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It had been accidental, really – finding out that Beauty couldn’t read. Annamari had been shocked. After all, the girl was a year older than Arno and Arno was a voracious reader. She always put at least two or three new books in his suitcase before she and Thys drove him back to school in Bloemfontein on Sunday afternoons after his fortnightly weekend visit. She was very grateful to Thys’ ouma for buying them for her at CNA and posting them down: the few books on the shelves at Silverman’s General Dealer were hardly appropriate reading material for an almost twelve-year old. Or even for her, although she didn’t have time to read books nowadays. She was too busy being a farmer’s wife – except that Thys wasn’t a farmer, would never be a farmer and didn’t want to be a farmer. But he seemed to be content, living on Steynspruit and teaching at Driespruitfontein Hoërskool.
‘I know you want to live on Steynspruit,’ he’d said. ‘And if that’s what you want, then it’s what I want. I love you.’
Dominee van Zyl had gone ballistic when Thys told him, but Thys had stood his ground. ‘Steynspruit is Annamari’s heritage, our children’s heritage. We belong there,’ he’d said and winked at her as his father huffed and puffed and snorted.
Annamari kneaded the dough and smiled at the girl painstakingly practising “real” writing at the other side of the big wooden kitchen table. Beauty was amazing. She’d literally galloped through the Grade one and Grade two reading and writing syllabus. Now she was tearing through Grade three at a rate of knots, all thanks to what they now laughingly referred to as “Beauty’s bread”.
The recipe in Huisgenoot had caught her attention: Tannie’s Health Loaf. It looked really delicious in the photograph. Annamari seldom made bread but she had needed to do something to ease her pain and frustration at the murder investigation that was going precisely nowhere. She’d smacked De Wet the day before, just for breaking a saucer. And it had probably been an accident. He’d looked at her with his big brown eyes, bewildered. She never hit her children. She knew the move to Steynspruit, and the loss of their grandparents and uncle had been traumatic for them. It had all just got too much. Kneading bread seemed a great solution.
Then she got stuck. She couldn’t remember how much bran she had to add. She should have measured it out before she started mixing the dough but she’d never been the most methodical cook.
‘Beauty,’ she’d said to the girl who was sitting on Rosie’s old stool in the corner, peeling potatoes for supper, ‘just check the recipe for me, please. How much bran must I add? And perhaps you could measure it out for me?’
She liked it when Beauty came into the kitchen in the afternoons to help Pretty prepare supper. She was good company, bright and cheerful. Someone to speak to because Pretty didn’t speak at all, except to acknowledge instructions. With Rosie now officially retired, the kitchen – the farmhouse – was hauntingly quiet until Thys brought De Wet home later, after they’d both finished school.
Beauty didn’t move.
‘Just have a look at the recipe for me,’ Annamari said sharply. ‘My hands are dirty and I don’t want to get dough all over the magazine. There – it’s the one at the bottom of the page – Tannie’s Health Loaf. The ingredients are listed at the top.’
Beauty glued her eyes to the floor. She seemed to shrink into the stool and her cheeks flushed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t read.’
***
That night Annamari had fumed at Thys. It was so wrong, she said, that a bright, pretty little thing like Beauty couldn’t read. She was thirteen years old, for heaven’s sake. It wasn’t as if she was stupid, or anything. It was just crazy, crazy that she hadn’t been sent to school. What had Pretty been thinking? What had Petrus been thinking? Petrus was a sensible man. Why hadn’t he made sure Beauty learned to read?
She got even angrier when Thys reminded her that Pretty and Petrus had tried to send Beauty to school, but the school had refused to accept her because of her blue eyes and pale complexion.
‘Ja, well they should have sent her to the Coloured township so she could go to school there.’
‘And who would have taken care of her there? She may look Coloured but her family is black. Do you really think Pretty should have sent her child away, to strangers – just because of the way she looks? Made Beauty into another Sandra Laing?’
Annamari stared at her husband, horrified. She remembered reading about Sandra Laing in the newspaper – about how she’d had white parents but was really Coloured and had been thrown out of her white school and then she’d run away with a kaffir which just went to prove that she really wasn’t white after all.
‘It’s not the same,’ she said.
‘It’s exactly the same,’ Thys replied. ‘The race classification system is cruel sometimes. I’m sure things like Sandra Laing and Beauty go on a hell of a lot more than we realise. And it’s wrong... it’s wrong when children like Beauty are the victims. I mean, why couldn’t she have gone to school in the township? Well, things are going to change now, that’s for sure, so perhaps there won’t be too many more Sandra Laings or Beautys in future. And it’s about bloody time.’
Annamari was shocked. Thys had never said anything like that before. Not so emphatically. He knew how she felt, especially now, after the terrorist attack and everything. Sometimes she teased him about being a bit of a commie. He was always going on about those poor kids he used to teach in Thaba ’Nchu, and how he wished he’d had the same equipment and facilities to teach them as he had at BHS, or even now at Driespruitfontein Hoërskool. Other than that, they hardly ever spoke about politics, not at home.
Thys hadn’t even said much when President FW de Klerk unbanned the ANC and all the other terrorist organisations back in February. She’d gone hysterical when she heard the news on the radio. She’d been horrified. Terrified. But Thys just said FW knew what he was doing. And when they were all watching Nelson Mandela’s release from prison on the big colour TV in the lounge and Stefan Smit called him a fucking kaffir and made some crude remarks about Mandela’s dreadful wife, Winnie, Thys had told Stefan never to use that language again in his house. Stefan walked out and she was pleased because she hated it when Thys invited him to join them. Thys was kind like that. She never told him that Stefan Smit always made her uncomfortable. They needed him. Stefan was virtually running Steynspruit now because Thys obviously couldn’t. But there was no way, no way on this earth, that she’d allow Stefan to move into Christo’s house. Christo had disliked him too, he’d told her so.
But Thys was right. Stefan Smit shouldn’t have used foul language like that, not even about Mandela, not even if he was a terrorist – not in front of her. Stefan had slammed the door hard on his way out.
Later, Thys had laughed at her when she expressed her surprise at how smart the tall, greying man looked as he addressed a huge mob of baying kaffirs and commies in Cape Town.
‘What did you think Nelson Mandela would look like?’ Thys asked.
‘Not like that. He looks so ordinary. Maybe it’s the suit and tie.’
While he certainly didn’t look like how she’d pictured the men who’d come into the house and butchered her entire family, Mandela still frightened her. He was a terrorist. Had been a terrorist. Otherwise why would they have kept him in jail for so long? And if FW just handed over everything to the kaffirs, like Stefan Smit said he would, then none of them would be safe.
***
‘What are you going to do about it?’ Thys asked as they got ready for bed.
‘About what?’
‘Beauty – not being able to read. Why don’t you teach her? You’re a teacher.’
‘Very funny. I’m a nursery school teacher. Beauty isn’t a baby. I wouldn’t know where to start.’
So Thys had given her some of his teaching books; and he brought home some lesson plans and workbooks from the Driespruitfontein primary school; and he even found some old Grade one reading books.
Beauty’s eyes had nearly popped out of her head when she walked into the kitchen the next day and found a little classroom had been set up at the end of the kitchen table, just for her. You could have lit a candle from the glow in her bright eyes. Annamari and Beauty were so engrossed in their lesson they didn’t notice Petrus standing in the doorway, tears in his eyes.
Every afternoon, after De Wet came home, he and Beauty sat on the stoep stairs and practised their reading together. On weekends, Arno helped Beauty and De Wet with their sums.
The only person who clearly wasn’t happy with the new arrangement was Stefan. ‘You’re asking for trouble, Mrs van Zyl. Kaffir kids should know their place. That girl is getting too big for her boots. And you’ve got Arno to think about – he’s getting to the age when boys and girls... you know.’
‘No Stefan, I don’t know,’ she said, and continued marking Beauty’s spelling test.
At the end of the first year of her little Steynspruit kitchen classroom school, Annamari was delighted with the improvement in De Wet’s school report. Arno, of course, was top of the class again. It was such a pity that he had chosen not to go to Greys in Bloemfontein but rather to Driespruitfontein Hoërskool so he could come home every weekend. But she knew he would excel anywhere. Just like his father.