Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  His father and his mother disagree about the Germans. His father likes the Italians (their heart was not in the fight, he says: all they wanted to do was surrender and go back home) but hates the Germans. He tells the story of a German shot while he was squatting on a privy. Sometimes, in the story, it was he who shot the German, sometimes one of his friends; but in none of the versions does he show any pity, only amusement at the German’s confusion as he tried to raise his hands and pull up his pants at the same time.

  His mother knows it is not a good idea to praise the Germans too openly; but sometimes, when he and his father gang up on her, she will leave discretion behind. ‘The Germans are the best people in the world,’ she will say. ‘It was that terrible Hitler who led them into so much suffering.’

  Her brother Norman disagrees. ‘Hitler gave the Germans pride in themselves,’ he says.

  His mother and Norman travelled through Europe together in the 1930s: not only through Norway and the highlands of Scotland but through Germany, Hitler’s Germany. Their family – the Brechers, the du Biels – is from Germany, or at least from Pomerania, which is now in Poland. Is it good to be from Pomerania? He is not sure.

  ‘The Germans didn’t want to fight against the South Africans,’ says Norman. ‘They like the South Africans. If it hadn’t been for Smuts we would never have gone to war against Germany. Smuts was a skelm, a crook. He sold us to the British.’

  His father and Norman do not like each other. When his father wants to get at his mother, in their late-night quarrels in the kitchen, he taunts her about her brother who did not join up, but marched with the Ossewabrandwag instead. ‘That’s a lie!’ she maintains angrily. ‘Norman was not in the Ossewabrandwag. Ask him yourself, he will tell you.’

  When he asks his mother what the Ossewabrandwag is, she says it is just nonsense, people who marched in the streets with torches.

  The fingers of Norman’s right hand are yellow with nicotine. He has a room in a boarding house in Pretoria where he has lived for years. He makes his money by selling a pamphlet he has written about ju-jitsu, which he advertises in the classified pages of the Pretoria News. ‘Learn the Japanese art of self-defence,’ says the advertisement. ‘Six easy lessons.’ People send him ten-shilling postal orders and he sends them the pamphlet: a single page folded in four, with sketches of the various holds. When ju-jitsu does not bring in enough money, he sells plots on commission for an estate agency. He stays in bed till noon every day, drinking tea and smoking and reading stories in Argosy and Lilliput. In the afternoons he plays tennis. In 1938, twelve years ago, he was the Western Province singles champion. He still has ambitions of playing at Wimbledon, in the doubles, if he can find a partner.

  At the end of his visit, before he goes back to Pretoria, Norman takes him aside and slips a brown ten-shilling note into his shirt pocket. ‘For ice cream,’ he murmurs: the same words every year. He likes Norman not only for the present – ten shillings is a lot of money – but for remembering, for never failing to remember.

  His father prefers the other brother, Lance, the schoolteacher from Kingwilliamstown who did join up. There is also the third brother, the eldest, the one who lost the farm, but no one mentions him except his mother. ‘Poor Roland,’ murmurs his mother, shaking her head. Roland married a woman who calls herself Rosa Rakocka, daughter of an exiled Polish count, but whose real name, according to Norman, is Sophie Pretorius. Norman and Lance hate Roland because of the farm and despise him because he is under the thumb of Sophie. Roland and Sophie run a boarding house in Cape Town. He went there once, with his mother. Sophie turned out to be a large blonde woman who wore a silk dressing gown at four in the afternoon and smoked cigarettes in a cigarette-holder. Roland was a quiet, sad-faced man with a bulbous red nose from the radium treatment that had cured him of cancer.

  He likes it when his father and his mother and Norman get into political arguments. He enjoys the heat and passion, the reckless things they say. He is surprised that his father, the one he least wants to win, is the one he agrees with: that the English were good and the Germans bad, that Smuts was good and the Nats are bad.

  His father likes the United Party, his father likes cricket and rugby, yet he does not like his father. He does not understand this contradiction, but has no interest in understanding it. Even before he knew his father, that is to say, before his father returned from the war, he had decided he was not going to like him. In a sense, therefore, the dislike is an abstract one: he does not want to have a father, or at least does not want a father who stays in the same house.

  What he hates most about his father are his personal habits. He hates them so much that the mere thought of them makes him shudder with distaste: the loud nose-blowing in the bathroom in the mornings, the steamy smell of Lifebuoy soap that he leaves behind, along with a ring of scum and shaving-hairs in the washbasin. Most of all he hates the way his father smells. On the other hand, he likes, despite himself, his father’s natty clothes, the maroon cravat he wears instead of a tie on Saturday mornings, his trim figure, his brisk way of walking, his Brylcreemed hair. He Brylcreems his own hair, cultivates a quiff.

  He dislikes visiting the barber, dislikes it so much that he even tries, with embarrassing results, to cut his own hair. The barbers of Worcester seem to have decided in concert that boys should have short hair. Sessions begin as brutally as possible with the electric trimmer scything his hair away on the back and sides, and continue with a remorseless snick-snack of scissors till there is only a brush-like stubble left, with perhaps a saving cowlick at the front. Even before the session ends he is squirming with shame; he pays his shilling and hurries home, dreading school the next day, dreading the ritual jeers that greet every boy with a fresh haircut. There are proper haircuts and then there are the haircuts one suffers in Worcester, charged with the barbers’ vindictiveness; he does not know where one has to go, what one has to do or say, how much one has to pay, to get a proper haircut.

  Six

  Though he goes to the bioscope every Saturday afternoon, films no longer have the hold on him that they used to have in Cape Town, where he had nightmares of being crushed under elevators or falling from cliffs like the heroes of the serials. He does not see why Errol Flynn, who looks just the same whether he is playing Robin Hood or Ali Baba, is supposed to be a great actor. He is tired of horseback chases, which are all the same. The Three Stooges have begun to seem silly. And it is hard to believe in Tarzan when the man who plays Tarzan keeps changing. The only film that makes an impression on him is one in which Ingrid Bergman gets into a train carriage that is infected with smallpox and dies. Ingrid Bergman is his mother’s favourite actress. Is life like that: could his mother die at any moment just by failing to read a sign in a window?

  There is also the radio. He has outgrown Children’s Corner, but is faithful to the serials: Superman at 5.00 daily (‘Up! Up and away!’), Mandrake the Magician at 5.30. His favourite story is The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico, which the A Service broadcasts again and again, by popular request. It is the story of a wild goose that leads the boats back from the beaches of Dunkirk to Dover. He listens with tears in his eyes. He wants one day to be faithful as the snow goose is faithful.

  They perform Treasure Island on the radio in a dramatized version, one half-hour episode a week. He has his own copy of Treasure Island; but he read it when he was too young, not understanding the business of the blind man and the black spot, unable to work out whether Long John Silver was good or bad. Now, after every episode on the radio, he has nightmares centring on Long John: about the crutch with which he kills people, about his treacherous, sentimental solicitude for Jim Hawkins. He wishes Squire Trelawney would kill Long John instead of letting him go: he is sure he will return one day with his cutthroat mutineers to take his revenge, just as he returns in his dreams.

  The Swiss Family Robinson is much more comforting. He has a handsome copy of the book with colour plates. He particularly likes the picture of the ship i
n its cradle under the trees, the ship that the family has built with tools salvaged from the wreck, to take them back home with all their animals, like Noah’s Ark. It is a pleasure, like slipping into a warm bath, to leave Treasure Island behind and enter the world of the Swiss Family. In the Swiss Family there are no bad brothers, no murderous pirates; in their family everyone works happily together under the guidance of a wise, strong father (the pictures show him with a barrel chest and a long chestnut beard) who knows from the beginning what needs to be done to save them. The only thing that puzzles him is why, when they are so snug and happy on the island, they have to leave at all.

  He owns a third book too, Scott of the Antarctic. Captain Scott is one of his unquestioned heroes: that is why the book was given to him. It has photographs, including one of Scott sitting and writing in the tent in which he later froze to death. He often looks at the photographs, but he does not get far with reading the book: it is boring, it is not a story. He only likes the bit about Titus Oates, the man with frostbite who, because he was holding up his companions, went out into the night, into the snow and ice, and perished quietly, without fuss. He hopes he can be like Titus Oates one day.

  Once a year Boswell’s Circus comes to Worcester. Everyone in his class goes; for a week beforehand talk is about the circus and nothing else. Even the Coloured children go, after a fashion: they hang around outside the tent for hours, listening to the band, peering in through gaps in the canvas.

  They plan to go on the Saturday afternoon, when his father is playing cricket. His mother makes it into an outing for the three of them. But at the ticket booth she hears with a shock the high Saturday afternoon prices: 2/6 for children, 5/- for adults. She does not have enough money with her. She buys tickets for him and his brother. ‘Go in, I’ll wait here,’ she says. He is unwilling, but she insists.

  Inside, he is miserable, enjoys nothing; he suspects his brother feels the same way. When they emerge at the end of the show, she is still there. For days afterwards he cannot banish the thought: his mother waiting patiently in the blazing heat of December while he sits in the circus tent being entertained like a king. Her blinding, overwhelming, self-sacrificial love, for both him and his brother but for him in particular, disturbs him. He wishes she did not love him so much. She loves him absolutely, therefore he must love her absolutely: that is the logic she compels upon him. Never will he be able to pay back all the love she pours out upon him. The thought of a lifetime bowed under a debt of love baffles and infuriates him to the point where he will not kiss her, refuses to be touched by her. When she turns away in silent hurt, he deliberately hardens his heart against her, refusing to give in.

  Sometimes, when she is feeling bitter, she makes long speeches to herself, contrasting her life on the barren housing estate with the life she lived before she was married, which she represents as a continual round of parties and picnics, of weekend visits to farms, of tennis and golf and walks with her dogs. She speaks in a low whispering voice in which only the sibilants stand out: he in his room, and his brother in his, strain their ears to hear, as she must know they will. That is another reason why his father calls her a witch: because she talks to herself, making up spells.

  The idyll of life in Victoria West is substantiated by photographs from the albums: his mother, together with other women in long white dresses, standing with tennis racquets in what looks like the middle of the veld, his mother with her arm over the neck of a dog, an Alsatian.

  ‘Was that your dog?’ he asks.

  ‘That is Kim. He was the best, the most faithful dog I ever had.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He ate poisoned meat that the farmers had put down for jackals. He died in my arms.’

  There are tears in her eyes.

  After his father makes his appearance in the album, there are no more dogs. Instead he sees the couple at picnics with their friends from those days, or his father, with his dapper little moustache and his cocky look, posing against the bonnet of an old-fashioned black car. Then the pictures of himself begin, dozens of them, starting with the picture of a blank-faced, pudgy baby being held up to the camera by a dark, intense-looking woman.

  In all these photographs, even the photographs with the baby, his mother strikes him as girlish. Her age is a mystery that intrigues him endlessly. She will not tell him, his father pretends not to know, even her brothers and sisters seem sworn to secrecy. While she is out of the house he searches through the papers in the bottom drawer of her dressing table, looking for a birth certificate, but without success. From a remark she has let slip he knows she is older than his father, who was born in 1912; but how much older? He decides she was born in 1910. That means she was thirty when he was born and is forty now. ‘You’re forty!’ he tells her triumphantly one day, watching closely for signs that he is right. She gives a mysterious smile. ‘I’m twenty-eight,’ she says.

  They have the same birthday. He was born to her on her birthday. This means, as she has told him, as she tells everyone, that he is a gift of God.

  He calls her not Mother or Mom but Dinny. So do his father and his brother. Where does the name come from? No one seems to know; but her brothers and sisters call her Vera, so it cannot come from their childhood. He has to be careful not to call her Dinny in front of strangers, as he has to guard against calling his aunt and uncle plain Norman and Ellen instead of Uncle Norman and Aunt Ellen. But saying Uncle and Aunt like a good, obedient, normal child is as nothing beside the circumlocutions of Afrikaans. Afrikaners are afraid to say you to anyone older than themselves. He mocks his father’s speech: ‘Mammie moet ’n kombers oor Mammie se knieë trek anders word Mammie koud’ – Mommy must put a blanket over Mommy’s knees, otherwise Mommy will get cold. He is relieved he is not Afrikaans and is saved from having to talk like that, like a whipped slave.

  His mother decides that she wants a dog. Alsatians are the best – the most intelligent, the most faithful – but they cannot find an Alsatian for sale. So they settle for a pup half Doberman, half something else. He insists on being the one to name it. He would like to call it Borzoi because he wants it to be a Russian dog, but since it is not in fact a borzoi he calls it Cossack. No one understands. People think the name is kos-sak, food-bag, which they find funny.

  Cossack turns out to be a confused, undisciplined dog, roaming about the neighbourhood, trampling gardens, chasing chickens. One day the dog follows him all the way to school. Nothing he does will put him off: when he shouts and throws stones the dog drops his ears, puts his tail between his legs, slinks away; but as soon as he gets back on his bicycle the dog lopes after him again. In the end he has to drag him home by the collar, pushing his bicycle with the other hand. He gets home in a rage and refuses to go back to school, since he is late.

  Cossack is not quite full grown when he eats the ground glass someone has put out for him. His mother administers enemas, trying to flush out the glass, but without success. On the third day, when the dog just lies still, panting, and will not even lick her hand, she sends him to the pharmacy to fetch a new medicine someone has recommended. He races there and races back, but he comes too late. His mother’s face is drawn and remote, she will not even take the bottle from his hands.

  He helps to bury Cossack, wrapped in a blanket, in the clay at the bottom of the garden. Over the grave he erects a cross with the name ‘Cossack’ painted on it. He does not want them to have another dog, not if this is how they must die.

  His father plays cricket for Worcester. It ought to be yet another feather in his cap, another source of pride for him. His father is an attorney, which is almost as good as a doctor; he was a soldier in the war; he used to play rugby in the Cape Town league; he plays cricket. But in each case there is an embarrassing qualification. He is an attorney but no longer practises. He was a soldier but only a lance corporal. He played rugby, but only for Gardens second or perhaps even third team, and Gardens are a joke, they always come bottom of the Grand Challenge
league. And now he plays cricket, but for the Worcester second team, which no one bothers to watch.

  His father is a bowler, not a batsman. There is something wrong with his backlift that bedevils his batting; furthermore, he averts his eyes when he plays fast bowling. His idea of batting seems to be confined to pushing the bat forward and, if the ball slides off it, trotting a sedate single.

  The reason why his father can’t bat is of course that he grew up in the Karoo, where there was no proper cricket and no way of learning. Bowling is a different matter. It is a gift: bowlers are born, not made.

  His father bowls slow off-spinners. Sometimes he is hit for six; sometimes, seeing the ball slowly floating towards him, the batsman loses his head, swings wildly, and is bowled. That seems to be his father’s method: patience, cunning.

  The coach for the Worcester teams is Johnny Wardle, who in the northern summer plays cricket for England. It is a great coup for Worcester that Johnny Wardle has chosen to come here. Wolf Heller is mentioned as an intercessor, Wolf Heller and his money.

  He stands with his father behind the practice net watching Johnny Wardle bowl to the first-team batsmen. Wardle, a nondescript little man with sparse sandy hair, is supposed to be a slow bowler, but when he trots up and releases the ball he is surprised at how fast it travels. The batsman at the crease plays the ball easily enough, stroking it gently into the netting. Someone else bowls, then it is Wardle’s turn again. Again the batsman strokes the ball gently away. The batsman is not winning, but neither is the bowler.

  At the end of the afternoon he goes home disappointed. He had expected more of a gulf between the England bowler and the Worcester batsmen. He had expected to be witness to a more mysterious craft, to see the ball doing strange things in the air and off the pitch, floating and dipping and spinning, as great slow bowling is supposed to do according to the cricket books he reads. He was not expecting a talkative little man whose only mark of distinction is that he bowls spinners as fast as he himself can bowl at his fastest.