Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [133]
Nineteen
It is raining. He and Ganapathy are alone in the canteen, playing lightning chess on Ganapathy’s pocket set. Ganapathy is beating him, as usual.
‘You should go to America,’ says Ganapathy. ‘You are wasting your time here. We are all wasting our time.’
He shakes his head. ‘That’s not realistic,’ he replies.
He has thought more than once of trying for a job in America, and decided against it. A prudent decision, but a correct one. As a programmer he has no particular gifts. His colleagues on the Atlas team may not have advanced degrees, but their minds are clearer than his, their grasp of computational problems is quicker and keener than his will ever be. In discussion he can barely hold his own; he is always having to pretend to understand when he does not really understand, and then work things out for himself afterwards. Why should businesses in America want someone like him? America is not England. America is hard and merciless: if by some miracle he bluffed his way into a job there, he would soon be found out. Besides, he has read Allen Ginsberg, read William Burroughs. He knows what America does to artists: sends them mad, locks them up, drives them out.
‘You could get a fellowship at a university,’ says Ganapathy. ‘I got one, you would have no trouble.’
He stares hard. Is Ganapathy really such an innocent? There is a Cold War on the go. America and Russia are competing for the hearts and minds of Indians, Iraquis, Nigerians; scholarships to universities are among the inducements they offer. The hearts and minds of whites are of no interest to them, certainly not the hearts and minds of a few out-of-place whites in Africa.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he says, and changes the subject. He has no intention of thinking about it.
In a photograph on the front page of the Guardian a Vietnamese soldier in American-style uniform stares helplessly into a sea of flames. ‘RAIDERS WREAK HAVOC AT U.S. BASE,’ reads the headline. A band of Viet Cong sappers have cut their way through the barbed wire around the American air base at Pleiku, blown up twenty-four aircraft, and set fire to the fuel storage tanks. They have given up their lives in the action.
Ganapathy, who shows him the newspaper, is exultant; he himself feels a surge of vindication. Ever since he arrived in England the British newspapers and BBC have carried stories of American feats of arms in which Viet Cong are killed by the thousand while the Americans get away unscathed. If there is ever a word of criticism of America, it is of the most muted kind. He can barely bring himself to read the war reports, so much do they sicken him. Now the Viet Cong have given their undeniable, heroic reply.
He and Ganapathy have never discussed Vietnam. Because Ganapathy studied in America, he has assumed that Ganapathy either supports the Americans or is as indifferent to the war as everyone else at International Computers. Now, suddenly, in his smile, the glint in his eye, he is seeing Ganapathy’s secret face. Despite his admiration for American efficiency and his longing for American hamburgers, Ganapathy is on the side of the Vietnamese because they are his Asian brothers.
That is all. That is the end of it. There is no further mention of the war between them. But he wonders more than ever what Ganapathy is doing in England, in the Home Counties, working on a project he has no respect for. Would he not be better off in Asia, fighting the Americans? Should he have a chat to him, tell him so?
And what of himself? If Ganapathy’s destiny lies in Asia, where does his lie? Would the Viet Cong ignore his origins and accept his services, if not as a soldier or suicide bomber then as a humble porter? If not, what of the friends and allies of the Viet Cong, the Chinese?
He writes to the Chinese Embassy in London. Since he suspects the Chinese have no use for computers, he says nothing about