John Coetzee: Scenes from Provincial Life

He courts his brother, though his brother is only six years old, promising to let him play with his toys if he will bowl to him in the backyard. His brother bowls for a while, then grows bored and sullen and scuttles indoors for protection. He tries to teach his mother to bowl, but she cannot master the action. While he grows exasperated, she quivers with laughter at her own clumsiness. So he allows her to throw the ball instead. But in the end the spectacle is too shameful, too easily seen from the street: a mother playing cricket with her son.

He cuts a jam-tin in half and nails the bottom half to a two-foot wooden arm. He mounts the arm on an axle through the walls of a packing case weighed down with bricks. The arm is drawn forward by a strip of inner-tube rubber, drawn back by a rope that runs through a hook on the packing case. He puts a ball in the tin cup, retreats ten yards, pulls on the rope till the rubber is taut, anchors the rope under his heel, takes up his batting position, and releases the rope. Sometimes the ball shoots up into the sky, sometimes straight at his head; but every now and again it flies within reach and he is able to hit it. With this he is satisfied: he has bowled and batted all by himself, he has triumphed, nothing is impossible.

One day, in a mood of reckless intimacy, he asks Greenberg and Goldstein to bring out their earliest memories. Greenberg demurs: it is a game he is not willing to play. Goldstein tells a long and pointless story about being taken to the beach, a story he barely listens to. For the point of the game is, of course, to allow him to recount his own first memory.

He is leaning out of the window of their flat in Johannesburg. Dusk is falling. Out of the distance a car comes racing down the street. A dog, a small spotted dog, runs in front of it. The car hits the dog: its wheels go right over the dog’s middle. With its hind legs paralysed, the dog drags itself away, yelping with pain. No doubt it will die; but at this point he is snatched away from his perch at the window.

It is a magnificent first memory, trumping anything that poor Goldstein can dredge up. But is it true? Why was he leaning out of the window watching an empty street? Did he really see the car hit the dog, or did he just hear a dog yelping, and run to the window? Is it possible that he saw nothing but a dog dragging its hindquarters and made up the car and the driver and the rest of the story?

There is another first memory, one that he trusts more fully but would never repeat, certainly not to Greenberg and Goldstein, who would trumpet it around the school and turn him into a laughing stock.

He is sitting beside his mother in a bus. It must be cold, for he is wearing red woollen leggings and a woollen cap with a bobble. The engine of the bus labours; they are ascending the wild and desolate Swartberg Pass.

In his hand is a sweet-wrapper. He holds the wrapper out of the window, which is open a crack. It flaps and trembles in the wind.

‘Shall I let go?’ he asks his mother.

She nods. He lets it go.

The scrap of paper flies up into the sky. Below there is nothing but the grim abyss of the pass, ringed with cold mountain peaks. Craning backwards, he catches a last glimpse of the paper, still bravely flying.

‘What will happen to the paper?’ he asks his mother; but she does not comprehend.

That is the other first memory, the secret one. He thinks all the time of the scrap of paper, alone in all that vastness, that he abandoned when he should not have abandoned it. One day he must go back to the Swartberg Pass and find it and rescue it. That is his duty: he may not die until he has done it.

His mother is full of scorn for men who are ‘useless with their hands’, among whom she numbers his father, but also her own brothers, and principally her eldest brother Roland, who could have kept the farm if he had worked hard enough to pay off its debts, but did not. Of the many uncles on his father’s side (he counts six by blood, another five by marriage), the one she admires most is Joubert Olivier, who on Skipperskloof has installed an electric generator and has even taught himself dentistry. (On one of his visits to the farm he gets toothache. Uncle Joubert seats him on a chair under a tree and, without anaesthetic, drills out the hole and fills it with gutta-percha. Never in his life has he suffered such agony.)

When things break — plates, ornaments, toys — his mother fixes them herself: with string, with glue. The things she ties together come loose, since she does not know about knots. The things she glues together fall apart; she blames the glue.

The kitchen drawers are full of bent nails, lengths of string, balls of tinfoil, old stamps. ‘Why are we saving them?’ he asks. ‘In case,’ she replies.

In her angrier moods his mother denounces all book learning. Children should be sent to trade school, she says, then put to work. Studying is just nonsense. Learning to be a cabinet-maker or a carpenter, learning to work with wood, is best. She is disenchanted with farming: now that farmers have suddenly become rich there is too much idleness among them, too much ostentation.

For the price of wool is rocketing. According to the radio, the Japanese are paying a pound a pound for the best grades. Sheep-farmers are buying new cars and taking seaside holidays. ‘You must give us some of your money, now that you are so rich,’ she tells Uncle Son on one of their visits to Voëlfontein. She smiles as she speaks, pretending it is a joke, but it is not funny. Uncle Son looks embarrassed, murmurs a reply he does not catch.

The farm was not meant to go to Uncle Son alone, his mother tells him: it was bequeathed to all twelve sons and daughters in equal portions. To save it from being auctioned off to some stranger, the sons and daughters agreed to sell their portions to Son; from that sale they came away with IOUs for a few pounds each. Now, because of the Japanese, the farm is worth thousands of pounds. Son ought to share his money.

He is ashamed of his mother for the crudeness with which she talks about money.

‘You must become a doctor or an attorney,’ she tells him. ‘Those are the people who make money.’ However, at other times she tells him that attorneys are all crooks. He does not ask how his father fits into this picture, his father the attorney who did not make money.

Doctors are not interested in their patients, she says. They just give you pills. Afrikaans doctors are the worst, because they are incompetent as well.

She says so many different things at different times that he does not know what she really thinks. He and his brother argue with her, point out the contradictions. If she thinks farmers are better than attorneys, why did she marry an attorney? If she thinks book learning is nonsense, why did she become a teacher? The more they argue with her the more she smiles. She takes so much pleasure in her children’s skill with words that she concedes every point, barely defending herself, willing them to win.

He does not share her pleasure. He does not think these arguments funny. He wishes she would believe in something. Her sweeping judgments, born out of passing moods, exasperate him.

As for him, he will probably become a teacher. That will be his life when he grows up. It seems a dull kind of life, but what else is there? For a long time he was going to become an engine-driver. ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ his aunts and uncles used to ask. ‘An engine-driver!’ he would pipe up, and everyone would nod and smile. Now he understands that ‘Engine-driver’ is what all small boys are expected to say, just as small girls are expected to say ‘Nurse’. He is no longer small now, he belongs to the big world; he will have to put aside the fantasy of driving a great iron horse and do the realistic thing. He is good at school, there is nothing else he knows of that he is good at, therefore he will stay on at school, moving up through the ranks. One day, perhaps, he will even become an inspector. But he will not take an office job. How can one work from morning to night with only two weeks’ holiday a year?