Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [198]
Someone is tapping her on the shoulder. ‘Mrs Jonker?’ A fresh young nurse. ‘Your mother is awake, she is asking for you.’
‘Come,’ she says. Jack and John follow her.
Her mother is conscious, she is calm, so calm as to seem a little remote. The oxygen mask has been replaced with a tube into her nose. Her eyes have lost their colour, turned into flat grey pebbles. ‘Margie?’ she whispers.
She presses her lips to her mother’s brow. ‘I’m here, Ma,’ she says.
The doctor enters, the same doctor as before, with the dark-rimmed eyes. Kiristany says the badge on his coat. On duty yesterday afternoon, still on duty this morning.
Her mother has had a cardiac episode, says Doctor Kiristany, but is now stable. She is very weak. Her heart is being stimulated electrically.
‘I would like to move my mother to a private hospital,’ she says to him, ‘somewhere quieter than this.’
He shakes his head. Impossible, he says. He cannot give his consent. Perhaps in a few days’ time, if she rallies.
She stands back. Jack bends over his sister, murmuring words she cannot hear. Her mother’s eyes are open, her lips move, she seems to be replying. Two old people, two innocents, born in olden times, out of place in the loud, angry place this country has become.
‘John?’ she says. ‘Do you want to speak to Ma?’
He shakes his head. ‘She won’t know me,’ he says.
[Silence.]
And?
That’s the end.
The end? But why stop there?
It seems a good place. She won’t know me: a good line.
[Silence.]
Well, what is your verdict?
My verdict? I still don’t understand: if it is a book about John why are you putting in so much about me? Who is going to want to read about me – me and Lukas and my mother and Carol and Klaus?
You were part of your cousin. He was part of you. That is plain enough, surely. What I am asking is, can it stand as it is?
Not as it is, no. I want to go over it again, as you promised.
Interviews conducted in Somerset West, South Africa,
December 2007 and June 2008.
Adriana
SENHORA NASCIMENTO, YOU ARE Brazilian by birth, but you spent several years in South Africa. How did that come about?
We went to South Africa from Angola, my husband and I and our two daughters. In Angola my husband worked for a newspaper and I had a job with the National Ballet. But then in 1973 the government declared an emergency and shut down his newspaper. They wanted to call him up into the army too – they were calling up all men under the age of forty-five, even those who were not citizens. We could not go back to Brazil, it was still too dangerous, we saw no future for ourselves in Angola, so we left, we took the boat to South Africa. We were not the first to do that, or the last.
And why Cape Town?
Why Cape Town? No special reason, except that we had a relative there, a cousin of my husband’s who owned a fruit and vegetable shop. After we arrived we stayed with him and his family, it was difficult for all of us, nine people in three rooms, while we waited for our residence papers. Then my husband managed to find a job as a security guard and we could move into a flat of our own. That was in a place called Epping. A few months later, just before the disaster that ruined everything, we moved again, to Wynberg, to be nearer the children’s school.
What disaster do you refer to?
My husband was working night shifts guarding a warehouse near the docks. He was the only guard. There was a robbery – a gang of men broke in. They attacked him, hit him with an axe. Maybe it was a machete, but more likely it was an axe. One side of his face was smashed in. I still don’t find it easy to talk about. An axe. Hitting a man in the face with an axe because he is doing his job. I can’t understand it.
What happened to him?
There were injuries to his brain. He died. It took a long time, nearly a year, but he died. It was terrible.
I’m sorry.
Yes. For a while the firm he worked for went on paying his wages. Then the money stopped