J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

From a change in the air, a change that penetrates even the sluggish space of the dormitory, she knows the sun is declining. She has let the whole afternoon slip by. She has neither gone dancing nor worked on her statement, merely brooded, wasted her time.

In the poky little washroom at the back she freshens up as best she can. When she returns there is a new arrival, a woman younger than herself, slumped on a bunk with her eyes shut. It is someone she has noticed before, on the square, in the company of a man wearing a white straw hat. She took her to be a local. But evidently not. Evidently she is a petitioner too.

Not for the first time, the question occurs to her: Is that what we are, all of us; petitioners awaiting our respective judgements, some new, some, the ones I call locals, long enough here to have settled down, settled in, become part of the scenery?

About the woman on the bunk there is something familiar that she cannot pin down. Even when she first saw her on the square she seemed familiar. But from the beginning there has been something familiar about the square itself, the whole town. It is as though she has been transported to the set of a dimly remembered film. The Polish cleaning woman, for instance, if that is what she is, Polish: where has she seen her before, and why does she associate her with poetry? Is this younger woman a poet too? Is that where she is: not so much in purgatory as in a kind of literary theme park, set up to divert her while she waits, with actors made up to look like writers? But if so, why is the make-up so poor? Why is the whole thing not done better?

That is, finally, what is so eerie about this place, or would be eerie if the tempo of life were not so languid: the gap between the actors and the parts they play, between the world it is given her to see and what that world stands for. If the afterlife, if that is what this is, give it that name for the moment – if the afterlife turns out to be nothing but hocus-pocus, a simulation from beginning to end, why does the simulation fail so consistently, not just by a hair's breadth – one could forgive it that – but by a hand's breadth?

It is the same with the Kafka business. The wall, the gate, the sentry, are straight out of Kafka. So is the demand for a confession, so is the courtroom with the dozing bailiff and the panel of old men in their crows' robes pretending to pay attention while she thrashes about in the toils of her own words. Kafka, but only the superficies of Kafka; Kafka reduced and flattened to a parody.

And why is it Kafka in particular who is trundled out for her? She is no devotee of Kafka. Most of the time she cannot read him without impatience. As he veers between helplessness and lust, between rage and obsequiousness, she too often finds him, or at least his K selves, simply childish. So why is the mise en scène into which she has been hurled so – she dislikes the word but there is no other – so Kafkaesque?

One answer that occurs to her is that the show is put together in this way because it is not her kind of show. You do not like the Kafkaesque, so let us rub your nose in it. Perhaps that is what these border towns are for: to teach pilgrims a lesson. Very well; but why submit to the lesson? Why take it all so seriously? What can these so-called judges do to her except hold her up, day after day after day? And the gate itself, that bars her way: she has seen what lies beyond it. There is light, certainly, but it is not the light that Dante saw in Paradise, it is not even in the same league. If they are going to block her from passing through, very well then, basta, let them block her. Let her spend the rest of her life, so to speak, here, idling the daytime hours away on the square and retiring at nightfall to lie in the smell of someone else's sweat. Not the worst of fates. There must be things she could do to pass the time. Who knows, she might even, if she finds a shop that hires out typewriters, take up novel-writing again.

It is morning. She is at her table on the pavement, working on her statement, trying out a new approach. Since she boasts that she is secretary of the invisible, let her concentrate her attention, turn it inward. What voice does she hear from the invisible today?

For the moment, all she hears is the slow thud of the blood in her ears, just as all she feels is the soft touch of the sun on her skin. That at least she does not have to invent: this dumb, faithful body that has accompanied her every step of the way, this gentle, lumbering monster that has been given to her to look after, this shadow turned to flesh that stands on two feet like a bear and laves itself continually from the inside with blood. Not only is she in this body, this thing which not in a thousand years could she have dreamed up, so far beyond her powers would it be, she somehow is this body; and all around her on the square, on this beautiful morning, these people, somehow, are their bodies too.

Somehow; but how? How on earth can bodies not only keep themselves clean using blood (blood!) but cogitate upon the mystery of their existence and make utterances about it and now and again even have little ecstasies? Does it count as a belief, whatever property she has that allows her to continue to be this body when she has not the faintest idea how the trick is done? Would they, the bench of judges, the panel of examiners, the tribunal that demands she bare her beliefs – would they be satisfied with this: I believe that I am? I believe that what stands before you today is I? Or would that be too much like philosophy, too much like the seminar room?

There is an episode in the Odyssey that always sends a shiver down her back. Odysseus has descended into the kingdom of the dead to consult the seer Tiresias. Following instructions, he digs a furrow, cuts the throat of his favourite ram, lets its blood flow into the furrow. As the blood pours, the pallid dead crowd around, slavering for a taste, until to hold them off Odysseus has to draw his sword.

The pool of dark blood, the expiring ram, the man, at a crouch, ready to thrust and stab if need be, the pale souls hard to distinguish from cadavers: why does the scene haunt her? What, coming from the invisible, does it say? She believes, most unquestionably, in the ram, the ram dragged by its master down to this terrible place. The ram is not just an idea, the ram is alive though right now it is dying. If she believes in the ram, then does she believe in its blood too, this sacred liquid, sticky, dark, almost black, pumped out in gouts on to soil where nothing will grow? The favourite ram of the king of Ithaca, so runs the story, yet treated in the end as a mere bag of blood, to be cut open and poured from. She could do the same, here and now: turn herself into a bag, cut her veins and let herself pour on to the pavement, into the gutter. For that, finally, is all it means to be alive: to be able to die. Is this vision the sum of her faith: the vision of the ram and what happens to the ram? Will it be a good enough story for them, her hungry judges?

Someone sits down opposite her. Preoccupied, she does not look up.

'Are you working on your confession?'

It is the woman from the dormitory, the one with the Polish accent, the one she thinks of as the Kapo. This morning she is wearing a cotton dress, flowery, lemon-green, somewhat old-fashioned, with a white belt. It suits her, suits her strong blonde hair and sunburnt skin and broad frame. She looks like a peasant at harvest time, sturdy, capable.

'No, not a confession, a statement of belief. That is what I have been asked for.'

'We call them confessions here.'

'Really. I would not call it that. Not in English. Perhaps in Latin, perhaps in Italian.'