Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [43]
He does not understand why sheep accept their fate, why they never rebel but instead go meekly to their death. If buck know that there is nothing worse on earth than falling into the hands of men, and to their last breath struggle to escape, why are sheep so stupid? They are animals, after all, they have the sharp senses of animals: why do they not hear the last bleatings of the victim behind the shed, smell its blood, and take heed?
Sometimes when he is among the sheep – when they have been rounded up to be dipped, and are penned tight and cannot get away – he wants to whisper to them, warn them of what lies in store. But then in their yellow eyes he catches a glimpse of something that silences him: a resignation, a foreknowledge not only of what happens to sheep at the hands of Ros behind the shed, but of what awaits them at the end of the long, thirsty ride to Cape Town on the transport lorry. They know it all, down to the finest detail, and yet they submit. They have calculated the price and are prepared to pay it – the price of being on earth, the price of being alive.
Twelve
In Worcester the wind is always blowing, thin and cold in the winter, hot and dry in summer. After an hour outdoors there is a fine red dust in one’s hair, in one’s ears, on one’s tongue.
He is healthy, full of life and energy, yet seems always to have a cold. In the mornings he wakes up tight-throated, red-eyed, sneezing uncontrollably, his body temperature soaring and plunging. ‘I’m sick,’ he croaks to his mother. She rests the back of her hand against his forehead. ‘Then you must surely stay in bed,’ she sighs.
There is one more difficult moment to get through, the moment when his father says, ‘Where’s John?’ and his mother says, ‘He’s sick,’ and his father snorts and says, ‘Pretending again.’ Through this he lies as quiet as he can, till his father is gone and his brother is gone and he can at last settle down to a day of reading.
He reads at great speed and with total absorption. During his sick spells his mother has to visit the library twice a week to take out books for him: two on her cards, another two on his own. He avoids the library himself in case, when he brings his books to be stamped, the librarian should ask questions.
He knows that if he wants to be a great man he ought to be reading serious books. He ought to be like Abraham Lincoln or James Watt, studying by candlelight while everyone else is sleeping, teaching himself Latin and Greek and astronomy. He has not abandoned the idea of being a great man; he promises himself he will soon begin serious reading; but for the present all he wants to read are stories.
He reads all the Enid Blyton mystery stories, all the Hardy Boys stories, all the Biggles stories. But the books he likes best are the French Foreign Legion stories of P C Wren. ‘Who is the greatest writer in the world?’ he asks his father. His father says Shakespeare. ‘Why not P C Wren?’ he says. His father has not read P C Wren and, despite his soldiering background, does not seem interested in doing so. ‘P C Wren wrote forty-six books. How many books did Shakespeare write?’ he challenges, and starts reciting titles. His father says ‘Aah!’ in an irritated, dismissive way but has no reply.
If his father likes Shakespeare then Shakespeare must be bad, he decides. Nevertheless, he begins to read Shakespeare, in the yellowing edition with the tattered edges that his father inherited and that may be worth lots of money because it is old, trying to discover why people say Shakespeare is great. He reads Titus Andronicus because of its Roman name, then Coriolanus, skipping the long speeches as he skips the nature descriptions in his library books.
Besides Shakespeare, his