John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

To cricket he looks for more than Johnny Wardle offers. Cricket must be like Horatius and the Etruscans, or Hector and Achilles. If Hector and Achilles were just two men hacking away at each other with swords, there would be no point to the story. But they are not just two men: they are mighty heroes, their names ring in legend. He is glad when, at the end of the season, Wardle is dropped from the England team.

Wardle bowls, of course, with a leather ball. He is unfamiliar with the leather ball: he and his friends play with what they call a cork ball, compacted out of some hard, grey material that is proof against the stones that tear the stitching of a leather ball to shreds. Standing behind the net watching Wardle, he hears for the first time the strange whistling of a leather ball as it approaches the batsman through the air.

His first chance comes to play on a proper cricket field. A match is organized for a Wednesday afternoon, between two teams from the junior school. Proper cricket means proper wickets, a proper pitch, no need to fight for a turn to bat.

His turn comes to bat. Wearing a pad on his left leg, carrying his father’s bat that is much too heavy for him, he walks out to the middle. He is surprised at how big the field is. It is a great and lonely place: the spectators are so far away that they might as well not exist.

He takes his stand on the strip of rolled earth with a green coir mat spread over it and waits for the ball to come. This is cricket. It is called a game, but it feels to him more real than home, more real even than school. In this game there is no pretending, no mercy, no second chance. These other boys, whose names he does not know, are all against him. They are of one mind only: to cut short his pleasure. They will feel not one speck of remorse when he is out. In the middle of this huge arena he is on trial, one against eleven, with no one to protect him.

The fielders settle into position. He must concentrate, but there is something irritating he cannot put out of his mind: Zeno’s paradox. Before the arrow can reach its target it must reach halfway; before it can reach halfway it must reach a quarter of the way; before it can reach a quarter of the way … Desperately he tries to stop thinking about it; but the very fact that he is trying not to think about it agitates him still further.

The bowler runs up. He hears particularly the thud of the last two steps. Then there is a space in which the only sound breaking the silence is the eerie rustling noise of the ball as it tumbles and dips towards him. Is this what he is choosing when he chooses to play cricket: to be tested again and again and again, until he fails, by a ball that comes at him impersonally, indifferently, without mercy, seeking the chink in his defence, and faster than he expects, too fast for him to clear the confusion in his mind, compose his thoughts, decide properly what to do? And in the midst of this thinking, in the midst of this muddle, the ball arrives.

He scores two runs, batting in a state of disarray and, later, of gloom. He emerges from the game understanding less than ever the matter-of-fact way in which Johnny Wardle plays, chatting and joking all the while. Are all the fabled England players like that: Len Hutton, Alec Bedser, Denis Compton, Cyril Washbrook? He cannot believe it. To him, real cricket can only be played in silence, silence and apprehension, the heart thudding in the chest, the mouth dry.

Cricket is not a game. It is the truth of life. If it is, as the books say, a test of character, then it is a test he sees no way of passing yet does not know how to dodge. At the wicket the secret that he manages to cover up elsewhere is relentlessly probed and exposed. ‘Let us see what you are made of,’ says the ball as it whistles and tumbles through the air towards him. Blindly, confusedly, he pushes the bat forward, too soon or too late. Past the bat, past the pads, the ball finds its way. He is bowled, he has failed the test, he has been found out, there is nothing to do but hide his tears, cover his face, trudge back to the commiserating, politely schooled applause of the other boys.

On his bicycle is the British Small Arms emblem of two crossed rifles and the label ‘Smiths — BSA’. He bought the bicycle for five pounds, second-hand, with the money for his eighth birthday. It is the most solid thing in his life. When other boys boast that they have Raleighs, he replies that he has a Smiths. ‘Smiths? Never heard of Smiths,’ they say.

There is nothing to match the elation of riding a bicycle, of leaning over and swooping through the curves. On his Smiths he rides to school every morning, the half-mile from Reunion Park to the railway crossing, then the mile on the quiet road alongside the railway line. Summer mornings are the best. Water murmurs in the roadside furrows, doves coo in the bluegum trees; now and then there is an eddy of warm air to warn of the wind that will blow later in the day, chasing gusts of fine red clay-dust before it.

In winter he has to set out for school while it is still dark. With his lamp casting a halo before him, he rides through the mist, breasting its velvety softness, breathing it in, breathing it out, hearing nothing but the soft swish of his tyres. Some mornings the metal of the handlebars is so cold that his bare hands stick to it.

He tries to get to school early. He loves to have the classroom to himself, to wander around the empty seats, to mount, surreptitiously, the teacher’s podium. But he is never first at school: there are two brothers from De Doorns whose father works on the railways and who come in on the 6 a.m. train. They are poor, so poor that they own neither jerseys nor blazers nor shoes. There are other boys just as poor, particularly in the Afrikaans classes. Even on icy winter mornings they come to school in thin cotton shirts and serge short-pants so outgrown that their slim thighs can hardly move in them. Their tanned legs show chalk-white patches of cold; they blow on their hands and stamp their feet; snot is always running out of their noses.

Once there is an outbreak of ringworm, and the brothers from De Doorns have their heads shaved. On their bare skulls he can clearly see the whorls of the ringworm; his mother warns him to have no contact with them.

He prefers tight shorts to loose shorts. The clothes his mother buys for him are always too loose. He likes to gaze at slim, smooth brown legs in tight shorts. Best of all he loves the honeytan legs of boys with blond hair. The most beautiful boys, he is surprised to find, are in the Afrikaans classes, as are the ugliest, the ones with hairy legs and Adam’s apples and pustules on their faces. Afrikaans children are almost like Coloured children, he finds, unspoiled and thoughtless, running wild, then suddenly, at a certain age, going bad, their beauty dying within them.

Beauty and desire: he is disturbed by the feelings that the legs of these boys, blank and perfect and inexpressive, create in him. What is there that can be done with legs beyond devouring them with one’s eyes? What is desire for ?

The naked sculptures in the Children’s Encyclopaedia affect him in the same way: Daphne pursued by Apollo; Persephone ravished by Dis. It is a matter of shape, of perfection of shape. He has an idea of the perfect human body. When he sees that perfection manifested in white marble, something thrills inside him; a gulf opens up; he is on the edge of falling.

Of all the secrets that set him apart, this may in the end be the worst. Among all these boys he is the only one in whom this dark erotic current runs; among all this innocence and normality, he is the only one who desires.

Yet the language of the Afrikaans boys is filthy beyond belief. They command a range of obscenity far beyond his, to do with fok and piel and poes , words from whose monosyllabic heaviness he retreats in dismay. How are they written? Until he can write them he has no way of taming them in his mind. Is fok spelled with a v , which would make it more venerable, or with an f , which would make it a truly wild word, primeval, without ancestry? The dictionary says nothing, the words are not there, none of them.