Summertime (10 page)

John's room, where I had slept, was larger and better lit. A bookshelf: dictionaries, phrasebooks, teach yourself this, teach yourself that. Beckett. Kafka. On the table, a mess of papers. A filing cabinet. Idly I searched through the drawers. In the bottom drawer, a box of photographs, which I burrowed amongst. What was I looking for? I didn't know. For something I would recognize only when I found it. But it was not there. Most of the photographs were from his school years: sports teams, class portraits.

From the front I heard noises, and went outdoors. A beautiful day, the sky a brilliant blue. John was unloading sheets of galvanized iron roofing from his truck. 'I'm sorry if I forsook you,' he said. 'I needed to pick these up, and I didn't want to wake you.'

I drew up a deckchair in a sunny spot, closed my eyes, and indulged in a little day-dreaming. I wasn't about to abandon my child. I wasn't about to walk out on my marriage. Nevertheless, what if I did? What if I forgot about Mark and Chrissie, settled down in this ugly little house, became the third member of the Coetzee family, the adjunct, Snow White to the two dwarves, doing the cooking, the cleaning, the laundering, maybe even helping with roof repairs? How long before my wounds healed? And then how long before my true prince rode by, the prince of my dreams, who would recognize me for who I was, lift me onto his white stallion, and bear me off into the sunset?

Because John Coetzee was not my prince. Finally I come to the point. If that was the question at the back of your mind when you came to Kingston –
Is this going to be another of those women who mistook John Coetzee for their secret prince?
– then you have your answer now. John was not my prince. Not only that: if you have been listening carefully you will see by now how very unlikely it was that he could have been a prince, a satisfactory prince, to any maiden on earth.

You don't agree? You think otherwise? You think the fault lay with me, not him – the fault, the deficiency? Well, cast your mind back to the books he wrote. What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book? It is that the woman doesn't fall in love with the man. The man may or may not love the woman; but the woman never loves the man. What do you think that theme reflects? My guess, my highly informed guess, is that it reflects his life experience. Women didn't fall for him – not women in their right senses. They inspected him, they sniffed him, maybe they even tried him out. Then they moved on.

They moved on as I did. I could have remained in Tokai, as I said, in the Snow White role. As an idea it was not without its seductions. But in the end I did not. John was a friend to me during a rough patch in my life, he was a crutch I sometimes leant on, but he was never going to be my lover, not in the real sense of the word. For real love you need two full human beings, and the two need to fit together, to fit into each other. Like Yin and Yang. Like an electrical plug and an electrical socket. Like male and female. He and I didn't fit.

Believe me, over the course of the years I have given plenty of thought to John and his type. What I am going to tell you now I offer with due consideration, and I hope without animus. Because, as I said, John was important to me. He taught me a lot. He was a friend who remained a friend even after I broke up with him. When I felt low I could always rely on him to joke with me and lift my spirits. He raised me once to unexpected erotic heights – once only, alas! But the fact is, John wasn't made for love, wasn't constructed that way – wasn't constructed to fit into or be fitted into. Like a sphere. Like a glass ball. There was no way to connect with him. That is my conclusion, my mature conclusion.

Which may not come as a surprise to you. You probably think it holds true for artists in general, male artists: that they aren't built for what I am calling love; that they can't or won't give themselves fully for the simple reason that there is a secret essence of themselves they need to preserve for the sake of their art. Am I right? Is that what you think?

Do I think that artists aren't built for love? No. Not necessarily. I try to keep an open mind on the subject.

Well, you can't keep your mind open indefinitely, not if you mean to get your book written. Consider. Here we have a man who, in the most intimate of human relations, cannot connect, or can connect only briefly, intermittently. Yet how does he make his living? He makes his living writing reports, expert reports, on intimate human experience. Because that is what novels are about – isn't it? – intimate experience. Novels as opposed to poetry or painting. Doesn't that strike you as odd?

[Silence.]

I have been very open with you, Mr Vincent. For instance, the Schubert business: I never told anyone about that before you. Why not? Because I thought it would cast John in too ridiculous a light. Because who but a total dummy would order the woman he is supposed to be in love with to take lessons in lovemaking from some dead composer, some Viennese
Bagatellenmeister
? When a man and a woman are in love they create their own music, it comes instinctively, they don't need lessons. But what does our friend John do? He drags a third presence into the bedroom. Franz Schubert becomes number one, the master of love; John becomes number two, the master's disciple and executant; and I become number three, the instrument on whom the sex-music is going to be played. That – it seems to me – tells you all you need to know about John Coetzee. The man who mistook his mistress for a violin. Who probably did the same with every other woman in his life: mistook her for some instrument or other, violin, bassoon, timpani. Who was so dumb, so cut off from reality, that he could not distinguish between playing on a woman and loving a woman. A man who loved by numbers. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry!

That is why he was never my Prince Charming. That is why I never let him bear me off on his white steed. Because he was not a prince but a frog. Because he was not human, not fully human.

I said I would be frank with you, and I have kept my promise. I will tell you one more frank thing, just one more, then I will stop, and that will be the end of it.

It is about the night I tried to describe to you, the night at the Canterbury Hotel, when, after all our experimenting, the two of us finally hit on the right chemical combination. How could we have achieved that, you may ask – as I ask too – if John was a frog and not a prince?

Let me tell you how I now see that pivotal night. I was hurt and confused, as I said, and beside myself with worry. John saw or guessed what was going on in me and for once opened his heart, the heart he normally kept wrapped in armour. With open hearts, his and mine, we came together. For him it could and should have marked a sea-change, that first opening of the heart. It could have marked the beginning of a new life for the two of us together. Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is not unattainable in this world. He saw me – saw me as I was at that moment – took fright, hurriedly strapped the armour back over his heart, this time with chains and a double padlock, and stole out into the darkness.

Do you think I find it easy to forgive him for that? Do you?

You are being a little hard on him, if I may say so.

No, I am not. I am just telling the truth. Without the truth, no matter how hard, there can be no healing. That's all. That's the end of my offering to your book. Look, it's nearly eight o'clock. Time for you to go. You have a plane – don't you? – to catch in the morning.

Just one question more, one brief question.

No, absolutely not, no more questions. You have had time enough. End.
Fin
. Go.

Interview conducted in Kingston,
Ontario, May 2008.

L
ET ME TELL YOU
, Mrs Jonker, what I have been doing since we met last December. After I got back to England I transcribed the tapes of our conversations. I asked a colleague from South Africa to check that I had the Afrikaans words right. Then I did something fairly radical. I cut out my prompts and questions and fixed up the prose to read as an uninterrupted narrative spoken in your voice.

What I would like to do today, if you are agreeable, is to read through the new text with you. How does that sound?

All right.

One further point. Because the story you told was so long I dramatized it here and there, letting people speak in their own voices. You will see what I mean once we get going.

All right.

Here goes then.

In the old days, at Christmas-time, there would be huge gatherings on the family farm. From far and wide the sons and daughters of Gerrit and Lenie Coetzee would converge on Voëlfontein, bringing with them their spouses and offspring, more and more offspring each year, for a week of laughing and joking and reminiscing and, above all, eating. For the menfolk it was a time for hunting too: game-birds, antelope.

But by now, in the 1970s, those family gatherings are sadly diminished. Gerrit Coetzee is long in the grave, Lenie shuffles around a nursing home in The Strand. Of their twelve sons and daughters, the firstborn has already joined the multitudinous shades; in private moments –

Multitudinous shades?

Too grand-sounding? I'll change it. The firstborn has already departed this life. In private moments the survivors have intimations of their own end, and shudder.

I don't like that.

I'll cut it out. No problem. Has already departed this life. Among the survivors the joking has grown more subdued, the reminiscing sadder, the eating more temperate. As for hunting parties, there are no more of those: old bones are weary, and anyway, after year upon year of drought, there is nothing left in the veld that would count as game.

Of the third generation, the sons and daughters of the sons and daughters, most are by now too absorbed in their own affairs to attend, or too indifferent to the larger family. This year only four of the generation are present: her cousin Michiel, who has inherited the farm; her cousin John from Cape Town; her sister Carol; and herself, Margot. And of the four, she alone, she suspects, looks back to the old days with nostalgia.

I don't understand. Why do you call me
she
?

Of the four, Margot alone, she – Margot – suspects, looks back with nostalgia . . . You can hear how clumsy it is. It just doesn't work that way. The
she
I use is like
I
but is not
I
. Do you really dislike it so much?

I find it confusing. But go on.

John's presence on the farm is a source of unease. After years spent overseas – so many years it was concluded he was gone for good – he has suddenly reappeared among them under some cloud or other, some disgrace. One story being whispered about is that he has been in an American jail.

The family simply does not know how to behave toward him. Never yet have they had a criminal – if that is what he is, a criminal – in their midst. A bankrupt, yes: the man who married her aunt Marie, a braggart and heavy drinker of whom the family had disapproved from the start, declared himself bankrupt to avoid paying his debts and thereafter did not a stitch of work, loafing at home, living off his wife's earnings. But bankruptcy, while it may leave a bad taste in the mouth, is not a crime; whereas going to jail is going to jail.

Her own feeling is that the Coetzees ought to try harder to make the lost sheep feel welcome. She has a lingering soft spot for John. As children they used to talk quite openly of marrying each other when they grew up. They thought it was allowed – why should it not be? They did not understand why the adults smiled, smiled and would not say why.

Did I really tell you that?

You did. Do you want me to cut it out? I like it.

No, leave it in. [Laughs.] Go on.

Her sister Carol is of quite another mind. Carol is married to a German, an engineer, who has for years been trying to get the two of them out of South Africa and into the United States. Carol has made it plain she does not want it to appear in her dossier that she is related to a man who, whether or not he is technically a criminal, has in some way fallen foul of American law. But Carol's hostility to John goes deeper than that. She finds him affected and supercilious. From the heights of his
engelse
[English] education, says Carol, John looks down on the Coetzees, one and all. Why he has decided to descend upon them at Christmastide she cannot imagine.

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?'