Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [17]
His mother’s world is quite different from the world of his father’s photograph album, in which South Africans in khaki uniform strike poses against the pyramids of Egypt or against the rubble of Italian cities. But in his father’s album he spends less time on the photographs than on the fascinating pamphlets interspersed among them, pamphlets dropped on the Allied positions from German aeroplanes. One tells the soldiers how to give themselves a temperature (by eating soap); another pictures a glamorous woman perched on the knee of a fat Jew with a hooked nose, drinking a glass of champagne. ‘Do you know where your wife is tonight?’ asks the subtitle. And then there is the blue porcelain eagle that his father found in the ruins of a house in Naples and brought back in his kit-bag, the eagle of empire that now stands on the mantelshelf in the living room.
He is immensely proud of his father’s war service. He is surprised – and gratified – to find how few of the fathers of his friends fought in the war. Why his father rose to no more than a lance corporal he is not sure: he quietly leaves out the lance when he repeats his father’s adventures to his friends. But he treasures the photograph, taken in a studio in Cairo, of his handsome father sighting down a rifle barrel, one eye closed, his hair neatly combed, his beret tucked in regulation fashion under his epaulette. If he had his way it would be on the mantelshelf too.
His father and his mother disagree about the Germans. His father likes the Italians (their heart was not in the fight, he says: all they wanted to do was surrender and go back home) but hates the Germans. He tells the story of a German shot while he was squatting on a privy. Sometimes, in the story, it was he who shot the German, sometimes one of his friends; but in none of the versions does he show any pity, only amusement at the German’s confusion as he tried to raise his hands and pull up his pants at the same time.
His mother knows it is not a good idea to praise the Germans too openly; but sometimes, when he and his father gang up on her, she will leave discretion behind. ‘The Germans are the best people in the world,’ she will say. ‘It was that terrible Hitler who led them into so much suffering.’
Her brother Norman disagrees. ‘Hitler gave the Germans pride in themselves,’ he says.
His mother and Norman travelled through Europe together in the 1930s: not only through Norway and the highlands of Scotland but through Germany, Hitler’s Germany. Their family – the Brechers, the du Biels – is from Germany, or at least from Pomerania, which is now in Poland. Is it good to be from Pomerania? He is not sure.
‘The Germans didn’t want to fight against the South Africans,’ says Norman. ‘They like the South Africans. If it hadn’t been for Smuts we would never have gone to war against Germany. Smuts was a skelm, a crook. He sold us to the British.’
His father and Norman do not like each other. When his father wants to get at his mother, in their late-night quarrels in the kitchen, he taunts her about her brother who did not join up, but marched with the Ossewabrandwag instead. ‘That’s a lie!’ she maintains angrily. ‘Norman was not in the Ossewabrandwag. Ask him yourself, he will tell you.’
When he asks his mother what the Ossewabrandwag is, she says it is just nonsense, people who marched in the streets with torches.
The fingers of Norman’s right hand are yellow with nicotine. He has a room in a boarding house in Pretoria where he has lived for years. He makes his money by selling a pamphlet he has written about ju-jitsu, which he advertises in the classified pages of the Pretoria News. ‘Learn the Japanese art of self-defence,’ says the advertisement. ‘Six easy lessons.’ People send him ten-shilling postal orders and he sends them the pamphlet: a single page folded in four, with sketches of the various holds. When ju-jitsu does not bring in