Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  Which may not come as a surprise to you. You probably think it holds true for artists in general, male artists: that they aren’t built for what I am calling love; that they can’t or won’t give themselves fully for the simple reason that there is a secret essence of themselves they need to preserve for the sake of their art. Am I right? Is that what you believe?

  Do I believe that artists aren’t built for love? No. Not necessarily. I try to keep an open mind on the subject.

  Well, you can’t keep your mind open indefinitely, not if you mean to get your book written. Consider. Here we have a man who, in the most intimate of human relations, cannot connect, or can connect only briefly, intermittently. Yet how did he make a living? He made a living writing reports, expert reports, on intimate human experience. Because that is what novels are about – isn’t it? – intimate experience. Novels as opposed to poetry or painting. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?

  [Silence.]

  I have been very open with you, Mr Vincent. For instance, the Schubert business: I never told anyone about that before you. Why not? Because I thought it would cast John in too ridiculous a light. Because who but a total dummy would order the woman he is supposed to be in love with to take lessons in lovemaking from some dead composer, some Viennese Bagatellenmeister? When a man and a woman are in love they create their own music, it comes instinctively, they don’t need lessons. But what does our friend John do? He drags a third presence into the bedroom. Franz Schubert becomes number one, the master of love; John becomes number two, the master’s disciple and executant; and I become number three, the instrument on whom the sex-music is going to be played. That – it seems to me – tells you all you need to know about John Coetzee. The man who mistook his mistress for a violin. Who probably did the same with every other woman in his life: mistook her for some instrument or other, violin, bassoon, timpani. Who was so dumb, so cut off from reality, that he could not distinguish between playing on a woman and loving a woman. A man who loved by numbers. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry!

  That is why he was never my Prince Charming. That is why I never let him bear me off on his white steed. Because he was not a prince but a frog. Because he was not human, not in the fullest sense.

  I said I would be frank with you, and I have kept my promise. I will tell you one more frank thing, just one more, then I will stop, and that will be the end of it. It is about the night I tried to describe to you, the night at the Canterbury Hotel, when, after all our experimenting, the two of us finally hit on the right chemistry, the right combination. How could we have achieved that, you may ask – as I ask too – if John was a frog and not a prince?

  Let me tell you how I now see that pivotal night. I was hurt and confused, as I said, and beside myself with worry. John saw or guessed what was going on in me and for once opened his heart, the heart he normally kept wrapped in armour. With open hearts, his and mine, we came together. For him that first opening of the heart could and should have marked a sea-change, the beginning of a new life for the two of us together. Yet what happened? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is not unattainable in this world. He saw me – saw me as I was at that moment – took fright, hurriedly strapped the armour back over his heart, with chains and a double padlock, and stole out into the darkness.

  Do you think I find it easy to forgive him for that? Do you?

  You are being a little hard on him, if I may say so.

  No, I am not. I am just telling the truth. Without the truth, no matter how hard, there can be no healing. That’s all. That’s the end of my offering for your book. Look, it’s nearly eight o’clock. Time for you to go. You have a plane to catch in the morning.

  Just one question more, one brief question.

  No, absolutely not, no more questions. You have had time enough. End. Fin. Go.

  Interview conducted in Kingston, Ontario, May 2008.

  Margot

  LET ME BRING YOU up to date, Mrs Jonker, with what I have been doing since we met last December. After I got back to England I transcribed the tapes of our conversations. I asked a colleague who was originally from South Africa to check that I had all the Afrikaans words right. Then I did something fairly radical, which I am hoping you will approve of. I cut out my own interjections, my prompts and questions, and fixed up the prose to read as if it were an uninterrupted narrative spoken in your voice.

  What I would like to do now is to read through the new text with you and give you a chance to comment. How does that sound?

  All right.

  One further point. Because the story you told was quite lengthy, longer than I expected, I decided to dramatize it here and there, for the sake of variety, letting the various people speak in their own voices. You will see what I mean once we get going.

  All right.

  Here goes then.

  In the old days, at Christmas-time, there would be huge gatherings on the family farm. From far and wide the sons and daughters of Gerrit and Lenie Coetzee would converge on Voëlfontein, bringing with them their spouses and offspring, more and more offspring each year, for a week of laughing and joking and reminiscing and, above all, eating. For the menfolk it was a time for hunting too: game birds, antelope.

  But by now, in the 1970s, those family gatherings are sadly diminished. Gerrit Coetzee is long in the grave, Lenie shuffles around a nursing home in The Strand. Of their twelve sons and daughters, the firstborn has already joined the multitudinous shades; in private moments –

  Multitudinous shades?

  Too grand-sounding? I’ll change it. The firstborn has already departed this life. In private moments the survivors have intimations of their own end, and shudder.

  No, I don’t like that.

  You mean the shuddering? No problem. I’ll cut it out. Has already departed this life. Among the survivors the joking has grown more subdued, the reminiscing sadder, the eating more temperate. As for hunting parties, there are no more of those: old bones are weary, and anyway, after year upon year of drought, there is nothing left in the veld worth shooting.

  Of the third generation, the sons and daughters of the sons and daughters, most are by now too absorbed in their own affairs to attend, or too indifferent to the larger family. This year only four of that generation are present: her cousin Michiel, who has inherited the farm; her cousin John from Cape Town; her sister Carol; and herself, Margot. And of the four, she alone, she suspects, looks back to the old days with anything like nostalgia.

  I don’t understand. Why do you call me she?

  Of the four, Margot alone, she – Margot – suspects, looks back with anything like nostalgia…You can hear how clumsy it sounds. It just won’t work that way. The she I have introduced is like I but is not I. Do you really dislike it so much?

  I find it confusing. But you know better than I. Go on.

  John’s presence on the farm is a source of unease. After years spent overseas – so many years it was concluded he was gone for good – he has suddenly reappeared among them under some cloud or other, some disgrace. One story being whispered about is that he has spent time in an American jail.

  The family simply does not know how to behave towards him. Never yet have they had a criminal – if that is what he is, a criminal – in their midst. A bankrupt, yes: the man who married her aunt Marie, a braggart and heavy drinker of whom the family had disapproved from the start, declared himself bankrupt to avoid paying his debts and thereafter did not a stitch of work, loafing at home, living off his wife’s earnings. But bankruptcy, while it may leave a bad taste in the mouth, is not a crime; whereas going to jail is going to jail.

  Her own feeling is that the Coetzees ought to try harder to make the lost sheep feel welcome. She has a lingering soft spot for John. As young children they used to talk quite openly of marrying each other when they grew up. They assumed it would be allowed – why should it not be? They did not un
derstand why the adults smiled, smiled and would not say why.

  Did I really tell you that?

  You did. Do you want me to cut it out? I like it. It’s sweet.

  All right, leave it in. [Laughs.] Go on.

  Her sister Carol is of quite another mind. Carol is married to a German, an engineer, who has for years been trying to get the two of them out of South Africa and into the United States. Carol has made it plain she does not want it to appear in her American dossier that she is related to a man who, whether or not he is technically a criminal, has in some way fallen foul of the law, their law. But Carol’s hostility to John goes deeper than that. She finds him affected and supercilious. From the heights of his engelse [English] education, says Carol, John looks down on the Coetzees, one and all. Why he has decided to favour them with his presence at Christmastide she cannot imagine.

  She, Margot, is distressed by her sister’s attitude. Her sister, she believes, has grown more and more hardhearted ever since she married and began to move in her husband’s circle, a circle of German and Swiss expatriates who arrived in South Africa in the 1960s to make quick money and are preparing to abandon ship now that the country is going through stormy times.

  I don’t know. I don’t know if I can let you say that.

  Well, whatever you decide, I will abide by what you say. But that is what you told me, word for word. And bear in mind, it is not as if your sister is going to pick up an obscure book published by an academic press in England. Where is your sister now?

  She and Klaus live in Florida, in a town called St Petersburg. I have never been there. As for your book, one of her friends might come across it and send it to her – you never know. But that is not the main point. When I spoke to you last year, I was under the impression you were simply going to transcribe our interview. I had no idea you were going to rewrite it completely.

  That’s not entirely fair. I have not actually rewritten it, I have merely recast it as a narrative, giving it a different form. Giving it new form has no effect on the content. If you feel I am taking liberties with the content itself, that is another question. Do you feel I am taking too many liberties?

  I don’t know. Something sounds wrong to me, but I can’t put my finger on it yet. All I can say is, your version doesn’t sound like what I said to you. But I am going to shut up now. I will wait until the end to make up my mind. So go on.

  All right.

  If Carol is too hard, she is too soft, she will admit to that. She is the one who cries when the new kittens have to be drowned, the one who blocks her ears when the slaughter-lamb bleats in fear, bleats and bleats. She used to mind, when she was younger, being scoffed at for it; but now, in her mid-thirties, she is not so sure she need be ashamed of being tender-hearted.

  Carol claims not to understand why John is attending the family gathering, but to her the reason is obvious. To the haunts of his youth he has brought back his father, who though not much over sixty looks like an old man, looks to be on his last legs – has brought him back so that he can be renewed and fortified, or, if he cannot be renewed, so that he can at least say his farewells. It is, to her mind, an act of filial duty, one that she thoroughly approves of.

  She tracks John down behind the packing-shed, where he is working on his car, or pretending to.

  ‘Something wrong with the car?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s overheating,’ he says. ‘We had to stop twice on Du Toit’s Kloof to let the engine cool.’

  ‘You should ask Michiel to have a look at it. He knows everything about cars.’

  ‘Michiel is busy with his guests. I’ll fix it myself.’

  Her guess is that Michiel would welcome an excuse to escape his guests, but she does not press her case. She knows male stubbornness all too well, knows that a man will wrestle endlessly with a problem rather than undergo the humiliation of asking another man for help.

  ‘Is this what you drive in Cape Town?’ she says. By this she means this one-ton Datsun pickup, the kind of light truck she associates with farmers and builders. ‘What do you need a truck for?’

  ‘It’s useful,’ he replies curtly, not explaining what its use might be.

  She could not help laughing when he made his arrival at the farm behind the wheel of this selfsame truck, he with his beard and his unkempt hair and his owl-glasses, his father beside him like a mummy, stiff and embarrassed. She wishes she could have taken a photograph. She wishes, too, she could have a quiet word with John about his hairstyle. But the ice is not yet broken, intimate talk will have to wait.

  ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘I’ve been instructed to call you for tea, tea and melktert that Aunt Joy has baked.’

  ‘I’ll come in a minute,’ he says.

  They speak Afrikaans together. His Afrikaans is halting; she suspects her English is better than his Afrikaans, though, living in the back country, the platteland, she seldom has call to speak English. But they have spoken Afrikaans together since they were children; she is not about to embarrass him by offering to switch.

  She blames the deterioration in his Afrikaans on the move he made years ago, first to Cape Town, to ‘English’ schools and an ‘English’ university, then to the world abroad, where not a word of Afrikaans is to be heard. In ’n minuut, he says: in a minute. It is the kind of solecism that Carol will latch onto at once and make fun of. ‘In ’n minuut sal meneer sy tee kom geniet,’ Carol will say: in a minute his lordship will come and partake of tea. She must protect him from Carol, or at least plead with Carol to have mercy on him for the space of these few days.

  At table that evening she makes sure she is seated beside him. The evening meal is simply a hotchpotch of leftovers from the midday meal, the main meal of the day: cold mutton, warmed-up rice, green beans with vinegar.

  She notices that he passes on the meat platter without helping himself.

  ‘Aren’t you having mutton, John?’ calls out Carol from the other end of the table in a tone of sweet concern.

  ‘Not tonight, thanks,’ John replies. ‘Ek het my vanmiddag dik gevreet’: I stuffed myself like a pig this afternoon.

  ‘So you are not a vegetarian. You didn’t become a vegetarian while you were overseas.’

  ‘Not a strict vegetarian. Dis nie ’n woord waarvan ek hou nie. As ’n mens verkies om nie so veel vleis te eet nie…’ It is not a word he is fond of. If one chooses not to eat so much meat…

  ‘Ja?’ says Carol. ‘As ’n mens so verkies, dan…?’ If that is what you choose, then – what?

  Everyone is by now staring at him. He has begun to blush. Clearly he has no idea how to deflect the benign curiosity of the gathering. And if he is paler and scrawnier than a good South African ought to be, might the explanation be, not just that he has tarried too long amid the snows of North America, but that he has indeed been starved too long of good Karoo mutton? As ’n mens verkies… – what is he going to say next?

  His blush has grown desperate. A grown man, yet he blushes like a girl! Time to intervene. She lays a reassuring hand on his arm. ‘Jy wil seker sê, John, ons het almal ons voorkeure,’ we all have our preferences.

  ‘Ons voorkeure,’ he says; ‘ons fiemies.’ Our preferences; our silly little whims. He spears a green bean and pops it into his mouth.

  It is December, and in December it does not get dark until well after nine. Even then – so pristinely clear is the air on the high plateau – the moon and stars are bright enough to light one’s footsteps. So after supper she and he go for a walk, making a wide loop to avoid the cluster of cabins that house the farm workers.

  ‘Thank you for saving me at the dinner table,’ he says.

  ‘You know Carol,’ she says. ‘She has always had a sharp eye. A sharp eye and a sharp tongue. How is your father?’

  ‘Depressed. As you must surely know, he and my mother did not have the happiest of marriages. Even so, after my mother died he went into a decline – moped, didn’t know what to do with himself. Men of his generation were brought up
to be more or less helpless. If there isn’t some woman on hand to cook and care for them, they simply fade away. If I hadn’t offered my father a home he would have starved to death.’

  ‘Is he still working?’

  ‘Yes, he still has his job with the motor-parts dealer, though I think they have been hinting it may be time for him to retire. And his enthusiasm for sport is undimmed.’

  ‘Isn’t he a cricket umpire?’

  ‘He was, but not any more. His eyesight has deteriorated too far.’

  ‘And you? Didn’t you play cricket too?’

  ‘Yes. In fact I still play in the Sunday league. The standard is fairly amateurish, which suits me. Curious: he and I, two Afrikaners devoted to an English game that we aren’t much good at. I wonder what that says about us.’

  Two Afrikaners. Does he really think of himself as an Afrikaner? She doesn’t know many real [egte] Afrikaners who would accept him as one of the tribe. Even his father might not pass scrutiny. To pass as an Afrikaner nowadays you need at the very least to vote National and attend church on Sundays. She can’t imagine her cousin putting on a suit and tie and going off to church. Or indeed his father.

  They have arrived at the dam. The dam used to be filled by a wind-pump, but during the boom years Michiel installed a diesel-driven pump and left the old wind-pump to rust, because that was what everyone was doing. Now that the oil price has gone through the roof, Michiel may have to think again. He may have to fall back on God’s wind after all.

  ‘Do you remember,’ she says, ‘When we used to come here as children…’

  ‘And catch tadpoles in a sieve,’ he picks up the story, ‘and carry them back to the house in a bucket of water and the next morning they all would be dead and we could never figure out why.’

  ‘And locusts. We caught locusts too.’

  Having mentioned the locusts, she wishes she hadn’t. For she has remembered the fate of the locusts, or of one of them. Out of the bottle in which they had trapped it John took the insect and, while she watched, pulled steadily at a long rear leg until it came off the body, dryly, without blood or whatever counts as blood among locusts. Then he released it and they watched. Each time it tried to launch itself into flight it toppled to one side, its wings scrabbling in the dust, the remaining rear leg jerking ineffectually. Kill it! she screamed at him. But he did not kill it, just walked away, looking disgusted.