John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

Even Voëlfontein and the Karoo are no longer Voëlfontein and the Karoo as they used to be. Look at those children in the Apollo Café. Look at cousin Michiel’s work gang, who are certainly not the plaasvolk of yore. In the attitude of Coloured people in general towards whites there is a new and unsettling hardness. The younger ones regard one with a cold eye, refuse to call one Baas or Miesies . Strange men flit across the land from one settlement to another, lokasie to lokasie , and no one will report them to the police as in the old days. The police find it harder and harder to come up with information they can trust. People no longer want to be seen talking to them; sources have dried up. For the farmers, summons for commando duty come more often and for longer. Lukas complains about it all the time. If that is the way things are in the Roggeveld, it must certainly be the way things are here in the Koup.

Business is changing character too. To get on in business it is no longer enough to be friends with all and sundry, to do favours and be owed favours in return. No, nowadays you have to be as hard as nails and ruthless as well. What chance do slapgat men stand in such a world? No wonder her Coetzee uncles are not prospering: bank managers idling away the years in dying platteland towns, civil servants stalled on the ladder of promotion, penurious farmers, even in the case of John’s father a disgraced, disbarred attorney.

If she had children, she would not only do her utmost to purge them of their Coetzee inheritance, she would think seriously of doing what Carol is doing: whisking them out of the country, giving them a fresh start in America or Australia or New Zealand, places where they can look forward to a decent future. But as a childless woman she is spared having to make that decision. She has another role prepared for her: to devote herself to her husband and to the farm; to live as good a life as the times allow, as good and as fair and as just.

The barrenness of the future that yawns before Lukas and herself — this is not a new source of pain, no, it returns again and again like a toothache, to the extent that it has by now begun to bore her. She wishes she could dismiss it and get some sleep. How is it that this cousin of hers, whose body manages to be both scrawny and soft at the same time, does not feel the cold, while she, who is undeniably more than a few kilos over her best weight, has begun to shiver? On cold nights she and her husband sleep tight and warm against each other. Why does her cousin’s body fail to warm her? Not only does he not warm her, he seems to suck her own body heat away. Is he by nature as heatless as he is sexless?

A ripple of true anger runs through her; and, as if sensing it, this male being beside her stirs. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles, sitting upright.

‘Sorry for what?’

‘I lost track.’

She has no idea what he is talking about and is not going to inquire. He slumps down and in a moment is asleep again.

Where is God in all of this? With God the Father she finds it harder and harder to have dealings. What faith she once had in Him and His providence she has by now lost. Godlessness: an inheritance from the godless Coetzees, no doubt. When she thinks of God, all she can picture is a bearded figure with a booming voice and a grand manner who inhabits a mansion on top of a hill with hosts of servants rushing around anxiously, doing things for Him. Like a good Coetzee, she prefers to steer clear of people like that. The Coetzees look askance at self-important folk, crack jokes about them sotto voce . She may not be as good at jokes as the rest of the family, but she does find God a bit of a trial, a bit of a bore.

Now I must protest. You are really going too far. I said nothing remotely like that. You are putting words of your own in my mouth.

I’m sorry, I must have got carried away. I’ll fix it. I’ll tone it down.

Cracking jokes sotto voce . Nevertheless, does God in His infinite wisdom have a plan for her and for Lukas? For the Roggeveld? For South Africa? Will things that look merely chaotic today, chaotic and purposeless, reveal themselves at some future date to be part of some vast, benign design? For instance: Is there a larger explanation for why a woman in the prime of her life must spend four nights a week sleeping alone in a dismal second-floor room in the Grand Hotel in Calvinia, month after month, perhaps even year after year, with no end in sight; and for why her husband, a born farmer, must spend most of his time trucking other people’s livestock to the abattoirs in Paarl and Maitland — an explanation larger than that the farm would go under without the income these soul-destroying jobs bring in? And is there a larger explanation for why the farm that the two of them are slaving to keep afloat will in the fullness of time pass into the care not of a son of their loins but of some ignoramus nephew of her husband’s, if it is not swallowed down by the bank first? If, in God’s vast, benign design, it was never intended that this part of the world — the Roggeveld, the Karoo — should be profitably farmed, then what exactly is His intention for it? Is it meant to fall back into the hands of the volk , who will proceed, as in the old, old days, to roam from district to district with their ragged flocks in search of grazing, trampling the fences flat, while people like herself and her husband expire in some forgotten corner, disinherited?

Useless to put questions like that to the Coetzees. Die boer saai, God maai, maar waar skuil die papegaai? say the Coetzees, and cackle. Nonsense words. A nonsense family, flighty, without substance; clowns. ’n Hand vol vere : a handful of feathers. Even the one member for whom she had had some slight hopes, the one beside her who has tumbled straight back into dreamland, turns out to be a lightweight. Who ran away to the big world and now comes creeping ignominiously back to the little world. Failed runaway, failed car mechanic too, for whose failure she is at this moment having to suffer. Failed son. Sitting in that dreary, dusty old house in Merweville looking out on the empty, sunstruck street, rattling a pencil between his teeth, trying to think up verses. O droë land, o barre kranse … O parched land, o barren cliffs … What next? Something about weemoed for sure, melancholy.

She wakes as first streaks of mauve and orange begin to extend across the sky. In her sleep she has somehow twisted her body and slumped down further in the seat, so that her cousin, still dormant, reclines not against her shoulder but against her rump. Irritably she frees herself. Her eyes are gummy, her bones creak, she has a raging thirst. Opening the door, she slides out.

The air is cold and still. Even as she watches, thornbushes and tufts of grass, touched by the first light, emerge out of nothing. It is as if she were present at the first day of creation. My God , she murmurs; she has an urge to sink to her knees.

There is a rustle nearby. She is looking straight into the dark eyes of an antelope, a little steenbok not twenty paces off, and it is looking straight back at her, wary but not afraid, not yet. My kleintjie! she says, my little one. More than anything she wants to embrace it, to pour out upon its brow this sudden love; but before she can take a first step the little one has whirled about and raced off with drumming hooves. A hundred yards away it halts, turns, inspects her again, then trots at less urgent pace across the flats and into a dry riverbed.

‘What’s that?’ comes her cousin’s voice. He has at last awoken; he clambers out of the truck, yawning, stretching.

‘A steenbokkie,’ she says curtly. ‘What are we going to do now?’