"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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d, to any idea you may have that your adulteries excite me! Let this put paid, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, to any idea you may have that your adulteries excite me! That was what I thought to myself. 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 G.o.d"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 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 b.u.mp 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 s.e.x: 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 s.e.x wrestler, though not as subtle or as steely as I. Whereas my verdict on John and here at last, 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 s.e.xual mode, into which he would switch when he took off his clothes. In s.e.xual mode he could perform the male part perfectly adequately adequately, competently, but for my taste too impersonally. I never had the feeling that he was with me 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. Characteristically the autistic type treats other people as automata, mysterious automata. In return he expects to be treated as a mysterious automaton too. If you are autistic, falling in love translates as turning some or other chosen other into the inscrutable object of your desire; being loved translates as being treated reciprocally 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: s.e.x with him lacked all thrill.
In my practice I have not had much experience of patients I would cla.s.sify as clinically autistic. Nevertheless, regarding their s.e.x lives, my guess is that they prefer masturbation to 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, s.e.x-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 somehow 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 opening up for an instant to reveal the falseness at their core.
Of course I was a South African too, and 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 Kis?, or even better Kis? Julia, of s...o...b..thely. As long as I did not desert Julia Kis?, as long as Julia Kis? 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 ruled 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 tribe 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 more 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 go on?
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 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 doc.u.ments.
"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 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 doc.u.ment 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 doc.u.ment 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. In one place 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 Dusklands. I know it sounds old-fashioned, but I prefer my books to have proper heroes and heroines, characters you 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 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 h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens, or even h.o.m.o sapiens sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens sapiens.
Which leads me back to Dusklands Dusklands. As a piece of writing I don"t say Dusklands Dusklands is lacking in pa.s.sion, but the pa.s.sion behind it is obscure. I read it as a book about cruelty, an expose of the cruelty involved in various forms of conquest. But what is the actual source of that cruelty? Its locus, it seems to me, lies within the author himself. The best interpretation I can give the book is that writing it was a project in self-administered therapy. Which casts a certain light back over our time together, our conjoint time. is lacking in pa.s.sion, but the pa.s.sion behind it is obscure. I read it as a book about cruelty, an expose of the cruelty involved in various forms of conquest. But what is the actual source of that cruelty? Its locus, it seems to me, lies within the author himself. The best interpretation I can give the book is that writing it was a project in self-administered therapy. Which casts a certain light back over our time together, our 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 toward 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 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. 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 that time I did not have the language to describe it. Besides, I was having an affair with the man. You can"t be too a.n.a.lytic in the middle of a love affair.
A love affair. You haven"t used that expression before.
Then let me correct myself. An erotic entanglement. Because, young and self-centred as I was then, it would have been hard for me to love, really love, someone as radically incomplete as John. So: I was in the midst of an erotic entanglement with two men, in one of whom I had made a deep investment I had married him, he was the father of my child and in the other of whom I had made no investment at all.
Why I made no deeper investment in John has much to do, I now suspect, with his project of turning himself into what I described to you, a gentle man, the kind of man who would do no harm, not even to dumb animals, not even to a woman. I should have been clearer with him, I now think: If for some reason you are holding yourself back, don"t, there is no need! If for some reason you are holding yourself back, don"t, there is no need! If I had told him that, if he had taken it to heart, if he had allowed himself to be a little more impetuous, a little more imperious, a little less If I had told him that, if he had taken it to heart, if he had allowed himself to be a little more impetuous, a little more imperious, a little less thoughtful, thoughtful, then he might actually have yanked me out of a marriage that was bad for me then and would become worse later. He might actually have saved me, or saved the best years of my life for me, which, as it turned out, were wasted. then he might actually have yanked me out of a marriage that was bad for me then and would become worse later. He might actually have saved me, or saved the best years of my life for me, which, as it turned out, were wasted.
[Silence.]
I"ve lost track. What were we talking about?
Dusklands.
Yes, Dusklands Dusklands. A word of caution. That book was actually written before he met me. Check the chronology. So don"t be tempted to read it as about the two of us.
The thought did not cross my mind.
I remember asking John, after Dusklands Dusklands, what new project he had on the go. His answer was vague. "There is always something or other I am working on," he said. "If I yielded to the seduction of not working, what would I do with myself? What would there be to live for? I would have to shoot myself."
That surprised me his need to write, I mean. I knew hardly anything about his habits, about how he spent his time, but he had never struck me as an obsessive worker.
"Do you mean that?" I said.
"I get depressed if I am not writing," he replied.
"Then why the endless house repairs?" I said. "You could pay someone else to do the repairs, and devote the time you saved to writing."
"You don"t understand," he said. "Even if I had the money to employ a builder, which I don"t, I would still feel the need to spend X hours a day digging in the garden or moving rocks or mixing concrete." And he launched into another of his speeches about the need to overthrow the taboo on manual labour.
I wondered whether there might not be some criticism of myself hanging in the air: that the paid labour of my black domestic set me free to have idle affairs with strange men, for instance. But I let it pa.s.s. "Well," I said, "you certainly don"t understand economics. The first principle of economics is that if we all insisted on spinning our own thread and milking our own cows rather than employing other people to do it for us, we would be stuck for ever in the Stone Age. That is why we have invented an economy based on exchange, which has in turn made possible our long history of material progress. You pay someone else to lay the concrete, and in exchange you get the time to write the book that will justify your leisure and give meaning to your life. That may even give meaning to the life of the workman laying the concrete for you. So that we all prosper."
"Do you really believe that?" he said."That books give meaning to our lives?"
"Yes." I said. "A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us. What else should it be?"
"A gesture of refusal in the face of time. A bid for immortality."
"No one is immortal. Books are not immortal. The entire globe on which we stand is going to be sucked into the sun and burnt to a cinder. After which the universe itself will implode and disappear down a black hole. Nothing is going to survive, not me, not you, and certainly not minority-interest books about imaginary frontiersmen in eighteenth-century South Africa."
"I didn"t mean immortal in the sense of existing outside time. I mean surviving beyond one"s physical demise."
"You want people to read you after you are dead?"
"It affords me some consolation to cling to that prospect."
"Even if you won"t be around to witness it?"
"Even if I won"t be around to witness it."
"But why should the people of the future bother to read the book you write if it doesn"t speak to them, if it doesn"t help them find meaning in their lives?"
"Perhaps they will still like to read books that are well written."
"That"s silly. It"s like saying that if I build a good enough gramradio then people will still be using it in the twenty-fifth century. But they won"t. Because gram-radios, however well made, will be obsolete by then. They won"t speak to twenty-fifth-century people."
"Perhaps in the twenty-fifth century there will still be a minority curious to hear what a late-twentieth-century gramradio sounded like."
"Collectors. Hobbyists. Is that how you intend to spend your life: sitting at your desk handcrafting an object that might or might not be preserved as a curiosity?"
He shrugged. "Have you a better idea?"
You think I am showing off. I can see that. You think I make up dialogue to show how smart I am. But that is how they were at times, conversations between John and myself. They were fun. I enjoyed them; I missed them afterwards, after I stopped seeing him. In fact our conversations were probably what I missed most. He was the only man I knew who would let me beat him in an honest argument, who wouldn"t bl.u.s.ter or obfuscate or go off in a huff when he saw he was losing. And I always beat him, or nearly always.
The reason was simple. It wasn"t that he couldn"t argue; but he ran his life according to principles, whereas I was a pragma- tist. Pragmatism always beats principles; that is just the way things are. The universe moves, the ground changes under our feet; principles are always a step behind. Principles are the stuff of comedy. Comedy is what you get when principles b.u.mp into reality. I know he had a reputation for being dour, but John Coetzee was actually quite funny. A figure of comedy. Dour comedy. Which, in an obscure way, he knew, even accepted. That is why I still look back on him with affection. If you want to know.
[Silence.]
I was always good at arguing. At school everyone used to be nervous around me, even my teachers. A tongue like a knife A tongue like a knife, my mother used to say half-reprovingly. A girl should not argue like that, a girl should learn to be more soft A girl should not argue like that, a girl should learn to be more soft. But at other times she would say: A girl like you should be a lawyer A girl like you should be a lawyer. She was proud of me, of my spirit, of my sharp tongue. She came from a generation when a daughter was still married from the father"s home straight into the husband"s, or the father-in-law"s.
Anyway, "Have you a better idea," John said "a better idea for how to use one"s life than writing books?"
"No. But I have an idea that might shake you up and help give direction to your life."
"What is that?"
"Find yourself a good woman and marry her."
He looked at me strangely. "Are you making me a proposal?" he said.
I laughed. "No," I said, "I am already married, thank you. Find a woman better suited to you, someone who will take you out of yourself."