John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

‘Yes, in my Datsun. It’s fixed.’

‘Fixed so that it won’t break down in the middle of nowhere?’

It is of course a joke. Voëlfontein is already the middle of nowhere. But it is not just a joke. She has no idea how big the farm is, measured in square miles, but she does know you cannot walk from one end of it to the other in a single day, not unless you take your walking seriously.

‘It won’t break down,’ he says. ‘But I’ll bring spare water along just in case.’

Voëlfontein lies in the Koup region, and in the Koup it has rained not a drop in the past two years. What on earth inspired Grandpa Coetzee to buy land here, where every last farmer is struggling to keep his stock alive?

‘What sort of word is Koup ?’ she says. ‘Is it English? The place where no one can cope?’

‘It’s Khoi,’ he says. ‘Hottentot. Koup : dry place. It’s a noun, not a verb. You can tell by the final —p .’

‘Where did you learn that?’

‘From books. From grammars put together by missionaries in the old days. There are no speakers of Khoi languages left, not in South Africa. The languages are, for all practical purposes, dead. In South-West Africa there are still a handful of old people speaking Nama. That’s the sum of it. The sum of what is left.’

‘And Xhosa? Do you speak Xhosa?’

He shakes his head. ‘I am interested in the things we have lost, not the things we have kept. Why should I speak Xhosa? There are millions of people who can do that already. They don’t need me.’

‘I thought languages exist so that we can communicate with each other,’ she says. ‘What is the point of speaking Hottentot if no one else does?’

He presents her with what she is coming to think of as his secret little smile, betokening that he has an answer to her question, but since she will be too stupid to understand, he will not waste his breath revealing it. It is this Mister Know-All smile, above all, that sends Carol into a rage.

‘Once you have learned Hottentot out of your old grammar books, who can you speak to?’ she repeats.

‘Do you want me to tell you?’ he says. The little smile has turned into something else, something tight and not very nice.

‘Yes, tell me. Answer me.’

‘The dead. You can speak with the dead. Who otherwise’ — he hesitates, as if the words might be too much for her and even for him — ‘who otherwise are cast out into everlasting silence.’

She wanted an answer and now she has one. It is more than enough to shut her up.

They drive for half an hour, to the westernmost boundary of the farm. There, to her surprise, he opens the gate, drives through, closes the gate behind them, and without a word drives on along the rough dirt road. By four-thirty they have arrived at the town of Merweville, where she has not set foot in years.

Outside the Apollo Café he draws to a halt. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ he says.

They enter the café with half a dozen barefoot children tagging along behind them, the youngest a mere toddler. Mevrou the proprietress has the radio on, playing Afrikaans pop tunes. They sit down, wave the flies away. The children cluster around their table, staring with unabashed curiosity. ‘ Middag, jongens ,’ says John. ‘ Middag, meneer ,’ says the eldest.

They order coffee and get a version of coffee: pale Nescafé with long-life milk. She takes a sip of hers and pushes it aside. He drinks his abstractedly.

A tiny hand reaches up and filches the cube of sugar from her saucer. ‘ Toe, loop! ’ she says: Run off! The child smiles merrily at her, unwraps the sugar, licks it.

It is by no means the first hint she has had of how far the old barriers between white and Coloured have come down. The signs are more obvious here than in Calvinia. Merweville is a smaller town and in decline, in such decline that it must be in danger of falling off the map. There can be no more than a few hundred people left. Half the houses they drove past seemed unoccupied. The building with the legend Volkskas [People’s Bank] in white pebbles studded in the mortar over the door houses not a bank but a welding works. Though the worst of the afternoon heat is past, the sole living presence on the main street is provided by two men and a woman stretched out, along with a scrawny dog, in the shade of a flowering jacaranda.

Did I say all that? I don’t remember.

I may have added a detail or two to bring the scene to life. I didn’t tell you, but since Merweville figures so largely in your story, I actually paid a visit there to check it out.

You went to Merweville? How did it seem to you?

Much as you described it. But there is no Apollo Café any more. No café at all. Shall I go on?

John speaks. ‘Are you aware that, among his other accomplishments, our grandfather used to be mayor of Merweville?’

‘Yes, I am aware of that.’ Their mutual grandfather had his finger in all too many pies. He was — the English word occurs to her — a go-getter in a land with few go-getters, a man with plenty of — another English word — spunk, more spunk probably than all his children put together. But perhaps that is the fate of the children of strong fathers: to be left with less than a full share of spunk. As with the sons, so with the daughters too: a little too self-effacing, the Coetzee women, blessed with too little of whatever the female equivalent of spunk might be.

She has only tenuous memories of their grandfather, who died when she was still a child: of a stooped, grouchy old man with a bristly chin. After the midday meal, she remembers, the whole house would freeze into silence: Grandpa was having his nap. Even at that age she was surprised to see how fear of the old man could make grown people creep about like mice. Yet without that old man she would not be here, nor would John: not just here on earth but here in the Karoo, on Voëlfontein or in Merweville. If her own life, from cradle to grave, has been and is still being determined by the ups and downs of the market in wool and mutton, then that is her grandfather’s doing: a man who started out as a smous , a hawker peddling cotton prints and pots and pans and patent medicines to country folk, then when he had saved up enough money bought a share in a hotel, then sold the hotel and bought land and settled down as of all things a gentleman horse-breeder and sheep-farmer.

‘You haven’t asked what we are doing here in Merweville,’ says John.

‘Very well: what are we doing in Merweville?’

‘I want to show you something. I am thinking of buying property here.’

She cannot believe her ears. ‘You want to buy property? You want to live in Merweville? In Merweville ? Do you want to be mayor too?’

‘No, not live here, just spend time here. Live in Cape Town, come here for weekends and holidays. It’s not impossible. Merweville is seven hours from Cape Town if you drive without stopping. You can buy a house for a thousand rand — a four-room house and half a morgen of land with peach trees and apricot trees and orange trees. Where else in the world will you get such a bargain?’

‘And your father? What does your father think of this plan of yours?’

‘It’s better than an old-age home.’

‘I don’t understand. What is better than an old-age home?’

‘Living in Merweville. My father can stay here, take up residence; I will be based in Cape Town but I will come up regularly to see that he is okay.’

‘And what will your father do during the time he is here all by himself? Sit on the stoep and wait for the one car a day to drive past? There is a simple reason why you can buy a house in Merweville for peanuts, John: because no one wants to live here. I don’t understand you. Why this sudden enthusiasm for Merweville?’