Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  ‘Do you remember,’ she says, ‘how once you pulled the leg off a locust and left me to kill it? I was so cross with you.’

  ‘I remember it every day of my life,’ he says. ‘Every day I ask the poor thing’s forgiveness. I was just a child, I say to it, just an ignorant child who did not know better. Kaggen, I say, forgive me.’

  ‘Kaggen?’

  ‘Kaggen. The name of mantis, the mantis god. Maybe not a locust, but the locust will understand. In the afterworld there are no language problems. It’s like Eden all over again.’

  The mantis god. He has lost her.

  A night wind moans through the vanes of the dead wind-pump. She shivers. ‘We must go back,’ she says.

  ‘In a minute. Have you read the book by Eugène Marais about the year he spent in the Waterberg observing a baboon troop? He claims that at nightfall, when the troop stopped their foraging and settled down to watch the sun set, he could detect in their eyes, or at least the eyes of the older baboons, stirrings of melancholy, the birth of a first awareness of their own mortality.’

  ‘Is that what the sunset makes you think of – mortality?’

  ‘No. But I can’t help remembering the first conversation you and I had, the first meaningful conversation. We must have been six years old. What the actual words were I don’t recall, but I know I was unburdening my heart to you, telling you everything about myself, all my hopes and longings. And at the same time I was thinking, So this is what it means to be in love! Because – let me confess it – I was in love with you in those days. And ever since then, being in love with a woman has meant being free to say everything on my heart.’

  ‘Everything on your heart…What has that to do with Eugène Marais?’

  ‘Simply that I understand what the old male baboon was thinking as he watched the sun go down, the troop leader, the one Marais was closest to. Never again, he was thinking: Just one life and then never again. Never, never, never. That is what the Karoo does to me too. It fills me with melancholy. It spoils me for life.’

  She still does not see what baboons have to do with the Karoo or their childhood years, but she is not going to let on.

  ‘This place wrenches my heart,’ he says. ‘It wrenched my heart when I was a child, and I have never been right since.’

  His heart is wrenched. She had no inkling of that. It used to be, she thinks to herself, that she knew without being told what was going on in other people’s hearts. Her own special talent: meegevoel, feelingwith. But not any more, alas, not any more! She grew up; and as she grew up she grew stiff, like a woman who never gets asked to dance, who spends her Saturday evenings waiting in vain on a bench in the church hall, who by the time some man remembers his manners and offers his hand has lost all pleasure, wants only to go home. What a shock! What a revelation! This cousin of hers carries within him memories of how as a child he used to love her! Has carried them all these years!

  [Groans.] Did I really say all that?

  [Laughs.] You did.

  How indiscreet of me! [Laughs.] Never mind, go on.

  ‘Don’t reveal any of that to Carol,’ he – John, her cousin – says. ‘Don’t tell her, with her satirical tongue, how I feel about the Karoo. If you do, I’ll never hear the end of it.’

  ‘You and the baboons,’ she says. ‘Carol has a heart too, believe it or not. But no, I won’t tell her your secret. It’s getting chilly. Shall we go back?’

  They circle past the farm-workers’ quarters, keeping a decent distance. Through the dark the coals of a cooking-fire glow in fierce points of red.

  ‘How long will you be staying?’ she asks. ‘Will you still be here for New Year’s Day?’ Nuwejaar: for the volk, the people, a red letter day, quite overshadowing Christmas.

  ‘No, I can’t stay so long. I have things to attend to in Cape Town.’

  ‘Then why don’t you leave your father behind and come back later to fetch him? Give him time to relax and build up his strength. He doesn’t look well.’

  ‘He won’t stay behind. My father has a restless nature. Wherever he happens to be, he wants to be somewhere else. The older he grows, the worse it gets. It’s like an itch. He can’t keep still. Besides, he has his job to get back to. He takes his job very seriously.’

  The farmhouse is quiet. They slip in through the back door. ‘Goodnight,’ she says, ‘sleep tight.’

  In her room she hurries to get into bed. She would like to be asleep by the time her sister and brother-in-law come indoors, or at least to be able to pretend she is asleep. She is not keen to be interrogated on what passed during her ramble with John. Given half a chance, Carol will prise the story out of her. I was in love with you when I was six; you set the pattern of my love for other women. What a thing to say! Indeed, what a compliment! But what of herself? What was going on in her six-year-old heart when all that premature passion was going on in his? She consented to marry him, certainly, but did she accept that they were in love? If so, she has no recollection of it. And what of now – what does she feel for him now? His declaration has certainly made her heart glow. What an odd character, this cousin of hers! His oddness does not come from the Coetzee side, that she is sure of, she is after all half Coetzee herself, so it must come from his mother’s, from the Meyers or whatever the name was, the Meyers from the Eastern Cape. Meyer or Meier or Meiring.

  Then she is asleep.

  ‘He is stuck up,’ says Carol. ‘He thinks too much of himself. He can’t bear to lower himself to talk to ordinary people. When he isn’t messing around with his car he is sitting in a corner with a book. And why doesn’t he get a haircut? Every time I lay eyes on him I want to slap a puddingbowl over his head and snip off those hideous greasy locks of his.’

  ‘His hair isn’t greasy,’ she protests, ‘it’s just too long. I think he washes it with hand soap. That’s why it is all over the place. And he is shy, not stuck up. That’s why he keeps to himself. Give him a chance, he’s an interesting person.’

  ‘He is flirting with you. Anyone can see it. And you are flirting back. You, his cousin! You should be ashamed of yourself. Why isn’t he married? Is he homosexual, do you think? Is he a moffie?’

  She never knows whether Carol means what she says or is simply out to provoke her. Even here on the farm Carol goes about in modish white slacks and low-cut blouses, high-heeled sandals, heavy bracelets. She buys her clothes in Frankfurt, she says, on business trips with her husband. She certainly makes the rest of them look very dowdy, very staid, very country-cousin. She and Klaus live in Sandton in a twelve-room mansion owned by Anglo-American, for which they pay no rent, with stables and polo-ponies and a groom, though neither of them knows how to ride. They have no children yet; they will have children, Carol informs her, when they are properly settled. Properly settled means settled in America.

  In the Sandton set in which she and Klaus move, Carol once confided, quite advanced things go on. She did not spell out what these advanced things might be, and she, Margot, did not want to ask, but they seemed to have to do with sex.

  I won’t let you write that. You can’t write that about Carol.

  It’s what you told me.

  Yes, but you can’t write down every word I say and broadcast it to the world. I never agreed to that. Carol will never speak to me again.

  All right, I’ll cut it out or tone it down, I promise. Just hear me to the end. Can I go on?

  Go on.

  Carol has broken completely from her roots. She bears no resemblance to the plattelandse meisie, the country girl, she once used to be. She looks, if anything, German, with her bronzed skin and coiffeured blonde hair and emphatic eyeliner. Stately, big-busted, and barely thirty. Frau Dr Müller. If Frau Dr Müller decided to flirt in the Sandton manner with cousin John, how long would it be before cousin John succumbed? Love means being able to open your heart to the beloved, says John. What would Carol say to that? About love Carol could teach her cousin a thing or two, she is sure – at least about love in it
s more advanced version.

  John is not a moffie: she knows enough about men to know that. But there is something cool or cold about him, something that if not neuter is at least neutral, as a young child is neutral in matters of sex. There must have been women in his life, if not in South Africa then in America, though he has said not a word about them. Did his American women get to see his heart? If he makes a practice of it, of opening his heart, then he is unusual: men, in her experience, find nothing harder.

  She herself has been married for ten years. Ten years ago she said goodbye to Carnarvon, where she had a job as a secretary in a lawyer’s office, and moved to her bridegroom’s farm east of Middelpos in the Roggeveld where, if she is lucky, if God smiles on her, she will live out the rest of her days.

  The farm is home to the two of them, home and Heim, but she cannot be at home as much as she wishes. There is no money in sheep-farming any more, not in the barren, drought-ridden Roggeveld. To help make ends meet she has had to go back to work, as a bookkeeper this time, at the one hotel in Calvinia. Four nights of the week, Monday through Thursday, she spends at the hotel; on Fridays her husband drives in from the farm to fetch her, delivering her back in Calvinia at the crack of dawn the next Monday.

  Despite this weekly separation – it makes her heart ache, she hates her dreary hotel room, sometimes she cannot hold back her tears, but lays her head on her arms and sobs – she and Lukas have what she would call a happy marriage. More than happy: fortunate, blessed. A good husband, a happy marriage, but no children. Not by design but by fate: her fate, her fault. Of the two sisters, one barren, the other not yet settled.

  A good husband but close with his feelings. Is a guarded heart an affliction of men in general or just of South African men? Are Germans – Carol’s husband, for instance – any better? At this moment Klaus is seated on the stoep with the troop of Coetzee kinsfolk he has acquired by marriage, smoking a cheroot (he freely offers his cheroots around, but his rookgoed is too strange, too foreign for the Coetzees), regaling them in his loud baby-Afrikaans, of which he is not in the slightest ashamed, with stories of the times he and Carol have gone skiing in Zermatt. Does Klaus, in the privacy of their Sandton home, open up his heart to Carol once in a while in his slick, easy, confident European manner? She doubts it. She doubts that Klaus has much of a heart to show. She has seen little evidence of one. Whereas of the Coetzees it can at least be said that they have hearts, to a man and to a woman. Too much heart, in fact, sometimes, some of them.

  ‘No, he’s not a moffie,’ she says. ‘Talk to him and you will see for yourself.’

  ‘WOULD YOU LIKE TO go for a drive this afternoon?’ John offers. ‘We could do a grand tour of the farm, just you and I.’

  ‘In what?’ she says. ‘In your Datsun?’

  ‘Yes, in my Datsun. It’s fixed.’

  ‘Fixed so that it won’t break down in the middle of nowhere?’

  It is of course a joke. Voëlfontein is already the middle of nowhere. But it is not just a joke. She has no idea how big the farm is, measured in square miles, but she does know you cannot walk from one end of it to the other in a single day, not unless you take your walking seriously.

  ‘It won’t break down,’ he says. ‘But I’ll bring spare water along just in case.’

  Voëlfontein lies in the Koup region, and in the Koup it has rained not a drop in the past two years. What on earth inspired Grandpa Coetzee to buy land here, where every last farmer is struggling to keep his stock alive?

  ‘What sort of word is Koup?’ she says. ‘Is it English? The place where no one can cope?’

  ‘It’s Khoi,’ he says. ‘Hottentot. Koup: dry place. It’s a noun, not a verb. You can tell by the final –p.’

  ‘Where did you learn that?’

  ‘From books. From grammars put together by missionaries in the old days. There are no speakers of Khoi languages left, not in South Africa. The languages are, for all practical purposes, dead. In South-West Africa there are still a handful of old people speaking Nama. That’s the sum of it. The sum of what is left.’

  ‘And Xhosa? Do you speak Xhosa?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I am interested in the things we have lost, not the things we have kept. Why should I speak Xhosa? There are millions of people who can do that already. They don’t need me.’

  ‘I thought languages exist so that we can communicate with each other,’ she says. ‘What is the point of speaking Hottentot if no one else does?’

  He presents her with what she is coming to think of as his secret little smile, betokening that he has an answer to her question, but since she will be too stupid to understand, he will not waste his breath revealing it. It is this Mister Know-All smile, above all, that sends Carol into a rage.

  ‘Once you have learned Hottentot out of your old grammar books, who can you speak to?’ she repeats.

  ‘Do you want me to tell you?’ he says. The little smile has turned into something else, something tight and not very nice.

  ‘Yes, tell me. Answer me.’

  ‘The dead. You can speak with the dead. Who otherwise’ – he hesitates, as if the words might be too much for her and even for him – ‘who otherwise are cast out into everlasting silence.’

  She wanted an answer and now she has one. It is more than enough to shut her up.

  They drive for half an hour, to the westernmost boundary of the farm. There, to her surprise, he opens the gate, drives through, closes the gate behind them, and without a word drives on along the rough dirt road. By four-thirty they have arrived at the town of Merweville, where she has not set foot in years.

  Outside the Apollo Café he draws to a halt. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ he says.

  They enter the café with half a dozen barefoot children tagging along behind them, the youngest a mere toddler. Mevrou the proprietress has the radio on, playing Afrikaans pop tunes. They sit down, wave the flies away. The children cluster around their table, staring with unabashed curiosity. ‘Middag, jongens,’ says John. ‘Middag, meneer,’ says the eldest.

  They order coffee and get a version of coffee: pale Nescafé with longlife milk. She takes a sip of hers and pushes it aside. He drinks his abstractedly.

  A tiny hand reaches up and filches the cube of sugar from her saucer. ‘Toe, loop!’ she says: Run off! The child smiles merrily at her, unwraps the sugar, licks it.

  It is by no means the first hint she has had of how far the old barriers between white and Coloured have come down. The signs are more obvious here than in Calvinia. Merweville is a smaller town and in decline, in such decline that it must be in danger of falling off the map. There can be no more than a few hundred people left. Half the houses they drove past seemed unoccupied. The building with the legend Volkskas [People’s Bank] in white pebbles studded in the mortar over the door houses not a bank but a welding works. Though the worst of the afternoon heat is past, the sole living presence on the main street is provided by two men and a woman stretched out, along with a scrawny dog, in the shade of a flowering jacaranda.

  Did I say all that? I don’t remember.

  I may have added a detail or two to bring the scene to life. I didn’t tell you, but since Merweville figures so largely in your story, I actually paid a visit there to check it out.

  You went to Merweville? How did it seem to you?

  Much as you described it. But there is no Apollo Café any more. No café at all. Shall I go on?

  John speaks. ‘Are you aware that, among his other accomplishments, our grandfather used to be mayor of Merweville?’

  ‘Yes, I am aware of that.’ Their mutual grandfather had his finger in all too many pies. He was – the English word occurs to her – a go-getter in a land with few go-getters, a man with plenty of – another English word – spunk, more spunk probably than all his children put together. But perhaps that is the fate of the children of strong fathers: to be left with less than a full share of spunk. As with the sons, so with the daughters too: a littl
e too self-effacing, the Coetzee women, blessed with too little of whatever the female equivalent of spunk might be.

  She has only tenuous memories of their grandfather, who died when she was still a child: of a stooped, grouchy old man with a bristly chin. After the midday meal, she remembers, the whole house would freeze into silence: Grandpa was having his nap. Even at that age she was surprised to see how fear of the old man could make grown people creep about like mice. Yet without that old man she would not be here, nor would John: not just here on earth but here in the Karoo, on Voëlfontein or in Merweville. If her own life, from cradle to grave, has been and is still being determined by the ups and downs of the market in wool and mutton, then that is her grandfather’s doing: a man who started out as a smous, a hawker peddling cotton prints and pots and pans and patent medicines to country folk, then when he had saved up enough money bought a share in a hotel, then sold the hotel and bought land and settled down as of all things a gentleman horse-breeder and sheep-farmer.

  ‘You haven’t asked what we are doing here in Merweville,’ says John.

  ‘Very well: what are we doing in Merweville?’

  ‘I want to show you something. I am thinking of buying property here.’

  She cannot believe her ears. ‘You want to buy property? You want to live in Merweville? In Merweville? Do you want to be mayor too?’

  ‘No, not live here, just spend time here. Live in Cape Town, come here for weekends and holidays. It’s not impossible. Merweville is seven hours from Cape Town if you drive without stopping. You can buy a house for a thousand rand – a four-room house and half a morgen of land with peach trees and apricot trees and orange trees. Where else in the world will you get such a bargain?’