Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [195]
She would like to spit in his eye, but does not.
Her mother cannot stay alone on the farm while she and Lukas are away, there is no question of that. So she arranges for a second bed to be moved into her room at the hotel. It is inconvenient, it means the end of all privacy for her, but there is no alternative. She is billed full board for her mother, though in fact her mother eats like a bird.
They are into the second week of this new regime when a member of the cleaning staff comes upon her mother slumped on a couch in the empty hotel lounge, unconscious and blue in the face. She is rushed to the district hospital and resuscitated. The doctor on duty shakes his head. Her heartbeat is very weak, he says, she needs more urgent and more expert care than she can get in Calvinia; Upington is an option, there is a decent hospital there, but it would be preferable if she went to Cape Town.
Within an hour she, Margot, has shut her office and is on the way to Cape Town, sitting in the cramped back of the ambulance, holding her mother’s hand. With them is a young Coloured nurse named Aletta, whose crisp, starched uniform and cheerful air soon set her at ease.
Aletta, it turns out, was born not far away, in Wuppertal in the Cederberg, where her parents still live. She has made the trip to Cape Town more times than she can count. She tells of how, only last week, they had to rush a man from Loeriesfontein to Groote Schuur Hospital along with three fingers packed in ice in a cool box, fingers he had lost in a mishap with a bandsaw.
‘Your mother will be fine,’ says Aletta. ‘Groote Schuur – only the best.’
At Clanwilliam they stop for petrol. The ambulance driver, who is even younger than Aletta, has brought along a thermos flask of coffee. He offers her, Margot, a cup, but she declines. ‘I’m cutting down on coffee,’ she says (a lie), ‘it keeps me awake.’
She would have liked to buy the two of them a cup of coffee at the café, would have liked to sit down with them in a normal, friendly way, but of course one could not do that without causing a fuss. Let the time come soon, O Lord, she prays to herself, when all this apartheid nonsense will be buried and forgotten.
They resume their places in the ambulance. Her mother is sleeping. Her colour is better, she is breathing evenly beneath the oxygen mask.
‘I must tell you how much I appreciate what you and Johannes are doing for us,’ she says to Aletta. Aletta smiles back in the friendliest of ways, with not the faintest trace of irony. She hopes for her words to be understood in their widest sense, with all the meaning that for very shame she cannot express: I must tell you how grateful I am for what you and your colleague are doing for an old white woman and her daughter, two strangers who have never done anything for you but on the contrary have participated in your humiliation in the land of your birth, day after day after day. I am grateful for the lesson you teach me through your actions, in which I see only human kindness, and above all through that lovely smile of yours.
They reach the city of Cape Town at the height of the afternoon rush hour. Though theirs is not, strictly speaking, an emergency, Johannes nevertheless sounds his siren as he coolly threads his way through the traffic. At the hospital she trails behind as her mother is wheeled into the emergency unit. By the time she returns to thank Aletta and Johannes, they have left, taken the long road back to the Northern Cape.
When I get back! she promises herself, meaning When I get back to Calvinia I will make sure I thank them personally! but also When I get back I will become a better person, that I swear!