LITMIR.BIZ

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to go to school. This was because her mother had had other priorities, but also because the girl had been born in South Africa, of all countries; furthermore, she was born in the early 1960s, when the political leaders were of the opinion that children like Nombeko didn’t count. The prime minister at the time made a name for himself by asking rhetorically why the blacks should go to school when they weren’t good for anything but carrying wood and water.

      In principle he was wrong, because Nombeko carried shit, not wood or water. Yet there was no reason to believe that the tiny girl would grow up to socialize with kings and presidents. Or to strike fear into nations. Or to influence the development of the world in general.

      If, that is, she hadn’t been the person she was.

      But, of course, she was.

      Among many other things, she was a hardworking child. Even as a five-year-old she carried latrine barrels as big as she was. By emptying the latrine barrels, she earned exactly the amount of money her mother needed in order to ask her daughter to buy a bottle of thinner each day. Her mother took the bottle with a ‘Thank you, dear girl,’ unscrewed the lid, and began to dull the never-ending pain that came with the inability to give oneself or one’s child a future. Nombeko’s dad hadn’t been in the vicinity of his daughter since twenty minutes after the fertilization.

      As Nombeko got older, she was able to empty more latrine barrels each day, and the money was enough to buy more than just thinner. Thus her mum could supplement the solvent with pills and booze. But the girl, who realized that things couldn’t go on like this, told her mother that she had to choose between giving up or dying.

      Her mum nodded in understanding.

      The funeral was well attended. At the time, there were plenty of people in Soweto who devoted themselves primarily to two things: slowly killing themselves and saying a final farewell to those who had just succeeded in that endeavour. Nombeko’s mum died when the girl was ten years old, and, as mentioned earlier, there was no dad available. The girl considered taking over where her mum had left off: chemically building herself a permanent shield against reality. But when she received her first pay cheque after her mother’s death, she decided to buy something to eat instead. And when her hunger was alleviated, she looked around and said, ‘What am I doing here?’

      At the same time, she realized that she didn’t have any immediate alternatives. Ten-year-old illiterates were not the prime candidates on the South African job market. Or the secondary ones, either. And in this part of Soweto there was no job market at all, or all that many employable people, for that matter.

      But defecation generally happens even for the most wretched people on our Earth, so Nombeko had one way to earn a little money. And once her mother was dead and buried, she could keep her salary for her own use.

      To kill time while she was lugging barrels, she had started counting them when she was five: ‘One, two, three, four, five . . .’

      As she grew older, she made these exercises harder so they would continue to be challenging: ‘Fifteen barrels times three trips times seven people carrying, with another one who sits there doing nothing because he’s too drunk . . . is . . . three hundred and fifteen.’

      Nombeko’s mother hadn’t noticed much around her besides her bottle of thinner, but she did discover that her daughter could add and subtract. So during her last year of life she had started calling upon her each time a delivery of tablets of various colours and strengths was to be divided among the shacks. A bottle of thinner is just a bottle of thinner. But when pills of 50, 100, 250 and 500 milligrams must be distributed according to desire and financial ability, it’s important to be able to tell the difference between the four kinds of arithmetic. And the ten-year-old could. Very much so.

      She might happen, for example, to be in the vicinity of her immediate boss while he was struggling to compile the monthly weight and amount report.

      ‘So, ninety-five times ninety-two,’ her boss mumbled. ‘Where’s the calculator?’

      ‘Eight thousand seven hundred and forty,’ Nombeko said.

      ‘Help me look for it instead, little girl.’

      ‘Eight thousand seven hundred and forty,’ Nombeko said again.

      ‘What’s that you’re saying?’

      ‘Ninety-five times ninety-two is eight thousand seven hund—’

      ‘And how do you know that?’

      ‘Well, I think about how ninety-five is one hundred minus five, ninety-two is one hundred minus eight. If you turn it round and subtract, it’s eighty-seven together. And five times eight is forty. Eighty-seven forty. Eight thousand seven hundred and forty.’

      ‘Why do you think like that?’ said the astonished manager.

      ‘I don’t know,’ said Nombeko. ‘Can we get back to work now?’

      From that day on, she was promoted to manager’s assistant.

      But in time, the illiterate who could count felt more and more frustrated because she couldn’t understand what the supreme powers in Johannesburg wrote in all the decrees that landed on the manager’s desk. The manager himself had a hard time with the words. He stumbled his way through every Afrikaans text, simultaneously flipping through an English dictionary so that the unintelligible letters were at least presented to him in a language he could understand.

      ‘What do they want this time?’ Nombeko might ask.

      ‘For us to fill the sacks better,’ said the manager. ‘I think. Or that they’re planning to shut down one of the sanitation stations. It’s a bit unclear.’

      The manager sighed. His assistant couldn’t help him. So she sighed, too.

      But then a lucky thing happened: thirteen-year-old Nombeko was accosted by a smarmy man in the showers of the latrine emptiers’ changing room. The smarmy man hadn’t got very far before the girl got him to change his mind by planting a pair of scissors in his thigh.

      The next day she tracked down the man on the other side of the row of latrines in Sector B. He was sitting in a camping chair with a bandage round his thigh, outside his green-painted shack. In his lap he had . . . books?

      ‘What do you want?’ he said.

      ‘I believe I left my scissors in your thigh yesterday, Uncle, and now I’d like them back.’

      ‘I threw them away,’ the man said.

      ‘Then you owe me some scissors,’ said the girl. ‘How come you can read?’

      The smarmy man’s name was Thabo, and he was half toothless. His thigh hurt an awful lot, and he didn’t feel like having a conversation with the ill-tempered girl. On the other hand, this was the first time since he’d come to Soweto that someone seemed interested in his books. His shack was full of them, and for this reason his neighbours called him Crazy Thabo. But the girl in front of him sounded more jealous than scornful. Maybe he could use this to his advantage.

      ‘If you were a bit more cooperative instead of violent beyond all measure, perhaps Uncle Thabo might consider telling you. Maybe he would even teach you how to interpret letters and words. If you were a bit more cooperative, that is.’

      Nombeko had no intention of being more cooperative towards the smarmy man than she had been in the shower the day before. So she replied that, as luck would have it, she had another pair of scissors in her possession, and that she would very much like to keep them rather than use them on Uncle Thabo’s other thigh. But as long as Uncle kept himself under control – and taught her to read – thigh number two would remain in good health.

      Thabo didn’t quite understand. Had the girl just threatened him?

      * * *

      One couldn’t tell by looking at him, but Thabo was rich. He had been born under a tarpaulin in the harbour of Port Elizabeth in Eastern Cape Province. When he was six years old, the police had taken his mother and never given

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