Summary
Mrs. Curren catches a bad chest cold, which sends her into painful and frequent coughing fits. Vercueil has still not returned, but his dog remains on Curren's property. Without Vercueil, Curren has to once again fend for herself. Simple things like grocery shopping become extremely difficult with her debilitating cough. One night, in a medicinal fog, Curren hears rifling in the kitchen. She goes downstairs expecting to see Vercueil, but instead she finds John, Bheki's friend who was badly hurt in the bike crash. At first, Curren thinks he is Bheki, but she realizes when she sees the poorly stitched gash in his forehead that it is Bheki's friend.
She makes him tea and a sandwich and insists that he stay at the house to rest. His wounds are not properly dressed, his stitches haven't been removed, and he appears in no state to have been discharged from the hospital. Curren doesn't believe the clothes he's wearing belong to him, but John insists that they were brought to him by a friend. He asks where Bheki is, and Curren tells him that Bheki was killed. The boy has come looking for Florence, and Curren tells him that Florence has returned to Guguletu, but that he should stay at her house until he is well. She warns him that it would be dangerous to return to Guguletu.
The boy sleeps in Florence's room and Curren returns to her own. She takes the painkillers and interrupts the narrative once again to address her daughter directly. She tells her daughter that this "letter," the novel, is a way for her to call her daughter back to her. She fluctuates between saying that the letter isn't and is an accusation. She calls it "a heartfelt reproach" and "a call into the night, into the northwest, for you to come back to me" (139). The next day, Curren calls Lifeline and asks for someone to do her grocery shopping for her. The person on the phone suggests Meals on Wheels, but Curren insists that it isn't the cooking she has a problem with, it's the physical act of hauling groceries. The person suggests a social worker, and Curren hangs up the phone.
Curren then discusses the indignities of dying. She considers, again, self-immolation. She wonders how much it would hurt and how quickly she would stop feeling altogether. She also wonders whether the final act of driving a flaming car into a parliamentary building would truly be an effective or meaningful act of resistance, or whether she would be doing it just to make herself feel better. When Curren tries to judge the validity of her actions in this respect, she always thinks of Florence. She says of her imagined suicide, "If Florence were passing by, with Hope at her side and Beauty on her back, would she be impressed by the spectacle? Would she even spare it a glance? A juggler, a clown, an entertainer, Florence would think: not a serious person. And stride on" (141).
Curren lectures the boy, John, about not giving his life to his cause. She pleads with him to let himself be taken care of and tries to convince him that he is still a child and has more to live for than to die for. She tells him about her cancer, about how she is actively dying, and tries to make a case for why he should focus on his own wellbeing and self-preservation. John tells her he must go home. She asks him where home is, and he has no answer for her.
John stays in Florence's room. One morning, as she's passing by the open door, Curren notices John staring at some concealed object in his hand. She assumes it is a weapon of some sort and asks him about it. He shoves the object under the sheets of the bed. Curren also notices that he's torn a baseboard off the wall. It appears that he's hiding things in the floor, but he won't tell her what he's hiding. Curren calls Florence, but she isn't there. Instead, she speaks to Thabane. She tells Thabane all about John coming to her house and the state he is in. She expresses concern for his physical and mental wellbeing. She asks Thabane to send someone to retrieve him. Thabane says he will try to get someone there. They then get into an argument about the efficacy of violence in the revolution. Curren argues that the comradeship for which these young boys are dying is not a valid reason to die, and Thabane vehemently disagrees.
The next morning, Curren hears a commotion in her yard and thinks perhaps Vercueil has returned. Then there is a knocking on her door, and the knocking increases in urgency. Then she hears a gunshot. She rushes downstairs and finds the police surrounding her house. They're looking for John. They know he's inside Florence's room. Curren communicates with the officers in Afrikaans. She pleads with them to leave John alone, to let her speak to him herself. She keeps telling them that he's only a child, but the police only tell her to step aside. They tell her to let them do their jobs. In Afrikaans Curren tells them that she is not on their side, she is on the opposite side.
The police try to drag Curren out of her house, but she puts up a fight. As she's struggling to stay in her house, a shot rings out. Police move in. Just as a policewoman has managed to coax Curren out of the house, they are wheeling John's body out on a gurney, covered in a white sheet. The policewoman tries to get Curren to either go to the hospital or return to her home, but Curren insists that the house does not belong to her anymore, at least not while the police are in it, ransacking it for evidence. Curren walks down the street and takes a seat on the sidewalk to rest her hip. She's drowsy, so she lays down and falls asleep. When she wakes up, unsure of the time, little boys are prodding at her with a stick. One of the boys shoves the stick in her mouth and cuts her soft palate. She tells them to go away, but they continue to prod. She tells them she is sick, and she'll make them sick, too, and they back off.
Too weak to stand, Curren urinates where she lays. She falls in a grey area between asleep and awake. She's woken again by a dog's tongue licking her face. Then she's hit with a familiar smell: it's Vercueil. He asks who put her there, and she tells him she put herself there. He picks her up and carries her away from the spot. She asks him not to return to her house, so they walk into the woods. Curren tells him about the boys shoving the stick in her mouth, and he tells her that they were looking for gold and silver fillings. They sleep there in the woods on some cardboard, beneath a quilt.
The next morning, Curren wakes before Vercueil. On the walk back to her house, she tells him about her perception of him as an angel. She has dreams about him, and she describes his appearance in her dreams. When they arrive at her house, a police officer is waiting there. He seems quite happy to see them, and Curren gets the impression that the officer feels he's done her a great favor by staying there, making sure no one breaks in. The police have ransacked her house looking for more evidence of rebel activity. The officer tells her that a detective will be dropping by shortly to ask her some questions.
Curren does not cooperate easily with the detective. She takes her painkillers in the middle of the interrogation and starts to doze off before he finishes questioning her. He tells her that they found a handgun and several detonators in the floorboards of the room where John was staying. Curren denies knowing anything about the detonators but claims that the gun is hers and that she's had it for a long time, for self-protection, before licenses were necessary to own guns. When the detective asks her why John had the gun, she tells him she lent it to him for protection from harm.
The detective leaves, and in the days following, Vercueil becomes an informal caretaker for Mrs. Curren. He checks on her and offers to make her food. And as Vercueil warms to her, Curren becomes increasingly detached. The pills keep her sane and keep the pain at bay, but they also render her unable to write, so she doesn't take them as much as she needs to. She has to endure pain in order to continue her letter to her daughter.
Analysis
In the second half of Part 3, Mrs. Curren's facade of composure begins to break down. Coetzee clearly marks a turning point in her physical wellbeing when Curren describes her cough at the beginning of a new section: "Days ago I caught a cold, which has now settled on my chest and turned into a dry, hammering cough that goes on for minutes at a stretch and leaves me panting, exhausted" (131). Before this point in the novel, Curren's cancer has remained an abstract concept, especially to the reader. Curren often talks about a shooting pain in her hip, but she discusses the cancer in mostly figurative terms. It is a "crab," gnawing its way through her bones. It is something unseen, sometimes felt, but always contained within her body.
When the cough begins, Curren's illness, in a sense, escapes the containment of her body. It starts to manifest in ways obvious not only to her, but for the first time, to the people around her. Strangers passing her on the street can tell she is sick. Curren describes a particular incident when, while carrying her groceries home, she spiraled into a coughing fit. She says, "three passing schoolboys stopped to stare at the old woman leaning against a lamppost with her groceries spilled around her feet" (132). A woman in a car slows down to ask if she's alright, struggles to hear Curren, and drives away. The concern of strangers is largely superficial—what is significant is that they can tell Curren is vulnerable. She can no longer hide the way the cancer is affecting her. "Ugliness," she says. "What is it but the soul showing through the flesh?" (132)
And like that, Coetzee establishes a theme for the second half of Part 3—the theme of emergence. Curren has reached a point where she can no longer contain her illness or conceal her true feelings about anything. She drops pretenses and allows contradictions to creep into her writing. She goes from explicitly denying that her letter is an accusation—"Is this an accusation? No, but it is a reproach..."—to admitting to her daughter that it is an accusation in the very next paragraph—"Is this an accusation? Yes. J'accuse" (139). She admits to her daughter what she told Vercueil she would never admit: that she longs for her to return to South Africa, to "bury [her] head in [Curren's] lap as a child does, as [she] used to, [her] nose burrowing like a mole's for the place [she] came from" (139).
Curren continues to discuss how people live on through their children and their children's children, and as she approaches death, Curren surrenders to this desire both for her legacy to be continued by her daughter, and for herself to somehow return to her mother, to the womb, "like a mole" burrowing "for the place it came from" (139)—when she tries to appeal to John to stop fighting, she insists that her words are "from my heart, from my womb" (145). As Curren approaches death, she publicly occupies both poles of this maternal-infantile dichotomy she's established throughout the book.
Furthering the theme of emergence, Curren introduces the motif of anagrams. The concept first comes up as Curren considers all the different medications she takes, among them Borodino and Diconal. "I stare at the words," she says. "Are they anagrams? They look like anagrams. But for what, and in what language?" (138) This idea of hidden meaning and concealed language persists through the remainder of the section. As Curren is being interrogated by the detective after John's murder, she describes "A word appear[ing] before" her, "Thabanchu, Thaba Nchu. I tried to concentrate. Nine letters, anagram for what? With a great effort I placed the b first. Then I was gone" (173). She is "gone" because of the aforementioned pills. The pills go from being anagrams themselves to being the agent of obscurity, preventing Curren from deciphering language.
Ultimately, Curren casts herself as the agent of obscurity, the container of hidden meaning. When she calls Florence's number and a child picks up, she asks them to leave a message for Thabane. She leaves her name and spells it for the child, then narrates: "Mrs. Curren: nine letters, anagram for what?" (174) This concept of anagrams functions to show Curren's attempt, and frequent failure, to uncover the hidden meaning of her life, to rearrange details and recontextualize that which was once familiar in order to understand her place in the world.
