J. Coetzee - Slow Man

Marijana collects all his trousers and takes them home with her. She brings them back two days later with the right legs neatly folded and sewn. 'I don't cut them,' she says. 'Maybe you change your mind and wear, you know, prosthese. We see.'

Prosthese: she pronounces it as if it were a German word. Thesis, antithesis, then prosthesis.

The surgical wound, which has given no trouble hitherto and which he thought had healed for good, starts to itch. Marijana dusts it with antibiotic powder and winds it in fresh bandages, but the itching continues. It is worst at night. He has to stay awake to keep himself from scratching. The wound feels to him like a great inflamed jewel glowing in the dark; both guard and prisoner, he is condemned to crouch over it, protecting it.

The itching abates, but Marijana continues to wash the stump with particular care, powder it, tend it.

'You think your leg grow again, Mr Rayment?' she asks one day, out of the blue.

'No, I have never thought so.'

'Still, maybe you think so sometimes. Like baby. Baby think, you cut it off, it grow again. Know what I mean? But you are not baby, Mr Rayment. So why don't you want this prosthese? Maybe you shy like a girl, eh? Maybe you think, you walk in street, everybody look at you. That Mr Rayment, he got only one leg! Isn't true. Isn't true. Nobody look at you. You wear prosthese, nobody look at you. Nobody know. Nobody care.'

'I'll think about it,' he says. 'There's lots of time. All the time in the world.'

After six weeks of water-work and swaying and being re-programmed he gives up on Madeleine Martin. He telephones her studio after hours and leaves a message on the answer machine. He telephones the ferry service and tells them not to come again. He even thinks of telephoning Mrs Putts. But what would he say to Mrs Putts? For six weeks he was prepared to believe in Madeleine Martin and the cure she offered, the cure for old memory systems. Now he has stopped believing in her. That is all, there is no more to it than that. If there is any residue of belief left in him, it has been shifted to Marijana Jokic, who has no studio and promises no cure, just care.

Perching on his bedside, pressing down on his groin with her left hand, Marijana watches, nodding, as he flexes, extends, and rotates the stump. With the lightest of pressure she helps him extend the flexion. She massages the aching muscle; she turns him over and massages his lower back.

From the touch of her hand he learns all he needs to know: that Marijana does not find this wasted and increasingly flabby body distasteful; that she is prepared, if she can, and if he will permit it, to transmit to him through her fingertips a fair quantum of her own ruddy good health.

It is not a cure, it is not done with love, it is probably no more than orthodox nursing practice, but it is enough. What love there is is all on his side.

'Thank you,' he says when their time is over, speaking with such feeling that she gives him a quizzical look.

'No worries,' she replies.

One evening after Marijana has left he rings for a taxi, then embarks alone on the slow sideways descent of the stairs, holding tight to the banister, sweating with fear that a crutch will slip. By the time the taxi arrives he has reached the street.

In the public library – where thankfully he does not have to leave ground level – he finds two books on Croatia: a guidebook to Illyria and the Dalmatian coast and a guidebook to Zagreb and its churches; also a number of books on the Yugoslav Federation and on the recent Balkan wars. On what he has come to enlighten himself about, however – the character of Croatia and its people – there is nothing.

He checks out a book called Peoples of the Balkans. When the taxi returns he is ready and waiting.

Peoples of the Balkans: Between East and West, so runs the full title. Is that how the Jokics felt back home: caught between Orthodox East and Catholic West? If so, how do they feel in Australia, where east and west have quite new meanings? The book has pages of black-and-white photographs. In one of them, a pair of peasant girls in head-scarves conduct a donkey laden with firewood along a rocky mountain path. The younger girl smiles shyly at the camera, revealing a gap in her teeth. Peoples of the Balkans dates from 1962, before Marijana was even conceived. The pictures date from who knows when. The two girls could be grandmothers by now, they could be dead and buried. The donkey too. Was this the world Marijana was born into, an immemorial world of donkeys and goats and chickens and water-buckets sheeted in ice in the mornings, or was she a child of the workers' paradise?

More than likely the Jokics brought with them from the old country their own picture collection: baptisms, confirmations, weddings, family get-togethers. A pity he will not get to see it. He tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words. Not because pictures cannot lie but because, once they leave the darkroom, they are fixed, immutable. Whereas stories – the story of the needle in the bloodstream, for instance, or the story of how he and Wayne Blight came to meet on Magill Road – seem to change shape all the time.

The camera, with its power of taking in light and turning it into substance, has always seemed to him more a metaphysical than a mechanical device. His first real job was as a darkroom technician; his greatest pleasure was always in darkroom work. As the ghostly image emerged beneath the surface of the liquid, as veins of darkness on the paper began to knit together and grow visible, he would sometimes experience a little shiver of ecstasy, as though he were present at the day of creation.

That was why, later on, he began to lose interest in photography: first when colour took over, then when it became plain that the old magic of light-sensitive emulsions was waning, that to the rising generation the enchantment lay in a techne of images without substance, images that could flash through the ether without residing anywhere, that could be sucked into a machine and emerge from it doctored, untrue. He gave up recording the world in photographs then, and transferred his energies to saving the past.

Does it say something about him, that native preference for black and white and shades of grey, that lack of interest in the new? Is that what women missed in him, his wife in particular: colour, openness?

The story he told Marijana was that he saved old pictures out of fidelity to their subjects, the men and women and children who offered their bodies up to the stranger's lens. But that is not the whole truth. He saves them too out of fidelity to the photographs themselves, the photographic prints, most of them last survivors, unique. He gives them a good home and sees to it, as far as he is able, as far as anyone is able, that they will have a good home after he is gone. Perhaps, in turn, some as yet unborn stranger will reach back and save a picture of him, of the extinct Rayment of the Rayment Bequest.

As for the politics of the Jokic family, as for what niche they might have occupied in the mosaic of Balkan loyalties and enmities, he has never quizzed Marijana and he has no intention of doing so. As with most immigrants, their feelings towards the old country are probably mixed. The Dutchman who married his mother and brought her and her children from Lourdes to Ballarat kept a framed photograph of Queen Wilhelmina side by side with a plaster statuette of the Virgin Mary in the living-room. On the monarch's birthday he lit a candle before her image as if she were a saint. Infidéle Europe, he used to say of Europe; the queen's picture bore the motto Trouw, faith, fidelity. In the evenings he would huddle over the short-wave radio trying to catch through the crackle a word here and a word there from Radio Hilversum. At the same time he was desperate for the country of his new allegiance to live up to the idea of it he had formed from afar. In the face of a dubious wife and two unhappy stepchildren, Australia had to be the sunny land of opportunity. If the natives were unwelcoming, if they fell silent in their presence or mocked their faltering English, no matter: time and hard work would wear down that hostility. A faith the man still held to when he last saw him, aged ninety, pale as a mushroom, shuffling among the pot-plants in his ramshackle greenhouse. The Jokics, man and wife, must hold to some variant of the Dutchman's faith. Whereas their children, Drago and Ljuba and the other one, will have formed their own picture of Australia, clearer and cooler.