Scenes From Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth, Summertime

  It was the first time he had actually used my name. I could have replied, See you soon. I could have replied, You and John must come over for a bite. But I didn’t. I just gave a wave and drove off.

  How mean! I berated myself. How hard-hearted! Why was I so hard on him, on both of them?

  And indeed, why was I, why am I, so critical of John? At least he was looking after his father. At least, if something went wrong, his father would have a shoulder to lean on. That was more than could be said for me. My father – you are probably not interested, why should you be?, but let me tell you anyway – my father was at that very moment in a private sanatorium outside Port Elizabeth. His clothes were locked away, he had nothing to wear, day or night, but pyjamas and a dressing gown and slippers. And he was dosed to the gills with tranquillizers. Why so? Simply for the convenience of the nursing staff, to keep him tractable. Because when he neglected to take his pills he became agitated and started to shout.

  [Silence.]

  Did John love his father, do you think?

  Boys love their mothers, not their fathers. Don’t you know your Freud? Boys hate their fathers and want to supplant them in their mothers’ affections. No, of course John did not love his father, he did not love anybody, he was not built for love. But he did feel guilty about his father. He felt guilty and therefore behaved dutifully. With certain lapses.

  I was telling you about my own father. My father was born in 1905, so at the time we are talking about he was getting on for seventy, and his mind was going. He had forgotten who he was, forgotten the rudimentary English he picked up when he came to South Africa. To the nurses he spoke sometimes German, sometimes Magyar, of which they understood not a word. He was convinced he was in Madagascar, in a prison camp. The Nazis had taken over Madagascar, he thought, and turned it into a Strafkolonie for Jews. Nor did he always remember who I was. On one of my visits he mistook me for his sister Trudi, my aunt, whom I had never met but who looked a bit like me. He wanted me to go to the prison commandant and plead on his behalf. ‘Ich bin der Erstgeborene,’ he kept saying: I am the first-born. If der Erstgeborene was not going to be allowed to work (my father was a jeweller and diamondcutter by trade), how would his family survive?

  That’s why I am here. That’s why I am a therapist. Because of what I saw in that sanatorium. To save people from being treated as my father was treated there.

  The money that kept my father in the sanatorium was supplied by my brother, his son. My brother was the one who religiously visited every week, even though my father recognized him only intermittently. In the sole sense that matters, my brother had taken on the burden of his care. In the sole sense that matters, I had abandoned him. And I was his favourite – I, his beloved Julischka, so pretty, so clever, so affectionate!

  Do you know what I hope for, above all else? I hope that in the afterlife we will be allowed a chance, each of us, to say our sorries to the people we have wronged. I will have plenty of sorries to say, believe you me.

  Enough of fathers. Let me get back to the story of Julia and her adulterous dealings, the story you have travelled so far to hear.

  One day my husband announced that he would be going to Hong Kong for discussions with the firm’s overseas partners.

  ‘How long will you be away?’ I asked.

  ‘A week,’ he replied. ‘Maybe a day or two longer if the discussions go well.’

  I thought no more of it until, shortly before he was due to leave, I got a phone call from the wife of one of his colleagues: was I packing an evening dress for the Hong Kong trip? It’s just Mark who is going to Hong Kong, I replied, I am not accompanying him. Oh, she said, I thought all the wives were invited.

  When Mark came home I raised the subject. ‘June just phoned,’ I said. ‘She says she is going with Alistair to Hong Kong. She says all the wives are invited.’

  ‘Wives are invited but the firm isn’t paying for them,’ Mark said. ‘Do you really want to come all the way to Hong Kong to sit in a hotel with a bunch of wives from the firm, bitching about the weather? Hong Kong is like a steam bath at this time of year. And what will you do with Chrissie? Do you want to take Chrissie along too?’

  ‘I have no desire whatsoever to go to Hong Kong and sit in a hotel with a screaming child,’ I said. ‘I just want to know what’s what. So that I don’t have to be humiliated when your friends phone.’

  ‘Well, now you know what’s what,’ he said.

  He was wrong. I didn’t know. But I could guess. Specifically I could guess that the girlfriend from Durban was going to be in Hong Kong too. From that moment I was as cold as ice to Mark. Let this put paid, you bastard, to any idea you may have that your extramarital activities excite me! That was what I thought to myself.

  ‘Is this all about Hong Kong?’ he said to me, when at last the message began to get through. ‘If you want to come to Hong Kong, for God’s sake just say the word, instead of stalking around the house like a tiger with indigestion.’

  ‘And what might that word be?’ I said. ‘Is the word Please? No, I don’t want to accompany you to Hong Kong of all places. I would only be bored, as you say, sitting and kvetching with the wives while the men are busy elsewhere deciding the future of the world. I will be happier here at home where I belong, looking after your child.’

  That was how things stood between us the day Mark left.

  Just a minute, I’m confused. Where are we in time? When did this trip to Hong Kong take place?

  It must have been sometime in 1973, early 1973, I can’t give you a precise date.

  So you and John Coetzee had been seeing each other…

  No. He and I had not been seeing each other. You asked at the beginning how I came to meet John, and I told you. That was the head of the tale. Now we are coming to the tail of the tale, namely, how our relationship drifted on and then came to an end.

  But where is the body of the tale, you ask? There is no body. I can’t supply a body because there was none. This is a tale without a body.

  We return to Mark, to the fateful day he left for Hong Kong. No sooner was he gone than I jumped into the car, drove to Tokai Road, and pushed a note under the front door: ‘Drop by this afternoon, if you feel like it, around 2.’

  As two o’clock approached I could feel the fever mount in me. The child felt it too. She was restless, she cried, she clung to me, she would not sleep. Fever, but what kind of fever, I wondered to myself? A fever of madness? A fever of rage?

  I waited but John did not come, not at two, not at three. He came at five-thirty, by which time I had fallen asleep on the sofa with Chrissie, hot and sticky, on my shoulder. The doorbell woke me; when I opened the door to him I was still groggy and confused.

  ‘Sorry I couldn’t come earlier,’ he said, ‘but I teach in the afternoons.’ It was too late, of course. Chrissie was awake, and jealous in her own way.

  Later John returned, by arrangement, and we spent the night together. In fact while Mark was in Hong Kong, John spent every night in my bed, departing at the crack of dawn so as not to bump into the house-help. For the sleep I lost I compensated by napping in the afternoons. What he did to make up for lost sleep I have no idea. Maybe his students, his Portuguese girls – you know about them, about his scatterlings from the ex-Portuguese empire? No? Remind me to tell you – maybe his girls had to suffer for his nocturnal excesses.

  My high summer with Mark had given me a new conception of sex: as a contest, a variety of wrestling in which you do your best to subject your opponent to your erotic will. For all his failings, Mark was a more than competent sex wrestler, though not as subtle as I, or as steely. Whereas my verdict on John – and here at last, at last, comes the moment you have been waiting for, Mr Biographer – my verdict on John Coetzee, after seven nights of testing, was that he was not in my league, not as I was then.

  John had what I would call a sexual mode, into which he would switch when he took off his clothes. In sexual mode he could perform the male part perf
ectly adequately – adequately, competently, but – for my taste – too impersonally. I never had the feeling that he was with me, me in all my reality. Rather, it was as if he was engaged with some erotic image of me inside his head; perhaps even with some image of Woman with a capital W.

  At the time I was simply disappointed. Now I would go further. In his lovemaking I now think there was an autistic quality. I offer this not as a criticism but as a diagnosis, if it interests you. The autistic type treats other people as automata, mysterious automata. In return he expects to be treated as a mysterious automaton too. So if you are autistic, falling in love translates as turning the other into the inscrutable object of your desire; and reciprocally, being loved translates as being treated as the inscrutable object of the other’s desire. Two inscrutable automata having inscrutable commerce with each other’s bodies: that was how it felt to be in bed with John. Two separate enterprises on the go, his and mine. What his enterprise was I can’t say, it was opaque to me. But to sum up: sex with him lacked all thrill.

  In my practice I have not had much experience of patients I would classify as clinically autistic. Nevertheless, regarding their sex lives, my guess is that they find masturbation more satisfying than the real thing.

  As I think I told you, John was only the third man I had had. Three men, and I left them all behind, sex-wise. A sad story. After those three I lost interest in white South Africans, white South African men. There was some quality they had in common that I found it hard to put a finger on, but that I connected with the evasive flicker I caught in the eyes of Mark’s colleagues when they spoke about the future of the country – as if there were some conspiracy they all belonged to that was going to create a fake, trompe-l’oeil future where no future had seemed possible before. Like a camera shutter flicking open for an instant to reveal the falseness at their core.

  Of course I was a South African too, as white as white could be. I was born among the whites, was reared among them, lived among them. But I had a second self to fall back on: Julia Kiš, or even better Kiš Julia, of Szombathely. As long as I did not desert Julia Kiš, as long as Julia Kiš did not desert me, I could see things to which other whites were blind.

  For instance, white South Africans in those days liked to think of themselves as the Jews of Africa, or at least the Israelis of Africa: cunning, unscrupulous, resilient, running close to the ground, hated and envied by the tribes they lorded it over. All false. All nonsense. It takes a Jew to know a Jew, as it takes a woman to know a man. Those people were not tough, they were not even cunning, or cunning enough. And they were certainly not Jews. In fact they were babes in the wood. That is how I think of them now: a great big family of babies looked after by slaves.

  John used to twitch in his sleep, so much that it kept me awake. When I couldn’t stand it any longer I would give him a shake. ‘You were having a bad dream,’ I would say. ‘I never dream,’ he would mumble in return, and go straight back to sleep. Soon he would be twitching and jerking again. It reached a point where I began to long to have Mark back in my bed. At least Mark slept like a log.

  Enough of that. You get the picture. Not a sensual idyll. Far from it. What else? What else do you want to know?

  Let me ask this. You are Jewish and John was not. Was there ever any tension because of that?

  Tension? 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 conclude?

  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. For instance, 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 heroes and heroines, characters I 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 – untrustworthy 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 I went back to college. This was in Montreal. I started from scratch with basic science, followed by medical studies, followed by training as a therapist. A long road.

  Would relations with Coetzee have been any different, do you think, if you had been trained in psychology rather than in literature?

  What a curious question! The answer is no. If I had studied psychology in the South Africa of the 1960s I would have had to immerse myself in the neurological processes of rats and octopi, and John wasn’t a rat or an octopus.

  What kind of animal was he?

  What odd questions you ask! He wasn’t any kind of animal, and for a very specific reason
: his mental capacities, and specifically his ideational faculties, were overdeveloped, at the cost of his animal self. He was Homo sapiens, or even Homo sapiens sapiens.

  Which leads me back to Dusklands. As a piece of writing I don’t say Dusklands is lacking in passion, but the passion behind it is obscure. I read it as a book about cruelty, an exposé of the cruelty involved in various forms of conquest. But what was the actual source of that cruelty? Its locus, it now seems to me, lay within the author himself. The best interpretation I can give of the book is that writing it was a project in self-administered therapy. Which casts a certain light back over our time together, his and my conjoint time.

  I am not sure I understand. Can you say more?

  What don’t you understand?

  Are you saying he took out his cruelty on you?

  No, not at all. John never behaved towards me with anything but the utmost gentleness. He was what I would call a gentle person, a gentleperson. That was part of his problem. His life project was to be gentle. Let me start again. In Dusklands you must recall how much killing there is – killing not only of human beings but of animals. Well, at about the time the book appeared, John announced to me he was becoming a vegetarian. I don’t know how long he persisted in it, but I interpreted the vegetarian move as part of a larger project of self-reformation. He had decided he was going to block cruel and violent impulses in every arena of his life – including his love life, I might say – and channel them into his writing, which as a consequence was going to become a sort of unending cathartic exercise.

  How much of this was visible to you at the time, and how much do you owe to later insights as a therapist?

  I saw it all – it was on the surface, you didn’t need to dig – but at the time I did not have the language to describe it. Besides, I was having an affair with the man. You can’t be too analytic in the middle of a love affair.

  A love affair. You haven’t used that expression before.