Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  ‘And your father? What does your father think of this plan of yours?’

  ‘It’s better than an old-age home.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What is better than an old-age home?’

  ‘Living in Merweville. My father can stay here, take up residence; I will be based in Cape Town but I will come up regularly to see that he is okay.’

  ‘And what will your father do during the time he is here all by himself? Sit on the stoep and wait for the one car a day to drive past? There is a simple reason why you can buy a house in Merweville for peanuts, John: because no one wants to live here. I don’t understand you. Why this sudden enthusiasm for Merweville?’

  ‘It’s in the Karoo.’

  Die Karoo is vir skape geskape! The Karoo was made for sheep! She has to bite back the words. He means it! He speaks of the Karoo as if it were paradise! And all of a sudden memories of those Christmastides of yore come flooding back, when they were children roaming the veld as free as wild animals. ‘Where do you want to be buried?’ he asked her one day, then without waiting for her answer whispered: ‘I want to be buried here.’ ‘For ever?’ she said, she, her child self – ‘Do you want to be buried for ever?’ ‘Just till I come out again,’ he replied.

  Till I come out again. She remembers it all, remembers the very words.

  As a child one can do without explanations. One does not demand that everything make sense. But would she be recalling those words of his if they had not puzzled her then and, deep down, continued to puzzle her all these years? Come out again: did her cousin really believe, does he really believe, that one comes back from the grave? Who does he think he is: Jesus? And what does he think this place is, this Karoo: the Holy Land?

  ‘If you mean to take up residence in Merweville you will need to get a haircut first,’ she says. ‘The good folk of this town won’t allow a wild man to settle in their midst and corrupt their sons and daughters.’

  From Mevrou behind the counter come unmistakable hints that she would like to close up shop. He pays, and they drive off. On the way out of the town he slows down before a house with a TE KOOP sign at the gate: For Sale. ‘That’s the house I had in mind,’ he says. ‘A thousand rand plus the legal paperwork. Can you believe it?’

  The house is a nondescript cube with a corrugated-iron roof, a shaded veranda running the length of the front, and a steep wooden staircase up the side leading to a loft. The paintwork is in a sorry state. In front of the house, in a bedraggled rockery, a couple of aloes struggle to stay alive. Does he really mean to dump his father here, in this dull house in this exhausted hamlet? An old man, trembly, eating out of tins, sleeping between dirty sheets?

  ‘Would you like to take a look?’ he says. ‘The house is locked, but we can walk around the back.’

  She shivers. ‘Another time,’ she says. ‘I’m not in the mood today.’

  What she is in the mood for today she does not know. But her mood ceases to matter twenty kilometres out of Merweville, when the engine begins to cough and John frowns and switches it off and coasts to a stop. A smell of burning rubber invades the cab. ‘It’s overheating again,’ he says. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

  From the back he fetches a jerry can of water. He unscrews the radiator cap, dodging a whoosh of steam, and refills the radiator. ‘That should be enough to get us home,’ he says. He tries to restart the engine. It turns over dryly without catching.

  She knows enough about men never to question their competence with machines. She offers no advice, is careful not to seem impatient, not even to sigh. For an hour, while he fiddles with hoses and clamps and filthies his clothes and tries again and again to get the engine going, she maintains a strict, benign silence.

  The sun begins to dip below the horizon; he continues to toil in what might as well be darkness.

  ‘Do you have a torch?’ she asks. ‘Perhaps I can hold a torch for you.’

  But no, he has not brought a torch. Furthermore, since he does not smoke, he does not even have matches. Not a Boy Scout, just a city boy, an unprepared city boy.

  ‘I’ll walk back to Merweville and get help,’ he says at last. ‘Or we can both walk.’

  She is wearing light sandals. She is not going to stumble in sandals twenty kilometres across the veld in the dark.

  ‘By the time you get to Merweville it will be midnight,’ she says. ‘You know no one there. There isn’t even a service station. Who are you going to persuade to come out and fix your truck?’

  ‘Then what do you suggest we do?’

  ‘We wait here. If we are lucky, someone will drive past. Otherwise Michiel will come looking for us in the morning.’

  ‘Michiel doesn’t know we went to Merweville. I didn’t tell him.’

  He tries one last time to start the engine. When he turns the key there is a dull click. The battery is flat.

  She gets out and, at a decent distance, relieves her bladder. A thin wind has come up. It is cold and is going to be colder. There is nothing in the truck with which to cover themselves, not even a tarpaulin. If they are going to wait out the night, they are going to have to do so huddled in the cab. And then, when they get back to the farm, they are going to have to explain themselves.

  She is not yet miserable; she is still removed enough from their situation to find it grimly amusing. But that will soon change. They have nothing to eat, nothing even to drink save water from the can, which smells of petrol. Cold and hunger are going to gnaw away at her fragile good humour. Sleeplessness too, in due course.

  She winds the window shut. ‘Shall we just forget,’ she says, ‘that we are a man and a woman, and not be too embarrassed to keep each other warm? Because otherwise we are going to freeze.’

  In the thirty-odd years they have known each other they have now and then kissed, in the way that cousins kiss, that is to say, on the cheek. They have embraced too. But tonight an intimacy of quite another order is on the cards. Somehow, on this hard seat, with the gear lever uncomfortably in the way, they are going to have to lie together, or slump together, give warmth to each other. If God is kind and they manage to fall asleep, they may in addition have to suffer the humiliation of snoring or being snored upon. What a test! What a trial!

  ‘And tomorrow,’ she says, allowing herself a single acid moment, ‘when we get back to civilization, maybe you can arrange to have this truck fixed properly. There is a good mechanic at Leeuw Gamka. Michiel uses him. Just a friendly suggestion.’

  ‘I am sorry. The fault is mine. I try to do things myself when I ought really to leave them to more competent hands. It’s because of the country we live in.’

  ‘The country we live in? Why is it the country’s fault that your truck keeps breaking down?’

  ‘Because of our long history of making other people do our work for us while we sit in the shade and watch.’

  So that is the reason why they are here in the cold and the dark waiting for some passer-by to rescue them. To make a point, namely that white folk should do their own car repairs. How comical.

  ‘The mechanic in Leeuw Gamka is white,’ she says. ‘I am not suggesting that you take your car to a Native.’ She would like to add: If you want to do your own repairs, for God’s sake take a course in auto maintenance first. But she holds her tongue. ‘What other kind of work do you insist on doing,’ she says instead, ‘besides fixing cars?’ Besides fixing cars and writing poems.

  ‘I do garden work. I do repairs around the house. I am at present relaying the drainage. It may seem funny to you but to me it is not a joke. I am making a gesture. I am trying to break the taboo on manual labour.’

  ‘The taboo?’

  ‘Yes. Just as in India it is taboo for upper-caste people to clean up – what shall we call it? – human waste, so, in this country, if a white man touches a pickaxe or a spade he at once becomes unclean.’

  ‘What nonsense you talk! That is simply not true! It’s just anti-white prejudice!’

  She regrets the words as
soon as she has spoken them. She has gone too far, driven him into a corner. Now she is going to have this man’s resentment to cope with, on top of the boredom and the cold.

  ‘But I can see your point,’ she goes on, helping him out, since he doesn’t seem able to help himself. ‘You are right in one sense: we have become too used to keeping our hands clean, our white hands. We should be more ready to dirty our hands. I couldn’t agree more. End of subject. Are you sleepy yet? I’m not. I have a suggestion. To pass the time, why don’t we tell each other stories.’

  ‘You tell a story,’ he says stiffly. ‘I don’t know any stories.’

  ‘Tell me a story from America,’ she says. ‘You can make it up, it doesn’t have to be true. Any story.’

  ‘Given the existence of a personal God,’ he says, ‘with a white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia loves us deeply quaquaquaqua with some exceptions.’

  He stops. She has not the faintest idea what he is talking about.

  ‘Quaquaquaqua,’ he says.

  ‘I give up,’ she says. He is silent. ‘My turn,’ she says. ‘Here follows the story of the princess and the pea. Once upon a time there is a princess so delicate that even when she sleeps on ten piled-up feather mattresses she is convinced she can feel a pea, one of those hard little dried peas, underneath the last mattress. She frets and frets all night – Who put a pea there? Why? – and as a result doesn’t get a wink of sleep. She comes down to breakfast looking haggard. To her parents the king and queen she complains: “I couldn’t sleep, and it’s all the fault of that accursed pea!” The king sends a serving-woman to remove the pea. The woman searches and searches but can find nothing.

  “‘Let me hear no more of peas,” says the king to his daughter. “There is no pea. The pea is just in your imagination.”

  ‘That night the princess reascends her mountain of feather mattresses. She tries to sleep but cannot, because of the pea, the pea that is either underneath the bottom-most mattress or else in her imagination, it does not matter which, the effect is the same. By daybreak she is so exhausted that she cannot even eat breakfast. “It’s all the pea’s fault!” she laments.

  ‘Exasperated, the king sends an entire troop of serving-women to hunt for the pea, and when they return, reporting that there is no pea, has them beheaded. “Now are you satisfied?” he bellows at his daughter. “Now will you sleep?”’

  She pauses for breath. She has no idea what is going to happen next in this bedtime story, whether the princess will at last manage to fall asleep or not; yet, strangely, she is convinced that, when she opens her lips, the right words will come.

  But there is no need for more words. He is asleep. Like a child, this prickly, opinionated, incompetent, ridiculous cousin of hers has fallen asleep with his head on her shoulder. Fast asleep, undoubtedly: she can feel him twitching. No peas under him.

  And what of her? Who is going to tell her stories to send her off to the land of nod? Never has she felt more awake. Is this how she is going to have to spend the night: bored, fretting, bearing the weight of a somnolent male?

  He claims there is a taboo on whites doing manual labour, but what of the taboo on cousins of opposite sexes spending the night together? What are the Coetzees back on the farm going to say? Truly, she has no feeling towards John that could be called physical, not the faintest quiver of womanly response. Will that be enough to absolve her? Why is there no male aura about him? Does the fault lie with him; or on the contrary does it lie with her, who has so wholeheartedly absorbed the taboo that she cannot think of him as a man? If he has no woman, is that because he has no feeling for women, and therefore women, herself included, respond by having no feeling for him? Is her cousin, if not a moffie, then a eunuch?

  The air in the cab is becoming stale. Taking care not to wake him, she opens the window a crack. What presences surround them – bushes or trees or perhaps even animals – she senses on her skin rather than sees. From somewhere comes the chirping of a lone cricket. Stay with me tonight, she whispers to the cricket.

  But perhaps there is a type of woman who is attracted to a man like this, who is happy to listen without contradicting while he airs his opinions, and then to take on those opinions as her own, even the self-evidently silly ones. A woman indifferent to male silliness, indifferent even to sex, simply in search of a man to attach to herself and take care of and protect against the world. A woman who will put up with shoddy work around the house because what matters is not that the windows close and the locks work but that her man have the space in which to live out his idea of himself. And who will afterwards quietly call in hired help, someone good with his hands, to fix up the mess.

  For a woman like that, marriage might well be passionless but it need not therefore be childless. She could give birth to a whole brood. Then of an evening they could all sit around the table, the lord and master at the head, his helpmeet at the foot, their healthy, well-behaved offspring down the two sides; and over the soup course the master could expatiate on the sanctity of labour. What a man is my mate! the wife could whisper to herself. What a developed conscience he has!

  Why is she feeling so bitter towards John, and even bitterer towards this wife she has conjured up for him out of thin air? The simple answer: because due to his vanity and clumsiness she is stranded on the Merweville road. But the night is long, there is plenty of time to unfold a grander hypothesis and inspect that hypothesis to see if it has any virtue. The grander answer: she feels bitter because she had hoped for much from her cousin, and he has failed her.

  What had she hoped for from him?

  That he would redeem the Coetzee men.

  Why did she desire the redemption of the Coetzee men?

  Because the Coetzee men are so slapgat.

  Why had she placed her hopes in John in particular?

  Because of the Coetzee men he was the one blessed with the best chance. He had a chance and he did not make use of it.

  Slapgat is a word she and her sister throw around rather easily, perhaps because it was thrown around rather easily in their hearing while they were children. It was only after she left home that she noticed the shocked looks that the word evoked, and began to use it more cautiously. A slap gat: a rectum, an anus, over which one has less than complete control. Hence slapgat: slack, spineless.

  Her uncles have turned out slapgat because their parents, her grandparents, brought them up that way. While their father thundered and roared and made them quake in their boots, their mother tiptoed around like a mouse. The result was that they went out into the world lacking all fibre, lacking backbone, lacking belief in themselves, lacking courage. The life-paths they chose for themselves were without exception easy paths, paths of least resistance. Gingerly they tested the tide, then swam with it.

  What made the Coetzees so easygoing and therefore so gesellig, such good company, was precisely their preference for the easiest available path; and their geselligheid was precisely what made the Christmas get-togethers such fun. They never quarrelled, never squabbled among themselves, got along famously, all of them. It was the next generation, her generation, who had to pay for their easygoingness, who went out into the world expecting the world to be just another slap, gesellige place, Voëlfontein writ large, and found that, behold, it was not!

  She herself has no children. She cannot conceive. But if, blessedly, she had children, she would take it as her first duty to work the Coetzee blood out of them. How you work slap blood out of people she does not know offhand, short of taking them to a hospital and having their blood pumped out and replaced with the blood of some vigorous donor; but perhaps a strict training in self-assertion, starting at the earliest possible age, would do the trick. Because if there is one thing she knows about the world in which the child of the future will have to grow up, it is that there will be no room for the slap.

  Even Voëlfontein and the Karoo are no longer Voëlfontein and the Karoo as they used
to be. Look at those children in the Apollo Café. Look at cousin Michiel’s work gang, who are certainly not the plaasvolk of yore. In the attitude of Coloured people in general towards whites there is a new and unsettling hardness. The younger ones regard one with a cold eye, refuse to call one Baas or Miesies. Strange men flit across the land from one settlement to another, lokasie to lokasie, and no one will report them to the police as in the old days. The police find it harder and harder to come up with information they can trust. People no longer want to be seen talking to them; sources have dried up. For the farmers, summons for commando duty come more often and for longer. Lukas complains about it all the time. If that is the way things are in the Roggeveld, it must certainly be the way things are here in the Koup.

  Business is changing character too. To get on in business it is no longer enough to be friends with all and sundry, to do favours and be owed favours in return. No, nowadays you have to be as hard as nails and ruthless as well. What chance do slapgat men stand in such a world? No wonder her Coetzee uncles are not prospering: bank managers idling away the years in dying platteland towns, civil servants stalled on the ladder of promotion, penurious farmers, even in the case of John’s father a disgraced, disbarred attorney.

  If she had children, she would not only do her utmost to purge them of their Coetzee inheritance, she would think seriously of doing what Carol is doing: whisking them out of the country, giving them a fresh start in America or Australia or New Zealand, places where they can look forward to a decent future. But as a childless woman she is spared having to make that decision. She has another role prepared for her: to devote herself to her husband and to the farm; to live as good a life as the times allow, as good and as fair and as just.

  The barrenness of the future that yawns before Lukas and herself – this is not a new source of pain, no, it returns again and again like a toothache, to the extent that it has by now begun to bore her. She wishes she could dismiss it and get some sleep. How is it that this cousin of hers, whose body manages to be both scrawny and soft at the same time, does not feel the cold, while she, who is undeniably more than a few kilos over her best weight, has begun to shiver? On cold nights she and her husband sleep tight and warm against each other. Why does her cousin’s body fail to warm her? Not only does he not warm her, he seems to suck her own body heat away. Is he by nature as heatless as he is sexless?