Читать книгу Room 207 - Kgebetli Moele - Страница 9

D’nice

Honestly, we are a drinking nation. We don’t go, during the holidays, on tours of this lovely country of ours, from the Klein Karoo to Skukuza, via Borakalalo National Park. No.

Why not?

Because we don’t care. That’s for white people. I don’t blame them. Don’t blame us. We drink, grill meat and cook some hard porridge, then quarrel and maybe end up fighting or trying to stop one fight from getting way out of hand.

I was at a New Year celebration; it was just before half-four, New Year. Only a few people, the real party animals and drinkers, were still partying and drinking. Matome and I were still fighting the war, which so far had been without incident, and then these two guys who were sitting not far from us, sharing a beer, started to quarrel about something. We didn’t take any notice of them and they quarrelled on, still sharing the beer.

The first guy said, “You take me as the things you shit in the toilet.”

The second guy, ignoring him, said, “Let me smoke.”

And the first guy took a cigarette out of his pocket and gave it to him, repeating to him, as he gave him the cigarette, “You take me for your shit in the toilet.”

He even gave him the lighter.

Then the second guy, after lighting the cigarette, replied, “If you feel like you are someone else’s shit in the toilet, then you are shit.”

“Joe! Joe! Joe! I’m going to break you, going to break you now.”

“Hey! Drink beer. This is the first day of this year. So don’t try, because then I’ll have to do something very bad to you. It will be a bad year for you.”

They went on talking, frightening and threatening each other with harmless words. To make it seem even more harmless they were sharing the cigarette and a seven-fifty lengolongolo.

Surprise.

It got very ugly and there was blood everywhere.

Afterwards, they patched it up with each other, and shared a cigarette and a lekhamba, like they didn’t want to break each other’s heads any more. And that was how I met D’nice for the first time; after he had been fighting with his dear friend.

D’nice came to the city the very same year that I met Matome. He came, as everybody who comes to dream city, hoping and dreaming. He came to the city to continue with his education. He was brilliant, with a three digit IQ. He’d passed eight of the nine subjects in matric with straight As and got a B in the other one – and that’s way ahead of the fifteen points needed to gain acceptance to Wits.

Well, let’s look carefully at the issues.

The issue here: The cost of tertiary education and black students.

We were all like D’nice in one way or another, or maybe like him in every way.

Your mother works as a washerwoman. Your father, at fifty-one, is on the blue card, leaving his house every morning to take refuge and comfort with his mates in the war against alcohol. If you’re lucky you have a grandparent or two and through them some pension money, which doesn’t really help with anything, but is better than nothing. Then there are seven of you. Your two older sisters, who are sitting at home with one-year computer certificates waiting for that job, which, let’s be honest, isn’t coming. But what is coming is a child, whose father won’t show up, even at its first birthday party. The other two are doing grade twelve this year, and the others are in grade ten and grade eight respectively.

Then you get admitted to the great institution and, before even three months have passed, the last cent from the blue card is gone.

Have you ever been at university?

With two pairs of black shoes (the good pair and the other pair, in which your feet act as the sole – thank God your toes are still intact), two T-shirts, two round-neck skippers, one V-neck, one vest, two pairs of underwear (that should be written off), four pairs of jeans and four pairs of smart trousers. Not to forget about the pair of washed-every-evening socks. You have absolutely no pocket money at all, and then there is the institution itself, which keeps reminding you that you need to pay your fees or you are out. As if you weren’t their student at all, but were working. Four months pass with their share of peer pressure and stress. Then comes the student awards and they award you the most unfashionable student of the year or, worse still, they look at you as some kind of socially handicapped library-dweller . . .

It gets too deep inside, into the soul, and then you start to lose a kilogram every two and a quarter days and now your well-cared-for clothing hangs on you like it was never yours.

Have you ever been at a tertiary institution of education and witnessed what the black students are going through?

D’nice survived Wits by his own will and sometimes, when he looked back and thought about how he made it, it puzzled him.

From a high school in the rural areas, where not that much matters much and the school didn’t even have a proper office. From a place where what matters the most is to see a smile on your face.

He came into the heart of the dream city with his dreams, putting on a smile with a promise: I am going to show them the best of me and they will think I’m from a private school.

Three months into the thing, peer pressure ran him down, and he realised nobody gave a shit about the smile on his face.

He lay on his bed in his paid-for room, courtesy of his scholarship, thinking that he was in the wrong place, thinking that he didn’t belong there, while the tears were trying hard to wet the bed.

Then he made a decision.

He got up, wiping away the tears, shook his head and promised them, “They have to take me as I am, because I am what I am.”

And that was that.

D’nice was the kind of guy who’d wake up at ten to prepare an assignment that was due at four. He had no need for a rubber or Tipp-Ex. He wrote. It was written. No looking back. His was always the last assignment in the box. He was never known to attend more than three lectures a week.

He was called to the dean’s office once and, like always, he was drunk. The dean gave him a tongue-lashing and D’nice took it calmly, and when the dean was tired, he looked at him calmly. The dean knew that D’nice was always in the A-plus category on every exam and assignment and, to make it even worse, he came from a rural public school.

D’nice said, “Sir, I have a very different mind, which I don’t really understand myself. I get very bored and it wanders, then I have to keep it forever in a state of intoxication to control it.”

He said that to the dean and that became D’nice’s passport for part-time studying and permanent intoxication – a definite, sure way to be survived by the great institution.

D’nice was not your average genius with spectacles. He looked more like a conservative man with short hair and because of that you would miss the fact that he was a genius. He would read a paragraph in the paper and then he would know it, and you could do that too, but you can’t rewrite it in the same way it was written, can you? He could do that and he wouldn’t even miss a comma. He read everything once, and if he reread it, it was giving him some kind of philosophical problem.

Long ago, when he was still doing his matric, the mathematics teacher wrote a problem on the board and said, “Who can tell me the answer to this sum?”

D’nice wasn’t interested, he didn’t even hear the question because he was busy at the back of the class with some other thing that interested his mind.

The teacher let a few minutes pass, thinking that perhaps the pupils were still working it out.

“Somebody give me the answer?”

Nobody came with the answer. The pupils weren’t working out the answer, they were just waiting for someone to give an answer, any answer. Then the teacher started to shout in anger, and that was when D’nice took notice and told him the answer, but the teacher replied, “I am not interested in the answer but how to get it.”

D’nice kicked his chair back and walked to the board. He looked at the others, then wrote the whole sum back to front, starting with the answer first. After he’d finished he put the chalk back in the teacher’s hand and sat down again.

Then the puzzled teacher suddenly became aware of what he’d done and was thankful that he hadn’t asked D’nice to explain what he’d written on the board, because it would have been embarrassing on his part.

Jeans were never his thing. He always wore smart trousers, black, khaki or brown, very well-ironed, and a T-shirt. His feet were always imprisoned in a pair of shining black formal shoes. He had a pair of sandals, but those were only for walking about in the haven. He also had a pair of sports shoes for when he and Matome would jog to Sandton and back.

You could talk politics, sport, cars, fashion and even your professional work with him, and he’d always have something to say or ask you some puzzling question.

Why?

Because he spent too much of his time in the library, not choosing what to read like you, but reading.

D’nice was poor, had a scholarship, but he was deadly at poking the opposite sex.

His speciality: the rich, spoiled white girls.

He dated Michelle in his final year. Michelle was a final-year music student. It was after he had poked with this member of God’s chosen few, and the beauty was resting, that his life changed. He was bored, life bored this man, and his thinking wandered. His eyes were running around, up and down, wishing that the god of Isando would appear and provide that which he provides best. Then his eyes landed on a keyboard. He switched it on and played it like he was born playing it, played it so well that the beauty woke up.

She just looked at him playing and maybe the world stopped and listened. We all stopped and listened. It was the first time that he had played a keyboard and from that day on his need to play grew in him, grew in him so that eventually she saw fit to give him the expensive keyboard.

Michelle put a stop to his drinking during this time; if it hadn’t been for that good Jewish girl, he wouldn’t have written his final examinations.

Michelle loved D’nice. She loved the darkie brother. It went on and on, despite the fact that they both knew that the relationship was a cul-de-sac from the beginning – she was from a very powerful family and the music was just a way of killing time between now and when she found Mr Right, got married and had children.

Michelle was a celebrity in her own right. For those of you that have satellite television, she used to have a show on the Jewish channel as a teenager. Beautiful, thin, thin and tall as the world’s models.

Not many people knew that D’nice was having it with her. They probably would have suspected something, but they were always told that D’nice was her music producer.

She is featured on the shelved kwaito CD by Cäres and, believe me, she was burning the pipe. She did justice to that song, which, at the time, I didn’t believe she could.

I liked Michelle, liked her fearless character, liked the fact that she could just come to Hillbrow at night, park her car in Van der Merwe and walk herself to 207.

Well, we enjoyed her company and it was the first time I ever saw the underwear of a white girl.

D’nice was picked up by this big company before he even graduated. They gave him a very good job. He worked there for two months then handed in his resignation. When they asked why, he just said he wanted to quit, so they increased his pay by hundred per cent and put in a car. He worked for another month then resigned with immediate effect and told them no negotiations. They negotiated anyway, but his mind was made up.

There was music in his head and he wanted to get the music out.