Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [9]
Nevertheless, with Jews one has to tread carefully. For the Jews are everywhere, the Jews are taking over the country. He hears this on all sides, but particularly from his uncles, his mother’s two bachelor brothers, when they visit. Norman and Lance come every summer, like migrating birds, though rarely at the same time. They sleep on the sofa, get up at eleven in the morning, moon around the house for hours, half-dressed, tousled. Both have cars; sometimes they can be persuaded to take their sister and her boys for an afternoon drive, but they seem to prefer passing their time smoking and drinking tea and talking about the old days. Then they have supper, and after supper, play poker or rummy until midnight with whoever can be persuaded to stay up.
He loves to listen to his mother and his uncles going for the thousandth time over the events of their childhood on the farm. He is never happier than when listening to these stories, to the teasing and the laughter that go with them. His friends in Worcester do not come from families with stories like these. That is what sets him apart: the two farms behind him, his mother’s farm, his father’s farm, and the stories of those farms. Through the farms he is rooted in the past; through the farms he has substance.
There is a third farm too: Skipperskloof, near Williston. His family has no roots there, it is a farm they have married into. Nevertheless, Skipperskloof is important too. All farms are important. Farms are places of freedom, of life.
In among the stories that Norman and Lance and his mother tell flit the figures of Jews, comic, sly, but also cunning and heartless, like jackals. Jews from Oudtshoorn came to the farm every year to buy ostrich feathers from their father, his grandfather. They persuaded him to give up wool and farm only with ostriches. Ostriches would make him rich, they said. Then one day the bottom fell out of the ostrich-feather market. The Jews refused to buy any more feathers and his grandfather went bankrupt. Everyone in the district went bankrupt and the Jews took over their farms. That is how the Jews operate, says Norman: you must never trust a Jew.
His father demurs. His father cannot afford to decry the Jews, since he is employed by a Jew. Standard Canners, where he works as a bookkeeper, belongs to Wolf Heller. In fact it was Wolf Heller who brought him from Cape Town to Worcester when he lost his job in the civil service. The future of their family is bound up with the future of Standard Canners, which, in the few years since he took it over, Wolf Heller has built up into a giant of the canning world. There are wonderful prospects in Standard Canners, says his father, for someone like himself, with legal qualifications.
So Wolf Heller is exempted from the strictures on Jews. Wolf Heller takes care of his employees. At Christmas he even buys them presents, though Christmas means nothing to Jews.
There are no Heller children at school in Worcester. If there are Heller children at all, they have presumably been sent to SACS in Cape Town, which is a Jewish school in all but name. Nor are there Jewish families in Reunion Park. The Jews of Worcester live in the older, greener, shadier part of the town. Though there are Jewish boys in his class, he is never invited into their homes. He sees them only at school, brought closer to them during assembly periods, when Jews and Catholics are isolated and subjected to the ire of the Christians.
Every now and again, however, for reasons that are not clear, the dispensation that allows them freedom during assembly is withdrawn and they are summoned to the hall.
The hall is always packed. Senior boys occupy the seats, while boys from the junior school crowd the floor. The Jews and Catholics – perhaps twenty in all – thread their way among them, looking for space. Hands surreptitiously snatch at their ankles, trying to trip them.
The dominee is already on the stage, a pale young