For Tsotso, Western Medical Fund was a stop-gap. Something she could do before opening her workshop and really taking off. She'd taught herself to make violins, with the help of a book she'd downloaded off the internet and a Chinaman she'd met in a chat room. The notes from the string instrument-making course she'd taken last year helped too.
On the way to work every morning she stopped in front of Frankie's and stared at the upright piano – a simple “Squire” make, cherry-wood body. She'd priced it a few months back and had been salivating ever since.
Watching the piano, especially the stool placed in front of it, reminded Tsotso of her piano lessons in primary school, Madame Desmarais sitting next to her, straight-backed, tapping a ruler on her lap and counting to keep the 3:6 time.
Madame Desmarais had always counted out loud, Tsotso had counted in her mind, also imagining that the piano counted with them.
As far as Tsotso was concerned musical instruments had always breathed and lived and spoken; she liked to think she had a special love affair with them, ever since she was five and her uncle had handed her a rusty mbira. She'd held the rough wooden body of the Zimbabwean musical instrument in her small hands and plucked at the row of long slender metal teeth. That was the beginning of the love affair.
An affair that had crescendoed, years later, in a boarding school scandal – Tsotso was found lying naked, in the Cecil Skotnes assembly hall, atop the baby grand.
Her academic scholarship at the prestigious school hung in the balance for a few days. Finally, convinced it was part of a Grade 11 prank, the disciplinary committee had suspended her for a week and requested, on her return, she make an apology to Mrs. Vuyisiwe, the principal.
Tsotso had borne her punishment, accustomed, by then, to being misunderstood. She hadn't been trying to defile school property, as the teachers had insisted. Instead it was an innocent experiment – she'd wanted to know what it would feel like to have her naked skin pressed up against the skin of the piano. Glorious.