The Eight Dead Machines Behind the Library in Kimberley

The Key on the Nail

For thirty-one years I fixed things underground that nobody above ground ever thought about. Pumps, winders, lighting circuits that ran for kilometres through rock. When I retired from the mine I told my wife, Riana, that I was finished with fixing things for other people. I would grow tomatoes. I would read the books I had been buying and stacking since the nineties. I would sit on the stoep in Kimberley and watch the afternoon heat come off the road.

That lasted about four months.

The library in our suburb is a small face-brick building with a ramp that was added much later and a fig tree that drops its fruit on the cars. I went there on Tuesdays to return whatever I had finished. One Tuesday in May the librarian, Mrs Mokoena, was standing at the counter with a schoolboy who was almost crying. He needed to type an assignment. The library had a computer room, she told him, but it was closed. She said it the way you say someone has passed away.

After the boy left I asked her about it. She took a key off a nail behind the counter and walked me down the passage to a door with a handwritten sign that said OUT OF ORDER in red koki. The sign had faded to pink.

Inside were eight desks, eight towers, and eight screens, all under a layer of dust so even it looked deliberate. The smell was the smell of a room that has not had a person in it for a long time. She told me that two winters before, during a bad stretch of load shedding, the power had come back with a surge one evening and the whole room had gone quiet. Some of the machines would not switch on at all. The rest switched on and showed nothing. The municipality had been asked. The province had been asked. A form had been filled in, and then another form.

I stood there with my hands in my pockets and I heard myself say I would have a look.

What the Surge Had Done

Riana laughed at me for a full minute when I got home. Then she made me a flask of coffee for the next morning, which is how I knew she approved.

I am not a computer person. I understand current and what it does when it goes where it should not. So I started where I would have started underground, at the wall. The plug points in that room were on one circuit with no surge protection at all, daisy-chained through multiplugs that had scorch marks on the back. I photographed everything before I touched it, because thirty-one years teaches you that the person who comes after you deserves to know what you found.

Then I opened the towers one by one on a trestle table Mrs Mokoena let me borrow from the children's corner. Three of them had the sharp, sweet burnt smell that every electrician knows. On two I could see it with my naked eye, a little blistered capacitor near the power connector, brown where it should have been clean. The power supplies in all three were finished. In two of them the damage had gone further, into the board itself.

I spent many evenings at the kitchen table with my reading glasses and my phone, learning words I had never needed. Chipsets. Sockets. Which processor sits in which board. My grandson in Bloemfontein sent me voice notes explaining things, very slowly, the way I used to explain earth leakage to new apprentices. It was humbling, being on the other side of that patience.

A Budget Smaller Than My Pension Cheque

There was no money. That needs saying, because people imagine that a public library has some account somewhere for these things. What it had was a Friends of the Library group of nine pensioners who ran a book sale twice a year, and a church down the road that said it could help a little. The first meeting I attended was in the reading room, with Marie biscuits on a plate and the urn ticking.

I stood up and explained what I had found, as plainly as I could. Five of the towers could be saved with new power supplies and a good clean. Two needed new boards. One was beyond saving, and we would strip it for parts. Several of the old screens were the deep, heavy kind, and two of those had died with the surge as well.

Mr Pillay, who had been a school principal and who still talks like one, asked me what it would cost. I had done my sums. He looked at the number for a long time and then said, "So. We have two book sales to plan."

We had three, in the end. People in Kimberley gave in a way I did not expect. A woman brought in her late husband's entire collection of Wilbur Smith novels and sat at the table selling them herself. Children from the primary school baked. Someone donated a box of old LPs that a collector drove from Barkly West to buy.

Ordering Parts From a Kitchen Table

When the money was in the tin, I did the buying. I have always bought things by walking into a shop and holding them, and there is no shop in Kimberley that carries the parts I needed, so I had to learn to order online and trust a courier. My grandson sat with me on a video call while I compared boards, reading out socket types like a man checking serial numbers on a delivery note. I ended up ordering the two motherboards after checking each one three times against the processors we already had, because the thought of getting it wrong with other people's book sale money kept me awake.

The courier came on a Thursday. Mrs Mokoena signed for the box as if it were a newborn.

Fitting the first board took me most of a day. My fingers are thick and the screws are small and I dropped one into the bottom of a tower and spent twenty minutes getting it out with a magnet on a piece of string, which is a trick from the mine. When I pressed the power button and the fans spun and the little light came on, I said something in Afrikaans I will not write down here. Mrs Mokoena heard it from the counter and came running, and when she saw the screen she said nothing at all. She just put her hand on my shoulder.

The Problem With the Screens

The old screens were the next fight. Two were dead. The others worked but were dim and flickered, and they took up so much of each desk that a learner had nowhere to put a book. One of the Friends, a retired nurse named Thandeka, pointed out that the children doing homework always had a textbook open next to them and nowhere to put it.

So with what was left over from the third book sale, plus a donation from the church, we replaced the screens in the four seats nearest the window, the ones the children always wanted. I read a great deal before choosing, mostly in the evenings with Riana watching her programmes beside me, scrolling through pages of computer monitors and trying to understand why one was cheaper than another. In the end I chose plain, flat ones that would sit low and leave room for a book. The old heavy screens went to a man who restores old arcade cabinets, which pleased me more than I can explain. I do not like waste.

Every Cable Has a Name

Here is where my mine habits came back strongest. Underground, nothing is unlabelled. A cable without a tag is a cable someone will cut by mistake. Every circuit had a number, every isolator had a name, and you could walk into a substation in the dark and know what you were looking at.

That computer room had nothing. Cables went from towers into multiplugs into the wall with no way of knowing which belonged to which, and when one machine played up you could spend an hour just tracing wires. I asked Mrs Mokoena whether the library had a way of printing labels. She said they had one for the book spines, an old machine that printed the catalogue numbers, but that it had been broken for longer than the computers.

I borrowed a friend's machine for a weekend, and then, because Mrs Mokoena saw what it did and would not stop talking about it, the Friends voted to buy one of their own. Thandeka found the options on a page of label printers and brought her tablet to the Tuesday meeting to show everyone, and there was a long and very serious discussion about tape widths that I will remember fondly for the rest of my life.

I labelled everything. PC 1 to PC 7. Every power cable, every screen cable, every network cable, each with the seat number at both ends. I labelled the new surge-protected plug points I had installed, and I drew a little map and laminated it and stuck it inside the door. Mrs Mokoena took the label machine back to her counter and began, very quietly, to relabel the book spines that had faded. She was still doing it in September.

The Morning the Door Opened

We reopened the room on the first Monday of the school holidays in July. There was no ribbon. Mrs Mokoena simply took down the pink OUT OF ORDER sign and put up one that said OPEN 9 TO 4, printed on the new machine.

By ten o'clock every seat was taken. The boy who had nearly cried at the counter in May came in with his younger sister, and he sat at PC 3, by the window, and typed for two hours without looking up once. A woman in her sixties sat at PC 6 and asked me to show her how to video call her son in Perth. An unemployed young man spent the whole morning working on his CV.

I stood at the back with my hands in my pockets, the way I had stood on the first day, and I did not feel the way I thought I would. I did not feel proud, exactly. I felt the way I used to feel at the end of a long shift when a pump that had been down for a week started up again and the water began to move. Something that had been stuck was moving.

I still go on Tuesdays. I return my books, and then I walk down the passage and check the plug points and run my eye along the labels to make sure nobody has swapped a cable. Usually nobody has. Riana says I have simply found a smaller mine to look after. She may be right. But this one is above ground, it has a fig tree outside, and nobody in it has ever asked me to fill in a form.