Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [185]
Useless to put questions like that to the Coetzees. Die boer saai, God maai, maar waar skuil die papegaai? say the Coetzees, and cackle. Nonsense words. A nonsense family, flighty, without substance; clowns. ’n Hand vol vere: a handful of feathers. Even the one member for whom she had had some slight hopes, the one beside her who has tumbled straight back into dreamland, turns out to be a lightweight. Who ran away to the big world and now comes creeping ignominiously back to the little world. Failed runaway, failed car mechanic too, for whose failure she is at this moment having to suffer. Failed son. Sitting in that dreary, dusty old house in Merweville looking out on the empty, sunstruck street, rattling a pencil between his teeth, trying to think up verses. O droë land, o barre kranse … O parched land, o barren cliffs … What next? Something about weemoed for sure, melancholy.
She wakes as first streaks of mauve and orange begin to extend across the sky. In her sleep she has somehow twisted her body and slumped down further in the seat, so that her cousin, still dormant, reclines not against her shoulder but against her rump. Irritably she frees herself. Her eyes are gummy, her bones creak, she has a raging thirst. Opening the door, she slides out.
The air is cold and still. Even as she watches, thornbushes and tufts of grass, touched by the first light, emerge out of nothing. It is as if she were present at the first day of creation. My God, she murmurs; she has an urge to sink to her knees.
There is a rustle nearby. She is looking straight into the dark eyes of an antelope, a little steenbok not twenty paces off, and it is looking straight back at her, wary but not afraid, not yet. My kleintjie! she says, my little one. More than anything she wants to embrace it, to pour out upon its brow this sudden love; but before she can take a first step the little one has whirled about and raced off with drumming hooves. A hundred yards away it halts, turns, inspects her again, then trots at less urgent pace across the flats and into a dry riverbed.
‘What’s that?’ comes her cousin’s voice. He has at last awoken; he clambers out of the truck, yawning, stretching.
‘A steenbokkie,’ she says curtly. ‘What are we going to do now?’
‘I’ll head back to Merweville,’ he says. ‘You wait here. I should be back by ten o’clock, eleven at the latest.’
‘If a car passes and offers me a lift, I’m taking it,’ she says. ‘Either direction, I’m taking it.’
He looks a mess, with his unkempt hair and beard sticking out at all angles. Thank God I don’t have to wake up with you in my bed every morning, she thinks. Not enough of a man. A real man would do better than this, sowaar!
The sun is showing above the horizon; already she can feel the warmth on her skin. The world may be God’s world, but the Karoo belongs first of all to the sun. ‘You had better get going,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be a hot day.’ And watches as he trudges off, the empty jerry can slung over his shoulder.
An adventure: perhaps that is the best way to think of it. Here in the back of beyond she and John are having an adventure. For years to come the Coetzees will be reminiscing about it. Remember the time when Margot and John broke down on that godforsaken Merweville road? In the meantime, while she waits for her adventure to end, what has she for diversion? The tattered instruction manual for the Datsun; nothing else. No poems. Tyre rotation. Battery maintenance. Tips for fuel economy.
The truck, facing into the rising sun, grows stiflingly hot. She takes shelter in its lee.
On the crest of the road, an apparition: out of the heat-haze emerges first the torso of a man, then by degrees a donkey and donkey-cart. On the wind she can even hear the neat clip-clop of the donkey’s hooves.
The figure grows clearer. It is