J. Coetzee - Slow Man

He spends the afternoon tidying his study, putting things where they used to be; then he takes a shower. In the shower he by accident drops the flask of shampoo. As he bends to pick it up, the Zimmer frame, which he always brings into the cubicle with him, slips sideways. He loses his footing and falls, slamming his head against the wall.

Let nothing be broken: that is his first prayer. Tangled in the frame, he tries to move his limbs. A flicker of exquisite pain runs from his back down his good leg. He takes a slow, deep breath. Be calm, he tells himself. A slip in the bathroom, nothing to be alarmed about, it happens to many people, all may yet be well. Plenty of time to think, plenty of time to set things right.

Setting things right (he tries to be calm and clear) will mean, one, disengaging himself from the frame; two, manoeuvring himself out of the cubicle; then, three, assessing what he has done to his back; and, four, proceeding to whatever comes next.

The problem lies between one and two. He cannot disengage himself from the Zimmer frame without sitting up; and he cannot sit up without a gasp of pain.

No one bothered to inform him, and he did not think to ask, who the Zimmer is or was who has come to play such a role in his life. For his own convenience he has imagined Zimmer as a thin-faced, tight-lipped figure of a man, dressed in the high collar and stock of the 1830s. Johann August Zimmer, son of Austrian peasants, determined to escape the drudgery of the family farm, toils by candlelight over his anatomy books while in the byre behind the house the milch-cow moans in her sleep. After scraping through his examinations (he is not a gifted student), he finds a posting as an army surgeon. The next twenty yean he spends dressing wounds and cutting off limbs in the name of His Serene Imperial Majesty Carl Joseph August, nicknamed The Good. Then he retires from the service and after several wrong turns lands up at Bad Schwanensee, one of the lesser spas in Bohemia, prescribing for gentlewomen with arthritis. There he has the brainwave of adapting for the more frail among his patients the apparatus that back in Carinthia has for centuries been used to teach children to walk, thereby earning for himself a modest immortality.

Now here he is on the tiled floor, naked, immobile, with Zimmer's invention on top of him blocking the cubicle door, while water continues to pour down and leaking shampoo rises in a froth all around and the stump, which has taken a knock on its tender end, begins to throb with its own, unique variety of pain. What a mess! he thinks. Thank God Drago does not have to witness it! And thank God the Costello woman is not here to make jokes!

There are drawbacks, however, to having neither Drago nor the Costello woman nor anyone else within calling distance. One is that, as the supply of warm water runs out, he finds himself being douched with cold. The controls are beyond his reach. He is certainly free to lie here all night without risk of being laughed at; but by dawn he will have frozen to death.

It takes him a full thirty minutes to escape the prison he has made for himself. Unable to lift himself, unable to push Zimmer's frame out of the way, he finally grits his teeth and forces the door of the cubicle back until the hinges snap.

All shame is gone by now. He crawls across the floor to the telephone, calls Marijana's number, gets a child's voice. 'Mrs Jokic, please,' he says through chattering teeth; and then, 'Marijana, I have had an accident. I am OK but can you come at once?'

'What is accident?'

'I had a fall. I have done something to my back. I can't move.'

'I come.'

He drags the bedclothes down and huddles under them, but he cannot get warm. Not only his hands and foot, not only his scalp and his nose, but his very belly and heart are gripped with cold; spasms overtake him during which he grows too rigid even to shiver. He yawns until he is light-headed with yawning. Old blood, cold blood: the words drum in his brain. Not enough heat in the veins.

He has a vision of himself hung by the ankles in a cold chamber amid a forest of frozen carcases. Not by fire but by ice.

He falls into some kind of slumber. Then suddenly Marijana is bending over him. He tries to form his frozen lips into a smile, into words. 'My back,' he croaks. 'Careful.' No need, thank God, to explain how it happened. How it happened must be all too clear from the chaos in the bathroom, the hiss of the cold shower.

There is no tea left, but Marijana makes coffee, puts a pill between his lips, helps him to drink, then with surprising strength raises him bodily from the floor onto the bed. 'You get scare, eh?' she says. 'Now maybe you stop this shower business all alone.'

He nods obediently, closes his eyes. Under the ministrations of this excellent woman and superlative nurse, he can feel the ice within him begin to thaw. No bones broken, no being reprimanded by Mrs Putts, no being laughed at by Mrs Costello. Instead, the soothing presence of an angel who has put aside all else to come to his aid.

No doubt for an ageing cripple the future holds further mishaps, further falls, further humiliating calls for help. What he needs at this moment, however, is not that dismaying and depressing prospect but this soft, consoling, and eminently feminine presence. There, there, be calm, it is all over: that is what he wants to hear. Also: I will stay by your side while you sleep.

So when Marijana rises and briskly dons her coat and picks up her keys, he has a quite childish sense of aggrievement. 'Can't you stay a while longer?' he says. 'Can't you spend the night?'

She sits down again on the bedside. 'OK if I smoke?' she says. 'Just one time?' She lights a cigarette, puffs, blows the smoke away from him. 'We have talk, Mr Rayment, fix up things. What you want from me? You want I must do my job, come back, be nurse for you? Then you don't say these things, like' – she waves the cigarette – 'you know what I mean.'

'I must not speak of my feelings for you.'

'You go through bad time, you lose your leg and all that, I understand. You have feelings, man's feelings, I understand, is OK.'

Though the pain seems to be dwindling, he cannot yet sit up. 'Yes, I have feelings,' he says, flat on his back.

'You have feelings, you say things, is natural, is OK. But.'

'Labile. That is the word you are hunting for. I am too labile for your taste. Too much at the mercy of the feelings you refer to. I speak my heart too openly. I say too much.'

'Mercy. What is mercy of feelings?'

'Never mind. I believe I understand you. I have an accident and am shaken to the core. My spirits rise, my spirits fall, they are no longer under my control. As a result I become attached to the first woman to cross my path, the first sympathetic woman. I fall, excuse the word, in love with her; I fall in love with her children too, in a different way. I, who have been childless, suddenly want children of my own. Hence the present friction between us, between you and me. And it can all be traced back to my brush with death on Magill Road. Magill Road shook me up so much that even today I let my feelings pour out without reckoning the consequences. Is that not what you are telling me?'

She shrugs but does not contradict him. Instead, drawing in the smoke luxuriously, blowing it out, she lets him run on. For the first time he sees what sensual pleasure there can be in smoking.

'Well, you are wrong, Marijana. It is not like that at all. I am not in a confused state. I may be labile, but being labile is not an aberration. We should all be more labile, all of us. That is my new, revised opinion. We should shake ourselves up more often. We should also brace ourselves and take a look in the mirror, even if we dislike what we will see there. I am not referring to the ravages of time. I am referring to the creature trapped behind the glass whose stare we are normally so careful to avoid. Behold this being who eats with me, spends nights with me, says "I" on my behalf. If you find me labile, Marijana, it is not just because I suffered a knock. It is because every now and then the stranger who says "I" breaks through the glass and speaks in me. Through me. Speaks tonight. Speaks now. Speaks love.'