Fiction

Southern Rhodesia, 1948

Brian Pines walked to Baines kindergarten following tree-shaded, dusty, curving footpaths. I wish I had a brother to play with, he thought, as he ambled five long blocks to the public school. I want the children to like me and play with me.

Through his brown, sometimes hazel eyes, he watched sparrows feeding. In his right hand, a small, square, brown case held a jam sandwich and an apple for the morning break. Inside the left pocket of his khaki shorts, he fingered used razor blades, re-wrapped in cellophane and blue paper covers.

The children will be my friends after I give them the razor blades, he thought. Dad saves them for the servants. He won’t miss these. Didn’t take me long to get some of the blades from his closet when he left the bathroom.

Stopping at a wide street crossing, he waited until an African policeman raised his hand to halt traffic. As the policeman walked into the middle of the street, he gestured to Brian to cross.

“Good morning,” Brian said looking up at the policeman as he walked past him.

“Good morning,” the policeman responded.

Hearing raised voices in the distance, the policeman frowned as he watched Brian walk towards a white-painted school. Around a small bend in the street 200 yards ahead, Brian saw ten African men walk fast towards him, carrying knobkerries, short wooden sticks carved to form a knob at one end. He stopped as the group advanced. In back of one of the nearby homes, a white woman called, in a high-pitched voice, for a servant to come into the house. Two schoolgirls in dark green, school-uniform dresses arrived at the crossing and stared at the men carrying knobkerries, as the group moved forward towards Brian.

“Gee whiz,” Brian mumbled.

At that moment he saw the policeman stride, baton in hand, from the crossing towards the advancing group. Putting a hand over his face, Brain watched through his fingers as the band came closer.

The policeman yelled and pointed. “Go back! Get back to the township!”

The men stopped. Wet lines on dusty faces marked their dripping sweat, as their broad-faced leader, with darting eyes shouted, “The jobs have not found us in the township! Food has not come to our crying stomachs!”

The policeman continued, “Big trouble will come to you if you stay here.”

The group stopped and gaped, while Brian stared with raised eyebrows. The leader, a large man with old tennis shoes, laced with string, looked at his ragged followers and read fear in their eyes. Then in low voices, the men talked with each other.

Turning, the leader yelled at the policeman, “Go to Satan!”

The policeman didn’t respond but stood without moving and looked at the leader, who hesitated, then turned to walk back, followed by his friends.

After the policeman watched them leave, he walked towards Brian and stood close. “Go straight away to the headmistress. Tell her to come and talk to me.”

The policeman returned to where the schoolgirls waited to cross the street, while Brian ran to the school and knocked on the headmistress’s open office door.

“Come in,” said the large-framed, blond woman.

With heaving chest, Brian walked into the spacious office and stood, unable to talk.

Mrs. Smith looked up. “Good morning, Brian.”

“G… G… Good morning, Mrs. Smith,” he gasped. “The policeman… the policeman... he said he wants to talk to you.”

“What policeman? Talk about what?”

“Those natives.”

“What natives?”

“The ones with knobkerries.”

“Brian, take your hat off when you talk to me. Sit down.”

Brian put his round, soft gray hat in his lap as he sat facing Mrs. Smith’s large wooden desk.

“Now, slowly tell me everything that happened, from the beginning.”

Listening to his story without interruption, she observed his bright red cheeks.

And Brian thought, She’s frightened. She’s trying not to show it.

“Thank you, Brian,” she said. “I’ll talk to the policeman. You may go to your classroom now.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Smith.”

Brian put his small case on the floor near the wall of a corridor outside Mrs. Smith’s office. As he went to his classroom at the end of a low “L” shaped building, Mrs. Smith walked to the street crossing and spoke to the policeman. Soon afterward, she called the Police Station to report the incident.

In the classrooms, wooden chairs faced small, sloping, wooden desks with black watery ink in inkwells. Boys and girls sporadically entered the room and sat at their desks. As Brian’s teacher, Miss Giles, walked into the classroom with Mrs. Smith at her side, chair legs scraped the floor when the children rose.

“Good morning, Miss Giles. Good morning Mrs. Smith,” they chanted in unsynchronized, high-pitched voices, while they observed Mrs. Smith’s tight jaws and the deep line between her eyebrows.

“Good morning, children. You may sit down,” said fair-skinned Miss Giles and she waited for silence. “Mrs. Smith is going to speak to you.”

Mrs. Smith looked into the apprehensive eyes of the students. “Children, a bad thing happened this morning. Some natives with knobkerries have been near our school. I talked with the policeman at the crossing and the sergeant at headquarters. From now on, we’ll do some things differently. After school today, you will not go home by yourselves. Your mothers will come to fetch you. Do you all understand?”

“Yes Mrs. Smith.”

“Thank you, Miss Giles. You may carry on.”

As Mrs. Smith left to make the same announcement in other classrooms, Miss Giles ordered, “Quiet please, children. Those in the front row may hand out the books.”

Textbooks were distributed and Miss Giles began the school lessons.

Children’s stomachs growled in anticipation of the mid-morning school break. A student chosen for good behavior took a large bell from the headmistress’s office and she rang it loudly outside the classrooms. Each teacher announced, “Class dismissed,” and children ran to get prepared food from their small cases, then scattered into the playground. Some sat on the earth, under the shadow of eucalyptus trees, eating and talking.

With used, re-wrapped razor blades bulging in his pocket, Brian shouted to boys in his playgroup, “Who wants a present?”

“What kind of present?” asked a friend.

“Razor blades.”

“Where did you get them?” asked another boy.

“From my Dad. They’re really sharp.”

As he distributed the blades, boys and a few girls crowded around him and he loved being the center of their attention. “Only one each. I don’t have enough for everyone.” Examining the double-edged steel blades, the children tested their sharpness on sticks they found in the playground. Then they returned to their food and games, and soon the hand bell called them back to their classrooms.

At noon, anxious mothers chatted as they waited outside the school entrance to escort their children home.

“I heard your son was confronted by those natives,” a woman said to Brian’s mother.

“Yes,” Monica answered, her shoulder length, curled hair surrounding her frowning face. “I’m shocked. I hope he won’t have nightmares.”

“I’m sure he’ll be all right,” said the woman. “Here come the children.”

Standing at her traditional place at the school’s front entrance, Mrs. Smith smiled and shook hands with students as they left. Brian removed his hat and looked up into the headmistress’s gray eyes. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Smith.”

“Good afternoon, Brian. Good afternoon, Mrs. Pines.”

As Monica reached down for Brian’s warm hand, she looked at her first-born’s clear-skinned face and high forehead and felt a fretful ache for his safety.

“Now, tell me what happened,” she said. “Exactly how many natives were there? What did they look like? What did the policeman do?”

In the shimmering heat, they walked home and Monica pried for more information when Brian gave brief answers to her questions about the morning confrontation. But Brian didn’t tell her about his gifts to the children and how they patted him on the back and made him feel good.

“The natives are getting so cheeky,” she said as they walked into the semi-circular, tar-paved driveway of their home. “Brian, don’t leave your shoes and socks at the front door. Take them upstairs straight away.”

Knowing that her husband was waiting at his workplace to hear what had happened to Brian, Monica telephoned him and said, “Brian told me about his awful experience this morning.”

“How is he?” Gerald asked.

“I really don’t know how he feels. He seems fine.”

“That’s good. The police are having lots of trouble. Native gangs have been looting in the township.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes.”

Monica knew the dissatisfaction was widespread among the African people but she replied as white people usually did. “It’s just a few troublemakers who stir things up.”

“They’ve set fire to their own buildings. I don’t understand them,” Gerald said, although he realized that the Africans had more freedom of movement in the African township than in the white suburbs and the town center, where they required authorizing papers to prove their need to be there.

“They’ve gone mad,” said Monica. “I can smell smoke from the township.”

“What do our servants think?”

“They all said the agitators are terrible,” Monica responded, knowing that whenever she asked the servants about the recent events, they would tell her what she wanted to hear.

Gerald said, “Let’s watch out, until things settle down again.”

“All right. In the meantime, I’ll keep Brian inside the house this afternoon.”

The evening coolness brought creaks to the green corrugated iron roof of the two-story house and the family sat down to eat dinner around a glass-topped, wooden dining room table. Chicken soup and noodles were ladled into decorated, ceramic bowls and passed around.

Monica said, “Don’t wait for me. Eat while it’s still hot.”

“The radio announced that the police moved into the township,” Gerald remarked.

“Is the situation under control?” Monica asked.

“Not yet. They did catch some of the ringleaders and put them in jail.”

As they ate, only the sound of the soup spoons scraping bowls and soup being swallowed was heard. Pressing down with her foot on a small board under a large rug, Monica caused a bell to ring in the kitchen, signaling for an African servant to remove the empty bowls and bring the next course.

She said, “I hope we’ll be back to normal soon.”

“We will,” Gerald answered, wanting to be optimistic. “Last time this happened, things settled down in a few days.”

“It’s so disturbing,” Monica said. “Leaders from the last riots are still in jail. Doesn’t stop the others. Pass this plate to Dad, please,” she asked Brian. And Monica worried about threatened security in the country and the town of her birth.

Brian thought, I’m frightened. What’s going to happen?

The telephone rang in the hallway next to the dining room.

“Hello, Monica,” said a woman neighbor. “How are you and Brian?”

In a distressed voice Monica said, “We’re so upset. And it’s so nice of you to phone us.”

“Well, I also phoned about something else. Brian gave razor blades to my two boys and other children at kindergarten.”

“Brian gave razor blades to the children?”

Brian thought, I’m in trouble.

“He certainly did.”

“That’s terrible,” responded Monica.

“Not only that. My boys were fighting again, and David slashed Marshal on his cheek with the razor,” said the neighbor.

“Oh my gosh!”

“We rushed Marshal to hospital. The doctor gave him twelve stitches.”

Monica held her aching forehead as she sat on a hand-embroidered stool and moaned, “I must sit. I feel faint.”

Brian said to himself as he bit his fingernails, My stomach hurts.

“We’re all shocked!” exclaimed the neighbor.

“I’m so sorry and embarrassed. Sometimes… I just don’t understand that boy. We’ll punish him for this.”

“We’ve punished David too,” said the neighbor and ended the conversation.

Returning to the dining room, Monica said, “Marshall had to have twelve stitches after David slashed him with a razor blade! He said Brian gave blades to him and other children at school.”

“Did you Brian?” Gerald asked with a raised voice.

Staring at his plate of baked chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans, Brian was silent.

“Where did you get the blades?”

Brain hesitated, without raising his eyes from the table. “From… from your... cl… cl… closet.”

“It’s usually locked.”

“Well… I took them when you walked out the bathroom and left the door open.”

“Why did you take them?” Gerald asked, his cheeks coloring red.

“Well… sometimes… the other children at school, give me something… a biscuit or a marble. I just wanted to give them something, too.”

“You deserve a good hiding,” Gerald threatened, with eyes that scorched.

Brian slid sideways on his chair, away from his father.

“Go to your room,” Gerald ordered as he pointed and stood.

Brian ran towards the dining room door, with Gerald following and hitting Brian on his buttocks. Then Brian felt the warm wetness of urine spurt in his shorts and run down his legs.

“You naughty boy!” Gerald yelled as he struck again and again.

Brian squeezed his eyes shut as the hot, stinging blows propelled him forward while his father vice-gripped his left shoulder. His whole body shook with fright as he cried, “Ow! Ouch!”

“This’ll teach you!”

While Brian tried to reach the stairs, the spanking continued. Now Gerald released his hold as he shouted, “No more dinner for you tonight! Stay in your room!”

Quivering like a dry, brown leaf blowing in the wind, Brian ran up the stairs and thought, “I’m ashamed of peeing in my shorts. Happens every time he hits me. I’m scared of him.”

In his room, Brian lay on his bed under a white mosquito net hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Tears rolled down his hot cheeks onto his pillow, while he listened to his mother’s pained telephone conversations with other angry parents who called.

In a clear sky, stars gradually appeared but he did not see them through the open windows. He imagined the slash on Marshall’s cheek and he could see the swinging knobkerries of the sweating men.

Marshal was absent from school for two days while his cheek healed. When he returned to kindergarten, children crowded around him, to get a close look at the scar and stitches, which were tied in knots with transparent nylon thread. Brian looked and said nothing.

Teasing Brian, the children yelled, “Hello, Mr. Razor Blades! Bye-bye, Mr. Razor Blades!” And they laughed at his discomfort.

Sitting alone on steps that led to the playground, Brian held back tears as he watched children run and shout to each other. He picked up small, rough stones and threw them hard on the ground in front of him.

Walking back to the classroom after the break, he thought, It hurts when they tease me.

And at the evening meal, an oppressive silence that enveloped the sounds of eating choked Brian’s need to speak to his parents. I want to tell them how I feel, he thought. But I’m afraid they won’t understand. Don’t know how to tell them what it’s like to be spanked. Just for giving the children the blades. Mom says I have my head in the clouds and I must come down to earth.

Monica interrupted his thoughts by asking, “Seconds?”

Gerald said, “Yes, please” and passed his plate for more cottage pie.

“Brian, you have hardly eaten,” Monica said. “Finish everything on your plate or you won’t get desert.”

“Yes Mom.”

“Just think about the poor, starving children in the world. They’d do anything to have a good meal.”

Brian continued his thoughts. Wish I could talk to Mom and Dad. And I wish that they would understand. They’d laugh if I told them the nicknames other children call me. Didn’t Mom and Dad get teased? Don’t they know how awful it is? It hurts when I can’t say things to them. I’m afraid to tell them what I’m thinking. I have a bad headache. I feel sick.

Brian stared at the cold food on his plate.

Monica asked, “Brian, why aren’t you eating? Are you daydreaming again?”

“Please may I be excused from the table?”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m not feeling well.”

“Come here and let me feel your forehead,” Monica ordered. “You don’t seem to have a temperature, although your face is flushed. Go and lie down in your room. I’ll tell Jackson to keep your food for tomorrow.”

“Yes, Mom.”

Brian walked slowly up the stairs to his bedroom, changed into his pajamas and cleaned his teeth. Glad I’m out of the dining room. I don’t like eating with them. Wish I could eat by myself.

He looked outside at the stars in the unclouded night sky. Then he drew the heavy curtains closed, lay on his bed and, shut his eyes and fell asleep.

After a restless night, a vivid dream appeared to him in the morning, as he lay between wakefulness and sleep.

His body grew tense, as he shouted in his dream, “God, where are you?”

“I am here,” God answered in a whisper.

“Where?”

“Within you and surrounding you.”

“I can’t see you.”

“I know.”

“God, I have a question.”

“I’m listening, my child.”

“I want to know who my real parents are.”

“What do you mean?”

“I must be adopted. My real father wouldn’t hit me. My real parents would listen to me and I’d know they really loved me.”

“My child, you know I can only speak the truth.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then I must tell you that they are your real parents.”

“Oh... I see. I wish I could have had different parents.”

“I understand.”

“Can’t you do anything about my parents?”

“What would you like me to do?”

“Please will you do something… so they’ll be nice to me?”

“Hmmm… Do you have any ideas on how to do that?”

“Well…yes, I do. If they thought I was going to die, they’d be sorry for how they’ve been treating me.”

“I see what you mean. I will do something. You may notice a change in their behavior… but it will take a few years.”

“Thank you. I’d like to ask one more favor, God.”

‘Please do.”

“I’d like to have some good friends.”

“You already have some.”

“I do?”

“Yes, my child. Come with me and listen to children talking about you.”

“Where are we going?”

‘We are traveling to wherever children are talking about you. Can you hear them?”

“No…no, I can’t. Now I can. Yes, I can hear them and see them.”

“What are they saying?”

“They’re saying how nice I am! That I’m kind! They think I’m a jolly good friend!”

“That’s the truth.”

“Good God! I mean… gosh, gee whiz! Thanks for helping me listen! Is this a dream?”

“Yes, my child. And now it’s time to end our conversation. Remember the truth.”

“I will. Thank you, God.”

At that moment, Brian awoke with a small smile, feeling hungry. After eating hot malt porridge sweetened with sugar and added milk, he ran barefoot outside to join a small group of neighborhood boys, gathered in the street outside his house, throwing an old, brown, worn tennis ball to each other.

Remembering his dream, he said to himself, They’re my friends.

For a week, the dream stayed foremost in his mind. Then he thought, I must do something with a friend. Maybe… maybe I’ll ask Johnny if his father will take us fishing for baby bream at Khami Dam.

I can dig for worms in wet soil near the dripping faucet in back of the house for bait. Then we’ll catch lots of little fish, keep them alive in a bucket of water until we get home and put them in our fishpond with the goldfish. They’ll grow big and we’ll catch them and eat them.

As he followed his thoughts and his dreams, he realized the love of his companions. And as the years passed, his parents showed him their respect and he understood that, as assured in his dream, something had changed.

When guests came to visit, Brian’s father delighted in telling the guests the story of how Brian had given razor blades to the children at kindergarten, without realizing the danger of his gifts.

And then Brian added, “That’s true. And the children teased me and called me Mr. Razor Blades.”