J. Coetzee - Slow Man

'And?'

'God paid no attention. Nor did the boy. My maiden longings were never requited. So, alas, I never became a child of God. The last I heard of Mr Eyelashes, he was married and had moved to the Gold Coast, where he was making a killing in real estate.'

'So is it all a lie then: Whom the gods love die young?'

'I fear so. I fear the gods no longer have time for us, whether to love us on the one hand or to punish us on the other. They have troubles enough in their own gated community.'

'No time even for Drago Jokic? Is that the moral of your story?'

'No time even for Drago Jokic. Drago is on his own.'

'Like the rest of us.'

'Like the rest of us. He can relax. No spectacular doom hangs over his head. He can be sailor or soldier or tinker or tailor, as he chooses. He can even go into real estate.'

It is the first exchange that he and the Costello woman have had that he would call cordial, even amiable. For once they are on the same side: two old folk ganging up on youth.

Might that be the real explanation for why the woman has descended on him out of nowhere: not to write him into a book but to induct him into the company of the aged? Might the whole Jokic affair, with his ill-considered and to this point fruitless passion for Mrs Jokic at its centre, be nothing in the end but a complicated rite of passage through which Elizabeth Costello has been sent to guide him? He had thought Wayne Blight was the angel assigned to his case; but perhaps they all work together, she and Wayne and Drago.

Drago pokes his head around the door. 'Can Shaun and me look at your cameras, Mr Rayment?'

'Yes. But take care, and put them back in their cases when you have finished.'

'Drago is interested in photography?' murmurs Elizabeth Costello.

'In cameras. He has never seen anything like mine. He knows only the new, electronic kind. A Hasselblad is like a sailing-ship to him, or a trireme. An antiquity. He also spends hours going through my photographs, the nineteenth-century ones. I thought it odd at first, but perhaps it is not so odd after all. He must be feeling his way into what it is like to have an Australian past, an Australian descent, Australian forebears of the mystical variety. Instead of being just a refugee kid with a joke name.'

'That is what he tells you?'

'No, he would not dream of telling me. But I can guess. I can sympathise. I am not unfamiliar with the immigrant experience.'

'Yes, of course. I keep forgetting. Such a proper Anglo-Adelaidean gentleman that I forget you are not English at all. Mr Rayment, rhyming with payment.'

'Rhyming with vraiment. I had three doses of the immigrant experience, not just one, so it imprinted itself quite deeply. First when I was uprooted as a child and brought to Australia; then when I declared my independence and returned to France; then when I gave up on France and came back to Australia. Is this where I belong? I asked with each move. Is this my true home?'

'You went back to France – I forgot about that. One day you must tell me more about that period of your life. But what is the answer to your question? Is this your true home?' She waves a hand in a gesture that encompasses not just the room in which they are sitting but also the city and, beyond that, the hills and mountains and deserts of the continent.

He shrugs. 'I have always found it a very English concept, home. Hearth and home, say the English. To them, home is the place where the fire burns in the hearth, where you come to warm yourself. The one place where you will not be left out in the cold. No, I am not warm here.' He waves a hand in a gesture that imitates hers, parodies it. 'I seem to be cold wherever I go. Is that not what you said of me: You cold man?'

The woman is silent.

'Among the French, as you know, there is no home. Among the French to be at home is to be among ourselves, among our kind. I am not at home in France. Transparently not. I am not the we of anyone.'

It is the closest he has come, with the Costello woman, to lamenting his lot, and it sickens him faintly. I am not the we of anyone: how does she manage to extort such words from him? A hint dropped here, a suggestion dropped there, and he follows like a lamb.

'And Marijana? Are you not desirous of joining the we of Marijana and Drago? And Ljuba? And Blanka, on whom you have yet to lay an eye?'

'That is another question,' he snaps. And will not be drawn further.

Noon passes, and Marijana does not show up. Drago has strapped a doll to his little sister's back with rubber bands; she trots from room to room, her arms stretched out, making a droning noise like an aeroplane. Shaun has brought along some kind of electronic game. The two boys sit in front of the television screen, which emits low whoops and buzzes.

'You know, we don't have to put up with this,' says Elizabeth Costello. 'They don't need to be babysat, these young folk. We could make a quiet exit, go back to the park. We could sit in the shade and listen to the birds. We could look on it as our weekend excursion, our little adventure.'

He is prepared to accept a helping hand from Marijana, who is after all a paid nurse, but not from a woman older than himself. He sends Costello to wait in the entranceway while he negotiates the stairs on his crutches.

On the way down he is passed by one of the neighbours, a slim, bespectacled girl from Singapore who with her two sisters, quiet as mice, occupies the flat above his. He nods to her; the greeting is not returned. In all their time on Coniston Terrace the girls have never acknowledged his existence. Each unto herself: that must be what they are taught in their island state. Self-reliance.

He and Costello find an empty bench. A dog trots up: it gives him a quick, jaunty once-over, then moves on to her. Always embarrassing when a dog pushes its snout into a woman's crotch. Is it reminding itself of sex, dog sex, or is it just savouring the novel, complex smells? He has always thought of Elizabeth as an asexual being, but perhaps a dog, putting its trust in its nose, will know better.

Elizabeth bears the investigation well, letting the dog have its way with her, then pushing it away good-humouredly.

'So,' she says. 'You were telling me.'

'I was telling you what?'

'You were telling me the story of your life. Telling me about France. I was married to a Frenchman once. Didn't I tell you? My first marriage. Unforgettable times. He walked out on me, in the end, for another woman. Left me with a child on my hands. I was, according to him, too mutable. Vipère, was another of the terms he applied to me, which in England is an adder rather than a viper. Sale vipère, those were his words. He never knew where he was with me. Great ones for order, the French. Great ones for knowing where they are with you. But enough of that. We were talking about you.'

'I thought you thought the French were great ones for passion. Passion, not order.'

She turns a reflective eye on him. 'Passion and order, Paul. Both, not one or the other. But proceed with the story of your love affair with France.'

'It is not a long story. At school I was good at science. Not outstandingly good, I was not outstanding at anything, just good. So when I went to university I signed up for science. Science seemed a good bet in those days. It seemed to promise safety, and that was what my mother wanted above all for my sister and me: that we find some safe niche for ourselves in this foreign land where the man whom she had followed, God knows why, was retreating more and more into himself, where we had no family to fall back on, where she floundered in the language and could not get a grip on local ways of doing things. My sister went into teaching, which was one way of being safe, and I went into science.