When he does, he has some news.
“Sipho’s twin brother, Asanda, has been asking around for information. He told Nothando there was a man seen regularly with Nomsa and Phumla.”
“What man?”
“He does not know. Some believe he is with the African National Congress while others say Pan Africanist Congress. He has not been seen since the march. The boy says the man lives in Mofolo. We will send someone to check.”
I nod and try not to get my hopes up.
A few hours after sunrise, a murmur ripples through the line and Andile places his hand on my shoulder. The morgue is about to open for the day. Soon we will know if Nomsa’s body is one of the many waiting inside to be identified.
The door opens and a voice calls out from inside.
“One family at a time. Wait until you are called.”
It is only 9 a.m. and already we have been waiting for five hours. The queue has grown so long that it snakes around the building. It is going to be a long day.
The first family steps inside. Progress is slow and no words are exchanged between those who are at the front of the line still waiting to go in and those who exit the doors once their business there is complete. No words are necessary. Some mothers are weeping, their eyes unseeing with horror and disbelief. Others are mute; the shock of their loss is too much for them. Some have to be carried out; their legs unable to hold them up under the crushing weight of knowing that their children will not be coming home, not ever again. Nothando, when she walks out the door, is dry-eyed. She shakes her head at Andile. Phumla’s body has not been found.
When it is our turn, Andile tries to wrap his arm around my shoulders, but I gently shake him off. I will bear myself with dignity. I walk inside and go to the counter. Behind the glass, a white policeman stands with his head bent. I clear my throat, but he does not look up. He does not appear to know I am there.
“Good morning, sir, my name is—”
Without raising his head, the man holds up his hand. “I haven’t addressed you yet. You’ll wait until I’m ready for you.” He shakes his head and then mutters, “Geen fokken maniere, hierdie kaffirs.”
I understand Afrikaans. It is one of the six languages I speak. No fucking manners, these kaffirs.
I fall silent. He is writing on a piece of paper, taking his time with each word. He pauses between sentences, and even as I read them upside down, I can see he has spelled three words incorrectly. I do not dare correct him. The clock overhead ticks away a minute and then another two as the man continues writing at his snail’s pace. When the document appears to be done, he reaches for an ink pad and spends another minute stamping and signing the document.
Finally, he sighs and puts the paper in a folder. He looks up though he does not meet my gaze. His eyes hover just above me. “Name?”
“I am Beauty Mbali.”
“Who are you looking for?”
“Nomsa Mbali, she is my—”
Again, he holds up his hand. He extracts another piece of paper from a drawer in his desk and begins writing. Dark hairs sprout like spiders on the pale flesh of his fingers. Another minute passes before he looks up again.
“Age?”
“My age?”
“No, man, the age of the missing person.”
“Eighteen years old.”
“Sex?”
“Female.”
“Description?”
“Black hair, brown eyes—”
He snorts. “Ja, ja. That’s the same for all you people. We know she’s a black, okay? What was she wearing? Does she have any distinguishing features like scars or birthmarks?”
“She was in her school uniform. Gray skirt, white shirt and gray jersey. Stockings and black shoes.” Andile runs through the description.
“She would also have had her silver stud earrings in,” I add, knowing that Nomsa never took the earrings out. “And a silver cross on a chain around her neck.”
“Okay, go sit down. We’ll call you if we find anyone matching that description.”
We walk to the back of the room and sit on orange plastic chairs. We wait. Each minute stretches into an eternity. I have heard Catholic missionaries speak of a place called purgatory. This is what I imagine it to be like.
After half an hour, a door opens and a tall man in a military uniform steps inside. His polished black boots squeak on the floor. He beckons me to follow. “Come, we have found a girl matching the description.”
The room and everything in it tilts and shifts out of focus. I am no longer rooted to the ground by my feet. Instead, I am floating above it, above the ugly room with its ugly chairs, above myself and Andile and the man. The ceiling keeps me trapped inside, my head butting against its broad whiteness, and I want to tear a hole through it with my teeth. I want to float away.
“Come! Hurry up!”
The man’s impatient command returns me to myself and though I am light-headed, I stand and Andile stands with me.
“No, just her,” the man barks. He has already turned away and is heading back through the door. Andile makes a sound of protest, but I pat his arm and nod at the chair for him to sit down again. I follow the man down a long, bright corridor that smells of bleach. My own shoes squeak on the floor, and I try to focus on that sound rather than the pain growing and expanding in my chest. The soldier reaches another door and I trail him through it.
I have never been in a morgue before. In our village, we prepare our own dead for burial and then we perform the umkhapho rituals. I am not sure what to expect, but it is not the rows and rows of tables to hold the dozens of bodies that take up every inch of surface space. The tables are pushed so close together that it looks like one large bed on which all the corpses sleep.
The man squeezes his way through the tables, muttering about African women with their fat black asses who aren’t able to fit through the narrow passages. He turns and seems to see me properly for the first time. He nods, apparently satisfied that my black ass will be able to comfortably navigate the cramped route behind him. Finally, he stops in front of a table and indicates that I should join him there.
I try to block out the bodies on either side and focus on the shape under the white sheet. It does not seem real that this could be Nomsa, my only daughter, the child who has brought such light and joy to my life. How could it truly be that she may be dead? If that is so, I will never see her smile again. I will never enjoy an intelligent argument with her quick mind while pretending to scold her for being disrespectful to her mother. If she is dead, I will never see her become a wife. I will never see her pregnant belly swell with a child of her own. It does not seem possible that I will not bear witness to her life, share in her joy and triumphs, and console her in her misery.
I am not ready but the man does not care. He reaches for the sheet and I murmur a prayer to both God and the ancestors as he pulls it back. Silver stud earrings catch the light and my knees weaken as I avert my eyes. I take a deep breath, ignoring the twinge of pain in my chest, and force myself to look at her face.
I exhale a quivering breath. The girl is someone’s daughter, but she is not mine.
Twenty
ROBIN
23 JUNE 1976
Boksburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
The funeral was held at an austere church in Boksburg. All the men wore long-sleeved shirts, suits and ties, and they fidgeted in jackets that were bought for their own weddings. There were a lot of straining buttons battling to close over stomachs that were rounder than they’d been ten years before.
The women wore dresses in dark shades and the air crackled with the static electricity of polyester blends rubbing against each other. The only thing more shocking than their synthetic materials was the scandal Edith created by arriving in a sunflower-yellow tailored pantsuit, with matching handbag and heels. She also sported a yell
ow pillbox hat with a veil that was bordered with yellow trim. Looking at her was like looking directly at the sun.
I was in a yellow polka-dot sundress. I wore a matching yellow ribbon in my hair, which had been curled into ringlets that bounced when I shook my head. We couldn’t find yellow shoes for my outfit, so I was wearing shiny black Mary Janes with frilly white ankle socks. Since it was the middle of a South African winter, the sundress wasn’t very practical and had to be paired with a long-sleeved knitted jersey. Edith also made me carry a dainty yellow umbrella despite my protests that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and even if there was, it wouldn’t rain inside in the church. She explained that the umbrella was an accessory worn purely for effect, and promised I could use it as a fencing sword if I got bored.
We arrived exactly as the service was scheduled to begin because Edith wanted to make an entrance. “There’s no point in spending all that money on our outfits if we don’t give everyone the opportunity to gawk at them!”
As we walked down the long red-carpeted aisle of the packed church, a murmur rose from the congregation. It rippled behind us and only trailed off a few minutes after we sat down. I realized, when Edith smiled faintly at the scorn directed at her, that she didn’t share my mother’s obsession with what people thought of her. She looked glamorous and completely relaxed in the spotlight.
I’d had no control over what I was wearing since Edith had decided to use me as a weapon in her “war on repression,” and I knew my father would’ve hated my ridiculously girly outfit. It was only through Cat that I was able to exert some force of my own will, and so I dressed her in jeans, takkies, and a red-and-white rugby jersey because Transvaal was my father’s favorite Curry Cup team.
A man waved to us from the front pews where he was sitting. “Edie! Over here, I saved you a spot.”
He had a shiny, bald head and a cherubic face, and was immaculately dressed in a three-piece suit; none of his buttons were straining to remain closed.
“Robin,” Edith said as she sat down next to him, “this is my friend Victor.”
Victor shook my hand across Edith. “Dear heart, I’m so terribly sorry for your loss. Please accept my heartfelt condolences.” He had kind hazel eyes and he squeezed my hand softly before I pulled it away. I wondered if he was Edith’s boyfriend and watched to see if they’d kiss or hold hands, but they just leaned in close and spoke in whispers, which I was still able to overhear.
“How is she holding up?”
“Okay, I think. It’s hard to tell.”
“And you, Edie, how are you holding up?” Victor asked.
“I’ve packed a hip flask. That should tell you.”
“That’s my girl,” Victor said. He was quiet for a beat and then leaned over again. “Don’t you always feel like you’re going to burst into flames when you set foot inside a church?”
Edith laughed and I could see that had been Victor’s intention. He had to be a very good friend of hers, because he knew not to fawn over her or focus on the negative. “Is Michael coming?” he asked, craning his head to look at the rows behind us.
“No,” Edith replied.
“Why not?”
“He’s in China, but even if he wasn’t, I don’t think Lotharios generally make a habit of attending their lovers’ family funerals.”
Edith’s voice dropped too low for me to hear anything after that, and so I tuned their whispers out and took in my surroundings. The church was cavernous. Up until then, our school hall was the largest building I’d ever been in and this dwarfed it in comparison. The air smelled of pine wood polish and flowers.
A scrawny woman decked out all in black scurried over to where we were. She had small piggy eyes and a thin-lipped mouth that was puckered in disapproval. She made me think of kids I’d known in school who couldn’t color in the lines, because her orange lipstick was applied well beyond the confines of her lips’ natural contours.
“Good morning, Ms. Vaughn. I am Mrs. van der Walt, and I just wanted to let you know we delayed the service until you arrived. We are about to begin now.”
“Where’s her horse?” Cat asked. “Edith said she’d be riding in on a horse.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We can ask her later.”
Just then, a tiny woman who was sitting in front of a huge organ that took up most of one wall started to play a tune I didn’t recognize. I panicked and tugged on Edith’s pants.
“What?”
“I don’t know this song. They haven’t taught it to us at school.”
“When in doubt, just do what I do, Robs. Hum if you don’t know the words.”
The pace of the melody began to pick up and the congregation took this as a cue to slowly turn and face the back of the church, and Cat and I swiveled with them. Thankfully, no one started singing—it was one of those songs without any words—and so I could concentrate on what was happening. A throng of men lumbered down the aisle, laboring under the weight of large oak and brass boxes resting on their shoulders. Wreaths of lilies perched atop the boxes, and I breathed in the cloying scent as they were carried past us.
I recognized a few of the men who were huffing and puffing under the strain of their cargo and waved to them, though none of them waved back. Oom Hennie, Piet’s dad who should have been at the party that night, winked at me as he walked by. Behind him were Oom Hans, Oom Willie and Uncle Charles, all of whom worked with my dad on the mine. I also recognized Mr. Murray and Mr. Clarke from my mom’s office, and a few other faces, but there were no other children. Cat and I were the only ones there.
As the men struggled to lower the boxes onto two stands, Cat tugged at my jersey. “What’s in the boxes?” she asked.
I shrugged and then leaned over to Edith to repeat the question.
“What boxes?” she asked.
I nodded in their direction. “Those ones.”
Edith’s eyes widened. “Those aren’t boxes, Robs, they’re coffins.”
“Coffins?” I bounced the word around in my mind, hoping to shake loose its meaning. I’d never been to a funeral before and since we didn’t have a television, I’d never seen a show depicting one. Suddenly, though, something clicked into place.
My parents hadn’t let me listen to the scary radio programs, sending me off to bed before they started, but Mabel wasn’t quite as strict when they were out. I remembered a show I’d listened to about a man who’d been falsely pronounced dead and then buried alive in a coffin. The sound of him scratching against the lid and calling for help had given me nightmares for weeks.
I looked back to the coffins, and then back to Cat whose expression of horror showed that she’d had the same realization as I had.
Our parents are in there.
Edith turned her whole body to face me, took my hands and leaned in to whisper urgently. “We spoke about this, remember? When we were shopping? I said that we were buying outfits for the funeral so you could say your good-byes.”
“Yes, but you didn’t say they’d be in coffins,” my voice rose shrilly.
Edith shushed me though the organ music was still echoing through the church. “Of course they’re in coffins. That’s where you put people before you bury them. I thought you knew that.”
“They can’t bury them,” Cat whispered fiercely.
I carried the thought through to Edith. “But what if they’re still alive like that guy on the show? That man who was buried alive?”
Edith’s grip on my hands tightened as I strained to be released. I could see her alarm and assumed it was because she’d also just realized the possibility that a terrible mistake was about to be made.
“We have to get them out of there. They’ll listen to you; you’re a grown-up.”
Our agitated whispers were starting to attract the attention of people seated near us and the organist turned to give us a dirty look.
<
br /> Stop making such a noise, I thought as I looked back at her. I can’t hear myself think and I need to come up with a plan. How can I do that with you pounding away like that?
The coffins had finally been balanced on the stands side by side, and the men were making their way to their seats. Oom Hennie blew me a kiss as he sat next to his wife, Tannie Gertruida. She attempted a watery smile and a small wave, but I didn’t wave back.
You told Mommy I’m a bad influence. You said I can’t play with Elsabe anymore.
Mrs. van der Walt, who’d been hovering around the coffins, stepped forward to adjust the wreaths and wipe fingerprints from the varnished wood. I nudged Edith to prompt her into action, and she cupped her hand around my ear so I would hear what she was saying without our neighbors eavesdropping.
“Robs, they’re not still alive. They’ve passed away and those are just their bodies in there. That’s what you do when people die, you bury them. I can assure you they’re not still alive.”
By then, the music had faded away completely and a tall man, with a huge stomach hanging over his belt, appeared from the wings. He was wearing a black suit, but the jacket remained unfastened; there was no way that gut was allowing itself to be tucked away. He carried a large black bible in his hands; the pages’ edges had been painted gold, which would have enthralled me at any other time, but I wasn’t going to allow myself to be distracted.
Edith turned to whisper to Victor as the minister welcomed the congregation, and I started to panic that the conversation was over. I tried to appeal to her one more time. “Did you see them? With your own eyes?”
Hum If You Don't Know the Words Page 12