J. Coetzee - The Schooldays of Jesus

He divides the block of prose he has written into five parts, five brief paragraphs.

‘I cannot honestly claim,’ he adds, ‘that being a museum attendant has ever been a dream of mine. However, I have reached a point of crisis in my life. You must change , I say to myself. But change into what? Perhaps the advertisement on which my eye fell was a sign intended for me, a sign from the heavens. Follow me , said the Star . So I follow, and this letter constitutes my following.’

That is his sixth paragraph.

He hands in his letter to Martina, all six paragraphs. During the break he does not leave the room but remains at his desk, watching covertly as she reads, watching the quick, decisive movements of her pen. He notices when she comes to his letter: she takes longer over it, reading with a frown on her face. She glances up and sees him watching her.

At the end of the break she returns the assignments. On his she has written: Please see me after the class.

He waits, after the class, until the other students have left.

‘Simón, I have read your assignments with interest,’ she says. ‘You write well. However, I wonder whether this is the best course for you. Do you not feel that you would be more at home in a course in creative writing? It is not too late to switch courses, you know.’

‘If you are telling me I should withdraw from the course I will withdraw,’ he replies. ‘But I do not conceive of my writing as creative. To me it is the same kind of writing one does in a diary. Diarizing is not creative writing. It is a form of letter-writing. One writes letters to oneself. However, I understand what you are saying. I am out of place here. I won’t waste any more of your time. Thank you.’ He takes the course reader out of his bag. ‘Let me return this to you.’

‘Don’t take offence,’ she says. ‘Don’t go. Don’t withdraw. I will go on reading your assignments. But I will read them in exactly the same way as I read the other students’ work: as a teacher of writing, not as a confidante. Do you accept that?’

‘I do,’ he says. ‘Thank you. I appreciate your kindness.’

As a third assignment they are asked to describe their previous work experience and set down a résumé of their educational qualifications.

‘I used to be a manual labourer,’ he writes. ‘Nowadays I earn a living by putting pamphlets in letter boxes. That is because I am not as strong as I once used to be. Besides lacking physical strength I also lack passion. This, at least, is the opinion of Dmitri, the man I wrote of earlier, the man of passion. Dmitri’s passion boiled over one evening to such an extent that he killed his mistress. As for me, I have no desire to kill anyone, least of all someone I might love. Dmitri laughs when I say that — when I say I would never kill someone I loved. According to Dmitri, at a buried level each of us desires to kill the one we love. Each of us desires to kill the beloved, but only a few elect souls have the courage to act on their desire.

‘A child can smell a coward, says Dmitri. A child can smell a liar too, and a hypocrite. Hence, according to Dmitri, the dwindling away of Davíd’s love for me, who have proved myself to be a coward, a liar, and a hypocrite. By contrast, in Davíd’s attraction toward characters like Dmitri himself (a self-confessed murderer) and his uncle Diego (in my opinion a wastrel and a bully, but let that pass) he finds a deep wisdom. Children come into the world with an intuition of what is good and true, he says, but lose that power as they become socialized. Davíd is, according to him, an exception. Davíd has retained his innate faculties in their purest form. For that he respects him — in fact reveres him or, as he puts it, recognizes him. My sovereign, my king , he calls him, not without an element of mockery.

‘ How can you recognize someone you have never seen before? That is the question I would like to put to Dmitri.

‘Meeting Dmitri (whom I dislike and indeed from a moral point of view despise) has been an educational experience, for me. I would go so far as to list it among my educational qualifications.

‘I believe I am open to new ideas, including Dmitri’s. I think it is highly likely that Dmitri’s judgement on me is correct: that as a father or stepfather or guide to life I am not the right person for a child like Davíd, an exceptional child, a child who never fails to remind me that I do not know him or understand him. Therefore perhaps the time has come for me to withdraw and find myself another role in life, another object or soul on which or on whom to pour whatever it is that pours out of me, sometimes as mere talk, sometimes as tears, sometimes in the form that I persist in calling loving care.

‘ Loving care is a formulation I would use without hesitation in a diary. But of course this is not a diary. So the claim to be animated by loving care is a large one.

‘To be continued.

‘In the form of a footnote, let me add a few words about tears.

‘Certain music brings tears to my eyes. If I am without passion, where do these tears come from? I have yet to see Dmitri moved to tears by music.

‘In the form of a second footnote, let me say something about Inés’ dog Bolívar, that is, about the dog who came with Inés when she consented to become Davíd’s mother, but who has now become Davíd’s dog in the sense that we speak of someone who guards us as “our” guardian though we have no power over him or her or it.

‘Like children, dogs are said to be able to smell out cowards and liars and so forth. Yet Bolívar has, from the first day and without reserve, accepted me into their family. To Dmitri this should surely be food for thought.’

When señora Martina — he cannot call her simply Martina, despite her youth — distributes the checked assignments to the rest of the class, she does not return his. Instead, as she passes his desk, she murmurs, ‘After class, please, Simón.’ Those words, and the light waft of a scent for which he has no name.

Señora Martina is young, she is pretty, she is intelligent, he admires her assurance and her competence and her dark eyes, but he is not in love with her, as he was not in love with Anna Magdalena, whom he knew better (and had seen naked) but who is dead now. It is not love that he wants from señora Martina but something else. He wants her to listen to him and tell him whether his speech — the speech he is trying his best to write down on the page — rings true or whether on the contrary it is one long lie from beginning to end. Then he wants her to tell him what to do with himself: whether to continue to set off on his bicycle rounds in the mornings and lie on his bed in the afternoons, resting and listening to the radio and (more and more often) drinking, and then afterwards fall asleep and sleep the sleep of the dead for eight or nine or even ten hours; or whether to go out into the world and do something quite different.

It is a lot to expect of a teacher of prose composition, a lot more than she is paid to do. But then, for the child who boarded the ship on the far shore, it was a lot to expect that the solitary man in the drab clothes should take him under his wing and guide his steps in a strange land.

His classmates — with whom he has yet to exchange more than a nod — file out of the room. ‘Sit down, Simón,’ says señora Martina. He sits down opposite her. ‘This is more than I can deal with,’ she says. She regards him levelly.

‘It is only prose,’ he says. ‘Can you not deal with it as prose?’

‘It is an appeal,’ she says. ‘You are appealing to me. I have a job in the mornings and classes to teach in the evenings plus a husband and a child and a home to take care of. It is too much.’ She lifts the assignment into the air as if to assess its weight. ‘Too much,’ she repeats.