But it is another story for the people who rely on our largesse to survive: the women who live in our house and care for our children and feed us. They have trouble treating us as their equals because they know we are the haves and they are the have-nots, no matter how often we may greet them with respect, sit down at the same table to eat with them and fawn over pictures of their children. Simon and I and our friends and my sisters and everyone who comes to stay with us or to visit for a while – my parents, Uncle Stan and Aunty Angela – all of us occupy a South Africa in which there are limitless possibilities. We are new blacks and we live in the South Africa of Mandela and rainbows, the South Africa of the Constitution and progressively realised socioeconomic rights.
They live with us, yes, these women. They laugh and listen and they share. Their bodies are warm and their hands are sturdy, yes, but when they stand in queues at the bank, when they go to the hospital, when they enrol their children in school, they might as well be ghosts. This is no country for poor people. It is a country in which only the wealthy are respected; those without wealth know this best.
It is fitting, then, that the house on Congo Road and the women who live in it – The Help – bring on the existential crisis that forces me to confront my place in South Africa. Were it not for the ghosts who love my children and take them from me when I need rest – the women whose mother has abandoned them and whose children they would leave for their jobs in my house if I willed it – I would not have learnt that, in my heart, I am from this place but not of it.
* * *
Nikki’s cell phone is stolen by a man with a knife as she walks home from the shops. Dipuo is stabbed in the arm on a Sunday evening as she makes her way home after a weekend in Soweto. It is a deep wound requiring stitches. A few months later a man in a car in Pretoria chases Simon as he walks in a quiet parking lot after a meeting with his laptop bag strapped across his chest. When he gets home he is pale and drawn as he recounts how he had to be rescued by a stranger.
We are uneasy, but not alarmed. Funny, that. A decade into our democracy, South Africans have learnt to live with crime and violence. We all know better than to panic about small events. Alarm is for extreme situations.
We tell ourselves nothing extreme has happened – that these are simply the daily reminders that we live in an unequal society. We are the haves. If this means becoming victims of petty crime, so be it.
All this changes in October 2009. In the space of two weeks, Simon and I lose our religion. We realise what others have known all along: that democracy means nothing if you are dead. We become atheists, cast into the wilderness. We discover – very late – that our exceptionalism will not protect us. We finally understand that it is impossible for anyone in South Africa to remain unscathed by brutality. We also finally see that the fault lies with us. We have elected to become part of the system, rather than to challenge it or think outside it. We thought that simply being – black and white and normal – in Congo Road would change Congo Road. This was naive; worse, it was reckless.
The violence jolts us out of our reverie.
Becoming a mother
S is born in Johannesburg on an autumn morning in 2008. Dr Mseleku injects the anaesthetic into my back. I feel rubbery and numb from the waist down. I cry even though it doesn’t hurt. Simon is standing next to me in green hospital scrubs. I can feel Dr Mseleku cutting but it still doesn’t hurt. I am scared. What if the drugs never wear off and I am paralysed forever? I am frightened and overwhelmed with the lights and the sterility of it all.
Dr M is my stylish doctor who loves me because I am stylish and successful too. We are the same kind of woman, determined and slightly tougher than everyone else we encounter. I have a sense, though, that she is more vulnerable than she lets on – that there are hurts there she might open up about if I weren’t sitting across from her with my belly between us – a patient but not a friend. I like her togetherness and her depth.
Over the months of my pregnancy we have sat in Dr M’s waiting room looking at the colour-blocked bulletin boards crammed full of images of newborns: red screwed-up bally faces next to exuberant new mothers and fathers.
Each card on the wall is from a grateful mother thanking Dr M for bringing forth a new life. Most of the cards are written in the voices of the newborn infants. They offer glimpses into a life I am not sure I can hack. ‘A year later and look how I have grown! Thank you so much, Dr M, for bringing me into this world!!! I will never forget that special day when I was born.’
In the few minutes before S’s arrival, Dr M is no longer skinny or sexy or an almost-friend. She is simply a doctor, completely focused on the task at hand. Her dreads are held back off her face and she has no makeup on. This is serious business. The strange assurance I got from the girly discussions we had in her office is gone. I had convinced myself that, if she could indulge in frivolities, if she could be so concerned with shoes and vineyards – which is what our appointments always ended up focusing on – then maybe there wasn’t so much life-and-deathness to this birthing business after all.
Now she looks professional and in control, hunched over, pushing my baby into position and then pulling her out of me like a rabbit out of a hat.
She is here: a steaming, squalling, bunched-up, writhing, life-drenched thing. Purple veins wending a spider’s web across her eyelids, blue arteries crisscrossing her thighs and she is as white as white can be.
‘She’s white.’
I say it in an involuntary gasp, a strange sort of stage whisper. I am half-amused, half-aghast, not so much because of her whiteness, but because of her apartness from me. And I suppose I am also exhausted. Simon is embarrassed. He reddens in his green scrubs. His eyes are disappointed and I am not sure whether it is me or the baby who has let him down.
The medical staff laugh out loud.
Back slaps to Simon.
‘Well at least you know she’s yours!’ they brag on his behalf, papering over my post-apartheid postpartum gaffe. I have overstepped. What is happening to this country when a black woman can be disdainful of her half-caste child?
I want to explain that I am not disdainful. I love her.
I expected her to be fair. After all, her father is white. But I didn’t anticipate this pallor, this translucence. Yet here she finally is after months of hiccups and pokes and frightening stillnesses that had me bruising myself to jolt her into action. Here she is, lying on the collapsing heap of my belly. Alive. Mine. A long glistening larva, pale against my mud.
Maybe it’s the medicine. It’s not helping me to express myself.
Later, Simon tells my sisters not to mention the baby’s colour to me. He thinks I am traumatised. He has been hoping – for my sake – that she will be darker. He only tells me this after the eight-month fog of my postpartum depression has lifted. By then I am well enough to cry proper tears, not just the exhausted ones that no longer make water. I sob because he is showing me in the kindest way possible that my idealism and my personal politics can be unrelenting and this has its effects on those around me – on him. He has borne them well but my militancy is a lot to take.
But now, on the day of S’s birth, I am not yet depressed – just overwhelmed.
The kids arrive in the ward. Nick is fifteen and sensitive and Gabi is all feelings and mouth. They hold her and Gabi cries. Nick takes pictures. Mummy is there. Baba is afraid of infants. Or has some sort of cultural thing perhaps so he isn’t there. He is in Japan. I think he would be too choked up and doesn’t want to admit it. Mandla and Zeng come, and then Gael and Richard. The friends pour in. S bites on my breast and my stomach lurches with the pain of it.
There is too much love. So much it hurts. So much that my uterus contracts and blood gushes. I am an animal. I am wounded and tender and sore. Then everyone leaves and I stay awake, guarding her against demons. I listen to her breathe. I wonder if I deserve her trust. She needs me too much and I have never been more scared in my life.
* * *<
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Six days later I fill in a job application. The foundation where I have been working for four years is hiring an executive director. I have been encouraged to apply. I have no idea what I am doing.
I get the job.
There are eighty staff members. I am the youngest. I am a woman. We work in ten countries. We are cowboys, flying in and out of Zimbabwe and Congo and Zambia and Lesotho. Human rights champions. I am brave. I stand up to New York when they try to tell us how to behave. I pump milk at lunch. I check my BlackBerry after six every evening to see if there are any messages. I make time for dinner with Simon but only because it’s the right thing to do. I do not miss my baby. Work is the only thing I know how to do.
I am sailing towards disaster and I do not know it. Everyone watching me is impressed. ‘My, how she sails,’ they all say. ‘What a dynamic young woman.’
Simon is worried. I cannot sleep. I cannot be alone with the baby. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to be good enough for her. I am very tired.
I do not crash because there is too much at stake. I keep sailing. I pretend I am okay. I cry a lot. Sometimes alone. Most often with Simon. Something about the way he looks at me, as though he is worried I might drown, makes me cry harder. Only he knows I am not sailing. Only he knows I barely know how to swim. It is our secret.
He forces me to go to the doctor. Dr Mseleku sashays in, as well put together as ever. Then she looks at me – her almost-friend who is also a patient – and I cannot hold it together any more. I weep. She frowns in empathy. She sends me to a psychiatrist. I take the medicine and I feel better but I need to understand why.
Simon steers me to Linda, whom we saw for a few months during our worst years when we thought we might fall apart. Her office is still sunny. Her couch is as old and worn as I remember. There is a dachshund at her feet curled into a ball. When we are not talking I can hear the dog snore. Linda does not smile with her mouth, only with her eyes. She makes me feel safe.
She says, ‘Of course you are falling apart.’ She reminds me of what I have been through and says I have looked for this precise meaning for a very long time. Can’t I see that this is the most important way that one person can belong to another? I am standing upright, but a child requires you to bend towards her. I am the soil and she is the seed and words will not do. Need is the only language her love understands. I will get there but I have to bend. I cannot stand still and strong and be a vision for everyone to behold. I cannot move too fast, the way they expect me to at work. I have to learn how to bend – to be someone I have never been before.
One day, when she is old enough, I will tell her the truth, which is that my love was never in question. I was afraid. I only wanted to be enough.
The violence
Nikki is standing outside our house. S – now eighteen months old – is in her pram. Nikki is wearing walking shoes and a hat. S wears a bonnet and a pink dress. A man gets out of a car and approaches them. He pretends that he is asking for directions and Nikki obliges. Then suddenly he is standing too close to Nikki. He is pointing a gun at them and saying that he wants her phone or he will shoot them both.
The jacarandas kiss overhead. The sky is a spring blue.
Nikki pushes the pram into the street, away from the sidewalk where he is standing with the weapon leering at them. On our pretty street, she screams and tries to flag down a passing car. The car swerves to avoid her, the driver’s mouth a shocked O. She persists, scared that she is going to be hit by oncoming traffic, but even more fearful of the young man with the gun in the shadows. The next car she flags down stops. The driver opens the door, sees the guy on the sidewalk, and threatens him with his own gun. The assailant disappears. The Good Samaritan makes sure that they are okay and quickly gets back in his car.
I am in the office. Just before lunch, the phone rings. ‘Come home now,’ Simon says. He is trying to sound calm, which panics me. ‘Everything is okay,’ he says to reassure me. And then there is a catch, a sharp intake of breath. ‘But you should get here.’ I arrive and the story rushes out in a pallid tumble.
As she watches us and hears the story retold, as she looks at our worried faces miming what has just happened, the baby vomits. I mark the moment in my heart. She is too small to know what has happened but she is old enough to understand. I want to fall to my knees and weep, but I cannot do that because I am a mother now and this is not the moment for weeping. In the face of this, my tears will not protect her.
Compared to other tales of crime and gore in South Africa, this is not really a story at all. It falls into the category of ‘it could have been worse’. A glinting gun pointed at the soft skull of a baby girl on a warm day in a quiet Johannesburg neighbourhood only makes the headlines if someone pulls the trigger.
The sun filters into the room, a deceptively soft yellow. We hold the baby tighter and we wonder how we will live in this strange place we love, this place that seems not to know how to be loved in return.
* * *
A week later my colleague and friend Alpheus Molefe is found at 4 a.m., dead in his car. He is the victim of a botched hijacking. He leaves a wife and a daughter, thirteen-year old Princess. She is beautiful, soft-spoken, bewildered.
Her mother sits stoic in their Katlehong house as mourners pour in. Alpheus was a people’s man – always busy, always making connections. The president of the American philanthropic foundation for which I work sends his condolences when he hears the news. He remembers him personally. Alpheus was our driver, but he was also our ambassador: earning a diploma in tourism, getting a certificate in tour guiding, spending weekends regaling our visitors from the US and Europe with his stories of life under apartheid. He stood for many of the things we tried to instil in our staff in the Johannesburg office.
I do not know what to do with myself. I am the boss of the organisation. There are eighty of us in shock and all eyes on me. I sit in my office and cry. I go home and look at my baby, and cry.
In a quiet moment at the house, in the days before the funeral, one of my colleagues looks at Princess and asks, ‘How are you?’ She responds wisely: ‘Outside I am okay, but inside I am broken.’
It is a refrain that comes back repeatedly in the months that follow as Simon and I begin the slow dance of deciding.
Alpheus’s death is senseless and tragic and of course entirely logical within the context of inequality and need and the legacy of brutality that South Africa hasn’t managed to confront directly. I want to give up. I feel like the whites who whinge about crime on the radio. I become obsessed with everything that is failing and yet I find it impossible to walk away.
* * *
Mummy stops by constantly. She phones the nanny several times a day to check on her. For months after the near-miss, she cannot stop thinking about what happened. She orders us to buy a new house, preferably one that is inside the gated community where she and my father live. This is an instruction we cannot obey.
Baba is equally worried but his prescription is worse. ‘If I were your age,’ he says to Simon in the way that men sometimes do when they must take charge, ‘I would pack up my bags, take my family and leave this place.’
For a while there is a ban on walking in the neighbourhood but this is absurd and everyone is miserable. Mummy is the originator and primary enforcer of this rule. She does drop-ins to ensure Nikki isn’t outside with S. She often whisks S away to her house on weekends as though the bigger gates and complicated security system will keep her only grandchild safe. After a few months we begin to defy her. Staying inside is making us all bad-tempered. The child likes the street and the neighbours and the barking dogs.
‘We can’t live in a cage,’ we say to each other resentfully when Mummy is not around, angry at each other although none of this is either one’s fault. Still, we are not brave enough to say anything to my mother’s face. After all, her fears are well founded and her vigilance is necessary.
The Incident forces us to retreat into our pr
ivilege. The house becomes unbearable. We talk feverishly every night. We are convinced we must leave. But then we laugh at ourselves, hysteria tingeing our conversations. Why would we leave this house and where would we go? We can’t afford to sell and we hate the idea of living in a gated community. We are stuck.
We are careful not to say anything aloud but my interior monologue is bleak. I feel like all those whites we have been mocking for years – the ones who have fled to Australia and Canada and the UK and who Facebook obsessively about South Africa’s horrors. Except we are still here.
We talk through how we would live with ourselves if anything were to happen to S. We remind ourselves that something already has, but that we were just lucky. The questions we ask ourselves are real and shameful and life changing.
A year passes. We recover. Somewhat. We accept that the pretty little home we joyously imagined we would settle into like bricks will not be our last home. We stay.
The house no longer feels like home but the stoicism of Johannesburg has settled itself into our bones and we ignore the fact that we have been betrayed by our dreams. We don’t trust ourselves any longer. We are not sure who we can trust. We cleave closer together. We turn our backs against the outside. We question not just the country but the entire enterprise. South Africa has failed us. Our sense of who and where we are is in flux.
The violence creates despondency. We blame it for everything. It is the fault of the violence that Dipuo failed her final year and cannot matriculate. We pay for her to go to a special college where she will be coached for the rewrite. She fails more dismally the second time: 4 per cent in maths, 19 per cent in English, despite her born-free fluency.
Then Aunty’s Lizzie dies of Aids. Aunty and Julia double down, grannies becoming mothers again. Moeketsi, their eight-year old grandson, is devastated. His mother is gone and he is too young to reject the old women. Still, he is old enough to remember his mother’s love and to know that he is angry with her for dying.
Always Another Country Page 25