In the Heart of the Country

by J. M. Coetzee

  207. He throws me against the wall, pinning my wrists, his whole weight upon me. The fork falls to the floor, his pelvis grinds hard into me. “No!” I say. “Yes!” he says, “Yes! . . . Yes! . . .” “Why do you hate me so?” I sob. I turn my face from him, I cannot help it. “You only want to hurt me all the time. What have I done to you? It is not my fault that everything is going so badly, it is your wife’s fault, it is her fault and my father’s. And it’s also your fault! You people don’t know where to stop! Stop it! Don’t do that, you’re hurting me! Please stop it! Why are you hurting me? Why do you hurt me so much? Please! Please not like this on the floor! Let me go, Hendrik!”

  208. He closes the bedroom door and stands against it. “Take off your clothes!” says this stranger. He forces me to undress. My fingers are numb. I am shivering. I whisper to myself without cease, but he is lost in himself, he does not hear me. “You do nothing but shout at me, you never talk to me, you hate me . . .” I turn my back on him and find my way gracelessly out of my dress and petticoat. This is my fate, this is a woman’s fate. I cannot do more than I have done. I lie down on the bed with my back to him, hugging and hiding my mean little breasts. I have forgotten to take my shoes off! It is too late now, things will follow on from a beginning to an end. I must simply endure until finally I am left alone and can begin to rediscover who I am, putting together, in the time of which there is blessedly so much here, the pieces that this unusual afternoon in my life is disarranging.

  209. Pulling off my pants he rips them on the shoebuttons: more womanwork for me. “Open up,” he says, those are his first words to me; but I am cold, I shake my head and clench myself, I clench everything together, I have nothing to give him, I am beyond being persuaded, even the tears can find no way out from behind these knotted eyelids, he will have to break me open, I am as hard as shell, I cannot help him. He parts my knees by force and I clamp them to again, time after time after time.

  He lifts my legs in the air. I stiffen and cry out with shame. “Don’t be afraid,” he says. Are those his words? His tongue is thick. Then suddenly his head pushes in between my thighs. I press against his woolly hair, I squirm, but he burrows in. “Aah . . .” I cry, there is no end to the humiliation. I am soggy, it is revolting, it must be with his spit, he must have spat on me while he was there. I sob and sob.

  He crouches between my legs, holding them apart and pushing. “It won’t hurt,” he says.

  He has forced his way into me. I toss from side to side and weep, but he is relentless, he bares my breasts too and presses down on me; he pants in my ear, rocking further and further in, when will it stop? “Everyone likes it,” he says harshly. Are those his words? What does he mean? And then: “Hold tight!” What? The bed creaks at every joint, it is a single bed, a divan, it was not made for this. He sucks the breath out of my lungs, he moans and hisses in my ear, his teeth grind like stones. “Everyone likes it”? “Everyone likes it”? Can people be so affected? But by what? Shudders run through him from head to foot, I feel them distinctly, more distinctly than anything else yet, this must be the climax of the act, this I know, this I have seen in animals, it is the same everywhere, it signals the end.

  210. He lies beside me on his back, snoring, asleep. My hand covers his man’s part, held there by his hand; but my nerves are dull, I am without curiosity, I feel only a dampness and softness. Without disturbing him I pull the green counterpane over myself. Am I now a woman? Has this made me into a woman? So many tiny events, acts, movements one after another, muscles pulling bones this way and that, and their upshot is that I can say, I am finally a woman, or, Am I finally a woman? Fingers grip the spine of a fork, the tines flash out, plunging through the patched shirt, ploughing through the skin. Blood flows. Two arms grapple, the fork falls. A body lies on top of a body pushing and pushing, trying to find a way in, motion everywhere. But what does this body want inside me? What is this man trying to find in me? Will he try again when he wakes up? What deeper invasion and possession does he plot in his sleep? That one day all his bony frame shall lie packed inside me, his skull inside my skull, his limbs along my limbs, the rest of him crammed into my belly? What will he leave me of myself?

  211. The last of the afternoon is wheeling past while I lie beside this man seeping tears and blood. If I were to get up now and walk, for I can still walk, I can still talk, if I were to walk out on to the stoep, my hair tangled, my buttocks sagging, my thighs smeared in filth, if I were to come out into the light, I, the black flower that grows in the corner, dazzled, dizzy, I am sure that in spite of all it would be an afternoon like any other, the cicadas would not pause in their grating, the heat-waves would still thrill on the horizon, the sun would still lie ponderous and indifferent on my skin. I have been through everything now and no angel has descended with flaming sword to forbid it. There are, it seems, no angels in this part of the sky, no God in this part of the world. It belongs only to the sun. I do not think it was ever intended that people should live here. This is a land made for insects who eat sand and lay eggs in each other’s corpses and have no voices with which to scream when they die. It would cost me nothing to go to the kitchen and fetch a knife and cut off the part of this man with which he has been offending me. Where will it all end? What is there left for me now? When will I be able to say, It is enough? I long for the end. I long to be folded in someone’s arms, to be soothed and fondled and told I may stop ticking. I want a cave, a hole to snuggle in, I want to block my ears against this chatter that streams endlessly from and into me, I want a home somewhere else, if it has to be in this body then on different terms in this body, if there is no other body, though there is one I would far prefer, I cannot stop these words unless I cut my throat, I would like to climb into Klein-Anna’s body, I would like to climb down her throat while she sleeps and spread myself gently inside her, my hands in her hands, my feet in her feet, my skull in the benign quiet of her skull where images of soap and flour and milk revolve, the holes of my body sliding into place over the holes of hers, there to wait mindlessly for whatever enters them, the song of birds, the smell of dung, the parts of a man, not angry now but gentle, rocking in my bloodwarmth, laving me with soapy seed, sleeping in my cave. I too am falling asleep as my fingers, covered by his sleeping fingers, begin to learn to caress this soft thing for which I will probably, as long as I am able, try not to learn the name.

  212. He pushes my hand away and sits up.

  “You have been sleeping.” They are my words, soft, from me. How strange. They just come. “Please don’t be cross any more. I won’t say anything.” I turn on my side and look full at him.

  He rubs his face in his cupped hands, climbs over me, and finds his trousers. I lean on an elbow watching the brisk movements with which men dress.

  He leaves the room, and a moment later I hear the tyres of his bicycle crunch on the gravel, softer and softer as he rides off.

  213. I knock at the open door of the cottage. I am washed, my face feels clean and kind. Anna comes up behind me carrying an armful of firewood.

  “Evening, Anna, is Hendrik at home?”

  “Yes, miss. Hendrik! The miss is here!”

  So she knows nothing. I smile at her and she flinches. It will take time.

  Hendrik stands in the doorway, keeping to the shadow.

  “Hendrik, will you and Anna come and sleep in the house from now on, I get too nervous when I am alone. I’ll give you proper beds, you won’t have to sleep on the floor again. In fact, there is no reason why you shouldn’t sleep in the guestroom. Bring along everything you will need, then you won’t have to run back and forth.”

  They exchange looks while I stand waiting.

  “Yes, we’ll come,” says Hendrik.

  214. We sit all three around the kitchen table eating by candlelight the soup that Anna and I have made. Unsure of their footing here, unsure of my customs, they eat awkwardly. Anna casts her eyes down; Hend
rik answers my questions about the farm in his old curt way.

  215. I wash the dishes and Anna dries. We work deftly together. It is the moments when her hands have no work that she fears. I am resolved to ask fewer questions and to chatter more, so that she will grow accustomed to the declarative mode. At the moments when our bodies brush I am careful not to pull back.

  Hendrik has vanished into the night. What do men do when they walk about in the dark?

  216. We make up two beds in the guestroom, decently, with sheets and blankets. Then we push the beds together. I see to it that there is a chamberpot. I fill the waterjug. I am failing in no observance, nor are my intentions impure. In the heart of nowhere, in this dead place, I am making a start; or, if not that, making a gesture.

  217. In the small hours of the night Hendrik creeps into my bed and takes me. It hurts, I am still raw, but I try to relax, to understand the sensation, though as yet it has no form. I do not see what it is in me that causes his excitement; or if I do recognize the cause, I hope that in time it will change for the better. I would like to sleep in his arms, to see whether it is possible to sleep in someone else’s arms, but that is not what he wants. I do not yet like the smell of his seed. Does a woman grow used to it, I wonder. Anna must on no account make up this bed in the morning. I must rub salt into the bloody sheets and lock them away, or else quietly burn them.

  Hendrik rises and dresses in the dark. I have had no sleep, it is nearly morning. I am dizzy with exhaustion.

  “Am I doing it right, Hendrik?” I lean out from the bed and catch his hand. I can hear from my voice, and he must hear it too, that I am changing. “I don’t know anything about this, Hendrik – do you understand? All I want to know is whether I am doing it right. Please give me just that little help.”

  He loosens my fingers, not unkindly, and departs. I lie naked, pondering, making the most of the time that is mine before first light, preparing myself too for the night to come.

  218. “Are you happy, Hendrik? Do I make you feel happy?” I run my fingers over his face, this is something he allows me. His mouth is not smiling, but a smiling mouth is not the sole sign of happiness. “Do you like what we do? Hendrik, I know nothing. I don’t know whether you like what we do. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

  I would like a chance to look at him, I would like to see whether he regards me with the old watchfulness. His face is growing more obscure to me every day.

  I lean over him, stroking him with swings of my hair, it is something he seems to like, it is something he allows me. “Hendrik, why won’t you let me light a candle? Just once? You come in the night like a ghost – how am I to know it is really you?”

  “Who else would it be?”

  “No one . . . I just want to see how you look. May I?”

  “No, don’t!”

  219. Some nights he does not come. I lie naked, waiting, dozing into shallow sleep, snapping awake, groaning at the first birdsong, the first aura of dawn. This too happens to women, they lie waiting for men who do not come, I have read of it, let it not be said that I do not undergo everything, from the first letter to the last.

  I am growing limp with lack of sleep. I fall asleep without warning in the afternoons, slumped in a chair anywhere, and wake hot and confused, the last thin echo of a snore in my ears. Do the two of them see me like this? Do they point at me and smile and tiptoe about their business? I grind my teeth with shame.

  220. I am eating badly, growing even scrawnier, if that is possible. I suffer from rashes about the neck. I have no beauty to lure him on with. Perhaps that is why he will not allow a candle, perhaps he thinks he would be put off by the sight of me. I do not know what pleases him, whether he wants me to move or lie still when he takes me. I stroke his skin but feel no response from it. He stays with me more and more briefly, sometimes for only the minute it takes him to release himself inside me. He does not take off his shirt. I am too dry for this kind of activity. I have begun with it too late in life, streams that should be running dried up long ago. I try to moisten myself when I hear him at the door, but it does not always work. I cannot honestly see why he leaves his wife’s bed for mine. Sometimes the fishy smell of her comes to my nostrils when he undresses. I am sure they make love every night.

  221. He turns me on my face and does it to me from behind like an animal. Everything dies in me when I have to raise my ugly rear to him. I am humiliated; sometimes I think it is my humiliation he wants.

  222. “Stay just a moment longer, Hendrik. Can’t we talk? We get so little chance to talk to each other.”

  “Ssh, not so loud, she will hear us!”

  “She is a child, she is fast asleep! Do you mind if she finds out?”

  “No. What can she do? What can brown people do?”

  “Please, don’t be so bitter! What have I done to make you so bitter?”

  “Nothing, miss.”

  He is scrambling out of the bed, his body as unyielding as iron.

  “Hendrik, don’t go! I am tired, tired to the marrow of my bones. Can’t you understand? All I want is a little peace between us. It isn’t much to ask for.”

  “No, miss.” And he is gone.

  223. There are the days to fill too, days of atomic aimlessness. We three cannot find our true paths in this house. I cannot say whether Hendrik and Anna are guests or invaders or prisoners. I can no longer shut myself off in my room as I used to do. I cannot leave Anna to fend for herself in the house. I watch her eyes, waiting for her to reveal that she knows what happens in the nights; but she will not look at me. We still work together in the kitchen. Beyond that, what can I expect of her? Must she be the one who keeps the house shining or must I, while she watches? Must we kneel and polish together, servitors of a domestic ideal? She wants to go back to her own home, I know, back to her own lax ways and comfortable smells. It is Hendrik who is keeping her here. She must want to be alone with Hendrik. But Hendrik wants both her and me as I want both her and Hendrik. I do not know how to resolve the problem. I know nothing save that asymmetry makes people unhappy.

  224. Anna is oppressed by my watching eyes. She is oppressed by my invitations to relax, to sit by my side on the old bench in the shade of the sering-tree. She is oppressed particularly by my talk. I no longer ask her questions, I know better than that, I simply speak to her; but I have no skill in speech, I know no anecdotes, no gossip, I have lived all my life alone, I have no experience to draw on, my speech is sometimes mere babble, sometimes I see myself as a boring child babbling to her, learning a human tongue, certainly, in the course of babbling, but slowly, too slowly, and at too great a cost. As for her words, they come to me dull with reluctance.

  225. I announce that the day has come to make green fig preserve. I am gay, it is a favourite day of mine, but I cannot rouse Anna from her morose fit. We move down the rows of trees. Pick only the smallest figs, I tell her, pick nothing that has so much as begun to ripen. For every five that fall into my bucket one falls into hers. We spread the figs on the kitchen table. Cut a little cross like this, I tell her, so that the sugar can work its way in to the core. My fingers are nimble, hers are thick, she works slowly, she is no help. She drops her hands into her lap and sighs. I watch from across the table, across the bowls of figs. She will not meet my eyes.

  “Is there something upsetting you, child?” I ask. “Come on, tell me, perhaps I can help.”

  She shakes her head miserably, stupidly. She picks up a fig and scrapes at it.

  “Are you lonely, Anna? Are you longing to see your family?”

  She shakes her head slowly.

  This is how I spend my days. There has been no transfiguration. What I long for, whatever it is, does not come.

  226. I stand behind Anna. I put my hands on her shoulders, I slip my fingers under the neck of her dress and caress the clear young bones, the clavicle, the scapula, names telling nothi
ng of their beauty. She sinks her head.

  “Sometimes I too feel full of sorrow. I am sure it is the landscape that makes us feel like that.” My fingers touch her throat, her jaw, her temples. “Never mind. Soon it will all come right.”

  What does one do with desire? My eye falls idly on objects, odd stones, pretty flowers, strange insects: I pick them up, bear them home, store them away. A man comes to Anna and comes to me: we embrace him, we hold him inside us, we are his, he is ours. I am heir to a space of natal earth which my ancestors found good and fenced about. To the spur of desire we have only one response: to capture, to enclose, to hold. But how real is our possession? The flowers turn to dust, Hendrik uncouples and leaves, the land knows nothing of fences, the stones will be here when I have crumbled away, the very food I devour passes through me. I am not one of the heroes of desire, what I want is not infinite or unattainable, all I ask myself, faintly, dubiously, querulously, is whether there is not something to do with desire other than striving to possess the desired in a project which must be vain, since its end can only be the annihilation of the desired. And how much keener does my question become when woman desires woman, two holes, two emptinesses. For if that is what I am then that is what she is too, anatomy is destiny: an emptiness, or a shell, a film over an emptiness longing to be filled in a world in which nothing fills. I speak to her: “Do you know what I feel like, Anna? Like a great emptiness, an emptiness filled with a great absence, an absence which is a desire to be filled, to be fulfilled. Yet at the same time I know that nothing will fill me, because it is the first condition of life forever to desire, otherwise life would cease. It is a principle of life forever to be unfulfilled. Fulfilment does not fulfil. Only stones desire nothing. And who knows, perhaps in stones there are also holes we have never discovered.”