J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

'Hence the Greeks, I suppose you want to say. The Apollo Belvedere. The Venus of Milo.'

'Yes, hence the Greeks. Hence my question:What are you doing, importing into Africa, importing into Zululand, for God's sake, this utterly alien, Gothic obsession with the ugliness and mortality of the human body? If you have to import Europe into Africa, is there not a better case for importing the Greeks?'

'Do you think, Elizabeth, that the Greeks are utterly foreign to Zululand? I tell you again, if you will not listen to me, at least have the decency to listen to Joseph. Do you think that Joseph carves suffering Jesus because he does not know better, that if you took Joseph on a tour around the Louvre his eyes would be opened and he would set about carving, for the benefit of his people, naked women preening themselves, or men flexing their muscles? Are you aware that when Europeans first came in contact with the Zulus, educated Europeans, men from England with public-school educations behind them, they thought they had rediscovered the Greeks? They said so quite explicitly. They took out their sketch blocks and drew sketches in which Zulu warriors with their spears and their clubs and their shields are shown in exactly the same attitudes, with exactly the same physical proportions, as the Hectors and Achilles we see in nineteenth-century illustrations of the Iliad, except that their skins are dusky. Well-formed limbs, skimpy clothes, a proud bearing, formal manners, martial virtues – it was all here! Sparta in Africa: that is what they thought they had found. For decades those same ex-public schoolboys, with their romantic idea of Greek antiquity, administered Zululand on behalf of the Crown. They wanted Zululand to be Sparta. They wanted the Zulus to be Greeks. So to Joseph and his father and his grandfather the Greeks are not a remote foreign tribe at all. They were offered the Greeks, by their new rulers, as a model of the kind of people they ought to be and could be. They were offered the Greeks and they rejected them. Instead, they looked elsewhere in the Mediterranean world. They chose to be Christians, followers of the living Christ. Joseph has chosen Jesus as his model. Speak to him. He will tell you.'

'That is not a byway of history I am familiar with, Blanche – Britons and Zulus. I cannot dispute with you.'

'It is not just in Zululand that it happened. It happened in Australia too. It happened all over the colonized world, just not in so neat a form. Those young fellows from Oxford and Cambridge and St Cyr offered their new barbarian subjects a false ideal. Throw away your idols, they said. You can be as gods. Look at the Greeks, they said. And indeed, who can tell gods from men in Greece, the romantic Greece of those young men, heirs of the humanists? Come to our schools, they said, and we will teach you how. We will make you disciples of reason and the sciences that flow from reason; we will make you masters of nature. Through us you will overcome disease and all corruption of the flesh. You will live for ever.

'Well, the Zulus knew better.' She waves a hand towards the window, towards the hospital buildings baking under the sun, towards the dirt road winding up into the barren hills. 'This is reality: the reality of Zululand, the reality of Africa. It is the reality now and the reality of the future as far as we can see it. Which is why African people come to church to kneel before Jesus on the cross, African women above all, who have to bear the brunt of reality. Because they suffer and he suffers with them.'

'Not because he promises them another, better life after death?'

Blanche shakes her head. 'No. To the people who come to Marianhill I promise nothing except that we will help them bear their cross.'

Eight thirty on Sunday morning, but the sun is already fierce. At noon the driver will come to take her to Durban and the flight home.

Two young girls in gaudy dresses, barefoot, race to the bell rope and begin tugging it. Atop its post the bell jangles spasmodically.

'Will you be coming?' says Blanche.

'Yes, I will be there. Do I need to cover my head?'

'Come as you are. There are no formalities here. But be warned: we are having a visit from a television crew.'

'Television?'

'From Sweden. They are making a film about Aids in KwaZulu.'

'And the priest? Has the priest been told the service is being filmed? Who is the priest anyhow?'

'Father Msimungu from Dalehill will be taking Mass. He has no objection.'

Father Msimungu, when he arrives in a still quite smart Golf, is young, gangly, bespectacled. He goes off to the dispensary to be robed; she joins Blanche and the other half-dozen sisters of the Order at the front of the congregation. The camera lights are already in place and trained on them. In their cruel glare she cannot fail to see how old they all are. The Sisters of Mary: a dying breed, an exhausted vocation.

Under its metal roof the chapel is already stiflingly hot. She does not know how Blanche, in her heavy outfit, bears it.

The Mass Msimungu leads is in Zulu, though here and there she is able to pick out a word of English. It starts sedately enough; but by the time of the first collect there is already a humming among the flock. Launching into his homily, Msimungu has to raise his voice to make himself heard. A baritone voice, surprising in so young a man. It seems to come from effortlessly deep in the chest.

Msimungu turns, kneels before the altar. A silence falls. Above him looms the crowned head of the tortured Christ. Then he turns and holds up the Host. There is a joyous shout from the body of worshippers. A rhythmic stamping commences that makes the wooden floor vibrate.

She feels herself swaying. The air is thick with the smell of sweat. She clasps Blanche's arm. 'I must get out!' she whispers. Blanche casts an appraising glance. 'Just a little while longer,' she whispers back, and turns away.

She takes a deep breath, trying to clear her head, but it does not help. A wave of cold seems to ascend from her toes. It rises to her face, her scalp prickles with the chill, and she is gone.

She wakes flat on her back up in a bare room she does not recognize. Blanche is there, gazing down on her, and a young woman in a white uniform. 'I am so sorry' she mumbles, struggling to sit up. 'Did I faint?'

The young woman puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder. 'It is all right,' she says. 'But you must rest.'

She casts her eyes up at Blanche. 'I am so sorry,' she repeats. 'Too many continents.'

Blanche regards her quizzically

'Too many continents,' she repeats. 'Too many burdens.' Her voice sounds thin to her ears, far away. 'I haven't been eating properly,' she says. 'That must be the explanation.'

But is that the explanation? Is a two-day stomach upset enough to cause a faint? Blanche would know. Blanche must have experience of fasting, of fainting. For her own part, she suspects her indisposition is not just of a bodily order. If she were so disposed, she might be welcoming these experiences on a new continent, making something of them. But she is not so disposed. That is what her body is saying, in its own way All too strange and too much, her body is complaining: I want to be back in my old surroundings, in a life I am familiar with.

Withdrawal: that is what she is suffering from. Fainting: a withdrawal symptom. It reminds her of someone. Of whom? Of that pale English girl in A Passage to India, the one who cannot take it, who panics and shames everyone. Who cannot take the heat.

The driver is waiting. She is packed and ready, still feeling a little pale, a little wobbly.'Goodbye,' she says to Blanche.'Goodbye, Sister Blanche. I see what you meant. Nothing like St Patrick's on a Sunday morning. I hope they didn't capture me on film, keeling over like that.'