Читать книгу Forget-me-not-Blues - Marita van der Vyver - Страница 11

The smell of chalk, blue ink and adolescent sweat hangs heavily in the stuffy classroom. It is the hottest, sleepiest hour of the school day, shortly before the final bell, in the hottest, laziest week of the year, the last week before the long summer holiday.

The only sounds are those of fountain pens scratching on paper, pages being turned, a buzzing blowfly trapped in a corner high up against the ceiling. Outside, in the shimmering white light, the shrill voices of primary school children who have been let out early. Inside, the occasional self-pitying sigh from a pupil who, half asleep, clutches his desk like a drowning man clings to a piece of driftwood with his last remaining strength.

Shame, Colette thinks, if the heat is so dreadful for her in a cool summer dress in the front of the class, it must be unbearable for them in their school uniform. The boys’ strangulating ties and long grey socks, the thick, dark fabric of the girls’ gyms, the lace-up shoes constricting sweaty toes and rough heels. These children from the wheat farms and dusty small-town streets grow up barefoot. They can run without shoes across a field of devil’s thorn, just like her cousins on Somerverdriet did when she was small, the soles of their feet tough as leather.

They must surely be more accustomed to the stifling heat than their young English teacher who spent her own school years in a milder climate. Primary school on the rainy back slope of Table Mountain, high school in the shelter of the city bowl. Like a mother who blows on a bowl of food before feeding it to her child, that is how Cape Town’s soft sea breezes blow away the worst heat. Except of course when the southeaster comes tumbling down the mountain to lift you right off your feet. Nothing maternal about the Cape Doctor.

On still, sweltering days such as these among the pale yellow wheat fields, the longing for Cape Town becomes like a stomach ulcer devouring her from the inside. A heart ulcer, she muses, feeling her eyelids grow heavy. But actually, there is much besides Cape Town that she longs for. She yearns for the cosmopolitan world cities she has only ever seen in photographs, for overseas art treasures and cathedrals she has only read about, for strange languages and exotic foods, for excitement and adventure. Storybook places, that is what she has dreamed about the entire year she has lived in a boarding house in Piketberg and tried to teach English to farm children.

An unexpected crack startles her out of her daydreams, back to the reality of a small-town classroom with pictures of Shakespeare, Edna St. Vincent Millay and both queens Elizabeth, the first and the second, stuck on the walls. On the blackboard behind her, written in her own tidy teacher’s script, is the standard eights’ essay topic for today: I shall always remember 1955 as the year when …

‘Sorry, Miss Cronjé,’ a brawny lout grins in the back row. ‘I had to make dead this fly.’ The class sniggers as he holds his large hand with the shiny green blowfly he has just crushed towards her.

At moments such as these she wonders why she still bothers. A young man like Leendert van Niekerk, at least two years older than most of his classmates because he has repeated at least two standards, will never learn to appreciate the language of Shakespeare. And why should he? He will soon take over the farm from his father, court a girl in the district until there’s a shotgun wedding – possibly one of the very schoolgirls who are now giggling at his antics – and together they will raise a string of children who will eventually end up in this very classroom crushing flies. Where would Leendert van Niekerk and his future family ever need English poetry? Certainly not in church or the bar or the farmer’s co-op, nor once a year when they go to Strand­fontein for their seaside holiday.

‘You didn’t have to “make it dead”, Leendert,’ she says. ‘You could have simply killed it. But please warn me next time you want to kill anything.’

The rest of the class is now laughing out loud, whispering to each other, making comments and cracking jokes, a general commotion that threatens to get out of hand if it isn’t nipped in the bud. ‘Quiet!’ she shouts in her sternest voice, smacking a ruler against the side of a table, marching between the rows of desks like a drill sergeant major. ‘You have fifteen minutes to finish your essay.’ It is hard for her to be severe with the children. She doesn’t want to control them with fear the way so many teachers did during her own school days. She would, in fact, really like them to like her. In this, her first year as a high-school teacher, it however didn’t take long to discover that it is extremely difficult for a young teacher to command respect without a degree of fear being involved. Even if it amounts to no more than the perpetual threat of the principal’s office. The swish of his cane and the dull crack when it meets tender skin, now these are sounds that command respect. Just another disillusionment among several the teaching profession has afforded Miss Cronjé.

Not that she ever had high expectations, really. To be honest, she became an English teacher purely because she didn’t know what else to do. Other than being a housewife and mother – but she is far from ready for that. She first wants to see something of the great wide world, but the only more or less respectable work that will allow a young woman with a university education to travel the world is the exciting new occupation of being an air hostess – and that, sadly, is not yet respectable enough in the eyes of her parents. The only thing left for her was to teach and save up to explore the great wide world a year or three from now.

Saving is so much easier in the countryside, too, away from temptations such as shops selling the latest fashions and records by The Platters or Bill Haley & His Comets, far away from irresistible bioscopes such as the Alhambra or the Plaza, from music concerts with international performers, and unforgettable stage plays such as Yerma with Lydia Lindeque. Besides bus tickets to Cape Town every holiday, there is nothing here to spend your money on.

Though sometimes, just sometimes, when she can no longer stand the dust and the silence, and craves her mother’s food, she will escape home for a weekend too.

Her father’s family farm is somewhere in this region, but she has never been hungry enough to go there for a weekend. Even her father hardly ever visits the farm now that her grandfather and grandmother have both died. Oom Kleingert’s son, Gerhard, who apparently shares his father’s admiration for Hitler, has taken over the farming and has had a grand, ultramodern flat-roofed house built for him and his family. In the Spanish style, according to Auntie Holy Wilma, too beautiful, I tell you! And the modest family homestead, now almost one hundred years old, where her father and numerous other Cronjés were born, stands empty, with broken windows, gaping doorways and bat droppings on the floors. That was what Deddy reported after the last time he went to Somerverdriet.

Colette has decided she would rather not see it. Some of her most pleasant childhood memories are of that house with the flat pumpkins on the corrugated iron roof. The wide stoep with the little diamond-shaped stained-glass windows at either end, the sparkling patterns that slide across the polished floor when the sun blazes through the glass, green and yellow and blue and red …

She resumes her march between the desks, straight-backed and stern, and tries to herd her thoughts like sheep into a pen, while here and there she pauses to read something over her pupils’ shoulders. It is enough to make you cry. Not just the mutilation of Shakespeare’s language – she should be used to that by now – but how small and remote their world is, how little they are touched by any international or even national news. Earlier in the week she had brought a stack of old Time and Life magazines to class in the faint hope that a few of them might be moved to write about something more significant than a school outing to Zebrakop or a rugby match against a neighbouring town. Now even this faint hope has been dashed. As far as she can tell, just one event outside Piketberg in the past year has made an impression on anyone. Three girls and one of the boys will always remember 1955 as the year when teen idol James Dean died tragically in a car accident.

Not that Miss Cronjé is immune to the animal magnetism of the young movie star. Of course not. One of the reasons she has allowed herself to be courted by a young farmer in the district for the past several months is precisely because this Janneman Diederiks reminds her of James Dean. Bigger, coarser, more Afrikaans than American, but there are similarities nonetheless. Aside from their initials and a preference for fast cars, the two JDs also share a sort of presumptuous sexuality which makes the heat rise to Miss Cronjé’s cheeks. And descend to more hidden parts of her body too.

She senses that she is being watched, and catches Leendert’s eye. His gaze is a little too challenging for comfort, as if he has guessed the direction in which her thoughts have strayed. At eighteen Leendert has to shave every morning – and he is not the only regular shaver in the standard eight class. Even in the younger classes there are boys of fourteen, fifteen who most likely have more sexual experience than their supposedly sophisticated English teacher. Could it be the wide blue sky and the endless wheat fields that make these boys grow so immoderately, with such large feet, such muscular thighs, grey school shorts straining over the hard buttocks? Could it be the heat that makes them so sexually precocious? Or is it just the constant proximity of animals – sheep, cows, horses, goats, pigs, dogs, cats – with their endless mating, mating, mating, from shortly after birth until they die?

‘Anneke!’ She holds out a hand for the clandestine note Anneke Benade is trying to pass to Leendert. Anneke hands over the scrap of paper, pouting. Miss Cronjé stuffs it into the breast pocket of her dress without reading it. Having to read their feeble essays is bad enough. Heaven forbid that she should read their intimate declarations of love and other scribbles. ‘Come and see me after class if you want it back.’

The girls ripen just as early; Anneke and a few others seem almost overripe, like watermelons that have been left in the field, their trembling breasts almost bursting from their gymslips, the swaying hips and plump white thighs, but at least they’re more timid than the boys. Or maybe they’re just more sanctimonious. They’re raised that way, these future mothers of the nation. Prim and proper, that’s their motto, modesty, piety, propriety and all the other signifiers of decency, an entire landscape of ornate hypocrisy covering a multitude of sins. But down below the devils are dancing, and no one knows this better than Miss Cronjé, herself a future mother of the nation.

Take pretty Marietjie Pretorius in the front row, the image of sixteen-year-old maidenhood with her pale skin, blushing cheeks and long black braid. You would swear she was Snow White sitting there bent over her scribbling, deep in thought. However, what Marietjie will remember above all about the year 1955, if Miss Cronjé is to judge from her essay thus far, is a holiday romance in Dwarskersbos. Romantic walks with an attractive boy as the sun sets over the sea. A rapturous description of the sunset (Marietjie has literary pretensions, Miss Cronjé has already learnt), every noun supported by at least three adjectives like a bride with too many bridesmaids, and then …

Marietjie’s pale hand is in the way, Miss Cronjé cannot read the rest. But it is highly unlikely that Marietjie will describe any of the action after sunset. Don’t ask, don’t tell is a strategy Marietjie and her girl friends know all too well. No, Marietjie’s essay will be like the romance novels she is so crazy about, filled with hints of erotic yearning, but anything beyond a chaste kiss is simply left to the imagination via three tiny dots. Dot, dot, dot.

Good grief, Miss Cronjé thinks, recalling her own teenage years at a prestigious city school, how very old it makes her feel. Oh hear ye the mighty rumble of hormones soaring across our land? Now that ought to be the unofficial anthem of Afrikaans high schools. Although six, seven years ago, when she was in high school, she was less susceptible to the waves of sensuality that are threatening to knock her off her feet here in her rural exile.

Perhaps she was just too young and green. These past few months she has felt fertile, ripened by the sun’s heat, as if her veins might explode. On the eve of her twenty-third birthday the English teacher feels ready to be harvested. Let Janneman Diederiks come and wield his sickle. No, stop it, she reprimands herself, where does this silliness come from?

What would Mammie say!

The fact that she has no intention of marrying Janneman Diederiks – let alone any of the other young farmers who have paid court to the young blonde teacher in the boarding house this past year – is becoming a matter of grave concern to Mammie. At almost twenty-three a girl’s trousseau chest should already be full, if not overflowing, and if she doesn’t want to end up on the shelf, then she should have her mind set on getting married. That is that. What more does Colette want than a smart young farmer from a prominent family with a beautiful farm? Besides, if he has a bit of education like Piketberg’s own James Dean, can pick out a tune on the piano or guitar, and can wear an air of ‘genteel refinement’ like a spray of perfume, well, really, Colette, what more do you want? Mammie asks with growing impatience.

Colette doesn’t know what to say. She just knows she wants more. More than she can get here. Once she has been overseas, travelled for a while, seen something of the world, heard foreign languages, inhaled unfamiliar smells, and tasted exotic flavours, perhaps then she will be content to marry a young farmer like Janneman Diederiks, and go on an annual holiday to Dwars­kersbos? But not now, Mammie, not yet, Mammie. Please try to ­understand!

‘Wakey-wakey, Leendert!’ She smacks her ruler against Leendert van Niekerk’s desk, and he jerks up, dazed, which sets off another ripple of giggling delight through the class.

‘But I’m finished, Miss!’ he objects.

‘I have finished,’ she corrects him automatically. Why does she still bother?

Not the marriage bed, Mammie, not yet. Of that she is certain. What she is by no means certain of anymore is how much longer she will be able to resist her Afrikaans James Dean’s smouldering sexuality without ending up in some bed or other. Maybe not even a bed. What if on some dark night she succumbed in the front seat of his red and white Chevrolet Bel Air with its soft top and swaggering tail fins? Oh, oh, oh, the scandal. The heat keeps getting worse, as does the fidgeting and whispering of the pupils behind her. It is just as well the Christmas vacation starts next week. Thank heavens she can escape back to the city once more, back to the safe respectability of her family, away from the heat of her boarding house room and hot-blooded boyfriend with a sports car.

She picks up a copy of Time from her table and uses it to fan her burning face. Calm down, Miss Cronjé. On the cover Princess Margaret looks rosy in a portrait painted in pastel hues: another young woman who has been plagued by her hormones in the past year – but in the end chose the traditional, rational path. Goodbye, Group Captain Peter Townsend. Shame.

A truck thunders past in Van der Stel Street, named after the governor who three centuries ago was charged and almost trampled by a rhinoceros, not far from the present-day town. There are no longer any rhinoceroses in these parts; they have all been wiped out by the farmers and their rifles, the colonial big-game hunters, the relentless march of white civilisation into Africa. Is that Kleinboet’s mocking voice in her ears? There are, however, still plenty of snakes, scorpions, hairy spiders, horrible flies, and other creatures that give the English teacher from the city the horrors. She read somewhere that there were no snakes in England. Or was that Ireland? How wonderful it must be to live on a soft green snake-free island …

This is how Miss Cronjé dreams away the final tormenting minutes of the school day, leaning against the wall at the back of the classroom, with Elizabeth I peering over her left shoulder and the present-day Elizabeth II, older sister of the princess with the hormones, over her right shoulder. In front of her the pupils are fidgeting like horses that have smelt the barn – nothing can restrain them now. Only Samuel Levy, the clever little Afrikaans-speaking Jew two rows from the back, is still bent over his essay. Because he is severely short-sighted, despite his black-rimmed glasses, his big nose almost touches the desk, which makes it difficult to see what he is writing so diligently. Miss Cronjé steals closer. He is the only child in the class who can speak English with ease. Or could, if he wasn’t far too shy and too awkward to do anything easily, whether it is tossing a ball or speaking a language.

Then she notices two words that leap off the page like flames, and she backs away as if to avoid getting burnt. Emmett Till, she reads. And, with bated breath, a few lines on, gouging out his eye before shooting him. Near the bottom of the sheet of paper, just before Samuel Levy turns the page, she manages to read a full sentence. His mother decided to have an open coffin funeral because she wanted the world to see what white men had done to a 14-year-old black boy.

Here comes trouble, Miss Cronjé feels it in the blood she can suddenly hear rushing to her head. She knows who Emmett Till is. Was. She has read somewhere about the Negro boy who was tortured and murdered by white men in Mississippi and tossed into the Tallahatchie River for allegedly speaking to a white woman in a cheeky tone. Not in the copies of Time she brought to class, no, she doesn’t know if Time’s respected journalists reported on Emmett Till’s murder at all. Why would they? It is the kind of disturbing event that white middle-class readers in America would prefer not to read about. Much less in South Africa, of course.

It is not a pretty story, it is a stinking tale, and what has made clever but shy Samuel Levy decide to crack open this rotten egg right under her nose? It upsets her, it unnerves her, it disturbs her, not because it happened in faraway Mississippi, but because she can imagine how easily it could happen here. Piketberg or Potchefstroom, Pretoria or Port Elizabeth, from the dustiest hamlet to the biggest city, everywhere in this country there are angry white men who would think nothing of punishing a brazen hotnotjie or a cocky kaffertjie in the cruellest possible way.

The National Party’s policy, this constant accumulation of laws upon laws that is called apartheid, is another egg that is starting to smell. The Mixed Marriages Act, the Immorality Act, the Group Areas Act, the Population Registration Act, the act to segregate beaches, sports facilities and bioscopes, the law that forces Bantus to attend separate schools, and the distasteful way in which the government is busy expanding the Senate in order to remove Coloureds from the voters’ roll in the Cape, and, and, and, all of it in barely seven years! And now that the aged Dr Malan has been succeeded by the fiery Lion of the North, now that Strijdom is in charge, the eggs are probably going to become even more rotten.

Where will it all end? Miss Cronjé wonders in her stuffy classroom while her heart beats ever more wildly and her head spins as if she might faint. If all these eggs break at once, it is surely going to stink to high heaven. She is breathing so hard that Samuel Levy looks up at her over his shoulder, his eyes blinking behind his thick glasses. Is it her imagination, or is there something cheeky in his gaze?

Calm down, Miss Cronjé. It is her own fault, isn’t it? There it is on the blackboard in her own pedagogical script, I shall always remember 1955 as the year when, followed by three suggestive little dots just like in a cheap romance novel. She had after all nursed a tiny flame of hope that some of her pupils would write about something more than their narrow little small-town lives. Hadn’t she? Now she feels as though she has dropped a burning match in a haystack. The flames are licking at the sky and there is nothing she can do about it, except look on helplessly and wonder where it will all end.

She swallows hard and nods to Samuel Levy, almost imperceptibly, a suggestion rather than an actual movement of her head. Not to say that she agrees with him, rather a veiled warning. Watch your step, Samuel, she wants to tell him, because from this ­moment on I will have my eye on you. She stares at the shiny film of sweat between his sensual upper lip and his nose, at the serious blinking eyes behind the heavy black-rimmed glasses, at the ­slender fingers clutching the pen. He has been in her class the entire year, but she hasn’t really seen him until now.

Then she walks quickly back to her table. Just two minutes before the bell goes. She claps her hands to bring the restless class to order. She wonders if Samuel has heard of Rosa Parks – of whom she herself only heard last week – a Negro women from Montgomery, Alabama, who earlier this month refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. A simple gesture from a tired working woman. Yet another tiny flame that set a haystack alight. The Negroes of Alabama are all on strike, and the unrest is spreading to the rest of the country. What if something like that were to happen here? What if one day Mammie’s beloved Sina from Somerverdriet refused to iron Pappie’s shirts, make the beds or wash the dishes because she was simply too tired? What if all the other Sinas in all the other white houses, from Piketberg to Potchefstroom, became obstreperous, mutinous, rebellious?

She simply must get away, Miss Cronjé decides when at last the final school bell of the day signals the end of the torture for her and her pupils. She must travel to other countries, see more, experience more, in order to understand what is going on in the world. The sooner the better. Stop flirting with the local farmers. Send Janneman Diederiks packing before she succumbs in the seat of his Chevrolet Bel Air. Or she will be trapped here. Or she will soon find herself in front of the altar with a bun in the oven. Both the bun and the oven concealed beneath a big white dress.

‘Miss, can I have my paper, please, Miss?’ Anneke asks, standing right in front of her while the rest of the pupils squeeze impatiently through the door.

‘Your paper?’ She remembers the confiscated letter in her dress pocket. She retrieves the crumpled piece of paper, and absent-mindedly hands it to the child who will most likely have a bun in the oven long before her English teacher. Anneke looks stunned for a moment as she realises she is not going to be punished. Then she stuffs the letter into the top of her gymslip and escapes as quickly as possible with a wiggle of her sturdy buttocks.

No, Mammie, I am not going to marry and have children until I have been overseas, no, no, no, murmurs Miss Cronjé while the stragglers make their way out of the classroom. Right at the back is Samuel Levy who gives her an odd look – cheeky? cocky? cunning? – when he places his essay on the table, but she pretends not to notice. She knows her mother worries that she might end up on the shelf, but maybe that is not so bad, she muses, as long as the shelf is in another country? A shelf where she can speak in a foreign language?

There now, Deddy, don’t be alarmed. I became an English teacher, and I would love to learn to speak a Latin language, too, but for you I will always keep writing in Afrikaans. Oh mother tongue, oh sweetest tongue, you I love above all else, as the song goes.

This is how Miss Cronjé cheers herself on in the empty classroom while she erases the phrase on the blackboard. I shall always remember 1955 as the year when …

Re: Contact!

• Colette Niemand 18/8/2007

To thinalusapho@iafrica.com

Thank you for the telephone call, my treasure. It was wonderful to hear your voice again, so young and breathless with excitement. It is something I can never get enough of after doing without it for so long.

But what you told me doesn’t sound all that wonderful to me. Please try to understand. You are at an age where you could change your entire life at a moment’s notice, move to another country, learn a new language, become a new person as it were. I am at an age where any change in my humdrum routine of eat, sleep, read and walk can be bewildering. Believe me, when I was your age, I never dreamed that I would become such a boring old lady.

I was always careful – about what I said and what I ate, how I sounded and how I looked, eventually even about what I thought – and gradually I suppose wariness turned into weariness. So gradually that I didn’t even notice it. Until one day I saw myself in the mirror, and hardly recognised the anxious and elderly woman looking back at me.

But even when I was your age, when at last my ship came in and I had the chance to change the entire course of my life, I suddenly got cold feet and couldn’t do it. While my heart ordered me north, my feet carried me south. That is the story of my life.

Now I ask you, sweetheart, if I was already an old scaredy-cat back then, what do you imagine I have become fifty years on? A samurai? No, I’ll tell you what we’ll do: I’ll encourage you to change to your heart’s content, to become a brand-new being if you want to, and you won’t begrudge me my cold feet and my predictable existence as the widow Niemand.

I miss you, and so do Sina and Lottie and the rest of your family in the Cape.