Summertime (18 page)

They reach the city of Cape Town at the height of the afternoon rush hour. Though theirs is not, strictly speaking, an emergency, Johannes nevertheless sounds his siren as he coolly threads his way through the traffic. At the hospital she trails behind as her mother is wheeled into the emergency unit. By the time she returns to thank Aletta and Johannes, they have left, taken the long road back to the Northern Cape.

When I get back!
she promises herself, meaning
When I get back to Calvinia I will make sure I thank them personally!
but also
When I get back I will become a better person, that I swear!
She also thinks:
Who was the man from Loeriesfontein who lost the three fingers? Is it only we whites who are rushed by ambulance to a hospital – only the best! – where well-trained surgeons will sew our fingers back on or give us a new heart as the case may be, and all at no cost? Let it not be so, O Lord, let it not be so!

When she sees her again, her mother is in a room by herself, awake, in a clean white bed, wearing the nightdress that she, Margot, had the good sense to pack for her. She has lost her hectic colouring, is even able to push aside the mask and mumble a few words: 'Such a fuss!'

She raises her mother's delicate, in fact rather babyish hand to her lips. 'Nonsense,' she says. 'Now Ma must rest. I'll be right here if Ma needs me.'

Her plan is to spend the night at her mother's bedside, but the doctor in charge dissuades her. Her mother is not in danger, he says; her condition is being monitored by the nursing staff; she will be given a sleeping pill and will sleep until morning. She, Margot, the dutiful daughter, has been through enough, best if she got a good night's sleep herself. Does she have somewhere to stay?

She has a cousin in Cape Town, she replies, she can stay with him.

The doctor is older than her, unshaven, with dark, hooded eyes. She has been told his name but did not catch it. He may be Jewish, but there are many other things he may be too. He smells of cigarette smoke; there is a blue cigarette pack peeking out of his breast pocket. Does she believe him when he says that her mother is not in danger? Yes, she does; but she has always had a tendency to trust doctors, to believe what they say even when she knows they are just guessing; therefore she mistrusts her trust.

'Are you absolutely sure there is no danger, doctor?' she says.

He gives her a tired nod. Absolutely indeed! What is
absolutely
in human affairs? 'In order to take care of your mother you must take care of yourself,' he says.

She feels a welling-up of tears, a welling-up of self-pity too.
Take care of both of us!
she wants to plead. She would like to fall into the arms of this stranger, to be held and comforted. 'Thank you, doctor,' she says.

Lukas is on the road somewhere in the Northern Cape, uncontactable. She calls her cousin John from a public telephone. 'I'll come and fetch you at once,' says John. 'Stay with us as long as you like.'

Years have passed since she was last in Cape Town. She has never been to Tokai, the suburb where he and his father live. Their house sits behind a high wooden fence smelling strongly of damp-rot and engine oil. The night is dark, the pathway from the gate unlit; he takes her arm to guide her. 'Be warned,' he says, 'it is all a bit of a mess.'

At the front door her uncle awaits her. He greets her distractedly; he is agitated in a way that she is familiar with among the Coetzees, talking rapidly, running his fingers through his hair. 'Ma is fine,' she reassures him, 'it was just an episode.' But he prefers not to be reassured, he is in the mood for drama.

John leads her on a tour of the premises. The house is small, ill lit, stuffy; it smells of wet newspaper and fried bacon. If she were in charge she would tear down the dreary curtains and replace them with something lighter and brighter; but of course in this men's world she is not in charge.

He shows her into the room that is to be hers. Her heart sinks. The carpet is mottled with what look like oil stains. Against the wall is a low single bed, and beside it a desk on which books and papers lie piled higgledy-piggledy. Glaring down from the ceiling is the same kind of neon lamp they used to have in the office in the hotel before she had it removed.

Everything here seems to be of the same hue: a brown verging in one direction on dull yellow and in the other on dingy grey. She wonders whether the house has been cleaned, properly cleaned, in years.

Normally this is his bedroom, John explains. He has changed the sheets on the bed; he will empty two drawers for her use. Across the passage are the necessary facilities.

She explores the necessary facilities. The bathroom is grimy, the toilet stained, smelling of old urine.

Since leaving Calvinia she has had nothing to eat but a chocolate bar. She is famished. John offers her what he calls French toast, white bread soaked in egg and fried, of which she eats three slices. He also gives her tea with milk that turns out to be sour (she drinks it anyway).

Her uncle sidles into the kitchen, wearing a pyjama top over his trousers. 'I'll say good night, Margie,' he says. 'Sleep tight. Don't let the fleas bite.' He does not say good night to his son. Around his son he seems distinctly tentative. Have they been having a fight?

'I'm restless,' she says to John. 'Shall we go for a walk? I've been cooped up in the back of an ambulance all day.'

He takes her on a ramble through the well-lit streets of suburban Tokai. The houses they pass are all bigger and better than his. 'This used to be farmland not long ago,' he explains. 'Then it was subdivided and sold in lots. Our house used to be a farm-labourer's cottage. That's why it is so shoddily built. Everything leaks: roof, walls. I spend all my free time doing repairs. I'm like the boy with his finger in the dyke.'

'Yes, I begin to see the attraction of Merweville. At least in Merweville it doesn't rain. But why not buy a better house here in the Cape? Write a book. Write a best-seller. Make lots of money.'

It is only a joke, but he chooses to take it seriously. 'I wouldn't know how to write a best-seller,' he says. 'I don't know enough about people and their fantasy lives. Anyway, I wasn't destined for that fate.'

'What fate?'

'The fate of being a rich and successful writer.'

'Then what is the fate you are destined for?'

'For exactly the present one. For living with an ageing parent in a house in the white suburbs with a leaky roof.'

'That's just silly,
slap
talk. That's the Coetzee in you speaking. You could change your fate tomorrow if you would just put your mind to it.'

The dogs of the neighbourhood do not take kindly to strangers roaming their streets by night, arguing. The chorus of barking grows clamorous.

'I wish you could hear yourself, John,' she plunges on. 'You are so full of nonsense! If you don't take hold of yourself you are going to turn into a sour old prune of a man who wants only to be left alone in his corner. Let's go back. I have to get up early.'

SHE SLEEPS BADLY
on the uncomfortable, hard mattress. Before first light she is up, making coffee and toast for the three of them. By seven o'clock they are on their way to Groote Schuur Hospital, crammed together in the cab of the Datsun.

She leaves Jack and his son in the waiting room, but then cannot locate her mother. Her mother had an episode during the night, she is informed at the nurses' station, and is back in intensive care. She, Margot, should return to the waiting room, where a doctor will speak to her.

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.

S
ENHORA 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 who were not citizens. We could not go back to Brazil, it was still too dangerous, we saw no future for ourselves in Angola, so we left, we took the boat to South Africa. We were not the first to do that, or the last.

And why Cape Town?

Why Cape Town? No special reason, except that we had a relative there, a cousin of my husband's who owned a fruit and vegetable shop. After we arrived we stayed with him and his family, it was difficult for all of us, nine people in three rooms, while we waited for our residence papers. Then my husband managed to find a job as a security guard and we could move into a flat of our own. That was in a place called Epping. A few months later, just before the disaster that ruined everything, we moved again, to Wynberg, to be nearer the children's school.

What disaster do you refer to?

My husband was working night shifts guarding a warehouse near the docks. He was the only guard. There was a robbery – a gang of men broke in. They attacked him, hit him with an axe. Maybe it was a machete, but more likely it was an axe. One side of his face was smashed in. I still don't find it easy to talk about. An axe. Hitting a man in the face with an axe because he is doing his job. I can't understand it.

What happened to him?

There were injuries to his brain. He died. It took a long time, nearly a year, but he died. It was terrible.

I'm sorry.

Yes. For a while the firm he worked for went on paying his wages. Then the money stopped coming. He was not their responsibility any more, they said, he was the responsibility of Social Welfare. Social Welfare! Social Welfare never gave us a penny. My older daughter had to leave school. She took a job as a packer in a supermarket. That brought in a hundred and twenty rands a week. I looked for work too, but I couldn't find a position in ballet, they weren't interested in my kind of ballet, so I had to teach classes at a dance studio. Latin American. Latin American was popular in South Africa in those days. Maria Regina stayed at school. She still had the rest of that year and the next year before she could matriculate. Maria Regina, my younger daughter. I wanted her to get her certificate, not follow her sister into the supermarket, putting cans on shelves for the rest of her life. She was the clever one. She loved books.

In Luanda my husband and I had made an effort to speak a little English at the dinner table, also a little French, just to remind the girls Angola wasn't the whole world, but they didn't really pick it up. At school in Cape Town English was Maria Regina's weakest subject. So I enrolled her for extra lessons in English. The school ran these extra lessons in the afternoons for children like her, new arrivals. That was when I began to hear about Mr Coetzee, the man you are asking about, who, as it turned out, was not one of the regular teachers, no, not at all, but was hired by the school to teach these extra classes.

This Mr Coetzee sounds like an Afrikaner to me, I said to Maria Regina. Can't your school afford a proper English teacher? I want you to learn proper English, from an English person.

I never liked Afrikaners. We saw lots of Afrikaners in Angola, working for the mines or as mercenaries in the army. They treated the blacks like dirt. I didn't like that. In South Africa my husband picked up a few words of Afrikaans – he had to, the security firm was all Afrikaners – but as for me, I didn't even like to listen to the language. Thank God the school did not make the girls learn Afrikaans, that would have been too much.

Mr Coetzee is not an Afrikaner, said Maria Regina. He has a beard. He writes poetry.

Afrikaners can have beards too, I told her, you don't need a beard to write poetry. I want to see this Mr Coetzee for myself, I don't like the sound of him. Tell him to come here to the flat. Tell him to come and drink tea with us and show he is a proper teacher. What is this poetry he writes?

Maria Regina started to fidget. She was at an age when children don't like you to interfere in their school life. But I told her, as long as I pay for extra lessons I will interfere as much as I want. What kind of poetry does this man write?

I don't know, she said. He makes us recite poetry. He makes us learn it by heart.

What does he make you learn by heart? I said. Tell me.

Keats, she said.

What is Keats? I said (I had never heard of Keats, I knew none of those old English writers, we didn't study them in the days when I was at school).

A drowsy numbness overtakes my sense, Maria Regina recited, as though of hemlock I had drunk. Hemlock is poison. It attacks your nervous system.

That is what this Mr Coetzee makes you learn? I said.

It's in the book, she said. It's one of the poems we have to learn for the exam.

My daughters were always complaining I was too strict with them. But I never yielded. Only by watching over them like a hawk could I keep them out of trouble in this strange country where they were not at home, on a continent where we should never have come. Joana was easier, Joana was the good girl, the quiet one. Maria Regina was more reckless, more ready to challenge me. I had to keep Maria Regina on a tight rein, Maria with her poetry and her romantic dreams.

There was the question of the invitation, the correct way to phrase an invitation to your daughter's teacher to visit her parents' home and drink tea. I spoke to Mario's cousin on the telephone, but he was no help. So in the end I had to ask the receptionist at the dance studio to write the letter for me. 'Dear Mr Coetzee,' she wrote, 'I am the mother of Maria Regina Nascimento, who is in your English class. You are invited to a tea at our residence' – I gave the address – 'on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time. Transport from the school will be arranged. RSVP Adriana Teixeira Nascimento.'

By transport I meant Manuel, the eldest son of Mario's cousin, who used to give Maria Regina a lift home in his van in the afternoons after he had made his deliveries. It would be easy for him to pick up the teacher too.

Mario was your husband.

Mario. My husband, who died.

Please go on. I just wanted to be sure.

Mr Coetzee was the first person who was invited to our flat – the first one outside Mario's family. He was only a schoolteacher – we met plenty of schoolteachers in Luanda, and before Luanda in São Paulo, I had no special esteem for them – but to Maria Regina and even to Joana schoolteachers were gods and goddesses, and I saw no reason why I should disillusion them. The evening before his visit the girls baked a cake and iced it and even wrote on it (they wanted to write 'Welcome Mr Coetzee' but I made them write 'St Bonaventure 1974'). They also baked trayfuls of the little biscuits that in Brazil we call
brevidades
.

Maria Regina was very excited.
Come home early, please, please!
I heard her urging her sister.
Tell your supervisor you are feeling ill!
But Joana wasn't prepared to do that. It is not so easy to take time off, she said, they dock your pay if you don't complete your shift.

So Manuel brought Mr Coetzee to our flat, and I could see at once he was no god. He was in his early thirties, I estimated, badly dressed, with badly cut hair and a beard when he shouldn't have worn a beard, his beard was too thin. Also he struck me at once, I can't say why, as
célibataire
. I mean not just unmarried but also not suited to marriage, like a man who has spent his life in the priesthood and lost his manhood and become incompetent with women. Also his comportment was not good (I am telling you my first impressions). He seemed ill at ease, itching to get away. He had not learned to hide his feelings, which is the first step toward civilized manners.

'How long are you a teacher, Mr Coetzee?' I asked.

He squirmed in his seat, said something I don't remember any more about America, about being a teacher in America. Then, after more questions, it emerged that in fact he had never taught in a school before this one, and – what is worse – did not even have a teacher's certificate. Of course I was surprised. 'If you don't have a certificate, how come you are Maria Regina's teacher?' I said. 'I don't understand.'

The answer, which again took a long time to squeeze out of him, was that, for subjects like music and ballet and foreign languages, schools were permitted to hire persons who had no qualifications, or at least did not have certificates of competence. These unqualified persons would not be paid salaries like proper teachers, they would instead be paid by the school with money collected from parents like me.

'But you are not English,' I said. It was not a question this time, it was an accusation. Here he was, hired to teach the English language, paid out of my money and Joana's money, yet he was not a teacher, and moreover he was an Afrikaner, not an Englishman.

'I agree I am not of English descent,' he said. 'Nevertheless I have spoken English from an early age and have passed university examinations in English, therefore I believe I can teach English. There is nothing special about English. It is just one language among many.'

That is what he said. English is just one language among many. 'My daughter is not going to be like a parrot that mixes up languages, Mr Coetzee,' I said. 'I want her to learn to speak English properly, and with a proper English accent.'

Fortunately for him, this was the moment when Joana arrived home. Joana was already twenty by then, but in the presence of a man she was still bashful. Compared with her sister she was not a beauty – look, here is a snapshot of her with her husband and their little boys, it was taken some time after we moved back to Brazil, you can see, not a beauty, all the beauty went to her sister – but she was a good girl and I always knew she would make a good wife.

Joana came into the room where we were sitting, still wearing her raincoat (I remember that long raincoat of hers).'My sister,' said Maria Regina, as if she was explaining who this new person was rather than introducing her. Joana said nothing, just looked shy, and as for Mr Coetzee the teacher, he almost knocked over the coffee-table trying to get to his feet.

Why is Maria Regina besotted with this foolish man? What does she see in him?
That was the question I asked myself. It was easy enough to guess what a lonely
célibataire
might see in my daughter, who was turning into a real dark-eyed beauty though she was still only a child, but what made her learn poems by heart for this man, something she had never done for her other teachers? Had he perhaps been whispering words to her that had turned her head? Was that the explanation? Was there something going on between the two of them that she was keeping secret from me?

Now if this man were to become interested in Joana, I thought to myself, it would be a different story. Joana may not have a head for poetry, but at least she has her feet on the ground.

'Joana is working this year at Clicks,' I said. 'To get experience. Next year she will take a management course. To be a manager.'

Mr Coetzee nodded abstractedly. Joana said nothing at all.

'Take off your coat, my child,' I said, 'and drink some tea.' We did not normally drink tea, we drank coffee. Joana brought home some tea the day before for this guest of ours, Earl Grey tea it was called, very English but not very nice, I wondered what we were going to do with the rest of the packet.

'Mr Coetzee is from the school,' I repeated to Joana, as if she did not know. 'He is telling us how he is not English but is nevertheless the English teacher.'

'I am not, properly speaking, the English teacher,' Mr Coetzee interjected, addressing Joana. 'I am the Extra English teacher. That means I have been hired by the school to help students who are having difficulty with English. I try to get them through the examinations. So I am a kind of examination coach. That would be a better description of what I do, a better name for me.'