John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

‘I’ll head back to Merweville,’ he says. ‘You wait here. I should be back by ten o’clock, eleven at the latest.’

‘If a car passes and offers me a lift, I’m taking it,’ she says. ‘Either direction, I’m taking it.’

He looks a mess, with his unkempt hair and beard sticking out at all angles. Thank God I don’t have to wake up with you in my bed every morning , she thinks. Not enough of a man. A real man would do better than this , sowaar!

The sun is showing above the horizon; already she can feel the warmth on her skin. The world may be God’s world, but the Karoo belongs first of all to the sun. ‘You had better get going,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be a hot day.’ And watches as he trudges off, the empty jerry can slung over his shoulder.

An adventure: perhaps that is the best way to think of it. Here in the back of beyond she and John are having an adventure. For years to come the Coetzees will be reminiscing about it. Remember the time when Margot and John broke down on that godforsaken Merweville road? In the meantime, while she waits for her adventure to end, what has she for diversion? The tattered instruction manual for the Datsun; nothing else. No poems. Tyre rotation. Battery maintenance. Tips for fuel economy.

The truck, facing into the rising sun, grows stiflingly hot. She takes shelter in its lee.

On the crest of the road, an apparition: out of the heat-haze emerges first the torso of a man, then by degrees a donkey and donkey-cart. On the wind she can even hear the neat clip-clop of the donkey’s hooves.

The figure grows clearer. It is Hendrik from Voëlfontein, and behind him, sitting on the cart, is her cousin.

Laughter and greetings. ‘Hendrik has been visiting his daughter in Merweville,’ John explains. ‘He will give us a ride back to the farm, that is, if his donkey consents. He says we can hitch the Datsun to the cart and he will tow it.’

Hendrik is alarmed. ‘ Nee, meneer! ’ he says.

‘ Ek jok maar net, ’ says her cousin. Just joking.

Hendrik is a man of middle age. As the result of a botched operation for a cataract he has lost the sight of one eye. There is something wrong with his lungs too, such that the slightest physical effort makes him wheeze. As a labourer he is not of much use on the farm, but her cousin Michiel keeps him on because that is how things are done here.

Hendrik has a daughter who lives with her husband and children outside Merweville. The husband used to have a job in the town but seems to have lost it; the daughter does domestic work. Hendrik must have set off from their place before first light. About him there is a faint smell of sweet wine; when he climbs down from the cart, she notices, he stumbles. Sozzled by mid-morning: what a life!

Her cousin reads her thoughts. ‘I have some water here,’ he says, and proffers the full jerry can. ‘It’s clean. I filled it at a wind-pump.’

So they set off for the farm, John seated beside Hendrik, she in the back holding an old jute bag over her head to keep off the sun. A car passes them in a cloud of dust, heading for Merweville. If she had seen it in time she would have hailed it — got a ride to Merweville and from there telephoned Michiel to come and fetch her. On the other hand, though the road is rutted and the ride uncomfortable, she likes the idea of arriving at the farmhouse in Hendrik’s donkey-cart, likes it more and more: the Coetzees assembled on the stoep for afternoon tea, Hendrik doffing his hat to them, bringing back Jack’s errant son, dirty and sunburnt and chastened. ‘ Ons was so bekommerd! ’ they will berate the miscreant. ‘ Waar was julle dan? Michiel wou selfs die polisie bel! ’ From him, nothing but mumble-mumble. ‘ Die arme Margie! En wat het van die bakkie geword? ’ We were so worried! Where were you? Michiel was on the point of phoning the police! Poor Margie! And where is the truck?

There are stretches of road where the incline is so steep that they have to get down and walk. For the rest the little donkey is up to its task, with no more than a touch of the whiplash to its rump now and again to remind it who is master. How slight its frame, how delicate its hooves, yet what staunchness, what powers of endurance! No wonder Jesus had a fondness for donkeys.

Inside the boundary of Voëlfontein they halt at a dam. While the donkey drinks she chats with Hendrik about the daughter in Merweville, then about the other daughter, the one who works in the kitchen at a home for the aged in Beaufort West. Discreetly she does not ask after Hendrik’s most recent wife, whom he married when she was no more than a child and who ran away as soon as she could with a man from the railway camp at Leeuw Gamka.

Hendrik finds it easier to talk to her than to her cousin, she can see that. She and he share a language, whereas the Afrikaans John speaks is stiff and bookish. Half of what John says probably goes over Hendrik’s head. Which is more poetic, do you think, Hendrik: the rising sun or the setting sun? A goat or a sheep?

‘ Het Katryn dan nie vir padkos gesorg nie? ’ she teases Hendrik: Hasn’t your daughter packed lunch for us?

Hendrik goes through the motions of embarrassment, averting his gaze, shuffling. ‘ Ja-nee, mies, ’ he wheezes. A plaashotnot from the old days, a farm Hottentot.

As it turns out, Hendrik’s daughter has indeed provided padkos . From a jacket pocket Hendrik brings out, wrapped in brown paper, a leg of chicken and two slices of buttered white bread, which shame forbids him to divide with them yet equally forbids him to devour in front of them.

‘ In Godsnaam eet, man! ’ she commands. ‘ Ons is glad nie honger nie, ons is ook binnekort tuis ’: We aren’t hungry, and anyway we’ll soon be home. And she draws John away on a circuit of the dam so that Hendrik, with his back to them, can hurriedly down his meal.

Ons is glad nie honger nie : a lie, of course. She is famished. The very smell of the cold chicken makes her salivate.

‘Sit up front beside the driver,’ John suggests. ‘For our triumphal return.’ And so she does. As they approach the Coetzees, assembled on the stoep exactly as she had foreseen, she takes care to put on a smile and even to wave in a parody of royalty. In response she is greeted with a light ripple of clapping. She descends, ‘ Dankie, Hendrik, eerlik dankie, ’ she says: Thank you sincerely. ‘ Mies, ’ says Hendrik. Later in the day she will go over to his house and leave some money: for Katryn, she will say, for clothing for her children, though she knows the money will go on liquor.

‘ En toe? ’ says Carol, in front of everyone. ‘ Sê vir ons: waar was julle? ’ Where were you?

Just for a second there is silence, and in that second she realizes that the question, on the face of it simply a prompt for her to come up with some flippant, amusing retort, has a serious core. The Coetzees really want to know where she and John have been; they want to be reassured that nothing truly scandalous has taken place. It takes her breath away, the cheek of it. That people who have known her and loved her all her life could think her capable of misconduct! ‘ Vra vir John, ’ she replies curtly — ask John — and stalks indoors.

When she rejoins them half an hour later the atmosphere is still uneasy.

‘Where has John gone?’ she asks.

John and Michiel, it turns out, set off just a moment ago in Michiel’s pickup to recover the Datsun. They will tow it to Leeuw Gamka, to the mechanic who will fix it properly.

‘We stayed up late last night,’ says her aunt Beth. ‘We waited and waited. Then we decided you and John must have gone to Beaufort and were spending the night there because the National Road is so dangerous at this time of the year. But you didn’t phone, and that worried us. This morning Michiel phoned the hotel at Beaufort and they said they hadn’t seen you. He phoned Fraserburg too. We never guessed you had gone to Merweville. What were you doing in Merweville?’