Читать книгу Mukiwa - Peter Godwin - Страница 14

Some diseases were more interesting than others. The most interesting of all was leprosy. If you got leprosy, bits of your body fell off. Only black people got leprosy.

Fatty Slabbert told leper jokes at school, but he’d never seen a leper in real life. In real life the first sign that you had leprosy was when you felt numb in your end bits, your fingers and toes or the tip of your nose. My mother would check patients for burns on their hands. Often lepers would burn their fingers in the cooking fire in the early stages because they couldn’t feel the heat.

The first leper I ever diagnosed was Jacob Number Ten from the factory, although no one believed me at the time. Jacob Number Ten was a boiler stoker and he was called Number Ten to distinguish him from another Jacob. Number Ten was his clocking-in number.

I had gone to work with my father that day. My father had a big office with a window that looked out over a lawn with sprinklers on it. Inside, there was a row of tall grey filing cabinets and a sloping desk on which to look at technical drawings and plans and maps of the estates. On the wall was a calendar from ‘SKF – The world’s leading ball bearing manufacturers.’

My father sat behind a wide mahogany desk. Most of it was covered by wire baskets piled high with manila folders. There was a huge piston from a bulldozer that he used as an ashtray. And there was a roladex office diary, with a new page for every day and Sundays in red. When I went to work with my father he let me move the diary forward to the next day, carefully lifting the previous day’s page over the metal hoops on to the pile of days gone by.

If I agreed to be quiet I was sometimes allowed to settle in the corner at the angled drawing table, where I was provided with crayons and paper. I would doodle away contentedly with my tongue stuck out of the corner of my mouth in concentration, interrupting my father only to present him with completed art works.

From time to time Old Zuma the tea boy would shuffle in, bearing a tray of tea arranged carefully on little crocheted doilies. Old Zuma had permanently trembling hands, from what was probably early Parkinson’s disease, and try as he did to hold the tray steady, much of the tea slopped over into the saucers. But he was a tribal headman and had immense authority over the workers, often being brought in to settle disputes. So there was no thought of getting rid of him.