Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [12]
He does not know what the Russians do when they are not making war.
Of his private cricket games he says nothing to his friends, keeping them for home. Once, during their early months in Worcester, a boy from his class had wandered in through the open front door and found him lying on his back under a chair. ‘What are you doing there?’ he had asked. ‘Thinking,’ he had replied unthinkingly: ‘I like thinking.’ Soon everyone in his class knew about it: the new boy was odd, he wasn’t normal. From that mistake he has learned to be more prudent. Part of being prudent is always to tell less rather than more.
He also plays proper cricket with whoever is prepared to play. But proper cricket on the empty square in the middle of Reunion Park is too slow to be borne: the ball is forever being missed by the batsman, missed by the wicketkeeper, getting lost. He hates searching for lost balls. He hates fielding too, on stony ground where you bloody your hands and knees every time you fall. He wants to bat or bowl, that is all.
He courts his brother, though his brother is only six years old, promising to let him play with his toys if he will bowl to him in the backyard. His brother bowls for a while, then grows bored and sullen and scuttles indoors for protection. He tries to teach his mother to bowl, but she cannot master the action. While he grows exasperated, she quivers with laughter at her own clumsiness. So he allows her to throw the ball instead. But in the end the spectacle is too shameful, too easily seen from the street: a mother playing cricket with her son.
He cuts a jam-tin in half and nails the bottom half to a two-foot wooden arm. He mounts the arm on an axle through the walls of a packing case weighed down with bricks. The arm is drawn forward by a strip of inner-tube rubber, drawn back by a rope that runs through a hook on the packing case. He puts a ball in the tin cup, retreats ten yards, pulls on the rope till the rubber is taut, anchors the rope under his heel, takes up his batting position, and releases the rope. Sometimes the ball shoots up into the sky, sometimes straight at his head; but every now and again it flies within reach and he is able to hit it. With this he is satisfied: he has bowled and batted all by himself, he has triumphed, nothing is impossible.
One day, in a mood of reckless intimacy, he asks Greenberg and Goldstein to bring out their earliest memories. Greenberg demurs: it is a game he is not willing to play. Goldstein tells a long and pointless story about being taken to the beach, a story he barely listens to. For the point of the game is, of course, to allow him to recount his own first memory.
He is leaning out of the window of their flat in Johannesburg. Dusk is falling. Out of the distance a car comes racing down the street. A dog, a small spotted dog, runs in front of it. The car hits the dog: its wheels go right over the dog’s middle. With its hind legs paralysed, the dog drags itself away, yelping with pain. No doubt it will die; but at this point he is snatched away from his perch at the window.
It is a magnificent first memory, trumping anything that poor Goldstein can dredge up. But is it true? Why was he leaning out of the window watching an empty street? Did he really see the car hit the dog, or did he just hear a dog yelping, and run to the window? Is it possible that he saw nothing but a dog dragging its hindquarters and made up the car and the driver and the rest of the story?
There is another first memory, one that he trusts more fully but would never repeat, certainly not to Greenberg and Goldstein, who would trumpet it around the school and turn him into a laughing stock.
He is sitting beside his mother in a bus. It must be cold, for he is wearing red woollen leggings and a woollen cap with a bobble. The engine of the bus labours; they are ascending the wild and desolate Swartberg Pass.
In his hand is a sweet-wrapper. He holds the wrapper out of the window, which is open a crack. It flaps