Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [50]
Their hosts rushed them to the hospital, where a doctor amputated the middle finger of his brother’s left hand. For a while his brother walked around with his hand bandaged and his arm in a sling; then he wore a little black leather pouch over the finger-stump. He was six years old. Though no one pretended his finger would grow back, he did not complain.
He has never apologized to his brother, nor has he ever been reproached with what he did. Nevertheless, the memory lies like a weight upon him, the memory of the soft resistance of flesh and bone, and then the grinding.
‘At least you can be proud to have someone in your family who did something with his life, who left something behind him,’ says his mother.
‘You said he was a horrible old man. You said he was cruel.’
‘Yes, but he did something with his life.’
In the photograph in Aunt Annie’s bedroom Balthazar du Biel has grim, staring eyes and a tight, harsh mouth. Beside him his wife looks tired and cross. Balthazar du Biel met her, the daughter of another missionary, when he came to South Africa to convert the heathen. Later, when he went to America to preach the gospel there, he took her and their three children along. On a paddle steamer on the Mississippi someone gave his daughter Annie an apple, which she brought to show him. He administered a thrashing to her for having spoken to a stranger. These are the few facts he knows about Balthazar, plus what is contained in the clumsy red book of which there are many more copies in the world than the world wants.
Balthazar’s three children are Annie, Louisa – his mother’s mother – and Albert, who figures in the photographs in Aunt Annie’s bedroom as a frightened-looking boy in a sailor suit. Now Albert is Uncle Albert, a bent old man with pulpy white flesh like a mushroom who trembles all the time and has to be supported as he walks. Uncle Albert has never earned a proper salary in his life. He has spent his days writing books and stories; his wife has been the one to go out and work.
He asks his mother about Uncle Albert’s books. She read one long ago, she says, but cannot remember it. ‘They are very old-fashioned. People don’t read books like that any more.’
He finds two books by Uncle Albert in the storeroom, printed on the same thick paper as Ewige Genesing but bound in brown, the same brown as benches on railways stations. One is called Kain, the other Die Misdade van die vaders, The Crimes of the Fathers. ‘Can I take them?’ he asks his mother. ‘I’m sure you can,’ she says. ‘No one is going to miss them.’
He tries to read Die Misdade van die vaders, but does not get beyond page ten, it is too boring.
‘You must love your mother and be a support for her.’ He broods on Aunt Annie’s instructions. Love: a word he mouths with distaste. Even his mother has learned not to say I love you to him, though now and then she slips in a soft My love when she says goodnight.
He sees no sense in love. When men and women kiss in films, and violins play low and lush in the background, he squirms in his seat. He vows he will never be like that: soft, soppy.
He does not allow himself to be kissed, except by his father’s sisters, making an exception for them because that is their custom and they can understand nothing else. Kissing is part of the price he pays for going to the farm: a quick brush of his lips against theirs, which are fortunately always dry. His mother’s family does not kiss. Nor has he seen his mother and father kiss properly. Sometimes, when there are other people present and for some reason they have to pretend, his father kisses his mother on the cheek. She presents her cheek to him reluctantly, angrily, as if she were being forced; his kiss is light, quick, nervous.
He has seen his father’s penis only once. That was in 1945, when his father had just come back from the War and all the family was gathered on Voëlfontein. His father and two of his brothers went hunting, taking him along. It was a hot day; arriving