John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

‘If I had Mrs Noerdien for just one extra hour a day,’ says his father, ‘we could be finished in no time. I could call out the figures and she could check. Doing it by myself is hopeless.’

His father is not a qualified bookkeeper; but during the years he spent running his own legal practice he picked up at least the rudiments. He has been the brothers’ bookkeeper for twelve years, ever since he gave up the law. The brothers, it must be presumed — Cape Town is not a big city — are cognisant of his chequered past in the legal profession. They are cognisant of it and therefore — it must be presumed — keep a close watch on him, in case, even so close to retirement, he should think of trying to diddle them.

‘If you could bring the ledgers home with you,’ he suggests to his father, ‘I could give you a hand with the checking.’

His father shakes his head, and he can guess why. When his father refers to the ledgers, he does so in hushed tones, as though they were holy books, as though keeping them were a priestly function. There is more to keeping books, his attitude would seem to suggest, than applying elementary arithmetic to columns of figures.

‘I don’t think I can bring the ledgers home,’ his father says. ‘Not on the train. The brothers would never allow it.’

He can appreciate that. What would become of Acme if his father were mugged and the sacred books stolen?

‘Then let me come in to the city at the end of the day, at closing time, and take over from Mrs Noerdien. You and I could work together from five till eight, say.’

His father is silent.

‘I’ll just help with the checking,’ he says. ‘If anything confidential comes up, I promise not to look.’

By the time he arrives for his first stint, Mrs Noerdien and the counter hands have gone home. He is introduced to the brothers. ‘My son John,’ says his father, ‘who has offered to help with the checking.’

He shakes their hands: Mr Rodney Silverman, Mr Barrett Silverman.

‘I’m not sure we can afford you on the payroll, John,’ says Mr Rodney. He turns to his brother. ‘Which do you think is more expensive, Barrett, a PhD or a CA? We may have to take out a loan.’

They all laugh together at the joke. Then they offer him a rate. It is precisely the same rate he earned as a student, sixteen years ago, for copying household data onto cards for the municipal census.

With his father he settles down in the bookkeepers’ glass cubicle. The task that faces them is simple. They have to go through file after file of invoices, confirming that the figures have been transcribed correctly to the books and to the bank ledger, ticking them off one by one in red pencil, checking the addition at the foot of the page.

They set to work and make steady progress. Once every thousand entries they come across an error, a piddling five cents one way or the other. For the rest the books are in exemplary order. As defrocked clergymen make the best proofreaders, so debarred lawyers seem to make good bookkeepers — debarred lawyers assisted if need be by their over-educated, under-employed sons.

The next day, on his way to Acme, he is caught in a rain-shower. He arrives sodden. The glass of the cubicle is fogged; he enters without knocking. His father is hunched over his desk. There is a second presence in the cubicle, a woman, young, gazelle-eyed, softly curved, in the act of putting on her raincoat.

He halts in his tracks, transfixed.

His father rises from his seat. ‘Mrs Noerdien, this is my son John.’

Mrs Noerdien averts her gaze, does not offer a hand. ‘I’ll go now,’ she says in a low voice, addressing not him but his father.

An hour later the brothers too take their leave. His father boils the kettle and makes them coffee. Page after page, column after column they press on with the work, until ten o’clock, until his father is blinking with exhaustion.

The rain has stopped. Down a deserted Riebeeck Street they head for the station: two men, able-bodied more or less, safer at night than a single man, many times safer than a single woman.

‘How long has Mrs Noerdien been working for you?’ he asks.

‘She came last February.’

He waits for more. There is no more. There is plenty he could ask. For instance: How does it happen that Mrs Noerdien, who wears a head-scarf and is presumably Muslim, comes to be working for a Jewish firm, one where there is no male relative to keep a protective eye on her?

‘Is she good at her job? Is she efficient?’

‘Very good. Very meticulous.’

Again he waits for more. Again, that is the end of it.

The question he cannot bring himself to ask is: What does it do to the heart of a lonely man like yourself to be sitting side by side, day after day, in a cubicle no larger than many prison cells, with a woman who is not only as good at her job and as meticulous as Mrs Noerdien, but also as feminine?

For that is the chief impression he carries away from his brush with Mrs Noerdien. He calls her feminine because he has no better word: the feminine, a higher rarefaction of the female, to the point of becoming spirit. Married to such a woman, what would it take for a man to traverse each day the space from the exalted heights of the feminine to the earthly body of the female? To sleep with a being like that, to embrace her, to smell and taste her — what would it do to the soul? And to be beside her all day, conscious of her slightest stirring: did his father’s sad response to Dr Schwarz’s lifestyle quiz — ‘Have relations with the opposite sex been a source of satisfaction to you?’ — ‘No’ — have something to do with coming face to face, in the wintertime of his life, with beauty such as he has not known before and can never hope to possess?

Query: Why ask whether his father is in love with Mrs Noerdien when he has so obviously fallen for her himself?

Undated fragment

Idea for a story.

A man, a writer, keeps a diary. In it he notes down thoughts, ideas, significant occurrences.

Things take a turn for the worse in his life. ‘Bad day,’ he writes in his diary, without elaboration. ‘Bad day … Bad day,’ he writes, day after day.

Tiring of calling each day a bad day, he decides to simply mark bad days with an asterisk, as some people (women) mark with a red cross days when they will bleed, or as other people (men, womanizers) mark with an X days when they have notched up a success.

The bad days pile up; the asterisks multiply like a plague of flies.

Poetry, if he could write poetry, might take him to the root of his malaise, this malaise that blossoms in the form of asterisks. But the spring of poetry in him seems to have dried up.

There is prose to fall back on. In theory prose can perform the same cleansing trick as poetry. But he has doubts about that. Prose, in his experience, calls for many more words than poetry. There is no point in embarking on an adventure in prose if one lacks confidence that one will be alive the next day to carry on with it.

He plays with thoughts like these — the thought of poetry, the thought of prose — as a way of not writing.

In the back pages of his diary he makes lists. One of them is headed Ways of Doing Away with Oneself . In the left-hand column he lists Methods, in the right-hand column Drawbacks .

Of the ways of doing away with oneself he has listed, the one he favours, on mature consideration, is drowning, that is to say, driving to Fish Hoek one night, parking near the deserted end of the beach, undressing in the car and putting on his swimming trunks (but why?), crossing the sand (it will have to be a moonlit night), breasting the waves, striking out into the dark, swimming until his physical powers are exhausted, then letting fate take its course.