The Classifier

by Wessel Ebersohn

  While the guard was being distracted by Sophia, Abraham and I collected vases off the graves and stacked them in the densest part of the bamboo to await the next Saturday morning when we would deliver them to Ruthie. Our system worked well. Sophia’s visits always took place in the evening, so we were able to operate under cover of darkness. And we took sensible precautions. Before starting to collect the vases, we crept quietly up to the guardbox to listen. If they were still talking, we would wait to let things develop. When the talking stopped and a mixture of male grunts and female gasps started coming from the guardbox, we knew we were in the clear for at least an hour, sometimes for the rest of the evening.

  Abel’s activities with Sophia seemed to exhaust him. Often the incessant patrolling we had to deal with on other nights disappeared until the next day. The only other issue was what exactly they were doing in the guardbox. Abraham tried looking through the keyhole once, but saw nothing. Abel only had a candle and it seemed that he extinguished that while he was occupied with Sophia.

  Once, when Sophia went home to Zululand for a few days, we had to find some other way of diverting his attention. Our stock was running low and we badly needed to replenish it. The plan we came up with was to set fire to the long grass on the far side of the graveyard, where it bordered the sugar cane. The grass was dry at the time and would burn nicely. Abel knew that he would be in trouble if a fire spread from the graveyard to the sugar cane. We calculated that it would keep him busy long enough for us to remove the vases from at least a hundred graves.

  It did not work out quite as we had planned. We needed matches or a lighter to get the grass going and Uncle Stefan, who was the only one in our family who smoked, was out. He always used a lighter and it had gone with him.

  Matches were always a problem in our house. Neither of my parents smoked, so Mama often forgot to buy them. On the night in question, Mama was busy in the kitchen and our only box of matches was lying on the table next to where she was working. Just picking them up and walking away with them would have caused maternal enquiries that I would have preferred not to answer. So our solution was for Annie to take Mama to some other part of the house. I would make off with the matches and Mama would not notice that they had disappeared. At least, that was our thinking.

  Annie made an excuse about wanting to show Mama some part of her homework, while I hovered close by. But Mama went on with the vegetables she was preparing and told her to bring the piece of homework to the kitchen. Annie made all sorts of fairly transparent excuses as to why Mama had to come to the bedroom. Eventually, she more or less dragged Mama out of the kitchen. But as Mama left, she scooped up the matches and slipped them into the pocket of her apron.

  Annie was stuck with having to show Mama some very ordinary algebra. Mama came back to the kitchen looking puzzled, but trying to sound enthusiastic about the algebra. ‘It’s very nice, Annie,’ she was saying, ‘but you were always good at mathematics.’ The matches were still in her pocket.

  In the meantime, our opportunity was slipping away. Outside, darkness was gathering. We would soon be expected to be inside, doing homework.

  It was Abraham who broke the stalemate. He had long since given up on Annie’s diversionary attempts. He returned suddenly from his own foraging, patting one of his pockets as a signal that he had what we were looking for. It seemed a schoolfriend that lived close by had better luck than us in raiding his family’s pantry.

  A patch of grass at the far end of the graveyard looked ideal for our purposes. Abraham and Annie waited in the shelter of a line of scrub while, running at a crouch, I approached the dry grass and struck just one match. The result was better than anything we could have hoped for. By the time I got back to them, the blaze was already almost head high and moving towards the sugar cane. ‘I didn’t think it would be like that,’ Abraham said.

  ‘Nor me,’ Annie said.

  ‘We better get Abel,’ Abraham said.

  ‘That’ll ruin everything,’ I told them.

  ‘We have to,’ Annie said. ‘You go, Chrissie. You can run fast.’

  The flames were growing by the second. I hesitated briefly, then ran for Abel’s hut. By now I could barely see the path. I stumbled twice, once over the graveyard’s only beehive, but the bees did not give chase. Further along the path, after glancing back at the growing wall of flame, I fell headlong, but was up almost immediately.

  By the time I reached the section closest to the gate where I could see by the light of the street lights, I was covered in dust and grass smears. I sprinted the last twenty metres and was about to bang on the door when, to my horror, I realised that the same sort of grunts I had heard before were issuing from Abel’s box.

  It took me a moment to get over my indignation, but another glance at the fire did it. I banged on the door and yelled Abel’s name. From within I heard him mumble something in his own language that sounded profane, but when I shouted to him that there was a fire, his head appeared in the doorway. He took one glance and said, ‘Shit.’ I had never heard anyone curse in quite such a heartfelt way. Glancing back over his shoulder, he spoke to Sophia’s replacement. ‘Fuck off.’ And then something else in Zulu. Abel was not a refined individual.

  The fire turned out to be more or less unstoppable. Men from neighbouring houses turned up to help, but the flames reached the cane in no time. It was only when the farmer himself arrived that our feverish activities came to a halt. He explained that the blaze was approaching a firebreak that cut off most of his cane. It was certain to stop the fire. Not only that, but the cane was almost mature and in a week or two he would have set it alight anyway to burn off the loose fronds. ‘But thank you all for your thoughtfulness,’ he said.

  I suppose it should have been an intense relief that the fire was not out of control, but later Abraham and I admitted to each other that seeing our fire fizzle out so easily was a big disappointment. It had looked far more menacing.

  The farmer was so impressed by ‘the three young people who had raised the alarm’, as he put it, that he turned up at our next school assembly with one hundred rand cheques for each of us. We were heroes.

  Not everyone was as believing though. ‘So where were you when you saw the fire?’ Uncle Stefan asked.

  ‘In the backyard,’ I said.

  ‘You couldn’t have seen it from there.’

  ‘It glowed,’ Abraham said.

  ‘I see.’ Uncle Stefan had that knowing smile that always seemed to suggest that he knew more than we wanted him to.

  Despite such setbacks, we pursued our graveyard industry with considerable enthusiasm. If anyone ever complained to Abel about vases that went missing, it could not have been too serious. He still had his job long after we stopped operating our business.

  We even developed a certain subtlety in our thieving. If a new vase appeared to replace the one we had stolen, we took it immediately, but we did not hand it over to Ruthie right away. We always held it long enough so that the previous owner would forget what it looked like. At least, that was our reasoning.

  Ruthie made no secret of her delight. ‘And the vases are so nice,’ she told us. ‘People are willing to pay for them. My ma asks where you boys get them.’

  We had worked out an answer to that one. ‘Factory rejects,’ I said. In any case, there was no chance of Ruthie’s mother cutting us out and going direct to the source.

  Ruthie was incredulous. ‘They reject easily, hey? This stuff is nice.’

  The tide in our business turned. The graveyard vases became our main line. We realised that just one line might look suspicious, so we made a point of still collecting the neighbourhood’s battered used goods. Even with Annie getting her cut from the vase business, my income started growing again. Five rands a week became seven, then eight, eventually reaching twenty and, in one week, even thirty-five.

  We were three weeks into this phase of our business when one of Mama’s friends, an auntie from up the coast, came to visit. She complaine
d to Mama that someone had stolen the vase right off her mother’s grave. ‘It’s not right,’ she said, ‘to steal the vase from another grave to put on the grave of your family member. How would it be if we were all stealing vases back and forth from each other’s family graves?’

  Mama sympathised and offered to see if we had a spare vase to replace her missing one.

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ the auntie said. ‘I got a nice one quite cheap at the Saturday morning flea market. They have a nice selection there. A sweet little coloured girl sold me one.’

  It was just as well that she did not see her own vase among those on sale. The idea that people might look for replacements at Ruthie’s stall had not occurred to any of us. But, to the best of my knowledge, no one ever challenged Ruthie by suggesting that a vase she had for sale looked very like the one missing from grandfather or grandmother’s grave. Our business thrived.

  eight

  While we were struggling with the many problems of entrepreneurship, the main other item of significance in my life was Ruthie. Looking forward to seeing her on Saturdays and the looming reality of Gert van Staden’s motorbike dominated all else. I did manage to improve my schoolmarks a little. Mama was not delighted, but she stopped hounding me.

  My bank account had passed two hundred rands when, one Saturday morning, I made our delivery to Ruthie alone. Abraham was not feeling well and his mother had put him to bed. While working the neighbourhood, he often had to sit down to rest.

  I dragged Abraham’s little cart that we used for deliveries up the hill to the flea market. Ruthie was her usual, perky self, grinning both at me and the new stock. ‘How far you still gotto go for the motorbike?’ she asked.

  ‘Another fifty, then I’m going to make an offer.’

  ‘You still going to keep doing this, if you got your motorbike?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. Then I thought about it. Would I still keep doing it or was the motorbike the end of the business? Ruthie seemed a little troubled by my uncertainty, studying my expression with those big, dark eyes. ‘I’ll keep doing it. I’ll need money for petrol.’

  She grinned. ‘Good. Mama says we need the stuff you boys bring, specially the vases. She asked me where you boys get the factory rejects. I told her I dunno, because I dunno.’

  ‘It’s a trade secret,’ I said. It felt good pretending to have trade secrets that someone like Ruthie’s mother, who had been in the business for a long time, did not know.

  ‘Can you drive a motorbike?’ Ruthie seemed very interested in my plans.

  ‘Not yet,’ I told her.

  ‘Aren’t you too young?’

  ‘I’m going to ride it on my oupa’s farm.’

  ‘Your oupa’s got a farm?’ This obviously impressed her.

  ‘Yes, and I can ride it there.’

  ‘He’ll let you ride it there?’

  ‘He doesn’t care.’ I was glad that she had not asked where the farm was and how I was going to get it there.

  The direction of our discussion prompted a new thought in Ruthie’s mind. ‘Why’nt you ever come here on your bicycle?’

  ‘I haven’t got a bicycle.’

  ‘Where’d you learn to ride then?’

  ‘I don’t know how to ride.’

  Ruthie’s mouth almost hung open in surprise. When she answered her voice had a higher pitch than before. ‘You can’t learn to ride on a motorbike.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You can’t. Everybody knows you can’t. You gotto learn on a ordinary bike.’

  ‘Is it hard to learn?’

  ‘No, it’s easy.’

  That is how it came about that Ruthie taught me to ride a bicycle. She said her method was simple and she guaranteed that I would learn in a day, an afternoon actually. We could use her brother Johnny’s bicycle. She would borrow it and he would not even notice that it was gone.

  On the appointed day, after school, I went to the place where Ruthie had said I should meet her. It was the first time I had been inside Greenwood Park.

  I ran all the way down the long hillside from our house to the Old North Coast Road and paused there. The two suburbs, Red Hill and Greenwood Park, had been built on sloping ground on either side of a narrow valley. Everywhere you went in our part of the city, in fact, in most of Durban, you were either going steeply uphill or as steeply downhill. The Old North Coast Road that ran up the valley between the two suburbs was a riot of cars, nice ones from our side and mostly old ones from their side, also buses from KwaMashu, heavy trucks from the brickworks further down the valley and delivery vehicles from the light industry in the area.

  I probably only stood there for a few seconds, waiting for a break in the traffic, before starting up the next hill into what was forbidden territory for a nice white boy like me. I think that even then it was clear to me that I was stepping over some unseen line. I knew I was doing nothing wrong, certainly nothing that was against the law. No white boys went to jail for passing through a coloured area. And I was sure that there was no law to prevent a white boy from learning to ride a bicycle in a coloured area. But I knew that I would find no other white kids there and that I was not going to tell anyone where I had been.

  Much of the brief debate within me, if you can call it that, was barely conscious. It rested in an uneasiness, rather than a clearly defined argument. If I was not sure that I should be learning to ride a bicycle in Greenwood Park, it was clear that I did need to learn somewhere. If the argument needed a clincher, I had one. Ruthie was going to be teaching me. That too was a cause for uneasiness though.

  On either side of the road, as I entered Greenwood Park, were houses that were not too different from the one we stayed in. Most of the paintwork looked older than that of the houses in Red Hill. The gardens were not as tidy. I didn’t see any Zulu garden boys. Some of the corrugated-iron roofs were red with rust and there were cars parked in the streets, most of the houses being without garages.

  The biggest difference, though, was in the people. Until my meeting with Ruthie and her mother, I had seen them only on the streets, in buses and in queues in shops. Because they had played no part in my life, I had paid no attention to them. They were a fact of existence, like the weather or the traffic. They were nothing more than that.

  As I walked up the hill into Greenwood Park, I saw people with skin as fair as Ruthie’s, others darker than her mother, girls with gentle, flowing locks and some with tight little African curls, even the occasional head of crisp African hair tinted with a dusty blonde – the evidence of a father who probably lived on the Red Hill side of the road.

  Far more kids were in the road and out in front of the houses than you would ever see in Red Hill. I saw boys playing soccer with a scarred old ball, girls in groups talking, others swinging schoolcases as they made their way up from the bus stop, a man tinkering on his car with the hood up: it was a much livelier suburban scene than I was accustomed to. No one paid any attention to me. No one even seemed to notice me.

  I followed Ruthie’s directions, turning into a side road and then turning again onto a street the council had not yet started developing. The road was even steeper than the one I had climbed to get there. It did not look like a good place to learn to ride a bike. Nevertheless, this was the spot to which she had directed me and I sat down on the grass verge to wait.

  The truth is that others had tried to teach me to ride and all had been unsuccessful. The idea of actually balancing on two thin tyres seemed so unlikely a thing to do, that I had brought no confidence to my previous attempts. Sitting on the grass at the roadside, I wondered what magic formula Ruthie had that could turn me into a bicycle rider – and ultimately a rider of my own motorbike.

  She arrived half an hour late, riding a man’s bicycle that was much too big for her. She had to transfer her entire weight from one pedal to the other just to reach them. Sitting on the saddle was out of the question. Behind her, a retinue of three smaller children ran, all obviously having come to enjoy th
e spectacle. When they saw me, they all laughed. The smallest of them all, a little girl, clapped her hands joyfully. Ruthie herself was flushed and out of breath from the ride. She stopped in front of me as I rose. ‘I didn’t think you going to come,’ she said, still gasping for breath.

  ‘I said I would.’

  ‘I know, but I didn’t think you going to.’

  She was standing next to the bike and grinning at me in that way she had. The smaller kids were grinning too. ‘How do I start?’ I asked.

  ‘You gotto get on the bike.’ It was said as if this was the most obvious thing and only the simple-minded could even ask such a question.

  A small girl echoed her. ‘You gotto get on the bike.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Jus’ get on,’ Ruthie said.

  I got on, my feet firmly anchored to the earth on either side. Although we were about the same age, I was a lot taller than she was.

  ‘Not like that,’ she said. ‘You gotto point it down the hill.’

  The steepness of the slope was a dangerous precipice to me. My past failures, humiliations and minor injuries at this particular endeavour returned to me in frightening detail. Despite my fears, with Ruthie standing next to me, I turned the bike and aimed it towards the precipice. ‘What now?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

  ‘You pick up your feet and you go down the hill.’

  ‘I’ll fall,’ I said.

  ‘No. People fall when they start learning ’cause they press on the pedals. You mustn’t press on the pedals. Jus’ hold your feet out on either side, then if you wobble to one side you can jus’ put your foot on the ground, and if you wobble to the other side you put your foot on the ground on the other side. It’s easy.’

  ‘You jus’ put your foot,’ the tiny girl who had clapped at seeing me repeated.

  I looked down the slope, wondering what the next few seconds would mean to my life, or at least my wellbeing. ‘You can go,’ Ruthie said. As if to emphasise it, she gave the bike a little push and it started moving.