Summary
Curren's condition continues to decline steadily, and Vercueil stays with her, tending to her needs. At the beginning of Part 4, Curren describes a dream she had involving Florence. The dream takes place in front of a parliamentary building on Government Avenue, near where Curren lives in Cape Town. The dream involves Curren's fantasy of dying by lighting herself on fire in front of the capitol building. She sets the scene of the dream "with a crowd of people of all kinds and conditions gathered around" her—she says "the air is festive," and that she is "to provide a show." But despite the crowd, Florence walks past the scene seeming to either not notice or not care. She walks with her two little daughters: "Hope by the hand and carrying Beauty on her back ... she passes as if through a congregation of wraiths" (177).
Florence and her two daughters are all wearing masks in the dream, and Curren is convinced that Florence, in her dream, is an embodiment of the goddess Aphrodite, an avatar of the goddess "emerging for an instant, showing herself, passing" (178). Meanwhile, Curren is engulfed in flame, but feeling no pain, and watching Florence pass in awe. Curren relates the dream to Vercueil, who asks if the dream is "real." Curren isn't sure what he means by "real," in the context of the dream, but she tells him the dream is not real, and not, in fact, "even authentic," because "Florence has nothing to do with Greece" (178-179). Vercueil repeats his question about the "reality" of the dream, but Curren is at a loss. Curren tells Vercueil she can't go back to the hospital because she knows if she goes there, she'll receive palliative care and never leave. The best thing that can happen to her at the hospital is that they numb her senses before she dies.
Curren asks Vercueil to fix the antenna so she can listen to the radio, but Vercueil turns the television on instead, as a tease, knowing Curren can't stand the sound or sight of television. He dances beside the TV while Curren screams at him to turn it off, which he eventually does. He tells her there's no use in getting so angry, but Curren is irate. She feels trivialized. She tells Vercueil she "[hasn't] got time for patience" (181), but he disagrees, telling her that she just might. At this, Curren cannot help but grin. Vercueil climbs onto the roof and fixes the antenna, and Curren listens to An American in Paris, awaiting her next scheduled pill before she slips into sleep.
Mrs. Curren calls her surgeon, Dr. Syfret, to ask about Diconal, the medication she's been taking to manage her pain. She requests a different prescription because the Diconal is giving her hallucinations. Dr. Syfret is surprised to hear from Mrs. Curren because he didn't figure she still considered him her primary doctor. He suggests she check herself into a hospital. Curren tells the doctor that she isn't seeking care, just something to manage the pain. She all but admits to the doctor that she knows she is dying soon and asks him to consider prescribing her something different without an appointment. Syfret reiterates that he would be happy to see her, but he won't prescribe medicine sight unseen. However, later that day, the pharmacy delivers Curren a two-week supply of a new drug, Tylox. Curren calls the pharmacy to ask if Tylox is "the last one prescribed," and the pharmacist assures her that that isn't the way it works, that "there is no first and no last" (184).
Around this time, Curren asks Vercueil if the dog can sleep with her to help keep her warm at night. Vercueil tells her that she can try, but the dog won't stay because it feels the need to sleep beside Vercueil. Curren asks Vercueil to sleep in her bed, too, and he does. They sleep with the dog nestled between them, and with the Tylox and the additional warmth, her sleep is not as restless as it was before. After Vercueil essentially moves into Mrs. Curren's room, she manages to hear little tidbits of his past, which before this point in their relationship, had remained a complete mystery.
Vercueil tells Curren that he lost the use of his dead fingers in an accident at sea. His hand was crushed in a pulley mechanism and went untreated for a day. By the time they were in reach of help, the nerves had died. He also tells her that he used to work at the ASPCA, and that he's always had a liking for dogs and vice versa. Curren tells Vercueil that she's worried for him, because once she dies, he'll be all alone again. She advises him to find a wife and refers to him in her narration to her daughter as "stoksielalleen: a stick in an empty field, a soul alone, sole" (187). She also calls Vercueil her "shadow husband" (189) and signs off the section of her letter to her daughter as "Mrs. V" (190).
Vercueil goes through Curren's office with her, sifting through her many possessions that were shuffled around when the police searched her house. He compares Curren's house to a museum, and she calls it "a museum that ought to be in a museum" (190). Vercueil suggests that she sell her things, and Curren tells him he can sell anything he'd like to try to sell. She then jokes with him that he could try to sell her, too. Vercueil asks Curren about Latin, and she tells him it's a dead language. She recites a passage of Virgil, and Vercueil asks if she would've been able to teach him Latin if there were more time. Curren is sure of it.
Curren then suggests that instead of mailing the letters to her daughter after she dies, he could fly to America and bring them to her in person. She offers to arrange all of his travel in advance. Vercueil thinks she's joking at first, but she's not. Then, switching to a direct address of her daughter, Curren says that the offer could never have actually been executed. She realizes that if Vercueil actually went to America and stayed with her daughter, no one involved would feel comfortable. She knows it would just be another burden. Curren then tells her daughter that she doesn't consider her grandchildren as real parts of her life. She feels entirely disconnected from them. "They are not my grandchildren," she says. "They are too distant to be children of mine of whatever sort" (195).
The novel ends with Curren describing herself slowly detaching from the world. As she grows weaker, Vercueil grows more attentive to her needs. Where he was once a flighty vagrant who slept in her side-yard, he is now as close to a nurse as he could ever be. Curren drifts into fitful periods of sleep thinking she'll never wake up, but she keeps waking up. The final scene of the novel occurs as Curren wakes from a cold sleep and finds Vercueil standing out on her balcony. She goes to him and asks what he's looking at, but he gives no answer. She asks him, "Is it time?" and climbs back into bed. He climbs in after her, and Curren relates her final words to her daughter: "He took me in his arms and held me with mighty force, so that the breath went out of me in a rush. From that embrace there was no warmth to be had" (198).
Analysis
In the fourth and final section of Age of Iron, Curren returns to the scene and circumstance of her most prominent suicidal ideation—self-immolation in front of the parliamentary buildings on Government Avenue. When she has previously considered committing suicide this way, she's thought of what Florence would think of her. She lands on the conclusion that Florence would consider it clownish behavior. Curren returns to the ideation in a dream, and in her dream, her flaming body attracts a large crowd. Florence and her children pass by, not looking, and Curren makes a point to clarify that while she is engulfed in flames, she feels no pain: "Burning, doing my show, I stand transfixed. The flames flowing from me are blue as ice. I feel no pain" (178).
Curren then compares Florence to Aphrodite and says, "Forever the goddess is passing, forever, caught in a posture of surprise and regret, I do not follow" (178). Shortly after relating the dream to Vercueil, Curren says to him, "All the days you have known me ... I have been standing on the riverbank awaiting my turn. I am waiting for someone to show me the way across. Every minute of every day I am here, waiting." She continues to explain to Vercueil why she refuses to go to the hospital to receive palliative care—she says that they will drug her and then, she "will never cross." She says, "I cannot allow it to happen. I have come too far. I cannot have my eyes closed" (179). This whole dream sequence gestures to the gradual development of Curren's consciousness regarding her place in the struggle to end apartheid. The blue flames that engulf Curren in her dream don't hurt her, and this signifies her understanding—at least subconsciously—that such an ostentatious show of support of the movement actually wouldn't cost her anything. She's already dying, and the desire for a final, grand gesture like setting herself ablaze in front of Parliamentary buildings is more self-serving, more about her personal legacy, than it would be about anything else.
The dream and Curren's subsequent explication of the dream demonstrate her understanding that the only way for her to support the movement is to follow the lead of those oppressed by apartheid. In the first half of the novel, Curren's generosity is continually challenged. She's asked to give reasons for why she won't simply "proceed on a basis of charity" (21). When she tries to hire Vercueil as a gardener, he asks why she can't just give him the money instead. When she realizes that Bheki and his friend were sleeping in her car, and she tells Florence, "I cannot turn my home into a haven for all the children running away from the townships," Florence replies, "But why not?" (54). When she drives Florence to Site C and Thabane and a young man want to use her car, she refuses them. Time after time, Curren is given these directives, these routes "across the river," and only after brushing up against the brutal reality of apartheid, after standing over Bheki's murdered body, does she finally let go of her strict proprietary sensibilities. She opens her house up to John, but the police murder him anyway. She opens her house to Vercueil, but even then, the arrangement is mutually beneficial (and arguable more favorable for Curren than for Vercueil in her final days).
In any case, by the end of the novel, Curren seems to fully grasp that she has been a beneficiary of apartheid her entire life, and that the only way to rectify that would have been to throw all of her material weight, all that was asked of her by the rising generation of oppressed South Africans, behind the cause of ending apartheid. When Vercueil roots through her possessions that were displaced when the police ransacked her house, Curren tells him to sell it all. She says, "Sell me too ... for bones. For hair. Sell my teeth too. Unless you think I am worth nothing" (191). This scene demonstrates the almost ascetic attitude that Curren gradually adopts in the company of Vercueil, and in the face of multiple tragedies.
By the end of the novel, Curren finally indicts her daughter's isolationist attitude toward South Africa. Looking through photos of her daughter's family in America, of her two grandchildren who, like the daughter, remain unnamed, Curren admits that she feels nothing toward the children but estrangement and a sense of disappointment. She's disappointed by how sheltered they are, and this sheltered life, she feels, is captured best by the orange floaties they wear in a photograph of them swimming in a lake. She writes, "let me say, in all tentativeness, that perhaps it dispirits me that your children will never drown." Curren goes on to explain that she doesn't wish death upon the children; in fact, she wishes them life. "But the wings you have tied on them will not guarantee them life," she writes, in reference to the floaties. "Life is dust between the toes. Life is dust between the teeth. Life is biting the dust" (194-195). In this way, Curren finally confronts her daughter for thinking that simply by leaving South Africa, by expending her privilege to get away from apartheid, she has divested herself of her complicity.
