Summary
Part 3 begins in a state of alarm and emergency. In the middle of the night, Curren's telephone rings. She answers, but the call is for Florence. The person on the phone tells Curren to wake Florence, and when Florence gets off the phone, she asks Curren to take her to Guguletu and then to a place called Site C. Curren tries to wake up Vercueil to join them in the car, but he refuses to go, so Curren, Florence, and her two daughters load up and drive to Guguletu, where there has apparently been violence between activists and police.
On the drive over, Florence tells Curren, "If people wave to you to stop, or if you see things in the road, you must not stop, you must drive on" (89), and this makes Curren highly uncomfortable. She refuses to agree to these terms and instead says, "at the first sign of trouble I am turning back" (89). When they reach a police checkpoint near Guguletu, Curren lies and tells the officer that she's taking Florence home. The officer tells her to let Florence out at the checkpoint and let her walk the rest of the way. Curren refuses this request on the basis that it is raining and Florence's daughters are with them. The officer waves her through the checkpoint.
Curren follows Florence's directions through the dark and heavy rain as police patrol the area, looking for any reason to stop the residents. They reach Florence's sister's house, and Florence goes in to drop off her daughter, Hope. When she emerges from the house, she's still holding her baby, named Beauty, and is followed by a man named Mr. Thabane, who she tells Curren is her cousin. Mr. Thabane will help them find Bheki. Mr. Thabane gets behind the wheel. He drives them to a second location, where a ten-year-old boy meets them to show them the way, deeper into the conflict.
They drive through the settlement and Curren notes the scorched trees and weary figures taking shelter from the rain. They drive until they reach a sandy path on a mountainside. Mr. Thabane determines they cannot go on safely in the car and must continue on foot. Curren insists on coming with them because she doesn't want to be left in the car by herself. Thabane leads them all to a shantytown. A group of men stands in the middle, destroying and setting fire to the makeshift structures. The residents try to resist and save their possessions, but the men violently keep them at bay.
Curren is thrown down as the onlookers rally to protest the burning of their homes. Curren, being white, represents the oppressor. She is shouted at to leave. With her weak hip, she's barely able to stand back up. She scrambles to catch up to Thabane and tells him she just wants to go back home. She claims she doesn't belong in the middle of this scene. "I must get home soon. ... I have seen enough. ... I am in pain, I am exhausted" (97) she says. Thabane then asks her a series of questions. "You want to go home," he says, "But what of the people who live here? When they want to go home, this is where they must go. What do you think of that?" (97) Curren can give him no answer. She says, "It is terrible," and Thabane responds, "It is not just terrible ... it is a crime. When you see a crime being committed in front of your eyes, what do you say? Do you say, 'I have seen enough, I didn't come to see sights, I want to go home'?" (98)
Thabane asks Curren to describe the crime she sees. Curren can sense that he was once a teacher by the rhetorical strength of his questions. At this point, several people in the crowd are listening in. Curren insists that her answer to his questions must come from within herself. She doesn't want to simply speak for the sake of speaking. A man in the crowd insists, "This woman talks shit" (99), referring to Curren. Thabane, Curren, and a young man return to her car. The battery is dead, so the men push it to start. They drive to a row of burned-out shops. Florence emerges from one of the shops, looking stunned. Curren calls out to her about Bheki and Florence nods to one of the shops. Thabane goes into the shop and when he reemerges, he takes Florence into his arms, and she weeps.
Curren goes into the shop and sees five bodies of young Black men, laid side by side, shot to death. One of them is Bheki. Mr. Thabane tells her the bodies are displayed so people can see them, can see the cost of apartheid. As Curren tries to find her way back home, she's approached by white militiamen. They laugh at her for being confused and discombobulated. One says he's going to call the police. Curren yells at them and asks if they've seen the bodies inside of the bombed-out shops. They deny responsibility. She says she doesn't need the police and drives herself home.
She sleeps through an entire day and wakes up to find Vercueil passed out on her toilet with his pants around his ankles. His dog is rummaging through her kitchen trash. In the face of so much disorder, Curren breaks down and weeps at her dining table. She weeps more out of shame than self-pity; she is ashamed of how childishly she shrunk away from the horror of the settlement, how urgently she just wanted to go home. Some women come to pick up Florence's things from Curren's house, and Curren asks them if Florence is alright. One of the women confronts Curren about the absurd nature of her question. "No, I cannot say she is all right. ... Not all right. How can she be all right?" (115) the woman says. Curren writes a check and asks them to bring it to Florence, and they leave.
Curren shares with Vercueil her desire to light herself and her car on fire and drive into a government building. This idea excites Vercueil to no end, and after Curren shares it with him, he constantly presses her on when she'll finally execute her plan. Curren delays. She's both insulted by how excited Vercueil is by her plan, and tantalized by the new attention he pays to her after she tells him she's considering suicide. Curren interrupts the narrative several times to address her daughter, to whom she writes the book. She expresses her desire to live on through her words and through her daughter. She discusses the concept of life after death through ancestry, particularly in the context of a lineage of motherhood.
One morning, as Curren describes to Vercueil the difficulty of finally deciding to kill oneself and then actually carrying out the decision, Vercueil suggests they take a car ride. They ride again to the overlook by False Bay. Vercueil asks for ten rand from Curren, and with it he walks to the liquor store and buys them a bottle. They drink in the car for a while. After drinking quite a lot of the bottle, Curren wants to stop drinking. Vercueil insists she drink more. Curren heatedly shouts him out of her car, and he in turn throws the keys into the bushes and walks away down the road, leaving Curren stranded at the overlook. After Vercueil leaves, a young couple pulls up in their car, blasting music. Curren taps on their window and asks them to turn it down, but they don't. The female passenger shoots Curren a nasty look as they pull away to park somewhere else. Eventually, Vercueil returns and drives Curren home.
Analysis
In Part 3 of Age of Iron, Curren is forced to confront first-hand, to witness for herself, the atrocities of apartheid that she has previously only understood in the abstract. Curren considers herself to be against apartheid, but practically, she's done nothing to combat it, and as a white person living in Cape Town, she has benefitted from apartheid her whole life. When Curren finds herself in Site C, in the midst of armed conflict, white militias burning down shanties, and police officers threatening Black citizens, she begins to realize her extreme impotence in the face of these tragedies. She considers her whiteness, and through this reflection, Coetzee returns to a previous image of whiteness from Part 1, where he describes white, middle-to-upper class children as "bee grubs, plump and white, drenched in honey" (17) and describes their innocence in terms of purgatory.
Coetzee returns to the metaphor of limbo for white privilege in Part 3, amidst the carnage. Curren reflects on her whiteness and says, "If justice reigns at all, we will find ourselves barred at the first threshold of the underworld. White as grubs in our swaddling bands, we will be dispatched to join those infant souls whose eternal whining Aeneas mistook for weeping. White our color, the color of limbo: white sands, white rocks, a white light pouring down from all sides" (92). Curren wonders whether the white Afrikaners see her as a "do-gooder," but rejects the title for herself: "Am I a do-gooder? No, I have done no good that I can think of" (105). Curren's words begin to accumulate toward the conclusion that by doing nothing, by standing by and allowing apartheid to proceed from her position of relative power and ease, she has essentially helped maintain it. Curren begins to understand her complicity in the system.
When Curren finds herself cornered in a debate by Mr. Thabane in Site C, she immediately recognizes him as a teacher, because he's led her to a conclusion about her place in this conflict. She says, "What he is doing to me he has practiced in the classroom. It is the trick one uses to make one's own answer seem to come from the child. Ventriloquism, the legacy of Socrates, as oppressive in Africa as it was in Athens" (98). The irony of this statement is that what Curren is referring to as oppression is actually Thabane's method of making her understand how she participates in oppression. Another irony of the situation is that Curren, herself, is a teacher. A retired professor of classics is being schooled by a school teacher, using a didactic technique from antiquity, the Socratic method, one of the most famous legacies of classical Greece. This exchange further emphasizes Coetzee's unorthodox project of writing a coming-of-age-like novel about a seventy-year-old. Later in the chapter, when Curren reflects on what she feels was shameful behavior at Site C, she says, "From an old person's throat a child's voice" (109), describing herself.
In Part 3, Curren also further explores her own mortality and attempt at immortality through writing and through her daughter. She describes her project, which is the contents of this novel, as "a letter from elsewhere (so long a letter!), truth and love together at last." She writes to her daughter, "It is the soul of you that I address, as it is the soul of me that will be left with you when this letter is over" (129). Curren describes how she carries the soul of her own mother with her by remembering her mother's stories—particularly the story she shares with Vercueil, about her mother sleeping under the wagon at the campgrounds with her family. Curren writes to her daughter in the hope that her soul will carry on through her. The irony of her daughter's absence lies at the core of the novel, and as Curren writes during her final months, this irony clarifies. Her daughter left South Africa to divest herself of responsibility for the atrocities of apartheid, but by leaving, by furnishing herself with the luxury of leaving it behind, she's done nothing really to protest it. She remains in the same league as Curren's grub-like whites, destined for limbo for their complicity.
