Summary
Since Vercueil took the thirty rand from Curren's purse, he's had an abundance of alcohol and gets drunk every day. Bheki and another boy around his age are sitting on the lawn, listening to the radio. Florence and Bheki strongly disapprove of Vercueil's presence and do very little to hide their disdain of him. One morning, shortly after the return of Florence to Curren's house, Bekhi and his friend have a confrontation with Vercueil. The boys take Vercueil's bottle of brandy and shatter it on the ground. Not long after, a confrontation follows which ends with Bheki and his friend beating Vercueil.
Curren calls out in defense of Vercueil, telling the boys to stop or she will call the police. At the mention of police, Florence appears and backs the boys off. Curren demands to know who this other boy is with Bheki, and Florence explains that he is a school friend. Mrs. Curren expresses her frustration with all of the people coming and going on her property as they please, and Bheki challenges her, demanding to know if they need "passes" to come to her place, referring to the internal passport system in South Africa largely restricting and criminalizing the movement of non-white South Africans in any areas outside the designated reservations. Curren counters Bheki's accusation by asking what right he has to assault Vercueil. She proclaims that Vercueil lives on her property, that it is his home, too. This incenses Florence, who calls Vercueil "rubbish," to which Curren replies, "There are no rubbish people. We are all people together" (47).
Vercueil disappears from the property that afternoon "like an old tom chased off by the rising males" (48). Curren has a tense conversation with Florence about parenting and how she, Curren, feels that parents aren't doing their duty if they allow their children to assault people and burn down buildings, even if it's for a worthy cause. Florence disagrees. Florence tells Curren, "I cannot tell these children what to do.... It is all changed today. There are no mothers and fathers" (39). Curren feels like she has no place in what she feels is a "merciless" war against apartheid. She argues that once their aims are achieved, the cruelty with which they achieved them will remain. Florence denies that she is, as Curren says, turning her back on her children. "These are good children," says Florence. "They are like iron, we are proud of them" (50). Curren muses on how she will soon be smoke and ash, with, perhaps, no role in this war of iron.
The next day, Curren notices that Bheki's friend's bicycle is still in her yard. She asks Florence if he stayed the night, and Florence tells her that he did because it wouldn't have been safe for him to ride back in the dark. Curren notices a police van parked on her street, and she goes out to speak to the officers. She asks them what they're doing there, and they give her snarky, dismissive responses. She tells them that if they're looking for the boys on the red bike, that they have her permission to be on the property. The officers ridicule her. One says, "I don't know anything about boys from Guguletu. Do you want us to look out for them?" (53) Curren asks Florence to send Bheki's friend back to Guguletu, but Florence refuses. She says that if the boy leaves, so will her son, and it's simply not safe there.
On the next rainy day, Vercueil returns to the property. Curren calls out for him to come inside, and a small woman follows him in. Curren is shocked that he's brought someone else onto the property. Both Vercueil and his companion are drunk. She tells them they can sleep on the couch, but have to leave as soon as the rain lets up. Curren is incensed by the presence of this mystery woman. She goes to sleep, laboring under her pain medication, but when she wakes up immediately thinks to kick the woman out of her house. When she goes downstairs, Florence has already discovered Vercueil and the woman, and Curren tells Florence to leave them be.
Then, Curren confronts Bheki about him and his friend sleeping in her car. She demands to know why he didn't ask permission. In the middle of this confrontation, Vercueil walks in, and Curren tells him to get the woman out of the house. He ignores her, so Curren and Florence lift the woman up and guide her outside. Just as they're doing this, Bheki and his friend appear on Schooner Street, riding their red bicycle. They are being chased by the yellow police van that was parked on the street the previous day. As they are about to ride past a utility truck, the driver, not seeing them, opens the door. The boys crash. Bheki's friend lands worse than he does and remains unconscious even after the ambulance arrives. Florence whisks Bheki inside, leaving Curren to apply pressure to the other boy's forehead wound to slow the bleeding.
After the commotion settles, Curren returns to her house to find Florence bandaging her son's leg. Curren confronts Florence about leaving her alone with the other boy, but Florence defends herself, saying that she was just avoiding contact with the police for her and her family's safety. Curren agrees to drive Florence and Bheki to Woodstock Hospital to check on the boy, but when they go, he is nowhere to be found. They go to another hospital, Groote Schuur, where it takes quite long to find him. Curren and Vercueil wait in the car. Curren is tired and additionally exhausted by seeing all of the sick, elderly people roaming through the hospital halls. She feels seen there, as if they can sense her illness and know that she belongs among them.
Florence and Bheki return to the car upset. They have placed Bheki's friend in a ward that, based on Florence's description, may be a geriatric psychiatric ward. Florence calls the ward "a waiting room for the funeral" (77). While they're in the hospital, Curren and Vercueil talk. Vercueil asks her why she insists on taking him along, and she tells him she needs his company and his help if the car won't start. Vercueil tells her that all she needs is a new battery, but Curren doesn't want a new battery. She's done fixing things. She's ready to accept all of the broken things in her life as it comes to a close.
The conversation turns to Curren's daughter, to whom the book is addressed. Curren explains how she wishes her daughter were there to comfort her, but how she could not possibly ask her to be there. She doesn't wish to force her daughter into mothering her as she dies. She tells Vercueil that her daughter is under the impression that the cancer was removed in surgery and that she's recovering. Vercueil tells Curren to either tell her daughter now, or to not tell her at all. He suggests that by waiting until after she dies to tell her daughter all she wants to say, she'll be denying her daughter the opportunity to be there for her. His words deeply affect Curren, but on the surface, she maintains that she won't be telling her daughter about her illness. Her daughter has resolved not to return to South Africa until apartheid has ended.
Vercueil and Curren return to the hospital later that evening, after bringing Florence and Bheki back home. They find the boy in the ward that Florence described. There is a man in the ward suffering from delirium tremens. Curren talks to the boy about her Thucydides class. She talks with him about mercy. It's clear that she doesn't know exactly what she's trying to communicate to him, but she touches his hand and tells him to "be slow to judge" (79), seeming to try and convince the boy that she is his ally, rather than his enemy. The boy retracts his hand.
Curren and Vercueil return to the house. Curren gives him some brandy while she drinks tea. They sit in her sitting room, and Vercueil browses the books on her shelf. She asks Vercueil about his origins and he avoids answering, as usual. She presses, and he tells her he spent time at sea, on trawlers. She tells him, if he would like, he can sleep on the sofa again. The next day, Curren tries to lodge a formal complaint about the officers who caused Bheki and his friends to crash, but the officers at the police station don't take her seriously. She tells them that the police in Cape Town make her ashamed to be a citizen.
Analysis
Part 2 of Age of Iron begins to explicate the novel's title and discuss the uprising of the African National Congress, often using figures of speech that involve inert objects or elemental materials. Bheki and Florence describe Vercueil as "rubbish," and Curren describes the strangeness of seeing Vercueil with blood on his face in material terms—"Strange to see blood on that leathery face. Like honey on ashes" (47). Later on, when Curren confronts Florence for allowing her son to attack Vercueil—more than allowing, even, but being proud of her son for attacking Vercueil—Florence says, "I do not turn my back on my children. ... These are good children, they are like iron, we are proud of them." Curren goes on to narrate, "Children of iron, I thought. 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 matron, iron-hearted, bearing warrior sons for the nation. 'We are proud of them.' We. Come home either with your shield or on your shield" (50).
When Curren considers her own place in this "war of iron," she asks, "Where is my heart in all of this? ... soon I will be smoke and ash; so what is it to me that a time has come when childhood is despised, when children school each other never to smile, never to cry, to raise fists in the air like hammers?" (50) When Curren sits with Vercueil in front of Groote Schuur hospital, Curren insists to Vercueil that her daughter will not, in good conscience, under any circumstance, return to South Africa. "You don't believe me," she says, "but perhaps one day you will meet her, and then you will see. She is like iron. I am not going to ask her to go back on her vows" (75).
Through such an extensive use of materials-related figurative language, Coetzee creates a constellation of reference in which the reader can place these characters in relation to one another. "Iron" thus becomes the material of, in Curren's terms, the "rising males" (48), the "sullen-mouthed boys" (7)—the children of the revolution. Vercueil is characterized with a softer material—leather. Curren considers herself "smoke and ash." In these chapters, Curren struggles to position herself on the "right side of history," for while she may have been against apartheid policies in South Africa, she, as a white, middle-class person, has never had to make sacrifices for change. She insists to Vercueil that her daughter is "iron," but the only reason her daughter is able to remove herself from apartheid South Africa is because she has the privileges and resources that allow her to move to the U.S., marry, and start a whole new life.
So, as Curren narrates her way through an extremely compressed history of the factional, white supremacist-driven history of 20th century South Africa and ends the section with this direct address to her daughter—"How fortunate you are to have put all this behind you!—the reader is left wondering about the sincerity of that statement. How much guile does Curren possess when it comes to her daughter? Certainly, with a statement like that, Coetzee at least is recognizing that Curren's daughter cannot possibly "put all this behind" her, because she is inextricably a part of the social hierarchy of South Africa. By the very fact of being able to move away from it, she is a part of it.
Coetzee continues along this thread of "material resources" in the scene depicting the aftermath of Bheki and his friend's bike crash. Florence rouses Bheki up off the pavement and rushes him indoors, away from the police, leaving Curren to attend to Bheki's friend and tamp the blood pouring out of his forehead wound. Curren cannot help but stay with him and try to keep his blood from flowing out of his body, because blood, she says, is a precious resource, "more precious than gold and diamonds" (63). Curren says, when she first sees him bleeding, "I did not know blood could be so dark, so thick, so heavy. What a heart he must have ... to pump that blood and go on pumping!" (62) Yet again, Coetzee homes in on the material properties of substance. Blood here is described less as a bodily fluid, and more as a fuel—in terms of its color and viscosity—and the heart appears not as an organ, but as an engine.
Of course, all of Curren's fixation on materials ends up circling back to her own approaching expiration. Where the rising generation is iron, she is quickly turning to ash. Throughout Part 2, Curren returns to her longing for life, her enduring love of life which, after receiving her prognosis, has only grown stronger. She says, "How I long, just once more, to put on crisp underwear smelling of the sun! ... And if that is not to be, let there still be, to the last, gratitude, unbounded, heartfelt gratitude, for having been granted a spell in this world of wonders" (55). Throughout Part 1, Curren muses on what it must be like for prisoners to stand before a firing squad: "They plead ..., they weep, they joke, they offer bribes, they offer everything they possess: the rings off their fingers, the clothes off their backs. The soldiers laugh. For they will take it all anyway, and the gold from their teeth too" (26). By referring to firing squads, Curren works through her position of complete powerlessness with regard to her diagnosis. Watching a surfer ride a wave at Fish Hoek with Vercueil, Curren becomes overwhelmed with grief. She grieves for herself—"These seas, these mountains: I want to burn them upon my sight so deeply that, no matter where I go, they will always be before me. I am hungry with love of this world" (18). But as the world slips from her grasp, Curren is realizing that the world she hungers for is not the same world hungered after by the children of the revolution.
