John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

Sometimes, when she is feeling bitter, she makes long speeches to herself, contrasting her life on the barren housing estate with the life she lived before she was married, which she represents as a continual round of parties and picnics, of weekend visits to farms, of tennis and golf and walks with her dogs. She speaks in a low whispering voice in which only the sibilants stand out: he in his room, and his brother in his, strain their ears to hear, as she must know they will. That is another reason why his father calls her a witch: because she talks to herself, making up spells.

The idyll of life in Victoria West is substantiated by photographs from the albums: his mother, together with other women in long white dresses, standing with tennis racquets in what looks like the middle of the veld, his mother with her arm over the neck of a dog, an Alsatian.

‘Was that your dog?’ he asks.

‘That is Kim. He was the best, the most faithful dog I ever had.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He ate poisoned meat that the farmers had put down for jackals. He died in my arms.’

There are tears in her eyes.

After his father makes his appearance in the album, there are no more dogs. Instead he sees the couple at picnics with their friends from those days, or his father, with his dapper little moustache and his cocky look, posing against the bonnet of an old-fashioned black car. Then the pictures of himself begin, dozens of them, starting with the picture of a blank-faced, pudgy baby being held up to the camera by a dark, intense-looking woman.

In all these photographs, even the photographs with the baby, his mother strikes him as girlish. Her age is a mystery that intrigues him endlessly. She will not tell him, his father pretends not to know, even her brothers and sisters seem sworn to secrecy. While she is out of the house he searches through the papers in the bottom drawer of her dressing table, looking for a birth certificate, but without success. From a remark she has let slip he knows she is older than his father, who was born in 1912; but how much older? He decides she was born in 1910. That means she was thirty when he was born and is forty now. ‘You’re forty!’ he tells her triumphantly one day, watching closely for signs that he is right. She gives a mysterious smile. ‘I’m twenty-eight,’ she says.

They have the same birthday. He was born to her on her birthday. This means, as she has told him, as she tells everyone, that he is a gift of God.

He calls her not Mother or Mom but Dinny. So do his father and his brother. Where does the name come from? No one seems to know; but her brothers and sisters call her Vera, so it cannot come from their childhood. He has to be careful not to call her Dinny in front of strangers, as he has to guard against calling his aunt and uncle plain Norman and Ellen instead of Uncle Norman and Aunt Ellen. But saying Uncle and Aunt like a good, obedient, normal child is as nothing beside the circumlocutions of Afrikaans. Afrikaners are afraid to say you to anyone older than themselves. He mocks his father’s speech: ‘ Mammie moet ’n kombers oor Mammie se knieë trek anders word Mammie koud ’ — Mommy must put a blanket over Mommy’s knees, otherwise Mommy will get cold. He is relieved he is not Afrikaans and is saved from having to talk like that, like a whipped slave.

His mother decides that she wants a dog. Alsatians are the best — the most intelligent, the most faithful — but they cannot find an Alsatian for sale. So they settle for a pup half Doberman, half something else. He insists on being the one to name it. He would like to call it Borzoi because he wants it to be a Russian dog, but since it is not in fact a borzoi he calls it Cossack. No one understands. People think the name is kos-sak , food-bag, which they find funny.

Cossack turns out to be a confused, undisciplined dog, roaming about the neighbourhood, trampling gardens, chasing chickens. One day the dog follows him all the way to school. Nothing he does will put him off: when he shouts and throws stones the dog drops his ears, puts his tail between his legs, slinks away; but as soon as he gets back on his bicycle the dog lopes after him again. In the end he has to drag him home by the collar, pushing his bicycle with the other hand. He gets home in a rage and refuses to go back to school, since he is late.

Cossack is not quite full grown when he eats the ground glass someone has put out for him. His mother administers enemas, trying to flush out the glass, but without success. On the third day, when the dog just lies still, panting, and will not even lick her hand, she sends him to the pharmacy to fetch a new medicine someone has recommended. He races there and races back, but he comes too late. His mother’s face is drawn and remote, she will not even take the bottle from his hands.

He helps to bury Cossack, wrapped in a blanket, in the clay at the bottom of the garden. Over the grave he erects a cross with the name ‘Cossack’ painted on it. He does not want them to have another dog, not if this is how they must die.

His father plays cricket for Worcester. It ought to be yet another feather in his cap, another source of pride for him. His father is an attorney, which is almost as good as a doctor; he was a soldier in the war; he used to play rugby in the Cape Town league; he plays cricket. But in each case there is an embarrassing qualification. He is an attorney but no longer practises. He was a soldier but only a lance corporal. He played rugby, but only for Gardens second or perhaps even third team, and Gardens are a joke, they always come bottom of the Grand Challenge league. And now he plays cricket, but for the Worcester second team, which no one bothers to watch.

His father is a bowler, not a batsman. There is something wrong with his backlift that bedevils his batting; furthermore, he averts his eyes when he plays fast bowling. His idea of batting seems to be confined to pushing the bat forward and, if the ball slides off it, trotting a sedate single.

The reason why his father can’t bat is of course that he grew up in the Karoo, where there was no proper cricket and no way of learning. Bowling is a different matter. It is a gift: bowlers are born, not made.

His father bowls slow off-spinners. Sometimes he is hit for six; sometimes, seeing the ball slowly floating towards him, the batsman loses his head, swings wildly, and is bowled. That seems to be his father’s method: patience, cunning.

The coach for the Worcester teams is Johnny Wardle, who in the northern summer plays cricket for England. It is a great coup for Worcester that Johnny Wardle has chosen to come here. Wolf Heller is mentioned as an intercessor, Wolf Heller and his money.

He stands with his father behind the practice net watching Johnny Wardle bowl to the first-team batsmen. Wardle, a nondescript little man with sparse sandy hair, is supposed to be a slow bowler, but when he trots up and releases the ball he is surprised at how fast it travels. The batsman at the crease plays the ball easily enough, stroking it gently into the netting. Someone else bowls, then it is Wardle’s turn again. Again the batsman strokes the ball gently away. The batsman is not winning, but neither is the bowler.

At the end of the afternoon he goes home disappointed. He had expected more of a gulf between the England bowler and the Worcester batsmen. He had expected to be witness to a more mysterious craft, to see the ball doing strange things in the air and off the pitch, floating and dipping and spinning, as great slow bowling is supposed to do according to the cricket books he reads. He was not expecting a talkative little man whose only mark of distinction is that he bowls spinners as fast as he himself can bowl at his fastest.