Читать книгу The Curse of the Ripe Tomato - John Eppel - Страница 6

Chapter Two

A Curious Thing

The poet, I suppose, might have called it a felt thought, though in Duiker’s case, the immediacy of the experience had more to do with the sipping of strong, milky tea than, say, the odour of a rose. Call it, if you like, the running together of blood, imagination, and intellect; call it undissociated sensibility; call it an intellectual and emotional complex presenting itself in an instant of time. Play the tautology game. It was on their third, deeply satisfying sips of Brooke Bond (tagless) that Nothando Grommet and Duiker Berry had their sensibilities modified. In one voice of recognition they cried, “Patience!/Mr Duiker!” In one move they were in each other’s arms. She began to ululate, softly, against his neck, and the tear that ran down the side of her nose, skirted her mouth, and disappeared in the vicinity of her chin, was his.

She never called him “Mr Duiker” again, and he called her “Patience” only a few more times. Let no one deny the influence for good of a strong cup of tea. In a moment, which can only be called epiphanic, the duality of servant and master was transformed into the unity of friends, companions, fellow Zimbabweans. It took more than one cup of tea, and more than one ginger snap, a packet of which Mrs Grommet produced from the capacious pocket of her apron, for them to tell their respective stories.

Nothando Sibanda had been the “town” wife of Aaron, the Berrys’ “houseboy” for many years. Duiker’s mother, who had made the important decisions in the family, kindly allowed Aaron to have his wife with him in the servant’s quarters. There she spent her days sweeping the ground with a grass broom, plaiting her hair, and preparing sadza and relish for Aaron. At least that’s how she seemed to spend her days; that’s how it seemed to Mrs Girlie Berry of Pioneer stock. But Duiker and his younger sister, April, knew better. Before they lost their innocence they were frequently to be found in the company of Patience, either in the kia which consisted of a living room, a toilet, a shower, and a fireplace, or directly outside in the shade of an Indaba tree. Now this tree bore a fruit, every few years, which Duiker’s father, Bill, claimed was deadly poisonous, and which he forbade his children to eat. But the birds ate it: great flocks of them: starlings, bulbuls, mousebirds, golden orioles... and Patience ate it. The children watched her one day, the year she came to live with Aaron, the month after which April was named. Fruit after fruit she plucked from the laden tree, and popped into her mouth. The children, gaping, waited for her to keel over and die. They imagined her rolling in the dust, gripping her tummy, and making terrible death rattles.

But she survived. Not only that: when she noticed them staring at her she called them over and broke them off a branch each, laden with juicy berries. They watched her eat a few more before they hesitantly began to test a berry. Duiker’s was so tightly packed with juice that it made a tiny explosion against his palate. Like most wild fruits it had a sharp taste but it was delicately flavoured and very refreshing. Duiker spat out the single, shiny black seed and began another. He noticed his sister tucking in with relish. It was the fruit of the Pappea capensis, not a sip of English tea, that originally united in friendship the boy and the young woman.

In-between sweeping the ground, plaiting her hair, and cooking for Aaron, Patience read; she read anything she could lay her hands on, which wasn’t much. Permanently accessible to her were Aaron’s bible which Aaron used only on Sundays, and a tattered Everyman edition of the poems and prophecies of William Blake which she found on the Berrys’ rubbish dump. Then Duiker and April would lend her their comics (“Dell comics are good comics”) and their Enid Blyton adventures which she found very entertaining. The antics of Kiki the parrot made her laugh so loudly that once, Duiker’s mother, who was nursing, simultaneously, a sick child, a migraine, and a glass (her fourth) of milk stout, told Aaron to “Tell that girl to shut up or I’ll throw her off the property!”

But it was the writings of William Blake and the teachings of Jesus Christ that absorbed her. Blake she had never heard of before coming to Umdidi. The bible she was familiar with. She had received a good primary education at a Roman Catholic mission school tucked away in the magnificent Matopos hills of Matabeleland, an education which included sufficient politicization to make her aware that she was a member of an oppressed majority; an awareness which, years later, gave her the courage to join the struggle for Independence, first in Zambia where she nursed and taught children in a refugee camp, and later in England where her plans to train as a midwife were interrupted by a somewhat over-hasty marriage to a Londoner called Fred Grommet. While Fred, who lived on the dole, drank beer after beer, and watched television programme after television programme (always in a grimy white vest), Nothando swept the apartment, plaited her hair, and prepared baked beans on toast for her husband.

When it was discovered that Nothando could not have children, her marriage to Aaron was dissolved. Aaron, to his credit, made special arrangements, in what can only be called a spirit of co-operation, for his uncles and his brothers to make Nothando pregnant. Nothing happened so she was rejected. Not only, she then realized, was she a member of an oppressed race, but of an oppressed gender too. When she walked away from the servants’ quarters at the Berry home in Umdidi, she took with her the Blake book - after all:

EVERYMAN, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side.

And as she walked down the narrow path, overhung with tick-infested grasses, that would take her to the strip road which, in turn, would take her to the railway station - thence to Bulawayo, thence, furtively, kraal by kraal, to Zambia - she recited these verses from her favourite poem:

Every Night & every Morn Some to Misery are Born. Every Morn & every Night Some are Born to sweet delight. Some are Born to sweet delight, Some are Born to Endless Night.

With her meagre belongings bundled, and balanced on her head, she walked, adjusting her pace - brief appraisal of tongueless white tackies - to the rhythm of Blake’s lines: “Every Night & every Morn....” She wondered at the poet’s eccentric use of capital letters, and mildly disapproved of his abbreviated form of the word “and”. She remembered how the teachers at St Augustans strictly forbade the use of abbreviations in the pupils’ English compositions. Left right left right, “Some are Born to sweet delight”; left right left right, “Some are Born to Endless Night.” So she walked.

Duiker was stunned to hear that his family had harboured for a time a... er... terrorist. His fourth ginger snap lodged itself in his gullet. How could dear, kind Patience who used to feed him sweet potatoes baked in hot ashes, and mealies boiled in their leaves and then lightly roasted on an open fire; who used to take out his splinters - paper thorns and duiweltjies; who taught him the rudiments of a beautiful language - khulumisana i-Sindebele; how could she think of butchering the Berry family in their beds... in the dead of night, with wolves... for goodness’ sake, not wolves... jackals, howling, owls hooting, and bats flitting across the moon? I mean, how could she?

A fifth ginger snap accompanied by an unconditional smile from the charlady, Mrs “Knotty” Grommet, and a decisive swallow of tea, dislodged the fourth, and Duiker settled into his account - it had to be brief because Mrs Grommet had work to do before Management began to arrive - his account of how he came to be a nightwatchman in a city somewhat larger and somewhat more cosmopolitan than Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

Duiker told Nothando of his miserable schooling at Milton Senior, his even more miserable stint in the army when he was badly wounded, his Perfumed Wind business which made him wealthy for a time, his unhappy period in Durban, his miraculous conversion to Christianity. He answered eager questions about his mother and father, and his sister April, his best friend, Percy, whom Nothando had known, his dog, Lady, and his cat, Socks.

“Yes, no, Patience... er... Nothando, I saw this ad in an English newspaper that Buckingham Palace was going to open to the public and there were jobs going for wardens, cashiers, cloakroom attendants, and stuff like that. I applied from Bulawayo and was invited for an interview. That’s what finally decided me to get out of Zimbabwe... maybe for ever. What’s more, I got the job.”

“But now you are here?”

“It was only a temporary job, less than nine weeks.” Duiker didn’t tell Nothando that he’d applied for the post of Ticket Office Cashier but had been offered the post, which nobody else had applied for, of Lavatory Attendant. Being desperate for employment, he had accepted the post and had soon turned it to his advantage. He had made friends with other lavatory attendants, including those with permanent posts, one of whom had access to the private lavatories which were used by the Royal Family and their guests.

It was Duiker’s idea but he could never have put it into practice without the collaboration of a whole network of Royal attendants, not the least important being the Royal plumber and his Royal assistants. Duiker’s plan was to retrieve all the turds that were deposited in the Buckingham Palace toilets before they lost their individuality in the democratic process of the London sewerage system. This was difficult enough but what really called for teamwork was the necessity of identifying whose turd was whose!

In the curio shops of Zimbabwe, tourists can purchase various wild animal turds - baboon, buffalo, leopard, hyena - preserved in perspex. It’s a gimmick that sells. Why not, thought Duiker (inventor, don’t forget, of Perfumed Wind), why not do the same with Royal turds and the turds of their visiting dignitaries? Identify their depositors, preserve them in perspex, and sell them on the streets of London to tourists from Africa and other parts of the world who have less to thank England for than England imagines.

By trial and error the team finally got it worked out. With almost one hundred percent accuracy they could put a name to each turd that came swanning out of Buckingham Palace’s main sewerage pipe. Soon a pattern began to emerge which made identification much easier. For instance, one personage’s turd was dominated by bran, another’s by tomato skins, another’s - astonishingly - by totally undigested fragments of a mouselike desert rodent of subfamily Gerbillinae, with long hind legs. The gimmick was a huge success - until the authorities stepped in. The turds were ambered in perspex, labelled “Lady so and so’s Droppings” or “Prince so and so’s Log” - poetically rendered according to size, shape and consistency. Duiker’s team made a lot of money in a short space of time on the streets of London. Most of the buyers were from Africa, France, and Australia. When the product was banned, Duiker applied for the post of Security Guard at the Alperton factory. The interviewer was impressed with Duiker’s somewhat embellished account of his role in Zimbabwe’s War of Independence, in particular the fact that he had been wounded, and he was appointed with immediate effect.

“Then I applied for this night watchman’s job and was lucky enough to get it. Any more of those delicious biscuits?”

She pushed the packet across to him, downed her tea, and stood up to begin work. “And are you happy here, my brother?” she said.

“Not really, Patience,” he replied through a mouthful of biscuit. The English aren’t very friendly, are they?”

“No, not very. They can be sarcastic. They look down on me because I’m black.”

“Even your husband?”

“He’s the worst, Umqobompunzi, the very worst.”

“Mr Grommet?”

“He is a pig, that one.”

“Ingulube.”

“Yebo!” She laughed, and her entire body responded. You still remember the words I taught you when you were a little boy?”

“Of course I do Pay... Nothando. You taught me the names of the animals, all the totems, and you taught me the greetings...”

“Uvuke njani, Duiker?”

“Ngivukile, Mama. Ngingabuza wena?”

“Ngivukile.” She laughed again and took Duiker’s face in her hands which smelt faintly, and pleasantly, of camphor cream. “What the hell are we doing here Duiker? Let’s go home.”