M. Tiro had obviously reached and passed his daily quota of homilies.
The R. E. D. fixed his eyes on T. B. Mokoka’s anxious face, and I stumbled forward to shake his hand. He was, after all, the PRIN-CI-PAL of Marakong-a-Badimo Primary School, Molomo District, North-West Province, Republic of South Africa. Another grand old-timer who faced the world with only his initials as his spear and shield, I thought, as he shook my hand limply.
* * *
An hour later I found myself in the Principal’s office. I had expected a messy, gloomy cave, but it was a model of organisation and order. Even my two battered suitcases had been neatly placed beside one of the steel cabinets stationed against the right-hand wall. The wall opposite them was used as a bulletin board, and for maps, scientific data, mathematical formulae and stern Biblical exhortations. Two tables had been pushed against the lower half of the map wall and these had a neat row of children’s exercise books on top of them.
I was seated in a plastic chair facing the Principal’s polished desk and its neat piles of papers. Behind the desk a large window overlooked a scraggly vegetable patch. There was a tired, muddy stream a few hundred metres beyond that, and still further away I could see what could only be the outskirts of the village of Marakong-a-Badimo.
Sometime after the RED’s departure we had begun speaking in a hybrid of Setswana and English. This had seemed to lift Mokoka’s spirits somewhat. He had asked me about all the Maje’s he had ever known or heard of, looking for links and connections. Some I had heard of, but most were just names written in the wind, unknown and probably forever unknowable to me. Yet it was strangely comforting to know that they were out there, these Maje’s, whoever they might be, entangled in their own complexities and bafflements.
Now, T. B. Mokoka turned to the matter in hand. “You shall take over Miss Marumo’s class,” he began.
“Yes, sir.”
“Those are the grade fives.”
“I am ready, sir.”
T. B. Mokoka went on to tell me about my duties and his relief at my arrival. He told me everything twice over, wringing his hands distractedly as he alluded to problems of discipline and parental interference. “They are sometimes difficult,” he confided, “but they are very good children under the circumstances.”
Poor T. B., he didn’t know that before my premature retirement I had taught in a township high school for several years and had lived to tell my war stories to disbelieving novices. I didn’t see how these children’s circumstances could be that different to those of thousands of other children throughout the country.
Retirement. I turned the word over in my mind as Mokoka worried out loud over whether his problems were caused by too rigid a disciplinary regime or too little parental involvement.
At the time of my retirement I was only thirty, but I was burnt out. The educational field had become too complex. Old certainties had been overturned and washed away. New truths had been proclaimed. But when we had prophesied a new type of education, like countless others in all revolutions the world has ever seen, we had failed to foresee our own demise, our inevitable irrelevance in the new order.
Counselling had been recommended by the progressive management in the newly reorganised Department of Education, after what they called my “stressful experiences” at a rural school.
I had peaked too early, tried to do too much, Doctors Padayachee and Littlewater had pronounced in their separate turns. One had prodded my bones while the other had puzzled over my psyche. It was depressing for all three of us. Intensive medication and therapy was prescribed for me and high fees for them. I had vetoed both. They had sneered politely and consigned my depression to the back of their files while assuring me of their respect of my right to choose
After that it was only a short step to handing in my resignation.
However, all Mokoka was supposed to know was that I was a substitute teacher. Even my CV was to remain closed to him. As far as he was concerned I was just one of the rootless nomads of the teaching world, either one of the tramps, who shirk long-term commitment, or one of the pirates, who arrive, astound and then abdicate, thus earning the just wrath and unworthy envy of the more responsible members of the profession who have to remain behind and try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
So I smiled at him and asked him about the thing that really concerned me at this time.
“Sir, where am I going to rest my bones tonight?” I nodded at the sinking sun.
The school had long been dismissed and a brooding silence had fallen over the empty yard and classrooms.
“Ah, the matter of your accommodation. I think you will use the teacher’s cottage. Miss Marumo used it and Mr Tiro was insistent that you also use it. Something to do with saving money. Yours . . . or maybe the department’s . . . I am not too clear. It has been cleaned of course.” He added the last hurriedly. “But if you want alternative lodgings I can –”
“No, don’t bother,” I said, interrupting him. “The cottage will be fine.”
“Nothing of hers is still there. The police took it all. For their investigation. I have not heard from them since. But if you find anything. Anything. Please bring it to me. The police . . . I am sure you understand.”
“Do the other teachers live in the village?” I asked.
“No! No! No!” he cried, flapping his hand as if swatting at an obscenity uttered by a child. “They live in another village eight or nine miles from here. I pick them up in the morning and drop them off in the afternoon.” He coughed, looked away and flapped his hand again. “I myself live in Bullsdrift,” he continued with restrained pride.
A vague recollection of a dot on the map came hazily back to me and I tried to look impressed. At least the world knew that the town existed. Mokoka, like the rest of us, was not immune to some vanity. He had graduated from the dusty villages to a town, probably to the formerly whites-only part of it too. It was his due and he had earned it. Of what good was a long career, dedicated service, liberation and so on if Mokoka could not enjoy some of the rewards? If that is what he really equated freedom with.
“So I am alone in the cottage?” I asked.
“If you want alternative acco–” he tried once more, but I got in before he could finish.
“In fact, I don’t mind at all. I will enjoy the peace and quiet.”
“Peace and quiet,” he whispered to himself. “Yes . . . peace in our time.” He turned to me and shared his great revelation. “We always forget that.”
Chapter 3
Chapter 3
An old, silent woman had given us the keys to the cottage at its door. The cottage itself was a half-mile from the school. It was roughly halfway between the school and the village, but it was not visible from either because it had, for some obscure reason, been built in a small, unexpected hollow. It was therefore not part of the village which stood on higher ground above it.
Mamorena had literally buried herself in this place, I thought, as the Principal began to reassure me, at great length, that the cottage was safe from flooding as the rain water, if and when there was any rain, ran into the underground streams in the area. I didn’t really believe him, but I knew I would be long
