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?