Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  Twice a week the separation of sheep from goats is repeated. While Jews and Catholics are left to their own devices, the Christians go off to assembly to sing hymns and be preached to. In revenge for which, and in revenge for what the Jews did to Christ, the Afrikaans boys, big, brutal, knobbly, sometimes catch a Jew or a Catholic and punch him in the biceps, short, vicious knuckle-punches, or knee him in the balls, or twist his arms behind his back till he pleads for mercy. ‘Asseblief! the boy whimpers: Please! ‘Jood!’ they hiss back: ‘Jood! Vuilgoed!’ Jew! Filth!

  One day during the lunch break two Afrikaans boys corner him and drag him to the farthest corner of the rugby field. One of them is huge and fat. He pleads with them. ‘Ek is nie ’n Jood nie,’ he says: I am not a Jew. He offers to let them ride his bicycle, offers them his bicycle for the afternoon. The more he gabbles, the more the fat boy smiles. This is evidently what he likes: the pleading, the abasement.

  From his shirt pocket the fat boy produces something, something that begins to explain why he has been dragged to this quiet corner: a wriggling green caterpillar. The friend pins his arms behind his back; the fat boy pinches the hinges of his jaws till his mouth opens, then forces the caterpillar in. He spits it out, already torn, already exuding its juices. The fat boy crushes it, smears it over his lips. ‘Jood!’ he says, wiping his hand clean on the grass.

  He chose to be a Roman Catholic, that fateful morning, because of Rome, because of Horatius and his two comrades, swords in their hands, crested helmets on their heads, indomitable courage in their glance, defending the bridge over the Tiber against the Etruscan hordes. Now, step by step, he discovers from the other Catholic boys what a Roman Catholic really is. A Roman Catholic has nothing to do with Rome. Roman Catholics have not even heard of Horatius. Roman Catholics go to catechism on Friday afternoons; they go to confession; they take communion. That is what Roman Catholics do.

  The older Catholic boys corner him and quiz him: has he been to catechism, has he been to confession, has he taken communion? Catechism? Confession? Communion? He does not even know what the words mean. ‘I used to go in Cape Town,’ he says evasively. ‘Where?’ they say. He does not know the names of any churches in Cape Town, but nor do they. ‘Come to catechism on Friday,’ they order him. When he does not come, they inform the priest that there is an apostate in Standard Three. The priest sends a message, which they relay: he must come to catechism. He suspects they have fabricated the message, but the next Friday he stays at home, lying low.

  The older Catholic boys begin to make it clear they do not believe his stories about being a Catholic in Cape Town. But he has gone too far now, there is no going back. If he says, ‘I made a mistake, I am actually a Christian,’ he will be disgraced. Besides, even if he has to bear the taunts of the Afrikaners and the interrogations of the real Catholics, are the two free periods a week not worth it, free periods to walk around the empty playing fields talking to the Jews?

  One Saturday afternoon when the whole of Worcester, stunned by the heat, has gone to sleep, he takes out his bicycle and cycles to Dorp Street.

  Usually he gives Dorp Street a wide berth, since that is where the Catholic church is. But today the street is empty, there is no sound but the rustle of water in the furrows. Nonchalantly he cycles past, pretending not to look.

  The church is not as big as he thought it would be. It is a low, blank building with a little statue over the portico: the Virgin, hooded, holding her baby.

  He reaches the bottom of the street. He would like to turn and come back for a second look, but he is afraid of stretching his luck, afraid that a priest in black will emerge and wave to him to stop.

  The Catholic boys nag him and make sneering remarks, the Christians persecute him, but the Jews do not judge. The Jews pretend not to notice. The Jews wear shoes too. In a minor way he feels comfortable with the Jews. The Jews are not so bad.

  Nevertheless, with Jews one has to tread carefully. For the Jews are everywhere, the Jews are taking over the country. He hears this on all sides, but particularly from his uncles, his mother’s two bachelor brothers, when they visit. Norman and Lance come every summer, like migrating birds, though rarely at the same time. They sleep on the sofa, get up at eleven in the morning, moon around the house for hours, half-dressed, tousled. Both have cars; sometimes they can be persuaded to take their sister and her boys for an afternoon drive, but they seem to prefer passing their time smoking and drinking tea and talking about the old days. Then they have supper, and after supper, play poker or rummy until midnight with whoever can be persuaded to stay up.

  He loves to listen to his mother and his uncles going for the thousandth time over the events of their childhood on the farm. He is never happier than when listening to these stories, to the teasing and the laughter that go with them. His friends in Worcester do not come from families with stories like these. That is what sets him apart: the two farms behind him, his mother’s farm, his father’s farm, and the stories of those farms. Through the farms he is rooted in the past; through the farms he has substance.

  There is a third farm too: Skipperskloof, near Williston. His family has no roots there, it is a farm they have married into. Nevertheless, Skipperskloof is important too. All farms are important. Farms are places of freedom, of life.

  In among the stories that Norman and Lance and his mother tell flit the figures of Jews, comic, sly, but also cunning and heartless, like jackals. Jews from Oudtshoorn came to the farm every year to buy ostrich feathers from their father, his grandfather. They persuaded him to give up wool and farm only with ostriches. Ostriches would make him rich, they said. Then one day the bottom fell out of the ostrich-feather market. The Jews refused to buy any more feathers and his grandfather went bankrupt. Everyone in the district went bankrupt and the Jews took over their farms. That is how the Jews operate, says Norman: you must never trust a Jew.

  His father demurs. His father cannot afford to decry the Jews, since he is employed by a Jew. Standard Canners, where he works as a bookkeeper, belongs to Wolf Heller. In fact it was Wolf Heller who brought him from Cape Town to Worcester when he lost his job in the civil service. The future of their family is bound up with the future of Standard Canners, which, in the few years since he took it over, Wolf Heller has built up into a giant of the canning world. There are wonderful prospects in Standard Canners, says his father, for someone like himself, with legal qualifications.

  So Wolf Heller is exempted from the strictures on Jews. Wolf Heller takes care of his employees. At Christmas he even buys them presents, though Christmas means nothing to Jews.

  There are no Heller children at school in Worcester. If there are Heller children at all, they have presumably been sent to SACS in Cape Town, which is a Jewish school in all but name. Nor are there Jewish families in Reunion Park. The Jews of Worcester live in the older, greener, shadier part of the town. Though there are Jewish boys in his class, he is never invited into their homes. He sees them only at school, brought closer to them during assembly periods, when Jews and Catholics are isolated and subjected to the ire of the Christians.

  Every now and again, however, for reasons that are not clear, the dispensation that allows them freedom during assembly is withdrawn and they are summoned to the hall.

  The hall is always packed. Senior boys occupy the seats, while boys from the junior school crowd the floor. The Jews and Catholics – perhaps twenty in all – thread their way among them, looking for space. Hands surreptitiously snatch at their ankles, trying to trip them.

  The dominee is already on the stage, a pale young man in a black suit and white tie. He preaches in a high, sing-song voice, drawing out the long vowels, pronouncing every letter of every word punctiliously. When the preaching is over, they have to stand for the prayer. What is it proper for a Catholic to do during a Christian prayer? Does he close his eyes and move his lips, or does he pretend not to be there? He cannot see any of the real Catholics; he puts on a blank look and allows his eyes to
go out of focus.

  The dominee sits down. The songbooks are handed out; it is time for the singing. One of the women teachers steps forward to conduct. ‘Al die veld is vrolik, al die voëltjies sing,’ sing the juniors. Then the seniors stand up. ‘Uit die blou van onse hemel,’ they sing in their deep voices, standing to attention, gazing sternly ahead: the national anthem, their national anthem. Tentatively, nervously, the younger boys join in. Leaning over them, waving with her arms as though scooping feathers, the teacher tries to uplift them, encourage them. ‘Ons sal antwoord op jou roepstem, ons sal offer wat jy vra,’ they sing: we will answer your call.

  At last it is over. The teachers descend from the platform, first the principal, then the dominee, then the rest of them. The boys file out of the hall. A fist strikes him in the kidneys, a short, quick jab, invisible. ‘Jood!’ a voice whispers. Then he is out, he is free, he can breathe fresh air again.

  Despite the menaces of the real Catholics, despite the hovering possibility that the priest will visit his parents and unmask him, he is thankful for the inspiration that made him choose Rome. He is grateful to the Church that shelters him; he has no regrets, does not wish to stop being a Catholic. If being a Christian means singing hymns and listening to sermons and then coming out to torment the Jews, he has no wish to be a Christian. The fault is not his if the Catholics of Worcester are Catholic without being Roman, if they know nothing about Horatius and his comrades holding the bridge over the Tiber (‘Tiber, Father Tiber, to whom we Romans pray’), about Leonidas and his Spartans holding the pass at Thermopylae, about Roland holding the pass against the Saracens. He can think of nothing more heroic than holding a pass, nothing nobler than giving up one’s life to save other people, who will afterwards weep over one’s corpse. That is what he would like to be: a hero. That is what proper Roman Catholicism should be about.

  It is a summer evening, cool after the long, hot day. He is in the public gardens, where he has been playing cricket with Greenberg and Goldstein: Greenberg, who is solid in class but not good at cricket; Goldstein, who has large brown eyes and wears sandals and is quite dashing. It is late, well past seven-thirty. Save for the three of them, the gardens are deserted. They have had to give up their cricket: it is too dark to see the ball. So they have wrestling fights as if they were children again, rolling about on the grass, tickling each other, laughing and giggling. He stands up, takes a deep breath. A surge of exultation passes through him. He thinks: ‘I have never been happier in my life. I would like to be with Greenberg and Goldstein forever.’

  They part. It is true. He would like to live like this forever, riding his bicycle through the wide and empty streets of Worcester in the dusk of a summer’s day, when all the other children have been called in and he alone is abroad, like a king.

  Five

  Being a Catholic is a part of his life reserved for school. Preferring the Russians to the Americans is a secret so dark that he can reveal it to no one. Liking the Russians is a serious matter. It can have you ostracized. It can have you sent to jail.

  In a box in his cupboard he keeps the book of drawings he did at the height of his passion for the Russians in 1947. The drawings, in heavy lead pencil coloured in with wax crayons, show Russian planes shooting American planes out of the sky, Russian ships sinking American ships. Though the fervour of that year, when a wave of enmity against the Russians suddenly burst out on the radio and everyone had to take sides, has subsided, he retains his secret loyalty: loyalty to the Russians, but even more loyalty to himself as he was when he did the drawings.

  There is no one here in Worcester who knows he likes the Russians. In Cape Town there used to be his friend Nicky, with whom he played war games with lead soldiers and a spring-loaded cannon that fired matchsticks; but when he found how dangerous his allegiances were, what he stood to lose, he first swore Nicky to secrecy, then, to make doubly sure, told him he had changed sides and now liked the Americans.

  In Worcester no one but he likes the Russians. His loyalty to the Red Star sets him absolutely apart.

  Where did he pick up this infatuation, that strikes even him as odd? His mother’s name is Vera: Vera, with its icy capital V, an arrow plunging downwards. Vera, she once told him, was a Russian name. When the Russians and the Americans were first set before him as antagonists between whom he had to choose (‘Who do you like, Smuts or Malan? Who do you like, Superman or Captain Marvel? Who do you like, the Russians or the Americans?’), he chose the Russians as he chose the Romans: because he likes the letter, r, particularly the capital R, the strongest of all the letters.

  He chose the Russians in 1947 when everyone else was choosing the Americans; having chosen them, he threw himself into reading about them. His father owned a three-volume history of World War Two. He loved these books and pored over them, pored over photographs of Russian soldiers in white ski uniforms, Russian soldiers with tommy guns dodging among the ruins of Stalingrad, Russian tank commanders staring ahead through their binoculars. (The Russian T-34 was the best tank in the world, better than the American Sherman, better even than the German Tiger.) Again and again he came back to a painting of a Russian pilot banking his dive-bomber over a burning and devastated German tank column. He adopted everything Russian. He adopted stern but fatherly Field Marshal Stalin, the greatest and most far-sighted strategist of the war; he adopted the borzoi, the Russian wolfhound, swiftest of all dogs. He knew everything there was to know about Russia: its land area in square miles, its coal and steel output in tons, the length of each of its great rivers, the Volga, the Dnieper, the Yenisei, the Ob.

  Then came the realization, from the disapproval of his parents, from the puzzlement of his friends, from what they reported when they told their own parents about him: liking the Russians was not part of a game, it was not allowed.

  Always, it seems, there is something that goes wrong. Whatever he wants, whatever he likes, has sooner or later to be turned into a secret. He begins to think of himself as one of those spiders that live in a hole in the ground sealed with a trapdoor. Always the spider has to be scuttling back into its hole, closing the trapdoor behind it, shutting out the world, hiding.

  In Worcester he keeps his Russian past a secret, hides the reprehensible book of drawings, with their smoke-trails of enemy fighters crashing into the ocean and battleships sliding bow-first under the waves. For drawing he substitutes games of imaginary cricket. He uses a wooden beach bat and a tennis ball. The challenge is to keep the ball in the air as long as possible. For hours on end he circles the dining-room table patting the ball in the air. All the vases and ornaments have been cleared away; every time the ball strikes the ceiling a shower of fine red dust descends.

  He plays entire games, eleven batsmen a side each batting twice. Each hit counts as a run. When his attention flags and he misses the ball a batsman is out, and he enters his score on the scorecard. Huge totals mount up: five hundred runs, six hundred runs. Once England scores a thousand runs, which no real team has ever done before. Sometimes England wins, sometimes South Africa; more rarely Australia or New Zealand.

  Russia and America do not play cricket. The Americans play baseball; the Russians do not appear to play anything, perhaps because it is always snowing there.

  He does not know what the Russians do when they are not making war.

  Of his private cricket games he says nothing to his friends, keeping them for home. Once, during their early months in Worcester, a boy from his class had wandered in through the open front door and found him lying on his back under a chair. ‘What are you doing there?’ he had asked. ‘Thinking,’ he had replied unthinkingly: ‘I like thinking.’ Soon everyone in his class knew about it: the new boy was odd, he wasn’t normal. From that mistake he has learned to be more prudent. Part of being prudent is always to tell less rather than more.

  He also plays proper cricket with whoever is prepared to play. But proper cricket on the empty square in the middle of Reunion Park is too slow to be borne: t
he ball is forever being missed by the batsman, missed by the wicketkeeper, getting lost. He hates searching for lost balls. He hates fielding too, on stony ground where you bloody your hands and knees every time you fall. He wants to bat or bowl, that is all.

  He courts his brother, though his brother is only six years old, promising to let him play with his toys if he will bowl to him in the backyard. His brother bowls for a while, then grows bored and sullen and scuttles indoors for protection. He tries to teach his mother to bowl, but she cannot master the action. While he grows exasperated, she quivers with laughter at her own clumsiness. So he allows her to throw the ball instead. But in the end the spectacle is too shameful, too easily seen from the street: a mother playing cricket with her son.

  He cuts a jam-tin in half and nails the bottom half to a two-foot wooden arm. He mounts the arm on an axle through the walls of a packing case weighed down with bricks. The arm is drawn forward by a strip of innertube rubber, drawn back by a rope that runs through a hook on the packing case. He puts a ball in the tin cup, retreats ten yards, pulls on the rope till the rubber is taut, anchors the rope under his heel, takes up his batting position, and releases the rope. Sometimes the ball shoots up into the sky, sometimes straight at his head; but every now and again it flies within reach and he is able to hit it. With this he is satisfied: he has bowled and batted all by himself, he has triumphed, nothing is impossible.

  One day, in a mood of reckless intimacy, he asks Greenberg and Goldstein to bring out their earliest memories. Greenberg demurs: it is a game he is not willing to play. Goldstein tells a long and pointless story about being taken to the beach, a story he barely listens to. For the point of the game is, of course, to allow him to recount his own first memory.