Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [110]
Her voice has a faint foreign huskiness to it; no doubt she is beautiful, intelligent, sophisticated. He does not ask whether she is Hungarian too. But if he had got the room, he would now be sharing a flat with her. Who is she? What is her name? Was she his destined love, and has his destiny now escaped him? Who is the fortunate one who has been granted the room and the future that should have been his?
He had the impression, when he called at the flat, that Miklos was showing him around rather perfunctorily. He can only think that Miklos was looking for someone who would bring more to the economy of the household than just a quarter of the rent, someone who would offer gaiety or style or romance as well. Summing him up in a glance, Miklos found him lacking in gaiety, style and romance, and rejected him.
He should have taken the initiative. ‘I am not what I may seem to be,’ he should have said. ‘I may look like a clerk, but in reality I am a poet, or a poet to be. Furthermore, I will pay my share of the rent punctiliously, which is more than most poets will do.’ But he had not spoken up, had not pleaded, however abjectly, for himself and his vocation; and now it is too late.
How does a Hungarian come to dispose over a flat in fashionable Swiss Cottage, to dress in the latest mode, to wake up in the lazy late morning with the no doubt beautiful girl with the husky voice beside him in bed, while he has to slave the day away for IBM and live in a dreary room off the Archway Road? How have the keys that unlock the pleasures of London come into the possession of Miklos? Where do such people find the money to support their life of ease?
He has never liked people who disobey the rules. If the rules are ignored, life ceases to make sense: one might as well, like Ivan Karamazov, hand back one’s ticket and retire. Yet London seems to be full of people who ignore the rules and get away with it. He seems to be the only one stupid enough to play by the rules, he and the other dark-suited, bespectacled, harried clerks he sees in the trains. What, then, should he do? Should he follow Ivan? Should he follow Miklos? Whichever he follows, it seems to him, he loses. For he has no talent for lying or deception or rule-bending, just as he has no talent for pleasure or fancy clothes. His sole talent is for misery, dull, honest misery. If this city offers no reward for misery, what is he doing here?
Twelve
Each week a letter arrives from his mother, a pale-blue aerogramme addressed in neat block capitals. It is with exasperation that he receives these evidences of her unvarying love for him. Will his mother not understand that when he departed Cape Town he cut all bonds with the past? How can he make her accept that the process of turning himself into a different person that began when he was fifteen will be carried through remorselessly until all memory of the family and the country he left behind is extinguished? When will she see that he has grown so far away from her that he might as well be a stranger?
In her letters his mother tells him family news, tells him of her latest work assignments (she moves from school to school substituting for teachers away on sick leave). She ends her letters hoping that his health is good, that he is taking care to wear warm clothes, that he has not succumbed to the influenza she has heard to be sweeping across Europe. As for South African affairs, she does not write about those because he has made it plain he is not interested.
He mentions that he has mislaid his gloves on a train. A mistake. Promptly a package arrives by air mail: a pair of sheepskin mittens. The stamps cost more than the mittens.
She writes her letters on Sunday evenings and posts them in time for the Monday morning collection. He can imagine the scene all too easily, in the flat into which she and his father and his brother moved when they had to sell the house in Rondebosch. Supper is over. She clears the table,