John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

What indeed were they doing in Merweville? She turns to John’s father. ‘John says you and he are thinking of buying property in Merweville,’ she says. ‘Is that true, Uncle Jack?’

A shocked silence falls.

‘Is it true, Uncle Jack?’ she presses him. ‘Is it true you are going to move from the Cape to Merweville?’

‘If you put the question like that,’ Jack says — the bantering Coetzee manner is gone, he is all caution — ‘no, no one is actually going to move to Merweville. John has the idea — I don’t know how realistic it is — of buying one of those abandoned houses and fixing it up as a holiday home. That’s as far as we have gone in talking about it.’

A holiday home in Merweville! Who has ever heard of such a thing! Merweville of all places, with its snooping neighbours and its diaken [deacon] knocking at the door, pestering one to attend church! How can Jack, in his day the liveliest and most irreverent of them all, be planning a move to Merweville?

‘You should try Koegenaap first, Jack,’ says his brother Alan. ‘Or Pofadder. In Pofadder the big day of the year is when the dentist from Upington comes visiting to pull teeth. They call it die Groot Trek, the Great Trek.’

As soon as their ease is threatened, the Coetzees come up with jokes. A family drawn up in a tight little laager to keep the world and its menaces at bay. But how long will the jokes go on doing their magic? One of these days the great foe himself will come knocking at the door, the Grim Reaper, whetting his scythe-blade, calling them out one by one. What power will their jokes have then?

‘According to John, you are going to move to Merweville while he stays on in Cape Town,’ she persists. ‘Are you sure you will be able to cope by yourself, Uncle Jack, without a car?’

A serious question. The Coetzees don’t like serious questions. ‘ Margie word ’n bietjie grim,’ they will say among themselves: Margie is becoming a bit grim. Is your son planning to shunt you off to the Karoo and abandon you , she is asking, and if that is what is afoot, how come you don’t raise your voice in protest?

‘No, no,’ replies Jack. ‘It won’t be like you say. Merweville will just be somewhere quiet to take a break. If it goes through. It’s just an idea, you know, an idea of John’s. It’s nothing definite.’

‘IT’S A SCHEME TO get rid of his father,’ says her sister Carol. ‘He wants to dump him in the middle of the Karoo and wash his hands of him. Then it will be up to Michiel to take care of him. Because Michiel will be closest.’

‘Poor old John!’ she replies. ‘You always believe the worst of him. What if he is telling the truth? He has promised he will visit Merweville every weekend, and spend the school holidays there as well. Why not give him the benefit of the doubt?’

‘Because I don’t believe a word he says. The whole plan sounds fishy to me. He has never got on with his father.’

‘He looks after his father in Cape Town.’

‘He lives with his father, but only because he has no money. He is thirty-something years old with no prospects. He ran away from South Africa to escape the army. Then he was thrown out of America because he broke the law. Now he can’t find a proper job because he is too stuck-up. The two of them live on the pathetic salary his father gets from the scrapyard where he works.’

‘But that’s not true!’ she protests. Carol is younger than she. Once Carol used to be the follower and she, Margot, the leader. Now it is Carol who stalks ahead, she who tails anxiously behind. How did it happen? ‘John teaches in a high school,’ she says. ‘He earns his own money.’

‘That’s not what I hear. What I hear is that he coaches dropouts for their matric exams and is paid by the hour. It’s part-time work, the sort of job students take to earn some pocket money. Ask him straight out. Ask him what school he teaches at. Ask him what he earns.’

‘A big salary isn’t all that counts.’

‘It isn’t just a matter of salary. It’s a matter of telling the truth. Let him tell you the truth about why he wants to buy this house in Merweville. Let him tell you who is going to pay for it, he or his father. Let him tell you his plans for the future.’ And then, when she looks blank: ‘Hasn’t he told you? Hasn’t he told you his plans?’

‘He doesn’t have plans. He is a Coetzee, Coetzees don’t have plans, they don’t have ambitions, they only have idle longings. He has an idle longing to live in the Karoo.’

‘His ambition is to be a poet, a full-time poet. Have you ever heard of such a thing? This Merweville scheme has nothing to do with his father’s welfare. He wants a place in the Karoo where he can come when it suits him, where he can sit with his chin on his hands and contemplate the sunset and write poems.’

John and his poems again! She can’t help it, she snorts with laughter. John sitting on the stoep of that ugly little house making up poems! With a beret on his head, no doubt, and a glass of wine at his elbow. And the little Coloured children clustered around him, pestering him with questions. Wat maak oom? — Nee, oom maak gedigte. Op sy ou ramkiekie maak oom gedigte. Die wêreld is ons woning nie … What is sir doing? — Sir is making poems. On his old banjo sir is making poems. This world is not our dwelling-place …

‘I’ll ask him,’ she says, still laughing. ‘I’ll ask him to show me his poems.’

SHE CATCHES JOHN THE next morning as he is setting off on one of his walks. ‘Let me come with you,’ she says. ‘Give me a minute to put on proper shoes.’

They follow the path that runs eastward from the farmstead along the bank of the overgrown riverbed towards the dam whose wall burst in the floods of 1943 and has never been repaired. In the shallow waters of the dam a trio of white geese float peacefully. It is still cool, there is no haze, they can see as far as the Nieuweveld Mountains.

‘ God ,’ she says, ‘ dis darem mooi. Dit raak jou siel aan, nè, dié ou wêreld .’ Isn’t it beautiful. It touches one’s soul, this landscape.

They are in a minority, a tiny minority, the two of them, of souls that are stirred by these great, desolate expanses. If anything has held them together over the years, it is that. This landscape, this kontrei — it has taken over her heart. When she dies and is buried, she will dissolve into this earth so naturally it will be as if she never had a human life.

‘Carol says you are still writing poems,’ she says. ‘Is that true? Will you show me?’

‘I am sorry to disappoint Carol,’ he replies stiffly, ‘but I haven’t written a poem since I was a teenager.’

She bites her tongue. She forgot: you do not ask a man to show you his poems, not in South Africa, not without reassuring him beforehand that it will be all right, he is not going to be mocked. What a country, where poetry is not a manly activity but a hobby for children and oujongnooiens [spinsters] — oujongnooiens of both sexes! How Totius or Louis Leipoldt got by she cannot guess. No wonder Carol chooses John’s poem-writing to attack, Carol with her nose for other people’s weaknesses.

‘If you gave up so long ago, why does Carol think you still write?’

‘I have no idea. Perhaps she saw me marking student essays and jumped to the wrong conclusion.’

She does not believe him, but she is not going to press him further. If he wants to evade her, let him. If poetry is a part of his life he is too shy or too ashamed to talk about, then so be it.

She does not think of John as a moffie , but it continues to puzzle her that he has no woman. A man alone, particularly one of the Coetzee men, seems to her like a boat without oar or rudder or sail. And now two of them, two Coetzee men, living as a couple! While Jack still had the redoubtable Vera behind him he steered a more or less straight course; but now that she is gone he seems quite lost. As for Jack and Vera’s son, he could certainly do with some level-headed guidance. But what woman with any sense would want to devote herself to the hapless John?