John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

What sort of teacher will he make? He can picture himself only dimly. He sees a figure in sports jacket and grey flannels (that is what men teachers seem to wear) walking down a corridor with books under its arm. It is only a glimpse, and in a moment it vanishes. He does not see the face.

He hopes that, when the day comes, he will not be sent to teach in a place like Worcester. But perhaps Worcester is a purgatory one must pass through. Perhaps Worcester is where people are sent to be tested.

One day they are assigned an essay to write in class: ‘What I do in the mornings.’ They are supposed to write about the things they do before setting off for school. He knows the kind of thing he is expected to say: that he makes his own bed, that he washes the breakfast dishes, that he cuts his own sandwiches for lunch. Though in fact he does none of these things — his mother does them for him — he lies well enough not to be found out. But he goes too far when he describes how he brushes his shoes. He has never brushed his own shoes in his life. In his essay he says you use the brush to brush the dirt off, after which you use a rag to coat the shoe with polish. Miss Oosthuizen puts a big blue exclamation mark in the margin next to the shoe-brushing. He is mortified, prays that she will not call him out in front of the class to read his essay. That evening he watches carefully as his mother brushes his shoes, so that he will not get it wrong again.

He lets his mother brush his shoes as he lets her do everything for him that she wants to. The only thing that he will not let her do any more is to come into the bathroom when he is naked.

He knows he is a liar, knows he is bad, but he refuses to change. He does not change because he does not want to change. His difference from other boys may be bound up with his mother and his unnatural family, but is bound up with his lying too. If he stopped lying he would have to polish his shoes and talk politely and do everything that normal boys do. In that case he would no longer be himself. If he were no longer himself, what point would there be in living?

He is a liar and he is cold-hearted too: a liar to the world in general, cold-hearted towards his mother. It pains his mother, he can see, that he is steadily growing away from her. Nevertheless he hardens his heart and will not relent. His only excuse is that he is merciless to himself too. He lies but he does not lie to himself.

‘When are you going to die?’ he asks his mother one day, challenging her, surprised at his own daring.

‘I am not going to die,’ she replies. Her voice is gay, but there is something false in it.

‘What if you get cancer?’

‘You only get cancer if you are hit on the breast. I won’t get cancer. I’ll live forever. I won’t die.’

He knows why she is saying this. She is saying it for him and his brother, so that they will not worry. It is a silly thing to say, but he is grateful to her for it.

He cannot imagine his mother dying. She is the firmest thing in his life. She is the rock on which he stands. Without her he would be nothing.

His mother guards her breasts carefully in case they are knocked. His very first memory, earlier than the dog, earlier than the scrap of paper, is of her white breasts. He suspects he must have hurt them when he was a baby, beaten them with his fists, otherwise she would not now deny them to him so pointedly, she who denies him nothing else.

Cancer is the great fear of her life. As for him, he has been taught to be wary of pains in his side, to treat each twinge as a sign of appendicitis. Will the ambulance get him to hospital before his appendix bursts? Will he ever wake up from the anaesthetic? He does not like to think of being cut open by a strange doctor. On the other hand, it would be nice to have a scar afterwards to show off to people.

When peanuts and raisins are doled out during break at school, he blows away the papery red skins of the peanuts, which are reputed to collect in the appendix and fester there.

He absorbs himself in his collections. He collects stamps. He collects lead soldiers. He collects cards — cards of Australian cricketers, cards of English footballers, cards of cars of the world. To get cards, one has to buy packets of cigarettes made of nougat and icing-sugar with pink-painted tips. His pockets are full of wilting, sticky cigarettes that he has forgotten to eat.

He spends hours on end with his Meccano set, proving to his mother that he too can be good with his hands. He builds a windmill with sets of coupled pulleys whose blades can be cranked so fast that a breeze wafts across the room.

He trots around the yard tossing a cricket ball in the air and catching it without breaking his stride. What is the true trajectory of the ball: is it going straight up and straight down, as he sees it, or is it rising and falling in loops, as a motionless bystander would see it? When he talks to his mother about this, he sees a desperate look in her eyes: she knows things like this are important to him, and wants to understand why, but cannot. For his part, he wishes she would be interested in things for their own sake, not just because they interest him.

When there is something practical to be done that she cannot do, like fixing a leaking tap, she calls in a Coloured man off the street, any man, any passer-by. Why, he asks in exasperation, does she have such faith in Coloured people? Because they are used to working with their hands, she replies.

It seems a silly thing to believe — that because someone has not been to school he must know how to fix a tap or repair a stove — yet it is so different from what everyone else believes, so eccentric, that despite himself he finds it endearing. He would rather that his mother expected wonders of Coloured people than expected nothing of them at all.

He is always trying to make sense of his mother. Jews are exploiters, she says; yet she prefers Jewish doctors because they know what they are doing. Coloured people are the salt of the earth, she says, yet she and her sisters are always gossiping about pretend-whites with secret Coloured backgrounds. He cannot understand how she can hold so many contradictory beliefs at the same time. Yet at least she has beliefs. Her brothers too. Her brother Norman believes in the monk Nostradamus and his prophecies of the end of the world; he believes in flying saucers that land during the night and take people away. He cannot imagine his father or his father’s family talking about the end of the world. Their sole goal in life is to avoid controversy, to offend no one, to be amiable all the time; by comparison with his mother’s family his father’s family is bland and boring.

He is too close to his mother, his mother is too close to him. That is the reason why, despite the hunting and the other manly things he does during his visits to the farm, his father’s family has never taken him to its bosom. His grandmother may have been harsh in denying the three of them a home during the war, when they were living on a share of a lance corporal’s pay, too poor to buy butter or tea. Nevertheless, her instinct was right. His grandmother is not blind to the dark secret of No. 12 Poplar Avenue, namely that the eldest child is first in the household, the second child second, and the man, the husband, the father, last. Either his mother does not care enough to conceal this perversion of the natural order from his father’s family, or else his father has been complaining in private. Whatever the case, his grandmother disapproves and does not hide her disapproval.

Sometimes, when she is caught up in a quarrel with his father and wants to score a point, his mother complains bitterly about her treatment at the hands of his family. Mostly, however — for her son’s sake, because she knows how close the farm is to his heart, because she can offer nothing to take its place — she tries to ingratiate herself with them in ways he finds as distasteful as her jokes about money, jokes that are not jokes.