Age of Iron

by J. M. Coetzee

  But the respite is never long. Clouds come over, thoughts begin to bunch, to take on the dense, angry life of a swarm of flies. I shake my head, trying; to clear them away. This is my hand, I say, opening my eyes wide, staring at the veins on the back of my hand; this is the bedspread. Then as quick as lightning something strikes. In an instant I am gone and in another instant I am back, still staring at my hand. Between these instants an hour may have passed or the blink of an eye, during which I have been absent, gone, struggling with something thick and rubbery that invades the mouth and grips the tongue at its root, something that comes from the depths of the sea. I surface, shaking my head like a swimmer. In my throat is a taste of bile, of sulphur. Madness! I say to myself: this is what it tastes like to be mad!

  Once I came to myself facing the wall. In my hand was a pencil, its point broken. All over the wall were sprawling, sliding characters, meaningless, coming from me or someone inside me.

  I telephoned Dr Syfret. 'My reaction to the Diconal seems to be getting worse,' I said, and tried to describe it. 'I wonder, is there no alternative you can prescribe?'

  'I was not aware that you still regarded yourself as under my care,' replied Dr Syfret. 'You should be in hospital getting proper attention. I can't conduct a surgery over the telephone.'

  'I am asking for very little,' I said. 'The Diconal is giving me hallucinations. Is there nothing else I can take?'

  'And I say, I can't treat you without seeing you. That is not how I work, that is not how any of my colleagues work.'

  I was silent so long he must have thought he had lost me. The truth was, I was wavering. Don't you understand? I wanted to say: I am tired, tired unto death. In manus tuas: take me into your hands, care for me, or, if you cannot, do whatever is next best.

  'Let me ask one last question,' I said. 'The reactions I am having – do other people have them too?'

  'Patients react in many different ways. Yes, it is possible your reactions are due to the Diconal.'

  'Then if by some chance you have a change of heart,' I said, 'could you telephone a new prescription through to the Avalon Pharmacy in Mill Street? I have no illusions about my condition, doctor. It is not care I need, just help with the pain.'

  'And if you change your mind and want to see me at any time, Mrs Curren, day or night, you have only to pick up the telephone.'

  An hour later the doorbell rang. It was the delivery man from the pharmacy bringing a new prescription in a fourteen-day supply.

  I telephoned the pharmacist. 'Tylox,' I asked: 'is that the strongest?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'I mean, is it the last one prescribed?'

  'That is not the way it works, Mrs Curren. There is no first and no last.'

  I took two of the new pills. Again the miraculous draining away of pain, the euphoria, the feeling of being restored to life. I had a bath, got back into bed, tried to read, fell into a confused sleep. In an hour I was awake again. The pain was creeping back, bringing with it nausea and the first edge of the familiar shadow of depression.

  The drug over the pain: a shaft of light but then darkness redoubled.

  Vercueil came in.

  'I have taken the new pills,' I said; 'They are no improvement. Slightly stronger, perhaps; that's all.'

  'Take more,' said Vercueil. 'You don't have to wait four hours.'

  A drunkard's advice.

  'I'm sure I will,' I said. 'But if I am free to take them whenever I like, why not take them all together?'

  There was silence between us.

  'Why did you choose me?' I said,

  'I didn't choose you.'

  'Why did you come here, to this house?'

  'You didn't have a dog.'

  'Why else?'

  'I thought you wouldn't make trouble.'

  'And have I made trouble?'

  He came toward me. His face was puffy, I could smell liquor on his breath. 'If you want me to help you. I'll help you,' he said. He leaned over and took me by the throat, his thumbs resting lightly on my larynx, the three bad fingers bunched under my ear. 'Don't,' I whispered, and pushed his hands away. My eyes swam with tears. I took his hands in mine and beat them on my chest in a gesture of lamentation quite foreign to me.

  After a while I was still. He continued to lean over me allowing me to use him. The dog put its nose over the edge of the bed, sniffing at us.

  'Will you let the dog sleep with me?' I said.

  'Why?'

  'For the warmth.'

  'He won't stay. He sleeps where I sleep.'

  'Then sleep here too.'

  There was a long wait while he went downstairs. I had another pill. Then the light on the landing went off. I heard him take off his shoes. 'Take off the hat too, for a change,' I said.

  He lay down at my back, on top of the bedclothes. The smell of his dirty feet reached me. He whistled softly; the dog leapt up, did its circle dance, settled between his legs and mine. Like Tristan's sword, keeping us honest.

  The pill worked its wonders. For half an hour, while he and the dog slept, I lay still, free of pain, my soul alert, darting. A vision passed before my eyes of the child Beauty riding towards me on her mother's back, bobbing, staring imperiously ahead. Then the vision faded and clouds of dust, the dust of Borodino, came rolling over my sight like the wheels of the carriage of death.

  I switched on the lamp. It was midnight.

  I will draw a veil soon. This was never meant to be the story of a body, but of the soul it houses. I will not show to you what you will not be able to bear: a woman in a burning house running from window to window, calling through the bars for help.

  Vercueil and his dog, sleeping so calmly beside these torrents of grief. Fulfilling their charge, waiting for the soul to emerge. The soul, neophyte, wet, blind, ignorant.

  I have the story now of how he lost the use of his fingers. It was in an accident at sea. They had to abandon ship. In the scramble his hand was caught in a pulley and crashed. All night he floated on a raft with seven other men and a boy, in agony. The next day they were picked up by a Russian trawler and his hand was given attention. But by then it was too late.

  'Did you learn any Russian?' I asked.

  All he remembered, he said, was xorosho.

  'No one mentioned Borodino?'

  'I don't remember Borodino.'

  'You didn't think of staying with the Russians?'

  He looked at me strangely.

  He has never been to sea since then.

  'Don't you miss the sea?' I asked. '

  'I'll never set foot in a boat again,' he replied decidedly.

  'Why?'

  'Because next time I won't be so lucky.'

  'How do you know? If you had faith in yourself you could walk on water. Don't you believe in the doings of faith?'

  He was silent.

  'Or a whirlwind would arrive and pluck you out of the water and set you down on dry land. And there are always dolphins. Dolphins rescue drowning sailors, don't they? Why did you become a sailor anyway?'

  'You don't always think ahead. You don't always know.'

  I pinched his ring finger lightly. 'Can't you feel anything?'

  'No. The nerves are dead.'

  I always knew he had a story to tell, and now he begins to tell it, starting with the fingers of one hand. A mariner's story. Do I believe it? Verily, I do not care. There is no lie that does not have at its core some truth. One must only know how to listen.

  He has worked at the docks too, lifting things, loading things. One day, he said, unloading a crate, they smelled something bad and opened it and found the body of a man, a stowaway who had starved to death in his hiding-place.

  'Where did he come from?' I asked.

  ' China. A long way away.'

  He has also worked for the SPCA, at their kennels.

  'Was that where you got to like dogs?'

  'I always got on with dogs.'

  'Did you have a dog as a child?'

  'Mm,
' he said, meaning nothing. Early on he decided he could get away with choosing which of my questions to hear, which not to hear.

  Nevertheless, piece by piece I put together the story of a life as obscure as any on earth. What is in store for him next, I wonder, when the episode of the old woman in the big house is over with? One hand crippled, unable to do all its offices. His sailor's skill with knots lost. Not dextrous any more, nor fully decent. In the middle years of his course, and at his side no wife. Alone: stoksielalleen: a stick in an empty field, a soul alone, sole. Who will watch over him?

  'What will you do with yourself when I am gone?'

  'I will go on.'

  'I am sure you will; but who will there be in your life?'

  Cautiously he smiled. 'Do I need somebody in my life?'

  Not a riposte. A real question. He does not know. He is asking me, this rudimentary man.

  'Yes. I would say you need a wife, if the idea does not strike you as eccentric. Even that woman, you brought here, as long as there is feeling for her in your heart.'

  He shook his head.

  'Never mind. It is not marriage I am talking about but something else. I would promise to watch over you, except that I have no firm idea of what is possible after death. Perhaps there will be no watching over allowed, or very little. All these places have their rules, and, whatever one may wish, it may not be possible to get around them. There may not even be secrets allowed, secret watching. There may be no way of keeping a space in the heart private for you or anyone else. All may be erased. All. It is a terrible thought. Enough to make one rebel, to make one say: If that is how things are to be, I withdraw: here is my ticket, I am handing it back. But I doubt very much that the handing back of tickets will be allowed, for whatever reason.

  'That is why you should not be so alone. Because I may have to go away entirely.'

  He sat on the bed with his back to me, bent over, gripping the dog's head between his knees, stroking it.

  'Do you understand me?'

  'Mm.' The mm that could mean yes but in fact means nothing.

  'No, you don't. You don't understand at all. It is not the prospect of your solitude that appals me. It is the prospect of my own.'

  Every day he goes off to do the shopping. In the evenings he cooks, then hovers over me, watching to see that I eat. I am never hungry but haven't the heart to tell him. 'I find it hard to eat while you watch,' I say as gently as I can, then hide the food and feed it to the dog.

  His favourite concoction is white bread fried in egg with tuna on the bread and tomato sauce on the tuna. I wish I had had the foresight to give him cooking lessons.

  Though he has the whole house to spread himself in, he lives, in effect, with me in my room. He drops empty packets, old wrapping papers on the floor. When there is a draught they scud around like ghosts. 'Take the rubbish away,' I plead. 'I will,' he promises, and sometimes does, but then leaves more.

  We share a bed, folded one upon the other like a page folded in two, like two wings folded: old mates, bunkmates, conjoined, conjugal. Lectus genialis, lectus adversus. His toe-nails, when he takes off his shoes, are yellow, almost brown, like horn. Feet that he keeps out of water for fear of falling: falling into depths where he cannot breathe. A dry creature, a creature of air, like those locust-fairies in Shakespeare with their whipstock of cricket's bone, lash of spider-film. Huge swarms of them borne out to sea on the wind, out of sight of land, tiring, settling one upon another upon another, resolving to drown the Atlantic by their numbers. Swallowed, all of them, to the last. Brittle wings on the sea-floor sighing like a forest of leaves; dead eyes by the million; and the crabs moving among them, clutching, grinding.

  He snores.

  From the side of her shadow husband your mother writes, Forgive me if the picture offends you. One must love what is nearest. One must love what is to hand, as a dog loves.

  Mrs V.

  September 23, the equinox. Steady rain falling from a sky that has closed in tight against the mountain, so low that one could reach up with a broomstick and touch it. A soothing, muffling sound, like a great hand, a hand of water, folding over the house; the patter on the rooftiles, the ripple in the gutters ceasing to be noise, become a thickening, a liquefaction of the air.

  'What is this?' asked Vercueil.

  He had a little hinged rosewood case. Held open at a certain angle to the light, it reveals a young man with long hair in an old-fashioned suit. Change the angle, and the image decomposes into silver streaks behind a glass surface.

  'It is a photograph from the olden days. From before photographs.'

  'Who is it?'

  'I am not sure. It may be one of my grandfather's brothers.'

  'Your house is like a museum.'

  (He has been poking around in the rooms the police broke into.)

  'In a museum things have labels. This is a museum where the labels have fallen off. A museum in decay. A museum that ought to be in a museum.'

  'You should sell these old things if you don't want them.'

  'Sell them if you like. Sell me too.'

  'For what?'

  'For bones. For hair. Sell my teeth too. Unless you think I am worth nothing. It's a pity we don't have one of those carts that children used to wheel the Guy around in. You could wheel me down the Avenue with a letter pinned to my front. Then you could set fire to me. Or you could take me to some more obscure place, the rubbish dump for instance, and dispose of me there.'

  He used to go out on to the balcony when he wanted to smoke. Now he smokes on the landing and the smoke drifts back into my room. I cannot stand it. But it is time to begin getting used to what I cannot stand.

  He came upon me washing my underwear in the basin. I was in pain from the bending: no doubt I looked terrible. 'I will do that tor you,' he offered. I refused. But then I could not reach the line, so he had to hang it for me: an old woman's underwear, grey, listless.

  When the pain bites deepest and I shudder and go pale and a cold sweat breaks out on me, he sometimes holds my hand. I twist in his grip like a hooked fish, I am aware of an ugly look on my face, the look people have when they are rapt in lovemaking: brutal, predatory. He does not like that look; he turns his eyes away. As for me, I think: let him see, let him learn what it is like!

  He carries a knife in his pocket. Not a clasp knife but a menacing blade with a sharp point embedded in a cork. When, he gets into bed he puts it on the floor beside him, with his money.

  So I am well, guarded. Death would think twice before trying to pass this dog, this man.

  What is Latin? he asked.

  A dead language, I replied, a language spoken by the dead. 'Really?' he said. The idea seemed to tickle him. 'Yes, really,' I said. 'You only hear it at funerals nowadays. Funerals and the odd wedding.' 'Can you speak it?' I recited some Virgil, Virgil on the unquiet dead:

  nec ripas datur horrendas et rauca fluenta

  transportare prius qaum sedibus ossa quierunt.

  centum errant annos volitantque haec litora circum;

  tum demum admissi stagna exoptata revisunt.

  'What does it mean?' he said.

  'It means that if you don't mail the letter to my daughter I will have a hundred years of misery.'

  'It doesn't.'

  'Yes, it does. Ossa: that is the word for a diary. Something on which the days of your life are inscribed.'

  Later he came back. 'Say the Latin again,' he asked. I spoke the lines and watched his lips move as he listened. He is memorizing, I thought. But it was not so. It was the dactyl beating in him, with its power to move the pulse, the throat.

  'Was that what you taught? Was that your job?'

  'Yes, it was my job. I made a living from it. Giving voice to the dead.'

  'And who paid you?'

  'The taxpayers. The people of South Africa, both great and small'

  'Could you teach me?'

  'I could have taught you. I could have taught you most things Roman. I am not so sure
about the Greek. I could still teach you, but: there would not be time for everything.'

  He was flattered, I could see.

  'You would find Latin easy,' I said. 'There would be much you remembered.'

  Another challenge issued, another intimation that I know. I am like a woman with a husband who keeps a mistress on the sly, scolding him, coaxing him to come clean. But my hints pass him by. He is not 'hiding anything. His ignorance is real. His ignorance, his innocence.

  'There is something that won't come, isn't there?' I said. 'Why don't you just speak, and see where the words take you?'

  But he was at a threshold he could not cross. He stood baulked, wordless, hiding behind the cigarette smoke, narrowing his eyes so that I should not see in.

  The dog circled him, came to me, drifted off again, restless.

  Is it possible that the dog is the one sent, and not he?

  You will never get to see him, I suppose. I would have liked to send you a picture, but my camera was taken in the last burglary. In any case, he is not the kind of person who photographs well. I have seen the picture on his identity card. He looks like a prisoner torn from the darkness of a cell, thrust into a room full of blinding lights, shoved against a wall, shouted at to stand still. His image raped from him, taken by force. He is like one of those half-mythical creatures that come out in photographs only as blurs, vague forms disappearing into the undergrowth that could be man or beast or merely a bad spot on the emulsion: unproved, unattested. Or disappearing over the edge of the picture, leaving behind in the shutter-trap an arm or a leg or the back of a head.

  'Would you like to go to America?' I asked him.

  'Why?'

  'To take my letter. Instead of mailing it, you could take it in person: fly to America and fly back. It would be an adventure. Better than sailing. My daughter would meet you and take care of you. I would buy the ticket in advance. Would you go?'