Napu came and begged Noria to go back home. As expected, That Mountain Woman ordered her daughter to ignore his pathetic pleas. But Xesibe’s secret advice prevailed, and Noria went back to their shack in town.
Like all marriages, Noria’s had its ups and downs. However, it was the down side that came to prevail. Besides the fact that Napu was a koata, and Noria had reached the stage where she never let him forget this, she became increasingly frustrated with their financial situation, which never seemed to improve. Vutha was three years old. In a year or two, they would have to send him to school. There was no doubt that even by then their situation would not have changed. Noria feared for the future. How on earth were they going to afford to send their son to school? There were fees to be paid, and one needed money to buy school uniform, without which the teachers expelled the pupils. Then one had to buy books, and make contributions to the building fund that the teachers always demanded from parents. How were they going to cope?
She could go to work. Over the years, the town had grown much bigger. Among the new places that had emerged were the hospital, the magistrate’s court, the offices of the agricultural extension workers, many other buildings (most of which were government offices), and a hotel which was always full of white people who came to admire our beautiful rivers and catch catfish there. Surely she could get a job in one of these places as a sweeper, or as a woman who made tea. But Napu would not hear of it.
‘My wife will not work, especially in those offices. That is where women meet men.’
‘It is my fault, Napu! It is my fault that I am married to a koata!’
One night, almost at midnight, a drunken Napu came home with another woman. He ordered Noria to pack her belongings and vacate the shack.
‘Where do you expect me to go at this time of the night, Napu?’
‘I don’t know. It is not my business where you go.’
So Noria took her few rags, and packed them in a pillow case. She woke Vutha up, dressed him, and they both left their home. Vutha was crying.
‘Where are we going, mama?’
‘I don’t know, my child. Ask your father.’
A neighbour gave them refuge until the next morning. Then they caught a bus back to the village. Although Noria did not have any money for the bus fare, she was well known to the bus drivers and conductors from the days when she used to spend most of her time making them happy. So they let her ride free of charge.
When Noria and her son arrived at her parents’ home, she immediately sensed that something was amiss.
‘Where is mother?’
‘She is not here, Noria. And what do you want here anyway?’
‘Napu has expelled us from his house. Where has mother gone?’
‘Hospital. She was struck by illness. And since as a doctor she could not cure herself, we took her to a white doctor in town. She was immediately admitted to hospital. They say she will be there for a long time.’
We thought Xesibe would be happy without his tormentor, but again we were wrong. He claimed that he was miserable, and desperately missed his wife. Nevertheless, we could see that he enjoyed being master of his own compound. Without That Mountain Woman around, he was able to be very firm with Noria. Even though it would have been very useful to have her help in the house, he insisted that she go and find a job so as to feed her child. ‘Mistake is your child, not mine. I am not giving you a single penny for his upkeep. You must go and find a job.’
Noria found a job as a sweeper in one of the government offices in town. She left the village at dawn every morning, got into a mini-bus taxi, and arrived in town two hours before the offices opened. The nightwatchman opened up for her, and she cleaned the offices. By eight, when the office workers arrived, she had finished cleaning. She was required to be around to make tea when the big bosses wanted it, or when there was an important visitor. She knocked off at three in the afternoon, and caught a taxi back to the village. This commuting would have been very expensive, and indeed would have swallowed her entire monthly salary, had it not been for the good relations that she enjoyed with the taxi drivers. She was able to travel without paying any fares.
Some days she went to the hospital to see her mother, who was slowly waning. The doctors said she had cancer of the womb. But she was always in high spirits, and her tongue had not lost its sharpness.
‘Who looks after Jealous Down when you’ve gone to work?’
‘He looks after himself.’
‘He does not even go to school?’
‘He’s still too young, mother. He will go when he’s older. And by that time I’ll have enough money to pay for him.’
‘Your father is a very cruel man. He has enough money to send all the children of the world to school. With a rich father like that, you don’t even need to work. But I know, he is doing it to spite me.’
Vutha, meanwhile spent each day blissfully playing in the mud. He developed scabies all over his body. Xesibe said that rather than let the boy behave like a hog at home, he should go and look after the calves in the veld. Noria said that her son was not going to be anyone’s herdboy. Her son would go to school instead, and receive the education that had escaped her, and become a teacher. But even as she said this, she knew that the money she was paid for sweeping the government offices was barely enough to feed them. Xesibe seemed to enjoy to see his daughter suffer.
One morning when Noria was serving tea to the big bosses, a tray laden with cups and saucers slipped from her hands and crashed to the floor. The china broke into smithereens. Noria was summarily dismissed from work.
Depressed and miserable, she went to the hospital to tell her mother of the misfortune that had befallen her. Another patient, whose bed was next to her mother’s heard her story and said, ‘I was only admitted yesterday, and I have been told that I am going to be here for a long time, like your mother. I was working for the Bible Society as a sweeper. Why don’t you go and see them? I am sure my job is still vacant.’ Noria thanked her, and immediately went to the Bible Society. She got the job.
She was much happier at the Bible Society. The women who worked there were Christians, and acted as a support group. There was one particular woman who was always expensively dressed, yet she was only a sweeper like Noria. Once Noria had got to know her, she asked, ‘How do you manage to look so smart on your salary? Or do they pay you more?’ The woman told her that she had other means of earning money. Sweeping at the Bible Society was only a front that gave her respectability in the eyes of her family and neighbours. The work that really paid was in the evening at the hotel. ‘You can come and join me tonight and see how I work.’
That evening Noria went to the hotel with her new friend. She knew that in the village her son would probably go to sleep on an empty stomach. Xesibe could not be bothered with feeding his grandchild. In fact, in the evenings, he had taken to visiting his friends for a drink of beer that extended to the small hours of the morning. Then he sang his way home, and slept on his bed without bothering to take off his clothes or even his gumboots. Noria’s hope was that Vutha would be wise enough to join the herdboys for their evening meal, which they cooked for themselves outside their hovel. One day Vutha would understand that his mother loved him very much, and that she was doing all this for him.
At the hotel, Noria learnt the art of entertaining white men who came from across the seas. In return, they bought her drinks and paid her a lot of money. Unlike her friend who introduced her to the trade, she did not find it necessary to continue working at the Bible Society. She had no need to preserve a respectable front. After all, she was earning more money in a single night than she earned in a month of drudgery either in the government offices or at the Bible Society.