Scenes from Provincial Life Read online

  He has two mothers. Twice-born: born from woman and born from the farm. Two mothers and no father.

  Half a mile from the farmhouse the road breaks in two, the left fork going to Merweville, the right to Fraserburg. At the fork is the graveyard, a fenced plot with a gate of its own. Dominating the graveyard is his grandfather’s marble headstone; clustered around it are a dozen other graves, lower and simpler, with headstones of slate, some with names and dates chipped into them, some with no words at all.

  His grandfather is the only Coetzee there, the only one who has died since the farm passed into the family. This is where he ended, the man who began as a pedlar in Piketberg, then opened a shop in Laingsburg and became mayor of the town, then bought the hotel at Fraserburg Road. He lies buried, but the farm is still his. His children run like midgets on it, and his grandchildren, midgets of midgets.

  On the other side of the road is a second graveyard, without a fence, where some of the grave-mounds are so weathered that they have been reabsorbed into the earth. Here lie the servants and hirelings of the farm, stretching back to Outa Jaap and far beyond. What few gravestones still stand are without names or dates. Yet here he feels more awe than among the generations of Botes clustering around his grandfather. It has nothing to do with spirits. No one in the Karoo believes in spirits. Whatever dies here dies firmly and finally: its flesh is picked off by the ants, its bones are bleached by the sun, and that is that. Yet among these graves he treads nervously. From the earth comes a deep silence, so deep that it could almost be a hum.

  When he dies he wants to be buried on the farm. If they will not permit that, then he wants to be cremated and have his ashes scattered here.

  The other place to which he does pilgrimage each year is Bloemhof, where the first farmhouse stood. Nothing remains now but the foundations, which are of no interest. In front of it there used to be a dam fed by an underground fountain; but the fountain long ago dried up. Of the garden and orchard that once grew here there is no trace. But beside the fountain, growing out of the bare earth, stands a huge, lonely palm tree. In the stem of this tree bees have made a nest, fierce little black bees. The trunk is blackened with the smoke of fires that people have lit over the years in order to rob the bees of their honey; yet the bees stay on, gathering nectar who knows where in this dry, grey landscape.

  He would like the bees to recognize that he, when he visits, comes with clean hands, not to steal from them but to greet them, to pay his respects. But as he nears the palm tree they begin to buzz angrily; outriders swoop upon him, warning him away; once he has even to flee, running ignominiously across the veld with the swarm behind him, zigzagging and waving his arms, thankful there is no one to see him and laugh.

  Every Friday a sheep is slaughtered for the people of the farm. He goes along with Ros and Uncle Son to pick out the one that is to die; then he stands by and watches as, in the slaughtering-place behind the shed, out of sight of the house, Freek holds down the legs while Ros, with his harmless-looking little pocketknife, cuts its throat, and then both men hold tight as the animal kicks and struggles and coughs while its lifeblood gushes out. He continues to watch as Ros flays the stillwarm body and hangs the carcase from the seringa tree and splits it open and tugs the insides out into a basin: the great blue stomach full of grass, the intestines (from the bowel he squeezes out the last few droppings that the sheep did not have time to drop), the heart, the liver, the kidneys – all the things that a sheep has inside it and that he has inside him too.

  Ros uses the same knife to castrate lambs. That event he watches too. The young lambs and their mothers are rounded up and penned. Then Ros moves among them, snatching lambs by the hind leg, one by one, pressing them to the ground while they bleat in terror, one despairing wail after another, and slitting open the scrotum. His head bobs down, he catches the testicles in his teeth and tugs them out. They look like two little jellyfish trailing blue and red blood-vessels.

  Ros slices off the tail as well, while he is about it, and tosses it aside, leaving a bloody stump.

  With his short legs, his baggy, castoff pants cut off below the knees, his homemade shoes and tattered felt hat, Ros shuffles around in the pen like a clown, picking out the lambs, doctoring them pitilessly. At the end of the operation the lambs stand sore and bleeding by their mothers’ side, who have done nothing to protect them. Ros folds his pocketknife. The job is done; he wears a tight little smile.

  There is no way of talking about what he has seen. ‘Why do they have to cut off the lambs’ tails?’ he asks his mother. ‘Because otherwise the blowflies would breed under their tails,’ his mother replies. They are both pretending; both of them know what the question is really about.

  Once Ros lets him hold his pocketknife, shows him how easily it cuts a hair. The hair does not bend, just springs in two at the merest touch of the blade. Ros sharpens the knife every day, spitting on the whetstone, brushing the blade across it back and forth, lightly, easily. So much of the blade has been worn away with all the sharpening and all the cutting and all the sharpening again that there is only a sliver left. It is the same with Ros’s spade: so long has he used it, so often sharpened it, that only an inch or two of steel remains; the wood of the grip is smooth and black with years of sweat.

  ‘You shouldn’t be watching that,’ says his mother, after one of the Friday slaughterings.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You just shouldn’t.’

  ‘I want to.’

  And he goes off to watch Ros peg down the skin and sprinkle it with rock salt.

  He likes watching Ros and Freek and his uncle at work. To take advantage of the high wool prices, Son wants to run more sheep on the farm. But after years of poor rain the veld is a desert, grass and bushes cropped to the ground. He therefore sets about re-fencing the entire farm, breaking it into smaller camps so that the sheep can be shifted from camp to camp and the veld given time to recover. He and Ros and Freek go out every day, driving fence posts into the rock-hard earth, spanning furlong after furlong of wire, drawing it taut as a bowstring, clamping it.

  Uncle Son always treats him kindly, yet he knows he does not really like him. How does he know? By the uneasy look in Son’s eyes when he is around, the forced tone in his voice. If Son really liked him, he would be as free and offhand with him as he is with Ros and Freek. Instead, Son is careful always to speak English to him, even though he speaks Afrikaans back. It has become a point of honour with both of them; they do not know how to get out of the trap.

  He tells himself that the dislike is not personal, that it is only because he, the son of Son’s younger brother, is older than Son’s own son, who is still a baby. But he fears that the feeling runs deeper, that Son disapproves of him because he has given his allegiance to his mother, the interloper, rather than to his father; also because he is not straight, honest, truthful.

  If he had a choice between Son and his own father as a father, he would choose Son, even though that would mean he would be irrecoverably Afrikaans and would have to spend years in the purgatory of an Afrikaans boarding school, as all farm-children do, before he would be allowed to come back to the farm.

  Perhaps that is the deeper reason why Son dislikes him: he feels the obscure claim this strange child is making on him and rejects it, like a man shaking himself free of a clinging baby.

  He watches Son all the time, admiring the skill with which he does everything from dosing a sick animal to repairing a wind pump. He is particularly fascinated by his knowledge of sheep. By looking at a sheep, Son can tell not only its age and its parentage, not only what kind of wool it will give, but what each part of its body will taste like. He can pick out a slaughter-sheep according to whether it has the right ribs for grilling or the right haunches for roasting.

  He himself likes meat. He looks forward to the tinkle of the bell at midday and the huge repast it announces: dishes of roast potatoes, yellow rice with raisins, sweet potatoes with caramel sauce, pumpkin with brown su
gar and soft bread-cubes, sweet-and-sour beans, beetroot salad, and, at the centre, in pride of place, a great platter of mutton with gravy to pour over it. Yet after seeing Ros slaughtering sheep he no longer likes to handle raw meat. Back in Worcester he prefers not to go into butchers’ shops. He is repelled by the casual ease with which the butcher slaps down a cut of meat on the counter, slices it, rolls it up in brown paper, writes a price on it. When he hears the grating whine of the band saw cutting through bone, he wants to stop his ears. He does not mind looking at livers, about whose function in the body he is vague, but he turns his eyes away from the hearts in the display case, and particularly from the trays of offal. Even on the farm he refuses to eat offal, though it is considered a great delicacy.

  He does not understand why sheep accept their fate, why they never rebel but instead go meekly to their death. If buck know that there is nothing worse on earth than falling into the hands of men, and to their last breath struggle to escape, why are sheep so stupid? They are animals, after all, they have the sharp senses of animals: why do they not hear the last bleatings of the victim behind the shed, smell its blood, and take heed?

  Sometimes when he is among the sheep – when they have been rounded up to be dipped, and are penned tight and cannot get away – he wants to whisper to them, warn them of what lies in store. But then in their yellow eyes he catches a glimpse of something that silences him: a resignation, a foreknowledge not only of what happens to sheep at the hands of Ros behind the shed, but of what awaits them at the end of the long, thirsty ride to Cape Town on the transport lorry. They know it all, down to the finest detail, and yet they submit. They have calculated the price and are prepared to pay it – the price of being on earth, the price of being alive.

  Twelve

  In Worcester the wind is always blowing, thin and cold in the winter, hot and dry in summer. After an hour outdoors there is a fine red dust in one’s hair, in one’s ears, on one’s tongue.

  He is healthy, full of life and energy, yet seems always to have a cold. In the mornings he wakes up tight-throated, red-eyed, sneezing uncontrollably, his body temperature soaring and plunging. ‘I’m sick,’ he croaks to his mother. She rests the back of her hand against his forehead. ‘Then you must surely stay in bed,’ she sighs.

  There is one more difficult moment to get through, the moment when his father says, ‘Where’s John?’ and his mother says, ‘He’s sick,’ and his father snorts and says, ‘Pretending again.’ Through this he lies as quiet as he can, till his father is gone and his brother is gone and he can at last settle down to a day of reading.

  He reads at great speed and with total absorption. During his sick spells his mother has to visit the library twice a week to take out books for him: two on her cards, another two on his own. He avoids the library himself in case, when he brings his books to be stamped, the librarian should ask questions.

  He knows that if he wants to be a great man he ought to be reading serious books. He ought to be like Abraham Lincoln or James Watt, studying by candlelight while everyone else is sleeping, teaching himself Latin and Greek and astronomy. He has not abandoned the idea of being a great man; he promises himself he will soon begin serious reading; but for the present all he wants to read are stories.

  He reads all the Enid Blyton mystery stories, all the Hardy Boys stories, all the Biggles stories. But the books he likes best are the French Foreign Legion stories of P C Wren. ‘Who is the greatest writer in the world?’ he asks his father. His father says Shakespeare. ‘Why not P C Wren?’ he says. His father has not read P C Wren and, despite his soldiering background, does not seem interested in doing so. ‘P C Wren wrote forty-six books. How many books did Shakespeare write?’ he challenges, and starts reciting titles. His father says ‘Aah!’ in an irritated, dismissive way but has no reply.

  If his father likes Shakespeare then Shakespeare must be bad, he decides. Nevertheless, he begins to read Shakespeare, in the yellowing edition with the tattered edges that his father inherited and that may be worth lots of money because it is old, trying to discover why people say Shakespeare is great. He reads Titus Andronicus because of its Roman name, then Coriolanus, skipping the long speeches as he skips the nature descriptions in his library books.

  Besides Shakespeare, his father owns the poems of Wordsworth and the poems of Keats. His mother owns the poems of Rupert Brooke. These poetry books have pride of place on the mantelshelf in the livingroom, along with Shakespeare, The Story of San Michele in a leather slipcase, and a book by A J Cronin about a doctor. Twice he tries to read The Story of San Michele, but gets bored. He can never work out who Axel Munthe is, whether the book is true or a story, whether it is about a girl or a place.

  One day his father comes to his room with the Wordsworth book. ‘You should read these,’ he says, and points out poems he has ticked in pencil. A few days later he comes back, wanting to discuss the poems. ‘The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion,’ his father quotes. ‘It’s great poetry, isn’t it?’ He mumbles, refuses to meet his father’s eye, refuses to play the game. It is not long before his father gives up.

  He is not sorry about his churlishness. He cannot see how poetry fits into his father’s life; he suspects it is just pretence. When his mother says that in order to escape the mockery of her sisters she had to take her book and creep away in the loft, he believes her. But he cannot imagine his father, as a boy, reading poetry, who nowadays reads nothing but the newspaper. All he can imagine his father doing at that age is joking and laughing and smoking cigarettes behind the bushes.

  He watches his father reading the newspaper. He reads quickly, nervously, flipping through the pages as though looking for something that is not there, cracking and slapping the pages as he turns them. When he is done with reading he folds the paper into a narrow panel and sets to work on the crossword puzzle.

  His mother too reveres Shakespeare. She thinks Macbeth is Shakespeare’s greatest play. ‘If but the something could trammel up the consequences then it were,’ she gabbles, and comes to a stop; ‘and bring with his surcease success,’ she continues, nodding to keep the beat. ‘All the perfumes of Arabia could not wash this little hand,’ she adds. Macbeth was the play she studied in school; her teacher used to stand behind her, pinching her arm until she had recited the whole of the speech. ‘Kom nou, Vera!’ he would say – ‘Come on!’ – pinching her, and she would bring out a few more words.

  What he cannot understand about his mother is that, though she is so stupid that she cannot help him with his Standard Four homework, her English is faultless, particularly when she writes. She uses words in their right sense, her grammar is faultless. She is at home in the language, it is an area where she cannot be shaken. How did it happen? Her father was Piet Wehmeyer, a flat Afrikaans name. In the photograph album, in his collarless shirt and wide-brimmed hat, he looks like any ordinary farmer. In the Uniondale district where they lived there were no English; all the neighbours seem to have been named Zondagh. Her own mother was born Marie du Biel, of German parents with not a drop of English blood in their veins. Yet when she had children she gave them English names – Roland, Winifred, Ellen, Vera, Norman, Lancelot – and spoke English to them at home. Where could they have learned English, she and Piet?

  His father’s English is nearly as good, though his accent has more than a trace of Afrikaans in it and he says ‘thutty’ for ‘thirty’. His father is always turning the pages of the Pocket Oxford English Dictionary for his crossword puzzles. He seems at least distantly familiar with every word in the dictionary, and every idiom too. He pronounces the more nonsensical idioms with relish, as though consolidating them in his memory: pitch in, come a cropper.

  He himself does not read further than Coriolanus in the Shakespeare book. But for the sports page and the comic strips, the newspaper bores him. When he has nothing else to read, he reads the green books. ‘Bring me a green book!’ he calls to his mother from his sickbed. The green books are Arthur Mee’s Ch
ildren’s Encyclopaedia, which have been travelling with them ever since he can remember. He has been through them scores of times; when he was still a baby he tore pages out of them, scrawled over them with crayons, broke their bindings, so that now they have to be handled gingerly.

  He does not actually read the green books: the prose makes him too impatient, it is too gushing and childish, except for the second half of volume 10, the index, which is full of factual information. But he pores over the pictures, particularly the photographs of marble sculptures, naked men and women with wisps of cloth around their middles. Smooth, slim marble girls fill his erotic dreams.

  The surprising thing about his colds is how quickly they clear up or seem to clear up. By eleven in the morning the sneezing has stopped, the stuffiness in his head has lifted, he feels fine. He has had enough of his sweaty, smelly pyjamas, of the stale blankets and sagging mattress, the soggy handkerchiefs all over the place. He gets out of bed but does not get dressed: that would be pushing his luck too far. Cautious not to show his face outdoors in case a neighbour or passer-by reports him, he plays with his Meccano set or sticks stamps in his album or threads buttons on strings or braids cords out of leftover skeins of wool. His drawer is full of cords he has braided, that have no use except as belts for the dressing gown he does not have. When his mother comes into his room he looks as hangdog as he can, bracing himself against her caustic remarks.

  On every side he is suspected of being a cheat. He can never persuade his mother that he is really sick; when she gives in to his pleas, she does so ungraciously, and only because she does not know how to say no to him. His schoolfellows think he is a namby-pamby and a mother’s darling.