Another Woman's Daughter

by Fiona Sussman

  Neither Michael nor Madam Rita could cook like Mme could. Most days they just warmed up something from Marks & Spencer. The trouble was that neither Mark nor Spencer was a good cook either—their pork pies had big bits of jelly in the middle and their peas were all mushy. I missed having slippery green balls to chase around my plate. In fact, I missed all of Mme’s cooking—the stiff chunks of mielie pap swimming in tomato gravy, the gem squash halves filled with pools of warm butter, the salty chuck stew. I missed apricot jam smeared thickly on wedges of soft white bread. I missed dollops of sweetened condensed milk stirred into my tea. I missed everything from Africa—especially the Saxonwold house. It had been so clean and tidy. I knew that if Mme ever visited us in England, she would be very disappointed. The house was such a mess. A lady called Louise did come on Tuesdays to clean, but she was not a proper cleaner like Mme. And she was always putting my suitcase back in the cupboard even though I wanted it out ready for when the England holiday came to an end. Louise smoked cigarettes too, and I could smell her even when she wasn’t there.

  One morning, I decided to give the kitchen a proper clean. I washed and dried the dirty dishes piled up in the sink, then packed them away in the cupboard—glasses on one side, cups and mugs on the other. I rearranged the fridge—vegetables and fruit in the bottom drawer, yogurt and cheese on the top shelf, meat in the middle. Then I took a bucket of warm water and, with a brush from the bathroom, scrubbed the kitchen floor till the water was brown and the tiles white again.

  “What are you doing, child?” Madam Rita said when she came downstairs and found me.

  “All tidy,” I boasted, with a sweep of my hand.

  Madam Rita was not pleased. She hauled me to my feet. “Miriam, I don’t want you cleaning, do you understand? And certainly not with my nail brush!”

  I didn’t understand. It was all topsy-turvy, this new holiday life.

  Madam Rita started coming home later and later from work. There were no more mealtime stories either. Any talk at dinner was either about work or about money. Though this was better than the long cold silences that could take hold of the house—Madam Rita and Michael sometimes not speaking to each other for a whole week. Talking, any talking, kept the tokoloshe away.

  I hated England. It had changed everybody and everything.

  All I wanted was my mme, but she had given me away.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1962

  Celia

  The noise drove nails through my dreams. I stirred, thick with sleep, then dozed again. The sound persisted, forcing open doors in my head until I was properly awake and staring into the blackness of 4:00 A.M. I slid a hand under my pillow and quickly silenced the old blue alarm clock. Someone coughed. Sleep-warm bodies restlessly rearranged themselves. I sat up. The air was thick and stale, breathed in and out all night by too many of us.

  My surroundings came slowly into focus—seven sleeping shapes sharing the skew black space with a table, three chairs, a bucket, and a stove.

  I rose and crept through the darkness. The floor was freezing; winter had fingered every inch of the shack. After washing in a bucket of icy water, I dressed and then lit the Primus stove, boiling up a tin of yesterday’s tea. I sat alone at the table to eat my breakfast—two slices of buttered bread washed down with a mug of sweet tea—before stepping out into the gray light of dawn to join the silent river of figures wending its way down the dusty track to the nearest bus stop.

  The small shack in Alexandra township had been my home for many months now. I had secured a new job, as promised by the Steiners, working four days a week for a Portuguese family—market gardeners who ran a greengrocer. There were servants’ quarters on their premises, but I had not been allowed to use them.

  “No, I know what you people is like. Next thing there is boyfriend coming in the night. The last girl is witch doctor. She kill chickens in the room and throw bones . . . No room!”

  So I had been forced to find a place in the townships. After a long and futile search, an acquaintance finally offered me a place on the outskirts of Alex—a shack I’d share with seven others. In return, I looked after the woman’s grandchildren two evenings a week while she worked at the local shebeen, serving home brew to drunken men and loud, loose women.

  I cursed. The queue at the bus stop was already over twenty people long. There was no guarantee I’d get onto the five o’clock bus, and if I missed it, I’d miss the connection, which meant I’d get to work after seven. The last time this happened the Portuguese madam had docked my wages.

  A youngster elbowed his way in front of me. “Sorry, Mama.” His tone was mocking.

  I straightened, my breathing picking up.

  The kid turned. His eyes were dark, his black face rutted with dents and ditches. A thick scar tracked down one cheek to end in the sharp corner of his mouth. “Give us your money, Mama.”

  No one in the line moved. Even the breeze was still as the morning held its breath.

  The boy brought his pockmarked face up to mine, his breath hot and sour. The whites of his eyes bulged. “Tokoloshe stolen your tongue?” he shouted, yanking at the brown paper bag I was carrying.

  I let go.

  He rifled through it like a dog rummaging through rubbish. My knitting hit the dirt, then my apple. My tub of talcum powder exploded in a cloud of white.

  Five seventeen A.M. Where is the bus? Where is it?

  The boy, finding no ticket or money in my bag, flung it aside. It trapped a pocket of air, hung suspended for a moment, then collapsed and sank slowly to the ground.

  “Don’t mess with me, Mama, or I’ll cut off your titties.”

  I crossed my hands over my breasts.

  “Now gimme your purse. Is it hiding in those big melons of yours?”

  He lunged forward and forced a hand into my bra, his jagged fingernails snagging on one of my nipples. I kept only my passbook and a clean tissue there.

  My pass landed at the feet of the woman behind me. She did not move. We lived in neighboring shacks and usually greeted each other every morning. Now she stood mute.

  My nipple was stinging. I looked down. A bright ring of blood had seeped through the fabric to form an angry red button on my lilac uniform.

  “Bitch! Give me money,” he shouted, his heavy hand connecting with the side of my head.

  I fell to the ground and landed with a thud in the dirt. Then I was being kicked over and over again, in the back, on my breasts, in my belly . . . I coughed and wheezed and tried to scramble away, but my movements were disjointed and the blows too many. Dazed, I swung there on all fours, bracing for more, the taste of my own blood strong in my mouth. I spat into the dirt. Something dropped into the frothy pool of pink saliva; it was one of my teeth.

  Then I heard the sound of salvation, the screeching brakes of the Putco bus as it lurched around the corner. For a moment time stood still, then the tsotsi vanished into the suspended dust of dawn.

  An old man bent down and helped me to my feet. Someone gathered up my unraveling knitting. My neighbor passed me my bruised apple. “Hau, Celia. I’m sorry for the skelm,” she said as she wiped the dirt off my passbook.

  The doors of the bus opened and the queue surged forward, as people clambered onto the already crowded vehicle. Trembling, I clutched my belongings to my chest and shuffled with the line. I did not think I would reach the door. When I did, I stopped at the foot of the stairs, expecting the driver to bellow that the bus was full and close the door in my face. He didn’t. I bent down and slipped off my right shoe. In it, lying safely under the innersole, was a warm two-rand note and my bus ticket. My job was secure for today.

  —

  I had been with the Portuguese family for more than a year now. The job was no good—thirteen-hour days on wages barely enough to keep food on my table, let alone that of my three boys and their granny up north. But I could not leave.
Jobs in the suburbs were scarce and those who had good ones guarded them fiercely. More importantly, though, the Parkhurst home was the only address the Steiners had for me. To leave would mean losing the one connection I had with my Miriam.

  I’d heard nothing from the Steiners since the day I’d waved good-bye to them outside their big Saxonwold home. So many words and promises, yet the days had slipped into weeks, the weeks into months, and still no news.

  I started to see my Miriam everywhere. The back of a little girl’s head in the crowd was her head; the laughter tinkling across the park was her laugh. A lucky-bean pod lying on the path meant she would be just around the next corner, and the rustling in the night was her moving in bed beside me; but when I reached over, only the bedclothes met my caresses.

  I chased people across streets, ran beside buses, and searched for the child I could hear crying. Every phone call was a trunk call; every envelope in the postbox, a letter from England. Every new day was the day I would hear from my Miriam.

  I asked anyone who would stop and listen, what they knew of England. In my head it was just a shadow I couldn’t pin down, a curtain I could not open. England was a word. There was no bus I could catch to take me there, no number to call. It was a shifting ghost, which haunted and taunted me and left me crazy with helplessness.

  There were five in this Portuguese family I now worked for—the Master and Madam, their two teenage children, and the Master’s mother. The only one I cared about was the old lady.

  I found her now, her wheelchair parked beside a blaring radio, the music successfully drowning out her feeble moans. The rank smell of old urine filled the air.

  “Hau, Makhulu! This would never happen with my people,” I despaired. “Old person is very important and must be respected. Why you let them treat you like this?”

  The old lady couldn’t understand my English, but muttered something in her own tongue.

  After switching off the radio and opening up the windows, I rescued her from her prison on wheels, easing her onto the bed. Then I began sponging down her crumpled body with warm water, gently cleaning under her shrunken breasts and between the wings of her sagging bottom. I loosened the crusts stacked high around her bedsores, and with a fresh cloth wiped away the food trapped between the purse-string creases of her wizened mouth. I cleared the sleep from her rheumy eyes and ran a comb through her baby-fine hair. Finally I powdered her neck with what was left of the talcum powder I had brought with me.

  “Now, Makhulu, you look and smell beautiful!”

  She smiled a lopsided grin, her false teeth grinding and clacking against each other.

  I draped her thin arms around my neck and heaved her back into her wheelchair. “My daughter, she never to treat me so bad,” I said, stroking her leathery cheek.

  My own words lifted the scab of pain I worried at daily, and tears blurred my vision. I sank down beside the old lady. “Where is my daughter? Where is she?” I whispered.

  Confusion and alarm swept across the old lady’s face.

  “My Miriam. I lose my Miriam,” I moaned.

  The granny leaned forward and grasped my hands in hers, her cold, thin fingers folding themselves around mine. Just for a moment I allowed myself to succumb to the comfort she offered, feeling her touch and accepting her caresses. Then I stood up and hurried on with my day.

  The bathroom was next on my list of chores. The toilet stood unflushed and a bin of used sanitary pads overflowed in the corner. Dirty clothes lay piled around the laundry basket and a band of grime ringed the bath I’d scoured just days before.

  As I knelt down to clean the lavatory, the eldest child of the house swung into the room. She brushed her teeth, pulled string through her teeth, and squeezed a pimple in the mirror. Then she left. I had been invisible.

  My hands started to shake, panic climbing up my throat like a monkey. I stood up, gasping for air, and pushed open the small window above the cistern. But the cool breeze did little to ease my suffocation. I had to do something. I could not bear it any longer.

  That night I sat in the quiet of the kitchen, waiting for the family to finish their dinner. My body was heavy with fatigue and my mind weighed down with worry. The breakfast table had been laid, but still I would have to wait to clear the dinner dishes before I could begin the long journey home to my room in the township.

  I hoped the meal would finish soon, though I suspected a long night still stretched ahead. Many bottles of wine had been opened and there was much loud laughter coming from next door. On a night such as this I could expect a visit from the Master—the only time I got to see the inside of the empty servants’ quarters.

  Suddenly, as though separated from reason, I found myself standing up. My hands untied the apron around my waist and unbuttoned the uniform I was wearing, before folding both and placing them neatly on the sideboard. I felt naked standing there in just my T-shirt and skirt. Then my hands were pushing open the back door.

  I hesitated on the edge of the night, before stepping into the garden. God had switched on his torch and the moon’s silver glow outed corners and crevices that on another night would have remained hidden.

  The cool night air brought me to my senses. I was inside my body again, but I knew there was no going back. I crept across the lawn, hugging the stingy line of shadows until I had reached the open window on the far side of the house. Hooking my arms over the ledge, I hoisted myself onto the sill and teetered there for a moment, before scrambling headfirst through the gap and landing inside with a crash.

  I heard the old granny gasp before I saw her, my eyes taking time to make sense of the shrouded surrounds. “Shhh, Makhulu,” I whispered, holding a finger to my lips. “Is me, Celia.”

  The old lady’s breathing was fast and tremulous, making the darkness shudder and shake. I crawled over to where she was slumped. “I am sorry, but I must to go, Granny.”

  The old lady frowned as she struggled to make some sense of my words.

  I kissed her forehead. “Be safe. God must watch over you.” Then I unfastened the chain around my neck and pressed a small silver crucifix into her palm. “For you.”

  Tears spilled onto her wrinkled cheeks. “Celia,” she whispered. “Celia.”

  “Zelia!”

  I froze. Someone else was calling my name.

  Now it was the old lady’s turn to put a finger to her lips, then she was shooing me on my way. I squeezed back through the open window and landed softly in the plants below.

  “Hey! What you do? Zelia, is you?” shrieked a high-pitched voice. “Where you go? Pedro quick! She go!”

  For the briefest moment I faltered, then I was running—up the drive, onto the street, and down the road. I did not stop, fear winning over the pain in my side that threatened to sabotage my escape.

  I reached the bus stop, my lungs clamoring for air.

  The bus was pulling off.

  “Kha vha ime! Stop!” I begged, knocking desperately on the moving door, but the driver stared straight ahead, and I was left standing in the middle of the road choking on black diesel fumes.

  It was another hour till the next bus. An hour!

  I looked quickly about me, then slunk into the shadows to wait.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1965

  Miriam

  Daffodils poked their yellow origami faces through the melting snow, birds built nests, and sunlight streamed through the library window, thinning the gloom and thawing the cold. It was spring in Norwich.

  I was sitting in my usual corner, behind the books on religion—the quietest and safest spot in the school.

  I had been living under England’s gray roof for four years now—one thousand five hundred and seventy-nine days—and I’d become well versed in making myself invisible. I knew how to blend in, disappear; how to be no one.

  Hiding in the library at lunchtime w
as one of my successes. The old stone building had become my refuge and my escape, the books carrying me beyond my lonely life to other worlds.

  Spending so much time studying between the letters R and S also meant my grades were excellent, something Michael and Rita found very reassuring, my report cards helping dispel some of the concerns they harbored about me.

  “She’s nothing more than four spare limbs and a pair of anxious eyes,” I overheard Michael once say.

  “Africans often are,” Rita reassured him. “Look at the build of those Kenyan runners. It’s a genetic thing. See how well she did in her English essay last week. Not the results of a troubled child, that’s for certain. The thing about adoption is that you never really know what you’re getting. I mean, there’s no template to measure the kid against. Saying that, we do at least know what her—what Celia was like.”

  Now I sat poring over a colossal book on earthquakes, reading about fault lines and foci, seismic waves and Richter readings.

  All of a sudden there was a crash, thump and then a scream. Instinctively, I threw myself under the table and curled up into a ball, the world I was reading about coming to life. Moments passed. No walls collapsed. No suffocating dust swirled. I felt no tremor or aftershock.

  Hesitantly I opened one eye, then the other . . .

  My gaze was met by that of an Indian girl. She was lying spread-eagled across the parquet floor. “Is that your bag?” she asked accusingly.

  There had been no earthquake. The girl had tripped over my satchel.

  I began to shake. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

  As she stood up to dust down her pinafore, I saw she was tall and leggy, with blue-black hair hanging in two solid braids down to her waist.

  “Stupid me!” she said with a wide smile. “I never watch where I’m going.” Her voice rose and fell like a song. “I was caught in an earthquake in India,” she went on, eyeing the book lying open on my desk. “It was sooo scary. I thought the sky was going to fall in.” She waved her arms in the air theatrically. “You’re meant to hide under the nearest table or something . . .”