Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [173]
I don’t know. I don’t know if I can let you say that.
Well, whatever you decide, I will abide by what you say. But that is what you told me, word for word. And bear in mind, it is not as if your sister is going to pick up an obscure book published by an academic press in England. Where is your sister now?
She and Klaus live in Florida, in a town called St Petersburg. I have never been there. As for your book, one of her friends might come across it and send it to her – you never know. But that is not the main point. When I spoke to you last year, I was under the impression you were simply going to transcribe our interview. I had no idea you were going to rewrite it completely.
That’s not entirely fair. I have not actually rewritten it, I have merely recast it as a narrative, giving it a different form. Giving it new form has no effect on the content. If you feel I am taking liberties with the content itself, that is another question. Do you feel I am taking too many liberties?
I don’t know. Something sounds wrong to me, but I can’t put my finger on it yet. All I can say is, your version doesn’t sound like what I said to you. But I am going to shut up now. I will wait until the end to make up my mind. So go on.
All right.
If Carol is too hard, she is too soft, she will admit to that. She is the one who cries when the new kittens have to be drowned, the one who blocks her ears when the slaughter-lamb bleats in fear, bleats and bleats. She used to mind, when she was younger, being scoffed at for it; but now, in her mid-thirties, she is not so sure she need be ashamed of being tender-hearted.
Carol claims not to understand why John is attending the family gathering, but to her the reason is obvious. To the haunts of his youth he has brought back his father, who though not much over sixty looks like an old man, looks to be on his last legs – has brought him back so that he can be renewed and fortified, or, if he cannot be renewed, so that he can at least say his farewells. It is, to her mind, an act of filial duty, one that she thoroughly approves of.
She tracks John down behind the packing-shed, where he is working on his car, or pretending to.
‘Something wrong with the car?’ she asks.
‘It’s overheating,’ he says. ‘We had to stop twice on Du Toit’s Kloof to let the engine cool.’
‘You should ask Michiel to have a look at it. He knows everything about cars.’
‘Michiel is busy with his guests. I’ll fix it myself.’
Her guess is that Michiel would welcome an excuse to escape his guests, but she does not press her case. She knows male stubbornness all too well, knows that a man will wrestle endlessly with a problem rather than undergo the humiliation of asking another man for help.
‘Is this what you drive in Cape Town?’ she says. By this she means this one-ton Datsun pickup, the kind of light truck she associates with farmers and builders. ‘What do you need a truck for?’
‘It’s useful,’ he replies curtly, not explaining what its use might be.
She could not help laughing when he made his arrival at the farm behind the wheel of this selfsame truck, he with his beard and his unkempt hair and his owl-glasses, his father beside him like a mummy, stiff and embarrassed. She wishes she could have taken a photograph. She wishes, too, she could have a quiet word with John about his hair-style. But the ice is not yet broken, intimate talk will have to wait.
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘I’ve been instructed to call you for tea, tea and melktert that Aunt Joy has baked.’
‘I’ll come in a minute,’ he says.
They speak Afrikaans together. His Afrikaans is halting; she suspects her English is better than his Afrikaans, though, living in the back country, the platteland, she seldom has call to speak English. But they have spoken Afrikaans together