Age of Iron

by J. M. Coetzee

  Clasping him under the shoulders, he dragged the boy off Bheki and laid him out on the pavement. Bheki opened his eyes.

  'Bheki,' I said. Bheki gave me a calm, incurious look.

  'Everything is all right,' I said. From entirely peaceful eyes he continued to regard, me, accepting the lie, letting it pass. 'The ambulance is on its way,' I said.

  Then Florence was there, kneeling beside her son, speaking to him urgently, stroking his head. He began to reply: slow, mumbled words. Her hand paused as she listened. 'They crashed into the back of this truck,' I explained. 'It's my truck,' said the man in blue. 'The police pushed them,' I said: 'it's appalling, quite appalling. It was those same two policemen who were here yesterday, I am sure.'

  Florence slid a hand under Bheki's head. Slowly he sat up. One shoe was off; a trouser-leg was torn open and wet with blood. Gingerly he held aside the torn material and peered at the wound. His palms were raw, the skin hung in strips.

  'The ambulance is on its way,' I said. 'We do not need the ambulance,' said Florence.

  She was wrong. The other boy lay sprawled on his back now. With his jacket the plumber was trying to staunch the blood that streamed down his face. But the flow would not stop. He lifted the wadded jacket and for an instant, before it darkened with blood again, I saw that the flesh across the forehead hung open in a loose flap as if sliced with a butcher's knife. Blood flowed in a sheet into the boy's eyes and made his hair glisten; it dripped on to the pavement; it: was everywhere. I did not know blood could be so dark, so thick, so heavy. What a heart he must have, I thought, to pump that blood and go on pumping!

  'Is the ambulance coming?' said the plumber. 'Because I don't know how to stop this.' He was sweating; he changed position and his shoe, soggy with blood, squelched.

  You were eleven, I remember, when you sliced your thumb in the bread machine. I rushed you to the emergency section at Groote Schuur. We sat on a bench waiting our turn, you with your thumb wrapped in lint, pressing it to stop the bleeding. 'What's going to happen to me?' you whispered. 'They will, give you an injection and put in stitches,' I whispered back. 'Just a few stitches, just a few pricks.'

  It was early on a Saturday evening, but already the casualties were trickling in. A man in white shoes and a rumpled black suit spat blood steadily into a dish. A youth on a stretcher, naked to the waist, his belt open, held a wad of sodden cloth to his belly. Blood on the floor, blood on the benches. What did our timid thimbleful count for beside this torrent of black blood? Child Snowdrop lost in the cavern of blood, and her mother lost too. A country prodigal of blood. Florence 's husband in yellow oilskins and boots, wading through blood. Oxen keeling over, their throats slit, hurling last jets into the air like whales. The dry earth soaking up the blood of its creatures. A land that drinks rivers of blood and is never sated.

  'Let me,' I said to the plumber. He made way. Kneeling, I lifted aside the sodden blue jacket. Blood ran down the boy's face in a steady, even sheet. Between thumbs and forefingers I pinched together as much as I could of the open flap. Vercueil's dog came pushing in again. 'Get that dog away,' I snapped. The plumber gave it a kick. It yelped and sidled away. Where was Vercueil? Was it true, was he truly good for nothing? 'Go and phone again,' I ordered the plumber.

  As long as I pinched tight I could hold in most of the flow. But when I relaxed blood poured again steadily. It was blood, nothing more, blood like yours and mine. Yet never before had I seen anything so scarlet and so black. Perhaps it was an effect of the skin, youthful, supple, velvet dark, over which it ran; but even on my hands it seemed both darker and more glaring than blood ought to be. I stared at it, fascinated, afraid, drawn into a veritable stupor of staring. Yet it was impossible, in my deepest being impossible, to give myself up to that stupor, to relax and do nothing to stop the flow. Why, I ask myself now? And I answer: Because blood is precious, more precious than gold and diamonds. Because blood is one: a pool of life dispersed among us in separate existences, but belonging by nature together: lent, not given: held in common, in trust, to be preserved: seeming to live in us, but only seeming, for in truth we live in it.

  A sea of blood, come back together: is that how it will be at the end of days? The blood of all: a Baikal Sea scarlet-black under a wintry blue Siberian sky, ice-cliffs around it, its snow-white shores lapped by blood, viscous, sluggish. The blood of mankind, restored to itself. A body of blood. Of all mankind? No: in a place apart, in a mud-walled dam in the Karoo with barbed wire around it and the sun blazing down, the blood of the Afrikaners and their tribute-bearers, still, stagnant.

  Blood, sacred, abominated. And you, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, bleeding every month into foreign soil.

  For twenty years I have not bled. The sickness that now eats at me is dry, bloodless, slow and cold, sent by Saturn. There is something about it that does not bear thinking of. To have fallen pregnant with these growths, these cold, obscene swellings; to have carried and carried this brood beyond any natural term, unable to bear them, unable to sate their hunger: children inside me eating more every day, not growing but bloating, toothed, clawed, forever cold and ravenous. Dry, dry: to feel them turning at night in my dry body, not stretching and kicking as a human child does but changing their angle, finding a new place to gnaw. Like insect-eggs laid in the body of a host, now grown to grubs and implacably eating their host away. My eggs, grown within me. Me, mine: words I shudder to write, yet true. My daughters death, sisters to you, my daughter life. How terrible when motherhood reaches a point of parodying itself! A crone crouched over a boy, her hands sticky with his blood: a vile image, as it comes up in me now. I have lived too long. Death by fire the only decent death left. To walk into the fire, to blaze like tow, to feel these secret sharers cringe and cry out too, at the last instant, in their harsh unused little voices; to burn and be gone, to be rid of, to leave, the world clean. Monstrous growths, misbirths: a sign that one is beyond one's term. This country too: time for fire, time for an end, time for what grows out of ash to grow.

  'When the ambulance came I was so stiff that I had to be lifted to my feet. In detaching my sticky fingers from the gash I opened it again. 'He has lost a lot of blood,' I said. 'It's not serious,' said the ambulance-man curtly. He held the boy's eyelid open. 'Concussed,' he said. 'How did it happen?'

  Bheki sat: on the bed, his trousers off, his hands in a basin of water; Florence knelt before him bandaging his leg.

  'Why did you leave me alone to loot after him? Why didn't you stay and help?'

  I sounded querulous, certainly, but for once was I not in the right?

  'I do not want to be involved with the police,' said Florence.

  'That is not the question. You leave me alone to take care of your son's friend. Why must I be the one to take care of him? He is nothing to me.'

  'Where is he?' said Bheki.

  'They took him to Woodstock Hospital. He is concussed.'

  'What does it mean, concussed?'

  'He is unconscious. He hit his head. Do you know why you crashed?'

  'They pushed us,' he said.

  'Yes, they pushed you. I saw it. You, are lucky to be alive, both of you. I am going to lay a complaint.'

  A glance passed between Bheki and his mother. 'We do not want to be involved with the police,' Florence repeated. 'There is nothing you can, do against the police. ' Again a glance, as though checking she had her son's approval.

  'If you don't complain, they will go on behaving as they like. Even if it gets you nowhere, you must stand up to them. I am not talking about the police only. I am talking about men in power. They must see you are not afraid. This is a serious matter. They could have killed you, Bheki. What have they got against you anyway? What have you and that: friend of yours been up to?'

  Florence knotted the bandage around his leg and murmured something to him. He took, his hands out of the basin. There was a smell of antiseptic.

  'Is it bad?' I said.

  He held out his hands, pal
ms upward. Blood continued to ooze from the raw flesh. Honourable wounds? Would these count on the roll as honourable wounds, wounds of war? Together we regarded the bleeding hands. I had the impression he was holding back tears. A child, no more than a child, playing on a bicycle.

  'Your friend,' I said – 'Don't you think his parents should know?'

  'I can phone,' said, Florence.

  Florence telephoned. A long, loud conversation. ' Woodstock Hospital,' I heard.

  Hours later there was a call, from a public telephone, a woman wanting Florence.

  'He is not in the hospital,' Florence reported.

  'Was that his mother?' I asked.

  'His grannie.'

  I telephoned Woodstock Hospital. 'You, won't have his name, he was unconscious when they took him,' I said.

  'No record of such a patient,' said the man.

  'He had a terrible gash across the forehead.'

  'No record,' he repeated. I gave up.

  'They work with the police,' said Bheki. 'They are all, the same, the ambulances, the doctors, the police.'

  'That is nonsense,' I said.

  'Nobody trusts the ambulance any more. They are always talking to the police on their radios.'

  'Nonsense.'

  He smiled a smile not without charm, relishing this chance to lecture me, to tell me about real life. I, the old woman who lived in a shoe, who had no children and didn't know what to do. 'It is true,' he said – 'listen and you will hear.'

  'Why are the police after you?'

  'They are not after me. They are after everybody. I have done nothing. But anybody they see they think should be in school, they try to get them. We do nothing, we just say we are not going to school. Now they are waging this terror against us. They are terrorists.'

  'Why won't you go to school?'

  'What is school for? It is to make us fit into the apartheid system.'

  Shaking my head, I turned to Florence. There was a tight little smile on her lips which she did not bother to hide. Her son was winning hands down. 'Well, let him. 'I am too old For this,' I said to her. 'I can't believe you want your son out on the streets killing time till apartheid comes to an end. Apartheid is not going to die tomorrow or the next day. He is ruining his future. '

  'What is more important, that apartheid must be destroyed or that I must go to school?' asked Bheki, challenging me, smelling victory.

  'That is not the choice,' I answered wearily. But was I right? If that was not the choice, what was the choice? 'I will take you to Woodstock,' I offered. 'But then we must leave at once.'

  When Florence saw Vercueil waiting, she bridled. But I insisted. 'He must come along in case I have trouble with the car,' I said.

  So I drove them to Woodstock, Vercueil beside me smelling worse than ever, somehow smelling miserable too, Florence and Bheki silent in the back. The car struggled up the gentle slope to the hospital; for once I had the presence of mind to park pointing downhill.

  'I tell you, there is no such person here,' said the man at the desk. 'If you don't believe me, go and look in the wards.'

  Tired though I was, I trailed through the male wards behind Florence and Bheki. It was the hour of the siesta; doves were calling softly from the trees outside. We saw no black boys with bandaged heads, only old white men in pyjamas staring emptily at the ceiling while the radio played soothing music. My secret brothers, I thought: this is where I belong.

  'If they didn't bring him here, where would they have taken, him?' I asked at the desk.

  'Try Groote Schuur.'

  The parking lot at Groote Schuur was full. For half an hour we sat at the gate with the engine idling, Florence and her son talking softly together, Vercueil blank-eyed, I yawning. Like a sleepy weekend in South Africa, I thought; like taking; the family for a drive. We could have played a word-game to pass the time, but what chance was there of enlisting those three? Word-games, from a past that I alone could look back to with nostalgia, when we of the middle classes, the comfortable classes, passed our Sundays roaming the countryside from beauty-spot to beauty-spot, bringing the afternoon to a close with tea and scones and strawberry jam and cream in a tea-room with a nice view, preferably westward over the sea.

  A car came out, we went in. 'I'll stay here,' said Vercueil.

  'Where would someone with concussion be taken?' I asked the clerk.

  Down long, crowded corridors we passed looking for ward C-5. We crammed ourselves into a lift with four Moslem women wearing veils, carrying dishes of food. Bheki, self-conscious about his bandaged hands, held them behind his back. Through C-5, through C-6, and no sign of the boy. Florence stopped a nurse. 'Try the new wing,' she suggested. Exhausted, I shook my head. 'I can't walk any further,' I said. 'You and Bheki go on; I will meet you at the car. '

  It was true, I was tired, my hip ached, my heart was thumping, there was an unpleasant taste in my mouth. But there was more to it than that. I was seeing too many sick old people, and too suddenly. They oppressed me, oppressed and intimidated me. Black and white, men and women, they shuffled about the corridors, watching each other covetously, eyeing me as I approached, catching unerringly on me the smell of death. 'Impostor!' they seemed to whisper, ready to grasp my arm, draw me back: 'Do you think you can come and go here as you please? Don't you know the rule? This is the house of shadow and suffering through which you must pass on the way to death. That is the sentence passed upon all: a term In prison before the execution.' Old hounds patrolling the corridors, seeing that none of the condemned flee back to the air, the light, the bounteous world above. Hades this place, and I a fugitive shade. I shuddered as I passed through the doorway.

  In silence we waited in the car, Vercueil and I, like a couple married too long, talked out, grumpy. I am even getting used to the smell, I thought. Is this how I feel toward South Africa: not loving it but habituated to its bad smell? Marriage is fate. What we marry we become. We who marry South Africa become South Africans: ugly, sullen, torpid, the only sign of life in us a quick flash of fangs when we are crossed. South Africa: a bad-tempered old hound snoozing in the doorway, taking its time to die. And what an uninspired name for a country! Let us hope they change it when they make their fresh start.

  A group of nurses passed, laughing, gay, their shift over. It is their ministrations I have been evading, I thought. 'What a relief it would be to give myself up to them now! Clean sheets, brisk hands on my body, a release from pain, a release into helplessness – what is it that keeps me from yielding? I felt a constriction in my throat, a welling up of tears, and turned my face away. A passing shower, I told myself – English weather. But the truth is, I cry more and more easily, with less and less shame, I knew a woman once (do you mind if your mother talks of these things?) to whom pleasure, orgasm came very easily. Orgasms would, pass through her, she said, like little shudders, one after another, rippling her body like water. How would it be, I used to wonder, to live in a body like that? To be turned to water: is that what bliss is? Now I have an answer of a kind in these flurries of tears, these deliquescences of mine. Tears not of sorrow but of sadness. A light, fickle sadness: the blues, but not the dark blues: the pale blues, rather, of far skies, clear winter days. A private matter, a disturbance of the pool of the soul, which I take less and less trouble to hide.

  I dried my eyes, blew my nose. 'You needn't be embarrassed,' I said to Vercueil. 'I cry without reason. Thank you fox coming along. '

  'I don't see what you need me for,' he said.

  'It is hard to be alone all the time. That's all. I didn't choose you, but you are the one who is here, and that will have to do. You arrived. It's like having a child. You can't choose the child. It just arrives.'

  Looking away, he gave a slow, crafty smile.

  'Besides,' I said, 'you push the car. If I couldn't use the car I would be trapped at home.'

  'All you need is a new battery.'

  'I don't want a new battery. You don't understand that, do you? Do I have to explai
n? This car is old, it belongs to a world that barely exists any more, but it works. What is left of that world, what still works, I am trying to hold on to. Whether I love it or hate it does not matter. The fact is, I belong to it as I do not belong, thank God, to what It has become. It is a world in which cars cannot be depended on to start whenever you want them to. In my world you try the self-starter. If that does not work you try the crank-handle. If that does not work you get someone to push. And if the car still does not start you, get on your bicycle ox walk or stay at home. That is how things are in the world where I belong. I am comfortable there, it is a world I understand. I don't see why I should change.'

  Vercueil said nothing.

  'And if you think I am a fossil from the past,' I added, 'it is time you took a look at yourself. You have seen what the children of today think of drinking and lying around and leeglopery. Be warned. In the South Africa of the future everyone will have to work, including you. You may not like the prospect, but you had better prepare yourself for it.' Darkness was falling over the parking lot. Where was Florence? The pain in my back was wearing; me down. It was past the time for my pills.

  I thought of the empty house, the long night yawning before me. Tears came again, easy tears.

  I spoke: 'I told you about my daughter in America. My daughter is everything to me. I have not told her the truth, the whole truth about my condition. She knows I was sick, she knows I had an operation; she thinks it was successful and I am getting better. When I lie in bed at night and stare into the black hole into which I am falling, all that keeps me sane is the thought of her. I say to myself: I have brought a child into the world, I have seen her to womanhood, I have seen her safely to a new life: that I have done, that can never be taken from me. That thought is the pillar I cling to when the storms hit me.

  'There is a little ritual I go through sometimes, that helps me to stay calm. I say to myself: It is two in the morning here, on this side of the world, therefore it is six in the evening there, on her side. Imagine it: six in the evening. Now imagine the rest. Imagine everything. She has just come in from work. She hangs up her coat. She opens the refrigerator and takes out a packet of frozen peas. She empties the peas into a bowl. She takes two onions and begins to peel them. Imagine the peas, imagine the onions. Imagine the world in which she is doing these things, a world with its own smells and sounds. Imagine a summer evening in North America, with gnats at the screen door, children calling from down the street. Imagine my daughter in her house, in her life, with an onion in one hand, in a land where she will live and die in peace. The hours pass, in that land and this one and all the rest of the world, at the same pace. Imagine them passing. They pass: here it grows light, there it grows dark. She goes to bed; drowsily she lies beside the body of her husband in their bed of marriage in their peaceful country. I think of her body, still, solid, alive, at peace, escaped. I ache to embrace her. 'I am so thankful,' I want to say, from a full heart. I also want to say, but never do: "Save me!"