Summertime_ Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [58]
She rejoins Jack and John. The waiting room is already filling up. A woman, a stranger, is slumped in a chair opposite them. Over her head, covering one eye, she has knotted a woollen pullover caked with blood. She wears a tiny skirt and rubber sandals; she smells of mouldy linen and sweet wine; she is moaning softly to herself.
She does her best not to stare, but the woman is itching for a fight.'Waarna loer jy?' she glares: What are you staring at? 'Jou moer!'
She casts her eyes down, withdraws into silence.
Her mother, if she lives, will be sixty-eight next month. Sixty-eight blameless years, blameless and contented. A good woman, all in all: a good mother, a good wife of the distracted, fluttering variety. The kind of woman men find it easy to love because she so clearly needs to be protected. And now cast into this hellhole! Jou moer! – filthy talk. She must get her mother out as soon as she can, and into a private hospital, no matter what the cost.
My little bird, that is what her father used to call her: my tortelduifie, my little turtledove. The kind of little bird that prefers not to leave its cage. Growing up she, Margot, had felt big and ungainly beside her mother. Who will ever love me? she had asked herself. Who will ever call me his little dove?
Someone is tapping her on the shoulder. 'Mrs Jonker?' A fresh young nurse. 'Your mother is awake, she is asking for you.'
'Come,' she says. Jack and John follow her.
Her mother is conscious, she is calm, so calm as to seem a little remote. The oxygen mask has been replaced with a tube into her nose. Her eyes have lost their colour, turned into flat grey pebbles. 'Margie?' she whispers.
She presses her lips to her mother's brow. 'I'm here, Ma,' she says.
The doctor enters, the same doctor as before, with the dark-rimmed eyes. Kiristany says the badge on his coat. On duty yesterday afternoon, still on duty this morning.
Her mother has had a cardiac episode, says Doctor Kiristany, but is now stable. She is very weak. Her heart is being stimulated electrically.
'I would like to move my mother to a private hospital,' she says to him, 'somewhere quieter than this.'
He shakes his head. Impossible, he says. He cannot give his consent. Perhaps in a few days' time, if she rallies.
She stands back. Jack bends over his sister, murmuring words she cannot hear. Her mother's eyes are open, her lips move, she seems to be replying. Two old people, two innocents, born in olden times, out of place in the loud, angry place this country has become.
'John?' she says. 'Do you want to speak to Ma?'
He shakes his head. 'She won't know me,' he says.
[Silence.]
And?
That's the end.
The end? But why stop there?
It seems a good place. She won't know me: a good line.
[Silence.]
Well, what is your verdict?
My verdict? I still don't understand: if it is a book about John why are you including so much about me? Who is going to want to read about me – me and Lukas and my mother and Carol and Klaus?
You were part of your cousin. He was part of you. That is plain enough, surely. What I am asking is, can it stand as it is?
Not as it is, no. I want to go over it again, as you promised.
Interviews conducted in Somerset West, South Africa, December 2007 and June 2008.
Adriana
SENHORA NASCIMENTO, YOU are Brazilian by birth, but you spent several years in South Africa. How did that come about?
We went to South Africa from Angola, my husband and I and our two daughters. In Angola my husband worked for a newspaper and I had a job with the National Ballet. But then in 1973 the government declared an emergency and shut down his newspaper. They wanted to call him up into the army too – they were calling up all men under the age of forty-five, even those