Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [26]
Nine
One of the conveniences of Worcester, one of the reasons, according to his father, why it is better living here than in Cape Town, is that shopping is so much easier. Milk is delivered every morning before dawn; one has only to pick up the telephone and, an hour or two later, the man from Schochat’s will be at the door with one’s meat and groceries. It is as simple as that.
The man from Schochat’s, the delivery boy, is a Native who speaks only a few words of Afrikaans and no English. He wears a clean white shirt, a bow tie, two-tone shoes, and a Bobby Locke cap. His name is Josias. His parents disapprove of him as one of the feckless new generation of Natives who spend all their pay on fancy clothes and give no thought to the future.
When his mother is not at home, he and his brother receive the delivery from the hands of Josias, packing the groceries away on the kitchen shelf and the meat in the refrigerator. If there is condensed milk, they appropriate it as booty. They punch holes in the can and take turns sucking till it is dry. When their mother comes home they pretend that there was no condensed milk, or that Josias stole it.
Whether she believes their lie he is not sure. But this is not a deceit he feels particularly guilty about.
The neighbours on the east side are named Wynstra. They have three sons, an older one with knock knees named Gysbert and twins named Eben and Ezer too young to go to school. He and his brother ridicule Gysbert Wynstra for his funny name and for the soft, helpless way in which he runs. They decide he is an idiot, mentally deficient, and declare war on him. One afternoon they take the half-dozen eggs Schochat’s boy has delivered, hurl them at the roof of the Wynstra house, and hide. The Wynstras do not emerge, but as the sun dries the smashed eggs they turn to ugly splashes of yellow.
The pleasure of throwing an egg, so much smaller and lighter than a cricket ball, of watching it fly through the air, end over end, of hearing the soft crunch of its impact, remains with him, long afterwards. Yet his pleasure is tinged with guilt. He cannot forget that it is food they are playing with. By what right does he use eggs as playthings? What would Schochat’s boy say if he found they were throwing away the eggs he had brought all the way from town on his bicycle? He has a sense that Schochat’s boy, who is in fact not a boy at all but a grown man, would not be so wrapped up in the image of himself in his Bobby Locke cap and bow-tie as to be indifferent. He has a sense that he would disapprove most strongly and would not hesitate to say so. ‘How can you do that when children are hungry?’ he would say in his bad Afrikaans; and there would be no answer. Perhaps elsewhere in the world one can throw eggs (in England, for instance, he knows they throw eggs at people in the stocks); but in this country there are judges who will judge by the standards of righteousness. In this country one cannot be thoughtless about food.
Josias is the fourth Native he has known in his life. The first, whom he remembers only dimly as wearing blue pyjamas all day long, was the boy who used to mop the stairs of the block of flats they lived in in Johannesburg. The second was Fiela in Plettenberg Bay, who took in their washing. Fiela was very black and very old and had no teeth and made long speeches about the past in beautiful, rolling English. She came from St Helena, she said, where she had been a slave. The third was also in Plettenberg Bay. There had been a great storm; a ship had sunk; the wind, which had blown for days and nights, was just beginning to die down. He and his mother and his brother were out on the beach inspecting the mounds of jetsam and seaweed that had been washed up, when an old man with a grey beard and a clerical collar, carrying an umbrella, came up to them and addressed them. ‘Man builds great boats of iron,’ said the