Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [22]
To cricket he looks for more than Johnny Wardle offers. Cricket must be like Horatius and the Etruscans, or Hector and Achilles. If Hector and Achilles were just two men hacking away at each other with swords, there would be no point to the story. But they are not just two men: they are mighty heroes, their names ring in legend. He is glad when, at the end of the season, Wardle is dropped from the England team.
Wardle bowls, of course, with a leather ball. He is unfamiliar with the leather ball: he and his friends play with what they call a cork ball, compacted out of some hard, grey material that is proof against the stones that tear the stitching of a leather ball to shreds. Standing behind the net watching Wardle, he hears for the first time the strange whistling of a leather ball as it approaches the batsman through the air.
His first chance comes to play on a proper cricket field. A match is organized for a Wednesday afternoon, between two teams from the junior school. Proper cricket means proper wickets, a proper pitch, no need to fight for a turn to bat.
His turn comes to bat. Wearing a pad on his left leg, carrying his father’s bat that is much too heavy for him, he walks out to the middle. He is surprised at how big the field is. It is a great and lonely place: the spectators are so far away that they might as well not exist.
He takes his stand on the strip of rolled earth with a green coir mat spread over it and waits for the ball to come. This is cricket. It is called a game, but it feels to him more real than home, more real even than school. In this game there is no pretending, no mercy, no second chance. These other boys, whose names he does not know, are all against him. They are of one mind only: to cut short his pleasure. They will feel not one speck of remorse when he is out. In the middle of this huge arena he is on trial, one against eleven, with no one to protect him.
The fielders settle into position. He must concentrate, but there is something irritating he cannot put out of his mind: Zeno’s paradox. Before the arrow can reach its target it must reach halfway; before it can reach halfway it must reach a quarter of the way; before it can reach a quarter of the way … Desperately he tries to stop thinking about it; but the very fact that he is trying not to think about it agitates him still further.
The bowler runs up. He hears particularly the thud of the last two steps. Then there is a space in which the only sound breaking the silence is the eerie rustling noise of the ball as it tumbles and dips towards him. Is this what he is choosing when he chooses to play cricket: to be tested again and again and again, until he fails, by a ball that comes at him impersonally, indifferently, without mercy, seeking the chink in his defence, and faster than he expects, too fast for him to clear the confusion in his mind, compose his thoughts, decide properly what to do? And in the midst of this thinking, in the midst of this muddle, the ball arrives.
He scores two runs, batting in a state of disarray and, later, of gloom. He emerges from the game understanding less than ever the matter-of-fact way in which Johnny Wardle plays, chatting and joking all the while. Are all the fabled England players like that: Len Hutton, Alec Bedser, Denis Compton, Cyril Washbrook? He cannot believe it. To him, real cricket can only be played in silence, silence and apprehension, the heart thudding in the chest, the mouth dry.
Cricket is not a game. It is the truth of life. If it is, as the books say, a test of character, then it is a test he sees no way of passing yet does not know