Disgrace

by J. M. Coetzee

  She teases him as her mother used to tease him. Her wit, if anything, sharper. He has always been drawn to women of wit. Wit and beauty. With the best will in the world he could not find wit in Meláni. But plenty of beauty.

  Again it runs through him: a light shudder of voluptuousness. He is aware of Lucy observing him. He does not appear to be able to conceal it. Interesting.

  He gets up, goes out into the yard. The younger dogs are delighted to see him: they trot back and forth in their cages, whining eagerly. But the old bulldog bitch barely stirs.

  He enters her cage, closes the door behind him. She raises her head, regards him, lets her head fall again; her old dugs hang slack.

  He squats down, tickles her behind the ears. ‘Abandoned, are we?’ he murmurs.

  He stretches out beside her on the bare concrete. Above is the pale blue sky. His limbs relax.

  This is how Lucy finds him. He must have fallen asleep: the first he knows, she is in the cage with the water-can, and the bitch is up, sniffing her feet.

  ‘Making friends?’ says Lucy.

  ‘She’s not easy to make friends with.’

  ‘Poor old Katy, she’s in mourning. No one wants her, and she knows it. The irony is, she must have offspring all over the district who would be happy to share their homes with her. But it’s not in their power to invite her. They are part of the furniture, part of the alarm system. They do us the honour of treating us like gods, and we respond by treating them like things.’

  They leave the cage. The bitch slumps down, closes her eyes.

  ‘The Church Fathers had a long debate about them, and decided they don’t have proper souls,’ he observes. ‘Their souls are tied to their bodies and die with them.’

  Lucy shrugs. ‘I’m not sure that I have a soul. I wouldn’t know a soul if I saw one.’

  ‘That’s not true. You are a soul. We are all souls. We are souls before we are born.’

  She regards him oddly.

  ‘What will you do with her?’ he says.

  ‘With Katy? I’ll keep her, if it comes to that.’

  ‘Don’t you ever put animals down?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Bev does. It is a job no one else wants to do, so she has taken it upon herself. It cuts her up terribly. You underestimate her. She is a more interesting person than you think. Even in your own terms.’

  His own terms: what are they? That dumpy little women with ugly voices deserve to be ignored? A shadow of grief falls over him: for Katy, alone in her cage, for himself, for everyone. He sighs deeply, not stifling the sigh. ‘Forgive me, Lucy,’ he says.

  ‘Forgive you? For what?’ She is smiling lightly, mockingly.

  ‘For being one of the two mortals assigned to usher you into the world and for not turning out to be a better guide. But I’ll go and help Bev Shaw. Provided that I don’t have to call her Bev. It’s a silly name to go by. It reminds me of cattle. When shall I start?’

  ‘I’ll give her a call.’

  TEN

  THE SIGN OUTSIDE the clinic reads ANIMAL WELFARE LEAGUE W.O. 1529. Below is a line stating the daily hours, but this has been taped over. At the door is a line of waiting people, some with animals. As soon as he gets out of his car there are children all around him, begging for money or just staring. He makes his way through the crush, and through a sudden cacophony as two dogs, held back by their owners, snarl and snap at each other.

  The small, bare waiting-room is packed. He has to step over someone’s legs to get in.

  ‘Mrs Shaw?’ he inquires.

  An old woman nods toward a doorway closed off with a plastic curtain. The woman holds a goat on a short rope; it glares nervously, eyeing the dogs, its hooves clicking on the hard floor.

  In the inner room, which smells pungently of urine, Bev Shaw is working at a low steel-topped table. With a pencil-light she is peering down the throat of a young dog that looks like a cross between a ridgeback and a jackal. Kneeling on the table a barefoot child, evidently the owner, has the dog’s head clamped under his arm and is trying to hold its jaws open. A low, gurgling snarl comes from its throat; its powerful hindquarters strain. Awkwardly he joins in the tussle, pressing the dog’s hind legs together, forcing it to sit on its haunches.

  ‘Thank you,’ says Bev Shaw. Her face is flushed. ‘There’s an abscess here from an impacted tooth. We have no antibiotics, so – hold him still, boytjie! – so we’ll just have to lance it and hope for the best.’

  She probes inside the mouth with a lancet. The dog gives a tremendous jerk, breaks free of him, almost breaks free of the boy. He grasps it as it scrabbles to get off the table; for a moment its eyes, full of rage and fear, glare into his.

  ‘On his side – so,’ says Bev Shaw. Making crooning noises, she expertly trips up the dog and turns it on its side. ‘The belt,’ she says. He passes a belt around its body and she buckles it. ‘So,’ says Bev Shaw. ‘Think comforting thoughts, think strong thoughts. They can smell what you are thinking.’

  He leans his full weight on the dog. Gingerly, one hand wrapped in an old rag, the child prises open the jaws again. The dog’s eyes roll in terror. They can smell what you are thinking: what nonsense! ‘There, there!’ he murmurs. Bev Shaw probes again with the lancet. The dog gags, goes rigid, then relaxes.

  ‘So,’ she says, ‘now we must let nature take her course.’ She unbuckles the belt, speaks to the child in what sounds like very halting Xhosa. The dog, on its feet, cowers under the table. There is a spattering of blood and saliva on the surface; Bev wipes it off. The child coaxes the dog out.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Lurie. You have a good presence. I sense that you like animals.’

  ‘Do I like animals? I eat them, so I suppose I must like them, some parts of them.’

  Her hair is a mass of little curls. Does she make the curls herself, with tongs? Unlikely: it would take hours every day. They must grow that way. He has never seen such a tessitura from close by. The veins on her ears are visible as a filigree of red and purple. The veins of her nose too. And then a chin that comes straight out of her chest, like a pouter pigeon’s. As an ensemble, remarkably unattractive.

  She is pondering his words, whose tone she appears to have missed.

  ‘Yes, we eat up a lot of animals in this country,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t seem to do us much good. I’m not sure how we will justify it to them.’ Then: ‘Shall we start on the next one?’

  Justify it? When? At the Great Reckoning? He would be curious to hear more, but this is not the time.

  The goat, a fullgrown buck, can barely walk. One half of his scrotum, yellow and purple, is swollen like a balloon; the other half is a mass of caked blood and dirt. He has been savaged by dogs, the old woman says. But he seems bright enough, cheery, combative. While Bev Shaw is examining him, he passes a short burst of pellets on to the floor. Standing at his head, gripping his horns, the woman pretends to reprove him.

  Bev Shaw touches the scrotum with a swab. The goat kicks. ‘Can you fasten his legs?’ she asks, and indicates how. He straps the right hind leg to the right foreleg. The goat tries to kick again, teeters. She swabs the wound gently. The goat trembles, gives a bleat: an ugly sound, low and hoarse.

  As the dirt comes away, he sees that the wound is alive with white grubs waving their blind heads in the air. He shudders. ‘Blowfly,’ says Bev Shaw. ‘At least a week old.’ She purses her lips. ‘You should have brought him in long ago,’ she says to the woman. ‘Yes,’ says the woman. ‘Every night the dogs come. It is too, too bad. Five hundred rand you pay for a man like him.’

  Bev Shaw straightens up. ‘I don’t know what we can do. I don’t have the experience to try a removal. She can wait for Dr Oosthuizen on Thursday, but the old fellow will come out sterile anyway, and does she want that? And then there is the question of antibiotics. Is she prepared to spend money on antibiotics?’

  She kneels down again beside the goat, nuzzles his throat, stroking the throat upward with her own hair. The goat trembles but is s
till. She motions to the woman to let go of the horns. The woman obeys. The goat does not stir.

  She is whispering. ‘What do you say, my friend?’ he hears her say. ‘What do you say? Is it enough?’

  The goat stands stock still as if hypnotized. Bev Shaw continues to stroke him with her head. She seems to have lapsed into a trance of her own.

  She collects herself and gets to her feet. ‘I’m afraid it’s too late,’ she says to the woman. ‘I can’t make him better. You can wait for the doctor on Thursday, or you can leave him with me. I can give him a quiet end. He will let me do that for him. Shall I? Shall I keep him here?’

  The woman wavers, then shakes her head. She begins to tug the goat toward the door.

  ‘You can have him back afterwards,’ says Bev Shaw. ‘I will help him through, that’s all.’ Though she tries to control her voice, he can hear the accents of defeat. The goat hears them too: he kicks against the strap, bucking and plunging, the obscene bulge quivering behind him. The woman drags the strap loose, casts it aside. Then they are gone.

  ‘What was that all about?’ he asks.

  Bev Shaw hides her face, blows her nose. ‘It’s nothing. I keep enough lethal for bad cases, but we can’t force the owners. It’s their animal, they like to slaughter in their own way. What a pity! Such a good old fellow, so brave and straight and confident!’

  Lethal: the name of a drug? He would not put it beyond the drug companies. Sudden darkness, from the waters of Lethe.

  ‘Perhaps he understands more than you guess,’ he says. To his own surprise, he is trying to comfort her. ‘Perhaps he has already been through it. Born with foreknowledge, so to speak. This is Africa, after all. There have been goats here since the beginning of time. They don’t have to be told what steel is for, and fire. They know how death comes to a goat. They are born prepared.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ she says. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.’

  Things are beginning to fall into place. He has a first inkling of the task this ugly little woman has set herself. This bleak building is a place not of healing – her doctoring is too amateurish for that – but of last resort. He recalls the story of – who was it? St Hubert? – who gave refuge to a deer that clattered into his chapel, panting and distraught, fleeing the huntsmen’s dogs. Bev Shaw, not a veterinarian but a priestess, full of New Age mumbo jumbo, trying, absurdly, to lighten the load of Africa’s suffering beasts. Lucy thought he would find her interesting. But Lucy is wrong. Interesting is not the word.

  He spends all afternoon in the surgery, helping as far as he is able. When the last of the day’s cases has been dealt with, Bev Shaw shows him around the yard. In the avian cage there is only one bird, a young fish-eagle with a splinted wing. For the rest there are dogs: not Lucy’s well-groomed thoroughbreds but a mob of scrawny mongrels filling two pens to bursting point, barking, yapping, whining, leaping with excitement.

  He helps her pour out dry food and fill the water-troughs. They empty two ten-kilogram bags.

  ‘How do you pay for this stuff?’ he asks.

  ‘We get it wholesale. We hold public collections. We get donations. We offer a free neutering service, and get a grant for that.’

  ‘Who does the neutering?

  ‘Dr Oosthuizen, our vet. But he comes in only one afternoon a week.’

  He is watching the dogs eat. It surprises him how little fighting there is. The small, the weak hold back, accepting their lot, waiting their turn.

  ‘The trouble is, there are just too many of them,’ says Bev Shaw. ‘They don’t understand it, of course, and we have no way of telling them. Too many by our standards, not by theirs. They would just multiply and multiply if they had their way, until they filled the earth. They don’t think it’s a bad thing to have lots of offspring. The more the jollier. Cats the same.’

  ‘And rats.’

  ‘And rats. Which reminds me: check yourself for fleas when you get home.’

  One of the dogs, replete, eyes shining with wellbeing, sniffs his fingers through the mesh, licks them.

  ‘They are very egalitarian, aren’t they,’ he remarks. ‘No classes. No one too high and mighty to smell another’s backside.’ He squats, allows the dog to smell his face, his breath. It has what he thinks of as an intelligent look, though it is probably nothing of the kind. ‘Are they all going to die?’

  ‘Those that no one wants. We’ll put them down.’

  ‘And you are the one who does the job.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘I do mind. I mind deeply. I wouldn’t want someone doing it for me who didn’t mind. Would you?’

  He is silent. Then: ‘Do you know why my daughter sent me to you?’

  ‘She told me you were in trouble.’

  ‘Not just in trouble. In what I suppose one would call disgrace.’

  He watches her closely. She seems uncomfortable; but perhaps he is imagining it.

  ‘Knowing that, do you still have a use for me?’ he says.

  ‘If you are prepared . . .’ She opens her hands, presses them together, opens them again. She does not know what to say, and he does not help her.

  He has stayed with his daughter only for brief periods before. Now he is sharing her house, her life. He has to be careful not to allow old habits to creep back, the habits of a parent: putting the toilet roll on the spool, switching off lights, chasing the cat off the sofa. Practise for old age, he admonishes himself. Practise fitting in. Practise for the old folks’ home.

  He pretends he is tired and, after supper, withdraws to his room, where faintly the sounds come to him of Lucy leading her own life: drawers opening and shutting, the radio, the murmur of a telephone conversation. Is she calling Johannesburg, speaking to Helen? Is his presence here keeping the two of them apart? Would they dare to share a bed while he was in the house? If the bed creaked in the night, would they be embarrassed? Embarrassed enough to stop? But what does he know about what women do together? Maybe women do not need to make beds creak. And what does he know about these two in particular, Lucy and Helen? Perhaps they sleep together merely as children do, cuddling, touching, giggling, reliving girlhood – sisters more than lovers. Sharing a bed, sharing a bathtub, baking gingerbread cookies, trying on each other’s clothes. Sapphic love: an excuse for putting on weight.

  The truth is, he does not like to think of his daughter in the throes of passion with another woman, and a plain one at that. Yet would he be any happier if the lover were a man? What does he really want for Lucy? Not that she should be forever a child, forever innocent, forever his – certainly not that. But he is a father, that is his fate, and as a father grows older he turns more and more – it cannot be helped – toward his daughter. She becomes his second salvation, the bride of his youth reborn. No wonder, in fairy-stories, queens try to hound their daughters to their death!

  He sighs. Poor Lucy! Poor daughters! What a destiny, what a burden to bear! And sons: they too must have their tribulations, though he knows less about that.

  He wishes he could sleep. But he is cold, and not sleepy at all.

  He gets up, drapes a jacket over his shoulders, returns to bed. He is reading Byron’s letters of 1820. Fat, middle-aged at thirty-two, Byron is living with the Guicciolis in Ravenna: with Teresa, his complacent, short-legged mistress, and her suave, malevolent husband. Summer heat, late-afternoon tea, provincial gossip, yawns barely hidden. ‘The women sit in a circle and the men play dreary Faro,’ writes Byron. In adultery, all the tedium of marriage rediscovered. ‘I have always looked to thirty as the barrier to any real or fierce delight in the passions.’

  He sighs again. How brief the summer, before the autumn and then the winter! He reads on past midnight, yet even so cannot get to sleep.

  ELEVEN

  IT IS WEDNESDAY. He gets up early, but Lucy is up before him. He finds her watching the wild geese on the dam.

  ‘Ar
en’t they lovely,’ she says. ‘They come back every year. The same three. I feel so lucky to be visited. To be the one chosen.’

  Three. That would be a solution of sorts. He and Lucy and Melanie. Or he and Melanie and Soraya.

  They have breakfast together, then take the two Dobermanns for a walk.

  ‘Do you think you could live here, in this part of the world?’ asks Lucy out of the blue.

  ‘Why? Do you need a new dog-man?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t thinking of that. But surely you could get a job at Rhodes University – you must have contacts there – or at Port Elizabeth.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Lucy. I’m no longer marketable. The scandal will follow me, stick to me. No, if I took a job it would have to be as something obscure, like a ledger clerk, if they still have them, or a kennel attendant.’

  ‘But if you want to put a stop to the scandal-mongering, shouldn’t you be standing up for yourself? Doesn’t gossip just multiply if you run away?’

  As a child Lucy had been quiet and self-effacing, observing him but never, as far as he knew, judging him. Now, in her middle twenties, she has begun to separate. The dogs, the gardening, the astrology books, the asexual clothes: in each he recognizes a statement of independence, considered, purposeful. The turn away from men too. Making her own life. Coming out of his shadow. Good! He approves!

  ‘Is that what you think I have done?’ he says. ‘Run away from the scene of the crime?’

  ‘Well, you have withdrawn. For practical purposes, what is the difference?’

  ‘You miss the point, my dear. The case you want me to make is a case that can no longer be made, basta. Not in our day. If I tried to make it I would not be heard.’

  ‘That’s not true. Even if you are what you say, a moral dinosaur, there is a curiosity to hear the dinosaur speak. I for one am curious. What is your case? Let us hear it.’

  He hesitates. Does she really want him to trot out more of his intimacies?

  ‘My case rests on the rights of desire,’ he says. ‘On the god who makes even the small birds quiver.’