J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

'Silent until the next rains come, rapping, as it were, on thousands of tiny coffin lids. In those coffins hearts begin to beat, limbs begin to twitch that for months have been lifeless. The dead awake. As the caked mud softens, the frogs begin to dig their way out, and soon their voices resound again in joyous exultation beneath the vault of the heavens.

'Excuse my language. I am or have been a professional writer. Usually I take care to conceal the extravagances of the imagination. But today, for this occasion, I thought I would conceal nothing, bare all. The vivifying flood, the chorus of joyous belling, followed by the subsiding of the waters and the retreat to the grave, then drought seemingly without end, then fresh rains and the resurrection of the dead – it is a story I present transparently without disguise.

'Why? Because today I am before you not as a writer but as an old woman who was once a child, telling you what I remember of the Dulgannon mudflats of my childhood and of the frogs who live there, some as small as the tip of my little finger, creatures so insignificant and so remote from your loftier concerns that you would not hear of them otherwise. In my account, for whose many failings I beg your pardon, the life cycle of the frog may sound allegorical, but to the frogs themselves it is no allegory, it is the thing itself, the only thing.

'What do I believe? I believe in those little frogs. Where I find myself today, in my old age and perhaps my older age, I am not sure. There are moments when it feels like Italy, but I could easily be mistaken, it could be a quite different place. Towns in Italy do not, as far as I know, have portals (I will not use the humble word gate in your presence) through which it is forbidden to pass. But the Australian continent, where I was born into the world, kicking and squalling, is real (if far away), the Dulgannon and its mudflats are real, the frogs are real. They exist whether or not I tell you about them, whether or not I believe in them.

'It is because of the indifference of those little frogs to my belief (all they want from life is a chance to gobble down mosquitoes and sing; and the males among them, the ones who do most of the singing, sing not to fill the night air with melody but as a form of courtship, for which they hope to be rewarded with orgasm, the frog variety of orgasm, again and again and again) – it is because of their indifference to me that I believe in them. And that is why, this afternoon, in this lamentably rushed and lamentably literary presentation for which I again apologize, but I thought I would offer myself to you without forethought, toute nue so to speak, and almost, as you can see for yourselves, without notes – that is why I speak to you of frogs. Of frogs and of my belief or beliefs and of the relation between the former and the latter. Because they exist.'

She comes to a stop. From behind her, the sound of gentle handclapping, from a single pair of hands, the cleaning woman's. The clapping dwindles, ceases. It was she, the cleaning woman, who put her up to it – this flood of words, this gabble, this confusion, this passion. Well, let us see what kind of response passion gets.

One of the judges, the man on the extreme right, leans forward. 'Dulgannon,' he says. 'That is a river?'

'Yes, a river. It exists. It is not negligible. You will find it on most maps.'

'And you spent your childhood there, on the Dulgannon?'

She is silent.

'Because it says nothing here, in your docket, about a childhood on the Dulgannon.'

She is silent.

'Is childhood on the Dulgannon another of your stories, Mrs Costello? Along with the frogs and the rain from heaven?'

'The river exists. The frogs exist. I exist. What more do you want?'

The woman among them, slim, with neat silver hair and silver-rimmed glasses, speaks. 'You believe in life?'

'I believe in what does not bother to believe in me.'

The judge makes a little gesture of impatience. 'A stone does not believe in you. A bush. But you choose to tell us not about stones or bushes but about frogs, to which you attribute a life story that is, as you concede, highly allegorical. These Australian frogs of yours embody the spirit of life, which is what you as a storyteller believe in.'

It is not a question, it is, in effect, a judgement. Should she accept it? She believed in life: will she take that as the last word on her, her epitaph? Her whole inclination is to protest: Vapid! she wants to cry. I am worth better than that! But she reins herself in. She is not here to win an argument, she is here to win a pass, a passage. Once she has passed, once she has said goodbye to this place, what she leaves behind of herself, even if it is to be an epitaph, will be of the utmost inconsequence.

'If you like,' she says guardedly.

The judge, her judge, looks away, purses her lips. A long silence falls. She listens for the buzzing of the fly that one is supposed to hear on such occasions, but there does not appear to be a fly in the courtroom.

Does she believe in life? But for this absurd tribunal and its demands, would she even believe in frogs? How does one know what one believes in?

She tries a test that seems to work when she is writing: to send out a word into the darkness and listen for what kind of sound comes back. Like a foundryman tapping a bell: is it cracked or healthy? The frogs: what tone do the frogs give off?

The answer: no tone at all. But she is too canny, knows the business too well, to be disappointed just yet. The mud frogs of the Dulgannon are a new departure for her. Give them time: they might yet be made to ring true. For there is something about them that obscurely engages her, something about their mud tombs and the fingers of their hands, fingers that end in little balls, soft, wet, mucous.

She thinks of the frog beneath the earth, spread out as if flying, as if parachuting through the darkness. She thinks of the mud eating away at the tips of those fingers, trying to absorb them, to dissolve the soft tissue till no one can tell any longer (certainly not the frog itself, lost as it is in its cold sleep of hibernation) what is earth, what is flesh.Yes, that she can believe in: the dissolution, the return to the elements; and the converse moment she can believe in too, when the first quiver of returning life runs through the body and the limbs contract, the hands flex. She can believe in that, if she concentrates closely enough, word by word.

'Psst.'

It is the bailiff. He gestures towards the bench, where the judge-in-chief is regarding her impatiently. Has she been in a trance, or even asleep? Has she been dozing in the faces of her judges? She should be more careful.

'I refer you to your first appearance before this court, when you gave as your occupation "secretary to the invisible" and made the following statement: "A good secretary should not have beliefs. It is inappropriate to the function"; and, a little later, "I have beliefs but I do not believe in them."

'At that hearing you appeared to disparage belief, calling it an impediment to your calling. At today's hearing, however, you testify to a belief in frogs, or more accurately in the allegorical meaning of a frog's life, if I understand your drift. My question is: Have you changed the basis of your plea from the first hearing to the present one? Are you giving up the secretary story and presenting a new one, based on the firmness of your belief in the creation?'

Has she changed her story? It is a weighty question, no doubt about that, yet she has to struggle to fix her attention on it. The courtroom is hot, she feels drugged, she is not sure how much more of this hearing she can take. What she would like most is to lay her head on a pillow and have a snooze, even if it has to be the filthy pillow in the bunkhouse.