J. Coetzee - Slow Man

He cannot give answers to questions like these. He cannot give answers because he is not in the mood for answers. That is what it means to be gloomy: at a level far below the play and flicker of the intellect (Why not this? Why not that?) he, he, the he he calls sometimes you, sometimes I , is all too ready to embrace darkness, stillness, extinction. He: not the one whose mind used to dart this way and that but the one who aches all night.

Of course he is not a special case. People lose limbs or the use of limbs every day. History is full of one-armed sailors and chairbound inventors; of blind poets and mad kings too. But in his case the cut seems to have marked off past from future with such uncommon cleanness that it gives new meaning to the word new. By the sign of this cut let a new life commence. If you have hitherto been a man, with a man's life, may you henceforth be a dog, with a dog's life. That is what the voice says, the voice out of the dark cloud.

Has he given up? Does he want to die? Is that what it comes down to? No. The question is false. He does not want to slash his wrists, does not want to swallow down four and twenty Somnex, does not want to hurl himself off the balcony. He does not want death because he does not want anything. But if it so happens that Wayne Blight bumps into him a second time and sends him flying through the air with the greatest of ease, he will make sure he does not save himself. No rolling with the blow, no springing to his feet. If he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what a last thought is like.

Unstrung: that is the word that comes back to him from Homer. The spear shatters the breastbone, blood spurts, the limbs are unstrung, the body topples like a wooden puppet. Well, his limbs have been unstrung and now his spirit is unstrung too. His spirit is ready to topple.

Mrs Putts's second full candidate is named Marijana. By origin she is Croatian, so she informs him during their interview. She left the land of her birth behind twelve years ago. Her training was done in Germany, in Bielefeld; since coming to Australia she has acquired South Australian certification. Besides private nursing she does housekeeping for, as she puts it, 'extra money'. Her husband works in a car assembly plant; they live in Munno Para, north of Elizabeth, a half-hour drive from the city. They have a son in high school, a daughter in middle school, a third child not yet of school-going age.

Marijana Jokic is a sallow-faced woman who, if not quite middle-aged, exhibits a thickening about the waist that is quite matronly. She wears a sky-blue uniform that he finds a relief after all the whiteness, with patches of dampness under the arms; she speaks a rapid, approximate Australian English with Slavic liquids and an uncertain command of a and the, coloured by slang she must pick up from her children, who must pick it up from their classmates. It is a variety of the language he is not familiar with; he rather likes it.

The agreement arrived at between himself and Mrs Jokic, Mrs Putts mediating, is that she will attend him six days of the week, Monday to Saturday, deploying upon him for those days the full range of her caring skills. On Sundays he will fall back on the emergency service. For as long as his powers of ambulation remain restricted, she will not only nurse him but attend to his everyday needs, that is to say, shop for him, cook his meals, and do the lighter cleaning.

After the misadventure of Sheena he has no great hopes for the lady from the Balkans. In the days that follow, however, he finds himself grudgingly thankful for her advent. Mrs Jokic – Marijana – seems able to intuit what he is ready for and what he is not. She treats him not as a doddering old fool but as a man hampered in his movements by injury. Patiently, without baby-talk, she helps him through his ablutions. When he tells her he wants to be left alone, she absents herself.

He reclines; she unwraps the thing, the stump, and runs a finger along its naked face. 'Nice sutures,' she says. 'Who put in sutures?'

'Dr Hansen.'

'Hansen. Don't know Hansen. But is good. Good surgeon.' She hefts the stump judiciously in one hand, as if it were a watermelon. 'Good job.'

She soaps it, washes it. The warm water brings out a pink-and-white flush. It begins to look less like a cured ham than like some sightless deep-water fish; he averts his eyes.

'Do you see many bad jobs?' he asks.

She puckers her lips, draws her hands apart in a gesture that reminds him of his mother. Maybe, says the gesture; it depends.

'Do you see many of… these?' With the lightest of fingertips he touches himself.

'Sure.'

He is interested to note how devoid of double entendre the exchange is.

To himself he does not call it a stump. He would like not to call it anything; he would like not to think about it, but that is not possible. If he has a name for it, it is le jambon. Le jambon keeps it at a nice, contemptuous distance.

He divides people with whom he has contact into two classes: those few who have seen it, and the rest, those who thankfully never will. It strikes him as a pity that Marijana should fall so early and so decisively into the first class.

'I have never understood why they could not leave the knee,' he complains to her. 'Bone grows together. Even if the joint was shattered, they could have made an attempt to reconstruct it. If I had known what a difference losing a knee makes I would never have consented. They told me nothing.'

Marijana shakes her head. 'Reconstruction,' she says, 'very difficult surgery, very difficult. For years, in and out hospital. For, you know, old patients they don't like it to make reconstruction. Only for young. What's the point, eh? What's the point?'

She puts him among the old, those whom there is no point in saving – saving the knee-joint, saving the life. Where, he wonders, would she put herself: among the young? the not-old? the neither young nor old? the never-to-be-old?

Rarely has he seen anyone throw herself as fully into her duties as Marijana does. The list with which she goes off to the shops comes back with the till receipts clipped to it, each item ticked off or, where she has had to vary it, annotated in her neat old-world hand with its barbed 1s and crossed 7s and looped 9s. From the tempests of her cooking emerge meals that are unfailingly appetising.

To friends who telephone to ask how he is getting on, he refers to Marijana simply as the day nurse. 'I have hired a very competent day nurse,' he says. 'She does the shopping and the cooking too.' He does not refer to her as Marijana in case it sounds too familiar; in conversation with her, he continues to call her Mrs Jokic, as she calls him Mr Rayment. But to himself he has no reservation about calling her Marijana. He likes the name, with its four full, uncompromising syllables. Marijana will be here in the morning, he tells himself when he feels the cloud of gloom descending again. Pull yourself together!

Whether he likes Marijana the woman as much as he likes her name he does not yet know. Objectively she is not unattractive. But in his company she seems to have the ability to annul sex. She is brisk, she is efficient, she is cheerful: that is the face she presents to him, her employer, that is the face he pays for and must be content with. So he gives up being irascible and takes pains to meet her with a smile. He would like her to think he bears his mishap gamely; he would like her to think well of him in all respects. If she does not flirt, he does not mind. It is better than coy talk about his willie.