John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

‘What do you think Eddie is doing now?’ he asks his mother.

‘He is surely in a reformatory.’

‘Why in a reformatory?’

‘People like that always end up in a reformatory, and then in jail.’

He does not understand his mother’s bitterness against Eddie. He does not understand these bitter moods of hers, when things almost at random come under the disparaging lash of her tongue: Coloured people, her own brothers and sisters, books, education, the Government. He does not really care what she believes about Eddie as long as she does not change her mind from day to day. When she lashes out like this he feels that the floor is crumbling beneath his feet and he is falling.

He thinks of Eddie in his old blazer, crouching to hide from the rain that is always falling in Ida’s Valley, smoking stompies with the older Coloured boys. He is ten and Eddie, in Ida’s Valley, is ten. For a while Eddie will be eleven while he is still ten; then he will be eleven too. Always he will be pulling level, staying with Eddie for a while, then getting left behind. How long will it go on? Will he ever escape from Eddie? If they passed each other in the street one day, would Eddie, despite all his drinking and dagga-smoking, despite all the jail and all the hardening, recognize him and stop and shout ‘Jou moer! ’

At this moment, in the leaky house in Ida’s Valley, curled under a smelly blanket, still wearing his blazer, he knows that Eddie is thinking of him. In the dark Eddie’s eyes are two yellow slits. One thing he knows for sure: Eddie will have no pity on him.

Outside their circle of kinfolk they have few social contacts. On the occasions when strangers come to the house, he and his brother scuttle away like wild animals, then sneak back to lurk and eavesdrop. They have pierced spyholes in the ceiling, so that they can climb into the roof-space and peer into the living room from above. Their mother is embarrassed by the scuffling noises. ‘Just the children playing,’ she explains with a strained smile.

He flees polite talk because its formulas — ‘How are you?’ ‘How are you enjoying school?’ — baffle him. Not knowing the right answers, he mumbles and stammers like a fool. Yet finally he is not ashamed of his wildness, his impatience with the tame patter of genteel conversation.

‘Can’t you just be normal?’ asks his mother.

‘I hate normal people,’ he replies hotly.

‘I hate normal people,’ his brother echoes. His brother is seven. He wears a continual tight, nervous smile; at school he sometimes throws up for no good reason and has to be fetched home.

Instead of friends they have family. His mother’s family are the only people in the world who accept him more or less as he is. They accept him — rude, unsocialized, eccentric — not only because unless they accept him they cannot come visiting, but because they too were brought up wild and rude. His father’s family, on the other hand, disapprove of him and of the upbringing he has had at the hands of his mother. In their company he feels constrained; as soon as he can escape he begins to mock the commonplaces of politeness (‘ En hoe gaan dit met jou mammie? En met jou broer? Dis goed, dis goed! ’ How is your mommy? Your brother? Good!) Yet there is no evading them: without participating in their rituals there is no way of visiting the farm. So, squirming with embarrassment, despising himself for his cravenness, he submits. ‘ Dit gaan goed, ’ he says. ‘ Dit gaan goed met ons almal .’ We’re all fine.

He knows that his father sides with his family against him. This is one of his father’s ways of getting back at his mother. He is chilled by the thought of the life he would face if his father ran the household, a life of dull, stupid formulas, of being like everyone else. His mother is the only one who stands between him and an existence he could not endure. So at the same time that he is irritated with her for her slowness and dullness, he clings to her as his only protector. He is her son, not his father’s son. He denies and detests his father. He will not forget the day two years ago when his mother for the one and only time let his father loose on him, like a dog let loose from its chain (‘I’ve reached the limit, I can’t stand it any more!’), and his father’s eyes glared blue and angry as he shook him and cuffed him.

He must go to the farm because there is no place on earth he loves more or can imagine loving more. Everything that is complicated in his love for his mother is uncomplicated in his love for the farm. Yet since as far back as he can remember this love has had an edge of pain. He may visit the farm but he will never live there. The farm is not his home; he will never be more than a guest, an uneasy guest. Even now, day by day, the farm and he are travelling different roads, separating, growing not closer but further apart. One day the farm will be wholly gone, wholly lost; already he is grieving over that loss.

The farm used to be his grandfather’s, but his grandfather died and it passed to Uncle Son, his father’s elder brother. Son was the only one with an aptitude for farming; the rest of the brothers and sisters all too eagerly fled to the towns and cities. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the farm on which they grew up is still theirs. So at least once a year, and sometimes twice, his father goes back to the farm and takes him along.

The farm is called Voëlfontein, Bird fountain; he loves every stone of it, every bush, every blade of grass, loves the birds that give it its name, birds that as dusk falls gather in their thousands in the trees around the fountain, calling to each other, murmuring, ruffling their feathers, settling for the night. It is not conceivable that another person could love the farm as he does. But he cannot talk about his love, not only because normal people do not talk about such things but because confessing to it would be a betrayal of his mother. It would be a betrayal not only because she too comes from a farm, a rival farm in a far-off part of the world which she speaks of with a love and longing of her own but can never go back to because it was sold to strangers, but because she is not truly welcome on this farm, the real farm, Voëlfontein.

Why this is so she never explains — for which, in the end, he is grateful — but slowly he is able to piece the story together. For a long spell during the War, his mother lived with her two children in a single rented room in the town of Prince Albert, surviving on the six pounds a month his father remitted from his lance corporal’s pay plus two pounds from the Governor-General’s Distress Fund. During this time they were not once invited to the farm, though the farm was a mere two hours away by road. He knows this part of the story because even his father, when he came back from the War, was angry and ashamed of how they had been treated.

Of Prince Albert he remembers only the whine of mosquitoes in the long hot nights, and his mother walking to and fro in her petticoat, sweat standing out on her skin, her heavy, fleshy legs crisscrossed with varicose veins, trying to soothe his baby brother, forever crying; and days of terrible boredom spent behind closed shutters sheltering from the sun. That was how they lived, stuck, too poor to move, waiting for the invitation that did not come.

His mother’s lips still grow tight when the farm is mentioned. Nevertheless, when they go to the farm for Christmas she comes along. The whole extended family congregates. Beds and mattresses and stretchers are set out in every room, and on the long stoep too: one Christmas he counts twenty-six of them. All day long his aunt and the two maids are busy in the steamy kitchen, cooking, baking, producing meal after meal, one round of tea or coffee and cake after another, while the men sit on the stoep, gazing lazily over the shimmering Karoo, swapping stories about the old days.