John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

Greedily he drinks in the atmosphere, drinks in the happy, slapdash mixture of English and Afrikaans that is their common tongue when they get together. He likes this funny, dancing language, with its particles that slip here and there in the sentence. It is lighter, airier than the Afrikaans they study at school, which is weighed down with idioms that are supposed to come from the volksmond , the people’s mouth, but seem to come only from the Great Trek, lumpish, nonsensical idioms about wagons and cattle and cattle-harness.

On his first visit to the farm, while his grandfather was still alive, all the barnyard animals of his story books were still there: horses, donkeys, cows with their calves, pigs, ducks, a colony of hens with a cock that crowed to greet the sun, nanny goats and bearded billy goats. Then, after his grandfather’s death, the barnyard began to dwindle, till nothing was left but sheep. First the horses were sold, then the pigs were turned into pork (he watched his uncle shoot the last pig: the bullet took it behind the ear: it gave a grunt and a great fart and collapsed, first on its knees, then on its side, quivering). After that the cows went, and the ducks.

The reason was the wool price. The Japanese were paying a pound a pound for wool: it was easier to buy a tractor than keep horses, easier to drive to Fraserburg Road in the new Studebaker and buy frozen butter and powdered milk than milk a cow and churn the cream. Only sheep mattered, sheep with their golden fleece.

The burden of agriculture could be shed too. The only crop still grown on the farm is lucerne, in case the grazing runs out and the sheep have to be fed. Of the orchards, only a grove of orange trees remains, yielding year after year the sweetest of navels.

When, refreshed by an after-dinner nap, his aunts and uncles congregate on the stoep to drink tea and tell stories, their talk sometimes turns to old times on the farm. They reminisce about their father the ‘gentleman farmer’ who kept a carriage and pair, who grew corn on the lands below the dam which he threshed and ground himself. ‘Yes, those were the days,’ they say, and sigh.

They like to be nostalgic about the past, but none of them want to go back to it. He does. He wants everything to be as it was in the past.

In a corner of the stoep, in the shade of the bougainvillea, hangs a canvas water-bottle. The hotter the day, the cooler the water — a miracle, like the miracle of the meat that hangs in the dark of the storeroom and does not rot, like the miracle of the pumpkins that lie on the roof in the blazing sun and stay fresh. On the farm, it seems, there is no decay.

The water from the water-bottle is magically cool, but he pours no more than a mouthful at a time. He is proud of how little he drinks. It will stand him in good stead, he hopes, if he is ever lost in the veld. He wants to be a creature of the desert, this desert, like a lizard.

Just above the farmhouse is a stone-walled dam, twelve feet square, filled by a wind pump, which provides water for the house and garden. One hot day he and his brother launch a galvanized-iron bathtub into the dam, climb unsteadily in, and paddle it back and forth across the surface.

He fears water; he thinks of this adventure as a way of overcoming his fear. Their boat bobs about in the middle of the dam. Shafts of light flash from the dappled water; there is no sound but the trilling of cicadas. Between him and death there is only a thin sheet of metal. Nevertheless he feels quite secure, so secure that he can almost doze. This is the farm: no ill can happen here.

He has been in a boat only once before, when he was four. A man (who? — he tries to summon him up, but cannot) rowed them out on the lagoon at Plettenberg Bay. It was supposed to be a pleasure-trip, but all the while they rowed he sat frozen, fixing his eye on the far shore. Only once did he glance over the side. Fronds of water-grass rippled languidly deep below them. It was as he feared, and worse; his head spun. Only these fragile boards, which groaned with every oar stroke as if about to crack, kept him from plunging to his death. He gripped tighter and closed his eyes, beating down the panic inside him.

There are two Coloured families on Voëlfontein, each with a house of their own. There is also, near the dam wall, the house, now without a roof, in which Outa Jaap used to live. Outa Jaap was on the farm before his grandfather; he himself remembers Outa Jaap only as a very old man with milky-white, sightless eyeballs and toothless gums and knotted hands, sitting on a bench in the sun, to whom he was taken before he died, perhaps in order to be blessed, he is not sure. Though Outa Jaap is gone now, his name is still mentioned with deference. Yet when he asks what was special about Outa Jaap, the answers that come back are very ordinary. Outa Jaap came from the days before jackal-proof fences, he is told, when the shepherd who took his sheep to graze in one of the far-flung camps would be expected to live with them and guard them for weeks on end. Outa Jaap belonged to a vanished generation. That is all.

Nevertheless, he has a sense of what lies behind these words. Outa Jaap was part of the farm; though his grandfather may have been its purchaser and legal owner, Outa Jaap came with it, knew more about it, about sheep, veld, weather, than the newcomer would ever know. That was why Outa Jaap had to be deferred to; that is why there is no question of getting rid of Outa Jaap’s son Ros, now in his middle years, though he is not a particularly good workman, unreliable and prone to get things wrong.

It is understood that Ros will live and die on the farm and be succeeded by one of his sons. Freek, the other hired man, is younger and more energetic than Ros, quicker on the uptake and more dependable. Nevertheless, he is not of the farm: it is understood that he will not necessarily stay.

Coming to the farm from Worcester, where Coloured people seem to have to beg for whatever they get (Asseblief my nooi! Asseblief my basie!) , he is relieved at how correct and formal relations are between his uncle and the volk . Each morning his uncle confers with his two men about the day’s tasks. He does not give them orders. Instead he proposes the tasks that need to be done, one by one, as if dealing cards on a table; his men deal their own cards too. In-between there are pauses, long, reflective silences in which nothing happens. Then all at once, mysteriously, the whole business seems to be settled: who will go where, who will do what. ‘ Nouja, dan sal ons maar loop, baas Sonnie! ’ — We’ll get going! And Ros and Freek don their hats and briskly set off.

It is the same in the kitchen. There are two women who work in the kitchen: Ros’s wife Tryn, and Lientjie, his daughter from another marriage. They arrive at breakfast time and leave after the midday meal, the main meal of the day, the meal that is here called dinner. So shy is Lientjie of strangers that she hides her face and giggles when spoken to. But if he stands at the kitchen door he can hear, passing between his aunt and the two women, a low stream of talk that he loves to eavesdrop on: the soft, comforting gossip of women, stories passed from ear to ear to ear, till not only the farm but the village at Fraserburg Road and the location outside the village are covered by the stories, and all the other farms of the district too: a soft white web of gossip spun over past and present, a web being spun at the same moment in other kitchens too, the Van Rensburg kitchen, the Alberts kitchen, the Nigrini kitchen, the various Botes kitchens: who is getting married to whom, whose mother-in-law is going to have an operation for what, whose son is doing well at school, whose daughter is in trouble, who visited whom, who wore what when.