John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

Her uncle sidles into the kitchen, wearing a pyjama top over his trousers. ‘I’ll say goodnight, Margie,’ he says. ‘Sleep tight. Don’t let the fleas bite.’ He does not say goodnight to his son. Around his son he seems distinctly tentative. Have they been having a fight?

‘I’m restless,’ she says to John. ‘Shall we go for a walk? I’ve been cooped up in the back of an ambulance all day.’

He takes her on a ramble through the well-lit streets of suburban Tokai. The houses they pass are all bigger and better than his. ‘This used to be farmland not long ago,’ he explains. ‘Then it was subdivided and sold in lots. Our house used to be a farm-labourer’s cottage. That’s why it is so shoddily built. Everything leaks: roof, walls. I spend all my free time doing repairs. I’m like the boy with his finger in the dyke.’

‘Yes, I begin to see the attraction of Merweville. At least in Merweville it doesn’t rain. But why not buy a better house here in the Cape? Write a book. Write a best-seller. Make lots of money.’

It is only a joke, but he chooses to take it seriously. ‘I wouldn’t know how to write a best-seller,’ he says. ‘I don’t know enough about people and their fantasy lives. Anyway, I wasn’t destined for that fate.’

‘What fate?’

‘The fate of being a rich and successful writer.’

‘Then what is the fate you are destined for?’

‘For exactly the present one. For living with an ageing parent in a house in the white suburbs with a leaky roof.’

‘That’s just silly, slap talk. That’s the Coetzee in you speaking. You could change your fate tomorrow if you would just put your mind to it.’

The dogs of the neighbourhood do not take kindly to strangers roaming their streets by night, arguing. The chorus of barking grows clamorous.

‘I wish you could hear yourself, John,’ she plunges on. ‘You are so full of nonsense! If you don’t take hold of yourself you are going to turn into a sour old prune of a man who wants only to be left alone in his corner. Let’s go back. I have to get up early.’

SHE SLEEPS BADLY ON the uncomfortable, hard mattress. Before first light she is up, making coffee and toast for the three of them. By seven o’clock they are on their way to Groote Schuur Hospital, crammed together in the cab of the Datsun.

She leaves Jack and his son in the waiting room, but then cannot locate her mother. Her mother had an episode during the night, she is informed at the nurses’ station, and is back in intensive care. She, Margot, should return to the waiting room, where a doctor will speak to her.

She rejoins Jack and John. The waiting room is already filling up. A woman, a stranger, is slumped in a chair opposite them. Over her head, covering one eye, she has knotted a woollen pullover caked with blood. She wears a tiny skirt and rubber sandals; she smells of mouldy linen and sweet wine; she is moaning softly to herself.

She does her best not to stare, but the woman is itching for a fight. ‘ Waarna loer jy? ’ she glares: What are you staring at? ‘ Jou moer!’

She casts her eyes down, withdraws into silence.

Her mother, if she lives, will be sixty-eight next month. Sixty-eight blameless years, blameless and contented. A good woman, all in all: a good mother, a good wife of the distracted, fluttering variety. The kind of woman men find it easy to love because she so clearly needs to be protected. And now cast into this hell-hole! Jou moer! — filthy talk. She must get her mother out as soon as she can, and into a private hospital, no matter what the cost.

My little bird , that is what her father used to call her: my tortelduifie, my little turtledove. The kind of little bird that prefers not to leave its cage. Growing up she, Margot, had felt big and ungainly beside her mother. Who will ever love me? she had asked herself. Who will ever call me his little dove?

Someone is tapping her on the shoulder. ‘Mrs Jonker?’ A fresh young nurse. ‘Your mother is awake, she is asking for you.’

‘Come,’ she says. Jack and John follow her.

Her mother is conscious, she is calm, so calm as to seem a little remote. The oxygen mask has been replaced with a tube into her nose. Her eyes have lost their colour, turned into flat grey pebbles. ‘Margie?’ she whispers.

She presses her lips to her mother’s brow. ‘I’m here, Ma,’ she says.

The doctor enters, the same doctor as before, with the dark-rimmed eyes. Kiristany says the badge on his coat. On duty yesterday afternoon, still on duty this morning.

Her mother has had a cardiac episode, says Doctor Kiristany, but is now stable. She is very weak. Her heart is being stimulated electrically.

‘I would like to move my mother to a private hospital,’ she says to him, ‘somewhere quieter than this.’

He shakes his head. Impossible, he says. He cannot give his consent. Perhaps in a few days’ time, if she rallies.

She stands back. Jack bends over his sister, murmuring words she cannot hear. Her mother’s eyes are open, her lips move, she seems to be replying. Two old people, two innocents, born in olden times, out of place in the loud, angry place this country has become.

‘John?’ she says. ‘Do you want to speak to Ma?’

He shakes his head. ‘She won’t know me,’ he says.

[Silence.]

And?

That’s the end.

The end? But why stop there?

It seems a good place. She won’t know me : a good line.

[Silence.]

Well, what is your verdict?

My verdict? I still don’t understand: if it is a book about John why are you putting in so much about me? Who is going to want to read about me — me and Lukas and my mother and Carol and Klaus?

You were part of your cousin. He was part of you. That is plain enough, surely. What I am asking is, can it stand as it is?

Not as it is, no. I want to go over it again, as you promised.

Interviews conducted in Somerset West, South Africa,

December 2007 and June 2008.

SENHORA NASCIMENTO, YOU ARE Brazilian by birth, but you spent several years in South Africa. How did that come about?

We went to South Africa from Angola, my husband and I and our two daughters. In Angola my husband worked for a newspaper and I had a job with the National Ballet. But then in 1973 the government declared an emergency and shut down his newspaper. They wanted to call him up into the army too — they were calling up all men under the age of forty-five, even those who were not citizens. We could not go back to Brazil, it was still too dangerous, we saw no future for ourselves in Angola, so we left, we took the boat to South Africa. We were not the first to do that, or the last.

And why Cape Town?

Why Cape Town? No special reason, except that we had a relative there, a cousin of my husband’s who owned a fruit and vegetable shop. After we arrived we stayed with him and his family, it was difficult for all of us, nine people in three rooms, while we waited for our residence papers. Then my husband managed to find a job as a security guard and we could move into a flat of our own. That was in a place called Epping. A few months later, just before the disaster that ruined everything, we moved again, to Wynberg, to be nearer the children’s school.

What disaster do you refer to?

My husband was working night shifts guarding a warehouse near the docks. He was the only guard. There was a robbery — a gang of men broke in. They attacked him, hit him with an axe. Maybe it was a machete, but more likely it was an axe. One side of his face was smashed in. I still don’t find it easy to talk about. An axe. Hitting a man in the face with an axe because he is doing his job. I can’t understand it.