Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  Their hosts rushed them to the hospital, where a doctor amputated the middle finger of his brother’s left hand. For a while his brother walked around with his hand bandaged and his arm in a sling; then he wore a little black leather pouch over the finger-stump. He was six years old. Though no one pretended his finger would grow back, he did not complain.

  He has never apologized to his brother, nor has he ever been reproached with what he did. Nevertheless, the memory lies like a weight upon him, the memory of the soft resistance of flesh and bone, and then the grinding.

  ‘At least you can be proud to have someone in your family who did something with his life, who left something behind him,’ says his mother.

  ‘You said he was a horrible old man. You said he was cruel.’

  ‘Yes, but he did something with his life.’

  In the photograph in Aunt Annie’s bedroom Balthazar du Biel has grim, staring eyes and a tight, harsh mouth. Beside him his wife looks tired and cross. Balthazar du Biel met her, the daughter of another missionary, when he came to South Africa to convert the heathen. Later, when he went to America to preach the gospel there, he took her and their three children along. On a paddle steamer on the Mississippi someone gave his daughter Annie an apple, which she brought to show him. He administered a thrashing to her for having spoken to a stranger. These are the few facts he knows about Balthazar, plus what is contained in the clumsy red book of which there are many more copies in the world than the world wants.

  Balthazar’s three children are Annie, Louisa – his mother’s mother – and Albert, who figures in the photographs in Aunt Annie’s bedroom as a frightened-looking boy in a sailor suit. Now Albert is Uncle Albert, a bent old man with pulpy white flesh like a mushroom who trembles all the time and has to be supported as he walks. Uncle Albert has never earned a proper salary in his life. He has spent his days writing books and stories; his wife has been the one to go out and work.

  He asks his mother about Uncle Albert’s books. She read one long ago, she says, but cannot remember it. ‘They are very old-fashioned. People don’t read books like that any more.’

  He finds two books by Uncle Albert in the storeroom, printed on the same thick paper as Ewige Genesing but bound in brown, the same brown as benches on railways stations. One is called Kain, the other Die Misdade van die vaders, The Crimes of the Fathers. ‘Can I take them?’ he asks his mother. ‘I’m sure you can,’ she says. ‘No one is going to miss them.’

  He tries to read Die Misdade van die vaders, but does not get beyond page ten, it is too boring.

  ‘You must love your mother and be a support for her.’ He broods on Aunt Annie’s instructions. Love: a word he mouths with distaste. Even his mother has learned not to say I love you to him, though now and then she slips in a soft My love when she says goodnight.

  He sees no sense in love. When men and women kiss in films, and violins play low and lush in the background, he squirms in his seat. He vows he will never be like that: soft, soppy.

  He does not allow himself to be kissed, except by his father’s sisters, making an exception for them because that is their custom and they can understand nothing else. Kissing is part of the price he pays for going to the farm: a quick brush of his lips against theirs, which are fortunately always dry. His mother’s family does not kiss. Nor has he seen his mother and father kiss properly. Sometimes, when there are other people present and for some reason they have to pretend, his father kisses his mother on the cheek. She presents her cheek to him reluctantly, angrily, as if she were being forced; his kiss is light, quick, nervous.

  He has seen his father’s penis only once. That was in 1945, when his father had just come back from the War and all the family was gathered on Voëlfontein. His father and two of his brothers went hunting, taking him along. It was a hot day; arriving at a dam, they decided to swim. When he saw that they were going to swim naked, he tried to withdraw, but they would not let him. They were gay and full of jokes; they wanted him to take off his clothes and swim too, but he would not. So he saw all three penises, his father’s most vividly of all, pale and white. He remembers clearly how he resented having to look at it.

  His parents sleep in separate beds. They have never had a double bed. The only double bed he has seen is on the farm, in the main bedroom, where his grandfather and grandmother used to sleep. He thinks of double beds as old-fashioned, belonging to the days when wives produced a baby a year, like ewes or sows. He is thankful his parents finished with that business before he understood it properly.

  He is prepared to believe that, long ago, in Victoria West, before he was born, his parents were in love, since love seems to be a precondition for marriage. There are photographs in the album that seem to prove it: the two of them sitting close together at a picnic, for instance. But all of that must have stopped years ago, and to his mind they are all the better for it.

  As for him, what does the fierce and angry emotion he feels for his mother have to do with the deliquescent swooning on the screen in the bioscope? His mother loves him, that he cannot deny; but that is precisely the problem, that is what is wrong, not what is right, in her attitude towards him. Her love emerges above all in her watchfulness, her readiness to pounce and save him should he ever be in danger. Should he choose (but he would never do so), he could relax into her care and for the rest of his life be borne by her. It is because he is so sure of her care that he is on his guard with her, never relaxing, never allowing her a chance.

  He yearns to be rid of his mother’s watchful attention. There may come a time when to achieve this he will have to assert himself, refuse her so brutally that with a shock she will have to step back and release him. Yet he has merely to think of that moment, imagine her surprised look, feel her hurt, and he is overtaken with a rush of guilt. Then he will do anything to soften the blow: console her, promise he is not going away.

  Feeling her hurt, feeling it as intimately as if he were part of her, she part of him, he knows he is in a trap and cannot get out. Whose fault is it? He blames her, he is cross with her, but he is ashamed of his ingratitude too. Love: this is what love really is, this cage in which he rushes back and forth, back and forth, like a poor bewildered baboon. What can ignorant, innocent Aunt Annie know about love? He knows a thousand times more about the world than she does, slaving her life away over her father’s crazy manuscript. His heart is old, it is dark and hard, a heart of stone. That is his contemptible secret.

  Fifteen

  His mother spent a year at university before she had to make way for brothers younger than her. His father is a qualified attorney; he works for Standard Canners only because to open a practice (so his mother tells him) would take more money than they have. Though he blames his parents because they have not brought him up as a normal child, he is proud of their education.

  Because they speak English at home, because he always comes first in English at school, he thinks of himself as English. Though his surname is Afrikaans, though his father is more Afrikaans than English, though he himself speaks Afrikaans without an English accent, he could not pass for a moment as an Afrikaner. The range of Afrikaans he commands is thin and bodiless; there is a whole dense world of slang and allusion commanded by real Afrikaans boys – of which obscenity is only a part – to which he has no access.

  There is a manner that Afrikaners have in common too – a surliness, an intransigence, and, not far behind it, a threat of physical force (he thinks of them as rhinoceroses, huge, lumbering, strong-sinewed, thudding against each other as they pass) – that he does not share and in fact shrinks from. The Afrikaners of Worcester wield their language like a club against their enemies. On the streets it is best to avoid groups of them; even singly they have a truculent, menacing air. Sometimes when the classes line up in the quadrangle in the mornings he scans the ranks of Afrikaans boys looking for someone who is different, who has a touch of softness; but there is no one. It is unthinkable that he should ever be cast among them: they wou
ld crush him, kill the spirit in him.

  Yet he finds himself unwilling to yield up the Afrikaans language to them. He remembers his very first visit to Voëlfontein, when he was four or five and could not speak Afrikaans at all. His brother was still a baby, kept indoors out of the sun; there was no one to play with but the Coloured children. With them he made boats out of seed-pods and floated them down the irrigation furrows. But he was like a mute creature: everything had to be mimed; at times he felt he was going to burst with the things he could not say. Then suddenly one day he opened his mouth and found he could speak, speak easily and fluently and without stopping to think. He still remembers how he burst in on his mother, shouting ‘Listen! I can speak Afrikaans!’

  When he speaks Afrikaans all the complications of life seem suddenly to fall away. Afrikaans is like a ghostly envelope that accompanies him everywhere, that he is free to slip into, becoming at once another person, simpler, gayer, lighter in his tread.

  One thing about the English that disappoints him, that he will not imitate, is their contempt for Afrikaans. When they lift their eyebrows and superciliously mispronounce Afrikaans words, as if veld spoken with a v were the sign of a gentleman, he draws back from them: they are wrong, and, worse than wrong, comical. For his part, he makes no concessions, even among the English: he brings out the Afrikaans words as they ought to be brought out, with all their hard consonants and difficult vowels.

  In his class there are several boys besides himself with Afrikaans surnames. In the Afrikaans classes, on the other hand, there are no boys with English surnames. In the senior school he knows of one Afrikaans Smith who might as well be a Smit; that is all. It is a pity, but understandable: what Englishman would want to marry an Afrikaans woman and have an Afrikaans family when Afrikaans women are either huge and fat, with puffed-out breasts and bullfrog necks, or bony and misshapen?

  He thanks God that his mother speaks English. Of his father he remains mistrustful, despite Shakespeare and Wordsworth and the crossword puzzles. He does not see why his father goes on making an effort to be English here in Worcester, where it would be so easy for him to slide back into being Afrikaans. The childhood in Prince Albert that he hears his father joking about with his brothers strikes him as no different from an Afrikaans life in Worcester. It centres just as much on being beaten and on nakedness, on body functions performed in front of other boys, on an animal indifference to privacy.

  The thought of being turned into an Afrikaans boy, with shaven head and no shoes, makes him quail. It is like being sent to prison, to a life without privacy. He cannot live without privacy. If he were Afrikaans he would have to live every minute of every day and night in the company of others. It is a prospect he cannot bear.

  He remembers the three days of the Scout camp, remembers his misery, his craving, continually thwarted, to sneak back to the tent and read a book by himself.

  One Saturday his father sends him to buy cigarettes. He has a choice between cycling all the way to the town centre, where there are proper shops with display windows and cash registers, and going to the little Afrikaans shop near the railway crossing, which is just a room at the back of a house with a counter painted dark brown and almost nothing on the shelves. He chooses the nearer.

  It is a hot afternoon. In the shop there are strips of biltong hanging from the ceiling, and flies everywhere. He is about to tell the boy behind the counter – an Afrikaans boy older than himself – that he wants twenty Springbok plain when a fly flies into his mouth. He spits it out in disgust. The fly lies on the counter before him, struggling in a pool of saliva.

  ‘Sies!’ says one of the other customers.

  He wants to protest: ‘What must I do? Must I not spit? Must I swallow the fly? I am just a child!’ But explanations count for nothing among these merciless people. He wipes the spit off the counter with his hand and amid disapproving silence pays for the cigarettes.

  Reminiscing about the old days on the farm, his father and his father’s brothers come once again to the subject of their own father. ‘’n Ware ou jintlman!’ they say, a real old gentleman, repeating their formula for him, and laugh: ‘Dis wat hy op sy grafsteen sou gewens het: A farmer and a gentleman’ – That’s what he would have liked on his gravestone. They laugh most of all because their father continued to wear riding boots when everyone else on the farm wore velskoen.

  His mother, listening to them, sniffs scornfully. ‘Don’t forget how frightened you were of him,’ she says. ‘You were afraid to light a cigarette in front of him, even when you were grown men.’

  They are abashed, they have no reply: she has clearly touched a nerve.

  His grandfather, the one with the gentlemanly pretensions, once owned not only the farm and a half-share in the hotel and general dealer’s store at Fraserburg Road, but a house in Merweville with a flagpole in front of it on which he hoisted the Union Jack on the King’s birthday.

  ‘’n Ware ou jintlman en ’n ware ou jingo!’ add the brothers: a real old jingo! Again they laugh.

  His mother is right about them. They sound like children saying naughty words behind a parent’s back. Anyway, by what right do they make fun of their father? But for him they would not speak English at all: they would be like their neighbours the Botes and the Nigrinis, stupid and heavy, with no conversation except about sheep and the weather. At least when the family gets together there is a babble of jokes and laughter in a mishmash of tongues; whereas when the Nigrinis or the Botes come visiting the air at once turns sombre and heavy and dull. ‘Ja-nee,’ say the Botes, sighing. ‘Ja-nee,’ say the Coetzees, and pray that their guests will hurry up and leave.

  What of himself? If the grandfather he reveres was a jingo, must he be a jingo too? Can a child be a jingo? He stands to attention when ‘God Save the King’ is played in the bioscope and the Union Jack waves on the screen. Bagpipe music sends a shiver down his spine, as do words like stalwart, valorous. Should he keep it a secret, this attachment of his to England?

  He cannot understand why it is that so many people around him dislike England. England is Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. England is doing one’s duty and accepting one’s fate in a quiet, unfussy way. England is the boy at the battle of Jutland, who stood by his guns while the deck was burning under his feet. England is Sir Lancelot of the Lake and Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood with his longbow of yew and his suit of Lincoln green. What do the Afrikaners have to compare? Dirkie Uys, who rode his horse till it died. Piet Retief, who was made a fool of by Dingaan. And then the Voortrekkers getting their revenge by shooting thousands of Zulus who didn’t have guns, and being proud of it.

  There is a Church of England church in Worcester, and a clergyman with grey hair and a pipe who doubles as Scoutmaster and whom some of the English boys in his class – the proper English boys, with English names and homes in the old, leafy part of Worcester – refer to familiarly as Padre. When the English talk like that he falls silent. There is the English language, which he commands with ease. There is England and everything that England stands for, to which he believes he is loyal. But more than that is required, clearly, before one will be accepted as truly English: tests to face, some of which he knows he will not pass.

  Sixteen

  Something has been arranged on the telephone, he does not know what, but it makes him uneasy. He does not like the pleased, secretive smile his mother wears, the smile that means she has been meddling in his affairs.

  These are the last days before they leave Worcester. They are also the best days of the school year, with examinations over and nothing to do but help the teacher fill in his mark book.

  Mr Gouws reads out lists of marks; the boys add them up, subject by subject, then work out the percentages, racing to be the first with his hand up. The game lies in guessing which marks belong to whom. Usually he can recognize his own marks as a sequence rising to nineties and hundreds for arithmetic and tailing off with seventies for history and geography.

  He doe
s not do well at history or geography because he hates memorizing. So much does he hate it that he postpones learning for history and geography examinations until the very last minute, until the night before the examination or even the morning of the examination. He hates the very sight of the history textbook, with its stiff chocolate-brown cover and its long, boring lists of the causes of things (the causes of the Napoleonic Wars, the causes of the Great Trek). Its authors are Taljaard and Schoeman. He imagines Taljaard as thin and dry, Schoeman as plump and balding and bespectacled; Taljaard and Schoeman on either side of a table in a room in Paarl, writing bad-tempered pages and passing them across to each other. He cannot imagine why they should have wanted to write their book in English except to mortify the Engelse children and teach them a lesson.

  Geography is no better: lists of towns, lists of rivers, lists of products. When he is asked to name the products of a country he always ends his list with hides and skins and hopes he is right. He does not know the difference between a hide and a skin, but nor does anyone else.

  As for the rest of the examinations, he does not look forward to them, yet, when the time comes, plunges into them willingly. He is good at examinations; if there were no examinations for him to be good at there would be little special about him. Examinations create in him a heady, trembling state of excitement during which he writes down the answers quickly and confidently. He does not like the state in itself but it is reassuring to know it is there to be tapped.

  Sometimes, striking two rocks against each other and inhaling, he can reinvoke this state, this smell, this taste: gunpowder, iron, heat, a steady thudding in the veins.