John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

Yet the truth is that many mornings he wakes struggling for breath; bouts of sneezing convulse him for minutes on end, till he is panting and weeping and wants to die. There is no feigning in these colds of his.

The rule is that when you have been absent from school, you have to bring a letter of excuse. He knows his mother’s standard letter by heart: ‘Please excuse John’s absence yesterday. He was suffering from a bad cold, and I thought it advisable for him to stay in bed. Yours faithfully.’ He hands in these letters, which his mother writes as lies and which are read as lies, with an apprehensive heart.

When at the end of the year he counts the days he has missed, they come to almost one in three. Yet he still comes first in class. The conclusion he draws is that what goes on in the classroom is of no importance. He can always catch up at home. If he had his way, he would stay away from school all year, making an appearance only to write the examinations.

Everything his teachers say comes out of the textbook. He does not look down on them for that, nor do the other boys. He does not like it when, as happens now and again, a teacher’s ignorance is exposed. He would protect his teachers if he could. He listens with attention to their every word. But he listens less in order to learn than in case he is caught daydreaming (‘What did I just say? Repeat what I just said’), in case he should be called out in front of the class and humiliated.

He is convinced that he is different, special. What he does not yet know is how he is special, why he is in the world. He suspects he will not be a King Arthur or an Alexander, revered in his lifetime. Not until after he is dead will it be understood what the world has lost.

He is waiting to be called. When the call comes, he will be ready. Unflinchingly he will answer, even if it means going to his death, like the men of the Light Brigade.

The standard he subjects himself to is the standard of the VC, the Victoria Cross. Only the English have the VC. The Americans do not have it, nor, to his disappointment, do the Russians. The South Africans certainly do not have it.

He does not fail to notice that VC are his mother’s initials.

South Africa is a country without heroes. Wolraad Woltemade would perhaps count as a hero if he did not have such a funny name. Swimming out into the stormy sea time and time again to save hapless sailors is certainly courageous; but did the courage belong to the man or to the horse? The thought of Wolraad Woltemade’s white horse steadfastly plunging back into the waves (he loves the redoubled, steady force of steadfast) brings a lump to his throat.

Vic Toweel fights against Manuel Ortiz for the bantamweight title of the world. The fight takes place on a Saturday night; he stays up late with his father to listen to the commentary on the radio. In the last round Toweel, bleeding and exhausted, hurls himself at his opponent. Ortiz reels; the crowd goes wild, the commentator’s voice is hoarse with shouting. The judges announce their decision: South Africa’s Viccie Toweel is the new champion of the world. He and his father shout with elation and embrace each other. He does not know how to express his joy. Impulsively he grips his father’s hair, tugs with all his might. His father starts back, looks at him oddly.

For days the newspapers are full of pictures of the fight. Viccie Toweel is a national hero. As for him, his elation soon dwindles. He is still happy that Toweel has beaten Ortiz, but has begun to wonder why. Who is Toweel to him? Why should he not be free to choose between Toweel and Ortiz in boxing as he is free to choose between Hamiltons and Villagers in rugby? Is he bound to support Toweel, this ugly little man with hunched shoulders and a big nose and tiny blank, black eyes, because Toweel (despite his funny name) is a South African? Do South Africans have to support other South Africans even if they don’t know them?

His father is no help. His father never says anything surprising. Unfailingly he predicts that South Africa is going to win or that Western Province is going to win, whether at rugby or cricket or anything else. ‘Who do you think is going to win?’ he challenges his father the day before Western Province plays Transvaal. ‘Western Province, by a mile,’ responds his father like clockwork. They listen to the match on the radio and Transvaal wins. His father is unshaken. ‘Next year Western Province will win,’ he says. ‘Just watch.’

It seems to him stupid to believe that Western Province will win just because you come from Cape Town. Better to believe that Transvaal will win, and then get a pleasant surprise if they don’t.

In his hand he retains the feel of his father’s hair, coarse, sturdy. The violence of his action still puzzles and disturbs him. He has never been so free with his father’s body before. He would prefer that it did not happen again.

It is late at night. Everyone else is asleep. He is lying in bed, thinking. Across his bed falls a strip of orange from the street lights that burn all night over Reunion Park.

He is remembering what happened that morning during assembly, while the Christians were singing their hymns and the Jews and Catholics were roaming free. Two older boys, Catholics, had penned him in a corner. ‘When are you coming to catechism?’ they had demanded. ‘I can’t come to catechism, I have to do errands for my mother on Friday afternoons,’ he had lied. ‘If you don’t come to catechism you can’t be a Catholic,’ they had said. ‘I am a Catholic,’ he had insisted, lying again.

If the worst were to happen, he thinks now, facing the worst, if the Catholic priest were to visit his mother and ask why he never comes to catechism, or — the other nightmare — if the school principal were to announce that all boys with Afrikaans names were to be transferred to Afrikaans classes — if nightmare were to turn to reality and he were left with no recourse but to retreat into petulant shouting and storming and crying, into the baby behaviour that he knows is still inside him, coiled like a spring — if, after that tempest, he were as a last, desperate step to throw himself upon his mother’s protection, refusing to go back to school, pleading with her to save him — if he were in this way to disgrace himself utterly and finally, revealing what only he in his way and his mother in her way and perhaps his father in his own scornful way know, namely that he is still a baby and will never grow up — if all the stories that have been built up around him, built by himself, built by years of normal behaviour, at least in public, were to collapse, and the ugly, black, crying, babyish core of him were to emerge for all to see and laugh at, would there be any way in which he could go on living? Would he not have become as bad as one of those deformed, stunted, mongol children with hoarse voices and slavering lips that might as well be given sleeping pills or strangled?

All the beds in the house are old and tired, their springs sag, they creak at the slightest movement. He lies as still as he can in the sliver of light from the window, conscious of his body drawn up on its side, of his fists clenched against his chest. In this silence he tries to imagine his death. He subtracts himself from everything: from the school, from the house, from his mother; he tries to imagine the days wheeling through their course without him. But he cannot. Always there is something left behind, something small and black, like a nut, like an acorn that has been in the fire, dry, ashy, hard, incapable of growth, but there . He can imagine himself dying but he cannot imagine himself disappearing. Try as he will, he cannot annihilate the last residue of himself.