Apartheid's Last Vicious Gasps

By LAWRENCE THORNTON; Lawrence Thornton is the author of ''Imagining Argentina,'' a novel Published: September 23, 1990

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AGE OF IRON By J. M. Coetzee. 198 pp. New York: Random House. $18.95. ''When some men suffer unjustly . . . it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it.'' This observation by the Magistrate in J. M. Coutzee's ''Waiting for the Barbarians'' (1982) could easily stand as an epigraph to ''Age of Iron,'' his superb new novel, which lays bare the effects of apartheid on the psyches of both the oppressor and the oppressed. Like the Magistrate, Mrs. Curren, the narrator of ''Age of Iron,'' awakens to her own complicity with South Africa's regime after years of silence. But there is a profound difference between these characters. ''Waiting for the Barbarians'' concludes with the Magistrate pressing on ''along a road that may lead nowhere.'' By the time we reach the end of ''Age of Iron,'' Mrs. Curren's crisis, compounded by terminal illness, becomes part of a larger vision of a time when justice and decency will return to her country. The novel's prophecy comes to us in her splendidly articulated voice, sometimes sharp, sometimes laconic, but always calibrated to her growing awareness of how things are. For the last 20 years Mr. Coetzee, a professor of literature at the University of Cape Town, has gone his own way, ignoring the trends of contemporary fiction in favor of allegorical narratives that focus on life under regimes capable of endless brutality. Each novel has its own idiosyncratic shape, but within that broad scope of difference, there is a constant focus on questions of power and position and the claims of conscience. Now, in ''Age of Iron,'' the wall of apartheid is finally cracking. The killings and oppression continue, but we are witnessing the death throes of the system. The action unfolds in Cape Town, ''where a century ago the patricians . . . gave orders that there be erected spacious homes for themselves and their descendants in perpetuity, foreseeing nothing of the day when, in their shadows, the chickens would come home to roost.'' ''Age of Iron'' takes the form of a long letter from Mrs. Curren, a former classics professor now dying of cancer, to her daughter, who has moved to America to avoid the complicity of living under a regime she despises. Mrs. Curren entrusts its mailing to an alcoholic homeless man called Vercueil, who has taken shelter in a pile of boxes and

plastic sheeting in the alley behind her house. The transient Mr. Vercueil is reluctant to speak. Soon after, on the day her doctor gives her the bad news, Mrs. Curren meets him and muses about his silence and inattention, aware that he barely listens to her. ''Perhaps, despite those keen bird-eyes, he is more befuddled with drink than I know. Or perhaps, finally, he does not care. Care: the true root of charity. I look for him to care, and he does not. Because he is beyond caring. Beyond caring and beyond care.'' Although they are linked through hopelessness and disease, whose double tragedy seems to marginalize them, Mrs. Curren is wrong. Care will bring her and Mr. Vercueil a measure of unexpected salvation, even though the full flowering of caritas in their homeland lies off in the future. Mrs. Curren's letter to America chronicles her awakening to apartheid's last vicious gasps as well as her own impending death. She is thus a witness to the dies irae - the days of wrath -of her inner and outer being and to the coming of the age of iron - the future of the country's black youth. Appalled that her housekeeper Florence cannot control her son Bheki and his friends, she asks how Florence and other mothers can turn their backs on their children, for surely the violence they engage in will deform their adult lives. Florence answers that she is only acknowledging necessity. All the children are good: ''They are like iron, we are proud of them.'' ''Children of iron,'' she thinks. ''Florence herself, too, not unlike iron. The age of iron. After which comes the age of bronze. How long, how long before the softer ages return in their cycle, the age of clay, the age of earth? A Spartan mother, iron-hearted, bearing warrior sons for the nation. 'We are proud of them.' We. Come home either with your shield or on your shield.'' Understanding the true meaning of this metaphor allows Mrs. Curren to open her eyes to the struggle and see it whole for the first time. When she ponders its ramifications she tells her daughter that she writes ''not so that you will feel for me but so that you will learn how things are.'' But the time for words has already passed. The historical process of revolution sweeps them aside in its indefatigable rush toward the future. She understands this after speaking to a friend of Bheki's and discovering that her ''words fell off him like dead leaves the moment they were uttered. The words of a woman, therefore negligible; of an old woman, therefore doubly negligible; but above all of a white.'' White words, then, are futile, and their lack of authority extends to her stock in trade, the words of Greek and Roman artists, lovingly read and interpreted in lectures. The first overt crisis of the novel occurs when Mrs. Curren's concern for Bheki's disappearance takes her to a place the authorities call Site C in the township of Guguletu. As she and Mr. Vercueil enter the township the full horror becomes

apparent. Bheki has been murdered by the police. His body is laid out with four others, eyes open to the terror of death but also to what she intuits as a kind of triumph. In going to Site C she has abandoned the sanctuary of her middle-class life, and afterward she can never forget those ''desolate flats'' where she had no choice but to ''smell the smoke in the air, see the bodies of the dead, hear the weeping.'' Mrs. Curren's journey to Guguletu allows her to see that no one is free, neither white or black. ''When madness climbs the throne,'' she thinks, ''who in the land escapes contagion?'' The madness follows her home when a friend of Bheki's goes to the boy's room for a gun. Later he is trapped in her house by the police. Despite her protests, the police commandeer her house, and in one of the novel's most chilling scenes, they force her outside, where she hears the explosion of a concussion grenade, then shots, then sees the boy's body being taken away. Devastating as these two murders are in their illustration of the regime's limitless brutality, the power of ''Age of Iron'' is nowhere more apparent than in Mrs. Curren's relationship with Mr. Vercueil, whose slovenliness and drinking she resents until she realizes that he is as doomed as she is, because he is not a man of iron. What she has taken for laziness is a profound malaise deeded him by the madness on the throne. It is quite simply too late for either of them. Yet a deeply moving attachment develops between this dying woman and castoff man that is all the more compelling because the reasons for it remain unspoken. After the boy is murdered in her house, she wanders off, falls ill and finds shelter beneath an overpass. A gang threatens her until Mr. Vercueil appears and runs them off. They spend the night together in a heap of cardboard boxes and the next day he carries her home. From this moment forward, she is increasingly forced to depend on him for the most intimate things because of her growing weakness. Just as the Magistrate washes the broken feet of a barbarian girl, so Mr. Vercueil washes Mrs. Curren's underwear when the pain prevents her from doing it. He prepares her meals, shops, becomes her guardian. He is, she constantly reiterates, her messenger. In her loneliness, she asks to sleep with his dog. ''He won't stay. He sleeps where I sleep.'' ''Then sleep here too,'' she says, binding herself even more completely to this ''rudimentary man.'' ''When it comes to last things,'' she tells her daughter, ''I no longer doubt him in any way. There has always been in him a certain hovering if undependable solicitude for me, a solicitude he knows no way of expressing. I have fallen and he has caught me. It is not he who fell under my care when he arrived, I now understand, nor I who fell under his: we fell under each other, and have tumbled and risen since then in the flights and swoops of that mutual election.'' Mrs. Curren and Mr. Vercueil are thus harbingers of the caritas that is slowly, even glacially, returning to South Africa. It is

not yet time when ''mutual election'' will heal the old wounds, but the process has begun with these two unlikely avant-gardes. ''I tell you this story not so that you will feel for me but so that you will learn how things are.'' How things are. ''Age of Iron'' teaches us that and also how things will be. Thinking of the dead boys, Mrs. Curren writes that ''these people will not burn, Bheki and the other dead. It would be like trying to burn figures of pig iron or lead.'' ''Now that child is buried and we walk upon him. Let me tell you, when I walk upon this land, this South Africa, I have a gathering feeling of walking upon black faces. They are dead but their spirit has not left them. They lie there heavy and obdurate, waiting for my feet to pass, waiting for me to go, waiting to be raised up again. Millions of figures of pig iron floating under the skin of the earth. The age of iron waiting to return.'' Despite the brutal killings and Mrs. Curren's excruciatingly detailed recording of the progress of the disease eating away at her, ''Age of Iron'' emerges from its smoky, apocalyptic images as a finely wrought prophecy that should send chills down the spines of the Voortrekkers. In this chronicle of an aged white woman coming to understand, and of the unavoidable claims of her country's black youth, Mr. Coetzee has created a superbly realized novel whose truths cut to the bone. His readers will ''suffer the shame'' of injustice that came to occupy the old Magistrate's heart, but they will also witness the inevitable flowering of the age of iron.

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/23/books/apartheid-s-last-viciousgasps.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm