John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

‘It’s in the Karoo.’

Die Karoo is vir skape geskape! The Karoo was made for sheep! She has to bite back the words. He means it! He speaks of the Karoo as if it were paradise! And all of a sudden memories of those Christmastides of yore come flooding back, when they were children roaming the veld as free as wild animals. ‘Where do you want to be buried?’ he asked her one day, then without waiting for her answer whispered: ‘I want to be buried here.’ ‘For ever?’ she said, she, her child self — ‘Do you want to be buried for ever?’ ‘Just till I come out again,’ he replied.

Till I come out again . She remembers it all, remembers the very words.

As a child one can do without explanations. One does not demand that everything make sense. But would she be recalling those words of his if they had not puzzled her then and, deep down, continued to puzzle her all these years? Come out again : did her cousin really believe, does he really believe, that one comes back from the grave? Who does he think he is: Jesus? And what does he think this place is, this Karoo: the Holy Land?

‘If you mean to take up residence in Merweville you will need to get a haircut first,’ she says. ‘The good folk of this town won’t allow a wild man to settle in their midst and corrupt their sons and daughters.’

From Mevrou behind the counter come unmistakable hints that she would like to close up shop. He pays, and they drive off. On the way out of the town he slows down before a house with a TE KOOP sign at the gate: For Sale. ‘That’s the house I had in mind,’ he says. ‘A thousand rand plus the legal paperwork. Can you believe it?’

The house is a nondescript cube with a corrugated-iron roof, a shaded veranda running the length of the front, and a steep wooden staircase up the side leading to a loft. The paintwork is in a sorry state. In front of the house, in a bedraggled rockery, a couple of aloes struggle to stay alive. Does he really mean to dump his father here, in this dull house in this exhausted hamlet? An old man, trembly, eating out of tins, sleeping between dirty sheets?

‘Would you like to take a look?’ he says. ‘The house is locked, but we can walk around the back.’

She shivers. ‘Another time,’ she says. ‘I’m not in the mood today.’

What she is in the mood for today she does not know. But her mood ceases to matter twenty kilometres out of Merweville, when the engine begins to cough and John frowns and switches it off and coasts to a stop. A smell of burning rubber invades the cab. ‘It’s overheating again,’ he says. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

From the back he fetches a jerry can of water. He unscrews the radiator cap, dodging a whoosh of steam, and refills the radiator. ‘That should be enough to get us home,’ he says. He tries to restart the engine. It turns over dryly without catching.

She knows enough about men never to question their competence with machines. She offers no advice, is careful not to seem impatient, not even to sigh. For an hour, while he fiddles with hoses and clamps and filthies his clothes and tries again and again to get the engine going, she maintains a strict, benign silence.

The sun begins to dip below the horizon; he continues to toil in what might as well be darkness.

‘Do you have a torch?’ she asks. ‘Perhaps I can hold a torch for you.’

But no, he has not brought a torch. Furthermore, since he does not smoke, he does not even have matches. Not a Boy Scout, just a city boy, an unprepared city boy.

‘I’ll walk back to Merweville and get help,’ he says at last. ‘Or we can both walk.’

She is wearing light sandals. She is not going to stumble in sandals twenty kilometres across the veld in the dark.

‘By the time you get to Merweville it will be midnight,’ she says. ‘You know no one there. There isn’t even a service station. Who are you going to persuade to come out and fix your truck?’

‘Then what do you suggest we do?’

‘We wait here. If we are lucky, someone will drive past. Otherwise Michiel will come looking for us in the morning.’

‘Michiel doesn’t know we went to Merweville. I didn’t tell him.’

He tries one last time to start the engine. When he turns the key there is a dull click. The battery is flat.

She gets out and, at a decent distance, relieves her bladder. A thin wind has come up. It is cold and is going to be colder. There is nothing in the truck with which to cover themselves, not even a tarpaulin. If they are going to wait out the night, they are going to have to do so huddled in the cab. And then, when they get back to the farm, they are going to have to explain themselves.

She is not yet miserable; she is still removed enough from their situation to find it grimly amusing. But that will soon change. They have nothing to eat, nothing even to drink save water from the can, which smells of petrol. Cold and hunger are going to gnaw away at her fragile good humour. Sleeplessness too, in due course.

She winds the window shut. ‘Shall we just forget,’ she says, ‘that we are a man and a woman, and not be too embarrassed to keep each other warm? Because otherwise we are going to freeze.’

In the thirty-odd years they have known each other they have now and then kissed, in the way that cousins kiss, that is to say, on the cheek. They have embraced too. But tonight an intimacy of quite another order is on the cards. Somehow, on this hard seat, with the gear lever uncomfortably in the way, they are going to have to lie together, or slump together, give warmth to each other. If God is kind and they manage to fall asleep, they may in addition have to suffer the humiliation of snoring or being snored upon. What a test! What a trial!

‘And tomorrow,’ she says, allowing herself a single acid moment, ‘when we get back to civilization, maybe you can arrange to have this truck fixed properly. There is a good mechanic at Leeuw Gamka. Michiel uses him. Just a friendly suggestion.’

‘I am sorry. The fault is mine. I try to do things myself when I ought really to leave them to more competent hands. It’s because of the country we live in.’

‘The country we live in? Why is it the country’s fault that your truck keeps breaking down?’

‘Because of our long history of making other people do our work for us while we sit in the shade and watch.’

So that is the reason why they are here in the cold and the dark waiting for some passer-by to rescue them. To make a point, namely that white folk should do their own car repairs. How comical.

‘The mechanic in Leeuw Gamka is white,’ she says. ‘I am not suggesting that you take your car to a Native.’ She would like to add: If you want to do your own repairs, for God’s sake take a course in auto maintenance first. But she holds her tongue. ‘What other kind of work do you insist on doing,’ she says instead, ‘besides fixing cars?’ Besides fixing cars and writing poems.

‘I do garden work. I do repairs around the house. I am at present relay ing the drainage. It may seem funny to you but to me it is not a joke. I am making a gesture. I am trying to break the taboo on manual labour.’

‘The taboo?’

‘Yes. Just as in India it is taboo for upper-caste people to clean up — what shall we call it? — human waste, so, in this country, if a white man touches a pickaxe or a spade he at once becomes unclean.’

‘What nonsense you talk! That is simply not true! It’s just anti-white prejudice!’

She regrets the words as soon as she has spoken them. She has gone too far, driven him into a corner. Now she is going to have this man’s resentment to cope with, on top of the boredom and the cold.