Age of Iron

by J. M. Coetzee

  In pain, I took two of Dr Syfret's pills and lay down on the sofa. Hours later I woke befuddled and cold, fumbled my way upstairs, got into bed without undressing.

  In the middle of the night I became aware of a presence in the room that could only have been his. A presence or a smell. It was there, then it went away.

  From the landing came a creak. Now he is entering the study, I thought; now he is switching on the light. I tried to recall whether, among the papers on the desk, any were private, but there was too much confusion in my head. Now he sees the books, shelf upon shelf, I thought, trying to bring back order, and the piles of old journals. Now he looks at the pictures on the wall: Sophie Schliemann decked out in Agamemnon's treasure hoard; the robed Demeter from the British Museum. Now, quietly, he slides out the drawers of the desk. The top drawer, full of letters, accounts, torn-off stamps, photographs, does not interest him. But in the bottom drawer there is a cigar-box full of coins: pennies, drachmas, centimes, schillings. The hand with the curled fingers dips into it, takes out two five-peseta pieces big enough to pass for rands, pockets them. Not an angel, certainly. An insect, rather, emerging from behind the skirting-boards when the house is in darkness to forage for crumbs.

  I heard him at the far end of the landing, trying the two locked doors. Only rubbish, I wanted to whisper to him – rubbish and dead memories; but the fog in my head closed in again.

  Spent the day in bed. No energy, no appetite. Read Tolstoy – not the famous cancer story, which I know all too well, but the story of the angel who takes up residence with the shoemaker. What chance is there, if I take a walk down to Mill Street, of finding my own angel to bring home and succour? None, I think. Perhaps in the countryside there are still one or two sitting against milestones in the heat of the sun, dozing, waiting for what chance will bring. Perhaps in the squatter camps. But not in Mill Street, not in the suburbs. The suburbs, deserted by the angels. When a ragged stranger comes knocking at the door he is never anything but a derelict, an alcoholic, a lost soul. Yet how, in our hearts, we long for these sedate homes of ours to tremble, as in the story, with angelic chanting!

  This house is tired of waiting for the day, tired of holding itself together. The floorboards have lost their spring. The insulation of the wiring is dry, friable, the pipes clogged with grit. The gutters sag where screws have rusted away or pulled loose from the rotten wood. The rooftiles are heavy with moss. A house built solidly but without love, cold, inert now, ready to die. Whose walls the sun, even the African sun, has never succeeded in warming, as though the very bricks, made by the hands of convicts, radiate an intractable sullenness.

  Last summer, when the workmen were re-laying the drains, I watched, them dig out the old pipes. Two metres down into the earth they went, bringing up mouldering brick, rusty iron, even a solitary horseshoe. But no bones. A site without a human past; to spirits, as to angels, of no interest.

  This letter is not a baring of my heart. It is a baring of something, but not of my heart.

  Since the car would not start this morning, I had to ask him, this man, this lodger to push. He pushed me down the driveway. 'Now!' he shouted, slapping the roof. The engine caught. I swung into the road, drove a few yards, then, on an impulse, stopped. 'I have to go to Fish Hoek,' I called from a cloud of smoke: 'Do you want to come along?'

  So we set off, the dog on the back seat, In the green Hillman of your childhood. For a long while no word passed between us. Past the hospital, past the University, past Bishopscourt we drove, the dog leaning over my shoulder to feel the wind on its face. Up Wynberg Hill we toiled. On the long downhill swoop on the other side I switched off the engine and coasted. Faster and faster we went, till the wheel shuddered in my hands and the dog whined with excitement. I was smiling, I believe; my eyes may even, have been shut.

  At the foot of the hill, as we began to slow down, I cast him a glance. He sat relaxed, imperturbable. Good man! I thought.

  'When I was a child,' I said, 'I used to do downhills on a bicycle with no brakes to speak of. It belonged to my elder brother. He would dare me. I was completely without fear. Children cannot conceive of what if is to die. It never crosses their minds that they may not be immortal.'

  'I would ride my brother's bicycle down hills even steeper than this one. The faster I went, the more alive I would feel. I would quiver with life as if I were about to burst through my skin. As a butterfly must feel when it is being born, or bearing itself.

  'In an old car like this you still have the freedom to coast. With a modern car, when you switch off the engine the steering wheel locks. I am sure you know that. But people sometimes make a mistake or forget, and then can't keep the car on the road. Sometimes they go over the side and into the sea.'

  Into the sea. Tussling with a locked wheel while you soar in a bubble of glass over the sun-glinting sea. Does it really happen? Do many do it? If I stood on Chapman's Peak on a Saturday afternoon, would I see them, men and women, thick in the air as midges taking off on their last flight?

  'There Is a story I want to tell you,' I said. 'When my mother was still a child, in the early years of the century, the family used to go to the seaside for Christmas. This was still in the age of ox-wagons. They would travel by ox-wagon all the way from Uniondale in the Eastern Cape to Plettenberg Bay at the mouth of the Piesangs River, a journey of a hundred miles taking I don't know how many days. Along the way they would camp at the roadside.

  'One of their stopping-places was at the top of a mountain pass. My grandparents would spend the nights In the wagon itself while my mother and the other children had their bed underneath it. So – here the story begins – nay mother lay at the top of the pass in the stillness of the night, snug in her blankets with her brothers and sisters sleeping beside her, watching the stars through the spokes of the wheels. As she watched it began to seem that the stars were moving: the stars were moving or else the wheels were moving, slowly, very slowly. She thought: What shall I do? What if the wagon is beginning to roll? Shall I call out a warning? What if I lie silent and the wagon gathers speed and rolls all the way down the mountainside with my parents inside? But what if I am imagining it all?

  'Choking with fear, her heart pounding, she lay there watching the stars, watching them move, thinking, 'Shall I? Shall I?,' listening for the creak, the first creak. At last she fell asleep, and her sleep was full of dreams of death. But in the morning, when she re-emerged, it was into light and peace. And the wagon re-emerged with her, and her parents re-emerged, and all was well, as it had been before.'

  It was time for him to say something now, about hills or cars or bicycles or about himself or his childhood. But he was stubbornly silent.

  'She told no one what went on in the night,' I resumed. 'Perhaps she was waiting for me to come. I heard the story many times from her, in many forms. Always they were on their way to the Piesangs River. Such a lovely golden name! I was sure it must be the most beautiful place on earth. Years after my mother's death I visited Plettenberg Bay and saw the Piesangs River for the first time. Not a river at all, just a trickle of water choked with reeds, and mosquitoes in the evenings, and a caravan park full of screaming children and fat barefoot men in shorts braaiing sausages over gas cookers. Not Paradise at all. Not a place one would mount a journey to year after year through valleys and over mountains.'

  Up Boyes Drive the car was labouring now, willing but old, like Rocinante. I gripped the wheel tighter, urging her on.

  Above Muizenberg, overlooking the sweep of False Bay, I parked and switched off the engine. The dog began to whine. We let it out. It sniffed the curbstones, sniffed the bushes, relieved itself, while we watched in awkward silence.

  He spoke. 'You are pointing the wrong way,' he said. 'You should be pointing downhill.'

  I hid my chagrin, I have always wished to be thought a capable person. Now more than ever, with incapability looming,

  'Are you from the Cape?' I said.

  'Yes.'

  'A
nd have you lived here all your life?'

  He shifted restlessly. Two questions: one too many.

  A breaker, perfectly straight, hundreds of yards long, foiled inshore, a single crouched figure on a surfboard gliding ahead of it. Across the bay the mountains of Hottentots Holland stood out clear and blue. Hunger, I thought: it is a hunger of the eyes that I feel, such hunger that I am loth even to blink. These seas, these mountains: I want to burn them upon my sight so deeply that, no matter where I go, they will always be before me. I am hungry with love of this world.

  A flock of sparrows settled on the bushes around us, preened themselves, took off again. The surfer reached shore and began to trudge up the beach. Suddenly there were tears in my eyes. From not blinking, I told myself. But the truth was, I was crying. Hunched over the wheel, I abandoned myself, first to a quiet, decent sobbing, then to long wails without articulation, emptyings of the lungs, emptyings of the heart. 'I am so sorry,' I gasped; and then, when I was calmer: 'I am sorry, I don't know what has come over me.'

  I should not have bothered to apologize. He gave no sign of having noticed anything.

  I dried my eyes, blew my nose. 'Shall we go?' I said.

  He opened the door, gave a long whistle. The dog bounded in. An obedient dog, no doubt stolen from a good family.

  The car was indeed pointing the wrong way.

  'Start in reverse,' he said.

  I released the handbrake, rolled back down the hill a little way, let out the clutch. The car shuddered and stopped. 'It has never started in reverse,' I said.

  'Swing over to the other side of the road,' he directed, like a husband giving a driving lesson.

  I let the car roll further downhill, then swung across the road. With blaring horn a great white Mercedes shot past on the inside. 'I didn't see it!' I gasped.

  'Go!' he shouted.

  I stared in astonishment at this stranger shouting at me. 'Go!' he shouted again, straight into my face.

  The engine caught. I drove back in stiff silence. At the corner of Mill Street he asked to be let off.

  The worst of the smell comes from, his shoes and feet. He needs socks. He needs new shoes. He needs a bath. He needs a bath every day; he needs clean underwear; he needs a bed, he needs a roof over his head, he needs three meals a day, he needs money in the bank. Too much to give: too much for someone who longs, if the truth be told, to creep into her own mother's lap and be comforted.

  Late in the afternoon he returned. Making an effort to forget what had passed, I took him around the garden, pointing out tasks that need to be done. 'Pruning, for instance, ' I said. 'Do you know how to prune?'

  He shook his head. No, he didn't know how to prune. Or didn't want to.

  In the bottom corner, the most heavily overgrown, thick creepers covered the old oak bench and the rabbit-hutch. 'This should all be cleared,' I said.

  He lifted one edge of the mat of creepers. On the floor of the hutch was a jumble of parched bones, including the perfect skeleton of a young rabbit, its neck arched back in a last contortion.

  'Rabbits,' I said. 'They used to belong to my domestic's son. I let him keep them here as pets. Then there was some commotion or other in his life. He forgot about them and they starved to death. I was in hospital and didn't know about it. I was terribly upset when I came back and found out what agony had been going on unheeded at the bottom of the garden. Creatures that can't talk, that can't even cry.'

  Guavas were dropping, worm-riddled, making a malodorous pulpy carpet under the tree. 'I wish the trees would stop bearing,' I said. 'But they never do. '

  The dog, following behind, sniffed perfunctorily at the hutch. The dead long dead, their smells all gone.

  'Anyhow, do what you can to bring it back under control, I said. 'So that it doesn't become a complete wilderness.'

  'Why?' he said.

  'Because that is how I am,' I said. 'Because I don't mean to leave a mess behind.'

  He shrugged, smiling to himself.

  'If you want to be paid you will have to earn it,' I said. 'I am not giving you money for nothing.'

  For the rest of the afternoon he worked, hacking away at the creepers and grass, pausing now and again, to stare into the distance, pretending not to be aware that I was keeping an eye on him from upstairs. At five o'clock I paid him. 'I know you are not a gardener,' I said, 'and I don't want to turn you into what you are not. But we can't proceed on a basis of charity.'

  Taking the notes, folding them, putting them in his pocket, looking off to one side so as not to look at me, he said softly, 'Why?'

  'Because you don't deserve it. '

  And he, smiling, keeping his smile to himself: 'Deserve… Who deserves anything?'

  Who deserves anything? In a quick fury I thrust the purse at him. 'What do you believe in, then? Taking? Taking what you want? Go on: take!'

  Calmly he took the purse, emptied it of thirty rand and some coins, and handed it back. Then off he went, the dog jauntily at his heels. In half an hour he was back; I heard the clink of bottles.

  Somewhere he has found himself a mattress, one of those folding mattresses people take to the beach. In his little nest amid the dust and mess of the woodshed, with a candle at his head and the dog at his feet, he lay smoking.

  'I want that money back,' I said.

  He reached into his pocket and held out some notes. I took them. Not all the money, but that did not matter.

  'If you are in need, you can ask,' I said. 'I am not a stingy person. And be careful with that candle. I don't want a fire.'

  I turned, and went. But in a minute was back.

  'You told me,' I said, 'that I should turn this house into a boarding-house for students. Well, there are better things I could do with it. I could turn it into a haven for beggars. I could run a soup-kitchen and a dormitory. But I don't. Why not? Because the spirit of charity has perished in this country. Because those who accept charity despise it, while those who give give with a despairing heart. What is the point of charity when it does not go from heart to heart? What do you think charity is? Soup? Money? Charity: from the Latin word for the heart. It is as hard to receive as to give. It takes as much effort. I wish you would learn that. I wish you would learn something instead of just lying around.'

  A lie: charity, caritas, has nothing to do with the heart. But what does it matter if my sermons rest on false etymologies?

  He barely listens when I speak to him. Perhaps, despite those keen bird-eyes, he is more befuddled with drink than I know.

  Or perhaps, finally, he does not care. Care: the true root of charity. I look for him to care, and he does not. Because he is beyond caring. Beyond caring and beyond care.

  Since life in this country is so much like life aboard a sinking ship, one of those old-time liners with a lugubrious, drunken captain and a surly crew and leaky lifeboats, I keep the shortwave radio at my bedside. Most of the time there is only talk to be heard; but if one persists into the unlikely hours of the night there are stations that relent and play music. Fading in, fading out, I heard last night – from where? Helsinki? the Cook Islands? – anthems of all the nations, celestial music, music that left us years ago and now comes back from the stars transfigured, gentle, as evidence that all that is given forth will at length return. A closed universe, curved like an egg, enclosing us.

  There I lay in the dark, listening to the music of the stars and the crackling and humming that accompanied it like the dust of meteors, smiling, my heart filed with gratitude for this good news from afar. The one border they cannot close, I thought: the border upwards, between the Republic of South Africa and the empire of the sky. Where I am due to travel. Where no passport is called for.

  Still under the spell of the music (it was, I think, Stoeksome of the old pieces: preludes from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Chopin preludes, Brahms waltzes, from Novello and Augener editions tattered, mottled, dry as dust. I played as badly as ever, misreading the same chords as half a century ago, repeating finger
ing mistakes grown by now into the bone, never to be corrected. (The bones prized above all by archaeologists, I remember, are those gnarled with disease or splintered by an arrowhead: bones marked with a history from a time before history.)

  After I had tired of the sweetness of Brahms I closed my eyes and played chords, searching with my fingers for the one chord I would recognize, when I came upon it, as my chord, as what in the old days we used to call the lost chord, the heart's-chord. (I speak of a time before your time, when, passing down the street on a hot Saturday afternoon, you might hear, faint but dogged from a front parlour, the maiden of the household groping among the keys for that yearned-for, elusive resonance. Days of charm and sorrow and mystery too! Days of innocence!)

  ' Jerusalem!' I sang softly, playing chords I last heard at my grandmother's knee: 'And was Jerusalem y-builded here?'

  Then at last I went back to Bach, and played clumsily, over and over again, the first fugue from Book One. The sound was muddy, the lines blurred, but every now and again, for a few bars, the real thing emerged, the real music, the music that does not die, confident, serene.

  I was playing for myself. But at some point a board creaked or a shadow passed across the curtain and I knew he was outside listening.

  So I played Bach for him, as well as I could. When the last bar was played I closed the music and sat with my hands in my lap contemplating the oval portrait on the cover with its heavy jowls, its sleek smile, its puffy eyes. Pure spirit, I thought, yet in how unlikely a temple! Where does that spirit find, itself now? In the echoes of my fumbling performance receding through the ether? In my heart, where the music still dances? Has it made its way into the heart too of the man in the sagging trousers eavesdropping at the window? Have our two hearts, our organs of love, been tied for this brief while by a cord of sound?

  The telephone rang: a woman from the flats across the road warning me of a vagrant she had spied on my property. 'He is not a vagrant,' I said. 'He is a man who works for me.'