“Do not speak like that. You will get better.”
“This is no place for you. I should have left you there with your grandmother. She said it was a mistake to bring you but I was selfish wanting you with me.”
Zodwa can’t help but think back to the day they were reunited in the township just over fifteen months before. Leleti had sat for hours on the side of the road in the blistering heat, waiting for the taxi that would finally discharge her daughter.
“My child,” Leleti had said, her frown of concern turning to relief when Zodwa finally stepped from one of the dozens of minivans that had pulled up. “Look what a beautiful woman you have become.” After almost twelve years apart, Leleti was a stranger to Zodwa.
“Thank you, Mama.” Zodwa felt shy under Leleti’s gaze. As much as she’d yearned for her mother after she’d left, she now fervently longed for her gogo who’d stepped into that role so neatly that her real mother had become a kind of myth others only spoke about. Yet there she was in front of her, a flesh-and-blood woman who was clearly sick, though Zodwa didn’t yet know with what.
“You have made me so proud,” Leleti had said, cupping Zodwa’s face. “Just like Dumisa. And you will go on to even greater things. I know it.”
It shames Zodwa to think how badly she has let her mother down.
“You would have finished school if you’d stayed in KwaZulu. This,” Leleti says, nodding at Zodwa’s belly, “would not have happened there. I have just enough money to send you back. If you leave tomorrow, you will get there before the baby comes.”
“No, Mama. We will use the money to take you to a doctor so you can get medicine.”
“Doctors are not for people like us.”
Leleti speaks the truth. Just days before, Leleti’s friend Mama Beauty came over with two plastic bags filled with baby things. Some of the clothes hadn’t even been worn yet but still smelled of fabric softener because the whites apparently washed everything straight after purchasing it, regardless of whether their babies ever used it or not.
Mama Beauty was the only black person Zodwa knew who had a white friend, a younger woman named Robin who would drive out to the squatter camp regularly to visit her. From what Zodwa could tell, Mama Beauty had worked for Robin’s family as a maid before she’d retired.
Apparently the white woman, Robin, appealed to Mama Beauty regularly to move in with her in Johannesburg, but she refused the offer, wanting to stay near her sons, who both worked in the platinum mines in Rustenburg. Zodwa knew there was an older daughter, Nomsa, who’d gone missing in the 1980s, because that was the basis of Mama Beauty and Leleti’s friendship: they’d bonded over the fact that each of them was searching for a child who’d disappeared during the worst of the apartheid era’s atrocities.
Mama Beauty was kind to Zodwa, sourcing maternity clothes and baby things for her, while sharing information about a world that Zodwa would otherwise never have known about, like how white women went for regular blood tests and checkups while pregnant, and how they took pills that pregnant women were supposed to have.
There have been no doctor’s visits or tests for Zodwa. It was only the cessation of her period and the tenderness of her breasts that had confirmed she was pregnant. The nearest clinic is half a day’s walk away and when her mother forced her to go, Zodwa arrived at a long queue that barely moved. After waiting for hours and still not being seen, Zodwa set out for home and never tried to return again. There seemed to be little point.
“You will get better, Mama. You just need to rest. I will go speak to your madam and ask if you can take a week off—”
“I was fired today. I no longer have a job.” Leleti’s voice is hollow.
“Why? You even went in when you could’ve taken the day off to vote.”
“Look at me, my child. I cannot clean a house properly. I am surprised it took this long for her to let me go.”
Apparently, the madam had paid Leleti only what she owed her for that month. It’s all the money they have and Leleti wants to use it to send Zodwa back to the KwaZulu homeland. They sit in silence for a while, each lost in her own thoughts. With only enough money for one of them to travel home, and no prospects for earning more, they will both have to stay.
“At least tell me who the father of the baby is,” Leleti says after a pause. “He is the father of the child and he must give you money to help you.”
“Mama, he won’t—”
“He will! I will go speak with him. I’ve been praying on it and it’s the Lord’s will that I shame him until he pays.”
“No, Mama.”
“Just tell me who he is! What self-respecting man will refuse to look after his own child? Stop this nonsense and tell me who—”
“I was raped, Mama!” Zodwa is so shocked by the admission that she claps a hand over her mouth. She looks at her mother, frightened by the horror on her face.
They have spoken more in the past half an hour than they have in the past few months. Zodwa has wished so much for them to get back to the closeness they used to share, but now that she’s confided the words that have been building up inside her for so long, they feel more like weapons.
Leleti’s face crumples then. “My child, who did this to you? Who?”
Zodwa shakes her head and is surprised by the emotion that constricts her throat.
Leleti pulls Zodwa to her chest and begins whimpering. “Lord Jesus, tell me it isn’t so. Tell me this isn’t what happened to my beautiful child.”
Zodwa allows herself to be rocked as her mother cries. She can’t help but think that sometimes it’s easier to stagger under the weight of our heaviest burdens with our heads bowed down, just so we don’t have to witness the pain that our suffering causes those who love us most.
“I’m sorry, my child. I am so sorry.” Leleti’s crying is punctuated at intervals by apologies and self-recrimination. “I should have protected you from this . . . Forgive me, my child . . . I will make it right. Forgive me. Forgive me.”
Her mother’s tears drip onto Zodwa’s cheeks, and she wants so much to contradict Leleti and tell her that she isn’t to blame but she can’t explain any further, not without losing the tenderness her mother feels for her.
You could not have protected me, Mama. I was raped because I loved the wrong person. I still do.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ruth
28 April 1994
Verdriet, Magaliesburg, South Africa
I thought I dreamt you,” I say after shuffling through to the kitchen, where Dee’s making a god-awful racket and generally being very inconsiderate of the throbbing in my temples. “Though it felt more like a nightmare than a dream, to be honest.”
She pours coffee and hands it to me. “Here, this should help.”
“Help what?”
“The headache and nausea you probably woke up with.”
“I don’t get headaches and nausea. I get raging hangovers.”
The comment is meant to break the ice a bit but Dee doesn’t thaw at all. “Sorry there’s no milk or sugar for it but the cupboards are completely bare. How can you live like this?”
“I only just arrived from Cape Town yesterday, a few hours before you did,” I say in my defense. “It’s not like I’m Mother Hubbard.”
“Well, in that case you should have realized there wouldn’t be any provisions and gone shopping before you arrived.”
“There wasn’t time.”
“There was time to stop at the liquor store.” Dee eyes the empty bottles standing next to the bin. “The only things in the fridge are wine and tonic water.”
“You could just as easily have stopped at the shops, Dee. I don’t see all your provisions stocking the cupboards.” She flushes but doesn’t explain why she didn’t do any shopping. Typical of her. Hypercritical of everyone else, but God help you if any of that critic
ism is directed at her. “At least we know one of us has her priorities straight. And thank you for the reminder about the tonic,” I say airily, getting up to fetch a ciggie and the ingredients for some hair of the dog.
“Do you really need a drink just after waking up?” Dee rinses an ashtray and plunks it down in front of me.
“Mosquitoes are the biggest killers in Africa. They claim more lives than hippos. This is just good sense. You should have one too.”
“There’s no malaria in the foothills of the Magaliesberg mountains. You know that.”
“You can’t be too careful.” I add an extra tot of gin for good measure.
“It’s the quinine in the tonic that’s the mosquito deterrent, anyway. Not the gin.”
“Oh well, it’s not like I can take the gin out now, can I? Ma could say what she liked about the Brits, but they brought G and Ts to Africa, so they couldn’t have been all that bad. Are you sure you don’t want one?”
“Yes.”
“Suit yourself,” I say, and then mutter under my breath, “Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”
Dee’s attack comes seemingly out of nowhere. I thought we were bantering but clearly not. My sister is as sensitive as she ever was. “Why are you here, Ruth? Another failed marriage or are you recovering from the most recent round of plastic surgery?”
I won’t let her get away with that. “Why are you here, Dee? Wait, don’t tell me. There’s someone who really needs you in Zaire or Rwanda or fucking Timbuktu, and so you thought you’d leave because isn’t that what you’ve always done best?”
Dee flinches but doesn’t rise to the bait. “I’ve retired, actually.”
“Retired? Well, I hope you don’t expect to stay here.”
“Why not? It’s as much my home as it is yours.”
That’s what she thinks. “I’m selling it.”
“What?”
“That’s why I’m here. We’ve had an offer on the farm that I’m in the process of accepting.”
“You can’t do that!”
“Oh, but I can. You signed over your power of attorney to me decades ago, remember? When you left me alone to deal with everything by myself, all that pesky paperwork included?” I hate that I sound hurt. To hell with her.
“I’ll rescind the power of attorney. You can’t sell the farm.”
“We’ll just have to see about that,” I say, taking my drink and sweeping out of the room, cigarette smoke and my silk kimono trailing behind me.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Delilah
28 April 1994
Verdriet, Magaliesburg, South Africa
There wasn’t a time that I could recall being free of Ruth’s torment.
With her being older than me by ten months but born in the same year, we were considered “Irish twins,” though no one ever called us that in front of our Scottish father, Angus. Their restraint may have been because he had an unpredictable mean streak, or it could’ve been because they simply didn’t know the term. Our town was a small farming community populated mainly by Afrikaners who were suspicious of anyone who was an outsider or read anything other than farming periodicals and the Bible.
The fact that my parents had produced two children so quickly may have been misconstrued as them having some affection for each other, but they didn’t. Their marriage was one long war punctuated by regular skirmishes, and the only battle Ma ever won was naming Ruth.
My father had wanted to name her Donalda, after his own mother, but my mother had insisted on naming her for a biblical character, someone the child could aspire to. It was probably the sight of that thatch of red hair on Ruth’s newborn head that scared her and made her refuse to back down. My mother knew that a daughter who took after her father in both looks and temperament would be too much for her to handle. She probably hoped that naming Ruth after an obedient woman might bestow a sobering effect.
It didn’t.
Da got his revenge against Ma on the day I was born when he was sent to the registry office with instructions to write “Naomi” on my birth certificate. Because she’d won the battle of naming Ruth, my mother thought she’d win again.
She was wrong.
“Yeh wan’ a bloody biblical name, woman? I’ll give yeh a biblical name!”
And that’s how I came to be named Delilah.
It was our father’s idea of a joke, especially since I’d been born on Christmas Day, our Lord’s birthday. And how ironic it was too: the Ruth of the family being wild and agnostic, and the Delilah being pliant and religious. I like to think that was my own way of rebelling against him and getting revenge on behalf of our mother, turning it around so that the laugh was on him.
Every day of my parents’ union that I can remember bearing witness to was bloody, and growing up on a battlefield took its toll. “God help you, Delilah, but you’ll understand when you’re older,” my mother told me one day when I sat glowering as she made my father’s breakfast. She had a fresh bruise on her cheek that sickened me. “This is what marital relations between a man and woman are like.” She shrugged as though there was nothing to be done but to accept it.
The more Da drank, the more belligerent he became, listing Ma’s many shortcomings and the myriad ways in which she’d failed him. The community wryly twisted the farm’s name, Verdriet, changing it to Dronkverdriet, which was the Afrikaans word for depression brought on by drunkenness. Da’s lack of success with the farm was Ma’s fault because she’d taken a shipbuilder and a man of the sea and forced him to become someone who labored in the dirt. His failings as a husband were her fault too because she emasculated him. How was a man supposed to be a man when his wife didn’t respect him?
Of course, I wanted no part of that then. If that’s what love could do to you—for I had to assume that they did love each other once—then I wanted nothing to do with it. Yet even while I rejected that kind of love, I still yearned for a great love, an exalted one that transcended earthly desires. Thus began my love affair with God and the church, which I stupidly thought would inoculate me against the messiness of human emotions.
It didn’t.
If anything, all it did was facilitate my ruin, for it was through the church that I fell in love with a priest, and it was that infatuation that was the catalyst for everything that came afterward. I thought at the time that I’d done a good job of hiding my feelings for him, but there was no hiding them from Ruth. She sniffed them out and tormented me relentlessly.
Ruth, the ruthless.
That’s how she was then and it’s how she still was. It was a quality, like her alcoholism, that she must have gotten from Da.
* * *
• • •
After our conversation about selling the farm, I knew I had to get out of the house or run the risk of throttling Ruth’s cosmetically enhanced neck. Besides, we needed supplies and she clearly wouldn’t be going shopping for anything more substantial than lemons for her gin and tonics.
Before I left for the shops, it took me ten minutes to build up the courage to call the ICU, and I let out a quavering breath when I was told Daniel’s condition remained critical and that nothing had changed. I tried to push away thoughts of him as I got into the car, fueling myself instead with anger and murderous thoughts directed at Ruth.
Though I’d driven the roads to the farm the night before, nothing looked familiar as I backtracked in the light of day. On the way to town, I passed a sprawling mass of shacks that stretched out as far as the eye could see. They covered acres of what used to be farmland. I’d kept up with South African news and knew it was one of the squatter camps that people euphemistically preferred to call “informal settlements.” Cities attracted thousands upon thousands of black laborers but had nowhere to house them, and so the camps were springing up all over the place.
I found a grocery store in
town and after doing my shopping, I joined the long queues for the tills. My cart was half-full but other shoppers had two or three trolleys filled with nonperishable goods. I couldn’t understand why a weekday would be so busy and I asked the white cashier about it when I finally reached her. “What’s going on today? Some kind of sale or something I’m not aware of?”
She was wearing a National Party T-shirt with State President F. W. de Klerk’s face on it to show her support of the apartheid government. “No, everyone’s just stockpiling,” the woman replied in Afrikaans, which I then switched to as well. Though Ruth and I had been sent to study at an English school by our father, the entire farming community, as well as Ma, had been Afrikaans and so we were fluent in both languages.
“Stockpiling? For what?”
“For when Nelson Mandela becomes president and the civil war begins.”
I thought she was joking but she looked dead serious. “Civil war?”
“Yes, the blacks have been threatening for years to come after all the whites as revenge for apartheid. None of us will be safe anymore. Women especially. Can you imagine anything worse than being raped by a filthy kaffir?”
As I drove back to the farm five minutes later, my mind was still reeling from what she’d said. Passing the squatter camp, I was forced to stop when the light turned red. Signs were posted at various points across the intersection warning drivers to be on the lookout since it was a prime hijacking location. I locked the doors.
While waiting for the light to change, I took in the chaotic scene around me. Minivan taxis were stopping, loading up passengers and then pulling out again haphazardly, kicking up dust. Pedestrians chatted in groups or stood with their hands out, the splay of their fingers indicating where they were headed. Hawkers shouted out their wares as guinea fowl and goats roamed the side of the road.
Everyone was black and a vast majority of the people were sporting Nelson Mandela’s popular green, yellow, and black African National Congress colors. Considering that the ban on his party had only been lifted in 1990, the support for it was impressive. The only white faces in the throng were those in their cars like I was, their doors locked but their faces still betraying their anxiety. Could the cashier at the Spar have been right? Was there reason to be scared?
If You Want to Make God Laugh Page 5