John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

I find it confusing. But you know better than I. Go on.

John’s presence on the farm is a source of unease. After years spent overseas — so many years it was concluded he was gone for good — he has suddenly reappeared among them under some cloud or other, some disgrace. One story being whispered about is that he has spent time in an American jail.

The family simply does not know how to behave towards him. Never yet have they had a criminal — if that is what he is, a criminal — in their midst. A bankrupt, yes: the man who married her aunt Marie, a braggart and heavy drinker of whom the family had disapproved from the start, declared himself bankrupt to avoid paying his debts and thereafter did not a stitch of work, loafing at home, living off his wife’s earnings. But bankruptcy, while it may leave a bad taste in the mouth, is not a crime; whereas going to jail is going to jail.

Her own feeling is that the Coetzees ought to try harder to make the lost sheep feel welcome. She has a lingering soft spot for John. As young children they used to talk quite openly of marrying each other when they grew up. They assumed it would be allowed — why should it not be? They did not understand why the adults smiled, smiled and would not say why.

Did I really tell you that?

You did. Do you want me to cut it out? I like it. It’s sweet.

All right, leave it in. [Laughs.] Go on.

Her sister Carol is of quite another mind. Carol is married to a German, an engineer, who has for years been trying to get the two of them out of South Africa and into the United States. Carol has made it plain she does not want it to appear in her American dossier that she is related to a man who, whether or not he is technically a criminal, has in some way fallen foul of the law, their law. But Carol’s hostility to John goes deeper than that. She finds him affected and supercilious. From the heights of his engelse [English] education, says Carol, John looks down on the Coetzees, one and all. Why he has decided to favour them with his presence at Christmastide she cannot imagine.

She, Margot, is distressed by her sister’s attitude. Her sister, she believes, has grown more and more hardhearted ever since she married and began to move in her husband’s circle, a circle of German and Swiss expatriates who arrived in South Africa in the 1960s to make quick money and are preparing to abandon ship now that the country is going through stormy times.

I don’t know. I don’t know if I can let you say that.

Well, whatever you decide, I will abide by what you say. But that is what you told me, word for word. And bear in mind, it is not as if your sister is going to pick up an obscure book published by an academic press in England. Where is your sister now?

She and Klaus live in Florida, in a town called St Petersburg. I have never been there. As for your book, one of her friends might come across it and send it to her — you never know. But that is not the main point. When I spoke to you last year, I was under the impression you were simply going to transcribe our interview. I had no idea you were going to rewrite it completely.

That’s not entirely fair. I have not actually rewritten it, I have merely recast it as a narrative, giving it a different form. Giving it new form has no effect on the content. If you feel I am taking liberties with the content itself, that is another question. Do you feel I am taking too many liberties?

I don’t know. Something sounds wrong to me, but I can’t put my finger on it yet. All I can say is, your version doesn’t sound like what I said to you. But I am going to shut up now. I will wait until the end to make up my mind. So go on.

All right.

If Carol is too hard, she is too soft, she will admit to that. She is the one who cries when the new kittens have to be drowned, the one who blocks her ears when the slaughter-lamb bleats in fear, bleats and bleats. She used to mind, when she was younger, being scoffed at for it; but now, in her mid-thirties, she is not so sure she need be ashamed of being tender-hearted.

Carol claims not to understand why John is attending the family gathering, but to her the reason is obvious. To the haunts of his youth he has brought back his father, who though not much over sixty looks like an old man, looks to be on his last legs — has brought him back so that he can be renewed and fortified, or, if he cannot be renewed, so that he can at least say his farewells. It is, to her mind, an act of filial duty, one that she thoroughly approves of.

She tracks John down behind the packing-shed, where he is working on his car, or pretending to.

‘Something wrong with the car?’ she asks.

‘It’s overheating,’ he says. ‘We had to stop twice on Du Toit’s Kloof to let the engine cool.’

‘You should ask Michiel to have a look at it. He knows everything about cars.’

‘Michiel is busy with his guests. I’ll fix it myself.’

Her guess is that Michiel would welcome an excuse to escape his guests, but she does not press her case. She knows male stubbornness all too well, knows that a man will wrestle endlessly with a problem rather than undergo the humiliation of asking another man for help.

‘Is this what you drive in Cape Town?’ she says. By this she means this one-ton Datsun pickup, the kind of light truck she associates with farmers and builders. ‘What do you need a truck for?’

‘It’s useful,’ he replies curtly, not explaining what its use might be.

She could not help laughing when he made his arrival at the farm behind the wheel of this selfsame truck, he with his beard and his unkempt hair and his owl-glasses, his father beside him like a mummy, stiff and embarrassed. She wishes she could have taken a photograph. She wishes, too, she could have a quiet word with John about his hair-style. But the ice is not yet broken, intimate talk will have to wait.

‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘I’ve been instructed to call you for tea, tea and melktert that Aunt Joy has baked.’

‘I’ll come in a minute,’ he says.

They speak Afrikaans together. His Afrikaans is halting; she suspects her English is better than his Afrikaans, though, living in the back country, the platteland , she seldom has call to speak English. But they have spoken Afrikaans together since they were children; she is not about to embarrass him by offering to switch.

She blames the deterioration in his Afrikaans on the move he made years ago, first to Cape Town, to ‘English’ schools and an ‘English’ university, then to the world abroad, where not a word of Afrikaans is to be heard. In ’n minuut , he says: in a minute. It is the kind of solecism that Carol will latch onto at once and make fun of. ‘ In ’n minuut sal meneer sy tee kom geniet ,’ Carol will say: in a minute his lordship will come and partake of tea. She must protect him from Carol, or at least plead with Carol to have mercy on him for the space of these few days.

At table that evening she makes sure she is seated beside him. The evening meal is simply a hotchpotch of leftovers from the midday meal, the main meal of the day: cold mutton, warmed-up rice, green beans with vinegar.

She notices that he passes on the meat platter without helping himself.

‘Aren’t you having mutton, John?’ calls out Carol from the other end of the table in a tone of sweet concern.

‘Not tonight, thanks,’ John replies. ‘ Ek het my vanmiddag dik gevreet ’: I stuffed myself like a pig this afternoon.

‘So you are not a vegetarian. You didn’t become a vegetarian while you were overseas.’

‘Not a strict vegetarian. Dis nie ’n woord waarvan ek hou nie. As ’n mens verkies om nie so veel vleis te eet nie … ’ It is not a word he is fond of. If one chooses not to eat so much meat …