The Classifier

by Wessel Ebersohn

  ‘Mrs Muller, your brother knows I kept him out of jail. He pleaded with me and told me that he has always lived as a coloured. So I agreed and I spoke for him in court and I changed his identity to coloured. He didn’t tell you this?’

  ‘No, Mister, he didn’t tell me.’

  ‘You tell him I say he can’t be coloured when he wants to sleep with a coloured girl and white when he wants a white person’s job. He told the court he’s coloured, now he stays coloured. He can get a coloured man’s job, not a white man’s job.’

  ‘But Mister, every time they want a coloured man to work, so many come for the job.’

  ‘I can’t help that.’

  ‘But Mister, I’m asking Mister. Mister can do anything Mister wants. Mister can make Wesley white again.’ She was crying now and the words were coming between her sobs. ‘He’s got no job now. He can get a postman job. Mister must know it’s so hard if I’m the only one in the family making a little bit of money.’

  ‘The law is the law,’ my father said sternly. He was starting to turn back towards the house. For him there was no point to the conversation. ‘Mrs Muller, I don’t want you coming to my home again. How did you find out where I stay?’

  ‘Mister stays close to us. Everybody in Greenwood Park knows where Mister stays.’

  ‘I don’t want you coming to my house again, you hear?’

  ‘I hear, Mister. But Mister, what about Wesley?’

  ‘Wesley wanted to be coloured when he was in bed with that girl, now he stays coloured. Tell him he can’t become white now.’

  ‘And the postman job?’

  ‘There is no postman’s job for Wesley. It’s a white man’s job.’

  My father walked away abruptly, leaving Mrs Muller alone at the gate. She watched him until he had entered the front door, then she turned and walked up the road in the direction of Greenwood Park. The road had a steep slope and I watched her go, taking small steps and moving slowly, as if this feeble action took all her remaining strength.

  I remembered my father often saying, ‘I do what I do to protect everyone.’ As I watched the slowly retreating figure of Mrs Muller, I wondered in which way he could be protecting her. It was no more than a fleeting thought. That night in bed I knew that my father was right. The woman’s brother, this Wesley, could not be coloured one day and white the next. That made no sense at all. You could not be German one day and French the next, I reasoned. I realised too how important my father was that he could make these decisions. My pa is like a judge, I thought.

  But I spent little time thinking about my father or Mrs Muller and her brother. They soon disappeared from my mind, leaving only the memory of the skinny girl at the flea market stall whose name I did not yet know. I pictured the way she moved, the little fluttering things she did with her hands. I heard her laughter, as she crowed loudly at my expense. It was Saturday and the flea market was always there on Saturday mornings. She would be there every Saturday. Perhaps I would be too.

  five

  As long as I can remember, I have been concerned about money and how to generate more of it. Even as a child, there were always things I wanted to buy. My needs began with toy soldiers and Dinky Toys cars, but soon developed to include footballs, cricket bats and other sporting equipment. The fifty cents a week Mama gave me for pocket money never came near to meeting my needs.

  There were always enterprises to raise a few rands here or there. Some of them were outright failures, like garden weeding for the families in the neighbourhood. Most families had their own kids. Very often, the only result of my sales visits to the parents in the streets around our home was to stir them into sending their own kids into the garden to weed it. It was an activity that did my popularity no good. Another problem with weeding was that the Zulu garden boys worked for next to nothing. To sell your labour in competition with theirs made no sense at all.

  What I did have in my favour was the presence of two willing business partners. Annie was always interested in any moneymaking scheme, while Abraham was like me, always needing to find the finance for some ambitious project. The only difficulty with them was that they hated each other and neither wanted to be part of a project if the other was involved. Annie called Abraham ‘that rat-faced little wimp,’ while he would only say that she was scary and that he would rather be an orphan than have a sister like her. So any plans I came up with could usually only include one of them.

  My main goal at the time was to buy a 50cc motorbike. The law said you had to be sixteen before you could get a licence to ride one. That left me three years short, but I knew a seventeen-year-old boy, Gert van Staden, who would sell me his for five hundred rands. I did not care about the licence as long as I could have the bike. I could always ride it on the graveyard paths, which were not public roads. At least, that was my thinking.

  The only problem was that five hundred rands was as far as the moon for a boy on fifty cents a week pocket money. When I heard about the bike and its selling price, I worked out that, if I saved all my pocket money, it would take me a thousand weeks – nearly twenty years. By that time I would be thirty-three and about ready for the grave. There was no way that bike was going to wait twenty years for me and no way on earth that I could wait that long before owning my own bike. I needed to find a way to raise money and I had to raise it before Gert van Staden sold the bike to someone else.

  One of our early projects, Annie’s and mine, was a cookie-baking enterprise. Annie baked and I sold the cookies house-to-house. Our first joint enterprise had the advantage over all businesses that I have been involved with since then, that we had no overhead and no input costs. Mama allowed us to use her ingredients as long as, in her words, ‘You don’t try to corner the cookie market.’

  Annie based the cookies on a recipe she said she had seen in Kook en Geniet, Cook and Enjoy, the traditional Afrikaans Bible of cooking. A problem arose in that someone had borrowed Mama’s copy and Annie baked our cookies from memory. On top of that, Mama was out on the day when Annie baked the first batch.

  They smelled wonderful and sold out in less than an hour. I came home with fifty rands, of which Annie was quick to take her half.

  The second batch was less successful. Most of the neighbourhood mothers were not enthusiastic now. Eventually one spelled out the problem. ‘Frankly, Chrissie, the first batch were not very good.’

  Like the thrifty businesspeople we were, Annie and I had not wanted to consume our profits. So we had not sampled our product, leaving us short in the area of quality control. In fact, our quality control had been nonexistent. The second time, I came home with ten rands and most of the stock. Annie took her five rands and we tried our product for the first time. After just one of Annie’s cookies, I told her I was not hungry and I would have more later. She tried one, then offered them to our parents. The second time she offered one to my father, I heard him tell Annie, ‘I’m not really one for cookies. You three have them.’

  It took three weeks of struggling unsuccessfully to find the perfect product for local conditions before I thought of the possibility of a flea market stall. It was a Saturday morning business and it had an added advantage that I did not even admit to myself. It would give me an excuse to look at, and perhaps even talk to the girl with the olive complexion and the dark hair and eyes.

  Every Saturday, since that first meeting, I had strolled with studied nonchalance to the flea market and looked to see if she was there. I never once used the direct route, walking an extra block or two to approach first from one side, then from the other. I had not once come closer than about half a block – and those were long blocks.

  She had always been there, in the same smiling, self-assured way helping everyone who came to buy. Usually she was on her own, but sometimes she was with the dark woman I had seen on the day she had startled me. On most days I watched for only ten or fifteen minutes. A few times I thought I saw her looking in my direction, but her attention was always taken away by customers. Occas
ionally, when I thought she was too busy to notice me, I stayed a few minutes longer, imagining that I had not been noticed.

  The Saturday morning that I decided to approach her to ask how you got permission to set up a stall, I saw to it that I was up early enough to be there before the shoppers arrived. I left home without breakfast, calling to my mother that I was going to Abraham’s place. She shouted to me to wait, but I pretended not to hear and hurried out the back through the banana palms and into the graveyard, running all the way to Umhlanga Rocks Drive.

  Her stall, a wooden frame with a back and sides that consisted of a painted tarpaulin was already up and she was unpacking boxes of merchandise. The only people nearby were stallholders who were themselves hard at work, getting ready for the morning’s trading. There was no point in delaying. This was my chance.

  She had her back turned to me as I crossed the road. I stopped right behind her. All at once, the hard edge of my determination vanished. I needed an opening line and I needed it before she turned round. ‘Can I help?’ I asked. It was not very original, but it was something.

  She turned round so quickly and with such a startled expression that it was my turn to laugh. It took her a moment to regain her breath. ‘It’s you, boy,’ she said. ‘You always peep at us from far away. What you doing so close today?’

  ‘I asked if I can help,’ I said.

  ‘You want to help me?’ I heard astonishment in her voice.

  It had been the best I could come up with at such short notice and it seemed pretty lame now. ‘If you want help,’ I said.

  She seemed to consider this, using as a reference her own thirteen years of experience with the other gender. ‘All right,’ she said. Then she gave me the little gleeful grin that, in time, I would get to know so well. ‘So, boy, what you doing so close today when you usually so far away?’

  ‘My name’s not boy,’ I said. ‘It’s Chris.’

  ‘My name’s Ruth,’ she said. ‘But everybody calls me Ruthie.’ I wanted to reach out and shake hands, but was not sure that would be acceptable. So instead I did nothing but stand there looking at her. ‘So you want to help me unpack,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. For the first time I got a good look at the merchandise she was selling. Most of the kitchenware had reached the sort of condition when my mother would have thrown it away or given it to the garden boy. Some bits even had signs of rust. Aluminium pots had lost handles, pans had lost their nonstick linings and dishes had chips along the edges. Eating utensils looked as if they had been twisted out of shape and someone had tried to twist them back, leaving little kinks. ‘Who buys this stuff?’ I asked.

  ‘Mos’ly the white people’s servants.’ The way she said it seemed to indicate that she fell into neither the category of white people, nor their servants. ‘It’s finished – the unpacking,’ she said. ‘What you going to do now?’ Again that gleeful, little smile flashed across her face.

  ‘Can I do this too?’

  ‘Boy, what you talking about?’

  ‘Chris,’ I said.

  ‘I meant Chris. What you want to do?’

  ‘I want to have a stand here, like you.’

  ‘You want to do this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to make some money.’

  ‘Your parents poor, Chris?’

  ‘No. I want to buy a motorbike.’

  Now all my secrets were out. It seemed to me that my big mouth had let her know everything there was to know about me. My deepest desire had been laid bare before her critical gaze.

  ‘I think you gotto ask the council.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I dunno. My ma will know. You want me to ask her?’ She started moving away, as if her mother were close enough to be accessible, but stopped suddenly, a new thought having arisen. ‘So, what you want to sell?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You gotto know what you want to sell.’ The impish grin was present again. ‘You gotto have some’ing to sell.’ I felt that the last fragments of what remained of my dignity were slipping away. The truth is that holding onto my fragile dignity while having dealings with Ruthie was proving to be difficult. The previous time she had surprised me so that I had blushed, now she was showing me how foolish I was. I was desperate to say something to regain some semblance of dignity, when her attention was drawn away. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said. ‘How are you today?’

  The customer was an old Zulu woman, the kind who would usually fall into the white people’s servant category she had been talking about and that my mother would call ousie. ‘Hullo, Ruthie. You got a pan for me today?’

  I backed away, far enough to be out of the picture, but close enough to overhear the conversation. Ruthie had three pans. It took a while for the old woman to select one and haggle with a smiling Ruthie over a price, that started at five rands and eventually settled at three seventy-five.

  ‘You gave her a big discount,’ I said.

  ‘No.’ The little grin was telling me that I knew very little about business. ‘You gotto start a bit high, then come down.’

  ‘How much did you pay for the pan?’

  ‘A rand maybe.’

  My mental arithmetic has always been good. A two rand seventy-five profit on a pan meant that for about one hundred and eighty pans I could get Gert van Staden’s motorbike. ‘How many pans do you sell every morning?’

  I was still looking at the grin that seemed to be saying, boy, you know nothing. ‘About two,’ she told me.

  That made ninety Saturday mornings by my calculations, nearly two years. At that rate, Gert van Staden’s motorbike was safe from me.

  ‘But I got lotsa other stuff, not just pans.’

  For the first time I considered supply problems. ‘Where do you get the stuff to sell?’

  ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘My ma gets it.’ Then I lost her attention again. ‘Good morning, sir. How are you today?’

  There was something about her and her smile that charmed all who came to her stall. If they were in the market for what she was selling, they all handed over their money and went away with a bowl, a frying pan, a pot, a few mismatched knives and forks or whatever.

  After the customer had left, she turned to me, a little trace of anxiety disturbing her grin. ‘Listen, boy, the customers are starting to come now …’

  ‘Chris,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Chris, that’s my name.’

  ‘Listen, Chris. I’ll ask my ma if she can help you start your own place or what.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Come next Saturday and I’ll tell you what she says.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay, next Saturday.’ Then her attention was again with a customer. ‘Good morning, ma’am.’

  The week that followed was a long one. The way I reckoned it, I could sell as well as Ruthie. After all, I had sold Annie’s awful cookies. When I thought about it, the ten rands I sold of the second batch was a major sales achievement. I had sold them to some of my customers of the first batch and presumably they had already sampled those.

  For a flea market stall, I needed stock. I supposed my mother might have some old pots that she would let me sell, but those would soon run out. Then there was the thing of the council. Did they let boys my age have flea market stalls?

  I thought that a partner might not be a bad idea for my stall. We could both be at the stall. That way, if there was already a customer being served, there would still be the other one to speak to a new customer. Also, while I did not admit it to myself at the time, it would be comforting not to be in it alone. But Annie was too bossy. And she was older than me. I knew she would start acting as if the whole thing was her idea and she was in charge. So I spoke to Abraham.

  ‘How much do you think we can make?’ he wanted to know the first time I raised the matter.

  ‘Two hundred rands on a Saturday.’

  ‘You’re making a joke.’
Most of the fathers in the neighbourhood would not have been earning as much in a week. The idea of making that kind of money had an obvious effect on Abraham’s thinking. He might have difficulty believing that it was possible, but it was clear that he wanted to believe it.

  ‘No, no joke,’ I said.

  ‘Two hundred rands?’

  ‘Easy,’ I said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I asked them.’ I reasoned that a small exaggeration in order to inspire Abraham was not a bad thing. ‘I’m going to see them again on Saturday.’

  ‘I’m coming too,’ he said.

  ‘No. I’ll handle it.’ I tried to say it the way I imagined a businessman would.

  Having recruited Abraham, I was again at the flea market early the next Saturday. This time I got there even before Ruthie. Again I helped her unpack. She had a good stock of new pots this time. ‘Bankrupt sale,’ she explained. ‘My ma says she picked them up for nothing.’

  ‘For nothing?’

  ‘My ma says so, but she actually means very cheap.’

  By the time we finished unpacking, Ruthie was again looking around anxiously. It was clear that Saturday morning meetings were not the best time for her. She leant slightly towards me and her face became still with intent. ‘I asked my ma about a place for you. She said why don’t you rather get stuff for us to sell then we can give you half the money?’

  That was not what I had envisaged, but half the money sounded interesting. ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Anything, kitchen stuff, old clo’es, pictures, anything. People buy anything. Ask the people round where you stay for old stuff.’

  That was how my second business venture, the one after the cookies, got started.

  six

  Abraham and I discussed Ruthie’s mother’s proposition at length. We made a list of the sort of things we would try to beg from the mothers of the neighbourhood. Then we drew a map, dividing Red Hill into two territories, one for him to work and one for me. That way we would cover twice the ground. That sounded fine until – another thing we would never admit to ourselves – we lacked the nerve to set out alone. So we started with our own families, and after that we threw away the list, forgot about the territories and went together to work the neighbourhood.