John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

And indeed, why was I, why am I, so critical of John? At least he was looking after his father. At least, if something went wrong, his father would have a shoulder to lean on. That was more than could be said for me. My father — you are probably not interested, why should you be? but let me tell you anyway — my father was at that very moment in a private sanatorium outside Port Elizabeth. His clothes were locked away, he had nothing to wear, day or night, but pyjamas and a dressing gown and slippers. And he was dosed to the gills with tranquillizers. Why so? Simply for the convenience of the nursing staff, to keep him tractable. Because when he neglected to take his pills he became agitated and started to shout.

[Silence.]

Did John love his father, do you think?

Boys love their mothers, not their fathers. Don’t you know your Freud? Boys hate their fathers and want to supplant them in their mothers’ affections. No, of course John did not love his father, he did not love anybody, he was not built for love. But he did feel guilty about his father. He felt guilty and therefore behaved dutifully. With certain lapses.

I was telling you about my own father. My father was born in 1905, so at the time we are talking about he was getting on for seventy, and his mind was going. He had forgotten who he was, forgotten the rudimentary English he picked up when he came to South Africa. To the nurses he spoke sometimes German, sometimes Magyar, of which they understood not a word. He was convinced he was in Madagascar, in a prison camp. The Nazis had taken over Madagascar, he thought, and turned it into a Strafkolonie for Jews. Nor did he always remember who I was. On one of my visits he mistook me for his sister Trudi, my aunt, whom I had never met but who looked a bit like me. He wanted me to go to the prison commandant and plead on his behalf. ‘Ich bin der Erstgeborene,’ he kept saying: I am the first-born. If der Erstgeborene was not going to be allowed to work (my father was a jeweller and diamond-cutter by trade), how would his family survive?

That’s why I am here. That’s why I am a therapist. Because of what I saw in that sanatorium. To save people from being treated as my father was treated there.

The money that kept my father in the sanatorium was supplied by my brother, his son. My brother was the one who religiously visited every week, even though my father recognized him only intermittently. In the sole sense that matters, my brother had taken on the burden of his care. In the sole sense that matters, I had abandoned him. And I was his favourite — I, his beloved Julischka, so pretty, so clever, so affectionate!

Do you know what I hope for, above all else? I hope that in the afterlife we will be allowed a chance, each of us, to say our sorries to the people we have wronged. I will have plenty of sorries to say, believe you me.

Enough of fathers. Let me get back to the story of Julia and her adulterous dealings, the story you have travelled so far to hear.

One day my husband announced that he would be going to Hong Kong for discussions with the firm’s overseas partners.

‘How long will you be away?’ I asked.

‘A week,’ he replied. ‘Maybe a day or two longer if the discussions go well.’

I thought no more of it until, shortly before he was due to leave, I got a phone call from the wife of one of his colleagues: was I packing an evening dress for the Hong Kong trip? It’s just Mark who is going to Hong Kong, I replied, I am not accompanying him. Oh, she said, I thought all the wives were invited.

When Mark came home I raised the subject. ‘June just phoned,’ I said. ‘She says she is going with Alistair to Hong Kong. She says all the wives are invited.’

‘Wives are invited but the firm isn’t paying for them,’ Mark said. ‘Do you really want to come all the way to Hong Kong to sit in a hotel with a bunch of wives from the firm, bitching about the weather? Hong Kong is like a steam bath at this time of year. And what will you do with Chrissie? Do you want to take Chrissie along too?’

‘I have no desire whatsoever to go to Hong Kong and sit in a hotel with a screaming child,’ I said. ‘I just want to know what’s what. So that I don’t have to be humiliated when your friends phone.’

‘Well, now you know what’s what,’ he said.

He was wrong. I didn’t know. But I could guess. Specifically I could guess that the girlfriend from Durban was going to be in Hong Kong too. From that moment I was as cold as ice to Mark. Let this put paid, you bastard, to any idea you may have that your extramarital activities excite me! That was what I thought to myself.

‘Is this all about Hong Kong?’ he said to me, when at last the message began to get through. ‘If you want to come to Hong Kong, for God’s sake just say the word, instead of stalking around the house like a tiger with indigestion.’

‘And what might that word be?’ I said. ‘Is the word Please ? No, I don’t want to accompany you to Hong Kong of all places. I would only be bored, as you say, sitting and kvetching with the wives while the men are busy elsewhere deciding the future of the world. I will be happier here at home where I belong, looking after your child.’

That was how things stood between us the day Mark left.

Just a minute, I’m confused. Where are we in time? When did this trip to Hong Kong take place?

It must have been sometime in 1973, early 1973, I can’t give you a precise date.

So you and John Coetzee had been seeing each other …

No. He and I had not been seeing each other. You asked at the beginning how I came to meet John, and I told you. That was the head of the tale. Now we are coming to the tail of the tale, namely, how our relationship drifted on and then came to an end.

But where is the body of the tale, you ask? There is no body. I can’t supply a body because there was none. This is a tale without a body.

We return to Mark, to the fateful day he left for Hong Kong. No sooner was he gone than I jumped into the car, drove to Tokai Road, and pushed a note under the front door: ‘Drop by this afternoon, if you feel like it, around 2.’

As two o’clock approached I could feel the fever mount in me. The child felt it too. She was restless, she cried, she clung to me, she would not sleep. Fever, but what kind of fever, I wondered to myself? A fever of madness? A fever of rage?

I waited but John did not come, not at two, not at three. He came at five-thirty, by which time I had fallen asleep on the sofa with Chrissie, hot and sticky, on my shoulder. The doorbell woke me; when I opened the door to him I was still groggy and confused.

‘Sorry I couldn’t come earlier,’ he said, ‘but I teach in the afternoons.’

It was too late, of course. Chrissie was awake, and jealous in her own way.

Later John returned, by arrangement, and we spent the night together. In fact while Mark was in Hong Kong, John spent every night in my bed, departing at the crack of dawn so as not to bump into the house-help. For the sleep I lost I compensated by napping in the afternoons. What he did to make up for lost sleep I have no idea. Maybe his students, his Portuguese girls — you know about them, about his scatterlings from the ex-Portuguese empire? No? Remind me to tell you — maybe his girls had to suffer for his nocturnal excesses.

My high summer with Mark had given me a new conception of sex: as a contest, a variety of wrestling in which you do your best to subject your opponent to your erotic will. For all his failings, Mark was a more than competent sex wrestler, though not as subtle as I, or as steely. Whereas my verdict on John — and here at last, at last , comes the moment you have been waiting for, Mr Biographer — my verdict on John Coetzee, after seven nights of testing, was that he was not in my league, not as I was then.