, but seem to come only from the Great Trek, lumpish, nonsensical idioms about wagons and cattle and cattle-harness.

  On his first visit to the farm, while his grandfather was still alive, all the barnyard animals of his story books were still there: horses, donkeys, cows with their calves, pigs, ducks, a colony of hens with a cock that crowed to greet the sun, nanny goats and bearded billy goats. Then, after his grandfather’s death, the barnyard began to dwindle, till nothing was left but sheep. First the horses were sold, then the pigs were turned into pork (he watched his uncle shoot the last pig: the bullet took it behind the ear: it gave a grunt and a great fart and collapsed, first on its knees, then on its side, quivering). After that the cows went, and the ducks.

  The reason was the wool price. The Japanese were paying a pound a pound for wool: it was easier to buy a tractor than keep horses, easier to drive to Fraserburg Road in the new Studebaker and buy frozen butter and powdered milk than milk a cow and churn the cream. Only sheep mattered, sheep with their golden fleece.

  The burden of agriculture could be shed too. The only crop still grown on the farm is lucerne, in case the grazing runs out and the sheep have to be fed. Of the orchards, only a grove of orange trees remains, yielding year after year the sweetest of navels.

  When, refreshed by an after-dinner nap, his aunts and uncles congregate on the stoep to drink tea and tell stories, their talk sometimes turns to old times on the farm. They reminisce about their father the ‘gentleman farmer’ who kept a carriage and pair, who grew corn on the lands below the dam which he threshed and ground himself. ‘Yes, those were the days,’ they say, and sigh.

  They like to be nostalgic about the past, but none of them want to go back to it. He does. He wants everything to be as it was in the past.

  In a corner of the stoep, in the shade of the bougainvillea, hangs a canvas water-bottle. The hotter the day, the cooler the water – a miracle, like the miracle of the meat that hangs in the dark of the storeroom and does not rot, like the miracle of the pumpkins that lie on the roof in the blazing sun and stay fresh. On the farm, it seems, there is no decay.

  The water from the water-bottle is magically cool, but he pours no more than a mouthful at a time. He is proud of how little he drinks. It will stand him in good stead, he hopes, if he is ever lost in the veld. He wants to be a creature of the desert, this desert, like a lizard.

  Just above the farmhouse is a stone-walled dam, twelve feet square, filled by a wind pump, which provides water for the house and garden. One hot day he and his brother launch a galvanized-iron bathtub into the dam, climb unsteadily in, and paddle it back and forth across the surface.

  He fears water; he thinks of this adventure as a way of overcoming his fear. Their boat bobs about in the middle of the dam. Shafts of light flash from the dappled water; there is no sound but the trilling of cicadas. Between him and death there is only a thin sheet of metal. Nevertheless he feels quite secure, so secure that he can almost doze. This is the farm: no ill can happen here.

  He has been in a boat only once before, when he was four. A man (who? – he tries to summon him up, but cannot) rowed them out on the lagoon at Plettenberg Bay. It was supposed to be a pleasure-trip, but all the while they rowed he sat frozen, fixing his eye on the far shore. Only once did he glance over the side. Fronds of water-grass rippled languidly deep below them. It was as he feared, and worse; his head spun. Only these fragile boards, which groaned with every oar stroke as if about to crack, kept him from plunging to his death. He gripped tighter and closed his eyes, beating down the panic inside him.

  There are two Coloured families on Voëlfontein, each with a house of their own. There is also, near the dam wall, the house, now without a roof, in which Outa Jaap used to live. Outa Jaap was on the farm before his grandfather; he himself remembers Outa Jaap only as a very old man with milky-white, sightless eyeballs and toothless gums and knotted hands, sitting on a bench in the sun, to whom he was taken before he died, perhaps in order to be blessed, he is not sure. Though Outa Jaap is gone now, his name is still mentioned with deference. Yet when he asks what was special about Outa Jaap, the answers that come back are very ordinary. Outa Jaap came from the days before jackal-proof fences, he is told, when the shepherd who took his sheep to graze in one of the far-flung camps would be expected to live with them and guard them for weeks on end. Outa Jaap belonged to a vanished generation. That is all.

  Nevertheless, he has a sense of what lies behind these words. Outa Jaap was part of the farm; though his grandfather may have been its purchaser and legal owner, Outa Jaap came with it, knew more about it, about sheep, veld, weather, than the newcomer would ever know. That was why Outa Jaap had to be deferred to; that is why there is no question of getting rid of Outa Jaap’s son Ros, now in his middle years, though he is not a particularly good workman, unreliable and prone to get things wrong.

  It is understood that Ros will live and die on the farm and be succeeded by one of his sons. Freek, the other hired man, is younger and more energetic than Ros, quicker on the uptake and more dependable. Nevertheless, he is not of the farm: it is understood that he will not necessarily stay.

  Coming to the farm from Worcester, where Coloured people seem to have to beg for whatever they get (Asseblief my nooi! Asseblief my basie!), he is relieved at how correct and formal relations are between his uncle and the volk. Each morning his uncle confers with his two men about the day’s tasks. He does not give them orders. Instead he proposes the tasks that need to be done, one by one, as if dealing cards on a table; his men deal their own cards too. In-between there are pauses, long, reflective silences in which nothing happens. Then all at once, mysteriously, the whole business seems to be settled: who will go where, who will do what. ‘Nouja, dan sal ons maar loop, baas Sonnie!’ – We’ll get going! And Ros and Freek don their hats and briskly set off.

  It is the same in the kitchen. There are two women who work in the kitchen: Ros’s wife Tryn, and Lientjie, his daughter from another marriage. They arrive at breakfast time and leave after the midday meal, the main meal of the day, the meal that is here called dinner. So shy is Lientjie of strangers that she hides her face and giggles when spoken to. But if he stands at the kitchen door he can hear, passing between his aunt and the two women, a low stream of talk that he loves to eavesdrop
on: the soft, comforting gossip of women, stories passed from ear to ear to ear, till not only the farm but the village at Fraserburg Road and the location outside the village are covered by the stories, and all the other farms of the district too: a soft white web of gossip spun over past and present, a web being spun at the same moment in other kitchens too, the Van Rensburg kitchen, the Alberts kitchen, the Nigrini kitchen, the various Botes kitchens: who is getting married to whom, whose mother-in-law is going to have an operation for what, whose son is doing well at school, whose daughter is in trouble, who visited whom, who wore what when.

  But it is Ros and Freek with whom he has more to do. He burns with curiosity about the lives they live. Do they wear vests and underpants like white people? Do they each have a bed? Do they sleep naked or in their work clothes or do they have pyjamas? Do they eat proper meals, sitting at table with knives and forks?

  He has no way of answering these questions, for he is discouraged from visiting their houses. It would be rude, he is told – rude because Ros and Freek would find it embarrassing.

  If it is not embarrassing to have Ros’s wife and daughter work in the house, he wants to ask, cooking meals, washing clothes, making beds, why is it embarrassing to visit them in their house?

  It sounds like a good argument, but there is a flaw in it, he knows. For the truth is that it is embarrassing to have Tryn and Lientjie in the house. He does not like it when he passes Lientjie in the passage and she has to pretend she is invisible and he has to pretend she is not there. He does not like to see Tryn on her knees at the washtub washing his clothes. He does not know how to answer her when she speaks to him in the third person, calling him ‘die kleinbaas’, the little master, as if he were not present. It is all deeply embarrassing.