• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 577 0

Why should there have been tension? Tension on whose side? I was not planning to marry John, after all. No, John and I got on perfectly well in that respect. It was Northerners he didn't get on with, particularly the English. The English stifled him, he said, with their good manners, their well-bred reserve. He preferred people who were ready to give more of themselves; then sometimes he would pluck up the courage to give a little of himself in return.

Any further questions before I go on?

No.

One morning (I skip ahead, I would like to get this over with) John appeared at the front door. 'I won't stay,' he said, 'but I thought you might like this.' He was holding out a book. On the cover: Dusklands, by J M Coetzee.

I was taken completely aback. 'You wrote this?' I said. I knew he wrote, but then, lots of people write; I had no inkling that in his case it was serious.

'It's for you. It's a proof copy. I got two proof copies in the mail today.'

I flipped through the book. Someone complaining about his wife. Someone travelling by ox-cart.'What is it?' I said. 'Is it fiction?'

'Sort of.'

Sort of. 'Thank you,' I said. 'I look forward to reading it. Is it going to make you a lot of money? Will you be able to give up teaching?'

He found that very funny. He was in a gay mood, because of the book. Not often that I saw that side of him.

'I didn't know your father was an historian,' I remarked the next time we met. I was referring to the preface to his book, in which the author, the writer, this man in front of me, claimed that his father, the little man who went off every morning to his bookkeeping job in the city, was also an historian who haunted the archives and turned up old documents.

'You mean the preface?' he said. 'Oh, that's all made up.'

'And how does your father feel about it,' I said – 'about having false claims made about him, about being turned into a character in a book?'

John looked uncomfortable. What he did not want to reveal, as I found out later, was that his father had not set eyes on Dusklands.

'And Jacobus Coetzee?' I said. 'Did you make up your estimable ancestor Jacobus Coetzee too?'

'No, there was a real Jacobus Coetzee,' he said. 'At least, there is a real, paper-and-ink document which claims to be a transcript of an oral deposition made by someone who gave his name as Jacobus Coetzee. At the foot of that document there is an X which the scribe attests was made by the hand of this same Coetzee, an X because he was illiterate. In that sense I did not make him up.'

'For an illiterate, your Jacobus strikes me as being very literary. In one place I see he quotes Nietzsche.'

'Well, they were surprising fellows, those eighteenth-century frontiersmen. You never knew what they would come up with next.'

I can't say I like Dusklands. I know it sounds old-fashioned, but I prefer my books to have proper heroes and heroines, characters you can admire. I have never written stories, I have never had ambitions in that direction, but I suspect it is a lot easier to make up bad characters – contemptible characters – than good ones. That is my opinion, for what it is worth.

Did you ever say so to Coetzee?

Did I say I thought he was going for the easy option? No. I was simply surprised that this intermittent lover of mine, this amateur handyman and part-time schoolteacher, had it in him to write a book-length book and, what is more, find a publisher for it, albeit only in Johannesburg. I was surprised, I was gratified for his sake, I was even a little proud. Reflected glory. In my student years I had hung around with numbers of would-be writers, but none had actually published a book.

I've never asked: What did you study? Psychology?

No, far from it. I studied German literature. As a preparation for my life as housewife and mother I read Novalis and Gottfried Benn. I graduated in literature, after which, for two decades, until Christina grew up and left home, I was – how shall I put it? – intellectually dormant. Then