In the Heart of the Country

by J. M. Coetzee

  37. My father pushes his food aside untouched. He sits in the front room staring into the grate. I light a lamp for him, but he waves me away. In my room I pick at a hem and tune my ears to his silence. Does he sigh between the chimes of the clock? I undress and sleep. In the morning the front room is empty.

  38. Six months ago Hendrik brought home his new bride. They came clip-clop across the flats in the donkey-cart, dusty after the long haul from Armoede. Hendrik wore the black suit passed on to him by my father with an old wide-brimmed felt hat and a shirt buttoned to the throat. His bride sat by his side clutching her shawl, exposed and apprehensive. Hendrik had bought her from her father for six goats and a five-pound note, with a promise of five pounds more, or perhaps of five goats more, one does not always hear these things well. I have never seen Armoede, I seem never to have been anywhere, I seem to know nothing for sure, perhaps I am simply a ghost or a vapour floating at the intersection of a certain latitude and a certain longitude, suspended here by an unimaginable tribunal until a certain act is committed, a stake is driven through the heart of a corpse buried at a crossroads, perhaps, or somewhere a castle crumbles into a tarn, whatever that may be. I have never been to Armoede, but with no effort at all, this is one of my faculties, I can bring to life the bleak windswept hill, the iron shanties with hessian in the doorways, the chickens, doomed, scratching in the dust, the cold snot-nosed children toiling back from the dam with buckets of water, the same chickens scattering now before the donkey-cart in which Hendrik bears away his child-bride, bashful, kerchiefed, while the six dowry-goats nuzzle the thorns and watch through their yellow eyes a scene in its plenitude forever unknowable to me, the thorn-bushes, the midden, the chickens, the children scampering behind the cart, all held in a unity under the sun, innocent, but to me only names, names, names. There is no doubt about it, what keeps me going (see the tears roll down the slopes of my nose, only metaphysics keeps them from falling on the page, I weep for that lost innocence, mine and mankind’s) is my determination, my iron determination, my iron intractable risible determination to burst through the screen of names into the goatseye view of Armoede and the stone desert, to name only these, in despite of all the philosophers have said (and what do I, poor provincial blackstocking, know about philosophy, as the lamp gutters and the clock strikes ten?).

  39. Locked in sleep she lies all night at Hendrik’s side, a child still growing, now a fraction at the knee, now a fraction at the wrist, the proportions always suave. In the old days, the bygone days when Hendrik and his kin followed their fat-tailed sheep from pasture to pasture, the golden age before the worm arrived, on the wings of the howling storm no doubt, and decamped at the very spot where I sit, what a coincidence, perhaps then, when Hendrik was a patriarch bowing his knee to no one, he took to bed two wives who revered him, did his will, adapted their bodies to his desires, slept tight against him, the old wife on one side, the young wife on the other, that is how I imagine it. But tonight Hendrik has only one wife, and old Jakob in the schoolhouse has only one wife, who pouts and mutters. Borne on the wind at nightfall comes her crosspatch voice, the words blessedly indistinct, one cannot have too little of quarrelling, but the tunes of denunciation quite clear.

  40. This is not Hendrik’s home. No one is ancestral to the stone desert, no one but the insects, among whom myself, a thin black beetle with dummy wings who lays no eggs and blinks in the sun, a real puzzle to entomology. Hendrik’s forebears in the olden days crisscrossed the desert with their flocks and their chattels, heading from A to B or from X to Y, sniffing for water, abandoning stragglers, making forced marches. Then one day fences began to go up – I speculate of course – men on horseback rode up and from shadowed faces issued invitations to stop and settle that might also have been orders and might have been threats, one does not know, and so one became a herdsman, and one’s children after one, and one’s women took in washing. Fascinating, this colonial history: I wonder whether a speculative history is possible, as a speculative philosophy, a speculative theology, and now, it would appear, a speculative entomology are possible, all sucked out of my thumb, to say nothing of the geography of the stone desert and animal husbandry. And economics: how am I to explain the economics of my existence, with its migraines and siestas, its ennui, its speculative languors, unless the sheep have something to eat (for this is not finally an insect farm); and what have I provided for them but stone and scrub? It must be the scrub that nourishes the sheep that nourish me, the bleached scrubgrass, the grey scrub-bushes, dreary to my eye but bursting with virtue and succulence to the sheep’s. There is another great moment in colonial history: the first merino is lifted from shipboard, with block and tackle, in a canvas waistband, bleating with terror, unaware that this is the promised land where it will browse generation after generation on the nutritious scrub and provide the economic base for the presence of my father and myself in this lonely house where we kick our heels waiting for the wool to grow and gather about ourselves the remnants of the lost tribes of the Hottentots to be hewers of wood and drawers of water and shepherds and body-servants in perpetuity and where we are devoured by boredom and pull the wings off flies.

  41. Hendrik was not born here. He arrived from nowhere, the child of some father and some mother unknown to me, sent into the world in hard times, with or without a blessing, to earn his bread. He arrived one afternoon asking for work, though why here I cannot imagine, we are on the road from no A to no B in the world, if such a fate is topologically possible, I hope I use the word correctly, I have never had a tutor, I am not one of those long-legged hoydens that wandering tutors love to draw a stool up next to, but dour and sweaty and stupid with anxiety. Hendrik arrived one afternoon, a boy of sixteen, I am guessing, dusty of course, with a stick in his hand and a bag on his shoulder, stopping at the foot of the steps and looking up to where my father sat smoking and staring into the distance: that is our wont here, that must be the origin of our speculative bias, staring into the distance, staring into the fire. Hendrik doffed his hat, a characteristic gesture, a sixteen-year-old boy holding his hat to his breast, men and boys all wear hats here.

  “Baas,” said Hendrik, “good day, baas. I am looking for work.”

  My father hawked and swallowed. I render his words; I cannot know whether Hendrik heard what I heard besides, what I perhaps did not hear that day but hear now in my inner ear, the penumbra of moodishness or disdain about the words.

  “What kind of work are you looking for?”

  “Anything – just work, baas.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “From Armoede, my baas. But now I come from baas Kobus. Baas Kobus says the baas has work here.”

  “Do you work for baas Kobus?”

  “No, I do not work for baas Kobus. I was there looking for work. Then baas Kobus said that the baas has work. So I came.”

  “What kind of work can you do? Can you work with sheep?”

  “Yes, I know sheep, baas.”

  “How old are you? Can you count?”

  “I am strong. I will work. The baas will see.”

  “Are you by yourself?”

  “Yes baas, I am by myself now.”

  “Do you know the people on my farm?”

  “No baas, I know no one around here.”

  “Now listen carefully. What is your name?”

  “Hendrik, my baas.”

  “Listen carefully, Hendrik. Go to the kitchen and tell Anna to give you bread and coffee. Tell her she must fix a place for you to sleep. Tomorrow morning early I want you here. Then I will tell you your job. Now go.”

  “Yes, my baas. Thank you, my baas.”

  42. How satisfying, the flow of this dialogue. Would that all my life were like that, question and answer, word and echo, instead of the torment of And next? And next? Men’s talk is so unruffled, so serene, so full of common purpose. I should have been a man, I would not have grown u
p so sour, I would have spent my days in the sun doing whatever it is that men do, digging holes, building fences, counting sheep. What is there for me in the kitchen? The patter of maids, gossip, ailments, babies, steam, foodsmells, catfur at the ankles – what kind of life can I make of these? Even decades of mutton and pumpkin and potatoes have failed to coax from me the jowls, the bust, the hips of a true country foodwife, have achieved no more than to send my meagre buttocks sagging down the backs of my legs. For alas, the power of my will, which I picture to myself as wire sheathed in crêpe, has not after all been great enough to keep me forever pristine against those molecules of fat: perishing by the million in their campaigns against the animalcules of my blood, they yet push their way forward, a tide of blind mouths, that is how I imagine it, as I sit year after year across the table from my silent father, listening to the tiny teeth inside me. One should not expect miracles from a body. Even I will die. How chastening.

  43. The mirror. Inherited from my long-lost mother, whose portrait it must be that hangs on the wall of the dining-room over the heads of my silent father and my silent self, though why it is that when I conjure up that wall I find below the picture-rail only a grey blur, a strip of grey blur, if such is imaginable, traced out by my eye along the wall . . . Inherited from my long-lost mother, whom one day I shall find, the mirror fills the door of the wardrobe opposite my bed. It gives me no pleasure to pore over reflections of my body, but when I have sheathed myself in my nightgown, which is white – white for nighttime, black for daytime, that is how I dress – and my bedsocks for the winter cold and my nightcap for the drafts, I sometimes leave the light burning and recline abed sustained on my elbow, and sometimes even talk to it, or her. It is at times like these that I notice (what a helpful device a mirror is for bringing things into the open, if one can call it a device, so simple is it, so devoid of mechanism) how thickly the hair grows between my eyes, and wonder whether my glower, my rodent glower, to mince no words, I have no cause to love this face, might not be cosmetically tempered if I plucked out some of that hair with tweezers, or even all of it in a bunch, like carrots, with a pair of pliers, thereby pushing my eyes apart and creating an illusion of grace and even temper. And might I not soften my aspect too if I released my hair from its daytime net and pins, its nighttime cap, and washed it, and let it fall first to the nape of my neck, then perhaps one day to my shoulders, if it grows for corpses why should it not grow for me? And might I not be less ugly if I did something about my teeth, of which I have too many, by sacrificing some to give the others space to grow in, if I am not too old for growth? How equably I contemplate pulling out teeth: many things I fear but pain does not seem to be one of them. I would seat myself (I say to myself) in front of the mirror, clench the jaws of the pliers on a condemned tooth, and tug and worry till it came out. Then I would go on to the next one. And having done the teeth and the eyebrows I would go on to the complexion. I would run down to the orchard every morning and stand under the trees, the apricot-trees, the peach-trees, the fig-trees, devouring fruit until my bowels relented. I would take exercise, a morning walk down the riverbed, an evening walk on the hillside. If the cause be physical that makes my skin so dull and pallid, my flesh so thin and heavy, if such combinations are possible, that I sometimes wonder whether the blood flows in me or merely stands in pools, or whether I have twenty-one skins instead of seven, as the books say – if the cause be physical then the cure must be physical; if not, what is there left to believe in?

  44. But what a joy it would be to be merely plain, to be a plain placid empty-headed heiress anxious not to be left on the shelf, ready to commit herself body and soul to the first willing fellow to pass by, a pedlar even, or an itinerant teacher of Latin, and breed him six daughters, and bear his blows and curses with Christian fortitude, and live a decent obscure life instead of leaning on an elbow watching myself in the mirror in an atmosphere of gathering gloom and doom, if my bones tell me aright. Why, when I am able so relentlessly to leave my warm bed at five in the morning to light the stove, my feet blue with cold, my fingers cleaving to the frozen ironware, can I not leap up now, run through the moonlight to the toolchest, to the orchard, and begin the whole regimen of hair-plucking and tooth-pulling and fruit-eating before it is too late? Is there something in me that loves the gloomy, the hideous, the doom-ridden, that sniffs out its nest and snuggles down in a dark corner among rats’ droppings and chicken-bones rather than resign itself to decency? And if there is, where does it come from? From the monotony of my surroundings? From all these years in the heart of nature, seven leagues from the nearest neighbour, playing with sticks and stones and insects? I think not, though who am I to say. From my parents? From my father, angry, loveless? From my mother, that blurred oval behind my father’s head? Perhaps. Perhaps from them, jointly and severally, and behind them from my four grandparents, whom I have forgotten but could certainly recall in case of need, and my eight great-grandparents and my sixteen great-great-grandparents, unless there is incest in the line, and the thirty-two before them and so forth until we come to Adam and Eve and finally to the hand of God, by a process whose mathematics has always eluded me. Original sin, degeneracy of the line: there are two fine, bold hypotheses for my ugly face and my dark desires, and for my disinclination to leap out of bed this instant and cure myself. But explanations do not interest me. I am beyond the why and wherefore of myself. Fate is what I am interested in; or, failing fate, whatever it is that is going to happen to me. The woman in the nightcap watching me from the mirror, the woman who in a certain sense is me, will dwindle and expire here in the heart of the country unless she has at least a thin porridge of event to live on. I am not interested in becoming one of those people who look into mirrors and see nothing, or walk in the sun and cast no shadow. It is up to me.

  45. Hendrik. Hendrik is paid in kind and cash. What was once two shillings at the end of the month has now grown to six shillings. Also two slaughter-sheep and weekly rations of flour, mealie-meal, sugar, and coffee. He has his own vegetable patch. He is clothed in my father’s good castoffs. He makes shoes for himself from skins that he cures and tans. His Sundays are his own. In sickness he is cared for. When he grows too old to work his duties will be passed on to a younger man and he will retire to a bench in the sun from where he will watch his grandchildren at their play. His grave is marked out for him in the graveyard. His daughters will close his eyes. There are other ways of arranging things, but none that I know of so pacific as this.

  46. Hendrik wishes to start a line, a humble line of his own in parallel to the line of my grandfather and my father, to speak only of them. Hendrik would like a house full of sons and daughters. That is why he has married. The second son, he thinks, the obedient one, will stay behind, learn the farmwork, be a pillar of help, marry a good girl, and continue the line. The daughters, he thinks, will work in the farmhouse kitchen. On Saturday nights they will be courted by boys from the neighbouring farms, come epic distances across the veld on their bicycles with guitars strapped on their shoulders, and bear children out of wedlock. The first son, the quarrelsome one, the one who will not say Yes, will leave home to find work on the railways, and be stabbed in a brawl, and die alone, and break his mother’s heart. As for the other sons, the obscure ones, perhaps they too will leave in search of work and never be heard of again, or perhaps they will die in infancy, along with a percentage of the daughters, so that although the line will ramify it will not ramify too far. Those are Hendrik’s ambitions.

  47. Hendrik has found a wife because he is no longer a young man, because he does not wish his blood to die from the earth forever, because he has come to dread nightfall, because man was not made to live alone.

  48. I know nothing of Hendrik. The reason for this is that in all our years together on the farm he has kept his station while I have kept my distance; and the combination of the two, the station and the distance, has ensured that my gaze falling on him, his gaze falling on m
e, have remained kindly, incurious, remote. This passes with me for an explanation. Hendrik is a man who works on the farm. He is nothing but a tall, straight-shouldered brown man with high cheekbones and slanting eyes who crosses the yard with a swift tireless walk I cannot imitate, the legs swivelled from the hip rather than bent at the knee, a man who slaughters the sheep for us on Friday evenings and hangs the carcase in the tree and chops the wood and milks the cow and says, “Morning, miss,” in the mornings and lifts his hat and goes about his duties. We have our places, Hendrik and I, in an old old code. With fluid ease we move through the paces of our dance.

  49. I keep the traditional distance. I am a good mistress, fair-minded, even-handed, kindly, in no sense a witch-woman. To the servants my looks do not count, and I am grateful. Therefore what I feel blowing in on the thin dawn-wind is not felt by me alone. All of us feel it, and all of us have grown sombre. I lie awake listening to the cries, muted, stifled, of desire and sorrow and disgust and anguish, even anguish, that swoop and glide and tremble through this house, so that one might think it infested with bats, with anguished, disgusted, sorrowful, longing bats, searching for a lost nesting-place, wailing at a pitch that makes dogs cringe and sears that inner ear of mine which, even in subterranean sleep, tunes itself to my father’s signals. It is from his bedroom that the cries have been coming, higher and angrier and sorrier than ever since Hendrik brought back his girl from Armoede, the dust rising lazily behind the cart, the donkeys toiling up the path to the cottage, weary after the long haul. At the door Hendrik pulls up, he rests the whip in its socket and dismounts and lifts the girl down and turning his back on her begins to unharness. And standing here on the stoep six hundred yards away my father for the first time sees through his heavy field-glasses the red kerchief, the wideset eyes, the pointed chin, the sharp little teeth, the foxy jaw, the thin arms, the slender body of Hendrik’s Anna.