John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

‘What about here?’ she says. She leans over his shoulder and stabs a finger at the text. Her hand is tiny, her skin mottled; on the third finger is a diamond in an extravagant setting. ‘Where it says Notwithstanding the aforesaid.’

‘It says that if you can demonstrate financial distress you are entitled to apply to the trust for support.’

‘What about notwithstanding ?’

‘It means that what is stated in this clause is an exception to what has been stated before and takes precedence over it.’

‘But it also means that the trust cannot withstand my claim. What does withstand mean if it doesn’t mean that?’

‘It is not a question of what withstand means. It is a question of what Notwithstanding the aforesaid means. You must take the phrase as a whole.’

She gives an impatient snort. ‘I am paying for your services as an expert on English, not as a lawyer,’ she says. ‘The will is written in English, in English words. What do the words mean? What does notwithstanding mean?’

A madwoman , he thinks. How am I going to get out of this? But of course she is not mad. She is simply in the grip of rage and greed: rage against the husband who has slipped her grasp, greed for his money.

‘The way I understand the clause,’ she says, ‘if I make a claim then no one, including my brother-in-law, can withstand it. Because that is what not withstand means: he can’t withstand me. Otherwise what is the point of using the word? Do you see what I mean?’

‘I see what you mean,’ he says.

He leaves the house with a cheque for ten rands in his pocket. Once he has delivered his report, his expert report, to which he will have attached a copy, attested by a Commissioner of Oaths, of the degree certificate that makes him an expert commentator on the meaning of English words, including the word notwithstanding , he will receive the remaining thirty rands of his fee.

He delivers no report. He forgoes the money that is owed him. When the widow telephones to ask what is up, he quietly puts down the receiver.

Features of his character that emerge from the story: (a) integrity (he declines to read the will as his employer wants him to); (b) naïveté (he misses an opportunity to make some badly needed money).

31 May 1975

South Africa is not formally in a state of war, but it might as well be. As resistance has grown, the rule of law has step by step been suspended. The police and the people who run the police (as hunters run packs of dogs) are by now more or less unconstrained. In the guise of news, radio and television relay the official lies. Yet over the whole sorry, murderous show there hangs an air of staleness. The old rallying cries — Uphold white Christian civilization! Honour the sacrifices of the forefathers! — have lost all force. The chess players have moved into the endgame, and everyone knows it.

Yet as the game slowly winds down, human lives are still being consumed — consumed and shat out. As it is the fate of some generations to be destroyed by war, so it seems the fate of the present one to be ground down by politics.

If Jesus had stooped to play politics he might have become a key man in Roman Judaea, a big operator. It was because he was indifferent to politics, and made his indifference clear, that he was liquidated. How to live one’s life outside politics, and one’s death too: that was the example he set for his followers.

Odd to find himself considering Jesus as a guide. But where should he search for a better one?

Caution: Avoid pushing his interest in Jesus too far and turning this into a narrative about finding the true way.

2 June 1975

The house across the street has new owners, a couple of more or less his own age with young children and a BMW. He pays no attention to them until one day there is a knock at the door. ‘Hello, I’m David Truscott, your new neighbour. I’ve locked myself out. Could I use your telephone?’ And then, as an afterthought: ‘Don’t I know you?’

Recognition dawns. They do indeed know each other. In 1952 David Truscott and he were in the same class, Standard Six, at St Joseph’s College. He and David Truscott might have progressed side by side through the rest of high school but for the fact that David failed Standard Six and had to be kept behind. It was not hard to see why he failed. In Standard Six came algebra, and about algebra David could not grasp the first thing, the first thing being that x, y and z were there to liberate one from the tedium of arithmetic. In Latin too, David never quite got the hang of things — of the subjunctive, for example. Even at so early an age it seemed to him clear that David would be better off out of school, away from Latin and algebra, in the real world, counting out banknotes in a bank or selling shoes.

But despite being regularly flogged for not grasping things — floggings that he accepted philosophically, though now and again his glasses would cloud with tears — David Truscott persisted in his schooling, pushed no doubt from behind by his parents. Somehow or other he struggled through Standard Six and then Standard Seven and so on to Standard Ten; and now here he is, twenty years later, neat and bright and prosperous and, it emerges, so preoccupied with matters of business that when he set off for the office in the morning he forgot his house key and — since his wife has taken the children to a party — can’t get into the family home.

‘And what is your line of business?’ he inquires of David, more than curious.

‘Marketing. I’m with the Woolworths Group. How about you?’

‘Oh, I’m in-between. I used to teach at a university in the United States, now I’m looking for a position here.’

‘Well, we must get together. You must come over for a drink, exchange notes. Do you have children?’

‘I am a child. I mean, I live with my father. My father is getting on in years. He needs looking after. But come in. The telephone is over there.’

So David Truscott, who did not understand x and y , is a flourishing marketer or marketeer, while he, who had no trouble understanding x and y and much else besides, is an unemployed intellectual. What does that suggest about the workings of the world? What it seems most obviously to suggest is that the path that leads through Latin and algebra is not the path to material success. But it may suggest more besides: that understanding things is a waste of time; that if you want to succeed in the world and have a happy family and a nice home and a BMW you should not try to understand things but just add up the numbers or press the buttons or do whatever else it is that marketers are so richly rewarded for doing.

In the event, David Truscott and he do not get together to have the promised drink and exchange the promised notes. If of an evening it happens that he is in the front garden raking leaves at the time when David Truscott returns from work, the two of them give a neighbourly wave or nod across the street, but no more than that. He sees somewhat more of Mrs Truscott, a pale little creature forever chivvying children into or out of the second car; but he is not introduced to her and has no occasion to speak to her. Tokai Road is a busy thoroughfare, dangerous for children. There is no good reason for the Truscotts to cross to his side, or for him to cross to theirs.

3 June 1975

From where he and the Truscotts live one has only to stroll a kilometre or so in a southerly direction to come face to face with Pollsmoor. Pollsmoor — no one bothers to call it Pollsmoor Prison — is a place of incarceration ringed around with high walls and barbed wire and watch towers. Once upon a time it stood all alone in a waste of sandy scrubland. But over the years, first hesitantly, then more confidently, the suburban developments have crept closer, until now, hemmed in by neat rows of homes from which upright citizens emerge each morning to play their part in the national economy, it is Pollsmoor that has become the anomaly in the landscape.