Читать книгу The Book of the Dead - Kgebetli Moele - Страница 7

In primary school Khutso never bunked once, even though Thabakgolo Primary School was a nine kilometres’ walk from his home, but after a couple of years at Lehlasedi High School his sporadic attendance began to worry his teachers. He always started the new school year in the same way – with a deep desire to go to school – but by the time the first school holidays came around, being at school had drained his energy. School is boring, he would think to himself. But in Standard Eight Khutso and his friends started smoking dagga, and after the first holidays – when his willpower was at its weakest – he began bunking school.

It started with him failing to submit his homework. After that he didn’t attend the subjects in which he still had to complete his work. Then he began to bunk school every Friday, telling himself that he would make up the lost days later in the term. But he never did and so he was behind in all his subjects. His teachers, who really believed in him, tried to understand what was wrong, but Khutso would just promise to attend class and they quickly came to learn that he never kept his promises.

Khutso bunked the whole of the second and third school terms that year and only came back to school a month into the final term. Unsurprisingly, to the disappointment of his mother, he failed Standard Eight.

* * *

The greatest influence and inspiration in the community was Leruo, the son of the local businessman. They said that his father had had no formal schooling and that he had taught himself to read and write. Whatever the truth, everyone knew that Leruo’s father had worked in the city of gold for a long time before coming back home to the village to open the café and hardware store.

Leruo, like all his siblings, had been to the most exclusive schools. And just like his brothers and sisters he had dropped out of university, but his father hadn’t minded at all. “Education can do nothing for you, which is why I left school. In this life you don’t need education to live, you only need brains,” he’d said to his son.

Leruo’s father had worked hard and made enough money to build the only double-storey house in the dusty community, the only house with a borehole, and although all his children had dropped out of university, he was sure that they would live far better lives than he and his father had lived.

“Look at the people teaching you . . .” he’d said to his son. “If education improves people’s lives, then why aren’t their lives improved in any way? They are slaves to the government. And look at those who have retired, people who have educated others for years and years, they are still poor.”

Leruo continued from where his old man had hung up. He had a fleet of taxis and a brick-manufacturing company, had more than thirty people working for him, but despite his wealth he was still a man of the people.

Usually, when the well-educated came back from university they behaved like strangers in the community. They thought of themselves as better than everyone else, and would quickly start to complain about how boring the place was. It was obvious to everyone that they were only home to show people how successful they had become. But Leruo was different. He talked to people in the community, and would always help if his hand was wanted.

However, Leruo was also part of Khutso’s problem. He loved temporary labour and paid cash at the end of the working day. By bunking school and working for Leruo, Khutso could feed his new-found hobbies – smoking and drinking. His money was the main reason that Khutso began bunking school.

* * *

Khutso thought he knew everything, thought that he had everything under control, that with his friends, Ngwan’Zo and Maoto, he was invincible. To him it was as if they were one. These were the boys that he had learned everything with: They were the boys that he had played with since he had started to walk. They had started at primary school and continued high school together. They had gone to komeng together and had come out of komeng – as men – together. They had shared their first bottle of alcohol together. They had learned to smoke together. But in their third year at high school things changed. In the first quarter of the new school year, Ngwan’Zo quit school after beating up his class teacher. The teacher had slapped him in the face and he had retaliated, then the cops were called and even though the governors of the school tried to intervene, they couldn’t stop Ngwan’Zo quitting school.

Maoto followed in his footsteps two months later. He got into a fight with the same teacher his friend had fought with, and as it was with his friend so it was with him. People in the know believed that Khutso would end up fighting the teacher as well, and also quit school, but Khutso respected all his teachers and they never failed to try to lead him in the right direction. In fact, Khutso even tried to convince his friends that they should come back to school. “You should apologise,” he told them. “Then we could go through high school together. It’s boring without you.” But they never listened to him.

* * *

When they were high, Khutso and his friends used to tell each other that they were going to have the greatest law firm in the world. They told each other that their law firm’s headquarters would be in their own village; that they would pack the village’s poverty into a container and export it to foreign lands. Then they would pave every road and every footpath. “Not construct new footpaths,” Ngwan’Zo said, exhaling smoke and looking at it as it disappeared into the air, “but pave the existing footpaths, keeping them the way our life here has engineered them.”

“And we won’t name the streets,” Khutso added. “They should remain as nameless as they are.”

Maoto laughed in a muted way. “We will also build our own school,” he said, smiling at the thought.

“Schools,” Ngwan’Zo corrected him. “Primary school, high school and a University of Masakeng.”

If they were not building magnificent castles in the air, Khutso would skip school and together the three of them would load one of Leruo’s six-cubic-metre tipper trucks for fifteen cents per load. While they worked they would sing songs composed on demand, songs whose beats were derived from the rhythm of their shovels as they were shoved into the river sand. It always made the work easier.

These songs always carried strong messages, but somehow they never listened to the messages, or maybe they just chose not to.

QUESTION: Heh! Ngwan’Zo, what is your problem? Why aren’t you going to school?

CHORUS: Because I beat my very own teacher. I beat him up, I beat him up.

QUESTION: Why did you beat him up? Do you know what you did to your future?

RESPONSE: No. I can’t tell you until the case has been resolved in the High Court.

CHORUS: Because I beat my very own teacher. I beat him up, I beat him up.

RESPONSE: My future is as good as what I do in a pit toilet: fucked-up shit.

CHORUS: Because I beat my very own teacher. I beat him up, I beat him up.

Ngwan’Zo had composed the song himself and he liked it more than any other, and, in fact, it became so popular that when the initiates were coming out of komeng that year it was the song they sang.

* * *

Leruo was a source of hope to Khutso and his friends because he always made them believe that they could be whatever they wanted to be in life, even though, like a responsible adult, he tried to show them the light. “So your time to bunk school has come,” he said to Khutso when it became clear that he had given up on education. “But something beats me about you, you always went to school like a model pupil, then you just sort of lost interest. Why?”

“There is no money at school,” Khutso said, uninterestedly.

Leruo looked at him with a strange smile, then he looked into the distance.

“Tell him,” Ngwan’Zo said. “Tell him that whoever needs money has to work hard for it.”

“I need people to work for me,” Leruo finally replied, “but I am still going to tell you to go to school. We are not all cut out to be rich people, but education will make you a better human being. And you will be thankful that you got an education when you had the time to.”

“Leruo, everybody is always preaching that we should go to school,” Ngwan’Zo said, “but most of them didn’t go to school themselves.”

“Do you want to know why?” Leruo asked him.

“Why?”

“It’s because they had the chance to go to school, and like you they didn’t take the opportunity. Now they are feeling the disadvantages of not having an education.”

“Why do you think they didn’t take the opportunity?”

“Because they thought that they knew better, just like you.”

“That’s a lie,” Ngwan’Zo said. “If that were true they would go to adult education classes and get educated.”

“Well, I am always thinking that I should go back to university,” Leruo said, “but I can’t afford to leave my businesses and go and study again. That part of my life is over.”

Khutso forgot about the conversation until one night when his mother cornered him.

“Khutso,” she said, looking at her last-born son, “I have always wanted you to go to university and be a doctor, and I have worked hard so that you can go to school, so I am going to give you another chance, the same as I gave all your brothers and sisters.”

His mother had never been able to give her children the opportunities that Leruo’s father had given his sons and daughters, but she had always made sure that whatever else had happened they had always gone to school.

“Don’t you think that your brothers and sisters are crying when they think how much of my energy they have wasted, how much of my hard-earned money they have thrown away?” his mother asked Khutso. “They know that I am poor. They know I wanted better things for them. They know, and yet still your sisters keep dumping their children on me, still your brothers keep asking me for money.” Tears filled the old woman’s eyes as she looked at Khutso. “They say that you can take a horse to the water but you can’t make it drink,” she went on, wiping away her tears. “But I am telling you, Khutso, to use this chance. Don’t throw it away like your brothers and sisters did before you.”

Khutso’s mother could not bring herself to disown her own children; she had always given them one more chance, and they had always disappointed her. Khutso’s eldest brother had just quit school one day, deciding that he wanted to become a taxi driver. But after his mother had sacrificed to get him a driver’s licence and saved enough for a deposit on a taxi, he had disappointed her – he never brought anything home. Three years later he had run the taxi into the ground, so he sold it and arrived home after a few months with nothing at all. “This is your home, you are welcome to stay,” Khutso’s mother had told him, “but please don’t ever ask for anything again.”

A few months later he got a job as a taxi driver in the big city and moved out. They hadn’t seen him again, but sometimes he would send a letter asking for money.

Khutso’s four sisters kept bringing home fatherless children. His mother tried again and again to put them back in school, but it was never long before they arrived home with yet another baby. And to top it all they never got married; they just moved in with their boyfriends. This was a source of great pain to Khutso’s mother, because she couldn’t visit them or recognise her extended families as they had never been introduced in the traditional way.

* * *

That night Khutso lay in his bed thinking of all the things that his mother had done for his brothers and sisters, for his sisters’ children and for him. He thought about what Leruo had said to Ngwan’Zo, and then he thought about all the things that his teachers had said to him. Finally, he thought about all the money that he and his friends had made shifting sand. The most they had ever moved in a day was eight loads, and although it was good money – that day they had celebrated by buying sardines, baked beans, spaghetti, atchar and a litre of soft drink – they had always smoked and drunk the rest of whatever they had earned over the following weekend. The money that Leruo paid them was always spent in the shebeen. He had never done anything good with it.

Khutso thought about the people in the community that he considered happy, and concluded that they were happy because they had money. He saw that money could buy you everything in this world – respect, love and happiness. I have to make money, he told himself. If I want to have friends, have the freshest-looking face, and be respected left, right and centre, I have to make money. And Khutso wanted to be respected and adored. He dreamed of it. And he wanted to have friends. That’s all he ever wanted.

Then Khutso looked at the options that he had, and after pondering them all he came up with a way out: school. It was the only solution he was sure about. He had never really been the brightest, but with some hard work he was sure he could succeed. School is like a railway line, he thought to himself. The train that runs on the rails has but one destination, and if it runs smoothly, sure enough it will reach its destination at the expected time. He knew he could work hard – he’d worked hard for Leruo, shovelling sand – but he also knew that people who work hard are the worst paid of all and that to get paid very well one has to have a degree.