J. Coetzee - Slow Man

Save them from what? He cannot say, not yet. But Drago above all he wants to save. Between Drago and the lightning-bolt of the envious gods he is ready to interpose himself, bare his own breast.

He is like a woman who, having never borne a child, having grown too old for it, now hungers suddenly and urgently for motherhood. Hungry enough to steal another's child: it is as mad as that.

'HOW IS DRAGO getting on?' he asks Marijana, as casually as he can.

She shrugs despondently. 'This weekend he will go with his friends to Tunkalooloo beach. You say it like that – Tunkalooloo?'

'Tunkalilla.'

'They go by bike. Wild friends, wild boys. I'm frighted. Is like gang. Girls too, you can't believe it so young. I'm glad you speak to him last week. Spoke.'

'It was nothing. Just a few fatherly words.'

'Yes, he don't get enough fatherly words, like you say, that's his problem.'

It is the first criticism she has voiced of the absent husband. He waits for more, but there is no more.

'This is not an easy country for a boy to grow up in,' he replies cautiously. 'A climate of manliness prevails. A lot of pressure on a boy to excel in manly deeds, manly sports. Be a daredevil. Take risks. It is probably different back where you come from.'

Back where you come from. Now that he hears them, the words sound condescending. Why should boys not also be boys where the Jokics come from? What does he know about the forms that manliness takes in south-eastern Europe? He waits for Marijana to set him right. But her mind is elsewhere.

'What you think of boarding school, Mr Rayment?'

'What do I think of boarding school? I think it can be very expensive. I also think it is a mistake, a bad mistake, to believe that in boarding schools young people are watched over night and day to make sure they come to no harm. But you can get a good education at a boarding school, no doubt about that, or at the better boarding schools. Is that what you are thinking of for Drago? Have you checked into their fees? You should do that first. Their fees can be high, absurdly high, in fact astronomical.'

What he refrains from saying is: So high as to exclude children whose fathers assemble cars for a living. Or whose mothers nurse the aged.

'But if you are serious about it,' he plunges on, and even as he speaks he feels the recklessness of what he is saying, but he cannot stop himself, will not stop himself, 'and if Drago himself really wants to go, I could help financially. We could treat it as a loan.'

There is a moment's silence. So, he thinks, it is out. No going back.

'We are thinking, maybe he can get scholarship, with his tennis and all that,' says Marijana, who has perhaps not absorbed his words and what must lie behind them.

'Yes, a scholarship is certainly a possibility, you can investigate that.'

'Or we can get loan.' Now the echo of his words seems to reach her, and her brow furrows. 'You can loan us money, Mr Rayment?'

'I can make you a loan. Interest-free. You can pay it back when Drago is earning.'

'Why?'

'It is an investment in his future. In the future of all of us.'

She shakes her head. 'Why?' she repeats, 'I don't understand.'

It is one of the days when she has brought Ljuba with her. In her scarlet pinafore, with her legs, one in a scarlet stocking, one in a purple, stretched out on the sofa, her arms slack at her sides, the child could be mistaken for a doll, were it not for the searching black eyes.

'Surely you must know, Marijana,' he whispers. His mouth is dry, his heart is thudding, it is as awful and as thrilling as when he was sixteen. 'Surely a woman always knows.'

Again she shakes her head. She seems genuinely puzzled. 'Don't understand.'

'I will tell you in private.'

She murmurs to the child. Obediently Ljuba picks up her little pink backpack and trots off to the kitchen.

'There,' says Marijana. 'Now say.'

'I love you. That is all. I love you and I want to give you something. Let me.'

In the books that his mother used to order from Paris when he was still a child, that used to arrive in brown pasteboard packets with the Librairie Hachette crest and a row of stamps bearing the head of stern Marianne decked in her Phrygian cap, books that his mother would sigh over in the living-room in Ballarat where the shutters were always closed, either against the heat or against the cold, and that he would secretly read after her, skipping the words he did not know, as part of his sempiternal quest to find what it was that would please her, it would have been written that Marijana's lip curled with scorn, perhaps even that her lip curled with scorn while her eye gleamed with secret triumph. But when he left his childhood behind he lost faith in the world of Hachette. If there ever was – which he doubts – a code of looks that, once mastered, would allow one to read infallibly the transient motions of the human lips and eyes, it has gone now, gone with the wind.

A silence falls, and Marijana does nothing to help. But at least she does not turn on her heel. Whether or not her lip curls, she does seem prepared to hear more of this extraordinary, irregular declaration.

What he ought to do, of course, is embrace the woman. Breast to breast she could not mistake him. But to embrace her he must put aside the absurd crutches that allow him to stand up; and once he does that he will totter, perhaps fall. For the first time he sees the sense of an artificial leg, a leg with a mechanism that locks the knee and thus frees the arms.

Marijana waves a hand as if wiping a windowpane or flapping a dishcloth. 'You want to pay so Drago can go to boarding school?' she says, and the spell is broken.

Is that what he wants: to pay for Drago's schooling? Yes. He wants Drago to have a good education, and then, after that, if he holds to his ambition, if the sea is indeed his heart's desire, to qualify as a naval officer. He wants Ljuba and her elder sister to grow up happy too, and have their own hearts' desire. Over the whole brood he wants to extend the shield of his benevolent protection. And he wants to love this excellent woman, their mother. That above all. For which he will pay anything.

'Yes,' he says. 'That is what I am offering.'

She meets his gaze squarely. Though he cannot swear to it, he believes she is blushing. Then, swiftly, she leaves the room. A moment later she is back. The red kerchief is gone, her hair is shaken free. On one arm she has Ljuba, on the other the pink satchel. She is murmuring into the child's ear. The child, thumb in mouth, turns and inspects him curiously.

'We must go,' Marijana says. 'Thank you.' And in a whisk they are gone.

He has done it. He, an old man with knobbly fingers, has confessed his love. But dare he even for a moment hope that this woman, in whom he has without forethought, without hesitation sunk all his hopes, will love him back?

THE NEXT DAY Marijana does not arrive. Nor does she come on Friday. The shadows that he had thought gone for ever return. He telephones the Jokic home, gets a female voice, not Marijana's (whose? the other daughter's?), on an answering machine. 'Paul Rayment here, for Marijana,' he says. 'Could she give me a call?' There is no call.

He sits down to write a letter. Dear Marijana, he writes, I fear you may have misunderstood me. He deletes me and writes my meaning. But what is the meaning she may have misunderstood? When I first met you, he writes, beginning a new paragraph, I was in a shattered state. Which is not true. His knee might have been shattered, and his prospects, but not his state. If he knew the word to describe his state as it was when he met Marijana, he would know his meaning too, as it is today. He deletes shattered. But what to put in its place?