John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

It is of course an irony that the South African gulag should protrude so obscenely into white suburbia, that the same air that he and the Truscotts breathe should have passed through the lungs of miscreants and criminals. But to the barbarians, as Zbigniew Herbert has pointed out, irony is like salt: you crunch it between your teeth, you enjoy a moment ary savour, but when the savour is gone the brute facts are still before you. So: What does one do with the brute fact of Pollsmoor once the irony is used up?

Continuation: the Prisons Service vans that pass along Tokai Road on their way from the courts; flashes of faces, fingers gripping the grated windows; what stories the Truscotts tell their children to explain those hands and faces, some defiant, some forlorn.

DR FRANKL, YOU HAVE had a chance to read the pages I sent you from John Coetzee’s notebooks for the years 1972-75, the years, more or less, when you were friendly with him. As a way of getting into your story, I wonder whether you have any thoughts about those entries. Do you recognize in them the man you knew? Do you recognize the country and the times he describes?

Yes, I remember South Africa. I remember Tokai Road, I remember the vans crammed with prisoners on their way to Pollsmoor. I remember it all quite clearly.

Nelson Mandela was of course imprisoned at Pollsmoor. Are you surprised that Coetzee doesn’t mention Mandela as a near neighbour?

Mandela wasn’t moved to Pollsmoor until later. In 1975 he was still on Robben Island.

Of course, I had forgotten that. And what of Coetzee’s relations with his father? He and his father lived together for some while after his mother’s death. Did you ever meet his father?

Several times.

Did you see the father in the son?

Do you mean, was John like his father? Physically, no. His father was smaller and slighter: a neat little man, handsome in his way, though plainly not well. He drank on the sly, and smoked, and generally did not look after himself, whereas John was a quite ferocious abstainer.

And in other respects? Were they alike in other respects?

They were both loners. Socially inept. Repressed, in the wider sense of the word.

And how did you come to meet John Coetzee?

I’ll tell you in a moment. But first, there was something I didn’t understand about the pages you sent me from his diaries. Those italicized passages — To be expanded on and so forth — who wrote them? Did you?

No, Coetzee wrote them himself. They are memos addressed to himself. He wrote them in 1999 or 2000, when he was thinking of reworking his diaries as a book. He later dropped the idea.

I see. How I met John. I first bumped into him in a supermarket. This was in the summer of 1972, not long after we had moved to the Cape. I seemed to be spending a lot of time in supermarkets in those days, even though our needs — I mean my needs and my child’s — were quite simple. I shopped because I was bored, because I needed to get away from the house, but mainly because the supermarket gave me peace and gave me pleasure: the airiness, the whiteness, the cleanness, the muzak, the quiet hiss of trolley wheels. And then there were all the choices — this spaghetti sauce against that spaghetti sauce, this toothpaste against that toothpaste, and so forth, on and on. I found it calming. It was good for my soul. Other women I knew played tennis or did yoga. I shopped.

This was the heyday of apartheid, the 1970s, so you didn’t see many people of colour in a supermarket, except of course the staff. Didn’t see many men either. That was part of the pleasure. I didn’t have to put on a performance. I could be myself.

You didn’t see many men, but in the Tokai branch of Pick n Pay there was one I noticed now and again. I noticed him but he didn’t notice me, he was too absorbed in his shopping. I approved of that. In appearance he was not what most people would call attractive. He was scrawny, he had a beard, he wore horn-rimmed glasses and sandals. He looked out of place, like a bird, one of those flightless birds; or like an abstracted scientist who had wandered by mistake out of his laboratory. There was an air of seediness about him too, an air of failure. I suspected there was no woman in his life, and it turned out I was right. What he plainly needed was someone to take charge of him, some veteran hippie with beads and hairy armpits and no makeup who would do the shopping and the cooking and cleaning and maybe supply him with dope too. I didn’t get close enough to check out his feet, but I was ready to bet his toenails weren’t trimmed.

I was always conscious, in those days, of when a man was looking at me. I could feel a pressure on my limbs, on my breasts, the pressure of the male gaze, sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle. You won’t understand what I am talking about, but any woman will. With this man there was no pressure detectable. None.

Then one day that changed. I was standing in front of the stationery rack. Christmas was around the corner, and I was selecting wrapping paper — you know, paper with jolly Christmas motifs, candles, fir trees, reindeer. By accident I let a roll slip, and as I bent to pick it up I dropped a second roll. Behind me I heard a man’s voice: ‘I’ll get them.’ It was of course your man, John Coetzee. He picked up the two rolls, which were quite long, a metre maybe, and returned them to me, and as he did so, whether intentionally or not I still can’t say, pressed them into my breast. For a second or two, through the length of the rolls, he could actually be said to have been prodding my breast.

It was outrageous, of course. At the same time it was not important. I tried to show no reaction: did not drop my eyes, did not blush, certainly did not smile. ‘Thank you,’ I said in a neutral voice, and turned away and went on with my business.

Nevertheless it was a personal act, no use pretending it wasn’t. Whether it was going to fade away and be lost among all the other personal moments only time would tell. But not easily ignored, that intimate, unexpected nudge. In fact when I got home I went so far as to lift my bra and examine the breast in question. It was unmarked, of course. Just a breast, a young woman’s innocent breast.

Then a couple of days later, driving home, I spotted him, Mister Prod, trudging along Tokai Road with his shopping bags. Without thinking twice I stopped and offered him a lift (you are too young to know, but in those days one still offered lifts).

Tokai of the 1970s was what you would call a new, upwardly mobile suburb. Though land was not cheap, there was a lot of building going on. But the house where John lived was from an earlier era. It was one of the cottages that had housed farm workers when Tokai was still farmland. Electricity and plumbing had been added, but as a home it was still fairly basic. I dropped him at the front gate; he did not ask me in.

Time passed. Then, happening one day to drive past the house, which was on Tokai Road itself, a major road, I caught sight of him. He was standing in the back of a pickup truck, shovelling sand into a wheelbarrow. He wore shorts; he looked pale and not particularly strong, but he seemed to be managing.

What was odd about the spectacle was that it was not usual in those days for a white man to do manual labour, unskilled labour. Kaffir work, it was generally called, work you paid someone else to do. If it was not exactly shameful to be seen shovelling sand, it certainly let the side down, if you know what I mean.

You asked me to give an idea of John as he was in those days, but I can’t give you a picture without any background, otherwise there are things you will fail to understand.