by Shamim Sarif
“No, not to worry, Missus,” replied Christina. “I’m just looking at these fabrics. I’m thinking of a new dress one of these days.”
Miriam nodded, barely listening. “Take your time, Christina,” she said, and she went back to see how Robert was doing.
In the black square that lay open in the floor, only the top rungs of a wooden ladder were visible. She looked at Robert, who stood with his feet right at the edge of the darkness beneath them.
“I will go down there, Madam,” he said, preparing to descend but Miriam’s voice held him back.
“No,” she said. “I know what I’m looking for. I’ll go down.”
“But there are many spiders there, Madam,” Robert replied, with only a trace of a smile. Miriam considered this information for a moment and then looked at the boy, who was grinning now. “Sometimes there are snakes also,” he added.
“I’m looking for a box of books,” Miriam told him. “The books I used to have when I was a girl. They are novels,” she added.
“I know books,” replied Robert. “I can find them.”
He was small and lithe and he scrambled down the ladder in a few seconds, pausing on the last rung before dropping down to the cellar floor with a thud. He waited with patience for a few moments, until his eyes adjusted to the close darkness around him. Then he went directly to a stack of boxes that had stood undisturbed in the back of the cellar for as long as he could recall.
Out in the shop, Christina was ringing the bell. Miriam hurried into the shop and looked at Christina, who still held the bell in her hand.
“I thought you had all gone home,” Christina said, laughing nervously.
“We live here,” Miriam said, and raised her eyes to the ceiling where she could hear the steps of her husband. No doubt the insistent ringing had roused him from his afternoon sleep. She moved swiftly halfway up the stairs, and saw Omar on his way back from the bathroom.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was outside with Robert and Christina kept ringing the bell.”
He nodded, still groggy with sleep.
“Go back,” Miriam urged him in a low voice. “Sleep for a while. I’ll wake you soon.”
“I’m up now,” he said irritably.
Miriam looked defeated. “All right,” she said. “But you don’t have to rush. Take your time.”
He glanced at her, suspicious at her insistence, but she was already running back down the stairs.
At last Christina was gone, and Miriam returned at once to the cellar door. Within seconds a cardboard box appeared, followed by the head of Robert. He pushed it onto the floor with some effort, and presented it to Miriam with a sweep of his hand.
“Books, Madam.”
Miriam kneeled down and pulled the box open. They were indeed her books, the ones that she had brought with her by boat from India and then by truck from Pretoria.
“You forgot them, Madam?” asked Robert, watching as Miriam emptied them from the box and touched them all, one by one.
“Yes,” she replied. “Until someone reminded me.”
She sorted through them quickly, not taking the time to open them or recall the last time they had been read. Those recollections and re-readings she would save for another day when she was lonely again in the quiet of the late evening. She piled them all around her—there must have been fifteen books in all—and picked up Far From the Madding Crowd and Jane Eyre, but settled finally upon Little Women, which she remembered well from her school days. As a schoolgirl, she had always imagined herself as the fiery, independent character Jo, but when she thought about it now, it was someone else that she pictured in that role.
Miriam carried the book into the shop. She could hear Omar’s steps upstairs and she knew also that her children would be returning from school at any moment. She placed the book gently on the counter and searched some drawers, finding a sheet of brown paper and some string. She looked longingly for a moment at the festive wrapping paper that lay in sheets at the other end of the counter, but she knew that Omar would miss it if she were to use some. She lifted the cover of the book, and revealed a clean, white page, slightly spotted with damp, but clean all the same. A page for writing upon, for leaving an inscription on.
Miriam hesitated, but she went to get a pen. This pen she then held poised above the flyleaf for at least three minutes, while she hesitated as to the best words to send to the recipient. Finally the pen moved down:
To the lover
Miriam wrote, and then paused. She scrutinised the strokes made by her pen on the page and seemed satisfied that the letters were neatly made. She had been good at English handwriting at school, all those years ago. She leaned over and wrote again, completing the sentence:
To the lover of books,
Love
Miriam
She had stopped again at the word “love”, uncertain whether “regards” or something similar might not be better. But then she had decided that for anyone else she would have had little hesitation signing with love, and saw no reason to be so tentative now. She waited for the black ink to dry, blowing on it a little anxiously when she became aware again of Omar’s footsteps. She heard him say something to Robert and heard the boy come downstairs.
She shut the book and deftly wrapped it. Then the string was passed twice around the parcel and secured in a bow, and she quickly wrote in block capitals the address in Pretoria.
“Robert,” she called, and the boy came in from the kitchen. “Here,” she said, holding the parcel out to him. “Take this.” From her purse she extracted more money than she believed the postage would cost and handed it to him.
“Take this to the Post Office tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay, Madam.” He carefully turned over the package. “Is it a book?”
“Yes,” she replied, and for the first time she allowed herself to feel some hesitation at this idea of hers. She heard Omar’s step on the stairs and held out her hand to Robert, wanting suddenly to take the book back. He held onto it tightly, however, and whispered reassuringly that he would post it for her the next morning. Then he was gone, attending to the vegetables in the sink, with the book safely in his pocket and Miriam turned to the stairs just in time to greet her husband.
The parcel lay in the Post Office for two weeks before it was eventually collected with the mail. Miss Smith, the postmistress, had been forced to keep it outside Amina’s post box because of its size, and she had kept it beside her, and had become used to the sight of it among the rubber stamps and books of coupons, and after a while had ceased to recognise it as something waiting to be delivered.
She noticed it again, finally, when she spilt some red ink on its outer wrapping. It was covered unassumingly in smooth brown paper and tied with plain string, and when Miss Smith knocked over the ink and saw the spreading blot of red, she picked up the package and muttered to herself in Afrikaans that at the age of sixty-three she was losing her mind already, and what hope was there for the rest of her old age? She turned the parcel over in her hands, which were freckled from younger days spent as much as possible in the sun, then placed it right before her in the little window from which she served customers, because she knew that Jacob Williams would be in again today, and that he would be able to pass it on, at last, to Amina.
It was just past eleven o’clock when Jacob came into the post office to collect the mail for the café. He came twice a week, on tuesdays and Fridays, and Amina left the mail collection to him, partly because she usually forgot about it altogether, and partly because she had been with him to the Post Office once, and she had noticed that he and Miss Smith seemed to enjoy a mild flirtation of some kind.
“Morning, ma’am,” said Jacob, tipping his hat to the postmistress. She smiled and her eyes seemed to him to be more blue than ever. They were like crackling neon, Jacob decided as he watched her, not like any colour he had ever seen in nature.
“Good morning, Mr Williams,” she replied and she asked after his health, and
he asked after hers, and they chatted for a few minutes across the counter, before another customer came in. The man saw Jacob leaning against the Whites Only counter, smiling at the postmistress, and he frowned. Jacob turned and moved smartly over to the counter from which Coloured people were supposed to be served and he waited patiently while Miss Smith, who was the only Post Office employee present in the mornings, served the newcomer. She tore off strips of stamps with efficiency, and ignored the angry stare of her customer.
“Its warm out, isn’t it?” she said to the man, and she looked at him over the steel rims of her spectacles, noting the sweat that dripped down the side of his head. Inside the Post Office it was cool and quiet, with only the reassuring sounds of Miss Smith’s rubber stamps and till echoing into the atmosphere. The windows were high up in the walls and they cast broad squares of sunlight into the room, but the area around the counters was shaded. On the ceiling, two fans whirred gently, producing soft currents of air that circled above them.
The man used his sleeve to wipe his forehead. “You can say that again,” he muttered in reply, and he looked up at Jacob who was studying the notices that were posted on the wall beyond. Miss Smith pushed some stamps across the glass divide in the centre of the counter, and told the man the price. She waited with her hand on the till, but he was still watching Jacob. She felt a prick of nervous tension in the tips of her fingers.
“Hey, boy,” he called across the room and for a moment, despite being the only other customer of the Post Office, Jacob did not understand that the words were directed at him.
“Hey!” the man called again. Jacob looked up and raised his eyebrows. “Get me some water, boy,” he said and jerked his head in the direction of the drinking fountain which stood in the back corner. Jacob watched him, and ran his hand over his head. By nature, he was not a man who made decisions quickly, and in this particular circumstance he found he suddenly had a lot to think about. Jacob would gladly have walked a mile to bring a glass of water to someone who asked him politely, but there was no way he would answer the disrespect which had just been shown. To be called “boy” by someone twenty years his junior was too much. But then again, he hated to make trouble. And he hated to do so in front of Miss Smith.
“Go on,” shouted the man. “You understand English, don’t you?”
Jacob burned with anger and embarrassment but his body remained relaxed and still. He looked completely at ease, although he could not quite bring himself to look at Miss Smith. The postmistress, however, was not looking at him. She had already moved out to the other side of the counter.
“There’s no need for that,” she said sharply to the customer. “I am the employee here and I will get you the water if you are incapable of getting it yourself.”
Miss Smith had spent twenty years of her life teaching mathematics in a secondary school and was still accustomed to treating people who were younger than she as ageing pupils, to be guided, praised or reprimanded as the situation required. She moved briskly to the water fountain, filled a glass beaker with tepid water and held it out to the man.
“Here you are,” she said.
He was incredulous. “What’s the matter with you, lady? Haven’t you heard of apartheid?”
For a moment, as she looked into his face, Miss Smith saw the face of her only son, who lived in England now. There was no real resemblance between this man and the boy of whom she was so proud, but they could have been the same age, and a shudder caught the postmistress as she saw the surprise in the eyes before her, and she felt keenly how easily a young mind could be educated into ignorance. She blinked, realising the man was still staring at her and she remembered his question, the tail-ends of his words still echoing in the high corners of the room.
“Yes, I have heard of apartheid,” she replied. “And I don’t much care for it, thank you.”
He made no move to take the water, so she placed it back down by the fountain, and asked him again for the money that he owed for his postage stamps. Abruptly, he fished the coins from his pocket, ignored Miss Smith’s outstretched palm, and tossed them onto the counter. They landed with a clatter that broke the tense silence of the room, and a single coin skipped to the floor, where it rolled away beneath a chair. Then the man walked out, stopping to mutter an oath at Jacob who was on his knees, retrieving the coin before Miss Smith should be forced to do that too. The door shut with a crash.
Jacob stood up slowly and handed Miss Smith the money.
“Thank you,” she said softly, and she held onto his hand for a moment longer than was necessary. “We are all of us losing our dignity as human beings in this place, aren’t we?” she said.
“Some of us more quickly than others,” Jacob replied, looking down.
“Don’t you believe it for a second.” Her tone was fierce. “It’s people like him that lose the most . . .”
“Perhaps.”
Miss Smith moved quickly away behind the counter and was relieved to recognise the parcel that sat before her.
“Mr Williams,” she called to him. “I have a parcel here for you. Or rather, for young Miss Harjan.” She looked up apologetically. “Its been here for rather a long time, I’m afraid. A couple of weeks. I kept forgetting to give it to you. Here.”
She held the package out to him, and Jacob was grateful to her for her business-like tone, for giving him something to look at so he did not have to look at her just yet. He took it and turned it over.
“No return address,” he commented, pointlessly.
“No,” Miss Smith agreed. “Maybe it’s from a secret paramour,” she added, but then she remembered all the rumours she had heard about Amina’s personal life and she reddened, cursing herself again inwardly for being absent-minded and tactless.
“I’d better be going back. Work to do,” said Jacob, sensing that the kindest thing for both of them would be to bring the visit to an end. He raised his hat and moved across to the door.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Mr Williams!” Jacob turned and waited, and Miss Smith hesitated for a moment, undecided whether to apologise for the incident or not.
“I’ll see you again soon,” he said, reading her look. She watched him over the tops of her spectacles and smiled suddenly, her blue eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Make sure you do,” she said and Jacob smiled back before closing the door.
Jacob walked into the café to find that it had filled up considerably in his absence. Amina’s eyes met his by way of greeting and he raised the parcel that he held in his right hand before he placed it down on the counter.
She was talking to some customers, and while she waited to take their order she glanced over at the package. It looked plainly wrapped in brown paper and string, and she wondered if it was from her mother.
“Are your breedies fresh?” someone asked her, and she fixed them with a smile that was tinged with surprise.
“All our food is always fresh,” she said. She finished taking the order, then picked up the package as she walked over to the kitchen. She called the order through the rectangular serving hatch and waited for a shout back to confirm it was understood. The handwriting on the front of the paper, she noticed, was not that of her mother or her father. As she reached for a knife to slit the string, a glass dropped, splintering noisily on the wooden floor behind the counter. There was a moment’s hush before people began talking again.
Jacob stood staring at the glass, wondering how it had slipped from his hands. Amina watched him, and realised that she had never seen him break anything before, not even a plate. She also noticed that his hands were shaking, very slightly. One of the waitresses was already at Jacob’s feet, with a short brush and a pan, and within a very few moments, all evidence of the broken glass had gone. No one was interested any more. Only Jacob still looked at the floor.
“What is it?” Amina appeared at his side.
“It slipped. I was polishing it. Sorry.”
“Not the gla
ss,” Amina said softly. “What’s the matter?”
Jacob used the cloth he still held to wipe over the shining counter. “Nothing,” he replied. She let him work for a few moments, and waiting patiently until he spoke again.
“Some Afrikaaner in the Post Office,” he said, finally, avoiding her gaze. “He called me ‘boy’ and ordered me to get him water. A young fellow.”
Amina sighed irritably. “What’s the matter with the world these days?”
Jacob shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Come and sit with me,” she said to him. Jacob put down his cloth and followed her.
“There are people waiting,” he told her. “We should be helping.”
“Doris and Mary will handle it,” she told him, watching the waitresses as they moved from table to table.
Amina carried a cup of coffee to the booth and placed it in front of Jacob, then sat down.
“I wonder what’s in this?” she asked, placing the parcel down between them. She wanted to give him time to settle, to gather himself, so she cut through the thin string with the knife and quickly pulled away the paper wrapping. Before her lay a book. It was old, with a powder blue jacket and fine lettering.
“Little Women” Jacob read the words upside down. “Who’s it from?”
“I don’t know,” Amina said, a little too quickly, and when she looked up at him she was smiling.
“No letter?” asked Jacob.
“No letter.”
“Maybe there’s something written inside,” he suggested helpfully.
Amina seemed to find this unlikely and appeared reluctant to open the front cover of the book. Jacob noted that her eyes were shining—she seemed hardly able to keep still.
“Jacob, don’t let those idiots get you down. They’re ignorant.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s not worth worrying about, but I was embarrassed.”
She nodded. “Miss Smith?”