It was a public secret that Mr Kapepsi, our maths teacher, was at least two decades older than he said he was. Never in our lives had we seen a fifty-year-old man look and act so old. However, there was no way to prove that he was lying. He had been born in his grandmother’s hut on a certain day of the month of a year that his mother could not remember. So when he stated his age, there was no way to dispute it. Still, there was brutal evidence of old age on Mr Kapepsi’s body. All his hair had changed from black to grey. His skin was flabby. His eyes were now permanently red. He had lost some of his teeth. His head shook involuntarily. He had a coin-shaped mass on his cheek. Then there was the fact that he ran out of breath walking five meters to the back of the class. He had done it the one time when he told Claris to get out of the class and she had adamantly stayed in her seat, challenging him to a stare-down. Claris waited for Mr Kapepsi to get close to her seat and then she jumped up and went to sit at the front. The poor old man then dragged his aching back to the front to catch her and as soon as he was close, she raced to the back again. It was the beginning of the lesson, in fact it was the beginning of the day, but Mr Kapepsi got tired and also infuriated and he walked out. The following day, he came to class with the Discipline Teacher. He demanded that the undisciplined student from the previous day show herself out “before things get serious.” We were threatened with punishments and suspensions if we didn’t produce the criminal. Because he didn’t mention her name and because he didn’t point her out, it occurred to us that he didn’t remember who it was. We saw this as an opportunity to rid ourselves of the old man. So we all stared at him looking obviously confused. We insisted that we had no idea what Mr Kapepsi was talking about. We cried and pleaded and denied that the criminal was in our class. “He must have us confused with another class,” we cried. We then pointed out that maybe it was about time Mr Kapepsi retired from teaching. He was obviously tired. If he could forget simple details such as the class where a grave crime had been committed unto him, what else was he forgetting? We suggested that it was even possible that he had skipped some topics. No wonder our class was, on the whole, performing poorly. And no, it had nothing to do with our collective short attention span. The argument went back and forth until Mr Kapepsi got so angry that he stood up and said that he’d rather be dead than stay in our classroom one more second of the few days remaining on his timeline. Okay he didn’t say anything about the few days remaining on his timeline but we added that detail when we told the story. When Mr Kapepsi died later that year, we still hadn’t made peace with him and we feared that he might come back to haunt us.
