Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  It is easier with Ros and Freek. But even with them he has to speak tortuously constructed sentences to avoid calling them jy when they call him kleinbaas. He is not sure whether Freek counts as a man or a boy, whether he is making a fool of himself when he treats Freek as a man. With Coloured people in general, and with the people of the Karoo in particular, he simply does not know when they cease to be children and become men and women. It seems to happen so early and so suddenly: one day they are playing with toys, the next day they are out with the men, working, or in someone’s kitchen, washing dishes.

  Freek is gentle and soft-spoken. He has a bicycle with fat tyres and a guitar; in the evenings he sits outside his room and plays his guitar to himself, smiling his rather remote smile. On Saturday afternoons he cycles off to the Fraserburg Road location and stays there until Sunday evening, returning long after dark: from miles away they can see the tiny, wavering speck of light that is his bicycle lamp. It seems to him heroic to cycle that vast distance. He would hero-worship Freek if it were permitted.

  Freek is a hired man, he is paid a wage, he can be given notice and sent packing. Nevertheless, seeing Freek sitting on his haunches, his pipe in his mouth, staring out over the veld, it seems to him that Freek belongs here more securely than the Coetzees do – if not to Voëlfontein, then to the Karoo. The Karoo is Freek’s country, his home; the Coetzees, drinking tea and gossiping on the farmhouse stoep, are like swallows, seasonal, here today, gone tomorrow, or even like sparrows, chirping, light-footed, short-lived.

  Best of all on the farm, best of everything, is the hunting. His uncle owns only one gun, a heavy Lee-Enfield .303 that fires a shell too large for any of the game (once his father shot a hare with it and nothing was left over but bloody scraps). So when he visits the farm they borrow from one of the neighbours an old .22. It takes a single cartridge, loaded straight into the breech; sometimes it misfires and he comes away with a singing in his ears that lasts for hours. He never manages to hit anything with this gun except frogs in the dam and muisvoëls in the orchard. Yet never does he live more intensely than in the early mornings when he and his father set off with their guns up the dry bed of the Boesmansrivier in search of game: steenbok, duiker, hares, and, on the bare slopes of the hills, korhaan.

  December after December he and his father come to the farm to hunt. They catch the train – not the Trans-Karoo Express or the Orange Express, to say nothing of the Blue Train, all of which are too expensive and anyhow do not stop at Fraserburg Road – but the ordinary passenger train, the one that stops at all the stations, even the most obscure, and sometimes has to creep into sidings and wait until the more famous expresses have flashed past. He loves this slow train, loves sleeping snug and tight under the crisp white sheets and navy-blue blankets that the bedding attendant brings, loves waking in the night at some quiet station in the middle of nowhere, hearing the hiss of the engine at rest, the clang of the ganger’s hammer as he tests the wheels. And then at dawn, when they arrive at Fraserburg Road, Uncle Son will be waiting for them, wearing his broad smile and his old, oil-stained felt hat, saying ‘Jis-laaik, maar jy word darem groot, John!’ – You’re getting big! – and whistling through his teeth, and they can load their bags on the Studebaker and set off on the long drive.

  He accepts without question the variety of hunting practised on Voëlfontein. He accepts that they have had a good hunt if they start a single hare or hear a pair of korhaan gargling in the distance. That is enough of a story to tell the rest of the family, who, by the time they return with the sun high in the sky, are sitting on the stoep drinking coffee. Most mornings they have nothing to report, nothing at all.

  There is no point in going out to hunt in the heat of the day, when the animals they want to slay are dozing in the shade. But in the late afternoon they sometimes go touring the farm roads in the Studebaker, with Uncle Son driving and his father in the passenger seat holding the .303 and he and Ros in the dickey seat at the back.

  Normally it would be Ros’s job to jump out and open the camp gates for the car, wait for the car to go through, and then close the gates behind, one gate after another. But on these hunts it is his privilege to open the gates, while Ros watches and approves.

  They are hunting the fabled paauw. However, since paauw are sighted only once or twice a year – so rare are they, indeed, that there is a fine of fifty pounds for shooting them, if you are caught – they settle for hunting korhaan. Ros is taken along on the hunt because, being a Bushman or nearly a Bushman, he must have preternaturally sharp vision.

  And indeed it is Ros, with a slap on the roof of the car, who sees the korhaan first: grey-brown birds the size of pullets trotting among the bushes in groups of two or three. The Studebaker comes to a halt; his father rests the .303 on the window and takes aim; the clap of the shot echoes back and forth across the veld. Sometimes the birds, alarmed, take flight; more often they simply trot faster, making their characteristic gargling noise. Never does his father actually hit a korhaan, so never does he get to see one of these birds (‘bush-bustard’, says the Afrikaans-English dictionary) from close by.

  His father was a gunner in the war: he manned a Bofors anti-aircraft gun shooting at German and Italian planes. He wonders whether he ever shot a plane down: he certainly never boasts of it. How did he come to be a gunner at all? He has no gift for it. Were soldiers just allotted things to do at random?

  The only variety of hunting at which they do succeed is hunting by night, which, he soon discovers, is shameful and not to be boasted about. The method is simple. After supper they climb aboard the Studebaker and Uncle Son drives them in darkness across the lucerne fields. At a certain point he stops and switches on the headlights. Not thirty yards away a steenbok stands frozen, its ears cocked towards them, its dazzled eyes reflecting the lights. ‘Skiet!’ hisses his uncle. His father shoots and the buck falls.

  They tell themselves it is acceptable to hunt in this way because the buck are a pest, eating lucerne that should go to the sheep. But when he sees how tiny the dead buck is, no larger than a poodle, he knows the argument is hollow. They hunt by night because they are not good enough to shoot anything by day.

  On the other hand, the venison, steeped in vinegar and then roasted (he watches his aunt cut slits in the dark flesh and stuff it with cloves and garlic), is even more delicious than lamb, tangy and soft, so soft that it melts in the mouth. Everything in the Karoo is delicious, the peaches, the watermelons, the pumpkin, the mutton, as though whatever can find sustenance in this arid earth is thereby blessed.

  They will never be famous hunters. Still, he loves the heft of the gun in his hand, the sound of their feet tramping the grey river-sand, the silence that descends heavy as a cloud when they stop, and always the landscape enclosing them, the beloved landscape of ochre and grey and fawn and olive-green.

  On the last day of the visit, according to ritual, he may shoot up the remainder of his box of .22 cartridges at a tin can on a fence post. It is a difficult occasion. The borrowed gun is not a good one, he is not a good shot. With the family watching from the stoep, he fires off his shots hastily, missing more often than he hits.

  One morning while he is out by himself in the riverbed, hunting muisvoëls, the .22 jams. He cannot find a way to release the cartridge-case stuck in the breech. He brings the gun back to the house, but Uncle Son and his father are away in the veld. ‘Ask Ros or Freek,’ his mother suggests. He seeks out Freek in the stable. Freek, however, does not want to touch the gun. It is the same with Ros, when he finds Ros. Though they will not explain themselves, they seem to have a holy terror of guns. So he has to wait for his uncle to come back and prise out the cartridge-case with his penknife. ‘I asked Ros and Freek,’ he complains, ‘but they wouldn’t help.’ His uncle shakes his head. ‘You mustn’t ask them to touch guns,’ he says. ‘They know they mustn’t.’

  They mustn’t. Why not? No one will tell him. But he broods on the word mustn’t. He hears it more often on the
farm than anywhere else, more often even than in Worcester. A strange word, easy to misspell because of the silent t hidden in the middle. ‘You mustn’t touch this.’ ‘You mustn’t eat that.’ Would that be the price, if he were to give up going to school and plead to live here on the farm: that he would have to stop asking questions, obey all the mustn’ts, just do as he was told? Would he be prepared to knuckle down and pay that price? Is there no way of living in the Karoo – the only place in the world where he wants to be – as he wants to live: without belonging to a family?

  The farm is huge, so huge that when, on one of their hunts, he and his father come to a fence across the riverbed, and his father announces that they have reached the boundary between Voëlfontein and the next farm, he is taken aback. In his imagination Voëlfontein is a kingdom in its own right. There is not enough time in a single life to know all of Voëlfontein, know its every stone and bush. No time can be enough when one loves a place with such devouring love.

  He knows Voëlfontein best in summer, when it lies flattened under an even, blinding light that pours down from the sky. Yet Voëlfontein has its mysteries too, mysteries that belong not to night and shadow but to hot afternoons when mirages dance on the horizon and the very air sings in his ears. Then, when everyone else is dozing, stunned by the heat, he can tiptoe out of the house and climb the hill to the labyrinth of stone-walled kraals that belong to the old days when the sheep in their thousands had to be brought in from the veld to be counted or shorn or dipped. The kraal walls are two feet thick and higher than his head; they are made of flat blue-grey stones, every one of them trundled here by donkey-cart. He tries to picture the herds of sheep, all of them dead and gone now, that must have sheltered from the sun in the lee of these walls. He tries to picture Voëlfontein as it must have been when the great house and its outbuildings and kraals were still in the process of being built: a site of patient, ant-like labour, year after year. Now the jackals that preyed on the sheep have been exterminated, shot or poisoned, and the kraals, without a use, are sliding into ruin.

  The kraal walls ramble for miles up and down the hillside. Nothing grows here: the earth has been trampled flat and killed forever, he does not know how: it has a stained, unhealthy, yellow look. Once inside the walls, he is cut off from everything save the sky. He has been warned not to come here because of the danger of snakes, because no one will hear him if he shouts for help. Snakes, he is warned, revel in hot afternoons like these: they come out of their lairs – ringhals, puff-adder, skaapsteker – to bask in the sun, warming their cold blood.

  He has yet to see a snake in the kraals; nevertheless, he watches his every step.

  Freek comes across a skaapsteker behind the kitchen, where the women hang the laundry. He beats it to death with a stick and drapes the long yellow body over a bush. For weeks the women will not go there. Snakes marry for life, says Tryn; when you kill the male, the female comes in search of revenge.

  Spring, September, is the best time to visit the Karoo, though the school vacation is only one week long. They are on the farm one September when the shearers arrive. They appear from nowhere, wild men who come on bicycles laden with bedrolls and pots and pans.

  Shearers, he discovers, are special people. When they descend on the farm, it is good luck. To hold them there, a fat hamel, a wether, is picked out and slaughtered. They take possession of the old stable, which they turn into their barracks. A fire burns late into the night as they feast.

  He listens to a long discussion between Uncle Son and their leader, a man so dark and fierce he could almost be a Native, with a pointed beard and trousers held up by rope. They talk about the weather, about the state of the grazing in the Prince Albert district, in the Beaufort district, in the Fraserburg district, about payment. The Afrikaans the shearers speak is so thick, so full of strange idioms, that he can barely understand it. Where do they come from? Is there a country deeper even than the country of Voëlfontein, a heartland even more secluded from the world?

  The next morning, an hour before dawn, he is woken by the trampling of hooves as the first troops of sheep are driven past the house to be penned in the kraals beside the shearing-shed. The household begins to awake. There is a bustle in the kitchen, and the smell of coffee. By first light he is outside, dressed, too excited to eat.

  He is given a task. He has charge of a tin mug full of dried beans. Each time a shearer finishes a sheep, and releases it with a slap on the hindquarters, and tosses the shorn pelt on to the sorting-table, and the sheep, pink and naked and bleeding where the shears have nipped it, trots nervously into the second pen – each time, the shearer may take a bean from the mug, which he does with a nod and a courteous ‘My basie!’

  When he is tired of holding the mug (the shearers can take the beans for themselves, they are country-bred and have never so much as heard of dishonesty), he and his brother help with the stuffing of the bales, jumping up and down on the mass of thick, hot, oily wool. His cousin Agnes is there too, visiting from Skipperskloof. She and her sister join in; the four of them tumble over each other, giggling and cavorting as if in a huge featherbed.

  Agnes occupies a place in his life that he does not yet understand. He first set eyes on her when he was seven. Invited to Skipperskloof, they arrived late one afternoon after a long train journey. Clouds scudded across the sky, there was no warmth in the sun. Under the chill winter light the veld stretched out a deep reddish blue without trace of green. Even the farmhouse looked unwelcoming: an austere white rectangle with a steep zinc roof. It was not at all like Voëlfontein; he did not want to be there.

  Agnes, a few months older than himself, was allotted to be his companion. She took him for a walk in the veld. She went barefoot; she did not even own shoes. Soon they were out of sight of the house, in the middle of nowhere. They began to talk. She had pigtails and a lisp, which he liked. He lost his reserve. As he spoke he forgot what language he was speaking: thoughts simply turned to words within him, transparent words.

  What he said to Agnes that afternoon he can no longer remember. But he told her everything, everything he did, everything he knew, everything he hoped for. In silence she took it all in. Even as he spoke he knew the day was special because of her.

  The sun began to sink, fiery crimson yet icy. The clouds darkened, the wind grew sharper, cutting through his clothes. Agnes was wearing nothing but a thin cotton dress; her feet were blue with cold.

  ‘Where have you been? What have you been doing?’ asked the grown-ups when they returned to the house. ‘Niks nie,’ answered Agnes. Nothing.

  Here on Voëlfontein Agnes is not allowed to go hunting, but she is free to wander with him in the veld or catch frogs with him in the big earth-dam. Being with her is different from being with his school friends. It has something to do with her softness, her readiness to listen, but also with her slim brown legs, her bare feet, the way she dances from stone to stone. He is clever, he is top of his class; she is reputed to be clever too; they roam around talking about things that the grown-ups would shake their heads over: whether the universe had a beginning; what lies beyond Pluto, the dark planet; where God is, if he exists.

  Why is it that he can speak so easily to Agnes? Is it because she is a girl? To whatever comes from him she seems to answer without reserve, softly, readily. She is his first cousin, therefore they cannot fall in love and get married. In a way that is a relief: he is free to be friends with her, open his heart to her. But is he in love with her nevertheless? Is this love – this easy generosity, this sense of being understood at last, of not having to pretend?

  All day and all of the next day the shearers work, barely stopping to eat, calling out challenges to each other to show who is fastest. By evening on the second day all the work is done, every sheep on the farm has been shorn. Uncle Son brings out a canvas bag full of notes and coins, and each shearer is paid according to his number of beans. Then there is another fire, another feast. The next morning they are gone and the farm can retur
n to its old, slow ways.

  The bales of wool are so many that they overflow the shed. Uncle Son goes from one to another with a stencil and ink-pad, painting on each his name, the name of the farm, the grade of wool. Days later a huge lorry arrives (how did it get across the sand-bed of the Boesmansrivier, where even cars stall?) and the bales are loaded and driven away.

  Every year this happens. Every year the shearers come, every year there is this adventure and excitement. It will never end; there is no reason why it should ever end, as long as there are years.

  The secret and sacred word that binds him to the farm is belong. Out in the veld by himself he can breathe the word aloud: I belong on the farm. What he really believes but does not utter, what he keeps to himself for fear that the spell will end, is a different form of the word: I belong to the farm.

  He tells no one because the word is misunderstood so easily, turned so easily into its inverse: The farm belongs to me. The farm will never belong to him, he will never be more than a visitor: he accepts that. The thought of actually living on Voëlfontein, of calling the great old house his home, of no longer having to ask permission to do what he wants to do, turns him giddy; he thrusts it away. I belong to the farm: that is the furthest he is prepared to go, even in his most secret heart. But in his secret heart he knows what the farm in its way knows too: that Voëlfontein belongs to no one. The farm is greater than any of them. The farm exists from eternity to eternity. When they are all dead, when even the farmhouse has fallen into ruin like the kraals on the hillside, the farm will still be here.

  Once, out in the veld far from the house, he bends down and rubs his palms in the dust as if washing them. It is ritual. He is making up a ritual. He does not know yet what the ritual means, but he is relieved there is no one to see and report him.

  Belonging to the farm is his secret fate, a fate he was born into but embraces gladly. His other secret is that, fight though he may, he still belongs to his mother. It does not escape him that these two servitudes clash. Nor does it escape him that on the farm his mother’s hold is at its weakest. Unable, as a woman, to hunt, unable even to walk about in the veld, she is here at a disadvantage.