Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  A ripple of true anger runs through her; and, as if sensing it, this male being beside her stirs. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles, sitting upright.

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  ‘I lost track.’

  She has no idea what he is talking about and is not going to inquire. He slumps down and in a moment is asleep again.

  Where is God in all of this? With God the Father she finds it harder and harder to have dealings. What faith she once had in Him and His providence she has by now lost. Godlessness: an inheritance from the godless Coetzees, no doubt. When she thinks of God, all she can picture is a bearded figure with a booming voice and a grand manner who inhabits a mansion on top of a hill with hosts of servants rushing around anxiously, doing things for Him. Like a good Coetzee, she prefers to steer clear of people like that. The Coetzees look askance at self-important folk, crack jokes about them sotto voce. She may not be as good at jokes as the rest of the family, but she does find God a bit of a trial, a bit of a bore.

  Now I must protest. You are really going too far. I said nothing remotely like that. You are putting words of your own in my mouth.

  I’m sorry, I must have got carried away. I’ll fix it. I’ll tone it down.

  Cracking jokes sotto voce. Nevertheless, does God in His infinite wisdom have a plan for her and for Lukas? For the Roggeveld? For South Africa? Will things that look merely chaotic today, chaotic and purposeless, reveal themselves at some future date to be part of some vast, benign design? For instance: Is there a larger explanation for why a woman in the prime of her life must spend four nights a week sleeping alone in a dismal second-floor room in the Grand Hotel in Calvinia, month after month, perhaps even year after year, with no end in sight; and for why her husband, a born farmer, must spend most of his time trucking other people’s livestock to the abattoirs in Paarl and Maitland – an explanation larger than that the farm would go under without the income these soul-destroying jobs bring in? And is there a larger explanation for why the farm that the two of them are slaving to keep afloat will in the fullness of time pass into the care not of a son of their loins but of some ignoramus nephew of her husband’s, if it is not swallowed down by the bank first? If, in God’s vast, benign design, it was never intended that this part of the world – the Roggeveld, the Karoo – should be profitably farmed, then what exactly is His intention for it? Is it meant to fall back into the hands of the volk, who will proceed, as in the old, old days, to roam from district to district with their ragged flocks in search of grazing, trampling the fences flat, while people like herself and her husband expire in some forgotten corner, disinherited?

  Useless to put questions like that to the Coetzees. Die boer saai, God maai, maar waar skuil die papegaai? say the Coetzees, and cackle. Nonsense words. A nonsense family, flighty, without substance; clowns. ‘n Hand vol vere: a handful of feathers. Even the one member for whom she had had some slight hopes, the one beside her who has tumbled straight back into dreamland, turns out to be a lightweight. Who ran away to the big world and now comes creeping ignominiously back to the little world. Failed runaway, failed car mechanic too, for whose failure she is at this moment having to suffer. Failed son. Sitting in that dreary, dusty old house in Merweville looking out on the empty, sunstruck street, rattling a pencil between his teeth, trying to think up verses. O droë land, o barre kranse… O parched land, o barren cliffs…What next? Something about weemoed for sure, melancholy.

  She wakes as first streaks of mauve and orange begin to extend across the sky. In her sleep she has somehow twisted her body and slumped down further in the seat, so that her cousin, still dormant, reclines not against her shoulder but against her rump. Irritably she frees herself. Her eyes are gummy, her bones creak, she has a raging thirst. Opening the door, she slides out.

  The air is cold and still. Even as she watches, thornbushes and tufts of grass, touched by the first light, emerge out of nothing. It is as if she were present at the first day of creation. My God, she murmurs; she has an urge to sink to her knees.

  There is a rustle nearby. She is looking straight into the dark eyes of an antelope, a little steenbok not twenty paces off, and it is looking straight back at her, wary but not afraid, not yet. My kleintjie! she says, my little one. More than anything she wants to embrace it, to pour out upon its brow this sudden love; but before she can take a first step the little one has whirled about and raced off with drumming hooves. A hundred yards away it halts, turns, inspects her again, then trots at less urgent pace across the flats and into a dry riverbed.

  ‘What’s that?’ comes her cousin’s voice. He has at last awoken; he clambers out of the truck, yawning, stretching.

  ‘A steenbokkie,’ she says curtly. ‘What are we going to do now?’

  ‘I’ll head back to Merweville,’ he says. ‘You wait here. I should be back by ten o’clock, eleven at the latest.’

  ‘If a car passes and offers me a lift, I’m taking it,’ she says. ‘Either direction, I’m taking it.’

  He looks a mess, with his unkempt hair and beard sticking out at all angles. Thank God I don’t have to wake up with you in my bed every morning, she thinks. Not enough of a man. A real man would do better than this, sowaar!

  The sun is showing above the horizon; already she can feel the warmth on her skin. The world may be God’s world, but the Karoo belongs first of all to the sun. ‘You had better get going,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be a hot day.’ And watches as he trudges off, the empty jerry can slung over his shoulder.

  An adventure: perhaps that is the best way to think of it. Here in the back of beyond she and John are having an adventure. For years to come the Coetzees will be reminiscing about it. Remember the time when Margot and John broke down on that godforsaken Merweville road? In the meantime, while she waits for her adventure to end, what has she for diversion? The tattered instruction manual for the Datsun; nothing else. No poems. Tyre rotation. Battery maintenance. Tips for fuel economy.

  The truck, facing into the rising sun, grows stiflingly hot. She takes shelter in its lee.

  On the crest of the road, an apparition: out of the heat-haze emerges first the torso of a man, then by degrees a donkey and donkey-cart. On the wind she can even hear the neat clip-clop of the donkey’s hooves.

  The figure grows clearer. It is Hendrik from Voëlfontein, and behind him, sitting on the cart, is her cousin.

  Laughter and greetings. ‘Hendrik has been visiting his daughter in Merweville,’ John explains. ‘He will give us a ride back to the farm, that is, if his donkey consents. He says we can hitch the Datsun to the cart and he will tow it.’

  Hendrik is alarmed. ‘Nee, meneer!’ he says.

  ‘Ek jok maar net,’ says her cousin. Just joking.

  Hendrik is a man of middle age. As the result of a botched operation for a cataract he has lost the sight of one eye. There is something wrong with his lungs too, such that the slightest physical effort makes him wheeze. As a labourer he is not of much use on the farm, but her cousin Michiel keeps him on because that is how things are done here.

  Hendrik has a daughter who lives with her husband and children outside Merweville. The husband used to have a job in the town but seems to have lost it; the daughter does domestic work. Hendrik must have set off from their place before first light. About him there is a faint smell of sweet wine; when he climbs down from the cart, she notices, he stumbles. Sozzled by mid-morning: what a life!

  Her cousin reads her thoughts. ‘I have some water here,’ he says, and proffers the full jerry can. ‘It’s clean. I filled it at a wind-pump.’

  So they set off for the farm, John seated beside Hendrik, she in the back holding an old jute bag over her head to keep off the sun. A car passes them in a cloud of dust, heading for Merweville. If she had seen it in time she would have hailed it – got a ride to Merweville and from there telephoned Michiel to come and fetch her. On the other hand, though the road is rutted and the ride uncomfortable, she likes the idea of arriving at the farm
house in Hendrik’s donkey-cart, likes it more and more: the Coetzees assembled on the stoep for afternoon tea, Hendrik doffing his hat to them, bringing back Jack’s errant son, dirty and sunburnt and chastened. ‘Ons was so bekommerd!’ they will berate the miscreant. ‘Waar was julle dan? Michiel wou selfs die polisie bel!’ From him, nothing but mumble-mumble. ‘Die arme Margie! En wat het van die bakkie geword?’ We were so worried! Where were you? Michiel was on the point of phoning the police! Poor Margie! And where is the truck?

  There are stretches of road where the incline is so steep that they have to get down and walk. For the rest the little donkey is up to its task, with no more than a touch of the whiplash to its rump now and again to remind it who is master. How slight its frame, how delicate its hooves, yet what staunchness, what powers of endurance! No wonder Jesus had a fondness for donkeys.

  Inside the boundary of Voëlfontein they halt at a dam. While the donkey drinks she chats with Hendrik about the daughter in Merweville, then about the other daughter, the one who works in the kitchen at a home for the aged in Beaufort West. Discreetly she does not ask after Hendrik’s most recent wife, whom he married when she was no more than a child and who ran away as soon as she could with a man from the railway camp at Leeuw Gamka.

  Hendrik finds it easier to talk to her than to her cousin, she can see that. She and he share a language, whereas the Afrikaans John speaks is stiff and bookish. Half of what John says probably goes over Hendrik’s head. Which is more poetic, do you think, Hendrik: the rising sun or the setting sun? A goat or a sheep?

  ‘Het Katryn dan nie vir padkos gesorg nie?’ she teases Hendrik: Hasn’t your daughter packed lunch for us?

  Hendrik goes through the motions of embarrassment, averting his gaze, shuffling. ‘Ja-nee, mies,’ he wheezes. A plaashotnot from the old days, a farm Hottentot.

  As it turns out, Hendrik’s daughter has indeed provided padkos. From a jacket pocket Hendrik brings out, wrapped in brown paper, a leg of chicken and two slices of buttered white bread, which shame forbids him to divide with them yet equally forbids him to devour in front of them.

  ‘In Godsnaam eet, man!’ she commands. ‘Ons is glad nie honger nie, ons is ook binnekort tuis’: We aren’t hungry, and anyway we’ll soon be home. And she draws John away on a circuit of the dam so that Hendrik, with his back to them, can hurriedly down his meal.

  Ons is glad nie honger nie: a lie, of course. She is famished. The very smell of the cold chicken makes her salivate.

  ‘Sit up front beside the driver,’ John suggests. ‘For our triumphal return.’ And so she does. As they approach the Coetzees, assembled on the stoep exactly as she had foreseen, she takes care to put on a smile and even to wave in a parody of royalty. In response she is greeted with a light ripple of clapping. She descends, ‘Dankie, Hendrik, eerlik dankie,’ she says: Thank you sincerely. ‘Mies,’ says Hendrik. Later in the day she will go over to his house and leave some money: for Katryn, she will say, for clothing for her children, though she knows the money will go on liquor.

  ‘En toe?’ says Carol, in front of everyone. ‘Sê vir ons: waar was julle?’ Where were you?

  Just for a second there is silence, and in that second she realizes that the question, on the face of it simply a prompt for her to come up with some flippant, amusing retort, has a serious core. The Coetzees really want to know where she and John have been; they want to be reassured that nothing truly scandalous has taken place. It takes her breath away, the cheek of it. That people who have known her and loved her all her life could think her capable of misconduct! ‘Vra vir John,’ she replies curtly – ask John – and stalks indoors.

  When she rejoins them half an hour later the atmosphere is still uneasy.

  ‘Where has John gone?’ she asks.

  John and Michiel, it turns out, set off just a moment ago in Michiel’s pickup to recover the Datsun. They will tow it to Leeuw Gamka, to the mechanic who will fix it properly.

  ‘We stayed up late last night,’ says her aunt Beth. ‘We waited and waited. Then we decided you and John must have gone to Beaufort and were spending the night there because the National Road is so dangerous at this time of the year. But you didn’t phone, and that worried us. This morning Michiel phoned the hotel at Beaufort and they said they hadn’t seen you. He phoned Fraserburg too. We never guessed you had gone to Merweville. What were you doing in Merweville?’

  What indeed were they doing in Merweville? She turns to John’s father. ‘John says you and he are thinking of buying property in Merweville,’ she says. ‘Is that true, Uncle Jack?’

  A shocked silence falls.

  ‘Is it true, Uncle Jack?’ she presses him. ‘Is it true you are going to move from the Cape to Merweville?’

  ‘If you put the question like that,’ Jack says – the bantering Coetzee manner is gone, he is all caution – ‘no, no one is actually going to move to Merweville. John has the idea – I don’t know how realistic it is – of buying one of those abandoned houses and fixing it up as a holiday home. That’s as far as we have gone in talking about it.’

  A holiday home in Merweville! Who has ever heard of such a thing! Merweville of all places, with its snooping neighbours and its diaken [deacon] knocking at the door, pestering one to attend church! How can Jack, in his day the liveliest and most irreverent of them all, be planning a move to Merweville?

  ‘You should try Koegenaap first, Jack,’ says his brother Alan. ‘Or Pofadder. In Pofadder the big day of the year is when the dentist from Upington comes visiting to pull teeth. They call it die Groot Trek, the Great Trek.’

  As soon as their ease is threatened, the Coetzees come up with jokes. A family drawn up in a tight little laager to keep the world and its menaces at bay. But how long will the jokes go on doing their magic? One of these days the great foe himself will come knocking at the door, the Grim Reaper, whetting his scythe-blade, calling them out one by one. What power will their jokes have then?

  ‘According to John, you are going to move to Merweville while he stays on in Cape Town,’ she persists. ‘Are you sure you will be able to cope by yourself, Uncle Jack, without a car?’

  A serious question. The Coetzees don’t like serious questions. ‘Margie word ’n bietjie grim,’ they will say among themselves: Margie is becoming a bit grim. Is your son planning to shunt you off to the Karoo and abandon you, she is asking, and if that is what is afoot, how come you don’t raise your voice in protest?

  ‘No, no,’ replies Jack. ‘It won’t be like you say. Merweville will just be somewhere quiet to take a break. If it goes through. It’s just an idea, you know, an idea of John’s. It’s nothing definite.’

  ‘IT’S A SCHEME TO get rid of his father,’ says her sister Carol. ‘He wants to dump him in the middle of the Karoo and wash his hands of him. Then it will be up to Michiel to take care of him. Because Michiel will be closest.’

  ‘Poor old John!’ she replies. ‘You always believe the worst of him. What if he is telling the truth? He has promised he will visit Merweville every weekend, and spend the school holidays there as well. Why not give him the benefit of the doubt?’

  ‘Because I don’t believe a word he says. The whole plan sounds fishy to me. He has never got on with his father.’

  ‘He looks after his father in Cape Town.’

  ‘He lives with his father, but only because he has no money. He is thirty-something years old with no prospects. He ran away from South Africa to escape the army. Then he was thrown out of America because he broke the law. Now he can’t find a proper job because he is too stuck-up. The two of them live on the pathetic salary his father gets from the scrapyard where he works.’

  ‘But that’s not true!’ she protests. Carol is younger than she. Once Carol used to be the follower and she, Margot, the leader. Now it is Carol who stalks ahead, she who tails anxiously behind. How did it happen? ‘John teaches in a high school,’ she says. ‘He earns his own money.’

  ‘That’s not what I hear. What I hea
r is that he coaches dropouts for their matric exams and is paid by the hour. It’s part-time work, the sort of job students take to earn some pocket money. Ask him straight out. Ask him what school he teaches at. Ask him what he earns.’

  ‘A big salary isn’t all that counts.’

  ‘It isn’t just a matter of salary. It’s a matter of telling the truth. Let him tell you the truth about why he wants to buy this house in Merweville. Let him tell you who is going to pay for it, he or his father. Let him tell you his plans for the future.’ And then, when she looks blank: ‘Hasn’t he told you? Hasn’t he told you his plans?’

  ‘He doesn’t have plans. He is a Coetzee, Coetzees don’t have plans, they don’t have ambitions, they only have idle longings. He has an idle longing to live in the Karoo.’

  ‘His ambition is to be a poet, a full-time poet. Have you ever heard of such a thing? This Merweville scheme has nothing to do with his father’s welfare. He wants a place in the Karoo where he can come when it suits him, where he can sit with his chin on his hands and contemplate the sunset and write poems.’

  John and his poems again! She can’t help it, she snorts with laughter. John sitting on the stoep of that ugly little house making up poems! With a beret on his head, no doubt, and a glass of wine at his elbow. And the little Coloured children clustered around him, pestering him with questions. Wat maak oom? – Nee, oom maak gedigte. Op sy ou ramkiekie maak oom gedigte. Die wêreld is ons woning nie… What is sir doing? – Sir is making poems. On his old banjo sir is making poems. This world is not our dwelling-place…

  ‘I’ll ask him,’ she says, still laughing. ‘I’ll ask him to show me his poems.’