John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

Boy Scouts, he discovers, consists, like school, of passing examinations. For each examination you pass you get a badge, which you sew on to your shirt.

Examinations are taken in a preordained sequence. The first examination is in tying knots: the reef knot and the double reef, the sheepshank, the bowline. He passes it, but without distinction. It is not clear to him how one passes these Boy Scout examinations with distinction, how one excels.

The second examination is for a woodsman’s badge. To pass, he is required to light a fire, using no paper and striking no more than three matches. On the bare ground at the side of the Anglican church hall, on a winter’s evening with a cold wind blowing, he assembles his heap of twigs and scraps of bark, and then, with his troop leader and the scoutmaster observing, strikes his matches one by one. Each time the fire does not take: each time the wind blows out the tiny flame. The scoutmaster and troop leader turn away. They do not utter the words, ‘You have failed,’ so he is not sure that he has in fact failed. What if they are going off to confer and decide that, because of the wind, the test was unfair? He waits for them to come back. He waits for the woodsman’s badge to be given to him anyhow. But nothing happens. He stands by his pile of twigs and nothing happens.

No one mentions it again. It is the first examination he has failed in his life.

Every June vacation the Scout troop goes on a camp. Save for a week in hospital at the age of four he has never been away from his mother. But he is determined to go with the Scouts.

There is a list of things to take. One is a groundsheet. His mother does not have a groundsheet, is not even sure what a groundsheet is. Instead she gives him an inflatable red rubber mattress. At the campsite he discovers that all the other boys have proper khaki-coloured groundsheets. His red mattress at once sets him apart. That is not all. He cannot bring himself to move his bowels over a stinking pit in the earth.

On the third day of the camp they go swimming in the Breede River. Though, at the time when they lived in Cape Town, he and his brother and his cousin used to catch the train to Fish Hoek and spend whole afternoons clambering on the rocks and making castles in the sand and splashing in the waves, he does not actually know how to swim. Now, as a Boy Scout, he must swim across the river and back.

He hates rivers for their murkiness, for the mud that oozes between his toes, for the rusty tin cans and broken bottles he could step on; he prefers clean white sea-sand. But he plunges in and somehow splashes across. On the far bank he clutches the root of a tree, finds a foothold, stands waist-deep in sullen brown water, his teeth chattering.

The other boys turn and begin to swim back. He is left alone. There is nothing to do but launch himself back into the water.

By midstream he is exhausted. He gives up swimming and tries to stand, but the river is too deep. His head goes under. He tries to lift himself, to swim again, but he has not the strength. He goes under a second time.

He has a vision of his mother sitting on a chair with a high, straight back reading the letter that tells of his death. His brother stands at her side, reading over her shoulder.

The next he knows, he is lying on the riverbank and his troop leader, whose name is Michael but whom he has been too shy to speak to, is straddling him. He closes his eyes, filled with well-being. He has been saved.

For weeks afterwards he thinks of Michael, of how Michael risked his own life to plunge back into the river and rescue him. Each time it strikes him how wonderful it is that Michael should have noticed — noticed him, noticed that he was failing. Compared with Michael (who is in Standard Seven and has all except the most advanced badges and is going to be a King’s Scout) he is negligible. It would have been quite appropriate for Michael not to have seen him go under, even not to have missed him until they got back to camp. Then all that would have been required of Michael would have been to write the letter to his mother, the cool, formal letter beginning: ‘We regret to inform you …’

From that day onward he knows there is something special about him. He should have died but he did not. Despite his unworthiness, he has been given a second life. He was dead but is alive.

Of what passed at the camp he breathes not a word to his mother.

The great secret of his school life, the secret he tells no one at home, is that he has become a Roman Catholic, that for all practical purposes he ‘is’ a Roman Catholic.

The topic is difficult to raise at home because their family ‘is’ nothing. They are of course South Africans, but even South Africanness is faintly embarrassing, and therefore not talked about, since not everyone who lives in South Africa is a South African, or not a proper South African.

In religion they are certainly nothing. Not even in his father’s family, which is much safer and more ordinary than his mother’s, does anyone go to church. He himself has been in a church only twice in his life: once to be baptized and once to celebrate victory in World War Two.

The decision to ‘be’ a Roman Catholic is made on the spur of the moment. On the first morning at his new school, while the rest of the class is marched off to assembly in the school hall, he and the three other new boys are kept behind. ‘What is your religion?’ asks the teacher of each of them. He glances right and left. What is the right answer? What religions are there to choose from? Is it like Russians and Americans? His turn comes. ‘What is your religion?’ asks the teacher. He is sweating, he does not know what to say. ‘Are you a Christian or a Roman Catholic or a Jew?’ she demands impatiently. ‘Roman Catholic,’ he says.

When the questioning is over, he and another boy who says he is a Jew are motioned to stay behind; the two who say they are Christians go off to assembly.

They wait to see what will happen to them. But nothing happens. The corridors are empty, the building is silent, there are no teachers left.

They wander into the playground, where they join the rag-tag of other boys left behind. It is marbles season; in the unfamiliar hush of the empty grounds, with dove-calls in the air and the faint, far-off sound of singing, they play marbles. Time passes. Then the bell rings for the end of assembly. The rest of the boys return from the hall, marching in files, class by class. Some appear to be in a bad mood. ‘ Jood! ’ an Afrikaans boy hisses at him as he passes: Jew! When they rejoin their class, no one smiles.

The episode disturbs him. He hopes that the next day he and the other new boys will be kept behind again and asked to make new choices. Then he, who has clearly made a mistake, can correct himself and be a Christian. But there is no second chance.

Twice a week the separation of sheep from goats is repeated. While Jews and Catholics are left to their own devices, the Christians go off to assembly to sing hymns and be preached to. In revenge for which, and in revenge for what the Jews did to Christ, the Afrikaans boys, big, brutal, knobbly, sometimes catch a Jew or a Catholic and punch him in the biceps, short, vicious knuckle-punches, or knee him in the balls, or twist his arms behind his back till he pleads for mercy. ‘ Asseblief! the boy whimpers: Please! ‘ Jood! ’ they hiss back: ‘ Jood! Vuilgoed! ’ Jew! Filth!

One day during the lunch break two Afrikaans boys corner him and drag him to the farthest corner of the rugby field. One of them is huge and fat. He pleads with them. ‘Ek is nie ’n Jood nie,’ he says: I am not a Jew. He offers to let them ride his bicycle, offers them his bicycle for the afternoon. The more he gabbles, the more the fat boy smiles. This is evidently what he likes: the pleading, the abasement.