“She knew your mother.”
“She knew my mother?” My throat tightened and tears immediately blurred my vision. I swung around. The woman had gone. I wanted to say something, but nothing came out. I hadn’t afforded her the import she was due. I hadn’t studied her face or asked her a single question. I’d been a passenger for the entire conversation.
“They were good friends; however, she hasn’t seen your mother in a very long time—many years, in fact.”
He went on to tell me how my mother had fled the Rodrigues’ employ, only to be arrested and thrown in prison on an accusation of theft. The two friends lost contact until, out of the blue, a letter had arrived from my mother. She was apparently working for a good family in Parktown North. The chubby one had visited her there once, before again losing touch.
“She’s given me the address,” Thabo said, pointing to the scrap of paper on the dashboard.
I grabbed it and scrutinized his scribble.
“So you see, it is not over till the fat lady sings,” Thabo said, grinding the gears into reverse before we shot out into the busy road.
We drove for the next fifteen minutes in silence. I was oblivious to my surroundings and even Thabo’s driving, and by the time we parked beside an imposing white wall in an avenue lined with plane trees, I had picked my thumbnails down to the raw, bulgy bit.
“Wait here,” Thabo said, getting out.
I wound down my window.
He pushed the buzzer of an intercom positioned in the white wall.
“Sawubona,” said a voice that crackled through the tiny holes.
“Sawubona,” he said, speaking into the silver box. “Hullo.”
Thabo leaned into the pillar, conversing earnestly with the device.
The voice at the other end went quiet.
Thabo straightened. My heart sank. What now?
I followed his gaze down the long driveway. A black woman in yellow overalls with a matching head scarf and frilled white apron was walking up the drive toward him.
Soon their intercom exchange had resumed in person, and once again there was much smiling, exclaiming, and pointing. The gentle pace and congenial preamble that seemed an integral part of any African interaction was beginning to frustrate me.
Unable to contain myself, I opened my door and made to get out.
I stopped. The woman was disappearing back down the driveway.
Thabo turned and held up a hand. I cursed and pulled the door shut.
Minutes passed. An eternity. My head was throbbing and Zaziwe, whom I was supposed to be babysitting, was being a pain, hopping excitedly about the car and leaving me dizzy.
Finally there was some movement again at the bottom of the driveway. I craned my neck to see two figures this time—the yellow overalls maid and someone else . . . a white woman—walking up the drive. Two small children followed in their wake.
Anxiety twisted through me. In England most of my patients had been white, but that felt like a lifetime ago. I’d only been in this country a short time and already I’d submitted to its edicts and pressures, to its beliefs.
I slunk down in the car, my determination now diminished and uncertain. I was just another black girl hoping this white madam would give me enough time to explain myself.
She looked about my age, with a shiny, rounded forehead, perfect complexion, and golden hair pulled back in a thick ponytail. She was beautiful. A chunky gold chain drooped around her neck and slid effortlessly over her cream blouse. She stopped short of the gate, fingering a small black disk in her hand. Thabo would later explain it was a remote panic button.
Thabo’s back excluded me from the ensuing conversation. Eventually he turned and beckoned to me. Suddenly running away seemed like the easier option. Did I really want to know the truth? And what if this was where the trail ended?
“Good morning,” I said, approaching the gate. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” I sounded out of breath, my words jerky and uneven.
There was a long pause, the woman obviously disconcerted by my Norfolk accent. I guess it wasn’t what she’d expected to come out of a black person’s mouth. She slipped the panic button into her cardigan pocket. A “white” accent had effectively bleached my complexion and lent me some credibility. “Not at all. Franscina tells me you’re looking for a girl called Celia.”
That word “girl” again. I’d heard it several times in my short stay. How could it refer to a mature woman in her sixties? How could “boy”—paperboy, garden boy, houseboy—refer to any black male, regardless of whether he was a piccanin or a grandfather?
One of the children started to pick her nose.
“We’ve certainly never had a girl by that name working here,” the woman went on. “And we’ve been in the house now . . . Gosh, it’s going on five years. We bought the place from a couple by the name of Eloff. Whether or not their maid was called Celia, though, I really couldn’t say. They moved to the Cape.”
“Do you know where in the Cape, madam?” Thabo asked.
“We forwarded their mail for almost a year. I think it was Knysna, or maybe George.” She pulled her child’s finger from its nose. “My memory fails me. I’ll see if I can find the address. Give me a minute.”
With that she turned and made her way quickly back to the house, her children scampering behind. The gate remained shut. My complexion had obviously not faded entirely.
Franscina was delighted with the new company and hung back to chat with Thabo while I stood aside, again a third wheel. After a time, the white woman returned.
“Franscina, go back down to the house, will you. I’ve left the children there and there’s soup on the stove. I don’t want it to boil over.”
Disappointed not to be party to the rest of the saga, Franscina bid us farewell and headed dutifully back to work.
“Look, I can’t find that address anywhere.”
I felt myself plunging down the next dip on this roller-coaster ride.
“Leave me the details of where I can reach you if it comes to light,” the woman said, a controlled smile moving across her face. Perhaps she felt she’d been too familiar and was now trying to claw back the appropriate boundaries.
“Thank you for your time, madam,” Thabo said, jotting down his telephone number on the back of an advertorial he’d picked up off the pavement. “Here is my phone number in Soweto. You can leave a message there, for Thabo Rhadebe. That’s me. Anything you think might be useful, anything at all, please call us.”
“Remember,” the woman added in a cautionary tone, “even if your mother did work for the Eloffs, she may not have followed them to the Cape.”
I managed a courteous smile and moved quickly back to the car, tears not far off. I was embarrassed by my emotions. Lately they’d been all over the place.
Thabo caught hold of my arm.
“This is the very beginning of the journey, Miriam. You can’t lose heart so soon.” He wiped a tear off my cheek. “There will be other hurdles. This just the first of many.”
—
The next day was Sunday—another perfectly clear and cloudless African day. Yet waking to the golden light did little to lift my spirits. I was trapped in a morose mood. How quickly I’d forgotten the grayness and gloom of the country I’d left behind.
In an effort to rescue me from myself, Thabo decided to take me on a drive to Zoo Lake—a man-made lake scooped out of the heart of the northern suburbs. It was a beautiful spot and strangely familiar—the colorful rowboats on the sun-drenched waters, the willows bowing over grassy banks, the swoops of undulating lawn; I felt like I’d been here before. We bought samosas and milk shakes from a small kiosk at the water’s edge, then lounged on the grass while Zaziwe busied herself pecking off the crumbs trapped in the creases of Thabo’s shirt.
Later, we hired one of the rowboats and ve
ntured out onto the lake, for an hour splashing and fooling like children. I wanted the afternoon to last forever.
When our hour was up, we moored the boat and I bought a mango the size of a small soccer ball from an African woman peddling fruit. It cost me just twenty cents. In England a pitiful pockmarked one could cost anything up to two pounds!
Thabo peeled it with his penknife, and as I savored the sweet orange flesh, gates were opened in my mind, releasing flashes of another life and almost-remembered memories. A black cloud of fruit flies hover over a cardboard box packed tightly with mangoes. I see myself choosing the biggest mango from the box. My mother . . . yes, my mother . . . puts it to her nose and nods. While she peels it for me, I suck on the sweet skins. Then I am chasing the slippery orange fruit around my plate, squealing with happiness and frustration. I also see a family of mango-pip dolls lined up on a concrete step. There’s a big garden. The Ma . . . the Mam . . . the Mamelodi family! Yes, the Mamelodi mango family. One doll has no hair. I remember cutting it off with blunt kitchen scissors. The others have crazy, stringy hairstyles . . .
As the afternoon light softened and the day started to draw to a lazy close, Thabo and I reluctantly took our leave.
For a Sunday evening, the traffic was thick and slow, and soon our chatter had slowed too, until we’d settled into a comfortable silence. Just as we were approaching the silky haze of Soweto, the car began to judder and gasp for air in the evening smog.
“I’ll need to get it serviced before we head off on any sort of long journey,” Thabo said, breaking into my thoughts.
“This time you must let me contribute something,” I insisted as we stuttered around a corner. Then I heard myself scream as I was catapulted toward the windscreen. Thabo threw an arm across me, arresting my momentum just in time and slapping me back into my seat.
“You okay?”
But before I could reply, I saw them—the crowd of people gathered in the middle of the road, oblivious to the fact that we’d nearly plowed into them.
“My god,” I cried out, my words weirdly in unison with a bone-chilling wail that had risen into the evening air.
“Lock my door and stay in the car,” Thabo said, getting out and making his way through the throng of people.
The crowd parted and I saw a boy lying in the middle of the road. There was a dark patch over the pocket of his denim shirt and another spreading in the dirt beneath him. His wide eyes told of a lonely fear. Thabo knelt down beside the teen and the crowd resealed around him. Then the group had burst wide open again and four men were carrying the groaning kid to our car. As they laid him across the backseat, the car was filled with a meaty cocktail of blood, sweat, and alcohol. I felt bilious. Another youth climbed in beside the boy, lifting the kid’s limp legs onto his lap. I kept staring straight ahead, for fear if I looked I would be sick.
As we drove away from the scene Thabo pointed out the armored vehicle stationed at the corner. A white soldier was standing on the roof of the Casspir observing us.
“Incident didn’t warrant intervention,” Thabo said cynically. “A black stabbing poses no threat to stability.”
With the horn blaring and hazard lights flashing, we sped through the maze of nameless streets. Adding to the commotion were the boy’s deep groans, but as they started to dwindle, the ranting of our other alcohol-fueled passenger grew louder.
Thabo put his hand over mine. It was warm and reassuring.
Eventually our headlights captured a lopsided green signpost in their glare: Baragwanath Hospital. I breathed a sigh of relief.
At the emergency entrance Thabo jumped out and harnessed a wayward gurney, and he and the other passenger hoisted the boy onto it. I noticed the soles of the kid’s feet were white. At the end of a long corridor Thabo maneuvered the gurney through a pair of stainless-steel doors.
“Surgical pit,” he said to me over his shoulder.
A bizarre scene greeted us, an eerie sort of organized chaos. Black patients were seated in rows on green plastic chairs, all waiting their turn as if in some post office queue. One man, a machete protruding from his skull, sat beside a woman gripping her belly. A sullen schoolboy sporting two swollen eyes was handcuffed to a black policeman. And an elderly man retched quietly into an ice-cream container. The stench of fresh blood and vomit swirled. Screams no one seemed to notice came from behind closed curtains, as black nurses and white doctors went about their business.
The sticky floor tugged at my sneakers. Looking down I saw I was making a line of red footprints as I walked. No one acknowledged our entrance. A doctor swept past us. He had an incongruously young yet unperturbed face, clearly already immune to the gore surrounding him.
Thabo caught a nurse’s attention. She glanced cursorily over her shoulder at our patient, appraised him in an instant, then was shouting across the room. “Stabbed heart!”
Like magic, the scene before us transformed. Stitching was deserted and wounds left gaping as nurses calmly abandoned what they were doing. Two doctors and an orderly appeared, and the boy on the trolley was pushed into a vacant cubicle.
The curtains were left open.
I couldn’t help but watch as the team worked to save the boy. It was like a well-rehearsed performance—every player familiar with his or her role. No prompting required.
A hush fell over the room when the principal walked in—a tall, unshaven man with tired gray eyes. A nurse unpacked a parcel on a stainless-steel trolley and assisted him to gown up. Once the green gown had been fastened, his gloves were meticulously applied. It was all happening so fast, yet nothing felt hurried, every detail calmly checked off.
Thabo wandered over to me. “You okay?”
“Is he going to be all right?” What a foolish question. How would he know?
He crossed his fingers and smiled.
“BP?” The gowned doctor was firing questions at his team.
“Sixty over forty.”
“Pulse?”
“One-eighty, thready.”
“Fluid?”
“Two fourteen-gauge lines. Haemaccel running. Blood sent for cross-match.”
The doctor picked up a scalpel.
“He’s the surgical registrar,” Thabo whispered. “The consultants hardly ever come in after hours. Registrars deal with everything.”
A metal blade scattered slices of light across the room as the registrar drew a thin white line down the youth’s black body—a thin white line. Just one layer beneath the black was white. The white turned red, then yellow flesh sprang back.
My head began to spin.
A nurse stepped into my line of view, but the sounds of pulling and splitting and tearing worked closely with my imagination to complete the picture.
The registrar called for bone cutters.
Kligh. Kligh.
“He’s cutting through the sternum,” Thabo said. “They’re going to pump the kid’s heart by hand and force around the body what little blood is left, while they try to repair the laceration in the heart wall.”
He was speaking like a medic. Was there nothing he didn’t know?
“But surely they can’t do open-heart surgery in a cubicle. I mean, shouldn’t it be performed in a sterile theater?”
Thabo didn’t respond. He was too busy watching. I followed his gaze. The nurse had moved aside and I could see a gloved hand reaching into the boy’s chest. It grabbed hold of something. Tighten, release, tighten, release . . .
My knees were buckling and I felt myself falling.
When I came to, I was lying across a set of the plastic chairs with a towel propping up my head. The curtains of the cubicle were now drawn and I could make out two figures behind it in silhouette.
I looked up at Thabo. He was standing over me, frowning. He shook his head, answering my silent interrogation. At the same time an agonizing scream rang out—fu
ll of fury and despair. It came from the other youth, the companion of our man-boy. I watched as he thumped his fists against the wall, punching a hole right through the prefab partition. Then security had leveled him and he was being dragged from the room, kicking, screaming, biting, and ranting.
“He didn’t make it.” Thabo sounded almost guilty, as though he’d played some part in the boy’s demise.
My eyes stung and my head throbbed.
He placed both his hands over mine. “I’ve got to make a statement to the police, then we can go. Lie here for now.”
I lay there for what seemed like hours. Thoughts came and went; some stayed. What was the kid’s name? Where was his mother? Was she happy the day he was born? What would he have looked like as an older man? And the doctor—what did it feel like to pump someone’s heart? To hold a life in one’s hands—the ultimate godlike act? Just a thin layer beneath the boy’s black skin was white. White. White. White!
Zaziwe alighted on my chest and tilted her head from side to side. Thabo must have been nearby.
He supported me as I walked in a daze down the open hospital corridors, through pale fingers of moonlight. We passed patients in brightly checkered dressing gowns lounging in the spacious quadrangles of lawn, their drip stands and wheelchairs blending in with their silvered surrounds.
Suddenly a wave of the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard swept over us.
I stopped.
“The nurses are changing shifts,” Thabo said. “They always sing with the patients at changeover.”
We were outside the entrance to a ward. I peered in. At least a dozen beds lined each wall. All were occupied, and the overflow patients lay on mattresses on the floor. A horseshoe of nurses stood at the top of the room, their starched white uniforms hugging voluptuous figures, all bust and bottom. Every eye was trained on the matron. Fungating sores, amputated limbs, and debrided ulcers seemed to melt away as the heavenly voices caressed every crevice of this old ward.
I stood mesmerized by the music, and as the last healing notes of the African hymn settled, I realized the pain in my heart had eased.
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