Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [54]
These are the last days before they leave Worcester. They are also the best days of the school year, with examinations over and nothing to do but help the teacher fill in his mark book.
Mr Gouws reads out lists of marks; the boys add them up, subject by subject, then work out the percentages, racing to be the first with his hand up. The game lies in guessing which marks belong to whom. Usually he can recognize his own marks as a sequence rising to nineties and hundreds for arithmetic and tailing off with seventies for history and geography.
He does not do well at history or geography because he hates memorizing. So much does he hate it that he postpones learning for history and geography examinations until the very last minute, until the night before the examination or even the morning of the examination. He hates the very sight of the history textbook, with its stiff chocolate-brown cover and its long, boring lists of the causes of things (the causes of the Napoleonic Wars, the causes of the Great Trek). Its authors are Taljaard and Schoeman. He imagines Taljaard as thin and dry, Schoeman as plump and balding and bespectacled; Taljaard and Schoeman on either side of a table in a room in Paarl, writing bad-tempered pages and passing them across to each other. He cannot imagine why they should have wanted to write their book in English except to mortify the Engelse children and teach them a lesson.
Geography is no better: lists of towns, lists of rivers, lists of pro ducts. When he is asked to name the products of a country he always ends his list with hides and skins and hopes he is right. He does not know the difference between a hide and a skin, but nor does anyone else.
As for the rest of the examinations, he does not look forward to them, yet, when the time comes, plunges into them willingly. He is good at examinations; if there were no examinations for him to be good at there would be little special about him. Examinations create in him a heady, trembling state of excitement during which he writes down the answers quickly and confidently. He does not like the state in itself but it is reassuring to know it is there to be tapped.
Sometimes, striking two rocks against each other and inhaling, he can reinvoke this state, this smell, this taste: gunpowder, iron, heat, a steady thudding in the veins.
The secret behind the telephone call, and behind his mother’s smile, is revealed at the mid-morning break, when Mr Gouws motions him to stay behind. There is a false air about Mr Gouws too, a friendliness he mistrusts.
Mr Gouws wants him to come to tea at his home. Dumbly he nods and memorizes the address.
This is not something he wants. Not that he dislikes Mr Gouws. If he does not trust him as much as he trusted Mrs Sanderson in Standard Four, that is only because Mr Gouws is a man, the first male teacher he has had, and he is wary of something that breathes from all men: a restlessness, a roughness barely curbed, a hint of pleasure in cruelty. He does not know how to behave towards Mr Gouws or towards men in general: whether to offer no resistance and court their approval, or to maintain a barrier of stiffness. Women are easier because they are kinder. But Mr Gouws – he cannot deny it – is as fair as a person can be. His command of English is good, and he seems to bear no grudge against the English or against boys from Afrikaans families who try to be English. During one of his many absences from school Mr Gouws taught the parsing of complements-of-the-predicate. He has trouble catching up with the class on complements-of-the-predicate. If complements-of-the-predicate made no sense, like idioms, then the other boys would also be having trouble with them. But the other boys, or most of them, seem to have attained an easy command of complements-of-the-predicate. The conclusion cannot be escaped: Mr Gouws knows something about English grammar that he does not.
Mr Gouws uses