John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

He wishes his mother would be normal. If she were normal, he could be normal too.

It is the same with her two sisters. They have one child each, one son, over whom they hover with suffocating solicitude. His cousin Juan in Johannesburg is his closest friend in the world: they write letters to each other, they look forward to holidays together at the sea. Nevertheless, he does not like to see Juan shamefacedly obeying his mother’s every instruction, even when she is not there to oversee him. Of all the four sons, he is the only one who is not wholly under his mother’s thumb. He has broken away, or half broken away: he has his own friends, whom he has chosen for himself; he goes out on his bicycle without saying where he is going or when he will be back. His cousins and his brother have no friends. He thinks of them as pale, timid, always at home under the eye of their fierce mothers. His father calls the three sister-mothers the three witches. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble,’ he says, quoting Macbeth . Delightedly, maliciously he echoes his father.

When she feels particularly bitter about her life in Reunion Park, his mother laments that she did not marry Bob Breech. He does not take her laments seriously. Yet at the same time he cannot believe his ears. If she had married Bob Breech, where would he be? Who would he be? Would he be Bob Breech’s child? Would Bob Breech’s child be him?

Only one piece of evidence remains of a real Bob Breech. He comes across it by chance in one of his mother’s albums: a blurred photograph of two young men in long white trousers and dark blazers standing on a beach with their arms around each other’s shoulders, squinting into the sun. One of them he knows: Juan’s father. Who is this other man? he asks his mother. Bob Breech, she replies. Where is he now? He is dead, she says.

He stares hard into the face of the dead Bob Breech. He can find nothing of himself there.

He does not interrogate her further. But, listening to the sisters, putting two and two together, he learns that Bob Breech came to South Africa for his health; that after a year or two he went back to England; that there he died. He died of consumption, but, it is implied, a broken heart may have contributed to his decline — a heart broken because of the dark-haired, dark-eyed, wary-looking young schoolteacher whom he met at Plettenberg Bay and who refused to marry him.

He loves to page through his mother’s albums. No matter how indistinct the images, he can always pick her out from the group: the one in whose shy, defensive look he recognizes himself. In her albums he follows her life through the 1920s and 1930s: first the team pictures (hockey, tennis), then the pictures from her tour of Europe: Scotland, Norway, Switzerland, Germany; Edinburgh, the fjords, the Alps, Bingen on the Rhine. Among her mementoes there is a pencil from Bingen with a tiny peephole in its side allowing a view of a castle perched on a cliff.

Sometimes they page through the albums together, he and she. She sighs, she says she wishes she could visit Scotland again, see the heather, the bluebells. He thinks: My mother had a life before I was born, and that life still lives in her. He is glad, in a way, for her sake, since she no longer has a life of her own.

His mother’s world is quite different from the world of his father’s photograph album, in which South Africans in khaki uniform strike poses against the pyramids of Egypt or against the rubble of Italian cities. But in his father’s album he spends less time on the photographs than on the fascinating pamphlets interspersed among them, pamphlets dropped on the Allied positions from German aeroplanes. One tells the soldiers how to give themselves a temperature (by eating soap); another pictures a glamorous woman perched on the knee of a fat Jew with a hooked nose, drinking a glass of champagne. ‘Do you know where your wife is tonight?’ asks the subtitle. And then there is the blue porcelain eagle that his father found in the ruins of a house in Naples and brought back in his kit-bag, the eagle of empire that now stands on the mantelshelf in the living room.

He is immensely proud of his father’s war service. He is surprised — and gratified — to find how few of the fathers of his friends fought in the war. Why his father rose to no more than a lance corporal he is not sure: he quietly leaves out the lance when he repeats his father’s adventures to his friends. But he treasures the photograph, taken in a studio in Cairo, of his handsome father sighting down a rifle barrel, one eye closed, his hair neatly combed, his beret tucked in regulation fashion under his epaulette. If he had his way it would be on the mantelshelf too.

His father and his mother disagree about the Germans. His father likes the Italians (their heart was not in the fight, he says: all they wanted to do was surrender and go back home) but hates the Germans. He tells the story of a German shot while he was squatting on a privy. Sometimes, in the story, it was he who shot the German, sometimes one of his friends; but in none of the versions does he show any pity, only amusement at the German’s confusion as he tried to raise his hands and pull up his pants at the same time.

His mother knows it is not a good idea to praise the Germans too openly; but sometimes, when he and his father gang up on her, she will leave discretion behind. ‘The Germans are the best people in the world,’ she will say. ‘It was that terrible Hitler who led them into so much suffering.’

Her brother Norman disagrees. ‘Hitler gave the Germans pride in themselves,’ he says.

His mother and Norman travelled through Europe together in the 1930s: not only through Norway and the highlands of Scotland but through Germany, Hitler’s Germany. Their family — the Brechers, the du Biels — is from Germany, or at least from Pomerania, which is now in Poland. Is it good to be from Pomerania? He is not sure.

‘The Germans didn’t want to fight against the South Africans,’ says Norman. ‘They like the South Africans. If it hadn’t been for Smuts we would never have gone to war against Germany. Smuts was a skelm , a crook. He sold us to the British.’

His father and Norman do not like each other. When his father wants to get at his mother, in their late-night quarrels in the kitchen, he taunts her about her brother who did not join up, but marched with the Ossewabrandwag instead. ‘That’s a lie!’ she maintains angrily. ‘Norman was not in the Ossewabrandwag. Ask him yourself, he will tell you.’

When he asks his mother what the Ossewabrandwag is, she says it is just nonsense, people who marched in the streets with torches.

The fingers of Norman’s right hand are yellow with nicotine. He has a room in a boarding house in Pretoria where he has lived for years. He makes his money by selling a pamphlet he has written about ju-jitsu, which he advertises in the classified pages of the Pretoria News . ‘Learn the Japanese art of self-defence,’ says the advertisement. ‘Six easy lessons.’ People send him ten-shilling postal orders and he sends them the pamphlet: a single page folded in four, with sketches of the various holds. When ju-jitsu does not bring in enough money, he sells plots on commission for an estate agency. He stays in bed till noon every day, drinking tea and smoking and reading stories in Argosy and Lilliput . In the afternoons he plays tennis. In 1938, twelve years ago, he was the Western Province singles champion. He still has ambitions of playing at Wimbledon, in the doubles, if he can find a partner.

At the end of his visit, before he goes back to Pretoria, Norman takes him aside and slips a brown ten-shilling note into his shirt pocket. ‘For ice cream,’ he murmurs: the same words every year. He likes Norman not only for the present — ten shillings is a lot of money — but for remembering, for never failing to remember.