In the Heart of the Country

by J. M. Coetzee

  90. But this, like so much else about me, is only theory. Let me at all costs not immure myself in a version of myself as avenger, eyes flashing and sword on high, of the old ways. It is the hermit crab, I remember from a book, that as it grows migrates from one empty shell to another. The grim moralist with the fiery sword is only a stopping-place, a little less temporary than the haggard wife knitting on the stoep, a little more temporary than the wild woman of the veld who talks to her friends the insects and walks in the midday sun, but temporary all the same. Whose shell I presently skulk in does not matter, it is the shell of a dead creature. What matters is that my anxious softbodied self should have a refuge from the predators of the deep, from the squid, the shark, the baleen whale, and whatever else it is that preys on the hermit crab, I do not know the oceans, though one day when I am a widow or a monied spinster I promise myself I will spend a day at the seaside, I will pack a basket with sandwiches and fill my purse with money and climb aboard the train and tell the man I want to see the sea: that gives you some idea of how naive I am. I will take off my shoes and crunch through the seasand, wondering at the millions of tiny deaths that have gone to make it up. I will roll up my skirts and wade in the shallows and be nipped by a crab, a hermit crab, as a cosmic joke, and stare at the horizon, and sigh at the immensity of it all, and eat my sandwiches, barely tasting the crisp sourdough bread, the sweet green fig preserve, and think on my insignificance. Then, chastened, sober, I will catch the train back home and sit on the stoep and watch the flaming sunsets, the crimsons, the pinks, the violets, the oranges, the bloody reds, and heave a sigh and sink my head on my breast and weep hesperian tears for myself, for the life I have not lived, the joy and willingness of an unused body now dusty, dry, unsavoury, for the slowing pulse of my blood. I will get up out of the canvas chair and trail off to my bedroom and undress by the last light, saving paraffin, and sighing, sighing fall at once asleep. I will dream of a stone, a pebble lying on the beach, on the acres of white sand, looking into the benign blue sky, lulled by the waves; but whether I will really have had the dream I will never know, for all nightly happenings will be washed from my memory with the crowing of the cock. Or perhaps I shall not sleep at all, but lie tossing and turning with the toothache after all those sugary figs; for we pay no heed to hygiene here, but walk around with foul-smelling breath and in due course with rotten stumps of teeth, wondering what to do with ourselves, until at last we are driven to the extremity of the farrier’s tongs, or to oil of cloves on a matchstick, or to weeping. Weeping I have avoided hitherto, but there is a time and a place for everything; I am sure it will come to weeping one day when I am left alone on the farm, when they have all gone, Hendrik and his wife, Anna and Jakob, my father, my mother, the ratlike grandchildren, and I can wander about the house carefree in my shift, and out into the yard, and into the deserted sheep-runs, and into the hills: then will be a time for weeping and for tearing my hair and gnashing my gums without fear of detection or reprisal, without having to keep up a front. That will be the time for testing these lungs I have never tested, to hear whether they can make the hills echo, and the flats, if flats can echo, with their shrieks and groans and laments. That too, who knows, may be the time for tearing up my clothes, for building a great bonfire in front of the house of clothes and furniture and pictures, my father and my mother and my long-lost brother crinkling in the flames among the antimacassars, and for screaming with wild glee as the flames soar into the night sky, and even perhaps for carrying firebrands into the house, for firing the mattresses and the wardrobes and the yellowwood ceilings and the loft with its trunks full of mementos, until even the neighbours, whoever they may be, see the tower of flames on the horizon and come galloping through the darkness to bear me off to a place of safety, a cackling, gibbering old woman who wanted notice taken of her.

  91. The schoolhouse is empty. The ashes in the grate are cold. The rack above the stove is bare. The bed is stripped. The shutter flaps. Jakob and Anna are gone. They have been sent packing. They have gone without even speaking to me. I watch the motes of dust dreamily ascend a shaft of sunlight. There is what tastes like blood at the back of my nose but is not. Truly, events have a power to move unmatched by one’s darkest imaginings. I stand in the doorway breathing fast.

  92. The schoolhouse. Once upon a time this was a real schoolhouse. Children came from the homestead to sit here and learn the three Rs. In summer they yawned and stretched and fidgeted while the heat buzzed in their ears. On winter mornings they picked their way across the frosty earth and chafed chilled bare toes together during the psalm-singing. The children of the neighbours came too, paying in cash and kind. There was a schoolmistress, daughter of an impoverished clergyman, no doubt, sent out to earn a living. Then one day she ran away with a passing Englishman and was never heard of again. After that there were no more schoolmistresses. For many years the schoolhouse stood unused, bats and starlings and spiders gradually taking it over, until one day it was turned over to Anna and Jakob, or to the Anna and Jakob who came before them, to live in. It cannot be otherwise, if I am simply sucking this history out of my thumb how am I to explain those three wooden benches stacked at the far end of the room, and the easel behind them on which Jakob used to hang his coat? Someone must have built and stocked a schoolhouse, and advertised for a schoolmistress in the Weekly Advertiser or the Colonial Gazette, and met her train, and installed her in the guest-room, and paid her stipend, in order that the children of the desert should not grow up barbarian but be heirs of all the ages familiar with the rotation of the earth, Napoleon, Pompeii, the reindeer herds of the frozen wastes, the anomalous expansion of water, the seven days of Creation, the immortal comedies of Shakespeare, geometric and arithmetic progressions, the major and minor modes, the boy with his finger in the dyke, Rumpelstiltskin, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the laws of perspective, and much much more. But where has it all gone now, this cheerful submission to the wisdom of the past? How many generations can have intervened between those children chanting the six times table and my dubious self? Could my father have been one of them? If I hauled those benches into the light would I find, beneath the dust, his initials hacked into the wood with a penknife? But if so, where has all the humane learning gone? What did he learn from Hansel and Gretel about fathers who lead their daughters into dark forests? What did Noah teach him about fornication? What did the six times table tell him about the iron laws of the universe? And even if it was not he but my grandfather who sat on these benches and sang out his tables, why did he pass on no humanity to my father but leave him a barbarian and me too after him? Or is it possible that we are not aboriginal here, my line? Did my father or my grandfather perhaps simply gallop up pistolled and bandoliered to the farmhouse one day, out of nowhere, and fling down a tobacco-pouch of gold nuggets, and shoo the schoolmistress out of the schoolhouse, and instal his hinds in her place, and institute a reign of brutishness? Or am I wrong, quite wrong? Was I the one who attended school here, sitting in the darkest corner draped in spiderwebs while my brothers and sisters, my many brothers and sisters, as well as the children from the neighbouring farms, clamoured to have a turn to tell the story of Noah; and have I put them all from my mind utterly, because of their happy laughter, or because they stuffed caterpillars down the back of my bottlegreen smock to punish me for my sour face and my hatred of games; and have they determined nevermore to communicate with me, but to leave me behind with my father in the desert while they make their fortunes in the city? How hard to believe this. If I have brothers and sisters they cannot be in the city, they must all have been swept away by the great meningitis epidemic; for I cannot believe that fraternal intercourse would not have left its mark upon me, and it has all too plainly not left its mark upon me, the mark that has been left upon me instead is the mark of intercourse with the wilds, with solitude and vacancy. Nor can I believe that I was ever told the story of Noah, to speak of Noah only, sitting in a ring with the other
children. My learning has the reek of print, not the resonance of the full human voice telling its stories. But perhaps our teacher was not a good teacher, perhaps she slumped sullen at her table tapping the cane in the palm of her hand, brooding over insults, dreaming of escape, while her pupils picked their way through their reading-books and one could hear a pin drop. For how else could I have learned to read, to say nothing of writing?

  93. Or perhaps they were stepbrothers, perhaps that explains everything, perhaps that is the truth, it certainly has more of the ring of truth, if I can trust my ear: perhaps they were my stepbrothers and stepsisters, children of a buxom blond much-loved wife who passed away in her prime; perhaps, themselves bold and blond and buxom and repelled by all that was shadowy and uncertain, they waged incessant war on the offspring of the mousy unloved second wife who died in childbirth. Then later, having imbibed all that their governess could offer, they were swept off en masse by a bluff maternal uncle to live happily ever after, leaving me behind to watch over my father’s last years. And I have forgotten this horde not because I hated them but because I loved them and they were taken from me. In my dark corner I used to sit openmouthed devouring their robust gaiety, hoarding up memories of all the shouting and laughter so that in my lonely bed I could relive the day and hug it to me. But of all my stepbrothers and stepsisters it was Arthur I loved most. If Arthur had thrashed me I would have squirmed with pleasure. If Arthur had thrown a stone I would have run to fetch it. For Arthur I would have eaten bootblacking, drunk urine. But alas, golden Arthur never noticed me, occupied as he was with winning the race and catching the ball and reciting the six times table. The day that Arthur left I hid in the darkest corner of the wagonhouse vowing that never another morsel of food would pass my lips. As the years went by and Arthur did not return I thrust his memory farther and farther from me, till today it recurs to me with all the remoteness of a fairy-tale. End of story. There are inconsistencies in it, but I have not the time to track down and abolish them, there is something that tells me I must get out of this schoolhouse and back to my own room.

  94. I close the door, sit down, and confront with unweeping eyes the patch of wallpaper above the desk where glows no image of golden Arthur and myself running hand in hand on the seashore, but a pink rose with two green leaves in a field of identical pink roses casting their light eternally into the uncomprehending space of the cubicle and on to the roses on the other walls. This is the irreducible, this is my room (I settle deep in my chair), and I do not wish that it should ever change: for the comfort of my dark days, the consolation that keeps me from closing my eyes, folding my arms, and rocking myself forever into vacancy, is the knowledge that from me and from me only do these flowers draw the energy that enables them to commune with themselves, with each other, in their ecstasy of pure being, just as the stones and bushes of the veld hum with life, with such happiness that happiness is not the word, because I am here to set them vibrating with their own variety of material awareness that I am forever not they, and they not I, that I can never be the rapture of pure self that they are but am alas forever set off from them by the babble of words within me that fabricate and refabricate me as something else, something else. The farm, the desert, the whole world as far as the horizon is in an ecstasy of communion with itself, exalted by the vain urge of my consciousness to inhabit it. Such are the thoughts I think looking at the wallpaper, waiting for my breath to settle, for the fear to go away. Would that I had never learned to read.

  95. But the beast is not enchanted by my prattle. From hour to hour he stalks me through the afternoon. I hear his velvet pad, smell his fetid breath. It is useless, if I go on running I will only perish the more ignominiously, borne down from behind in a cascade of underwear, screaming until my neck is broken, if it is a merciful beast, or until my bowels are clawed out, if it is not. Somewhere on the farm my father roams, burning with shame, ready to strike dead on the spot whoever wags a finger at him. Is my father the beast? Elsewhere on the farm loom Hendrik and Anna, he playing his mouthorgan in the shade of a tree, that is how I still imagine him, she humming to herself, picking her toes, waiting for what is to happen next. Is Hendrik the beast, the insulted husband, the serf trodden under his master’s boot, rising to roar for vengeance? Anna, with her sharp little teeth, her hot armpits – is she the beast, the woman, subtle, lascivious, insatiable? I talk and talk to keep my spirits up while they circle me, smiling, powerful. What is the secret of their power over me? What do they know that I do not know? Whatever way I turn I am blocked. In a month’s time, I can see it, I will be bringing my father and my maid breakfast in bed while Hendrik lounges in the kitchen eating biscuits, flicking his claspknife into the tabletop, pinching my bottom as I pass. My father will buy new dresses for her while I wash out her soiled underwear. He and she will lie abed all day sunk in sensual sloth while Hendrik tipples, jackals devour the sheep, and the work of generations falls to ruins. She will bear him olive-skinned children who will pee on the carpets and run up and down the passages. She will conspire with Hendrik to steal his money and his silver watch. They will send for their relatives, brothers and sisters and distant cousins, and settle them on the farm. Through a crack in the shutter I will watch them dance in hordes to guitar music on Saturday nights while the old master sits like an idiot on the stoep smiling and nodding, president of the festival.

  96. Who is the beast among us? My stories are stories, they do not frighten me, they only postpone the moment when I must ask: Is it my own snarl I hear in the undergrowth? Am I the one to fear, ravening, immoderate, because here in the heart of the country where space radiates out from me to all the four corners of the earth there is nothing that can stop me? As I sit quietly gazing at my roses waiting for the afternoon to end I find that hard to accept. But I am not quite such a fool as to believe in what I see; and if I attune myself carefully to what is passing inside me I can surely feel far away the withered apple of my womb rise and float, boding all ill. I may be only a ninety-pound spinster crazed with loneliness, but I suspect I am not harmless. So perhaps that is a true explanation of my fear, a fear that is also an expectancy: I fear what I am going to do, nevertheless I am going to do whatever I do because if I do not, but creep away till better days come, my life will continue to be a line trickling from nowhere to nowhere, without beginning or end. I want a life of my own, just as I am sure my father said to himself he wanted a life of his own when he bought the packet of hearts and diamonds. The world is full of people who want to make their own lives, but to few outside the desert is such freedom granted. Here in the middle of nowhere I can expand to infinity just as I can shrivel to the size of an ant. Many things I lack, but freedom is not one of them.

  97. But while I have sat here daydreaming, perhaps even dozing with my cheeks propped on my fists and my gums bared, the afternoon has been sliding away, the light is no longer green but grey, and it is by footsteps and voices that I have been jolted awake. Confused, my heart hammers; foul and sticky from the afternoon’s torpor, my mouth floods with salt.

  I open the door a crack. The voices are at the far end of the house. One is my father’s, issuing commands, I know the tones though I can make out no words. There is a second voice, but I know of it only through the silences of the first.

  It is as I feared. The magic of imagining the worst has not worked. The worst is here.

  Now those booted feet come up the passage. I close the door and push against it. I have known that tread all my life, yet I stand with mouth agape and pulse drumming. He is turning me into a child again! The boots, the thud of the boots, the black brow, the black eyeholes, the black hole of the mouth from which roars the great NO, iron, cold, thunderous, that blasts me and buries me and locks me up. I am a child again, an infant, a grub, a white shapeless life with no arms, no legs, nothing even to grip the earth with, a sucker, a claw; I squirm, again the boot is raised over me, the mouthhole opens, and the great wind blows, chilling me to my p
ulpy heart. Though I am leaning against the door he has only to push and I will fall. The core of anger in me is gone, I am afraid, there is no mercy for me, I will be punished and never consoled afterwards. Two minutes ago I was right and he was wrong, I was the dozing fury in the stiff chair waiting to confront him with silence, absence, contempt, and who knows what else; but now I am wrong again, wrong, wrong, wrong as I have been since I was born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, in the wrong body. Tears roll down my cheeks, my nose is stuffed, it is no good, I wait for the man on the other side of the door to decide for me what form tonight’s misery is to take.

  98. He knocks, three light clicks of fingernail on wood. Salt floods my mouth again; I huddle, holding my breath. Then he goes away: the even footsteps recede one, two, three . . . down the passage. So this is my punishment! He did not want to see me, but to lock me away for the night! Cruel, cruel, cruel! I weep in my cell.

  Again the voices come to me. They are in the kitchen. He tells her to put food on the table. She takes bread out of the breadsafe, fat and a bottle of preserves out of the cupboard. He tells her to boil water. She cannot make the paraffin stove work, she tells him. He lights the stove for her. She puts the kettle on the flame. She clasps her hands and waits for the water. He tells her to sit. She is going to sit at table with him. He has cut a slice of bread which he pushes toward her with the point of the knife. He tells her to eat. His voice is gruff. He cannot express tenderness. He expects people to understand this and allow for it. But no one understands it, no one but I, who have sat in corners all my life watching him. I know that his rages and moody silences can only be masks for a tenderness he dare not show lest he be overwhelmed in its consequences. He hates only because he dare not love. He hates in order to hold himself together. He is not a bad man, despite all. He is not unjust. He is merely an ageing man who has had little love and who thinks he has now found it, eating bread and peaches with his girl, waiting for the coffee-water to boil. No scene more peaceful can be imagined, if one ignores the bitter child straining her ears behind the door at the far end of the house. It is a love-feast they are having; but there is one feast which is nobler than the love-feast, and that is the family meal. I should have been invited too. I should be seated at that table, at the foot properly, since I am mistress of the household; and she, not I, should have to fetch and carry. Then we might break bread in peace, and be loving to one another in our different ways, even I. But lines have been drawn, I am excluded from communion, and so this has become a house of two stories, a story of happiness or a lunge toward happiness, and a story of woe.