Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [52]
Yet he finds himself unwilling to yield up the Afrikaans language to them. He remembers his very first visit to Voëlfontein, when he was four or five and could not speak Afrikaans at all. His brother was still a baby, kept indoors out of the sun; there was no one to play with but the Coloured children. With them he made boats out of seed-pods and floated them down the irrigation furrows. But he was like a mute creature: everything had to be mimed; at times he felt he was going to burst with the things he could not say. Then suddenly one day he opened his mouth and found he could speak, speak easily and fluently and without stopping to think. He still remembers how he burst in on his mother, shouting ‘Listen! I can speak Afrikaans!’
When he speaks Afrikaans all the complications of life seem suddenly to fall away. Afrikaans is like a ghostly envelope that accompanies him everywhere, that he is free to slip into, becoming at once another person, simpler, gayer, lighter in his tread.
One thing about the English that disappoints him, that he will not imitate, is their contempt for Afrikaans. When they lift their eyebrows and superciliously mispronounce Afrikaans words, as if veld spoken with a v were the sign of a gentleman, he draws back from them: they are wrong, and, worse than wrong, comical. For his part, he makes no concessions, even among the English: he brings out the Afrikaans words as they ought to be brought out, with all their hard consonants and difficult vowels.
In his class there are several boys besides himself with Afrikaans surnames. In the Afrikaans classes, on the other hand, there are no boys with English surnames. In the senior school he knows of one Afrikaans Smith who might as well be a Smit; that is all. It is a pity, but understandable: what Englishman would want to marry an Afrikaans woman and have an Afrikaans family when Afrikaans women are either huge and fat, with puffed-out breasts and bullfrog necks, or bony and misshapen?
He thanks God that his mother speaks English. Of his father he remains mistrustful, despite Shakespeare and Wordsworth and the crossword puzzles. He does not see why his father goes on making an effort to be English here in Worcester, where it would be so easy for him to slide back into being Afrikaans. The childhood in Prince Albert that he hears his father joking about with his brothers strikes him as no different from an Afrikaans life in Worcester. It centres just as much on being beaten and on nakedness, on body functions performed in front of other boys, on an animal indifference to privacy.
The thought of being turned into an Afrikaans boy, with shaven head and no shoes, makes him quail. It is like being sent to prison, to a life without privacy. He cannot live without privacy. If he were Afrikaans he would have to live every minute of every day and night in the company of others. It is a prospect he cannot bear.
He remembers the three days of the Scout camp, remembers his misery, his craving, continually thwarted, to sneak back to the tent and read a book by himself.
One Saturday his father sends him to buy cigarettes. He has a choice between cycling all the way to the town centre, where there are proper shops with display windows and cash registers, and going to the little Afrikaans shop near the railway crossing, which is just a room at the back of a house with a counter painted dark brown and almost nothing on the shelves. He chooses the nearer.
It is a hot afternoon. In the shop there are strips of biltong hanging from the ceiling, and flies everywhere. He is about to tell the boy behind the counter – an Afrikaans