John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

‘We will find a home for her.’

‘What do you mean, a home?’

‘A home, a home, a home for old people.’

The only room in Aunt Annie’s flat that he likes is the storeroom. The storeroom is piled to the ceiling with old newspapers and carton boxes. The shelves are full of books, all the same: a squat book in a red binding, printed on the thick, coarse paper used for Afrikaans books that looks like blotting-paper with flecks of chaff and fly-dirt trapped in it. The title on the spine is Ewige Genesing ; on the front cover is the full title, Deur ’n gevaarlike krankheid tot ewige genesing , Through a Dangerous Illness to Eternal Healing. The book was written by his great-grandfather, Aunt Annie’s father; to this book — he has heard the story many times — she has devoted most of her life, first translating the manuscript from German into Afrikaans, then spending her savings to pay a printer in Stellenbosch to print hundreds of copies, and a binder to bind them, then taking them from one bookshop in Cape Town to another. When the bookshops could not be persuaded to sell the book, she trudged from door to door herself, offering it for sale. The leftovers are on the shelves here in the storeroom; the boxes contain folded, unbound printed pages.

He has tried to read Ewige Genesing , but it is too boring. No sooner has Balthazar du Biel got under way with the story of his boyhood than he interrupts it with long reports of lights in the sky and voices speaking to him out of the heavens. The whole of the book seems to be like that: short bits about himself followed by long recountings of what the voices told him. He and his father have long-standing jokes about Aunt Annie and her father Balthazar du Biel. They intone the title of his book in the sententious, sing-song manner of a predikant , drawing out the vowels: ‘Deur ’n gevaaaarlike krannnnkheid tot eeeewige geneeeeesing .’

‘Was Aunt Annie’s father mad?’ he asks his mother.

‘Yes, I suppose he was mad.’

‘Then why did she spend all her money printing his book?’

‘She was surely afraid of him. He was a terrible old German, terribly cruel and autocratic. All his children were afraid of him.’

‘But wasn’t he already dead?’

‘Yes, he was dead, but she surely had a sense of duty towards him.’

She does not want to criticize Aunt Annie and her sense of duty towards the mad old man.

The best thing in the storeroom is the book press. It is made of iron as heavy and solid as the wheel of a locomotive. He persuades his brother to lay his arms in the bed of the press; then he turns the great screw until his brother’s arms are pinned and he cannot escape. After which they change places and his brother does the same to him.

One or two more turns, he thinks, and the bones will be crushed. What is it that makes them forbear, both of them?

During their first months in Worcester they were invited to one of the farms that supplied fruit to Standard Canners. While the grown-ups drank tea, he and his brother roamed around the farmyard. There they came upon a mealie-grinding machine. He persuaded his brother to put his hand down the funnel where the mealie-pits were thrown in; then he turned the handle. For an instant, before he stopped, he could actually feel the fine bones of his brother’s fingers yield as the cogs crushed them. His brother stood with his hand trapped in the machine, ashen with pain, a puzzled, inquiring look on his face.

Their hosts rushed them to the hospital, where a doctor amputated the middle finger of his brother’s left hand. For a while his brother walked around with his hand bandaged and his arm in a sling; then he wore a little black leather pouch over the finger-stump. He was six years old. Though no one pretended his finger would grow back, he did not complain.

He has never apologized to his brother, nor has he ever been reproached with what he did. Nevertheless, the memory lies like a weight upon him, the memory of the soft resistance of flesh and bone, and then the grinding.

‘At least you can be proud to have someone in your family who did something with his life, who left something behind him,’ says his mother.

‘You said he was a horrible old man. You said he was cruel.’

‘Yes, but he did something with his life.’

In the photograph in Aunt Annie’s bedroom Balthazar du Biel has grim, staring eyes and a tight, harsh mouth. Beside him his wife looks tired and cross. Balthazar du Biel met her, the daughter of another missionary, when he came to South Africa to convert the heathen. Later, when he went to America to preach the gospel there, he took her and their three children along. On a paddle steamer on the Mississippi someone gave his daughter Annie an apple, which she brought to show him. He administered a thrashing to her for having spoken to a stranger. These are the few facts he knows about Balthazar, plus what is contained in the clumsy red book of which there are many more copies in the world than the world wants.

Balthazar’s three children are Annie, Louisa — his mother’s mother — and Albert, who figures in the photographs in Aunt Annie’s bedroom as a frightened-looking boy in a sailor suit. Now Albert is Uncle Albert, a bent old man with pulpy white flesh like a mushroom who trembles all the time and has to be supported as he walks. Uncle Albert has never earned a proper salary in his life. He has spent his days writing books and stories; his wife has been the one to go out and work.

He asks his mother about Uncle Albert’s books. She read one long ago, she says, but cannot remember it. ‘They are very old-fashioned. People don’t read books like that any more.’

He finds two books by Uncle Albert in the storeroom, printed on the same thick paper as Ewige Genesing but bound in brown, the same brown as benches on railways stations. One is called Kain , the other Die Misdade van die vaders , The Crimes of the Fathers. ‘Can I take them?’ he asks his mother. ‘I’m sure you can,’ she says. ‘No one is going to miss them.’

He tries to read Die Misdade van die vaders , but does not get beyond page ten, it is too boring.

‘You must love your mother and be a support for her.’ He broods on Aunt Annie’s instructions. Love: a word he mouths with distaste. Even his mother has learned not to say I love you to him, though now and then she slips in a soft My love when she says goodnight.

He sees no sense in love. When men and women kiss in films, and violins play low and lush in the background, he squirms in his seat. He vows he will never be like that: soft, soppy.

He does not allow himself to be kissed, except by his father’s sisters, making an exception for them because that is their custom and they can understand nothing else. Kissing is part of the price he pays for going to the farm: a quick brush of his lips against theirs, which are fortunately always dry. His mother’s family does not kiss. Nor has he seen his mother and father kiss properly. Sometimes, when there are other people present and for some reason they have to pretend, his father kisses his mother on the cheek. She presents her cheek to him reluctantly, angrily, as if she were being forced; his kiss is light, quick, nervous.

He has seen his father’s penis only once. That was in 1945, when his father had just come back from the War and all the family was gathered on Voëlfontein. His father and two of his brothers went hunting, taking him along. It was a hot day; arriving at a dam, they decided to swim. When he saw that they were going to swim naked, he tried to withdraw, but they would not let him. They were gay and full of jokes; they wanted him to take off his clothes and swim too, but he would not. So he saw all three penises, his father’s most vividly of all, pale and white. He remembers clearly how he resented having to look at it.