John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

But it is Ros and Freek with whom he has more to do. He burns with curiosity about the lives they live. Do they wear vests and underpants like white people? Do they each have a bed? Do they sleep naked or in their work clothes or do they have pyjamas? Do they eat proper meals, sitting at table with knives and forks?

He has no way of answering these questions, for he is discouraged from visiting their houses. It would be rude, he is told — rude because Ros and Freek would find it embarrassing.

If it is not embarrassing to have Ros’s wife and daughter work in the house, he wants to ask, cooking meals, washing clothes, making beds, why is it embarrassing to visit them in their house?

It sounds like a good argument, but there is a flaw in it, he knows. For the truth is that it is embarrassing to have Tryn and Lientjie in the house. He does not like it when he passes Lientjie in the passage and she has to pretend she is invisible and he has to pretend she is not there. He does not like to see Tryn on her knees at the washtub washing his clothes. He does not know how to answer her when she speaks to him in the third person, calling him ‘ die kleinbaas ’, the little master, as if he were not present. It is all deeply embarrassing.

It is easier with Ros and Freek. But even with them he has to speak tortuously constructed sentences to avoid calling them jy when they call him kleinbaas . He is not sure whether Freek counts as a man or a boy, whether he is making a fool of himself when he treats Freek as a man. With Coloured people in general, and with the people of the Karoo in particular, he simply does not know when they cease to be children and become men and women. It seems to happen so early and so suddenly: one day they are playing with toys, the next day they are out with the men, working, or in someone’s kitchen, washing dishes.

Freek is gentle and soft-spoken. He has a bicycle with fat tyres and a guitar; in the evenings he sits outside his room and plays his guitar to himself, smiling his rather remote smile. On Saturday afternoons he cycles off to the Fraserburg Road location and stays there until Sunday evening, returning long after dark: from miles away they can see the tiny, wavering speck of light that is his bicycle lamp. It seems to him heroic to cycle that vast distance. He would hero-worship Freek if it were permitted.

Freek is a hired man, he is paid a wage, he can be given notice and sent packing. Nevertheless, seeing Freek sitting on his haunches, his pipe in his mouth, staring out over the veld, it seems to him that Freek belongs here more securely than the Coetzees do — if not to Voëlfontein, then to the Karoo. The Karoo is Freek’s country, his home; the Coetzees, drinking tea and gossiping on the farmhouse stoep, are like swallows, seasonal, here today, gone tomorrow, or even like sparrows, chirping, light-footed, short-lived.

Best of all on the farm, best of everything, is the hunting. His uncle owns only one gun, a heavy Lee-Enfield.303 that fires a shell too large for any of the game (once his father shot a hare with it and nothing was left over but bloody scraps). So when he visits the farm they borrow from one of the neighbours an old.22. It takes a single cartridge, loaded straight into the breech; sometimes it misfires and he comes away with a singing in his ears that lasts for hours. He never manages to hit anything with this gun except frogs in the dam and muisvoëls in the orchard. Yet never does he live more intensely than in the early mornings when he and his father set off with their guns up the dry bed of the Boesmansrivier in search of game: steenbok, duiker, hares, and, on the bare slopes of the hills, korhaan.

December after December he and his father come to the farm to hunt. They catch the train — not the Trans-Karoo Express or the Orange Express, to say nothing of the Blue Train, all of which are too expensive and anyhow do not stop at Fraserburg Road — but the ordinary passenger train, the one that stops at all the stations, even the most obscure, and sometimes has to creep into sidings and wait until the more famous expresses have flashed past. He loves this slow train, loves sleeping snug and tight under the crisp white sheets and navy-blue blankets that the bedding attendant brings, loves waking in the night at some quiet station in the middle of nowhere, hearing the hiss of the engine at rest, the clang of the ganger’s hammer as he tests the wheels. And then at dawn, when they arrive at Fraserburg Road, Uncle Son will be waiting for them, wearing his broad smile and his old, oil-stained felt hat, saying ‘ Jis-laaik, maar jy word darem groot, John! ’ — You’re getting big! — and whistling through his teeth, and they can load their bags on the Studebaker and set off on the long drive.

He accepts without question the variety of hunting practised on Voëlfontein. He accepts that they have had a good hunt if they start a single hare or hear a pair of korhaan gargling in the distance. That is enough of a story to tell the rest of the family, who, by the time they return with the sun high in the sky, are sitting on the stoep drinking coffee. Most mornings they have nothing to report, nothing at all.

There is no point in going out to hunt in the heat of the day, when the animals they want to slay are dozing in the shade. But in the late afternoon they sometimes go touring the farm roads in the Studebaker, with Uncle Son driving and his father in the passenger seat holding the.303 and he and Ros in the dickey seat at the back.

Normally it would be Ros’s job to jump out and open the camp gates for the car, wait for the car to go through, and then close the gates behind, one gate after another. But on these hunts it is his privilege to open the gates, while Ros watches and approves.

They are hunting the fabled paauw. However, since paauw are sighted only once or twice a year — so rare are they, indeed, that there is a fine of fifty pounds for shooting them, if you are caught — they settle for hunting korhaan. Ros is taken along on the hunt because, being a Bushman or nearly a Bushman, he must have preternaturally sharp vision.

And indeed it is Ros, with a slap on the roof of the car, who sees the korhaan first: grey-brown birds the size of pullets trotting among the bushes in groups of two or three. The Studebaker comes to a halt; his father rests the.303 on the window and takes aim; the clap of the shot echoes back and forth across the veld. Sometimes the birds, alarmed, take flight; more often they simply trot faster, making their characteristic gargling noise. Never does his father actually hit a korhaan, so never does he get to see one of these birds (‘bush-bustard’, says the Afrikaans-English dictionary) from close by.

His father was a gunner in the war: he manned a Bofors anti-aircraft gun shooting at German and Italian planes. He wonders whether he ever shot a plane down: he certainly never boasts of it. How did he come to be a gunner at all? He has no gift for it. Were soldiers just allotted things to do at random?

The only variety of hunting at which they do succeed is hunting by night, which, he soon discovers, is shameful and not to be boasted about. The method is simple. After supper they climb aboard the Studebaker and Uncle Son drives them in darkness across the lucerne fields. At a certain point he stops and switches on the headlights. Not thirty yards away a steenbok stands frozen, its ears cocked towards them, its dazzled eyes reflecting the lights. ‘ Skiet! ’ hisses his uncle. His father shoots and the buck falls.

They tell themselves it is acceptable to hunt in this way because the buck are a pest, eating lucerne that should go to the sheep. But when he sees how tiny the dead buck is, no larger than a poodle, he knows the argument is hollow. They hunt by night because they are not good enough to shoot anything by day.