Hum If You Don't Know the Words

by Bianca Marais

  The baubles were always the second-to-last thing to go up and had to be hung in a very particular order.

  “Globes first,” my mother would say. “Gold and then silver, followed by red and green.”

  I’d reach for a gold Father Christmas and my mother would swat my hand away. “Only the globes for now. Then the stars. Then the candy canes. Then the angels. Father Christmases are last.”

  There was no use arguing with her, and God help anyone who hung too many of the same ornaments next to each other or left a bald spot somewhere. Finally, once everything had been put up to both their exacting specifications, it would be time for the giant star. My father would slip his hands under my armpits and raise me up so I could place it right at the top of the tree.

  “Good job, Freckles! Now let’s hope those rumors that Father Christmas was arrested for shoplifting aren’t true!”

  I hadn’t gotten to do any of that this December. Edith didn’t do a Christmas tree and her only concessions to decorations were red and green liqueurs and multicolored shot glasses.

  “You miss them very much, don’t you?” Victor asked quietly.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  He sighed and then put on a fake, festive voice. “So . . . what did Father Christmas bring you?”

  “Father Christmas doesn’t exist, Victor, but Edith got me clothes and a few records, and Beauty gave me this. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  I came around to stand in front of him and opened the tiny latch of the heart-shaped locket to show him the black-and-white pictures inside: my dad’s face was on the left and my mother’s on the right. “The photos were taken on their wedding day. Beauty got them from Edith.”

  “It is beautiful. What a thoughtful gift.”

  That’s when I remembered that Edith had given me a gift to give Victor. I hopped up and ran to my hastily packed suitcase, pulling out the silver box tied with silver ribbons. “Here you go, this is for you.”

  “Thank you, but you really didn’t have to.” Victor took the box and put it down next to him.

  “No, you have to open it now. It’s Christmas already so you don’t have to wait.” He looked reluctant and I thought it was because he was intimidated by the sight of all those ribbons. “Here, I’ll help you untie them.” I picked the box up and set about loosening all the knots. When I was done, I tossed the lid aside and reached in, my hand connecting with something hard and cold. I pulled it out. “Handcuffs? Are you a policeman?”

  “I’ll take that,” Victor said, grabbing the box from me before I could delve any further into its depths. “Robin, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you comfortable in that outfit? I can’t help but notice that you keep tugging at the shorts.”

  “Hot pants,” I corrected.

  “Right. Hot pants. Would you like to go change into something more comfortable?”

  “Yes please!”

  “Wonderful. Go on upstairs; you’re staying in the guest room. It’s the second door on the left. I’ll get Elvis settled down here in the meantime.”

  As I turned away from Victor, I noticed that the dining room table was done up with all twelve of its places set. Crystal glasses twinkled in the light given off by the Christmas tree, and the multiple sets of gleaming cutlery stood to attention in between the china. At the end of the table was a white plastic chair that had hastily been pushed in at an angle between two other upholstered chairs. It was the only ugly thing in a perfect room filled with perfect things.

  Victor saw me looking. “That’s your spot. I haven’t finished setting it properly, but you’ll be sitting next to me at the head of the table.”

  Up until then, I’d been feeling sorry for myself that my first Christmas with Edith had been ruined by her having to work. We’d planned to go up to the roof and tan all day while listening to Boney M. records. I’d been teaching Elvis to sing “Feliz Navidad” and Edith had even bought a small, inflatable blue kiddie pool that was covered in fish motifs, which she’d said we could turn into a Jacuzzi. The cooler box had already been packed with wine, Coke and ice cream bars when the phone had rung.

  It dawned on me then as the heavenly scent of roast chicken wafted through from the kitchen that Edith had offloaded me on Victor without any regard for his own plans for Christmas. That was one of the worst things about being an orphan, not knowing when or if you were wanted.

  I had to ask. “Have I ruined your Christmas, Victor?”

  “Of course not!”

  “It looks like you’re having a lot of people over for a fancy lunch.”

  “Well, yes, but the more the merrier. I am honored to have you as a guest, young lady. Now scram upstairs to change. Everyone should be here any minute. Come down when you’re ready.”

  “Okay.” I gathered up my luggage and raced up the stairs to find my room. It was big and beautiful, and the best part was that it was all mine; I didn’t have to share it with anyone. The walls were covered in silky wallpaper that had red-and-white swirling patterns on it, and the double bed had giant, round fluffy pillows scattered across it. I climbed up and jumped on it like you would a trampoline, but that only made me hotter than I already was so I had to stop.

  I yanked off the hot pants and boots, and then dug around in my suitcase for my favorite denim shorts and the “Free Nelson Mandela” T-shirt Edith had given me for Christmas. It was only once I’d pulled them on and was looking at myself in the mirror that I decided I looked too casual. Victor had gone to so much trouble to make everything perfect that I wanted to look perfect too; I didn’t want him to regret having me at his party.

  I’d packed a few of the gifts I’d opened that morning and pulled them out one by one to see what might work. After much deliberation, I settled on a red corduroy miniskirt, pairing it with the white boots and turtleneck I’d just taken off. My crotch at least felt a lot cooler in the skirt; it let in a lot more air than the hot pants. My hair was getting very long and my fringe hung over my eyes almost down to my chin, so I pinned it back with a pair of red heart-shaped sunglasses.

  I looked good but there was still something missing and it took me a few minutes to figure out what it was. Edith always wore a lot of makeup, and my mother used to put extra on for special occasions. I decided this would definitely qualify as such. My strawberry lip gloss was easy enough to apply, though I licked two separate coats off because it tasted so good. Putting on my mother’s mascara was harder, because poking a small stick at your eyes while you try to keep them open is tricky. Also it was a bit clumpy by then. It smudged when I opened my eyes really wide, and when I tried to wipe the black streaks off, it smudged even more.

  The doorbell had been ringing intermittently the whole time I was getting ready and Elvis returned its call each time. Voices and delicious smells floated up the stairs and I didn’t want to miss out on any of the fun, so I gave up on fixing the mascara mess and followed the chatter down to the dining room. As I made my entrance, twelve men stopped talking and turned to look at me.

  “There she is!”

  “Doesn’t she look groovy?”

  “Oh my God, those boots are far out.”

  “Those glasses are so cool.”

  “Love the panda eyes. Is that the latest thing?”

  Victor called me over to his side, dipping a napkin in some water and gently removing the excess mascara. “Everyone, this is Robin. Edith is her aunt.” I loved that he said that. Not “She’s Edith’s niece,” but “Edith is her aunt” as though I was the important one to know. Then he walked me around the room, introducing me to everyone.

  The men were all well dressed and handsome, and very different-looking from the burly men my father worked with on the mine. They made a big deal out of greeting me, and some of them kissed my hand and some my cheeks. I tried to keep track of all the names: Claude (shirt open, lots of chest hair), Sebastian (per
med hair), Jonathan (John Lennon tinted glasses), Johan (Afrikaner with a purple paisley waistcoat), Kristoff (another Afrikaner, no moustache), Hans (moustache), Jacques (bald), Samson (smelled like suntan lotion), Gordon (very wide lapels), Nick (cowboy boots) and Shane (red hair).

  When Victor rang a little bell, everyone moved to their seats. Johan came around with champagne to top up everyone’s glasses and gave me Babycham in a port glass that looked like a wineglass for fairies. “Just a teeny tiny bit. Don’t get tipsy, okay?” His Afrikaner accent was gravelly and lyrical; when he spoke, it sounded like he was singing.

  The seven-course meal was served over the next three hours; it was a conveyer belt of food that just kept on coming. Avocado Ritz. Cold beetroot soup. Caesar salad. Crab cakes. Lemon sorbet. Roast chicken with roast potatoes and four vegetables. Cheese platter and crème brûlée. It was the best feast I’d ever had, and every time I thought I was too full to take another bite, I’d just wait ten minutes and I’d be ready to go again.

  The conversation was steady during the meal, but I didn’t feel as though I needed to add anything. I was content to just sit and listen to it as it buzzed all around me, sentences breaking loose in English and Afrikaans to float free like kites in the wind.

  “It’s disgusting that the All Blacks came out to play here this year. If the Springboks were banned from playing international rugby, you’d start to see things changing . . .”

  “Jeremy had a run-in with the police the other day. Something about a complaint from one of his neighbors. A question of his moral values and something to do with . . .”

  “I knew there was censorship, I just didn’t realize how bad it was. The foreign press reports everything that happens here while we remain deaf and blind . . .”

  “Where did you get this recipe from? These crab cakes are divine, simply divine.”

  After the last course had been consumed and the plates had been cleared away, we gathered in the second lounge, which is how we all eventually ended up crowded around the piano while everyone called out requests.

  Victor covered a few Christmas carols before the song suggestions started veering into more modern selections. Johan asked for “Lola” by the Kinks and I listened as they all sang, trying to figure out what the words meant. I didn’t know any of the words except the “Lola” part, which I really belted out during the chorus. I was just starting to hum the next bit when there was a loud crash to my right, and the glass pane window disintegrated into hundreds of tiny daggers.

  We all screamed as the glass rained down on us, but Johan screamed the loudest as something big and solid connected with his head. One minute he was standing next to me, his hand on my shoulder, and the next he’d dropped, clutching his temple. As everyone crouched out of the line of fire and Victor crawled across to Johan, I reached for the missile that had fallen on the floor next to me.

  It was a brick with a piece of paper tied around it. Someone had written “Die you queer freaks” in big block letters. Words once again buzzed over me as the men discussed the futility of calling the police and wondered if another attack was likely. I clutched the brick in one hand and Johan’s hand in the other. I was mute. I didn’t know what to say in a world where people were hated and attacked for not being the right color, not speaking the right language, not worshipping the right god or not loving the right people; a world where hatred was the common language, and bricks, the only words.

  Thirty-seven

  BEAUTY

  4 JANUARY 1977

  Yeoville, Johannesburg, South Africa

  Here, I made you a cup of tea just the way you like it.” Robin places the steaming mug on a coaster in front of me, and I smile a weak but grateful smile.

  I have only been back for half an hour and even though Edith has told the child not to badger me with questions, she cannot contain herself. I have never met such a curious child, one who has such an insatiable thirst for information. Even though I am tired from the long commute, I do not mind answering her as I like to talk about the Transkei and my family. It makes me feel closer to a life I fear I will never live again.

  After Robin serves the tea, she sits next to me and traces the satiny fabric of my dress where it flares out between us on the couch. Her fingers are pale against its darkness.

  “How was your Christmas?” she asks.

  “It was a blessed time, thank you. It was wonderful to see my sons.”

  “Did you give them the photo of me?”

  I smile and reach for the tea to take a sip. I have promised this child to only ever tell her the truth, but I also do not want to hurt her feelings by telling her that I had no intention of handing her gift across. I keep it in my bible, which is a better place for it than in the hands of two abandoned boys who are resentful of their mother’s presence in the white child’s life.

  I am spared from having to answer when Robin is unable to wait long enough before expressing the next thought that has occurred to her.

  “Johan had to go to hospital for stitches.”

  “Who is Johan?”

  The child explains that Johan is Victor’s friend, and that he was hurt when someone threw a brick through the window. I wonder where Edith was during this Christmas ordeal, as she was supposed to spend the holiday with the child, but before I can ask, Robin’s thoughts veer in a different direction yet again.

  “Edith said Silumko died of Tyson? My dad had to go for Tyson tests as well.”

  “It is actually called ‘phthisis,’” I correct her. “You get it from inhaling rock dust underground. Your father would have gone for regular checkups because it is a common mining disease. The black miners weren’t always tested.”

  “Are you very sad? Do you miss Silumko?”

  “Yes, I miss him very much,” I say, which is true though it is more complicated than that. I have discovered, to my surprise, that grief is a process that gets more difficult, rather than easier, with time. In those first few weeks after Mandla and then Silumko died, my loss had been too great, too much for me to take in all at once. During those early days, I could merely circle around it, tracing its contours as I tried to familiarize myself with its heft. I learned that just as a map of the world only contains rough outlines of countries—their borders and major cities, as well as the rivers and oceans that dissect and separate them—so too would the cartography of my loss at first be laid out as a broad, abstract concept for me to come to terms with.

  Only after I had learned those boundaries and generalities of my grief was I able to venture further into the mountains and valleys, the peaks and troughs of my despair. And as I traversed them—breathing a sigh of relief thinking that I’d conquered the worst of it—only then would I finally arrive at the truth about loss, the part that no one ever warns you about: that grief is a city all of its own, built high on a hill and surrounded by stone walls. It is a fortress that you will inhabit for the rest of your life, walking its dead-end roads forever. The trick is to stop trying to escape and, instead, to make yourself at home.

  I know Robin will learn this for herself one day, and that it is too much to try to explain to her now, so instead I say, “I will always miss him. Silumko was a good man. A very good man.”

  The child looks doubtful, and so I reach out and take her hand. I squeeze it gently. “He really was. I know that you find that difficult to believe after what happened to your mother and father. I know you think that all black men are bad, but that is not so. My husband was a kind and decent man, and my sons will grow up to be fine men as well.” I stroke her palm with my thumb. “Good people come in all different colors and speak many different languages, bad people too. And sometimes good people do bad things, and sometimes bad things are the only things people know how to do because they do not know any better. One day you will see that for yourself.”

  The bird suddenly screeches loudly from his perch on the top shelf and I
stand to go and tend to him. I stopped fearing him during Robin’s illness when I was the only person who could feed him, and I was surprised to find that I missed his constant chattering and singing while I was away.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll do it.” Robin gets up and puts Elvis back in his cage. She measures out his seed and tops up his water before coming back to sit next to me. “Why aren’t you crying if you miss Silumko so much? You’re allowed to, you know. Sometimes it makes you feel better.”

  “Just because you do not see something with your own eyes, my child, it does not mean it does not happen. I do cry but I do so in private.”

  “Oh.”

  I sigh. “The truth is that I have been mourning him for a long time now. Since long before he died.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Silumko left me more than ten years ago to work in the mines in Johannesburg, and during that time, I only saw him for four weeks a year when he was allowed to come home. Even then, I could see he was not the man I married and I missed that man.”

  “What man was he?”

  “He was still Silumko, but he was also not Silumko. Do you understand?”

  The child shakes her head and I try to explain. “The Silumko I first loved many years ago was a very handsome young man with a smile like the crescent moon. He was a person who did not like to be kept inside. He was happiest when he was setting out, sometimes for weeks at a time, to find the best grazing for his sheep, and during that time away, he would sleep on the ground among his cattle with nothing but the night sky as his blanket.”

  “Didn’t you miss him then when he was away?”

  “I did, but not so much because I knew he was happy. We both were, during those years when the children were little and we lived by the old ways. But then, Mandla drowned in the floods, and after that, the droughts came and we lost the last of the cattle, and Silumko was forced to leave for Johannesburg.” I stop speaking to make sure that the child is paying attention. It is important that she understand this. “Can you imagine what that is like? To be taken from the fields and open spaces and blue skies and sunk down a mine shaft more than a kilometer deep into the earth? To labor sixteen-hour days in damp and darkness, amid rockfalls and explosions? That is when I lost him, because that is when he lost himself. I first started mourning him then.”