Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [189]
‘Carol says you are still writing poems,’ she says. ‘Is that true? Will you show me?’
‘I am sorry to disappoint Carol,’ he replies stiffly, ‘but I haven’t written a poem since I was a teenager.’
She bites her tongue. She forgot: you do not ask a man to show you his poems, not in South Africa, not without reassuring him beforehand that it will be all right, he is not going to be mocked. What a country, where poetry is not a manly activity but a hobby for children and oujongnooiens [spinsters] – oujongnooiens of both sexes! How Totius or Louis Leipoldt got by she cannot guess. No wonder Carol chooses John’s poem-writing to attack, Carol with her nose for other people’s weaknesses.
‘If you gave up so long ago, why does Carol think you still write?’
‘I have no idea. Perhaps she saw me marking student essays and jumped to the wrong conclusion.’
She does not believe him, but she is not going to press him further. If he wants to evade her, let him. If poetry is a part of his life he is too shy or too ashamed to talk about, then so be it.
She does not think of John as a moffie, but it continues to puzzle her that he has no woman. A man alone, particularly one of the Coetzee men, seems to her like a boat without oar or rudder or sail. And now two of them, two Coetzee men, living as a couple! While Jack still had the redoubtable Vera behind him he steered a more or less straight course; but now that she is gone he seems quite lost. As for Jack and Vera’s son, he could certainly do with some level-headed guidance. But what woman with any sense would want to devote herself to the hapless John?
Carol is convinced John is a bad bet; and the rest of the Coetzee family, despite their good hearts, would probably agree. What sets her, Margot, apart, what keeps her confidence in John precariously afloat, is, oddly enough, the way in which he and his father behave towards each other: if not with affection, that would be saying too much, then at least with respect.
The pair used to be the worst of enemies. The bad blood between Jack and his elder son was the subject of much head-shaking. When the son disappeared overseas, the parents put on the best front they could. He had gone to pursue a career in science, his mother claimed. For years she put forward a story that John was working as a scientist in England, even as it became clear that she had no idea for whom he worked or what sort of work he did. You know how John is, his father would say: always very independent. Independent: what did that mean? Not without reason, the Coetzees took it to mean he had disowned his country, his family, his very parents.
Then Jack and Vera started putting out a new story: John was not in England after all but in America, pursuing ever higher qualifications. Time passed; in the absence of hard news, interest in John and his doings waned. He and his younger brother became just two among thousands of young white men who had run away to escape military service, leaving an embarrassed family behind. He had almost vanished from their collective memory when the scandal of his expulsion from the United States burst upon them.
That terrible war, said his father: it was all the fault of a war in which American boys were sacrificing their lives for the sake of Asians who seemed to feel no gratitude at all. No wonder ordinary Americans were revolting. No wonder they took to the streets. John had been caught up willy-nilly in a street protest, the story proceeded; what ensued had just been a bad misunderstanding.
Was it his son’s disgrace, and the untruths he had to tell as a consequence, that had turned Jack into a shaky, prematurely aged man? How can she even ask?
‘You must be glad to see the Karoo again,