John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

A race against time. A race against the Americans. That is something he can understand, something he can commit himself to more wholeheartedly than he could commit himself to IBM’s goal of making more and more money. And the programming itself is interesting. It requires mental ingenuity; it requires, if it is to be well done, a virtuoso command of Atlas’s two-level internal language. He arrives for work in the mornings looking forward to the tasks that await him. To stay alert he drinks cup after cup of coffee; his heart hammers, his brain seethes; he loses track of time, has to be called to lunch. In the evenings he takes his papers back to his rooms at Major Arkwright’s and works into the night.

So this is what, unbeknown to myself, I was preparing for, he thinks! So this is where mathematics leads one!

Autumn turns to winter; he is barely aware of it. He is no longer reading poetry. Instead he reads books on chess, follows grandmaster games, does the chess problems in the Observer . He sleeps badly; sometimes he dreams about programming. It is a development within himself that he watches with detached interest. Will he become like those scientists whose brains solve problems while they sleep?

There is another thing he notices. He has stopped yearning. The quest for the mysterious, beautiful stranger who will set free the passion within him no longer preoccupies him. In part, no doubt, that is because Bracknell offers nothing to match the parade of girls in London. But he cannot help seeing a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Does it mean he is growing up? Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

The people among whom he works — men, without exception — are more interesting than the people at IBM: more lively, and perhaps cleverer too, in a way he can understand, a way that is much like being clever at school. They have lunch together in the canteen of the Manor House. There is no nonsense about the food they are served: fish and chips, bangers and mash, toad in the hole, bubble and squeak, rhubarb tart with ice cream. He likes the food, has two helpings if he can, makes it the main meal of the day. In the evenings, at home (if that is what they are now, his rooms at the Arkwrights’), he does not bother to cook, simply eats bread and cheese over the chessboard.

Among his co-workers is an Indian named Ganapathy. Ganapathy often arrives late to work; on some days he does not come at all. When he does come, he does not appear to be working very hard: he sits in his cubicle with his feet on the desk, apparently dreaming. For his absences he has only the most cursory of excuses (‘I was not well’). Nevertheless, he is not chided. Ganapathy, it emerges, is a particularly valuable acquisition for International Computers. He has studied in America, holds an American degree in computer science.

He and Ganapathy are the two foreigners in the group. Together, when the weather allows, they go for after-lunch strolls in the manor grounds. Ganapathy is disparaging about International Computers and the whole Atlas project. Coming back to England was a mistake on his part, he says. The English do not know how to think big. He should have stayed in America. What is life like in South Africa? Would there be prospects for him in South Africa?

He dissuades Ganapathy from trying South Africa. South Africa is very backward, he tells him, there are no computers there. He does not tell him that outsiders are not welcome unless they are white.

A bad spell sets in, day after day of rain and blustery wind. Ganapathy does not come to work at all. Since no one else asks why, he takes it upon himself to investigate. Like him, Ganapathy has evaded the home-ownership option. He lives in a flat on the third floor of a council block. For a long while there is no answer to his knocking. Then Ganapathy opens the door. He is wearing a dressing gown over pyjamas and sandals; from the interior comes a gush of steamy warmth and a smell of rottenness. ‘Come in, come in!’ says Ganapathy. ‘Come out of the cold!’

There is no furniture in the living room except for a television set with an armchair before it, and two blazing electric heaters. Behind the door is a pile of black rubbish bags. It is from them that the bad smell comes. With the door closed the smell is quite nauseating. ‘Why don’t you take the bags out?’ he asks. Ganapathy is evasive. Nor will he say why he has not been to work. In fact, he does not appear to want to talk at all.

He wonders whether Ganapathy has a girl in the bedroom, a local girl, one of the pert little typists or shop assistants from the housing estate whom he sees on the bus. Or perhaps, indeed, an Indian girl. Perhaps that is the explanation for all of Ganapathy’s absences: there is a beautiful Indian girl living with him, and he prefers making love to her, practising Tantra, deferring orgasm for hours on end, to writing machine code for Atlas.

When he makes a move to leave, however, Ganapathy shakes his head. ‘Would you like some water?’ he offers.

Ganapathy offers him tap water because he has run out of tea and coffee. He has also run out of food. He does not buy food, except for bananas, because, it emerges, he does not cook — does not like cooking, does not know how to cook. The rubbish bags contain, for the most part, banana peels. That is what he lives on: bananas, chocolates, and, when he has it, tea. It is not the way he would like to live. In India he lived at home, and his mother and sisters took care of him. In America, in Columbus, Ohio, he lived in what he calls a dormitory, where food appeared on the table at regular intervals. If you were hungry between meals you went out and bought a hamburger. There was a hamburger place open twenty-four hours a day on the street outside the dormitory. In America things were always open, not like in England. He should never have come back to England, a country without a future where even the heating does not work.

He asks Ganapathy whether he is ill. Ganapathy brushes aside his concern: he wears the dressing gown for warmth, that is all. But he is not convinced. Now that he knows about the bananas, he sees Ganapathy with new eyes. Ganapathy is as tiny as a sparrow, with not a spare ounce of flesh. His face is gaunt. If he is not ill, he is at least starving. Behold: in Bracknell, in the heart of the Home Counties, a man is starving because he is too incompetent to feed himself.

He invites Ganapathy to lunch the next day, giving him precise instructions for how to get to Major Arkwright’s. Then he goes out, searches for a shop that is open on a Saturday afternoon, and buys what it has to offer: bread in a plastic wrapper, cold meats, frozen green peas. At noon the next day he lays out the repast and waits. Ganapathy does not arrive. Since Ganapathy does not have a telephone, there is nothing he can do about it short of conveying the meal to Ganapathy’s flat.

Absurd, but perhaps that is what Ganapathy wants: to have his food brought to him. Like himself, Ganapathy is a spoiled, clever boy. Like himself, Ganapathy has run away from his mother and the smothering ease she offers. But in Ganapathy’s case, running away seems to have used up all his energy. Now he is waiting to be rescued. He wants his mother, or someone like her, to come and save him. Otherwise he will simply waste away and die, in his flat full of garbage.

International Computers ought to hear about this. Ganapathy has been entrusted with a key task, the logic of the job-scheduling routines. If Ganapathy falls out, the whole Atlas project will be delayed. But how can International Computers be made to understand what ails Ganapathy? How can anyone in England understand what brings people from the far corners of the earth to die on a wet, miserable island which they detest and to which they have no ties?