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
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.
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