If You Want to Make God Laugh

by Bianca Marais

“Are you all right, gogo?” Zodwa says as she reaches out just in time to steady her.

  The woman looks dazed but still she smiles. “Jiving is difficult at my age. My blood pressure is not what it used to be and I didn’t take my tablets for the past few days. Too expensive.”

  That helps make Zodwa’s mind up. “Come, gogo. Come with me. We will speak to someone who will take you to the front of the line or let you sit in the shade while you wait.”

  With some cajoling, the old woman steps out of the line and starts walking toward the school gates with Zodwa. Despite the long wait and the predawn chill that has been burned away and replaced by biting heat, the mass of people waiting to vote are in good spirits.

  If there is one thing we know how to do, it is to wait. We have had decades’ and decades’ worth of experience doing it.

  It’s something her mother has told her many times.

  Though their people are used to waiting, standing single file in lines isn’t something they do well. Groups gather and break into song. The deep baritone strains of the apartheid protest song “Shosholoza” rises and falls throughout the morning.

  A gum-boot dancer nearby entertains the crowd, kicking up dust as he stomps his way through the mining dance, his black rubber boots providing the percussion, while an enterprising teenage boy makes his way along the line selling roasted mielies and Styrofoam cups filled with lukewarm Coke. The police step in to separate African National Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party supporters after a skirmish breaks out between them. They’re hauled off to the dreaded Hippos, the armored South African Police trucks.

  Zodwa recognizes a few faces in the queue and issues greetings as they walk along. Her smile freezes when she sees them up ahead: Thembeka and Mongezi; her ex–best friend standing with the father of Zodwa’s child. The fact that they’re still a couple hurts more than Zodwa can express.

  Before Zodwa can dip her head to pretend that she hasn’t seen them, Mongezi turns and catches sight of her. Quickly checking that Thembeka is otherwise occupied, he turns back to Zodwa and winks. Something inside of her cracks; it’s like the lightning bolt that slices through a block of ice when it’s dropped into a warm drink. She can almost hear the fissure as it cleaves through her.

  Zodwa turns from him. She resists the temptation to speed up, as there is no way the gogo could keep up. When they finally reach the front of the queue, Zodwa spots someone wearing the blue Independent Electoral Commission bib. It’s only when the person turns around that Zodwa realizes it’s Beauty Mbali, a township neighbor and her mother’s best friend. The woman hugs Zodwa when she catches sight of her. She’s in her element today as an IEC volunteer, something she never thought she’d live to do, and it makes Zodwa happy to see the huge smile on her face.

  “Where is your mother, child?” Mama Beauty asks.

  Zodwa doesn’t want to get Leleti in trouble with her zealously political friend, so she pretends not to hear the question. “Excuse me, Mama Beauty, but ugogo is ninety-four years old and she has been standing in the line for more than four hours. The heat is making her light-headed. Would it be possible to let her vote now?”

  Mama Beauty looks past Zodwa’s belly to the tiny woman behind it. “Sawubona, gogo,” she greets her. “Unjani?”

  “Good morning, my child,” the woman replies. “I am so well today. I am the best I have ever been because today is the day I vote.”

  Mama Beauty laughs. In her sixties herself, she is hardly a child except to someone so much older. “Then let us not delay any longer, gogo. Let us take you now so you can make your mark.”

  She leads them up the stairs past the queue into a blessedly cool classroom whose tables and chairs have been neatly stacked against the walls. “Can I have your identity books, please?”

  “Identity book?” the old lady asks, her smile fading, and Zodwa’s spirits drop. “But I don’t have an ID book.”

  “The temporary voting card will be fine instead,” Mama Beauty replies.

  The gogo’s look of bewilderment grows. “I don’t know what that is. I’ve never had a birth certificate and so I couldn’t apply for any of these things.”

  “But, gogo,” Mama Beauty says gently, “without proper documents, how do we know who you are?”

  The gogo’s smile returns as she touches her chest. “My dear, I can tell you who I am. I’m Eunice Dlamini and I was born on New Year’s Day in the year 1900. I may not have a birth certificate, but I know my own history. I know who I am.” Her face turns serious. “I’m ready now. I have been waiting my whole life and I will not wait any longer. Tell me, where do I write my name and put my cross? I want my God to watch me as I do this.”

  Mama Beauty’s expression is pinched. It clearly pains her to say, “I am so sorry, gogo, but without an ID or a voting card, you cannot vote.”

  The gogo’s smile falters and then dies on trembling lips as it slowly dawns on her that all of her struggles and suffering—the ninety-four years that she’s lived as a nonentity in the country of her birth—have all been for nothing.

  She will not get to vote this day or any day. She will never leave her mark.

  As Zodwa clutches the old woman’s hand and Mama Beauty leans in to comfort her, a white-hot rage flares up inside Zodwa. The baby kicks out in protest.

  Now you know, Zodwa says to her unborn child. Now you know what to expect from this world.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Delilah

  27 April 1994

  Verdriet, Magaliesburg, South Africa

  It was a shock to find myself by the wild fig tree that stood sentry at the entrance to the farm. I couldn’t remember getting there, couldn’t remember anything at all beyond running from the hospital and getting into my rental car. I must have driven around for hours because darkness had fallen without my noticing it.

  I considered turning around and making my way back the eighty kilometers to the hotel I’d booked near the hospital, but I was so bone-tired that it seemed a miracle I’d made it here without incident.

  When I pulled up to the old gate hanging off rickety hinges, I had to get out to swing it open, and then again to close it behind me once I was through. Rounding the bend, I was greeted by the rusted windmill that looked as decrepit as it had when I’d left almost forty years before. A waning gibbous moon backlit its enormous blades, and the moonlight reflected off the dam, casting eerie shadows in the thatch grass.

  The farmhouse hadn’t changed. It was still painted the same muddy brown I remembered, and the paint was chipping and peeling from the fascia boards and drainpipes. Though I couldn’t see them in the dark, I knew the avocado orchards stretched out behind the house, and that beyond them, the Magaliesberg mountains rose up in the distance. They were giant waves on an otherwise calm sea, the only thing breaking the monotony of a landscape made up of seemingly nothing but earth and sky.

  When I came to a stop in front of it, I eyed the darkened house warily. The farmstead was called Verdriet. It meant “grief” in Afrikaans and if that didn’t sum up everything there was to know about it, then I didn’t know what did. My Afrikaner grandfather had named it just before parceling it off and bestowing it to his daughter and her new Scottish husband as a wedding gift. My mother had said it was a prophecy; my father believed it to be oupa’s curse.

  I left the headlights on and opened the car door. My shadow loomed large as I slowly walked up the stairs. The illumination made finding the old concrete statue of the angel easier. I hefted it to the side, tipping the base, and there it was in the wedge that had been chiseled out specifically for it: the key my father told me would always be waiting for me in case I ever decided to come home. At the time, I hadn’t known if the gesture was a taunt, my father’s way of predicting that I would fail at something he so strongly disapproved of, or if it came from a sincere place.

  Dislodging the key, I blew the cobwebs
and dust off and fit it into the door’s lock. It yielded immediately like it had been expecting me. After I locked the car, I hitched my rucksack over my arm and went back up the stairs, shouldering my way into the house.

  It was dark inside and smelled strangely of stale cigarette smoke. Closing the door with my foot, I automatically turned right, knowing the light switch lay against the wall two steps in that direction. When I flicked it on, the fluorescent lights hummed awake, revealing an odd scene in the lounge.

  A woman lay stretched out on the couch, head resting on a throw cushion and one arm flung up over her head. She was wearing a red negligee with a bodice made almost entirely of lace, which exposed, rather than covered, her large breasts. Empty wine bottles and an overflowing ashtray cluttered the table in front of her. Two candles had burned down completely, leaving puddles of wax. The woman snored softly, completely oblivious to the lights that had been switched on and the noise I’d made getting inside.

  It took me longer than it should have to realize who she was.

  In my defense, it had been almost four decades since I’d last laid eyes on her. And seeing her there was unexpected; the last I’d heard, she was living with her third or fourth husband in Cape Town somewhere. Rumors of other things before then had also made their way to me, but they were so outlandish that I hadn’t known if I could believe them.

  “Ruth?” I whispered, not wanting to startle her. When she didn’t so much as twitch in response, I said her name louder. Still no reaction. I walked over to the couch and shook her arm, repeating her name until she finally woke up.

  “Wha—?” She blinked myopically up at me and then narrowed her eyes, a look of bewilderment on her face. “Ma?” she asked stupidly.

  She blinked a few times more and then struggled into a sitting position, not taking her eyes off me the entire time. Finally, my sister’s expression cleared.

  “Dee? Is that you?” she asked. “My God, you look old.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ruth

  27 April 1994

  Verdriet, Magaliesburg, South Africa

  Dee scares the bejesus out of me, looming over me looking so much like Ma that it’s like being visited by a ghost who’s been dead for more than thirty years.

  Her short gray hair stands up in greasy spikes and her face, completely devoid of makeup, has streaks of either sweat or tears that have carved their way down her cheeks. She’s wrinkled and stern; it’s like being visited by an avenging angel, and I wonder if I’m having a nightmare.

  “Get up and go to bed, Ruth,” she instructs, and it’s such a banal and typical-of-Dee thing to say that I know it’s not a dream.

  Still, just because it’s not a dream doesn’t mean her sudden appearance isn’t an omen.

  I have always believed in signs. Dee used to as well but since her signs came from the man upstairs, she didn’t view them as signs at all; rather just her listening to God telling her what to do. Sounds like most of my relationships with men, now that I come to think of it, so I really shouldn’t point any fingers. People in glass houses and all that.

  She said it was God who told her to leave our childhood home when she was seventeen so that she could fulfill his wish for her to become a nun. I thought it was more likely that it was the hunky priest, Father Somebody or Other, who charmed her so completely that she abandoned our mother’s Dutch Reformed Church for the Catholic faith.

  I remember her blushing scarlet when I suggested as much, insisting that he’d had nothing to do with it but of course that was nonsense. He was so gorgeous that I might have joined the church for him if he’d ever given me the time of day. That puppy dog sweetheart of hers, Riaan van Tonder, broke down and cried the night before she left. I know because I followed Dee when she snuck out of the house to meet him in the avocado orchard.

  I was there, too, the day Dee became a novice and the whole thing gave me the absolute creeps. Dee wore Ma’s wedding dress, which should have been kept for me since I was the eldest. Luckily, it was way too conservative and not my style at all, so it was only the principle of it that bothered me. The dress was tight on Dee because she’d put on weight sitting around all day praying rather than working on the farm. Her getting fat was karma for her being given something that was rightfully mine.

  She and the other pustules (which is what I called them even though Dee insisted it was “postulants”) walked down the aisle like blushing brides, veils over their heads, because they were supposedly taking vows to marry Christ. Ma even squirreled money away for months so that she could afford to buy Dee a gold band for her “wedding” ring.

  Watching my sister stand in a row with the other young women so that they could all marry Christ was chilling. I didn’t know anything about cults then, but if I had that’s exactly what I would have likened it to. I remember thinking that God was a terrible polygamist and I hoped like hell that he’d leave Dee jilted at the altar.

  We were all shocked when Dee dropped out of the convent just a few months later. She never revealed in her letter what made her quit, all she said was that God had changed his mind about her vocation.

  After we got the news, Ma waited impatiently for Dee to come home and explain herself.

  Instead, we received a letter from her in Rwanda saying that God had decided that she should head farther north to become an aid worker. I couldn’t understand why a scorned woman would take orders from her ex and didn’t think God should get away with that kind of behavior just because he was the Almighty.

  We expected Dee to come visit us over her holidays but we never saw her again. Not when Da was so sick nor for his funeral, though I suppose that was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was for her to ignore Ma’s pleas six years later when she was dying and begged Dee to come and see her. It struck me as a terribly vindictive thing to do, not to grant a dying woman her last wish to see her favorite daughter, and not at all in keeping with the piety Dee projected.

  God knows that her praying was always the showy kind, on her knees on the polished floor, lips moving fervently with her hands clasped together clutching her rosary beads as if they were a lifeline to keep her from drowning. I tried it a few times myself but I never heard back from Him.

  I know the seventeen-year-old Dee would’ve flat-out dismissed my belief that I’ve been having a lifelong conversation with the universe just as profound as the one she’s been having with God. She didn’t believe in any kind of spirituality that wasn’t dressed up as organized religion—with all of its rituals and vestments and judgments—and she definitely wouldn’t have understood the universe’s subtlety.

  The universe speaks in clues and signs, gentle nudges and hints, rather than pontifications and proverbs, commandments and condemnations. I have trusted its signs all my life, which is why I listened when it seemed like it wanted me back here.

  As I stumble to bed under Dee’s disapproving gaze, I can’t help but wonder why fate has brought us back together like this. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Zodwa

  27 April 1994

  Big Hope Informal Settlement, Magaliesburg, South Africa

  As the raindrops begin to clatter on the tin roof, Zodwa flinches, dropping her book onto her lap. The fluttering pages blow out the candle, plunging the shack into darkness.

  After more than a year at the squatter camp, Zodwa still hasn’t gotten used to it: the panic when those first few discordant taps find their rhythm and become a steady drumbeat heralding disaster. The shacks near the riverbed were washed away by flash floods in January. She’ll never forget the woman’s wailing when they retrieved her two-year-old’s bloated body a kilometer downstream a day later.

  The worst of their problems if the shack floods is the thin foam mattress stinking from the damp and the floor that stays caked with mud for days at a time. It makes Zodwa feel like an insect w
ho lives burrowed in wet soil rather than a human being trying to eke out a life in the tiny patch of land they’ve claimed as their own.

  Even the concept of ownership is an illusion. They may have erected their shack there but it isn’t their property. They, like so many thousands of other people, squat without formal permission to do so, living as much in fear of the bulldozers as of the shack fires that occasionally flare up and tear through the camp. The government and the police pose as much a threat as the elements.

  Zodwa is relieved when the raindrops die away, and has just struck a match to relight the candle when her mother suddenly sits up as a fit of coughing seizes her. The dog, who’s sleeping curled up between Leleti’s legs, gets up too.

  Leleti has lost so much weight in the past few weeks that she’s all edges. When Zodwa reaches out to place a hand on her mother’s knee, the sharpness of it feels like a rebuke. “Mama. What can I do?”

  Leleti waits for the coughing fit to pass before wheezing her reply. “Nothing, my child, but thank you. Try to get some rest.” The dog whines in response to her voice and licks her hand.

  “I can’t sleep. Let me help you. I’ll go and wet the cloth so that you can hold it against your face,” Zodwa says, beginning to rise.

  Her mother indicates the pot full of water next to her, the cloth floating uselessly inside it. It’s stained with blood that seeps out in ribbons, painting the water in swirls of pink. “It makes no difference.”

  Finally, the assault subsides and Leleti lies back down, the dog settling with her. Zodwa just thinks her mother has fallen asleep when she speaks. “You should go home.”

  “I am home, Mama.”

  “No, back to Ulundi. In KwaZulu. Back to the village.”

  “I want to stay here with you.”

  “I am sick with this coughing disease, Zodwa. It is not getting better and I cannot take care of you or the baby.” Leleti continues, “You will need help to look after it when I am no longer here.”