Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life by J. M. Coetzee

Author:J. M. Coetzee [Coetzee, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: General, Literary, Fiction, Biography & Autobiography, History, 20th Century, Biography, South, Coming of Age, Biographical, Africa, Coetzee; J. M, Apartheid, Authors; South African - 20th Century, Republic of South Africa, Authors; South African
ISBN: 9780140265668
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1997-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

He has no way of answering these-questions, for he is discouraged from visiting their houses. It would be rude, he is told—

rude because Ros and Freek would find it embarrassing.

If it is not embarrassing to have Ros's wife and daughter work in the house, he wants to ask, cooking meals, washing clothes, making beds, why is it embarrassing to visit them in their house?

It sounds like a good, argument, but there is a flaw in it, he knows. For the truth is that it is embarrassing to have Trvn and Xientjie in the house;. He doesHdf like it when he passes Lien-tjie in the passage and she has to pretend she is invisible and he has to pretend she is not there. He does not like to see Ttyn on her knees at the washtub washing his clothes. He does not know,., how to answer her when -she speaks to him in the third person, calling him 'die kleinbaas,' the little master, as if he were not'

present. It is all deeply embarrassing.

It is easier with Ros and Freek. But even with them he has to speak tortuously constructed sentences to avoid calling them jy when they call him kleinbaas. He is not sure whether Freek counts as a man or a boy, whether he is making a fool of himself when he treats Freek as a man. With Coloured people in general, and with the people of the Karoo in particular, he simply does- not know when they cease to be children and become men and women. It seems to happen so early and so suddenly: one day they are playing with toys, the next day they are out with the men, working, or in someone's kitchen, washing dishes.

Freek is gentle and soft-spoken. He has a bicycle with fat tyres and a guitar: in the evenings he sits outside,his room and plays his guitar to himself, smiling his rather remote, smile. On Saturday afternoons he cycles off to the Fraserburg Road loca-tion and stays there until Sunday evening, returning long after dark: from, miles away they can see "the tiny, wavering speck of light that is his bicycle lamp. It seems to him heroic to cycle that vast distance. He would hero-worship Freek if it were permitted.

Freek is a hired man, he is paid a wage, he can be given notice and sent packing. Nevertheless, seeing Freek sitting on his haunches, his pipe in his mouth, staring out over the veld, it'

seems.Jo him thai .Kree.k belongs here more securely than the -

Coetizees do—if not to Voelfontein, then to the Karoo. The Karoo -

is Freek's country, his home; the Coetzees, drinking tea and gossiping on the farmhouse stoep, are like swallows, seasonal, here today, gone tomorrow, or even like sparrows, chirping, lighl-footed, short-lived.

Best of all on the farm, best of everything, is the hunting. His uncle owns only one gun, a heavy Lee-Enfield .303 that fires a shell too large for any of the .game (once his father shot a hare with-it and nothing was left over but bloody scraps).

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