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 putting in 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.
Adriana
SENHORA 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 cent. 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. In Cape Town English was Maria Regina’s weakest school 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 them 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, 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.’