Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  Yet the truth is that many mornings he wakes struggling for breath; bouts of sneezing convulse him for minutes on end, till he is panting and weeping and wants to die. There is no feigning in these colds of his.

  The rule is that when you have been absent from school, you have to bring a letter of excuse. He knows his mother’s standard letter by heart: ‘Please excuse John’s absence yesterday. He was suffering from a bad cold, and I thought it advisable for him to stay in bed. Yours faithfully.’ He hands in these letters, which his mother writes as lies and which are read as lies, with an apprehensive heart.

  When at the end of the year he counts the days he has missed, they come to almost one in three. Yet he still comes first in class. The conclusion he draws is that what goes on in the classroom is of no importance. He can always catch up at home. If he had his way, he would stay away from school all year, making an appearance only to write the examinations.

  Everything his teachers say comes out of the textbook. He does not look down on them for that, nor do the other boys. He does not like it when, as happens now and again, a teacher’s ignorance is exposed. He would protect his teachers if he could. He listens with attention to their every word. But he listens less in order to learn than in case he is caught daydreaming (‘What did I just say? Repeat what I just said’), in case he should be called out in front of the class and humiliated.

  He is convinced that he is different, special. What he does not yet know is how he is special, why he is in the world. He suspects he will not be a King Arthur or an Alexander, revered in his lifetime. Not until after he is dead will it be understood what the world has lost.

  He is waiting to be called. When the call comes, he will be ready. Unflinchingly he will answer, even if it means going to his death, like the men of the Light Brigade.

  The standard he subjects himself to is the standard of the VC, the Victoria Cross. Only the English have the VC. The Americans do not have it, nor, to his disappointment, do the Russians. The South Africans certainly do not have it.

  He does not fail to notice that VC are his mother’s initials.

  South Africa is a country without heroes. Wolraad Woltemade would perhaps count as a hero if he did not have such a funny name. Swimming out into the stormy sea time and time again to save hapless sailors is certainly courageous; but did the courage belong to the man or to the horse? The thought of Wolraad Woltemade’s white horse steadfastly plunging back into the waves (he loves the redoubled, steady force of steadfast) brings a lump to his throat.

  Vic Toweel fights against Manuel Ortiz for the bantamweight title of the world. The fight takes place on a Saturday night; he stays up late with his father to listen to the commentary on the radio. In the last round Toweel, bleeding and exhausted, hurls himself at his opponent. Ortiz reels; the crowd goes wild, the commentator’s voice is hoarse with shouting. The judges announce their decision: South Africa’s Viccie Toweel is the new champion of the world. He and his father shout with elation and embrace each other. He does not know how to express his joy. Impulsively he grips his father’s hair, tugs with all his might. His father starts back, looks at him oddly.

  For days the newspapers are full of pictures of the fight. Viccie Toweel is a national hero. As for him, his elation soon dwindles. He is still happy that Toweel has beaten Ortiz, but has begun to wonder why. Who is Toweel to him? Why should he not be free to choose between Toweel and Ortiz in boxing as he is free to choose between Hamiltons and Villagers in rugby? Is he bound to support Toweel, this ugly little man with hunched shoulders and a big nose and tiny blank, black eyes, because Toweel (despite his funny name) is a South African? Do South Africans have to support other South Africans even if they don’t know them?

  His father is no help. His father never says anything surprising. Unfailingly he predicts that South Africa is going to win or that Western Province is going to win, whether at rugby or cricket or anything else. ‘Who do you think is going to win?’ he challenges his father the day before Western Province plays Transvaal. ‘Western Province, by a mile,’ responds his father like clockwork. They listen to the match on the radio and Transvaal wins. His father is unshaken. ‘Next year Western Province will win,’ he says. ‘Just watch.’

  It seems to him stupid to believe that Western Province will win just because you come from Cape Town. Better to believe that Transvaal will win, and then get a pleasant surprise if they don’t.

  In his hand he retains the feel of his father’s hair, coarse, sturdy. The violence of his action still puzzles and disturbs him. He has never been so free with his father’s body before. He would prefer that it did not happen again.

  Thirteen

  It is late at night. Everyone else is asleep. He is lying in bed, thinking. Across his bed falls a strip of orange from the street lights that burn all night over Reunion Park.

  He is remembering what happened that morning during assembly, while the Christians were singing their hymns and the Jews and Catholics were roaming free. Two older boys, Catholics, had penned him in a corner. ‘When are you coming to catechism?’ they had demanded. ‘I can’t come to catechism, I have to do errands for my mother on Friday afternoons,’ he had lied. ‘If you don’t come to catechism you can’t be a Catholic,’ they had said. ‘I am a Catholic,’ he had insisted, lying again.

  If the worst were to happen, he thinks now, facing the worst, if the Catholic priest were to visit his mother and ask why he never comes to catechism, or – the other nightmare – if the school principal were to announce that all boys with Afrikaans names were to be transferred to Afrikaans classes – if nightmare were to turn to reality and he were left with no recourse but to retreat into petulant shouting and storming and crying, into the baby behaviour that he knows is still inside him, coiled like a spring – if, after that tempest, he were as a last, desperate step to throw himself upon his mother’s protection, refusing to go back to school, pleading with her to save him – if he were in this way to disgrace himself utterly and finally, revealing what only he in his way and his mother in her way and perhaps his father in his own scornful way know, namely that he is still a baby and will never grow up – if all the stories that have been built up around him, built by himself, built by years of normal behaviour, at least in public, were to collapse, and the ugly, black, crying, babyish core of him were to emerge for all to see and laugh at, would there be any way in which he could go on living? Would he not have become as bad as one of those deformed, stunted, mongol children with hoarse voices and slavering lips that might as well be given sleeping pills or strangled?

  All the beds in the house are old and tired, their springs sag, they creak at the slightest movement. He lies as still as he can in the sliver of light from the window, conscious of his body drawn up on its side, of his fists clenched against his chest. In this silence he tries to imagine his death. He subtracts himself from everything: from the school, from the house, from his mother; he tries to imagine the days wheeling through their course without him. But he cannot. Always there is something left behind, something small and black, like a nut, like an acorn that has been in the fire, dry, ashy, hard, incapable of growth, but there. He can imagine himself dying but he cannot imagine himself disappearing. Try as he will, he cannot annihilate the last residue of himself.

  What is it that keeps him in existence? Is it fear of his mother’s grief, grief so great that he cannot bear to think of it for more than a flash? (He sees her in a bare room, standing silent, her hands covering her eyes; then he draws the blind on her, on the image.) Or is there something else in him that refuses to die?

  He remembers the other time he was cornered, when the two Afrikaans boys pinned his hands behind his back and marched him behind the earth-wall at the far end of the rugby field. He remembers the bigger boy in particular, so fat that the fat flowed over his tight clothes – one of those idiots or near-idiots who can break your fingers or crush your windpipe as easily as they wring a bird’s neck and smile placidly while t
hey are doing it. He had been afraid, there was no doubt of that, his heart had been hammering. Yet how true was that fear? As he stumbled across the field with his captors, was there not something deeper inside him, something quite jaunty, that said, ‘Never mind, nothing can touch you, this is just another adventure’?

  Nothing can touch you, there is nothing you are not capable of. Those are the two things about him, two things that are really one thing, the thing that is right about him and the thing that is wrong about him at the same time. This thing that is two things means that he will not die, no matter what; but does it not also mean that he will not live?

  He is a baby. His mother picks him up, face forward, gripping him under the arms. His legs hang, his head sags, he is naked; but his mother holds him up before her, advancing into the world. She has no need to see where she is going, she need only follow. Before him, as she advances, everything turns to stone and shatters. He is just a baby with a big belly and a lolling head, but he possesses this power.

  Then he is asleep.

  Fourteen

  There is a telephone call from Cape Town. Aunt Annie has had a fall on the steps of her flat in Rosebank. She has been taken to hospital with a broken hip; someone must come and make arrangements for her.

  It is July, mid-winter. Over the whole of the Western Cape there is a blanket of cold and rain. They catch the morning train to Cape Town, he and his mother and his brother, then a bus up Kloof Street to the Volkshospitaal. Aunt Annie, tiny as a baby in her flowered nightdress, is in the female ward. The ward is full: old women with cross, pinched faces shuffling about in their dressing gowns, hissing to themselves; fat, blowsy women with vacant faces sitting on the edges of their beds, their breasts carelessly spilling out. A loudspeaker in a corner plays Springbok Radio. Three o’clock, the afternoon request programme: ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ with Nelson Riddle and his orchestra.

  Aunt Annie takes his mother’s arm in a wizened grip. ‘I want to leave this place, Vera,’ she says in her hoarse whisper. ‘It is not the place for me.’

  His mother pats her hand, tries to soothe her. On the bedside table, a glass of water for her teeth and a Bible.

  The ward sister tells them that the broken hip has been set. Aunt Annie will have to spend another month in bed while the bone knits. ‘She’s not young any more, it takes time.’ After that she will have to use a stick.

  As an afterthought the sister adds that when Aunt Annie was brought in her toenails were as long and black as bird claws.

  His brother, bored, has begun to whine, complaining he is thirsty. His mother stops a nurse and persuades her to fetch a glass of water. Embarrassed, he looks away.

  They are sent down the corridor to the social worker’s office. ‘Are you the relatives?’ says the social worker. ‘Can you offer her a home?’

  His mother’s lips tighten. She shakes her head.

  ‘Why can’t she go back to her flat?’ he says to his mother afterwards.

  ‘She can’t climb the stairs. She can’t get to the shops.’

  ‘I don’t want her to live with us.’

  ‘She is not coming to live with us.’

  The visiting hour is over, it is time to say goodbye. Tears well up in Aunt Annie’s eyes. She clutches his mother’s arm so tightly that her fingers have to be prised loose.

  ‘Ek wil huistoe gaan, Vera,’ she whispers – I want to go home.

  ‘Just a few days more, Aunt Annie, till you can walk again,’ says his mother in her most soothing voice.

  He has never seen this side of her before: this treacherousness.

  Then it is his turn. Aunt Annie reaches out a hand. Aunt Annie is both his great-aunt and his godmother. In the album there is a photograph of her with a baby in her arms said to be him. She is wearing a black dress down to her ankles and an old-fashioned black hat; in the background is a church. Because she is his godmother Aunt Annie believes she has a special relationship with him. She does not seem to be aware of the disgust he feels for her, wrinkled and ugly in her hospital bed, the disgust he feels for this whole ward full of ugly women. He tries to keep his disgust from showing; his heart burns with shame. He endures the hand on his arm, but he wants to be gone, to be out of this place and never to come back.

  ‘You are so clever,’ says Aunt Annie in the low, hoarse voice she has had ever since he can remember. ‘You are a big man, your mother depends on you. You must love her and be a support for her and for your little brother too.’

  A support for his mother? What nonsense. His mother is like a rock, like a stone column. It is not he who must be a support for her, it is she who must be a support for him! Why is Aunt Annie saying these things anyhow? She is pretending she is going to die when all she has is a broken hip.

  He nods, tries to look serious and attentive and obedient while secretly he is only waiting for her to let go of him. She smiles the meaningful smile that is meant to be a sign of the special bond between her and Vera’s firstborn, a bond he does not feel at all, does not acknowledge. Her eyes are flat, pale blue, washed out. She is eighty years old and nearly blind. Even with glasses she cannot read the Bible properly, only hold it on her lap and murmur the words to herself.

  She relaxes her grip; he mumbles something and retreats.

  His brother’s turn. His brother submits to being kissed. ‘Goodbye, dear Vera,’ croaks Aunt Annie. ‘Mag die Here jou seën, jou en die kinders’ – May the Lord bless you and the children.

  It is five o’clock and beginning to get dark. In the unfamiliar bustle of the city rush-hour they catch a train to Rosebank. They are going to spend the night in Aunt Annie’s flat: the prospect fills him with gloom.

  Aunt Annie has no fridge. Her larder contains nothing but a few withered apples, a mouldy half-loaf of bread, a jar of fishpaste that his mother does not trust. She sends him out to the Indian shop; they have bread and jam and tea for supper.

  The toilet bowl is brown with dirt. His stomach turns when he thinks of the old woman with the long black toenails squatting over it. He does not want to use it.

  ‘Why have we got to stay here?’ he asks. ‘Why have we got to stay here?’ echoes his brother. ‘Because,’ says his mother grimly.

  Aunt Annie uses forty-watt bulbs to save electricity. In the dim yellow light of the bedroom his mother begins to pack Aunt Annie’s clothes into cardboard boxes. He has never been into Aunt Annie’s bedroom before. There are pictures on the walls, framed photographs of men and women with stiff, forbidding looks: Brechers, du Biels, his ancestors.

  ‘Why can’t she go and live with Uncle Albert?’

  ‘Because Kitty can’t look after two sick old people.’

  ‘I don’t want her to live with us.’

  ‘She is not going to live with us.’

  ‘Then where is she going to live?’

  ‘We will find a home for her.’

  ‘What do you mean, a home?’

  ‘A home, a home, a home for old people.’

  The only room in Aunt Annie’s flat that he likes is the storeroom. The storeroom is piled to the ceiling with old newspapers and carton boxes. The shelves are full of books, all the same: a squat book in a red binding, printed on the thick, coarse paper used for Afrikaans books that looks like blotting-paper with flecks of chaff and fly-dirt trapped in it. The title on the spine is Ewige Genesing; on the front cover is the full title, Deur ’n gevaarlike krankheid tot ewige genesing, Through a Dangerous Illness to Eternal Healing. The book was written by his great-grandfather, Aunt Annie’s father; to this book – he has heard the story many times – she has devoted most of her life, first translating the manuscript from German into Afrikaans, then spending her savings to pay a printer in Stellenbosch to print hundreds of copies, and a binder to bind them, then taking them from one bookshop in Cape Town to another. When the bookshops could not be persuaded to sell the book, she trudged from door to door herself, offering it for sale. The leftovers are on the shelves here in the storeroom; the
boxes contain folded, unbound printed pages.

  He has tried to read Ewige Genesing, but it is too boring. No sooner has Balthazar du Biel got under way with the story of his boyhood than he interrupts it with long reports of lights in the sky and voices speaking to him out of the heavens. The whole of the book seems to be like that: short bits about himself followed by long recountings of what the voices told him. He and his father have long-standing jokes about Aunt Annie and her father Balthazar du Biel. They intone the title of his book in the sententious, sing-song manner of a predikant, drawing out the vowels: ‘Deur ’n gevaaaarlike krannnnkheid tot eeeewige geneeeeesing.’

  ‘Was Aunt Annie’s father mad?’ he asks his mother.

  ‘Yes, I suppose he was mad.’

  ‘Then why did she spend all her money printing his book?’

  ‘She was surely afraid of him. He was a terrible old German, terribly cruel and autocratic. All his children were afraid of him.’

  ‘But wasn’t he already dead?’

  ‘Yes, he was dead, but she surely had a sense of duty towards him.’

  She does not want to criticize Aunt Annie and her sense of duty towards the mad old man.

  The best thing in the storeroom is the book press. It is made of iron as heavy and solid as the wheel of a locomotive. He persuades his brother to lay his arms in the bed of the press; then he turns the great screw until his brother’s arms are pinned and he cannot escape. After which they change places and his brother does the same to him.

  One or two more turns, he thinks, and the bones will be crushed. What is it that makes them forbear, both of them?

  During their first months in Worcester they were invited to one of the farms that supplied fruit to Standard Canners. While the grown-ups drank tea, he and his brother roamed around the farmyard. There they came upon a mealie-grinding machine. He persuaded his brother to put his hand down the funnel where the mealie-pits were thrown in; then he turned the handle. For an instant, before he stopped, he could actually feel the fine bones of his brother’s fingers yield as the cogs crushed them. His brother stood with his hand trapped in the machine, ashen with pain, a puzzled, inquiring look on his face.