J. Coetzee - Slow Man

Marijana returns with the big washing-bowl. 'Private time for Mr Rayment,' she says. 'Go make picture for Mama.' She shepherds the child out, closes the door. She has taken off her sandals; her feet, he notices for the first time, are broad and flat; her toenails are painted a surprising dark red, almost purple, the colour of an angry bruise.

'You need help?' she says.

He shakes his head, slips his trousers off. 'Lie down,' she says. She spreads a discreet towel over his middle, lifts the stump onto her lap, deftly unwinds the bandage, gives the naked thing an approving pat. 'No prosthese, eh? You think your leg grow again, Mr Rayment? Only baby think like that – you cut it off, it grow again.'

'Marijana, please stop. We have had this conversation before. I don't want to talk – '

'OK, OK, no more talk on prosthese. You stay at home, your lady friends come visit, better that way.' She runs her thumb along the scar. 'Cheaper. No pain? No itch?'

He shakes his head.

'Good,' she says; and begins to soap the stump.

His bad humour is evaporating like the morning mist. Anything, he thinks to himself: I would give anything for… He thinks the thought with such fervour that it is impossible it does not communicate itself to Marijana. But Marijana's face is impassive. Adored, he thinks to himself. I adore this woman! Despite all! And also: She has me in the palm of her hand!

She finishes washing the stump, pats it dry, begins the first massage. After the first massage, the stretch exercises. After the stretch exercises, the second and concluding massage.

Let this go on for ever!

She must be used to it, all nurses must be used to it: men under their care growing physically excited. That must be why she is always so quick, so businesslike, why she declines to meet his eye. Presumably that is how they are taught to deal with male excitement. It will sometimes happen that… It is important to understand that… Such motions are involuntary and are an embarrassment as much to the patient as to the nurse… It is best to… Lively moments in an otherwise boring lecture.

Before the Fall, said Augustine, all motions of the body were under the direction of the soul, which partakes of God's essence. Therefore if today we find ourselves at the mercy of whimsical motions of bodily parts, that is a consequence of a fallen nature, fallen away from God. But was the blessed Augustine right? Are the motions of his own bodily parts merely whimsical? It all feels one to him, one movement: the swelling of the soul, the swelling of the heart, the swelling of desire. He cannot imagine loving God more than he loves Marijana at this moment.

Marijana is not dressed in her blue uniform, which means that she does not regard today as a working day, or at least did not regard it as such when she left home. Instead she is wearing an olive-green dress with a black sash and a brief slit up the left side that reveals a knee and a flash of thigh. Her bare brown arms, her smooth brown legs: Anything! he thinks again. I would give anything! And somehow this anything! and his approval of the olive-green outfit, which he finds irresistibly fetching, are no different from his love of God, who, if he does not exist, at least fills what would otherwise be a vast, all-devouring hole.

'Now on left side.' She rearranges the towel to keep him decent. 'So: press against me.'

She presses the stump backward; he is supposed to press forward countervailingly. Briefly they hold the position, the two of them: she gripping the curtailed thigh with both hands, leaning her weight against him, he gripping the edge of the bed and resisting. How far! he thinks. How near and yet how far! Breast to breast they might as well be, pushing their fallen selves into each other. If Wayne were to hear about this, what would he say! But for Wayne Blight he would never have met Marijana Jokic; but for Wayne Blight he would not have known this pressure, this love, this urgency. Felix, felix. Felix lapsus. Everything is for the best, after all.

'OK, now relax,' says Marijana. 'Good. Now on front side.'

She hitches up her dress and straddles him. On the radio, which sent him to sleep in the first place and which has not been switched off, a man is talking about the Korean car industry. Figures are up, figures are down. Marijana's hands slip under his shirt, her thumbs find a knot of pain high in the buttock and begin to caress it away. Thank you, God, he thinks. And thank God the Costello woman is not here to observe and comment.

'Što to radiš, mama?'

He opens his eyes with a start. From an arm's length away Ljuba is staring straight at him. There is no mistaking the severity of that gaze. Here he is, old and ugly and hairy and half naked and no doubt to her angelic nostrils smelly, wrestling with her mother, the two of them trapped in a posture that does not even have the repulsive majesty of intercourse.

For a moment, when the child spoke, he could feel Marijana freeze. Now she picks up the rhythm of the massage again. 'Mr Rayment has pain,' she says. 'Mama is nurse, remember?'

'That will be enough for today, Marijana,' he says, hastening to cover himself. 'Thank you.'

Marijana clambers off the bed, slips on her sandals, takes Ljuba by the hand. 'Don't suck thumb,' she says. 'Is ugly. OK, Mr Rayment. Maybe pain go away now.'

IT IS SATURDAY. Marijana has closeted herself in the study with Drago; the two are having what sounds very much like a row. Her voice, rapid and insistent, rises every now and again above her son's, beating it down.

Ljuba is on the stairway, hopping up and down the stairs, making a clatter.

'Ljuba!' he calls. 'Come and have some yoghurt!' The child ignores him.

Marijana emerges from the study. 'Is OK I leave Ljuba here? She stay with Drago. No trouble. I come back later and fetch her.'

He had been hoping to receive from Marijana a little more of what he pays her to provide, perhaps even another session of body-care; but evidently that will not be forthcoming. Twice a month, like clockwork, a little mechanism at the bank switches money from the Rayment account to the Jokic account. In return for his money, in return for the home from home that he provides for Drago, he receives – what? A shopping service, more and more irregular; infrequent ministrations of a health-professional kind. A not unadvantageous bargain, from Marijana's point of view. But then, as the Costello woman keeps telling him, if he wants to be a father he had better find out about fatherhood as it really is, fatherhood of the non-mystical kind.

Marijana has barely gone off when there are voices from the stairwell and Ljuba reappears with the Costello woman and Drago's friend Shaun in tow, Shaun clad today in a slack T-shirt and shorts down to his calves.

'Hello, Paul,' says the Costello woman. 'I hope you don't mind us breezing in. Ljuba darling, tell Drago that Shaun is here.'

He and she are alone for a moment, the two seniors.

'Not quite in Drago's class, is he, our friend Shaun,' says Costello. 'But that is how gods and angels seem to be: they choose the most distressingly ordinary mortals to consort with.'

He is silent.

'There is a story I keep meaning to tell, that I think will amuse you,' she continues. 'It comes from the distant past, from the time of my youth. One of the boys on our street was very much like Drago. Same dark eyes, same long eyelashes, same not quite human good looks. I was smitten with him. I must have been fourteen at the time, he a little older. I still used to pray in those days. "God," I would say, "let him bestow on me just one of his smiles and I will be yours forever."'