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.
