Summertime_ Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [46]
The truck, facing into the rising sun, grows stiflingly hot. She takes shelter in its lee.
On the crest of the road, an apparition: out of the heat-haze emerges first the torso of a man, then by degrees a donkey and donkey-cart. On the wind she can even hear the neat clip-clop of the donkey's hooves.
The figure grows clearer. It is Hendrik from Voëlfontein, and behind him, sitting on the cart, is her cousin.
Laughter and greetings. 'Hendrik has been visiting his daughter in Merweville,' John explains. 'He will give us a ride back to the farm, that is, if his donkey agrees. He says we can hitch the Datsun to the cart and he will tow it.'
Hendrik is alarmed. 'Nee, meneer!' he says.
'Ek jok maar net,' says her cousin. Just joking.
Hendrik is a man of middle age. As the result of a botched operation for a cataract he has lost the sight of one eye. There is something wrong with his lungs too, such that the slightest physical effort makes him wheeze. As a labourer he is not of much use on the farm, but her cousin Michiel keeps him on because that is how things are done here.
Hendrik has a daughter who lives with her husband and children outside Merweville. The husband used to have a job in the town but seems to have lost it; the daughter does domestic work. Hendrik must have set off from their place before first light. About him there is a faint smell of sweet wine; when he climbs down from the cart, she notices, he stumbles. Sozzled by mid-morning: what a life!
Her cousin reads her thoughts. 'I have some water here,' he says, and proffers the full jerrycan. 'It's clean. I filled it at a wind-pump.'
So they set off for the farm, John seated beside Hendrik, she in the back holding an old jute bag over her head to keep off the sun. A car passes them in a cloud of dust, heading for Merweville. If she had seen it in time she would have hailed it – got a ride to Merweville and from there telephoned Michiel to come and fetch her. On the other hand, though the road is rutted and the ride uncomfortable, she likes the idea of arriving at the farmhouse in Hendrik's donkey-cart, likes it more and more: the Coetzees assembled on the stoep for afternoon tea, Hendrik doffing his hat to them, bringing back Jack's errant son, dirty and sunburnt and chastened. 'Ons was so bekommerd!' they will berate the miscreant. 'Waar was julle dan? Michiel wou selfs die polisie bel!' From him, nothing but mumble-mumble. 'Die arme Margie! En wat het van die bakkie geword?'We were so worried! Where were you? Michiel was on the point of phoning the police! Poor Margie! And where is the truck?
There are stretches of road where the incline is so steep that they have to get down and walk. For the rest the little donkey is up to its task, with no more than a touch of the whiplash to its rump now and again to remind it who is master. How slight its frame, how delicate its hooves, yet what staunchness, what powers of endurance! No wonder Jesus had a fondness for donkeys.
Inside the boundary of Voëlfontein they halt at a dam. While the donkey drinks she chats with Hendrik about the daughter in Merweville, then about the other daughter, the one who works in the kitchen at a home for the aged in Beaufort West. Discreetly she does not ask after Hendrik's most recent wife, whom he married when she was no more than a child and who ran away as soon as she could with a man from the railway camp at Leeuw Gamka.
Hendrik finds it easier to talk to her than to her cousin, she can see that. She and he share a language, whereas the Afrikaans John speaks is stiff and bookish.