J. Coetzee - Slow Man

Some mornings she brings her youngest child with her, the one who is not yet at school. Though born in Australia, the child's name is Ljuba, Ljubica. He likes the name, approves of it. In Russian, if he is not mistaken, lyubov means love. It is like calling a girl Aimée or, even better, Amour.

Her son and first-born has, she informs him, just turned sixteen. Sixteen: she must have married young. He is in the process of revising his estimate of her. More than not unattractive, she is on occasion a positively handsome woman, well built, sturdy, with nut-brown hair, dark eyes, a complexion olive rather than sallow; a woman who carries herself well, shoulders squared, breasts thrust forward. Prideful, he thinks, hunting for an English word that will capture her. Her teeth, stained yellow with nicotine, are the only objective flaw. She smokes in an unreconstructed old-European way, though for his sake she retires to the balcony.

As for the little girl, she is a true beauty, with dark curls and a perfect skin and eyes that glint with what can only be intelligence. Side by side the two make a pretty picture. Get on well together too. While she is cooking, Marijana helps the child to bake cupcakes or gingerbread biscuits. From the kitchen comes the even murmur of their voices. Mother and daughter: the protocols of womanhood being passed on, generation to generation.

WEEKS PASS; HE settles into Marijana's regimen of care. Each morning she takes him through his exercises, massages his wasted and wasting muscles; discreetly she helps him in what he cannot do without a helping hand, what he may never learn to do unaided. When he is in the mood to listen, she is ready to talk – about her work, her experience of Australia. When he withdraws, she seems content to be silent too.

Whatever love he might once have had for his body is long gone. He has no interest in fixing it up, returning it to some ideal efficiency. The man he used to be is just a memory, and a memory fading fast. He still has a sense of being a soul with an undiminished soul-life; as for the rest of him, it is just a sack of blood and bones that he is forced to carry around.

In such a state, it is tempting to let go of all modesty. But he resists the temptation. He does what he can to maintain the decencies, and Marijana backs him. When nakedness cannot be helped, he averts his eyes so that she will see he does not see her seeing him. What has to be done in private she does her best to ensure is done in private.

In all of this he is trying to remain a man, albeit a diminished man; and it could not be clearer that Marijana understands and sympathises. Where did she acquire this delicacy, he wonders, a delicacy her predecessors so signally lacked? In Bielefeld, at nursing college? Perhaps; but his guess is that it comes from deeper wells. A decent woman, he thinks to himself, decent through and through. One of the better things that has happened to him, having Marijana Jokic come into his life.

'Tell me if it hurts,' she says as she bears down with her thumbs on the obscenely curtailed thigh muscles. But it never hurts; or if it does, the hurt is so much like pleasure that he cannot tell the difference. An intuitive, he thinks. By intuition pure and simple she seems to know how he feels, how his body will respond.

A man and a woman on a warm afternoon behind locked doors. They might as well be performing a sex act. But it is nothing like that. It is just nursing, just care.

A phrase from catechism class a half-century ago floats into his mind: There shall be no more man and woman, but… But what – what shall we be when we are beyond man and woman? Impossible for the mortal mind to conceive. One of the mysteries.

The words are St Paul's, he is sure of that – St Paul his namesake, his name-saint, explaining what the afterlife will be like, when all shall love all with a pure love, as God loves, only not as fiercely, as consumingly.

He, alas, is no spirit being as yet, but a man of some kind, the kind that fails to perform what man is brought into the world to perform: seek out his other half, cleave to her, and bless her with his seed – seed which, in the allegory or perhaps the anagogy unfolded by Brother Aloysius, he forgets which is which, represents God's word. A man not wholly a man, then: a half-man, an after-man, like an after-image; the ghost of a man looking back in regret on time not well used.

His grandparents Rayment had six children. His parents had two. He has none. Six, two, one or none: all around him he sees the miserable sequence repeated. He used to think it made sense: in an overpopulated world, childlessness was surely a virtue, like peaceableness, like forbearance. Now, on the contrary, childlessness looks to him like madness, a herd madness, even a sin. What greater good can there be than more life, more souls? How will heaven be filled if the earth ceases to send its cargoes?

When he arrives at the gate, St Paul (for other new souls it may be Peter but for him it will be Paul) will be waiting. 'Bless me father for I have sinned,' he will say. 'And how have you sinned, my child?' Then he will have no words to say, save to show his empty hands. 'You sorry fellow,' Paul will say, 'you sorry, sorry fellow. Did you not understand why you were given life, the greatest gift of all?' 'When I was living I did not understand, father, but now I understand, now that it is too late; and believe me, father, I repent, I repent me, je me repens, and bitterly too.' 'Then pass,' Paul will say, and stand aside: 'in the house of your Father there is room for all, even for the stupid lonely sheep.'

Marijana would have set him right, had he only met her in time, Marijana from Catholic Croatia. From the loins of two, Marijana and her spouse, there have issued three – three souls for heaven. A woman built for motherhood. Marijana would have helped him out of childlessness. Marijana could mother six, ten, twelve and still have love left over, mother-love. But too late now: how sad, how sorry!

HE CAME AWAY from the hospital with a pair of forearm crutches and something they called a Zimmer frame, a four-footed aluminium stand for use around the flat. The equipment comes on loan, to be returned when no longer needed, that is to say, when he has graduated to higher forms of mobility or else passed on.

There are other aids to be had (he gets to see the brochure), from a device that adds wheels and a safety brake to the quadrangular Zimmer frame, to a vehicle with a battery-powered motor and a steering bar and a retractable rain-hood, intended for advanced cripples. If he wants one of these fancier aids, however, he will have to buy it himself.

Under Marijana's ministrations, what she likes to call his leg is day by day losing its angry colour and swollen look. The crutches are becoming second nature, though he feels more secure leaning on the frame. When he is by himself he roams on his crutches from room to room, thinking of it as exercise when it is really only restlessness.

He visits the hospital for weekly checkups. On one of these visits he shares the lift with an old woman, stooped, with a hawklike nose and a dark, Mediterranean skin. By the hand she holds a younger version of herself, small-boned, almost as dark, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of sunglasses huge enough to hide the upper half of her face. Pressed up against the younger woman, he has time, before they exit, to take in a lungful of rather overpowering gardenia perfume and to notice that, oddly, she is wearing her dress inside out, with the dry-cleaning instructions protruding like a bold little flag.

An hour later, on his way out of the building, he remarks the couple again, having a hard time with the swing door. By the time he himself reaches the street he can see only the wide black hat bobbing in the crowd.