Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [31]
He peered into the observatory once while the punishment was going on. Trevelyan was holding Eddie by the two wrists and flogging him on the bare legs with a leather strap. His father was also there, standing to one side, watching. Eddie howled and danced; there were tears and snot everywhere. ‘Asseblief, asseblief, my baas,’ he howled, ‘ek sal nie weer nie!’ – I won’t do it again! Then the two of them noticed him and waved him out.
The next day his aunt and uncle came from Stellenbosch in their black DKW to take Eddie back to his mother in Ida’s Valley. There were no goodbyes.
So Trevelyan, who was English, was the one to beat Eddie. In fact, Trevelyan, who was ruddy of complexion and already a little fat, went even ruddier while he was applying the strap, and snorted with every blow, working himself into as much of a rage as any Afrikaner. How does Trevelyan, then, fit into his theory that the English are good?
There is a debt he still owes Eddie, which he has told no one about. After he had bought the Smiths bicycle with the money for his eighth birthday and then found he did not know how to ride, it was Eddie who pushed him on Rosebank Common, shouting commands, till all of a sudden he mastered the art of balancing.
He rode in a wide loop that first time, thrusting hard on the pedals to get through the sandy soil, till he came back to where Eddie was waiting. Eddie was excited, jumping up and down. ‘Kan ek ’n kans kry?’ he clamoured – Can I have a turn? He passed the bicycle over to Eddie. Eddie didn’t need to be pushed: he set off as fast as the wind, standing on the pedals, his old navy-blue blazer streaming behind him, riding a lot better than he did.
He remembers wrestling with Eddie on the lawn. Though Eddie was only seven months older than he, and no bigger, he had a wiry strength and a singleness of purpose that always made him the victor. The victor, but cautious in victory. Only for a moment, when he had his opponent pinned on his back, helpless, did Eddie allow himself a grin of triumph; then he rolled off and stood at a crouch, ready for the next round.
The smell of Eddie’s body stays with him from those bouts, and the feel of his head, the high bullet-shaped skull and the close, coarse hair.
They have harder heads than white people, his father says. That is why they are so good at boxing. For the same reason, his father says, they will never be good at rugby. In rugby you have to think fast, you can’t be a bonehead.
There is a moment as the two of them wrestle when his lips and nose are pressed against Eddie’s hair. He breathes in the smell, the taste: the smell, the taste of smoke.
Every weekend Eddie gave himself a bath, standing in a footbath in the servant’s lavatory and washing himself with a soapy rag. He and his brother hauled a dustbin below the tiny window and climbed up to peek. Eddie was naked but for his leather belt, which he still wore around his waist. Seeing the two faces at the window, he gave a big smile and shouted ‘Hê!’ and danced in the footbath, splashing the water, not covering himself.
Later he told his mother: ‘Eddie didn’t take off his belt in the bath.’
‘Let him do what he wants,’ said his mother.
He has never been to Ida’s Valley, where Eddie comes from. He thinks of it as a cold, sodden place. In Eddie’s mother’s house there is no electric light. The roof leaks, everyone is always coughing. When you go outside you have to hop from stone to stone to avoid the puddles. What hope is there for Eddie now that he is back in Ida’s Valley, in disgrace?
‘What do you think Eddie is doing now?’ he asks his mother.
‘He is surely in a reformatory.’
‘Why in a reformatory?’
‘People like that always end up in a reformatory, and then in jail.’
He does not understand his mother’s bitterness against Eddie. He does not understand these bitter moods of hers, when things almost at random come under the disparaging lash of her tongue: Coloured people, her own brothers and sisters, books, education, the Government. He does not really care what she believes about Eddie as