Читать книгу Yellowbone - Ekow Duker - Страница 6

Even when Teacher was asleep he had this look of mild astonishment on his face. It was as if he couldn’t believe what he was dreaming. Precious touched his nose and watched it twitch. Then she pressed one nostril shut until Teacher’s breathing became shallow and rapid. He woke up with a start.

She spoke quickly before Teacher could gather his thoughts. ‘How long are your parents staying?’

Teacher rubbed his eyes and groaned. ‘My parents? You know they can stay as long as they want.’

She punched him lightly on the shoulder. ‘How long, Teacher? Two weeks? A month?’ It was too early in the morning to raise her voice but she raised it all the same.

He looked at her in astonishment. ‘What’s the matter, Precious?’

It was as if he didn’t live in the same house as she and Karabo. Their house was in proportion to a high school teacher’s salary and with Teacher’s parents in the house, they were practically living on top of each other. Precious snorted in frustration. How could he be so blind?

‘Your mother.’

It sounded like an insult but she didn’t mean it that way.

‘She doesn’t like me,’ she added.

Teacher smiled at her with that easy, broad-lipped smile that had made her fall in love with him in the first place.

‘She’s your mother-in-law,’ he said gently. ‘She’s not supposed to like you.’

‘I’m serious, Kojo. She doesn’t like Karabo either.’

Now this got Teacher’s attention and Precious felt a sudden stab of jealousy. Teacher propped himself up on one elbow and waited for her to continue, but she resisted the urge and stared blankly at him instead.

‘Did she hit her?’ he asked. There was a tremor in his voice.

Precious rolled her eyes to the ceiling. ‘And what would you have done if she had?’

Teacher’s lips tightened because they both knew he wouldn’t have done anything. Ma’ama was his mother, after all, and he was the dutiful son.

‘They’ll be gone in two weeks,’ Teacher said through clenched teeth. That made Precious feel bad because it was as if she was chasing his parents away. Her parents were right here in Mthatha but Teacher only saw his very rarely. She cupped his face in her hand and could feel the tightness in his jaw.

‘Paa Kofi can stay if he wants.’

She was trying to make light of the matter but Teacher could be just like the old BMW parked outside their bedroom window. When he got stuck on something, it was very difficult to get him going again.

Precious stroked his arm, thinking that might soothe away his anger. The slightest thing set Teacher off these days and she already regretted saying anything at all.

‘Your parents are next door,’ she said in a low voice. ‘We can talk properly after they are gone.’

To look at Teacher, one wouldn’t think he ever lost his temper. Not with his glasses slipping off his nose and his mild stutter. But sometimes he could get as angry as those young men in the ANC, the ones who began every sentence with ‘Amandla!’ and a clenched fist.

Precious stroked Teacher’s arm with greater urgency. ‘Karabo is sleeping. You’ll frighten her if you shout.’

That was Teacher’s magic word. Karabo. At the mere mention of her name, the sun came out in Teacher’s world and did not go down again. He made love to Precious that morning with a savagery that was most unlike a mild-mannered mathematics teacher. It felt as if he needed to punish Precious for something and as she clung to him, she realised she wanted the very same thing.

Something had changed between them since those early days when they first fell in love. As Teacher went back to sleep, Precious was still wide awake and as she looked at her husband, she remembered when she had first seen him.

Precious and her sister Thembeka were with their father that day in 1989 when the bus carrying the Ghanaians pulled into the Mthatha bus station. In those years many Ghanaian teachers and doctors emigrated to the then Transkei and the Mtakwendas had come to see the new arrivals for themselves. Their mother, however, had stayed at home. A Tswana woman, uMama was still not accustomed to how people in the Transkei stared at her. ‘It is as if they have never seen a light-skinned person before,’ she would complain. uTata would scold her and say she was imagining things. ‘Are we not all South African?’ he would growl through lips charred black by tobacco. But Precious, also fair skinned, knew their mother was right. People looked at her strangely too.

The Ghanaians spilled out of the bus with their ties still knotted and their jackets smartly buttoned. They looked as though they had boarded the bus less than an hour ago and not far away in Johannesburg. Among them was a man who stood out not only because he was the tallest and exceptionally dark, but because he looked like someone used to giving instructions. The men spoke a strange language with gentle, fluttering phrases that seemed to teeter on a ledge of melodious enquiry.

Precious, always the bolder of the two sisters, let go of Thembeka’s hand and began inching towards the group. She was halfway across the road when uTata came running up behind her and seized her by the scruff of the neck. He shook her hard and said gruffly, ‘These men are not from here.’

As uTata shepherded Precious and Thembeka away, the tall dark one called out in English and what he said were the first words Precious ever heard Teacher speak.

‘Where is our school?’

Those words made a deep and lasting impression on her. He hadn’t asked ‘Where is our guesthouse?’ or ‘Where can we find something to eat?’, but rather, ‘Where is our school?’ Later she would say that was Kojo through and through. No wonder they called him Teacher.

As Kojo’s reputation as a teacher grew, Precious’s excitement at one day being in his class grew in proportion. After all, she’d seen him first. She’d often watch Teacher from a distance as he strode purposefully through the Mathanzima High School grounds but she didn’t speak to him until she entered Standard Ten. He asked Precious her name on the very first day and she was so overcome that all she could manage was a stuttered response that had the entire class banging their desks with laughter. Teacher asked her again and this time she took a deep breath, smoothed the front of her dress, and said in her clearest voice, ‘Precious Mtakwenda’.

Teacher wasn’t married when he arrived in Transkei. Unlike most African men who came to South Africa, he didn’t have a wife or small children squirelled away in his home country, conveniently out of sight. Anyway, he was too absorbed by his teaching to have much time for women and that made the girls in Standard Ten even more determined to sleep with him. Teacher’s classes became a polite sort of scrum where the girls pretended not to understand the most basic formulae so Teacher would come over to their desks and help them. They even failed their tests deliberately so they would have to stay behind for detention. But soon there were so many girls in detention it was impossible for any of them to have a private moment with Teacher. So they abandoned that ruse and, much to Teacher’s delight, the average class mark went up again.

But unlike the other girls, Precious was genuinely atrocious at maths. It puzzled her that she should struggle so much with the subject when she tried so hard to be good at it. There were many at Mathanzima High School who equated light skin with ignorance and, conscious of this, Precious worked twice as hard to prove them wrong. She often envied Thembeka, her younger sister. With her dark skin, Thembeka took after uTata’s side of the family, and did not have to deal with the litany of bias and innuendo levelled at Precious. But despite all her frantic studying, it was not long before Precious was routinely the only one in detention.

Teacher listened carefully to Precious Mtakwenda’s shaky and hesitant logic and did his best to nudge her gently back to reason. He wrote out sums on the blackboard and explained the steps to her with such care that she marvelled at his patience while feeling ashamed by her inability to grasp the concepts. Teacher even wrote to a white school in Bloemfontein and asked them for a copy of their Standard Ten maths textbook in the hope that Precious might understand that better than the scant resources they had at Mathanzima High School. It was clear that getting Precious to understand differential equations and algebra was a personal challenge for Teacher. Sometimes he grew frustrated with her and spoke to her sharply but that only made the right answers flee in disarray from her head.

Precious tried pretending that she understood and nodded her head in what she hoped were all the right places, but of course Teacher caught her out. Her deception grieved him much more than her inability to do her sums. They were both exhausted by then and in time began talking about other things – mostly about him. Precious was curious to know about Teacher’s parents and what it had been like growing up in Ghana. But Teacher could be very shy and Precious had to coax the stories out of him. In those moments their roles oddly reversed, with Precious as the patient instructor, and Teacher the reticent pupil.

Precious’s family had been opposed to the marriage from the beginning. She did not understand why. After all, wasn’t Teacher highly respected? Didn’t he have a good job? When she asked uTata why this was, he’d stood up abruptly from his chair and went outside, muttering something about her taking the family backwards.

‘We all know Teacher is a good man,’ her mother had said at last. ‘And I am very fond of him.’ She took her daughter’s hands in hers and held them tight. ‘But he is so dark.’ She spoke in a whisper as if she did not want to be overheard. ‘Think of the problems you and he will face. The disadvantages.’

‘What disadvantages?’ Precious had asked.

But her mother had just sighed and said nothing more.

Following her restless night, Precious got to the kitchen and found Ma’ama already there. Her wax prints were as elegant as ever and a string of hand-painted beads hung from her neck. A look passed between Precious and Karabo. Ma’ama seemed to wear a different outfit every day.

At breakfast Precious did her best to play the part of the good wife. She looked down at her plate and said as little as possible, but both Ma’ama and she knew it was only an act.

‘I hope you slept well?’ Precious asked.

Ma’ama looked at her daughter-in-law with a mixture of regret and scorn. ‘How could I sleep? I was disturbed by some noises.’

The five of them were huddled around the small table, co-conspirators around a pot of porridge. Teacher and Paa Kofi kept their eyes averted. Only Karabo spoke up.

‘What noises, Ma? I didn’t hear anything.’

‘There were no noises,’ Precious said quickly. ‘Your grandmother must be mistaken.’

A small smile tugged at Paa Kofi’s lips.

‘At least we were not cold,’ he said.

Winter had not yet arrived but it had already sent its messengers to warn of its coming. Precious had had to light the cast-iron stove a month early because of Teacher’s parents. They were not used to the cold at all. They wrapped themselves up so tightly when they went outside it was as if Mthatha were caught in the depths of an Arctic blizzard. Teacher rarely helped to clean the stove but he was very proud to have it in the house. There was something about the way it banished the cold so completely that gave him a deep sense of achievement. It was as if in some small way he had wrestled against the elements and won.

Ma’ama didn’t allow Paa Kofi to serve himself. She fussed over him as if they had just met and she still needed to impress him. She filled his bowl to the brim with porridge but took hardly any for herself. When Precious followed her lead and served Teacher in the same way, he glanced up at her in surprise.

‘Ma’ama,’ Precious said when she had sat down again, ‘is there something wrong?’

Ma’ama’s spoon was suspended in the air and she was turning it slowly in front of her nose.

‘Hmm.’ She sniffed in a way that left no doubt as to her meaning. ‘Hmm.’

Precious grimaced behind her serviette. That would be another black mark against her name. She’d been in such a hurry this morning that she’d forgotten to lay out a matching set of cutlery for her mother-in-law. Ma’ama took mismatched cutlery as a sign of moral deficiency.

She knew Ma’ama blamed her for keeping Teacher in Mthatha. If it wasn’t for Precious, Teacher could have done much better for himself. He could be in Johannesburg or Cape Town, teaching in a proper school with black children who spoke like white children and with good food in the canteen.

He’d applied once for a teaching position in a school in Bloemfontein, the same one he’d written to some years before asking for a mathematics textbook for Precious. She’d thought him crazy to think he could get a job in Bloemfontein of all places, even if he did have a relationship of sorts with Gerhard, one of the teachers over there. But Teacher insisted he stood as good a chance as anybody else. After all and with the 1994 elections behind them, weren’t all the white establishments at pains to demonstrate that they were on the right side of history?

When three weeks later the letter arrived in the post, Teacher was left disappointed and angry. He called Gerhard for an explanation, only to be told they’d given the job to a Coloured man. Teacher remembered the man well. He’d met him in the waiting room and, as job applicants do, the two had struck up a conversation. It surprised Teacher that for a man who professed to be a mathematics teacher, this applicant had no idea who the great mathematicians, such as Descartes, Pascal and Nash, were. Teacher could have forgiven that. They were there to interview for a teaching job in mathematics, not history. But when he discovered the Coloured man didn’t even know what a Fibonacci number was, Teacher had been quietly confident he would get the job.

‘We were looking for a teacher the students could relate to,’ Gerhard said over the phone. ‘I hope you understand, Mr Bentil.’

‘You mean I’m too black,’ Teacher said, while Precious kneaded the knots in his neck. And Gerhard promptly hung up.

Secretly, Precious had been pleased for she had no desire to leave Mthatha. If she were honest, the thought frightened her a little. She still remembered what uTata had said to her the first day she’d seen Teacher all those years ago. Teacher wasn’t from here, he’d said. But she was.