John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

‘ Ja? ’ says Carol. ‘ As ’n mens so verkies, dan …? ’ If that is what you choose, then — what?

Everyone is by now staring at him. He has begun to blush. Clearly he has no idea how to deflect the benign curiosity of the gathering. And if he is paler and scrawnier than a good South African ought to be, might the explanation be, not just that he has tarried too long amid the snows of North America, but that he has indeed been starved too long of good Karoo mutton? As ’n mens verkies … — what is he going to say next?

His blush has grown desperate. A grown man, yet he blushes like a girl! Time to intervene. She lays a reassuring hand on his arm. ‘ Jy wil seker sê, John, ons het almal ons voorkeure ,’ we all have our preferences.

‘ Ons voorkeure ,’ he says; ‘ ons fiemies .’ Our preferences; our silly little whims. He spears a green bean and pops it into his mouth.

It is December, and in December it does not get dark until well after nine. Even then — so pristinely clear is the air on the high plateau — the moon and stars are bright enough to light one’s footsteps. So after supper she and he go for a walk, making a wide loop to avoid the cluster of cabins that house the farm workers.

‘Thank you for saving me at the dinner table,’ he says.

‘You know Carol,’ she says. ‘She has always had a sharp eye. A sharp eye and a sharp tongue. How is your father?’

‘Depressed. As you must surely know, he and my mother did not have the happiest of marriages. Even so, after my mother died he went into a decline — moped, didn’t know what to do with himself. Men of his generation were brought up to be more or less helpless. If there isn’t some woman on hand to cook and care for them, they simply fade away. If I hadn’t offered my father a home he would have starved to death.’

‘Is he still working?’

‘Yes, he still has his job with the motor-parts dealer, though I think they have been hinting it may be time for him to retire. And his enthusiasm for sport is undimmed.’

‘Isn’t he a cricket umpire?’

‘He was, but not any more. His eyesight has deteriorated too far.’

‘And you? Didn’t you play cricket too?’

‘Yes. In fact I still play in the Sunday league. The standard is fairly amateurish, which suits me. Curious: he and I, two Afrikaners devoted to an English game that we aren’t much good at. I wonder what that says about us.’

Two Afrikaners. Does he really think of himself as an Afrikaner? She doesn’t know many real [ egte ] Afrikaners who would accept him as one of the tribe. Even his father might not pass scrutiny. To pass as an Afrikaner nowadays you need at the very least to vote National and attend church on Sundays. She can’t imagine her cousin putting on a suit and tie and going off to church. Or indeed his father.

They have arrived at the dam. The dam used to be filled by a wind-pump, but during the boom years Michiel installed a diesel-driven pump and left the old wind-pump to rust, because that was what everyone was doing. Now that the oil price has gone through the roof, Michiel may have to think again. He may have to fall back on God’s wind after all.

‘Do you remember,’ she says, ‘When we used to come here as children …’

‘And catch tadpoles in a sieve,’ he picks up the story, ‘and carry them back to the house in a bucket of water and the next morning they all would be dead and we could never figure out why.’

‘And locusts. We caught locusts too.’

Having mentioned the locusts, she wishes she hadn’t. For she has remembered the fate of the locusts, or of one of them. Out of the bottle in which they had trapped it John took the insect and, while she watched, pulled steadily at a long rear leg until it came off the body, dryly, without blood or whatever counts as blood among locusts. Then he released it and they watched. Each time it tried to launch itself into flight it toppled to one side, its wings scrabbling in the dust, the remaining rear leg jerking ineffectually. Kill it! she screamed at him. But he did not kill it, just walked away, looking disgusted.

‘Do you remember,’ she says, ‘how once you pulled the leg off a locust and left me to kill it? I was so cross with you.’

‘I remember it every day of my life,’ he says. ‘Every day I ask the poor thing’s forgiveness. I was just a child, I say to it, just an ignorant child who did not know better. Kaggen , I say, forgive me.’

‘ Kaggen ?’

‘ Kaggen . The name of mantis, the mantis god. Maybe not a locust, but the locust will understand. In the afterworld there are no language problems. It’s like Eden all over again.’

The mantis god. He has lost her.

A night wind moans through the vanes of the dead wind-pump. She shivers. ‘We must go back,’ she says.

‘In a minute. Have you read the book by Eugène Marais about the year he spent in the Waterberg observing a baboon troop? He claims that at nightfall, when the troop stopped their foraging and settled down to watch the sun set, he could detect in their eyes, or at least the eyes of the older baboons, stirrings of melancholy, the birth of a first awareness of their own mortality.’

‘Is that what the sunset makes you think of — mortality?’

‘No. But I can’t help remembering the first conversation you and I had, the first meaningful conversation. We must have been six years old. What the actual words were I don’t recall, but I know I was un burdening my heart to you, telling you everything about myself, all my hopes and longings. And at the same time I was thinking, So this is what it means to be in love! Because — let me confess it — I was in love with you in those days. And ever since then, being in love with a woman has meant being free to say everything on my heart.’

‘Everything on your heart … What has that to do with Eugène Marais?’

‘Simply that I understand what the old male baboon was thinking as he watched the sun go down, the troop leader, the one Marais was closest to. Never again , he was thinking: Just one life and then never again. Never, never, never. That is what the Karoo does to me too. It fills me with melancholy. It spoils me for life.’

She still does not see what baboons have to do with the Karoo or their childhood years, but she is not going to let on.

‘This place wrenches my heart,’ he says. ‘It wrenched my heart when I was a child, and I have never been right since.’

His heart is wrenched. She had no inkling of that. It used to be, she thinks to herself, that she knew without being told what was going on in other people’s hearts. Her own special talent: meegevoel, feeling-with. But not any more, alas, not any more! She grew up; and as she grew up she grew stiff, like a woman who never gets asked to dance, who spends her Saturday evenings waiting in vain on a bench in the church hall, who by the time some man remembers his manners and offers his hand has lost all pleasure, wants only to go home. What a shock! What a revelation! This cousin of hers carries within him memories of how as a child he used to love her! Has carried them all these years!

[Groans.] Did I really say all that?

[Laughs.] You did.

How indiscreet of me! [Laughs.] Never mind, go on.

‘Don’t reveal any of that to Carol,’ he — John, her cousin — says. ‘Don’t tell her, with her satirical tongue, how I feel about the Karoo. If you do, I’ll never hear the end of it.’

‘You and the baboons,’ she says. ‘Carol has a heart too, believe it or not. But no, I won’t tell her your secret. It’s getting chilly. Shall we go back?’