This Mournable Body
Your pupils are all born frees, or as nearly so as to make no difference; the oldest amongst them were toddlers at Independence. They bear no resemblance to your adolescent self. The energy in their bearing as they walk across the lawns, clatter down the red tile corridors, or charge around the playing fields tells you these young women see their future stretch into glittering horizons. Their forthright manner of meeting your gaze, even the least intelligent, indicates they expect more of the world than you ever dreamed the planet contained. You discover this is true even for those not city-born, who moved in from the villages to live with relatives. Unaccustomed to such young people, with every class you stand in a room of strangers. The situation ignites a smouldering resentment, a kind of grudge, which has you imagining it would be therapeutic for the young ladies to endure, before their characters are fully formed, the same rigours as you did. All this interferes badly with your attempt to reinvent yourself as a model teacher.
You are particularly wary of one Esmeralda, a young woman with artificial nails several millimetres longer than the regulations allow, who, through means at her disposal that the other girls do not command, regularly coaxes the prefects into abandoning their duty. One morning, in your early days, you catch her sticking an artificial nail back on with art stock glue. As you confiscate the nail so that she has to walk around with one spoilt finger, you realize this is a beginning, not an end. Next you surprise her several times as she brushes on lip gloss behind a textbook and are convinced that your pupil is out to get you. Finally, when you come upon her writing, not notes on waterborne diseases, but a message to a male person in the bad grammar of cell phone texts, on a bulky gadget she has sneaked into your lesson, you discern that sooner or later there will be trouble.
Although a ringleader, Esmeralda is not the only girl who engages in scandalous behaviour. Many pierce multiple holes in their ears and other parts of their bodies. Green-skirted, beige-bloused, increasing numbers of them stop walking down the corridors and take to swaggering. They emphasize the r’s at the ends of words, and the boldest attempt to roll them. They stop opening their mouths, so that their vowels rise into their noses, in an effort to sound American. Most appallingly, neither lectures nor diagrams of fast-mutating viruses nor anything else you draw attention to blunts your charges’ appetite for experimentation. Your first strategy is to ignore them. Good teaching contracts into pages of dictated notes and putting up of exercises on the chalkboard. Then, after a few weeks, you are placed on the roster for outdoor supervision.
Doing rounds, your preferred strategy is to shout a greeting at a groundsman or sing the chorus of a hymn to signal to the young ladies that authority approaches. When you do detect a group hunched over a bottle or a cigarette, you expect them to hide the contraband and stub out whatever they are smoking. Instead, they regard you brazenly or collapse in giggles. You dismiss immediately a wild notion that emanates from a feeble place in your heart, that your charges are gravely confused, in need of rescue. You perceive the unwavering eyes as mockery, the laughter as scoffing at everything you have become. Crushing sympathy, convinced that their freedom-filled, post-Independence upbringing is vastly more advantageous than yours was, you buy a large black log book in whose pages you record names, classes, and offences. You send off your lists, along with the girls caught, to the headmistress.
It does not take your students long to realize there is little to recommend you. Halfway through the second term, they retaliate, baptizing you Tambudzai the Grief, TTG for short. During periods when you confiscate numerous cell phones and send many girls to detention, this escalates to MG—Mega-Grief. Esmeralda openly snorts, “Ah, Mega!” when you pass.
The most serious crime a girl can commit is climbing into a car driven by an unaccompanied man who is not a certified relation. Your staff handbook expounds over several paragraphs the heinousness of this misdeed and lists a dozen remedies that range from sessions with guardians to expulsion. In spite of this, there appears to be rough competition amongst certain pupils to see who flouts the rule most spectacularly by occupying the most expensive vehicle.
Mrs. Samaita is impassive when you approach her about the matter over tea in the staff room.
“I have looked at the lists you gave me,” she says. “Generally it has not affected results. A number of those girls obtain top marks, so the school record remains commendable.”
You are immediately outraged.
“But the form threes,” you insist, less scandalized on behalf of your students’ prospects than by your headmistress’s invalidation of all your efforts. “I have put the names down. Some of those girls in those cars are even in form two.”
“Live and let live,” the headmistress says. “Let sleeping dogs lie. Focus on what is necessary. It would be different,” she proceeds with a shrug, “if we could prove something like statutory rape. Since this is hardly possible, it becomes another problem.”
Energized by your discontent, one afternoon after lessons you take a trip to the police station, which in any case is at the shopping centre through which you pass on your way to and from school. There, sitting in the queue on the shaky wooden bench, your black book with students’ names, the registration numbers of the vehicles they sat in as well as descriptions of the middle-aged gentlemen who drove them neatly entered, you remember your headmistress’s words, rise, and continue on your way to your lodgings. Your distress deepens as you walk through the common, taking a shortcut to the road along which combis to Mai Manyanga’s run. Attempting distraction, you apply yourself to imagining what you will buy with the twenty dollars you lay away each month by walking this part of your route, but prices are increasing, as are your needs, so you are not consoled.
The grass is tall. At night, snakes and criminals slide around in it. Your stomach tenses fearfully, as it does whenever you take this path. Some months ago, there had been a meeting in the school hall that you did not attend, at which parents threatened to go out in force to cut the common grass themselves as it was a threat to their daughters. Upon contacting the city council to inform them of the resolution, the parents were warned that regardless of any action the council did or did not take, only the council had authority to remove any material or growth from the common. The stink of decomposition seeps skyward, flowing into your lungs. Then your eyes water and your nose and throat begin to pour, preventing you from smelling anything. Sneezing to the combi stop and through the rest of the journey, you are almost relieved to turn into the widow’s drive.
Inside, Bertha’s open doorway gapes into the corridor. The bed is stripped, her belongings cleared. The colleague she had once alluded to did not appear. Now you and Mako are left to endure the consequences of Shine’s uncontrolled sexual appetites on your own. Then Shine himself departs the following month. Mako starts telling you she is thinking of leaving too, of escaping the tension and gloom that continue to build up over Mai Manyanga’s, intensified by visits from her resentful-looking sons who these days stop by individually, never in pairs or all together.
You are too tired to lie to Mako, yourself, or your colleagues at work that you will shortly depart as well. You acknowledge that you are a woman without options. To divert yourself from this truth, you spend hours every night and weekend preparing more and more detailed lessons and increasing their complexity until you can scarcely comprehend what you have written yourself.
The students become so obstreperous that you speculate they will, at the end of the year, return nothing but failures. You double efforts at lesson planning, special reading, and drilling. When something inside you says enough is enough, you do not want to hear it. You begin taking a glass of wine at night as you pore over the girls’ exercise books. This escalates to two and then three. When you retire, moments after you lay your head on the pillow, you fall away into a void that you had before been wary of, but for which you are now grateful. In the morning you have difficulty waking.
On receiving your salary at the end of the
month, you catch a combi to town. It is an odd, not entirely pleasant, sensation to walk down First Street Mall after so many years, toward Edgars. Inside, you revel in the colours, textures, and cuts of the newest fashions. As you hold up one garment and struggle into another, the changing room mirror hints that not all is lost as you approach middle age. Walking and regular feeding, plus, you suppose, your families’ genes, have rescued you from the signs of getting on. All but trembling with excitement over spending so much money on goods that are not actually necessary but merely desired, you pay for a trouser suit and coordinating blouse in bottle green. Leaving the store, an impulse takes you into a hairdresser’s salon. You emerge with your hair neatly plaited, regretting only that you did not have enough cash on you to obtain a manicure, as so many of your older students have.
One morning, you rise later than usual. You intend to move quickly with your breakfast and toilet, but every limb drags. It takes you longer than normal to walk to the combi stop and then through the common. The assembly bell rings as you tramp up the school drive. Such tardiness is an offence for which you have punished scores of students. Having the privilege, as you think of it, of correcting means you are yourself to set a proper example. This you have striven to do since you took up employment at Northlea High some eight months earlier. Now, though, as has been the case all your adult life, you are failing dismally.
“What’s wrong with you? Knocking over everyone you meet. Is that why you wait until the bell’s gone?”
Out of your mouth you fling your fear of another defeat, directed at a group of first formers whom you almost bump into as they scurry from the classrooms to the hall on the other side of the school grounds.
“We are sorry, Miss Sigauke,” they breathe, bobbing respectful curtsies. Fright illuminates their eyes. “We are hurrying to get there in time.”
Mollified by the impact of your intervention, you unlock your office in a calmer state of mind. Following assembly, you spend the early part of the morning grading examination papers. It is an enjoyable task as you feel you exhibit considerable benevolence in allocating your students their grades. Completing the work well before tea time, you enjoy a sense of control.
At break time in the staff room, Mr. Chauke, A-level maths, and Mr. Tiza, O-level physical science, who call each other Brains One and Brains Two, push ahead of you into the queue for the hot water urn. They murmur, “Sorry, sorry, Miss Sigauke!” holding their cups under the spout. You hurry away from this annoyance.
Mrs. Samaita waves you over to her table.
After accepting a cupcake from First Year Shona Attachment, whose name you do not remember, the headmistress pushes some newspaper clippings at you.
“Have you seen these?” she asks. “Have you had the form threes yet?”
Each article depicts a gentleman, short, lean, and tautly muscled, who strikes you as being outrageously pleased with himself as he stands in front of a long, low Mercedes. Your mouth tastes of bitter gravel as you recognize the vehicle. ADF 3ZW, you recite to yourself the registration number recorded several times in your log book. The car’s bonnet, against which the man’s buttocks are propped, bears giant packs of brightly coloured cordials, jars of jam, blocks of laundry soap, packets of crisps, and jumbo-size packages of assorted fruit drops. More provisions spill out of the back windows. Blue-smocked staff dance in front of the vehicle. Some have pulled on over their uniforms baggy T-shirts on which the man’s face is printed. Other assistants cavort around the man and his automobile. In a passenger seat, half concealed by the chauffeur and packages, sits your third form pupil Esmeralda.
“All the girls are going wild about this,” sighs Mrs. Samaita. “They’re treating that Esmeralda like a queen. I will have to make an announcement about it tomorrow at assembly. Why on earth is she wearing her school uniform? I hope no one at the ministry’s seen it.”
“Head teacher,” says Chauke, sauntering by. “He is the business face of the chairperson of the Mining Council. Now that the country has discovered all these diamonds and platinum and oil, please let us be advised no one will touch him. Or anything he wants. In that position, he can’t be touched by anything.”
“Show him the picture and ask him for a donation,” says Tiza.
You join the rest of the teachers in clicking teeth, shaking heads, and placing teacups back on saucers.
“Let us hope,” Mrs. Samaita says, “that this Esmeralda does not end up like some of the girls we have had. Coming back to school after two weeks, with a doctor’s report saying something about her womb, looking as thin as a coat hanger.”
“That will serve her right,” breathes Ms. Moyo, Fashion and Fabrics. “If she can’t comport herself as we all try to teach them. Doesn’t everyone know the wires in that girl’s head are broken?”
You all give grunts of agreement. Your smile attaches itself to your face more tenaciously as your anxiety increases. Nothing can touch him, but this impunity does not apply to people like you. Men like the one in the photograph always find out. He can obtain staff reports, with your list of names and registration numbers. You might have been seen at the police station. You whisper a little prayer of thanksgiving that you were too cowardly to make a statement. Like all the others in the staff room, you know Esmeralda’s reputation and so, weighing the risks, favour no engagement although the law is being broken. You sense you are smiling too broadly, showing too many teeth. You press your lips together.
When it is time for the form three biology lesson, you discover Esmeralda has smuggled in several copies of the publication that carries the largest, most detailed photograph.
She is perched on her desk, twisting a gold watch around her wrist, evoking fascinated glances from her classmates and accepting homage like a goddess.
“MG’s here. Already,” Esmeralda says as you enter.
You breathe quickly in irritation. You swallow it down. You advance to your table.
“Your latest offerings,” you begin, meeting eyes glazed with fear or amusement or boredom.
Your pupil opens her desk and slides in several newspapers.
“From your latest offerings,” you repeat. You observe with surprised interest, very much as though examining another person, that in spite of swallowing and holding deep breaths, your breathing is growing more rapid.
“From the work you submitted, clearly we shall have to return to the first principles of diffusion,” you say. “We shall have, once more, to apply these principles at length and in detail to the case of human respiration that you are required to know for your O-level syllabus.”
Your pupil accepts a newspaper from the girl beside her and slides this one into her desk also.
“Diffusion. A definition, please,” you demand.
No one answers.
“I shall walk round the class and count to five,” you say.
One.
You pick up your T square and take a few steps.
Moving slowly, you approach Elizabeth. Like Esmeralda, this pupil Elizabeth is Rhodes scholar material. However, she is a meek girl. This morning she has the sense not to look at you as you approach her.
Two!
Your class holds its breath.
Three! Four!
You reach Elizabeth and raise the T square.
Five.
Your chest rises and falls. Sweat runs down your face. It slithers into your eyes. It gushes out of your armpits mingled with antiperspirant. You have seen how they do not want a qualification in biology, you say; in which case your pupils will receive a qualification in violence. Two or three young women pull at you. This has no effect. Instead, you escape yourself into an unbearable radiance.
The young goddess slips out and runs into the next classroom.
Ms. Rusike, returning with Esmeralda, takes a quiet look and disappears to inform Mrs. Samaita.
Someone laughs. She bites her lip until it bleeds when you glare at her. Exhilarated by her fear, you return your attention to Elizabeth. Seconds
later, your headmistress enters the classroom. She expects you to stop but you do not. The headmistress touches you gently on the shoulder. You throw the T square at the chalkboard. You twine your arms around your head. You howl a long rising note that shudders through the room.
Eventually you follow the headmistress to her office. She offers you a cup of tea, which you refuse. With no questions, pitching her voice low, speaking calmly and slowly, the headmistress gives you several days off to recover. Telling everyone you have received bad news concerning a close relative, she escorts you to her car and drives you to the widow’s.
That weekend you are more frightened than you have ever been, besieged by a great terror that leaves no space for remorse. Your only concern is to keep your job, not least so that you can continue to pay your rent. Christine, who has moved into Bertha’s old room, waylays you in front of her door and invites you inside. “You can come and get the mealie meal,” she reminds you. You make an excuse about visiting her the following day. On Sunday you cannot face her, believing she will see how the radiance that you escaped into in the classroom has dimmed to a pulsing purple sphere that sucks out all your energy, so that each word you utter is an intolerable effort. You sit in your room and remain silent when she knocks at your door.
The next day, Monday, you peer round your door tentatively, expecting her to have deposited the sack of mealie meal from your mother. You sigh in relief on seeing nothing obstructing the doorway. At school once more, you are restless as you sit in your office, but when there is no mention of the incident by lunchtime, you feel a surge of hope light up deep within you where it had almost been extinguished.