John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

Since the day his father came back from war service they have battled each other in a second war which his father has stood no chance of winning because he could never have foreseen how pitiless, how tenacious his enemy would be. For seven years that war has ground on; today at last he has triumphed. He feels like the Russian soldier on the Brandenburg Gate, raising the red banner over the ruins of Berlin.

Yet at the same time he wishes he were not here, witnessing this shame. Unfair! he wants to cry: I am just a child! He wishes that someone, a woman, would take him in her arms, make the sore place better, soothe him, tell him it was just a bad dream. He thinks of his grandmother’s cheek, soft and cool and dry as silk, offered to him to be kissed. He wishes his grandmother would come and put it all right.

A ball of phlegm catches in his father’s throat. He coughs, turns on his side. His eyes open, the eyes of a man fully conscious, fully aware of where he is. The eyes take him in as he stands there, where he should not be, spying. The eyes are without judgment but without human kindness either.

Lazily the man’s hand sweeps down and rearranges his pyjama pants.

He wants the man to say something, some ordinary word — ‘What time is it?’ — to make it easier for him. But the man says nothing. The eyes continue to regard him, peaceably, distantly. Then they close and he is asleep again.

He returns to his room, closes the door.

Sometimes, in the days that follow, the gloom lifts. The sky, that usually sits tight and closed over his head, not so near that it can be touched but not much further either, opens a slit, and for an interval he can see the world as it really is. He sees himself in his white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and the grey short trousers that he is on the point of outgrowing: not a child, not what a passer-by would call a child, too big for that now, too big to use that excuse, yet still as stupid and self-enclosed as a child: childish; dumb; ignorant; retarded. In a moment like this he can see his father and his mother too, from above, without anger: not as two grey and formless weights seating themselves on his shoulders, plotting his misery day and night, but as a man and a woman living dull and trouble-filled lives of their own. The sky opens, he sees the world as it is, then the sky closes and he is himself again, living the only story he will admit, the story of himself.

His mother stands at the sink, in the dimmest corner of the kitchen. She stands with her back to him, her arms flecked with soapsuds, scouring a pot, in no great hurry. As for him, he is roaming around, talking about something, he does not know what, talking with his usual vehemence, complaining.

His mother turns from her chore; her gaze flickers over him. It is a considered look, without any fondness. She is not seeing him for the first time. Rather, she is seeing him as he has always been and as she has always known him to be when she is not wrapped up in illusion. She sees him, sums him up, and is not pleased. She is even bored with him.

This is what he fears from her, from the person in all the world who knows him best, who has the huge, unfair advantage over him of knowing all about his first, most helpless, most intimate years, years of which, despite every effort, he himself can remember nothing; who probably knows as well, since she is inquisitive and has sources of her own, the paltry secrets of his school life. He fears his mother’s judgment. He fears the cool thoughts that must be passing through her mind at moments like this, when there is no passion to colour them, no reason for her faculties to be anything but clear; above all he fears the moment, a moment that has not yet arrived, when she will pronounce her judgment. It will be like a stroke of lightning; he will not be able to withstand it. He does not want to hear it. So much does he not want to hear it that he can feel a hand go up inside his own head to block his ears, block his sight. He would rather be blind and deaf than know what his mother thinks of him. He would rather live like a tortoise inside its shell.

For it is not true that, as he likes to think, this woman was brought into the world for the sole purpose of loving him and protecting him and satisfying his wants. On the contrary, she had a life before he came into being, a life in which she gave him not the slightest thought. Then at a certain moment in history she gave birth to him. She bore him and she decided to love him; perhaps she chose to love him even before she bore him; nevertheless, she chose to love him, and therefore she can choose to stop loving him.

‘Wait until you have children of your own,’ she says to him in one of her bitter moods. ‘Then you will know.’ What will he know? It is a formula she uses, a formula that sounds as if it comes from the old days. Perhaps it is what each generation says to the next, as a warning, as a threat. But he does not want to hear it. Wait until you have children. What nonsense, what a contradiction! How can a child have children? Anyway, what he would know if he were a father, if he were his own father, is precisely what he does not want to know. He will not accept the vision of the world that she wants to force upon him: a sober, disappointed, disillusioned vision.

Aunt Annie is dead. Despite the promises of the doctors, she never walked after her fall, not even with a stick. From her bed in the Volkshospitaal she was transferred to a bed in an old-age home in Stikland, in the back of beyond, where no one had the time to visit her and where she died alone. Now she is to be buried in Woltemade cemetery no. 3.

At first he refuses to go. He has to listen to enough prayers at school, he says, he does not want to hear more. He is vocal in his scorn for the tears that are going to be shed. Giving Aunt Annie a proper funeral is just a way for her relatives to make themselves feel good. She should be buried in a hole in the garden of the old-age home. It would save money.

In his heart he does not mean it. But he is compelled to say things like this to his mother; he needs to watch her face tighten in hurt and outrage. How much more must he say before she will at last round on him and tell him to be quiet?

He does not like to think of death. He would prefer it if, when people got old and sick, they simply stopped existing and disappeared. He does not like ugly old bodies; the thought of old people taking off their clothes makes him shudder. He hopes that the bath in their house in Plumstead has never had an old person in it.

His own death is a different matter. He is always somehow present after his death, floating above the spectacle, enjoying the grief of those who caused it and who, now that it is too late, wish he were still alive.

In the end, however, he does go with his mother to Aunt Annie’s funeral. He goes because she pleads with him, and he likes being pleaded with, likes the feeling of power it gives; also because he has never been to a funeral and wants to see how deep they dig the grave, how a coffin is lowered into it.

It is not a grand funeral at all. There are only five mourners, and a young Dutch Reformed dominee with pimples. The five are Uncle Albert and his wife and son, and then his mother and himself. He has not seen Uncle Albert for years. He is bent almost double over his stick; tears stream from his pale-blue eyes; the wings of his collar stick out as though his tie has been knotted by other hands.

The hearse arrives. The undertaker and his assistant are in formal black, far more smartly dressed than any of them (he is in his St Joseph’s school uniform: he possesses no suit). The dominee says a prayer in Afrikaans for the departed sister; then the hearse is reversed to the graveside and the coffin is slid out, onto poles over the grave. To his disappointment, it is not lowered into the grave — that must wait, it appears, for the graveyard workers — but discreetly the undertaker gestures that they may toss clods of earth on to it.