After years of rockiness and back-and-forthing, he and Babalwa had settled into a true man–wife thing. From the outside, their relationship appeared to be nearly as solid as the twins’. It was odd to observe, and to participate in, tangentially at least. In the main I was happy for both of them, and of course a little jealous, and a little paranoid, now that Gerald, myself and Beatrice were even more starkly shadowed by the reflected light of the two couples. (My semi-regular trysts with Beatrice were unnerving and guilt-inducing. I wondered frequently what the extent of her sex drive was: whether she was doubling up with me, or whether her cohabitation with Gerald was really just a matter of provisions and practicalities, jigsaw puzzles and boiled eggs.)
As the kids grew, Fats started organising them into units to be applied to various tasks, including my archiving project. Every now and then he would deliver a little army to me, a cluster of five or six children running in surprisingly orderly circles around his feet.
‘Right, boss, what’s it today? Wits? RAU? Oppenheimer library?’ I would pick the location and we would head off in two or three bakkies, depending on how many adults were along for the ride. Once or twice the entire farm set out – for some reason the Wits library trip sticks in my mind. (Why do we remember this, and not that? I can’t say. Maybe it was the light, the mood or the smell. We made many trips, but when I think of that time, the memory is of the horde of us crashing through the Wits library.) I had final editorial call on what was picked and what was left behind. The adults would build piles of what they thought was relevant, and the kids would tear up and down the floors, academic confetti fluttering around their every step, and pop up randomly to present their wild selections. I would filter with authority. Keepers into boxes on the left, junk in a pile on the right. Undecided in the middle.
I favoured, after quite a bit of consultation with the adults, the scientific and mathematical over narratives. It wasn’t my natural inclination, but ultimately it seemed to be the right thing to do. Our kids and their kids were going to need to build up technical knowledge. And that meant maths and science.
JM Coetzee and Es’kia Mphahlele could offer, ultimately, only voices.
Still, we allowed ourselves indulgences. I enjoyed tossing Coetzee – nemesis of my tertiary days – onto the junk pile. Conversely, I made sure that PG Wodehouse and Lesego Rampolokeng were completely collected, as well as a full ten-year set of the Daily Sun. Fats stacked every issue of Fast Company he could find onto his own personal pile, fondly examining covers he remembered from the old days, clucking while he leafed back and forth.
They were fun, our outings. They were also a way to slowly introduce the kids to the idea of our past as a binary opposite of the present. Through the archive we could present the idea of loss. Knowledge loss. History loss. The loss of culture. The loss of family. Loss as the theme of their lives.
My house was overflowing. We needed a new, permanent venue for the library. It made logistical sense to use the KES schoolrooms as the hub for the collection, and so we began at the school library and computer centre and reached out classroom by classroom, altering each as we occupied it with either books or electronic storage sets. We shelved each wall with six rows of pine for the book rooms, and added a central shelving column down the middle. I did my best to structure the stacking of the shelves as the books were carted in from their various sources, but really all I managed was to roughly separate categories. Science and maths on the main building’s first floor, arts and history on the second. It was going to take a lifetime – my lifetime, in all probability – to actually sort and index the titles, so to start with I allowed myself simply to achieve effective storage.
The computers and devices were more difficult. We knew where they had come from, but not what they contained. We debated for a good while the feasibility of plugging them in and examining their contents before storing them, but it would have taken too long. So we labelled the boxes and stored them like they were books. The idea was that sufficiently detailed labels would provide a simple filter through which to assess and deal with the contents. The labels included three categories:
Source: CSIR Nanotech Lab
Owner/content-originator designation: Administrator
Estimated intellectual worth: 3
Estimated intellectual worth, or EIW (pronounced ‘Eeeyu’ by the kids, as if describing a bad smell or taste), became the standard we applied to any particular thing to define its provisional intellectual potential. As the children grew older, they placed a lot of emphasis on big Eeeyu finds, motivated in no small measure by their parents.
‘Roy Roy Roy!’ Sthembiso, age seven, hurtled into the dining room. ‘Eeeyu ten, Eeeyu ten. I’ve got a Eeeyu ten!’ He was clutching a black spiral-bound notebook filled with what looked like mathematical schematics, stumbled upon during one of the increasingly frequent child-led excursions into the mansions of Munro Drive. Babalwa gently took the notebook from an excited dirty paw and flipped through it.
‘Well, it looks like a big Eeeyu, doesn’t it?’ She pulled the boy onto her lap and opened the notebook with the ends of her enveloping arms. ‘But our problem is the same as always, nè? We don’t really understand what any of the drawings mean. So I would say maybe it’s not a ten. Maybe it’s a seven?’
‘Not eight?’
‘You’ll have to ask Roy about that, but I would say a seven myself.’
Sthembiso handed me the book, dejected. I was notorious for my low Eeeyu scores. I considered the book quickly as I killed off my scrambled eggs. The schematics and drawings did look to be genuinely mathematical, as opposed to the far more common corporate spider diagrams the kids were often fooled by. The notebook was dirty and clearly well used. The pages had thumb marks on the lower right corner, indicating regular and repeated action. I pictured a generic mad scientist stuck away in the attic of his Houghton house, cooking up an equation he hoped would shake the world. Whoever the person was, he or she was dealing in subjects beyond my realm. Beyond any of our realms, really. I tossed it over to Fats without hope – his maths was some distance off mine, and that was saying something.
‘I think, Sthembiso, that you might actually have an eight on your hands, based on the WTF rule. Fats?’ I was half serious and half humouring the boy, now squirming profoundly in Babalwa’s lap at the thought of an eight, which would have constituted a rare victory.
Fats considered the notebook blankly. ‘Passes the WTF test on my side, but you knew that already.’ He flipped it over to Gerald, then Beatrice. Javas declined humbly – although superb with the construction of actual things, he held no mathematical pretensions.
We agreed it passed the WTF test – a simple mechanism to separate out material with indecipherable intellectual potential – and thus added an extra point.
‘Looks like a lucky day for Sthembiso!’ I handed the book back. ‘You know what to do, eh? Into the WTF filter for final review before you can claim the eight. Yes?’ He ripped the notebook from my hand. ‘And you need Andile to sign off before you can claim it.’
‘Yes yes yes,’ Sthembiso rattled back at me. ‘I know where she is. I just saw her. I’ll get her now.’
‘OK, go then.’ I tried to ruffle his hair, but my fingers hit fresh air.
Sthembiso, product of Javas and Babalwa, was my favourite. One isn’t supposed to have favourites, but now that I am knocking on the exit gate I can brush past delusions of objectivity. Sthembiso was my favourite – by some distance.