Foe

trunks, I descend, petals floating around me like a rain of snowflakes.

The dark mass of the wreck is flecked here and there with white. It is huge, greater than the leviathan: a hulk shorn of masts, split across the middle, banked on all sides with sand. The timbers are black, the hole even blacker that gives entry. If the kraken lurks anywhere, it lurks here, watching out of its stony hooded undersea eyes.

Sand rises in slow flurries around my feet. There are no swarms of gay little fish. I enter the hole.

I am below deck, the port side of the ship beneath my feet, feeling my way along beams and struts soggy to the touch. The stub of candle hangs on a string around my neck. I hold it up before me like a talisman, though it sheds no light.

Something soft obstructs me, perhaps a shark, a dead shark overgrown with pulpy flowers of the sea, or the body of a guardian wrapped in rotting fabric, turn after turn. On hands and knees I creep past it.

I had not thought the sea could be dirty. But the sand under my hands is soft, dank, slimy, outside the circulation of the waters. It is like the mud of Flanders, in which generations of grenadiers now lie dead, trampled in the postures of sleep. If I am still for more than a moment I begin to sink, inch by inch.

I come to a bulkhead and a stairway. The door at the head of the stairway is closed; but when I put a shoulder to it and push, the wall of water yields and I can enter.

It is not a country bath-house. In the black space of this cabin the water is still and dead, the same water as yesterday, as last year, as three hundred years ago. Susan Barton and her dead captain, fat as pigs in their white nightclothes, their limbs extending stiffly from their trunks, their hands, puckered from long immersion, held out in blessing, float like stars against the low roof. I crawl beneath them.

In the last corner, under the transoms, half buried in sand, his knees drawn up, his hands between his thighs, I come to Friday.

I tug his woolly hair, finger the chain about his throat. ‘Friday,’ I say, I try to say, kneeling over him, sinking hands and knees into the ooze, ‘what is this ship?’

But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday.

He turns and turns till he lies at full length, his face to my face. The skin is tight across his bones, his lips are drawn back. I pass a fingernail across his teeth, trying to find a way in.

His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without. breath, without interruption. It Rows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face.

About the Author

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940 and educated in South Africa and in the United States as a computer scientist and linguist. His novels include Dusklands; In the Heart of the Country, which won the premier South African literary award, the CNA Prize; Waiting for the Barbarians, which was awarded the CNA Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Life & Times of Michael K, which won the Booker Prize and the Prix Etranger Femina; Foe; Age of Iron, which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; The Master of Petersburg, which won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize; Disgrace, which won the Booker Prize; Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, both longlisted for the Booker Prize; and Diary of a Bad Year. J. M. Coetzee also won the Jerusalem Prize in 1987 and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1998. His other works include translations, linguistic studies, literary criticism and three volumes of memoir: Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II and Summertime, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He lives in Australia.

Copyright

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First published in Great Britain by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd. 1986

First published in the United States of America by Viking 1987

Published in Penguin Books 1987

Reissued in this edition 2010

Copyright© J M. Coetzee, 1986 All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental

Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

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ISBN: 978-0-241-95011-1

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