Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  ‘Unto every one that hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away. What does Jesus mean? Does he mean that the only way to attain salvation is to give away all we have? No. If Jesus had meant us to walk around in rags, he would have said so. Jesus speaks in parables. He tells us that those of us who truly believe will be rewarded with heaven, while those who have no belief will suffer eternal punishment in hell.’

  He wonders whether Mr Whelan checks with the Brothers – particularly with Brother Odilo, who is the bursar and collects the school fees – before preaching these doctrines to the non-Catholics. Mr Whelan, the lay teacher, clearly believes that non-Catholics are heathens, damned; whereas the Brothers themselves seem to be quite tolerant.

  His resistance to Mr Whelan’s Scripture lessons runs deep. He is sure that Mr Whelan has no idea of what Jesus’ parables really mean. Though he himself is an atheist and has always been one, he feels he understands Jesus better than Mr Whelan does. He does not particularly like Jesus – Jesus flies into rages too easily – but he is prepared to put up with him. At least Jesus did not pretend to be God, and died before he could become a father. That is Jesus’ strength; that is how Jesus keeps his power.

  But there is one part in Luke’s gospel that he does not like to hear read. When they come to it, he grows rigid, blocks his ears. The women arrive at the sepulchre to anoint the body of Jesus. Jesus is not there. Instead, they find two angels. ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?’ say the angels: ‘He is not here but is risen.’ If he were to unblock his ears and let the words come through to him, he knows, he would have to stand on his seat, and shout and dance in triumph. He would have to make a fool of himself for ever.

  He does not feel that Mr Whelan wishes him ill. Nevertheless, the highest mark he ever gets in English examinations is 70. With 70 he cannot come first in English: more favoured boys beat him comfortably. Nor does he do well in history or geography, which bore him more than ever. It is only the high marks he scores in mathematics and Latin that bring him tenuously to the head of the list, ahead of Oliver Matter, the Swiss boy who was cleverest in the class until he arrived.

  Now that, in Oliver, he has come up against a worthy opponent, his old vow always to take home a first-place report becomes a matter of grim private honour. Though he says nothing about it to his mother, he is preparing for the day he cannot face, the day when he will have to tell her he has come second.

  Oliver Matter is a gentle, smiling, moon-faced boy who does not seem to mind coming second. Every day he and Oliver vie with each other in the quick-answer contest that Brother Gabriel runs, lining the boys up, going up and down the line asking questions that have to be answered within five seconds, sending whoever misses an answer to the bottom of the line. By the end of the round it is always either he or Oliver who is at the top.

  Then Oliver stops coming to school. After a month without explanation, Brother Gabriel makes an announcement. Oliver is in hospital, he has leukemia, everyone must pray for him. With bowed heads the boys pray. Since he does not believe in God, he does not pray, just moves his lips. He thinks: Everyone will think I want Oliver to die so that I can be first.

  Oliver never comes back to school. He dies in hospital. The Catholic boys attend a special mass for the repose of his soul.

  The threat has receded. He breathes more easily; but the old pleasure in coming first is spoiled.

  Seventeen

  Life in Cape Town is less varied than life in Worcester used to be. During weekends, in particular, there is nothing to do but read the Reader’s Digest or listen to the radio or knock a cricket ball around. He no longer rides his bicycle: there is nowhere interesting to go in Plumstead, which is just miles of houses in every direction, and anyhow he has outgrown the Smiths, which is beginning to look like a child’s bicycle.

  Riding a bicycle around the streets has in fact begun to seem silly. Other things that used once to absorb him have lost their charm too: building Meccano models, collecting stamps. He can no longer understand why he wasted his time on them. He spends hours in the bathroom, examining himself in the mirror, not liking what he sees. He stops smiling, practises a scowl.

  The only passion that has not abated is his passion for cricket. He knows no one who is as consumed by cricket as he is. He plays cricket at school, but that is never enough. The house in Plumstead has a slate-floored front stoep. Here he plays by himself, holding the bat in his left hand, throwing the ball against the wall with his right, striking it on the rebound, pretending he is on a cricket field. Hour after hour he drives the ball against the wall. The neighbours complain to his mother about the noise, but he pays no heed.

  He has pored over coaching books, knows the various shots by heart, can execute them with the correct footwork. But the truth is, he has begun to prefer the solitary game on the stoep to real cricket. The prospect of batting on a real pitch thrills him but fills him with fear too. He is particularly afraid of fast bowlers: afraid of being struck, afraid of the pain. On the occasions when he plays real cricket he has to concentrate all his energies on not flinching, not showing he is a coward.

  He hardly ever scores runs. If he is not bowled out at once he can sometimes bat for half an hour without scoring, irritating everyone, including his teammates. He seems to go into a trance of passivity in which it is enough, quite enough, to merely parry the ball. Looking back on these failures, he consoles himself with stories of test matches played on sticky wickets during which a solitary figure, usually a Yorkshireman, dogged, stoic, tight-lipped, bats through the innings, keeping his end up while all around him wickets are tumbling.

  Opening the batting against Pinelands Under-13 one Friday afternoon, he finds himself facing a tall, gangly boy who, urged on by his team, bowls as fast and furiously as he can. The ball flies all over the place, missing the wickets, missing him, evading the wicketkeeper: he barely needs to use his bat.

  During the third over a ball pitches on the clay outside the mat, rears up, and hits him on the temple. ‘This is really too much!’ he thinks to himself crossly: ‘He has gone too far!’ He is aware of the fielders looking at him oddly. He can still hear the impact of ball against bone: a dull crack, without echo. Then his mind goes blank and he falls.

  He is lying at the side of the field. His face and hair are wet. He looks around for his bat but cannot see it.

  ‘Lie and rest for a while,’ says Brother Augustine. His voice is quite cheery. ‘You took a knock.’

  ‘I want to bat,’ he mumbles, and sits up. It is the correct thing to say, he knows: it proves one isn’t a coward. But he can’t bat: he has lost his turn, someone else is already batting in his place.

  He would have expected them to make more of it. He would have expected an outcry against dangerous bowling. But the game is going on, and his team is doing quite well. ‘Are you OK? Is it sore?’ asks one of his teammates, then barely listens to his reply. He sits on the boundary watching the rest of the innings. Later he fields. He would like to have a headache; he would like to lose his vision, or faint, or do something else dramatic. But he feels fine. He touches his temple. There is a tender spot. He hopes it swells up and turns blue before tomorrow, to prove he was really hit.

  Like everyone at school, he has also to play rugby. Even a boy named Shepherd whose left arm is withered with polio has to play. They are given team positions quite arbitrarily. He is assigned to play prop for the Under-13Bs. They play on Saturday mornings. It is always raining on Saturdays: cold and wet and miserable, he trudges around the sodden turf from scrum to scrum, getting pushed around by bigger boys. Because he is a prop, no one passes the ball to him, for which he is grateful, since he is frightened of being tackled. Anyhow, the ball, which is coated in horse fat to protect the leather, is too slippery to hold on to.

  He would pretend to be sick on Saturdays were it not for the fact that the team would then have only fourteen men. Not turning up for a rugby match is much worse t
han not coming to school.

  The Under-13Bs lose all their matches. The Under-13As too lose most of the time. In fact, most of the St Joseph’s teams lose most of the time. He does not understand why the school plays rugby at all. The Brothers, who are Austrian or Irish, are certainly not interested in rugby. On the few occasions when they come to watch, they seem bemused and don’t understand what is going on.

  In her bottom drawer his mother keeps a book with a black cover called Ideal Marriage. It is about sex; he has known about its existence for years. One day he spirits it out of the drawer and takes it to school. It causes a flurry among his friends; he appears to be the only one whose parents have such a book.

  Though it is a disappointment to read – the drawings of the organs look like diagrams in science books, and even in the section on postures there is nothing exciting (inserting the male organ into the vagina sounds like an enema) – the other boys pore avidly over it, clamour to borrow it.

  During the chemistry class he leaves the book behind in his desk. When they return Brother Gabriel, who is usually quite cheery, wears a frosty, disapproving look. He is convinced Brother Gabriel has opened his desk and seen the book; his heart pounds as he waits for the announcement and the shame that will follow. The announcement does not come; but in every passing remark of Brother Gabriel’s he hears a veiled reference to the evil that he, a non-Catholic, has imported into the school. Everything is spoiled between Brother Gabriel and himself. Bitterly he regrets bringing the book; he takes it home, returns it to the drawer, never looks at it again.

  For a while he and his friends continue to gather in a corner of the sports field during the break to talk about sex. To these discussions he contributes bits and pieces he has picked up from the book. But these are evidently not interesting enough: soon the older boys begin to separate off for conversations of their own in which there are sudden drops of tone, whisperings, outbursts of guffawing. At the centre of these conversations is Billy Owens, who is fourteen and has a sister of sixteen and knows girls and owns a leather jacket which he wears to dances and has possibly even had sexual intercourse.

  He makes friends with Theo Stavropoulos. There are rumours that Theo is a moffie, a queer, but he is not prepared to believe them. He likes the look of Theo, likes his fine skin and his high colouring and his impeccable haircuts and the suave way he wears his clothes. Even the school blazer, with its silly vertical stripes, looks good on him.

  Theo’s father owns a factory. What exactly the factory makes no one quite knows, but it has something to do with fish. The family lives in a big house in the richest part of Rondebosch. They have so much money that the boys would undoubtedly go to Diocesan College were it not for the fact that they are Greek. Because they are Greek and have a foreign name they have to go to St Joseph’s, which, he now sees, is a kind of basket to catch boys who fit nowhere else.

  He glimpses Theo’s father only once: a tall, elegantly dressed man with dark glasses. He sees his mother more often. She is small and slim and dark; she smokes cigarettes and drives a blue Buick which is reputed to be the only car in Cape Town – perhaps in South Africa – with automatic gears. There is also an older sister so beautiful, so expensively educated, so marriageable, that she is not allowed to be exposed to the gaze of Theo’s friends.

  The Stavropoulos boys are brought to school in the mornings in the blue Buick, driven sometimes by their mother but more often by a chauffeur in black uniform and peaked cap. The Buick sweeps grandly into the school quadrangle, Theo and his brother descend, the Buick sweeps off. He cannot understand why Theo allows this. If he were in Theo’s place he would ask to be dropped off a block away. But Theo takes the jokes and jeers with equanimity.

  One day after school Theo invites him to his house. When they get there he finds they are expected to have lunch. So at three in the afternoon they sit down at the dining table with silver cutlery and clean napkins and are served steak and chips by a steward in a white uniform who stands behind Theo’s chair while they eat, waiting for orders.

  He does his best to conceal his astonishment. He knows there are people who are waited on by servants; he did not realize that children could have servants too.

  Then Theo’s parents and sister go overseas – the sister, rumour has it, to be married off to an English baronet – and Theo and his brother become boarders. He expects Theo to be crushed by the experience: by the envy and malice of the other boarders, by the poor food, by the indignities of a life without privacy. He also expects Theo to have to submit to the same kind of haircut as everyone else. Yet somehow Theo manages to keep his hair elegantly styled; somehow, despite his name, despite being clumsy at sport, despite being thought to be a moffie, he maintains his suave smile, never complains, never allows himself to be humiliated.

  Theo sits squashed against him in his desk beneath the picture of Jesus opening his chest to reveal a glowing ruby heart. They are supposed to be revising the history lesson; in fact they have a little grammar book in front of them from which Theo is teaching him Ancient Greek. Ancient Greek with Modern Greek pronunciation: he loves the eccentricity of it. Aftós, whispers Theo; evdhemonía. Evdhemonía, he whispers back.

  Brother Gabriel pricks up his ears. ‘What are you doing, Stavropoulos?’ he demands.

  ‘I’m teaching him Greek, Brother,’ says Theo in his bland, confident way.

  ‘Go and sit in your own desk.’

  Theo smiles and strolls back to his own desk.

  The Brothers do not like Theo. His arrogance annoys them; like the boys, they think he is spoiled, has too much money. The injustice of it angers him. He would like to do battle for Theo.

  Eighteen

  To tide them over until his father’s new law practice begins to bring in money, his mother returns to teaching. To do the housework she hires a maid, a scrawny woman with hardly any teeth in her mouth named Celia. Sometimes Celia brings along her younger sister for company. Coming home one afternoon, he finds the two of them sitting in the kitchen drinking tea. The younger sister, who is more attractive than Celia, gives him a smile. There is something in her smile that confuses him; he does not know where to look and retires to his room. He can hear them laughing and knows they are laughing at him.

  Something is changing. He seems to be embarrassed all the time. He does not know where to direct his eyes, what to do with his hands, how to hold his body, what expression to wear on his face. Everyone is staring at him, judging him, finding him wanting. He feels like a crab pulled out of its shell, pink and wounded and obscene.

  Once upon a time he used to be full of ideas, ideas for places to go to, things to talk about, things to do. He was always a step ahead of everyone: he was the leader, the others followed. Now the energy that he used to feel streaming out of him is gone. At the age of thirteen he is becoming surly, scowling, dark. He does not like this new, ugly self, he wants to be drawn out of it, but that is something he cannot do by himself.

  They visit his father’s new office to see what it is like. The office is in Goodwood, which belongs to the string of Afrikaans suburbs Goodwood-Parow-Bellville. Its windows are painted dark green; over the green in gold lettering are the words PROKUREUR – Z COETZEE – ATTORNEY. The interior is gloomy, with heavy furniture upholstered in horsehair and red leather. The law books that have travelled around South Africa with them since his father last practised in 1937 have emerged from their boxes and are on the shelf. Idly he looks up Rape. Natives sometimes insert the male organ between the thighs of the woman without penetration, says a footnote. The practice falls under customary law. It does not constitute rape.

  Is this the kind of thing they do in law courts, he wonders: argue about where the penis went?

  His father’s practice appears to be flourishing. He employs not only a typist but an articled clerk named Eksteen. To Eksteen his father leaves the routine business of conveyancing and wills; his own efforts are devoted to the exciting court work of getting people off. Each day he co
mes home with new stories of people whom he has got off, and of how grateful they are to him.

  His mother is less interested in the people he has got off than in the mounting list of monies owed. One name in particular keeps cropping up: Le Roux the car salesman. She badgers his father: he is a lawyer, surely he can get Le Roux to pay up. Le Roux will settle his debt for sure at the end of the month, replies his father, he has promised. But at the end of the month, once again, Le Roux does not settle.

  Le Roux does not settle, nor does he make himself scarce. On the contrary, he invites his father for drinks, promises him more work, paints rosy pictures of the money to be made from repossessing cars.

  The arguments at home become angrier but at the same time more guarded. He asks his mother what is going on. Bitterly she says, Jack has been lending Le Roux money.

  He does not need to hear more. He knows his father, knows what is going on. His father craves approval, will do anything to be liked. In the circles in which his father moves there are two ways of getting to be liked: buying people drinks and lending them money.

  Children are not supposed to go into bars. But in the bar of the Fraserburg Road hotel he and his brother used often to sit at a corner table, drinking orange squash, watching their father buy rounds of brandy and water for strangers, getting to know this other side of him. So he knows the mood of expansive bonhomie that brandy creates in him, the boasting, the large spendthrift gestures.

  Avidly, gloomily, he listens to his mother’s monologues of complaint. Though his father’s wiles no longer take him in, he does not trust her to see through them: he has watched his father wheedle his way past her too often in the past. ‘Don’t listen to him,’ he warns her. ‘He lies to you all the time.’