Читать книгу Queen of the Free State - Jennifer Friedman - Страница 12

One January morning, a full year before I’m due to start school in Sub A, Ma meets with the primary school principal, Mr De Bruin.

‘Ja, I don’t know, mevrou,’ he says. ‘You know this is an Afrikaans-medium school? Your daughter will have to speak Afrikaans fluently before she can start Sub A next year …’

Behind his bastion of Afrikanerdom, Mr De Bruin looks uneasy at the prospect of his stronghold being infiltrated by the English-speaking enemy. Of his daughter being exposed to outside influences. He taps his fingers on the armrests of his chair. Ma’s sitting in his neat office opposite his carefully squared-off, government-issue wooden desk. On either side of a colour print of the Vierkleur of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, portraits of past and dead presidents of the Orange Free State stare solemnly from the walls. There’s no sign of Her Majesty’s official portrait. Ma looks him in the eye:

‘Mr De Bruin, my daughter will be starting school here next year. I assure you, she’ll be fluent in Afrikaans.’

At the end of our ‘We’re-speaking-only-Afrikaans-at-home’ year, Ma buys me new crayons and a small, wood-framed black slate, exercise books and a crisp, new Afrikaans reader called Sus en Daan. I spend hours in my room making up stories around the pictures, pretending to read the words out loud. She also buys me a brown cardboard suitcase lined inside with blue and cream squares. Two stiff silver locks open and close it. I can lock them with a tiny silver key. Ma takes it away.

‘I’ll keep it safe for you,’ she says.

Every day for a month, I pack and repack my suitcase. I put my nose inside it and breathe in the smell of new crayons and fresh books.

I have to wear a school uniform. Ma knots my green, gold and maroon tie in a triangle under my chin. I have to wear a white panama hat. I hate it.

‘You’re going to end up one big freckle!’ Ma says.

Even worse, now I have to wear shoes and socks every day. Ma says I’ve got beautiful narrow feet like hers. She buys me sensible Clarks shoes with buckles and leather soles. I want lace-ups with rubber soles and pointy toes. Ma just sniffs and turns away her head. She knits me cotton socks with bobbly, holey patterns. They hurt my feet.

‘Nonsense – they’re lovely,’ she insists. ‘Different.’

No nylon bought socks for me. No rubber-soled, pointy-toed, lace-up shoes either. I take a deep sniff inside my school suitcase for hope and reassurance.

My plaits are festooned with maroon ribbons. Crowned and buttressed by panama hat and cardboard case, I become instantly invisible amid the ubiquitous panama hat and cap-bobbing hordes of children dutifully filing in through the rusting school gates.

I’m starting school today …

Ma holds my hand. Briskly, she walks me to my classroom where I meet my teacher, Miss Barbie de Kock, for the first time. Miss De Kock isn’t wearing stockings and she’s got badly fitting closed shoes with pointy toes on her feet. She has thick red welts on the backs of her heels. I find these so grown-up and beautiful, and I long for heels like hers. When I tell Ma, she’s horrified by such pedestrian ambition. In despair, I realise that in my bobbled cotton socks and sensible round-toed shoes, my chances are severely curtailed.

Miss De Kock’s wearing a red shirt-waister dress. Dark sweat stains have rubbed under her arms in grown-up half-moons. I’m overwhelmed by such a defiant demonstration of adulthood. She’s also wielding Petrus Plak in one hand and, tapping the leather strap against the other with a sharp crack!, she assures us she’ll have no compunction using it, no matter how minor the infringement may seem.

Ma delivers me into the hands of this dame sans merci. Children and mothers are crying around us. Snot and tears spot and smear shirtsleeves and skirts. Anguished hands lose their grip in the ensuing slipperiness. Ma kisses me goodbye, pats me perfunctorily on the head and leaves me, Joan of Arc, to lead my lone self into battle.

‘Ma! I’m not ever going back to that bladdy school again!’

Ma comes running down the passage.

‘Why? What’s the matter? What happened at school, sweetheart?’

She’s frowning. I draw my wrist across my face, smear tears and dirt across my cheeks.

‘Elsie de Bruin called me a bladdyjew!’ I say. ‘Then everyone else also started calling me that and what does a bladdyjew mean, Ma? I don’t like those children – they’re mean and horrible and I’m not going back there. I don’t like it!’

Ma’s furious.

‘Listen, you’re five years old, old enough to fight your own battles. I’ll tell you what to say if they call you that name again …’

‘I’m not going back there, Ma!’

‘… If they tease you again tomorrow,’ Ma continues, ‘You tell them that if you’re a bloody Jew, then so was Jesus, because he was a Jew too …’

‘Who’s Jesus, Ma?’

‘Oh. Umm, he’s like God …’

‘Who?’

‘Plenty of time to learn about that stuff later. Don’t worry about it now …’ she says.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Next day, Ma has to knot my tie again. She warns me not to drink the milk at school; it’s only for the poor children.

‘Some children can’t even afford school shoes,’ she says when I complain. I think they’re lucky. I wish I didn’t have to wear shoes every day.

Elsie’s waiting for me at our classroom door. I push past her. She follows me, hissing like a goose, beating my back with her hands. She’s bigger than I am. I stumble against the corner of my desk.

‘Bladdyjew!’ she screams, and pushes her face into mine. Her breath smells of old soup. Her yellow teeth are furry. ‘Bladdyjew!’

The class is primed. Crowding around us, everyone starts chanting: ‘Bladdyjew! Bladdyjew!’

I’m determined not to cry. Elsie starts screaming again and shakes her fist in my face.

‘You’re a bladdyjew and my father says the bladdyjews killed Liewe Jesus!’

I can feel the heat of her rage steaming off her. The air smells rancid. I scream back at her.

‘You tell your stupid bladdy father, if I’m a bladdyjew then so was Liewe Jesus! He was also a bladdy Jew!’

Elsie sucks her breath back in horror.

‘Ag, you lie, you bladdyjew liar!’ she screams. ‘Everyone knows Liewe Jesus was an Afrikaner!’

In the dark night, I stand bent over, my head in the corner of my room. My arms are up at my sides, streamlined like wings. My fingers are stretched like an eagle’s pinion feathers, and I’m turning around so fast, my eyes blur, and I shoot through my bedroom ceiling, through the corrugated-iron roof, rise up into the air until I’m flying free and wild, gliding like an eagle, wheeling and soaring untouchable in the high, empty spaces of the sky.

The flying dream rescues me every night.

I turn around in the corner of my room, pierce through the ceilings and roofs of bad days until I’m up and out – free – fearless as a bird over the cage of the town and all the people in it.