Summertime

  She, Margot, is distressed by her sister's attitude. Her sister, she believes, has grown more and more hardhearted ever since she married and began to move in her husband's circle, a circle of German and Swiss expatriates who came to South Africa during the 1960s to make quick money and are preparing to abandon ship now that the country is going through stormy times.

  I don't know. I don't know if I can let you say that.

  Well, I will abide by your decision. But that is what you told me, word for word. And bear in mind, it is not as if your sister is going to read an obscure book put out by an academic press in England. Where is your sister living now?

  She and Klaus are in Florida in a place called St Petersburg. You never know, one of her friends might come across your book and send it to her. But that is not the main point. When I spoke to you, I was under the impression you were simply going to transcribe our interview and leave it at that. I had no idea you were going to rewrite it completely.

  That's not entirely fair. I have not rewritten it, I have simply recast it as a narrative. Changing the form should have no effect on the content. If you feel I am taking liberties with the content itself, that is another question. Am I taking too many liberties?

  I don't know. Something sounds wrong, but I can't put my finger on it. All I can say is, your version doesn't sound like what I told you. But I am going to shut up now. I will wait until the end to make up my mind. So go on.

  All right.

  If Carol is too hard, she is too soft, she will admit to that. She is the one who cries when the new kittens have to be drowned, who blocks her ears when the slaughter-lamb bleats in fear, bleats and bleats. She used to mind, when she was younger, being scoffed at for being tenderhearted; but now, in her mid-thirties, she is not so sure she ought to be ashamed.

  Carol claims not to understand why John has come to the gathering, but to her the explanation is obvious. To the haunts of his youth he has brought back his father, who though not much over sixty looks like an old man, looks to be on his last legs – has brought him back so that he can be renewed and fortified, or, if he cannot be renewed, so that he can say his farewells. It is, to her mind, an act of filial duty, one that she thoroughly approves of.

  She tracks John down behind the packing-shed, where he is working on his car, or pretending to.

  'Something wrong?' she asks.

  'It's overheating,' he says. 'We had to stop twice on Du Toit's Kloof to let the engine cool.'

  'You should ask Michiel to have a look at it. He knows everything about cars.'

  'Michiel is busy with his guests. I'll fix it myself.'

  Her guess is that Michiel would welcome any excuse to escape his guests, but she does not press her case. She knows men and male stubbornness, knows that a man will wrestle endlessly with a problem rather than ask another man for help.

  'Is this what you drive in Cape Town?' she says. By this she means this one-ton Datsun pickup, the kind of light truck she associates with farmers and builders. 'What do you need a truck for?'

  'It's useful,' he replies curtly, not explaining what its use might be.

  She could not help smiling when he made his arrival on the farm behind the wheel of this selfsame truck, he with his beard and his unkempt hair and his owl-glasses, his father beside him like a mummy, stiff and embarrassed. She wishes she had taken a photograph. She wishes, too, she could talk to John about his hair-style. But the ice is not yet broken, intimate talk will have to wait.

  'Anyway,' she says, 'I've been instructed to call you for tea, tea and melktert that Aunt Joy has baked.'

  'I'll come in a minute,' he says.

  They speak Afrikaans together. His Afrikaans is halting; she suspects her English is better than his Afrikaans, though, living in the back country, the platteland, she seldom has call to speak English. But they have spoken Afrikaans together since they were children; she is not about to humiliate him by offering to switch.

  She blames the deterioration in his Afrikaans on the move he made to Cape Town, to 'English' schools and an 'English' university, and then to the world abroad, where not a word of Afrikaans is to be heard. In 'n minuut, he says: in a minute. It is the kind of solecism that Carol will latch onto at once and parody. 'In 'n minuut sal meneer sy tee kom geniet,' Carol will say: in a minute his lordship will come and partake of tea. She must protect him from Carol, or at least beg Carol to have mercy on him for the space of these few days.

  At table that evening she makes sure she is seated beside him. On the farm the evening meal is simply a hotchpotch of leftovers from the midday meal, the main meal of the day: cold mutton, warmed-up rice, and what passes here for salad: green beans with vinegar.

  She notices that he passes on the meat platter without helping himself.

  'Aren't you having mutton, John?' calls out Carol from the other end of the table in a tone of sweet concern.

  'Not tonight, thanks,' John replies. 'Ek het my vanmiddag dik gevreet': I stuffed myself like a pig this afternoon.

  'So you are not a vegetarian. You didn't become a vegetarian while you were overseas.'

  'Not a strict vegetarian. Dis nie 'n woord waarvan ek hou nie. As 'n mens verkies om nie so veel vleis te eet nie . . .' It is not a word he is fond of. If one chooses not to eat so much meat . . .

  'Ja?' says Carol.'As 'n mens so verkies, dan . . . ?' If that is what you choose, then – what?

  Everyone is by now staring at him. He has begun to blush. Clearly he has no idea how to deflect the benign curiosity of the gathering. And if he is paler and scrawnier than a good South African ought to be, might the explanation indeed be, not that he has tarried too long amid the snows of North America, but that he has too long been starved of good Karoo mutton? As 'n mens verkies . . . – what is he going to say next?

  His blush has grown desperate. A grown man, yet he blushes like a girl! Time to intervene. She lays a reassuring hand on his arm.'Jy wil seker sê, John, ons het almal ons voorkeure,' we all have our preferences.

  'Ons voorkeure,' he says; 'ons fiemies.' Our preferences; our silly little whims. He spears a green bean and pops it into his mouth.

  It is December, and in December it does not get dark until well after nine. Even then – so pristinely clear is the air on the high plateau – the moon and stars are bright enough to light one's footsteps. So after supper she and he go for a walk, making a wide loop to avoid the cluster of cabins that house the farm-workers.

  'Thank you for saving me,' he says.

  'You know Carol,' she says. 'She has always had a sharp eye. A sharp eye and a sharp tongue. How is your father?'

  'Depressed. As you must know, he and my mother did not have a happy marriage. Even so, after her death he went into a decline – moped, didn't know what to do with himself. Men of his generation were brought up helpless. If there isn't some woman on hand to cook and care for them, they simply fade away. If I hadn't offered my father a home he would have starved to death.'

  'Is he still working?'

  'Yes, he still has his job with the motor-parts dealer, though I think they have been hinting it may be time for him to retire. And his enthusiasm for sport is undimmed.'

  'Isn't he a cricket umpire?'

  'He was, but not any more. His eyesight has been deteriorating.'

  'And you? Didn't you play cricket too?'

  'Yes. In fact I still play in the Sunday league. The standard is fairly amateurish, which suits me. Curious: he and I, two Afrikaners devoted to an English game that we aren't much good at. I wonder what that says about us.'

  Two Afrikaners. Does he really think of himself as an Afrikaner? She doesn't know many real [egte] Afrikaners who would accept him as one of the tribe. Even his father might not pass scrutiny. To pass as an Afrikaner nowadays you need at the very least to vote National and attend church on Sundays. She can't imagine her cousin putting on a suit and tie and going off to church. Or indeed his father.

  They have arrived at the dam. The dam used to be filled b
y a wind-pump, but during the boom years Michiel installed a diesel-driven pump and left the old wind-pump to rust, because that was what everyone was doing. Now that the oil price has gone through the roof, Michiel may have to think again. He may have to go back to God's wind after all.

  'Do you remember,' she says, 'When we used to come here as children . . .'

  'And catch tadpoles in a sieve,' he picks up the story, 'and take them back to the house in a bucket of water and the next morning they all would be dead and we could never figure out why.'

  'And locusts. We caught locusts too.'

  Having mentioned the locusts, she wishes she hadn't. For she has remembered the fate of the locusts, or of one of them. Out of the bottle in which they had trapped it John took the insect and, while she watched, pulled steadily at a long rear leg until it came off the body, dryly, without blood or whatever counts as blood among locusts. Then he released it and they watched. Each time it tried to launch itself into flight it toppled to one side, its wings scrabbling in the dust, the remaining rear leg jerking ineffectually. Kill it! she screamed at him. But he did not kill it, just walked away, looking disgusted.

  'Do you remember,' she says, 'how once you pulled the leg off a locust and left me to kill it? I was so cross with you.'

  'I remember it every day of my life,' he says. 'Every day I ask the poor thing's forgiveness. I was just a child, I say to it, just an ignorant child who did not know better. Kaggen, I say, forgive me.'

  'Kaggen?'

  'Kaggen. The name of mantis, the mantis god. But the locust will understand. In the afterworld there are no language problems. It's like Eden all over again.'

  The mantis god. He has lost her.

  A night wind moans through the vanes of the dead wind-pump. She shivers. 'We must go back,' she says.

  'In a minute. Have you read the book by Eugène Marais about the year he spent observing a baboon troop? He writes that at nightfall, when the troop stopped foraging and watched the sun go down, he could detect in the eyes of the older baboons the stirrings of melancholy, the birth of a first awareness of their own mortality.'

  'Is that what the sunset makes you think of – mortality?'

  'No. But I can't help remembering the first conversation you and I had, the first meaningful conversation. We must have been six years old. What the actual words were I don't recall, but I know I was unburdening my heart to you, telling you everything about myself, all my hopes and longings. And all the time I was thinking, So this is what it means to be in love! Because – let me confess it – I was in love with you. And ever since that day, being in love with a woman has meant being free to say everything on my heart.'

  'Everything on your heart . . . What has that to do with Eugène Marais?'

  'Simply that I understand what the old male baboon was thinking as he watched the sun go down, the troop leader, the one Marais was closest to. Never again, he was thinking: Just one life and then never again. Never, never, never. That is what the Karoo does to me too. It fills me with melancholy. It spoils me for life.'

  She still does not see what baboons have to do with the Karoo or their childhood years, but she is not going to let on.

  'This place wrenches my heart,' he says. 'It wrenched my heart when I was a child, and I have never been right since.'

  His heart is wrenched. She had no inkling of that. It used to be, she thinks to herself, that she knew without being told what was going on in other people's hearts. Her own special talent: meegevoel, feeling-with. But not any more, not any more! She grew up; and as she grew up she grew stiff, like a woman who never gets asked to dance, who spends her Saturday evenings waiting in vain on a bench in the church hall, who by the time some man remembers his manners and offers his hand has lost all pleasure, wants only to go home. What a shock! What a revelation! This cousin of hers carries within him memories of how he loved her! Has carried them all these years!

  [Groans.] Did I really say all that?

  [Laughs.] You did.

  How indiscreet of me! [Laughs.] Never mind, go on.

  'Don't reveal that to Carol,' he – John, her cousin – says. 'Don't tell her, with her satirical tongue, how I feel about the Karoo.

  If you do, I'll never hear the end of it.'

  'You and the baboons,' she says. 'Carol has a heart too, believe it or not. But no, I won't tell her your secret. It's getting chilly. Can we go back?'

  They circle past the farm-workers' quarters, keeping a decent distance. Through the dark the coals of a cooking-fire glow in fierce points of red.

  'How long will you be staying?' she asks. 'Will you still be here for New Year's Day?' Nuwejaar: for the volk, the people, a red letter day, quite overshadowing Christmas.

  'No, I can't stay so long. I have things to attend to in Cape Town.'

  'Then can't you leave your father behind and come back later to fetch him? Give him time to relax and build up his strength. He doesn't look well.'

  'He won't stay behind. My father has a restless nature. Wherever he is, he wants to be somewhere else. The older he grows, the worse it gets. It's like an itch. He can't keep still. Besides, he has his job to get back to. He takes his job very seriously.'

  The farmhouse is quiet. They slip in through the back door. 'Good night,' she says, 'sleep tight.'

  In her room she hurries to get into bed. She would like to be asleep by the time her sister and brother-in-law come indoors, or at least to be able to pretend she is asleep. She is not keen to be interrogated on what passed during her ramble with John. Given half a chance, Carol will prise the story out of her. I was in love with you when I was six; you set the pattern of my love for other women. What a thing to say! Indeed, what a compliment! But what of herself? What was going on in her six-year-old heart when all that premature passion was going on in his? She agreed to marry him, certainly, but did she agree they were in love? If so, she has no recollection of it. And what of now – what does she feel for him now? His declaration has certainly made her heart glow. What an odd character, this cousin of hers! His oddness does not come from the Coetzee side, she is sure of that, she is after all half Coetzee herself, so it must come from his mother's, from the Meyers or whatever the name was, the Meyers from the Eastern Cape. Meyer or Meier or Meiring.

  Then she is asleep.

  'He is stuck up,' says Carol. 'He thinks too much of himself. He can't bear to lower himself to talk to ordinary people. When he isn't messing around with his car he is sitting in a corner with a book. And why doesn't he get a haircut? Every time I lay eyes on him I have an urge to tie him down and slap a pudding-bowl over his head and snip off those hideous greasy locks of his.'

  'His hair isn't greasy,' she protests, 'it's just too long. I think he washes it with hand-soap. That's why it is all over the place. And he is shy, not stuck up. That's why he keeps to himself. Give him a chance, he's an interesting person.'

  'He is flirting with you. Anyone can see it. And you are flirting back. You, his cousin! You should be ashamed of yourself. Why isn't he married? Is he homosexual, do you think? Is he a moffie?'

  She never knows whether Carol means what she says or is simply out to provoke her. Even here on the farm Carol goes about in modish white slacks and low-cut blouses, high-heeled sandals, heavy bracelets. She buys her clothes in Frankfurt, she says, on business trips with her husband. She certainly makes the rest of them look very dowdy, very staid, very country-cousin. She and Klaus live in Sandton in a twelve-room mansion owned by Anglo-American, for which they pay no rent, with stables and polo-ponies and a groom, though neither of them knows how to ride. They have no children yet; they will have children, Carol informs her, when they are properly settled. Properly settled means settled in America.