In the Heart of the Country

by J. M. Coetzee

  136. I deceive myself. It is worse than that, far worse. He will never get well. What was once pastoral has become one of those stifling stories in which brother and sister, wife and daughter and concubine prowl and snarl around the bedside listening for the death-rattle, or stalk each other through the dim passages of the ancestral home. It is not fair! Born into a vacuum in time, I have no understanding of changing forms. My talent is all for immanence, for the fire or ice of identity at the heart of things. Lyric is my medium, not chronicle. As I stand in this room I see not father and master dying on the bed but the sunlight reflected with unholy brilliance from his beaded forehead; I smell the odour that blood has in common with stone, with oil, with iron, the odour that folk travelling through space and time, inhaling and exhaling the black, the empty, the infinite, smell as they pass through the orbits of the dead planets, Pluto, Neptune, and those not yet discovered, so tiny are they and so remote, the odour that matter gives off when it is very old and wants to sleep. Oh father, father, if I could only learn your secrets, creep through the honeycomb of your bones, listen to the turmoil of your marrow, the singing of your nerves, float on the tide of your blood, and come at last to the quiet sea where my countless brothers and sisters swim, flicking their tails, smiling, whispering to me of a life to come! I want a second chance! Let me annihilate myself in you and come forth a second time clean and new, a sweet fish, a pretty baby, a laughing infant, a happy child, a gay girl, a blushing bride, a loving wife, a gentle mother in a story with beginning and end in a country town with kind neighbours, a cat on the doormat, geraniums on the windowledge, a tolerant sun! I was all a mistake! There was a black fish swimming among all those white fish and that black fish was chosen to be me. I was sister to none of them, I was ill chance itself, I was a shark, an infant black shark. Why did you not recognize it and cut its throat? What kind of merciful father were you who never cared for me but sent me out into the world a monster? Crush me, devour me, annihilate me before it is too late! Wipe me clean, wipe out too these whispering watchers and this house in the middle of nowhere, and let me try again in a civilized setting! Wake up and embrace me! Show me your heart just once and I swear I will never look again, into your heart or any other, be it the heart of the meanest stone! I will give up this kind of talk too, every word of it! When the words come I will set fire to them! Do you not see that it is only despair, love and despair, that makes me talk this way? Speak to me! Do I have to call on you in words of blood to make you speak? What horrors more do you demand of me? Must I carve out my beseechings with a knife on your flesh? Do you think you can die before you have said Yes to me? Do you think I cannot breathe the breath of your lungs for you or pump your heart in my fist? Do you think I will lay pennies on your eyes before you have looked at me or tie up your jaw before you have spoken? You and I will live together in this room till I have my way, till the crack of doom, till the stars fall out of the sky. I am I! I can wait!

  137. There is no change in his condition.

  I am losing patience with everything. I have no stomach for trotting from room to room performing realistic tasks, conducting stupid conversation with Hendrik. Nothing happens or can be made to happen. We are in the doldrums. I twiddle my thumbs and fret. If only it would rain! If only lightning would strike and set the veld on fire! If only the last of the great reptiles would rise out of the slime at the bottom of the dam! If only naked men on ponies would come pouring out of the hills and massacre us! What must I do to save myself from the tedium of existence on this of all days? Why does Hendrik not plunge a breadknife into the breast of the man who wasted the joy of his life? Why does Klein-Anna not come out of her bolting-hole, wherever that is, and kneel before her husband and beg forgiveness and be cuffed and spat on and reconciled? Why is she not weeping at her paramour’s bedside? Why is Hendrik so withdrawn? Why, instead of waiting tirelessly in the kitchen, is he not hovering about me, smiling secret smiles and hinting at the price of silence? Why does my father not rouse himself and curse us? Why is it left to me to give life not only to myself, minute after surly minute, but to everyone else on the farm, and the farm itself, every stick and stone of it? I said once that I slept, but that was a lie. I said that every night I donned my white nightdress and fell asleep with my horny toes pointing to the stars. But that cannot be true. How can I afford to sleep? If for one moment I were to lose my grip on the world, it would fall apart: Hendrik and his shy bride would dissolve to dust in each other’s arms and sift to the floor, the crickets would stop chirping, the house would deliquesce to a pale abstract of lines and angles against a pale sky, my father would float like a black cloud and be sucked into the lair inside my head to beat the walls and roar like a bear. All that would remain would be me, lying for that fatal instant in a posture of sleep on an immaterial bed above an immaterial earth before everything vanished. I make it all up in order that it shall make me up. I cannot stop now.

  138. But I have dreams. I do not sleep but I have dreams: how I manage that I do not know. One of my dreams is about a bush. When the sun has set and the moon is dark and the stars shed so little light that one cannot see a hand in front of one’s face, the bush I dream of glows with an unearthly light. I stand before the bush watching it, and the bush watches me back through the depths of profoundest night. Then I grow sleepy. I yawn and lie down and sleep, in my sleep, and the last star goes out in the sky above me. But the bush, alone in the universe, but for me who am now asleep and therefore who knows where, continues to shed on me its radiance.

  Such is my dream about the burning bush. There is a scheme of interpretation, I am sure, according to which my dream about the bush is a dream about my father. But who is to say what a dream about my father is?

  139. “Must I harness the donkeys, miss?”

  “No, let us wait, it will only make the pain worse if we move the baas now.”

  140. The girl is in the sewing-room. She must have hidden here all night, crouching in a corner, listening to the groans from the bedroom and the footfalls on the gravel outside, until she fell asleep on the floor in a nest of drapery like a cat. Having decided to find her, I have found her at once: one does not grow up in a house without learning the nuances of its breathing.

  “Well, now the fun and games are over! And where are your clothes? Leave my blankets alone, please, you have clothes of your own. Well, come on, what are you going to do now? What are you going to say to your husband? What are you going to say to him about last night? Come on, speak up, what are you going to tell your husband? What have you been up to here in the house? You slut! You filth! Look what a mess you’ve caused! It’s your fault, all this mess is your fault! But one thing I tell you, you get out today, you and Hendrik, I am finished with you! And stop crying, it’s too late to cry, you should rather have cried yesterday, it won’t help today! Where are your clothes? Put your clothes on, don’t stand naked in front of me, put your clothes on and get out, I don’t want to see you again! I’m going to tell Hendrik to come and fetch you.”

  “Please, miss, my clothes are gone.”

  “Don’t lie to me, your clothes are in the bedroom where you were!”

  “Yes, miss. Please, miss, he will hit me.”

  Thus, venting torrents of mean-spirited resentment on the girl, swelling with ire and self-righteousness, do I become for a blessed interval a woman among women, shrew among doughty country shrews. It comes of itself, one needs no lessons, only meek folk around one and a grudge against them for not speaking back. I am cantankerous, but only because there is infinite space around me, and time before and after from which history seems to have retreated, and evidence in these bowed faces of limitless power. Everywhere I beat my fists on air. What is there for me but dreary expansion to the limits of the universe? Is it any wonder that nothing is safe from me, that the lowliest veld-flower is likely to find itself raped in its being or that I should dream with yearning of a bush that resists my metaphysical conque
st? Poor Hendrik, poor Anna, what chance have they?

  141. “Hendrik! Listen carefully. Anna is in the house. She is sorry about everything that has happened. She says it won’t happen again. She wants to ask your forgiveness. What I want to know is: must I send her out, or is there going to be trouble? Because, Hendrik, I am telling you here and now, if you give trouble I wash my hands of both of you, you can get out today. I want to make myself quite clear. What happens between you and Anna is none of my business; but if she comes to me and says you have been cruel to her, beware!

  “Anna! Come here at once! Come on, hurry up, he won’t do anything!”

  The child shuffles out. She is wearing her own clothes again, the brown frock to her knees, the blue cardigan, the scarlet kerchief. She stands in front of Hendrik tracing patterns with her big toe in the gravel. Her face is blotched with tear-stains. She sniffs and sniffs.

  Hendrik speaks.

  “Miss must not get upset, but miss is interfering too much.”

  He moves a step closer to Klein-Anna. His voice is big with passion as I have never heard it before. Anna slides behind me, wiping her nose on her sleeve. It is a beautiful morning and I am caught in a dogfight. “You! I’ll kill you!” says Hendrik. Anna grips my dress between my shoulderblades. I shake myself loose. Hendrik swears at her in words whose meaning I can mostly only guess at, I have not heard them before, how surprising. “Stop it!” I scream. Ignoring me he lunges at Anna. At once she spins on her heel and starts running; and he after her. She is nimble and barefoot, he shod but driven by fury. Shrieking without letup she spins leftward and rightward trying to throw him off. Then, in the middle of the schoolhouse road a hundred yards from where I stand, she suddenly falls and curls into a cringing ball. Hendrik begins to punch and kick; she screams despairingly. I pick up my skirts and run towards them. This is certainly action, and unambiguous action too. I cannot deny that there is exhilaration mixed in with my alarm.

  142. Hendrik is kicking rhythmically at her with his soft shoes. He does not look up at me, his face is wet with sweat, he has work to do. If there were a stick to hand he would be using it, but there are not many sticks in this part of the world, his wife is fortunate.

  I tug at his waistcoat. “Leave her!” I say. It is as if he expected me, for he takes hold of my wrist, then, turning smoothly, of the other wrist too. For a second he stands face to face with me clenching my wrists against his chest. I smell his heat, not without distaste. “Stop it!” I say. “Let me go!”

  A number of movements follow which, in the flurry of the moment, I cannot discriminate, though I shall be able to do so later in the cool of retrospection, I am sure. I am shaken back and forth: my feet stagger one way and another out of time with my body, my head jerks, I am off balance yet not allowed to fall. I know I look ridiculous. Happily, living here in the heart of nowhere, one need not keep up a front for anyone, not even, it would now appear, for the servants. I am not angry, though my teeth rattle: there are worse things than standing up for the weak, there are worse things than being shaken, not unkindly, I can feel no malevolence in this man whose passion is forgivable and whose eyes are anyhow, I see, closed.

  I stumble backward, let go by Hendrik, who turns away from me to the girl, who is gone. I fall heavily on my backside, my palms are scorched by the gravel, my skirts fly in the air, I am dizzy but gay and ready for more, perhaps what has been wrong all these years is simply that I have had no one to play with. The blood thuds in my ears. I close my eyes: in a moment I will be myself.

  143. Hendrik is out of sight. I beat my clothes and the dust rises in clouds. The pocket of my skirt is ripped clear off and the keyring with the keys to the storehouse, the pantry, and the dining-room cabinets is gone. I scratch around until I find it, pat my hair straight, and set off up the schoolhouse road after Hendrik. Event has been following event, yet the exhilaration is fading, I am losing momentum, I am not sure why I follow them further, perhaps they ought to be left to settle their debts and make peace in their own way. But I do not want to be alone, I do not want to begin moping.

  144. Hendrik crouches on hands and knees over the girl on the truckle bed as if about to sink his teeth into her throat. She lifts her knees to push him off; her dress falls back over her hips. “No,” she pleads with him, and I hear it all, stopping suddenly in the schoolhouse doorway, catching first the highlights on her thighs and his cheekbones, then, as my eyes adjust to the gloom inside, everything else—“No, not here, she’ll catch us!”

  The two heads turn in unison to the shape in the doorway. “God!” she says. She drops her legs, clutches her skirt down, and turns her face to the wall. Hendrik comes upright on his knees. He grins straight at me. From his middle juts out unhidden what must be his organ, but grotesquely larger than it should be, unless I am mistaken. He says: “Miss has surely come to watch.”

  145. I open the sickroom door and am hit by the sweet stench. The room is peaceful and sunny but filled with a high complex drone. There are hundreds of flies here, common houseflies and the larger green-tailed blowflies whose curt rasp is submerged in the general hum so that the texture of sound in the room is replete and polyphonal.

  My father’s eye is upon me. His lips form a word which I cannot hear. I stand in the doorway unwilling. I should not have come back. Behind every door there is a new horror.

  The word comes again. I tiptoe to the bedside. The pitch of the buzzing rises as the flies make way before me. One fly continues to sit on the bridge of his nose and clean its face. I brush it away. It rises, circles, and settles on my forearm. I brush it away. I could spend all day like this. The hum grows steady again.

  Water is the word he is saying. I nod.

  I raise the bedclothes and look. He is lying in a sea of blood and shit that has already begun to cake. I tuck the bedclothes back under his armpits.

  “Yes, daddy,” I say.

  146 I hold the beaker to his lips and he sucks noisily.

  “More,” he whispers.

  “First wait a little,” I tell him.

  “More.”

  He drinks more water and grips my arm, waiting for something, listening for something far away. I wave the flies off. He begins to croon, more and more loudly, his whole body stiffening. I should be doing something for his pain. The pressure on my arm is forcing me down. I yield, crouching at the bedside, not wishing to sit on the ooze in the bed. The stench grows sickening.

  “Poor daddy,” I whisper, and put a hand on his forehead. He is hot.

  Under the bedclothes there is a liquid convulsion. He releases his breath with a gasp. I cannot stand this. One by one I pick the fingers from my arm, but one by one they close again. He is by no means without strength. I wrench my arm loose and stand up. His eyes open. “The doctor will soon be here,” I tell him. The mattress is irrecoverable, it will have to be burned. I must close the window. I must also put back the curtains, the afternoon heat and the stench together will be too much for anyone. I will not stand for any more flies.

  147. The flies, which ought to be in transports of joy, sound merely cross. Nothing seems to be good enough for them. For miles around they have forsaken the meagre droppings of the herbivores and flown like arrows to this gory festival. Why are they not singing? But perhaps what I take for petulance is the sound of insect ecstasy. Perhaps their lives from cradle to grave, so to speak, are one long ecstasy, which I mistake. Perhaps the lives of animals too are one long ecstasy interrupted only at the moment when they know with full knowledge that the knife has found their secret and they will never again see the goodly sun which even at this instant goes black before them. Perhaps the lives of Hendrik and Klein-Anna are ecstasy, if not acute ecstasy then at least a kind of gentle streaming of radiance from eyes and fingertips which I do not see, interrupted only on such occasions as last night and this morning. Perhaps ecstasy is not after all so rare. Perhaps if I talked less and gave
myself more to sensation I would know more of ecstasy. Perhaps, on the other hand, if I stopped talking I would fall into panic, losing my hold on the world I know best. It strikes me that I am faced with a choice that flies do not have to make.

  148. One after another the flies fall under my swatter, some erupting in gouts of crop-slime, some folding their legs and passing neatly away, some spinning about angrily on their backs until the coup de grâce descends. The survivors circle the room waiting for me to tire. But I must keep a clean house and to that end I am tireless. If I abandon this room, locking the door, stuffing the cracks with rags, I will in time find myself abandoning another room, and then others, until the house is all but lost, its builders all but betrayed, the roof sagging, the shutters clapping, the woodwork cracking, the fabrics rotting, the mice having a field day, only a last room intact, a single room and a dark passage where I wander night and day tapping at the walls, trying for old times’ sake to remember the various rooms, the guest-room, the dining-room, the pantry in which the various jams wait patiently, sealed under candlewax, for a day of resurrection that will never come; and then retire, dizzy with sleepiness, for even mad old women, insensible to heat and cold, taking their nourishment from the passing air, from motes of dust and drifting strands of spiderweb and fleas’ eggs, must sleep, to the last room, my own room, with the bed against the wall and the mirror and the table in the corner where, chin in hand, I think my mad old woman’s thoughts and where I shall die, seated, and rot, and where the flies will suck at me, day after day after day, to say nothing of the mice and the ants, until I am a clean white skeleton with nothing more to give the world and can be left in peace, with the spiders in my eyesockets spinning traps for the stragglers to the feast.