J. Coetzee - Slow Man

Among the Faucherys he did not bring out for Marijana is the one that haunts him most deeply. It is of a woman and six children grouped in the doorway of a mud and wattle cabin. That is to say, it could be a woman and six children, or the eldest girl could be not a child at all but a second woman, a second wife, brought in to take the place of the first, who looks drained of life, exhausted of loins.

All of them wear the same expression: not hostile to the stranger with the newfangled picture-machine who a moment before this moment plunged his head under the dark cloth, but frightened, frozen, like oxen at the portal of a slaughterhouse. The light hits them flat in the face, picks out every smudge on their skin and their clothes. On the hand that the smallest child brings to her mouth the light exposes what might be jam but was more likely mud. How the whole thing could have been brought off with the long exposures required in those days he cannot even guess.

Not just bush, he would like to tell Marijana. Not just blackfellows either. Not zero history. Look, that is where we come from: from the cold and damp and smoke of that wretched cabin, from those women with their black helpless eyes, from that poverty and that grinding labour on hollow stomachs. A people with a story of their own, a past. Our story, our past.

But is that the truth? Would the woman in the picture accept him as one of her tribe – the boy from Lourdes in the French Pyrenees with the mother who played Fauré on the piano? Is the history that he wants to claim as his not finally just an affair for the English and the Irish, foreigners keep out?

Despite Marijana's bracing presence, he seems to be on the brink of one of his bad spells again, one of the fits of lugubrious self-pity that turn into black gloom. He likes to think they come from elsewhere, episodes of bad weather that cross the sky and pass on. He prefers not to think they come from inside him and are his, part of him.

Fate deals you a hand, and you play the hand you are dealt. You do not whine, you do not complain. That, he used to believe, was his philosophy. Why then can he not resist these plunges into darkness?

The answer is that he is running down. Never is he going to be his old self again. Never is he going to have his old resilience. Whatever inside him was given the task of mending the organism after it was so terribly assaulted, first on the road, then in the operating theatre, has grown too tired for the job, too overburdened. And the same holds for the rest of the team, the heart, the lungs, the muscles, the brain. They did for him what they could as long as they could; now they want to rest.

A memory comes back to him of the cover of a book he used to own, a popular edition of Plato. It showed a chariot drawn by two steeds, a black steed with flashing eyes and distended nostrils representing the base appetites, and a white steed of calmer mien representing the less easily identifiable nobler passions. Standing in the chariot, gripping the reins, was a young man with a half-bared torso and a Grecian nose and a fillet around his brow, representing presumably the self, that which calls itself J. Well, in his book, the book of him, the book of his life, if that ever comes to be written, the picture will be more humdrum than in Plato. Himself, the one he calls Paul Rayment, will be seated on a wagon hitched to a mob of nags and drays that huff and puff, some barely pulling their weight. After sixty years of waking up every blessed morning, munching their ration of oats, pissing and shitting, then being harnessed for the day's haul, Paul Rayment's team will have had enough. Time to rest, they will say, time to be put out to pasture. And if rest is denied them, well, they will just fold their limbs and settle down in their traces; and if the whip starts to whistle around their rumps, let it whistle.

Sick at heart, sick in the head, sick to the bone, and, if the truth be told, sick of himself – sick even before the wrath of God, transmitted through his angel Wayne Blight, struck him down. He would never want to diminish that event, that blow. It was nothing less than a calamity. It has shrunk his world, turned him into a prisoner. But escaping death ought to have shaken him up, opened windows inside him, renewed his sense of the preciousness of life. It has done nothing of the sort. He is trapped with the same old self as before, only greyer and drearier. Enough to drive one to drink.

One o'clock and Marijana has not finished with the books. Ljuba, usually a good child – if it is still permitted to divide children into the good and the bad – is beginning to whine.

'Leave the cleaning. Finish it off tomorrow,' he tells Marijana.

'I am finished in flesh of lightning,' she replies. 'Maybe you give her something to eat.'

'Flash. A flash of lightning. Flesh is what we are made of, flesh and bone.'

She does not reply. Sometimes he thinks she does not bother to listen to him.

He should give Ljuba something to eat, but what? What do small children eat other than popcorn and cookies and toasted cereal flakes encrusted in sugar, none of which he has in his pantry?

He tries stirring a spoonful of plum jam into a pot of yoghurt. Ljuba accepts it, seems to like it.

She sits at the kitchen table, he stands by her leaning on Zimmer's invention. 'Your mum is a great help to me,' he says. 'I don't know what I would do without her.'

'Is it true you've got a artificial leg?' She produces the long word casually, as though she uses it every day.

'No, it's the same leg I always had, just a bit shorter.'

'But in your cupboard in your bedroom. Do you got a artificial leg in your cupboard?'

'No, I'm afraid not, there is nothing of the sort in my cupboard.'

'Do you got a screw in your leg?'

'A screw? No, no screws. My leg is all natural. It has a bone inside, just like your legs and your Mommy's legs.'

'Doesn't it got a screw, to screw on your artificial leg?'

'No, not as far as I know. Because I have no artificial leg. Why do you ask?'

'Because.' And she will say no more.

A screw in his leg. Perhaps in the past Marijana nursed a man with screws in his leg, screws and bolts and pins and struts and braces, all made of gold or titanium – a man with a reconstructed leg of the kind that was not awarded to him because he was too old for it, not worth the trouble and expense. Perhaps that is the explanation.

As a child, he remembers, he was told the story of a woman who in a moment of absent-mindedness stuck a tiny sewing-needle into the palm of her hand. Unnoticed, the needle climbed up the woman's veins and in the fullness of time pierced her heart and killed her. The story was presented to him as a caution against treating needles carelessly, but in retrospect it reads more like a fairytale. Is steel really antipathetic to life? Can needles really enter the bloodstream? How could the woman in the story have been unaware of the tiny metallic weapon cruising up her arm towards her armpit, rounding the axillar curve, and heading south towards its helpless, thudding prey? Should he be re-telling the story to Ljuba, passing on its cryptic wisdom, whatever that may be?

'No,' he repeats, 'I have no screws in me. If I had screws I would be a mechanical man. Which I am not.'

But Ljuba has lost interest in the leg that is not a mechanical leg. With a smack of the lips she finishes off the yoghurt and draws the sleeve of her jumper across her mouth. He reaches for a tissue and wipes her lips, which she allows him to do. After that he wipes her sleeve clean too.

It is the first time he has laid a finger on the child. For a moment her wrist lies limp in his hand. Perfect: no other word will do. They arrive from the womb with everything new, everything in perfect order. Even in the ones who arrive damaged, with funny limbs or a brain that sends out sparks, each cell is as fresh, as clean, as new as on creation day. Each new birth a new miracle.