Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [192]
I should tear up this letter, it’s so embarrassing, but I won’t. I say to myself, we have known each other a long time, you will surely forgive me if I tread where I should not tread.
Lukas and I are happy together in every possible way. I go down on my knees every night (so to speak) to give thanks that his path crossed mine. How I wish you could have the same!
As if summoned, Lukas comes into the kitchen, bends down over her, presses his lips to her head, slips his hands under the dressing gown, cups her breasts. ‘My skat,’ he says: my treasure.
You can’t write that. You can’t. You are just making things up.
I’ll cut it out. Presses his lips to her head. ‘My skat,’ he says, ‘when are you coming to bed?’ ‘Now,’ she says, and lays down the pen. ‘Now.’
Skat: an endearment she disliked until the day she heard it from his lips. Now, when he whispers the word, she melts. This man’s treasure, into which he may dip whenever it pleases him.
They lie in each other’s arms. The bed creaks, but she could not care less, they are at home, they can make the bed creak as much as they like.
Again!
I promise, when I have finished I will hand over the text to you, the entire text, and let you cut out whatever you wish.
‘Was that a letter to John you were writing?’ says Lukas.
‘Yes. He is so unhappy.’
‘Maybe that’s just his nature. A melancholy type.’
‘But he used not to be. He used to be such a happy soul in the old days. If he could only find someone to take him out of himself!’
But Lukas is asleep. That is his nature, his type: he falls asleep at once, like an innocent child.
She would like to be able to join him, but sleep is slow in coming. It is as if the ghost of her cousin still lurks, calling her back to the dark kitchen to complete what she was writing to him. Have faith in me, she whispers. I promise I will return.
But when she wakes it is Monday, there is no time for writing, no time for intimacies, they have to set off at once on the drive to Calvinia, she to the hotel, Lukas to the transport depot. In the windowless little office behind the reception desk she labours over the backlog of invoices; by evening she is too exhausted to pursue the letter she was writing, and anyhow she has lost touch with the feeling. Am thinking of you, she writes at the foot of the page. Even that is not true, she has not given John a thought all day, she has had no time. Much love, she writes. Margie. She addresses the envelope and seals it. So. It is done.
Much love, but exactly how much? Enough to save John, in a pinch? Enough to raise him out of himself, out of the melancholy of his type? She doubts it. And what if he does not want to be raised? If his grand plan is to spend weekends on the stoep of the house in Merweville writing poems with the sun beating down on the tin roof and his father coughing in a back room, he may need all the melancholy he can summon up.
That is her first moment of misgiving. The second moment comes as she is mailing the letter, as the envelope is trembling on the very lip of the slot. Is what she has written, what her cousin will be fated to read if she lets the letter go, truly the best she can offer him? You need someone in your life. What kind of help is it to be told that? Much love.
But then she thinks, He is a grown man, why should it be up to me to save him? and she gives the envelope a final nudge.
She has to wait ten days, until the Friday of the next week, for a reply.
Dear Margot,
Thank you for your letter, which was waiting for us when we got back from Voëlfontein, and thank you for the good if impracticable advice re marriage.
The drive back from Voëlfontein was incident-free. Michiel’s mechanic friend did a first-class job. I apologize again for the night I made you spend in the open.
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