Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [193]
I trust that all is well on the farm. My father sends his love to you and Lukas, as do I.
John
Is that all? The cold formality of his response shocks her, brings an angry flush to her cheeks.
‘What is it?’ asks Lukas.
She shrugs, ‘It’s nothing,’ she says, and passes the letter over. ‘A letter from John.’
He reads it through swiftly. ‘So they are dropping their plans for Merweville,’ he says. ‘That’s a relief. Why are you so upset?’
‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘Just the tone.’
They are parked, the two of them, in front of the post office. This is what they do on Friday afternoons, it is part of the routine they have created for themselves: last thing, after they have done the shopping and before driving back to the farm, they fetch the week’s mail and scan it sitting side by side in the pickup. Though she could fetch the mail herself any day of the week, she does not. She and Lukas do it together, as they do together whatever else they can.
For the moment Lukas is absorbed in a letter from the Land Bank, with a long attachment, pages of figures, more important by far than mere family matters. ‘Don’t hurry, I’ll go for a stroll,’ she says, and gets out and crosses the street.
The post office is newly built, squat and heavy, with glass bricks instead of windows and a heavy steel grille over the door. She dislikes it. It looks, to her eye, like a police station. She thinks back with fondness to the old post office that was demolished to make way for it, the building that had once upon a time been the Truter house.
Not half her lifespan gone, and already she is hankering for the past!
It was never just a question of Merweville, of John and his father, of who was going to be living where, in the city or in the country. What are we doing here?: that had been the unspoken question all the time. He had known it and she had known it. Her own letter, however cowardly, had at least hinted at the question: What are we doing in this barren part of the world? Why are we spending our lives in dreary toil if it was never meant that people should live here, if the whole project of humanizing the place was misconceived from the start?
This part of the world. The part she means is not Merweville or Calvinia but the whole Karoo, perhaps the whole country. Whose idea was it to lay down roads and railway lines, build towns, bring in people and then bind them to this place, bind them with rivets through the heart, so that they cannot get away? Better to cut yourself free and hope the wound heals, he said when they were out walking in the veld. But how do you cut through rivets like that?
It is long past closing time. The post office is closed, the shops are closed, the street is deserted. Meyerowitz Jeweller. Babes in the Wood – Laybyes Accepted. Cosmos Café. Foschini Modes.
Meyerowitz (‘Diamonds are Forever’) has been here longer than she can remember. Babes in the Wood used to be Jan Harmse Slagter. Cosmos Café used to be Cosmos Milk Bar. Foschini Modes used to be Winterberg Algemene Handelaars. All this change, all this busyness! O droewige land! O sorrowful land! Foschini Modes is confident enough to open a new branch in Calvinia. What can her cousin the failed emigrant, the poet of melancholy, claim to know about the future of this land that Foschini does not? Her cousin who believes that even baboons, as they stare out over the veld, are overcome with weemoed.
Lukas is convinced there will be a political accommodation. John may claim to be a liberal, but Lukas is a more practical liberal than John will ever be, and a more courageous one too. If they chose to, Lukas and she, boer and boervrou, man and wife, could scrape together a living on their farm. They might have to tighten their belt a notch or two or three, but they would survive. If Lukas chooses instead