J. Coetzee - Slow Man

'Oh la la, ils gaspillent de l'essence!' he and his sister would whisper to each other in the back of the van that smelled of rotten dahlia bulbs, rasping their consonants in the barbaric Dutch way, snorting with laughter, holding back their snorts, while the proper can, the Holdens and Chevrolets and Studebakers, accelerated past. 'Merde, merde, merde!'

The Dutchman had taken to wearing shorts. Nothing could be more embarrassing than the Dutchman in his baggy shorts with his pale legs and his ankle-length check socks among the real Australians. Why did their mother ever marry him? Did she let him do it to her in her bedroom in the dark? When they thought of the Dutchman with his thing doing it to their mother they could explode with shame and outrage.

The Dutchman's Renault van was the only one in Ballarat. He had bought it second-hand from some other Dutchman. Renault, l'auto la plus économique, he would enounce, though in fact there was always something wrong with the van, it was always in the repair shop waiting for some part or other to arrive from Melbourne.

No Renault vans here in Adelaide. No Prinny Mittiga. No playing doctor. Only the real thing. Should they pay a last unannounced visit, for old times' sake? How will the Jokics take it? Will they slam the door in the faces of their surprise visitors; or, coming from the same world, broadly speaking, as the Mittigas, a world gone or going, will they make them welcome and offer them tea and cake and send them home laden with gifts?

'A real expedition,' says Elizabeth Costello. 'The dark continent of Munno Para. I'm sure it will take you out of yourself

'If we visit Munno Para it will not be in order to take me out of myself,' he says. 'There is nothing in me that I need to escape from.'

'And so good of you to invite me along,' continues Elizabeth Costello. 'Would you not prefer to go by yourself?'

Always gay, he thinks. How tiring it must be to live with someone so resolutely gay.

'I would not dream of going without you,' he says.

Years ago he used to cycle through Munno Para on the way to Gawler. Then it was just a few houses dotted around a filling station, with bare scrub behind. Now tracts of new housing stretch as far as the eye can see.

Seven Narrapinga Close: that was the address on the forms he had to sign for Marijana. The taxi drops them in front of a colonial-style house with green lawn around an austere little rectangular Japanese garden: a slab of black marble with water trickling down its face, rushes, grey pebbles. ('So real!' enthuses Elizabeth Costello, getting out of the car. 'So authentic! Would you like me to give you a hand?')

The driver passes him his crutches; he pays the fare.

The door is opened a hand's width; they are inspected suspiciously by a girl with a pale, stolid face and a silver ring in one nostril. Blanka, he presumes, the middle child, the shoplifter, his unwilling protégée. He had half hoped she might be a beauty like her sister. But no, she is not.

'Hello,' he says. 'I am Paul Rayment. This is Mrs Costello. We were hoping to see your mother.'

Without a word the girl disappears. They wait and wait on the doorstep. Nothing happens.

'I reckon we go in,' says Elizabeth Costello at last.

They find themselves in a living-room furnished in white leather, dominated to one side by a large television screen and to the other by a huge abstract painting, a swirl of orange and lime green and yellow against a white field. A fan spins overhead. No dolls in folk costume, no sunsets over the Adriatic, nothing to put one in mind of the old country.

'So real!' says Elizabeth Costello again. 'Who would have thought it!'

He presumes these remarks about the real are in some sense aimed at him; he presumes they are made with irony. What their point might be he cannot guess.

The putative Blanka puts her head around the door. 'She's coming,' she intones, and withdraws.

Marijana has made no effort to pretty herself up. She wears blue jeans and a white cotton top that does nothing for her thick waist. 'So, you bring your secretary,' she says without preliminaries. 'What you want?'

'This is not meant to be a confrontation,' he says. 'We have a slight problem on our hands, and I thought the best way of clearing it up would be to have a quiet talk. Elizabeth is not my secretary and has never been. She is just a friend. She came along because it is a nice day, we thought we would take a drive.'

'A drive in the country,' says Elizabeth. 'How are you, Marijana?'

'Good. So, sit down. You like some tea?'

'I would love a cup of tea, and so would Paul. If there is one thing Paul misses about the old way of life, it is dropping in on friends for a cup of tea.'

'Yes, Elizabeth knows me better than I know myself. I need barely open my mouth.'

'That's good,' says Marijana. 'I make tea.'

The blinds are angled against the fierce sun, but through the slats they can see two tall gum trees in the yard and a hammock slung between them, empty.

'A lifestyle,' says Elizabeth Costello. 'Isn't that what they call it nowadays? Our friends the Jokics have a lifestyle to support.'

'I don't see why you sneer,' he says. 'Surely one is as much entitled to a lifestyle in Munno Para as in Melbourne. Why else should they have left Croatia if not for the lifestyle of their choice?'

'I'm not sneering. On the contrary, I'm full of admiration.'

Marijana returns with the tea. Tea, but no cake.

'So, why you come?' she says.

'Could I speak to Drago, just briefly?'

She shakes her head. 'Not at home.'

'All right,' he says, 'I have a proposal to make. Drago has a key to my flat. On Tuesday morning I will be going out, and will be away most of the day. I will have left by nine and I won't be back before three. Could you tell Drago it would be nice, when I get home, to find everything as it was before.'

There is a long silence. Marijana is wearing blue plastic sandals. Blue sandals and purple toenails: he may be an ex-portrait photographer and Marijana may be an ex-picture restorer, but their aesthetics are worlds apart. Very likely other things about them are worlds apart too. Their attitude towards mine and thine, for instance. A woman he had dreamed of prising away from her husband. I want to look after you. I want to extend a protective wing over you. What would it be like in reality, looking after her and her two hostile daughters and her treacherous son? How long would he last, he and his protective wing? On the other hand… On the other hand, how proud her breasts, how comely!

'I don't know nothing about this key,' says Marijana. 'You give Drago keys?'

'Drago had a front door key during the time he was living with me. During the time he was using my flat. You have one key and Drago has another key. He can take things out of the flat and he can bring things back. Whether I am at home or not. Using his key. I don't see how I can express myself more clearly.'

There is a chrome cigarette lighter on the table in the shape of a nautilus shell. Marijana lights a cigarette. 'You also have complains?' she says to Elizabeth. 'You also think my son is thief?'

Elizabeth shrugs theatrically. 'I wouldn't know what to think, I am sure,' she says. 'The young are subject to so many temptations nowadays… That word thief… So large, so heavy, so final. In America they use the word larceny. Grand larceny, petty larceny, and all the grades between. My guess is that what Paul has in mind is a petty larceny, one of the pettiest, so petty that it merges into mere borrowing. Is that not what you would want to be saying, Paul? That Drago or more likely one of Drago's friends borrowed one or two items that you would like returned?'