Summertime_ Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [49]
'I'll ask him,' she says, still laughing. 'I'll ask him to show me his poems.'
SHE CATCHES JOHN the next morning as he is setting off on one of his walks. 'Let me come with you,' she says. 'Give me a minute to put on proper shoes.'
They follow the path that runs eastward from the farmstead along the bank of the overgrown river bed toward the dam whose wall burst in the floods of 1943 and has never been repaired. In the shallow waters of the dam a trio of white geese float peacefully. It is still cool, there is no haze, they can see as far as the Nieuweveld Mountains.
'God,' she says, 'dis darem mooi. Dit raak jou siel aan, nè, dié ou wêreld.' Isn't it beautiful. It touches one's soul, this landscape.
They are in a minority, a tiny minority, the two of them, of souls that are stirred by these great, desolate expanses. If anything has held them together over the years, it is that. This landscape, this kontrei – it has taken over her heart. When she dies and is buried, she will dissolve into this earth so naturally it will be as if she never had a human life.
'Carol says you are still writing poems,' she says. 'Is that true? Will you show me?'
'I am sorry to disappoint Carol,' he replies stiffly, 'but I haven't written a poem since I was a teenager.'
She bites her tongue. She forgot: you do not ask a man to show you his poems, not in South Africa, not without reassuring him beforehand that it will be all right, he is not going to be mocked. What a country, where poetry is not a manly activity but the province of children and oujongnooiens [spinsters] – oujongnooiens of both sexes! How Totius or Louis Leipoldt managed she cannot guess. No wonder Carol chooses John's poem-writing to attack, Carol with her nose for other people's weaknesses.
'If you gave up so long ago, why does Carol think you still write?'
'I have no idea. Perhaps she saw me marking student essays and jumped to the wrong conclusion.'
She does not believe him, but she is not going to press him further. If he wants to evade her, let him. If poetry is a part of his life he is too shy or too ashamed to talk about, then so be it.
She does not think of John as a moffie, but it continues to puzzle her that he has no woman. A man alone, particularly one of the Coetzee men, seems to her like a boat without oar or rudder or sail. And now two of them, two Coetzee men, living as a couple! While Jack still had the redoubtable Vera behind him he steered a more or less straight course; but now that she is gone he seems quite lost. As for Jack and Vera's son, he could certainly do with some level-headed guidance. But what woman with any sense would want to devote herself to the hapless John?
Carol is convinced John is a bad bet; and the rest of the Coetzee family, despite their good hearts, would probably agree. What sets her, Margot, apart, what keeps her confidence in John precariously afloat, is, oddly enough, the way in which he and his father behave toward each other: if not with affection, that would be saying too much, then at least with respect.
The pair used to be the worst of enemies. The bad blood between Jack and his elder son was the subject of much head-shaking. When that son disappeared overseas, the parents put on the best front they could. He had gone to pursue a career in science, his mother proclaimed. For years she maintained the story that John was working as a scientist in England, even as it became clear that she had no idea for whom he worked or what work he did. You know how John is, his father would say: always very independent. Independent: what did that mean? Not without reason, the Coetzees took it to mean he had disowned his country, his family, his very parents.
Then Jack and Vera started putting out a new story: John was not in England after all but in America, pursuing ever higher qualifications.