She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (18 page)

•   •   •

IT IS A TRUISM
of South Africa that you are more likely to be killed in a car than by a murderer (although if you are murdered, it is most likely to be by someone you know. Johannesburg is dangerous, but it's not immune to the law of averages). I hire a car and start tentatively to explore the quiet roads around the neighborhood. Studying the map, there are street names that strike me at the level of myth come to life. After forty years in England, my mother's references were still Johannesburg-based, so that in a crowded street, while you might say, “It's like Grand Central Station” or “It's like Piccadilly Circus,” my mother would say, “It's like Eloff Street on a Saturday morning.” There it was, in the grid of downtown Johannesburg: Eloff, between Joubert and Von Brandis, as famous in our house as Madison Avenue.

From the court papers, I have a list of my mother's old addresses, where she and the family lived during her teens and early twenties. Most of them are within a couple of hours' drive from the city, at the outer edges of metropolitan Johannesburg and in the rural communities beyond. I have an idea that, when I've acclimatized to the roads, I will drive to these places. This seems important, although I have no idea what I'll do when I get there. But I have to do something. What else is there to do?

One of the first major drives I undertake is to Fay's house, five miles southeast down a six-lane freeway, taxi minivans weaving in and out with terrifying speed and imprecision. Past the South African Broadcasting Company, a black tower not entirely stripped of its sinister apartheid-era associations. Past the mine dumps that stand along the southern edge of the freeway, flecks of gold in them catching the sun. I hear they are being remined; it turns out too much of value was thrown away the first time. Past the turnoff for Orlando East and Baragwanath Hospital, the biggest in the southern hemisphere. There is a sense of the air opening up and the sky expanding and getting lighter, fading to the shimmering white of real heat and the crushing weight of boundless space. Past Soweto on the right and east for two miles along Columbine. At the side of the road the grass is knee-high and waving. The buildings thin out, the pools disappear, the edges of things waver as the heat roars in. Another country begins.

My aunt is standing at the gate, waiting for me, a slim figure in the shade of a tree. “Hello, my darling,” she says. Hello. Hello.

•   •   •

ALTHOUGH IT IS ONLY
two miles away, Fay has never been to Soweto—“I can't believe it, it seems ridiculous”—and I am keen to see it. One morning, we are met at her house by an elderly black man called Opa, or rather, a man trading under the name of Opa, the Dutch word for “grandpa” and the most unthreatening name possible for a black man's professional dealings with white people. Opa will be our tour guide for the day. We get in his car for the fifteen-minute journey.

Soweto is the subject of endless chirpy editorials in the local press about the rise of the black middle class, epitomized by a new shopping center and redbrick homes with cars parked out front. This is not what tourists come to see. We drive through the fancier area quickly, Opa pausing to point out Winnie Mandela's house, which has a guard out front and satellite equipment on the roof, before speeding up again to reach the top of the hill. From here, the majority of the township can be viewed: an expanse of shanties in every direction as far as the eye can see. On the map it appears as a blank space.

“When the—how can I put this?—white people came to South Africa,” says Opa, “they encountered the—how can I put this?—black people.” As delicately as he can, he condenses the last hundred years of South African history as if it involved no human agency whatsoever but was merely a series of ahistorical forces bearing down on the country like weather. We pull in at some gift shops opposite Baragwanath Hospital, where the minivans terminate, throwing up dust and conking out at wild angles to one another. I buy some beads. My aunt seems pleased. Opa explains that lots of people mistakenly think the word “Baragwanath” comes from the Zulu, but in fact it's English. Many of the early immigrants who came to work in the mines were from Cornwall, he says; Baragwanath was one of them. For lunch, Opa takes us to a dark, busy restaurant in Soweto called Wandies Place. We have green beans and chicken, and while Opa lingers over the buffet, my aunt and I sit opposite each other and talk about our day.

“This has been just so good,” she says. “So interesting. Opa is wonderful.”

“Yes,” I say. I am happy to be here with her.

Over the next few weeks, we go on many more excursions. We see England play South Africa at cricket. I collect her in the car and bring her back to my neighborhood for dinner at a Thai restaurant. We go to see a show, a
Lion King
derivative called
African Footprint
. My aunt is a bookkeeper at a large company, and I go into work with her. She introduces me to her colleagues, and we spend a pleasant morning hanging out in her office. One evening, after spending the day together, she asks me to give Maria, her maid, a lift to the bus station in town. I have chatted quite a bit to Maria at my aunt's house. She has told me about her teenage son. When Maria laughs, she holds up a hand to cover her mouth. By the time we get into the city, it is dusk. The bus station is in a very dark street, crowds of people moving about in the shadows, and I am nervous. “Will you be OK?” I ask as Maria gets out. She looks at me severely, tightening the belt on her jacket. “Of course,” she says, and I see it in her face: “Oh, you people have no idea.”

At lunch one weekend in a shopping mall in Meyersdaal, I pull out some papers and slide them across the table. We are eating Klip River fish and drinking white wine. In the background, motor racing whines on the TV. Like Steven, Fay hadn't known anything about her father's murder conviction. I tell her about it now. My aunt doesn't react immediately.

“I'm glad,” she says finally.

I'm puzzled. “I don't understand.” I say.

“I'm glad he went to prison somewhere along the line.”

I turn over the top sheet of the paperwork. She glances down. “Yes,” she says. “That's his signature.” She reads on, through the judge's remarks to the sentencing. “Hard labor,” she says. “Good.”

•   •   •

THE TOWNS OF MY MOTHER'S
youth sound harsh to the ear and are no less severe in reality. One day, I drive two hours south on the highway and pull off onto a small, dusty regional road. I am looking for the faintest hairline on the map, a track that runs through open country and which, according to an address I have from the court papers, leads to the house where my mother walked out into the fields one morning in a pair of pink silk pajamas. After missing it several times, I turn onto an unsurfaced road that runs through grassland as high as the roof of the car. In a ghost story, after the engine died down I would see a flash of pink silk in the tall yellow grass and a second later hear laughter. But there are only the red roofs of a few mean scattered houses, with faded yellow walls and grilles on the windows. There are small purple and white flowers in the grass. I return to the main road and pull into the settlement's only sign of life, a liquor store, where men hang around the door in oil-stained dungarees. On the horizon is a line of trees, leaves streaming, sunlight gauzy behind them. It could be northern France, I think, and then one of the men shambles over to start a conversation, and I get in the car and leave.

Vereeniging is full of funeral parlors and pawnshops. Outside the art deco station stands an old steam engine, of a kind, I suppose, my grandfather once drove. I stand on the bridge, looking down the tracks toward Johannesburg, the heat rising from the concrete like floodwater. Witpoortjie, in the district of Roodepoort, where the family lived at the time my grandfather was arrested, is gaudy and chaotic, people spilling into the street from the sidewalk. Meyerton, Zwartkoppies—all flat, sullen, rebuked. I don't always get out of the car. In a quiet street in a town fifteen miles west of Johannesburg I find the magistrates' court where the first hearing took place, a squat municipal building behind razor wire. I have always thought that by fixing things exactly one widens their possibility; or in this case, lessens their power to torment. But driving to those places and just standing and looking seems woefully inadequate. I reach for some other ritual—laying flowers, saying prayers?—and find nothing. At the end of all those hot, tiring afternoons, I wonder what the point has been. Perhaps it this: that as long as there are places to visit and things to find out, my mother and I still exist in the present; are engaged, still, in conversation. And then I think of the places I can't go.

“Paula never talked about those years,” Fay had said over lunch at Meyersdaal, meaning the years after my grandmother's death and before Jimmy remarried, when my mother lived alone with him. “I should have . . .” Her expression was beseeching. I smiled. It always comes back to this, I think, one way or another. I should have asked about the past. The cowardice was mine. It reminds me of that bit in
Superman
when the dad keels over in the dust in the barn and dies, and the superchild looks up at the sky in the direction of his Kryptonian mother and howls, “With all my powers I couldn't save him.” With all my powers of education, all my competence and good taste; with my life-saving certificate and my grade-five piano; with my equity and insurance; with all that
perspective
, through which almost anything can be rationalized away or excused; with the invincibility that comes, simply, from having been loved, I couldn't ask a simple question, because I was frightened the answer would destroy me. My aunt said, “When I think of those years and what she—” Ha. Well. We both had to smile then, since we knew from long experience that such imaginings are impossible. The airbag inflates. There is no seeing around it.

•   •   •

MOST OF THE PEOPLE
I meet in those early days are either journalists or aid workers, people who come to South Africa determined to do their own laundry and within a week submit to the logic that having domestic staff helps the local economy.

Dora does my laundry.

The journalists look down on the aid workers for their worthiness. The aid workers look down on the journalists for their loucheness. The domestic staff look down on all of us, I imagine, as we cringe and dither in the face of their duties, and in one of eleven official languages think, “Pricks.”

A new friend, a South African journalist, is going to Canada for a few months and offers to let me house-sit in her absence; a vacant property is vulnerable to invasion. It's a beautiful two-story house, with a deck overlooking a lush garden running down to a pool.
Architectural Digest
is always bugging her to feature it, she says, and she always declines on the assumption it just serves as an advertisement to burglars. I won't be wholly alone there. For a while, the upstairs bedroom is rented out to a photographer for Agence France-Presse, who is away most of the time covering atrocities in Zimbabwe. And while the high, wide garden wall is being rebuilt, a man called Albert will stay in the pool house at night.

Over the next few weeks, a pattern establishes itself. In the mornings, I sit in the pool house rearranging chapter headings for the book I'm supposed to be writing. There is a chair, a desk, and a large purple exercise ball. When I'm not rearranging chapter headings or staring out at the pool, I'm wondering whether to use the exercise ball.

Mid-morning, I run up the path to make tea. The path is rough underfoot. Ferns brush my legs with what feels like a retractable groping action. Lizards scatter on the low garden wall. My mother used to say that if you dropped a stone on a lizard's tail, it would fall off and grow another. We once spent an entire week on vacation in Majorca chasing them to try to put this to the test, but they were always too fast for us.

In the kitchen the floor is tiled and cool. The tea is clear and red with a picture of a tree on the packet, bent-limbed like a broken umbrella, like a symbol of the broken heart of Africa, like . . . Dora comes in just then.

“Did you work this morning?” she says. She flicks the mop at my feet. That woman sees straight through me.

For lunch, I go to a place called Ant's, which used to be a weapons and ammo store and is now a coffee shop serving cappuccino and the two types of tapenade. Ant himself is a bearded Afrikaner, very dyslexic, who is hoping to collaborate with someone on his memoirs and who once threatened to extinguish a rival snack outlet for what he said was their plagiarism of his meat platter. I find a municipal tennis club and twice a week have coaching with Therese, “South Africa's number three,” who makes me run back and forth in ninety-degree heat as retribution for the Boer War.

When I walk back to the house, I pass Siya, one of a group of itinerant men who seem to live in a park at the end of my street. Siya is young and agile, with dreadlocks and a big multicolored beanie. He is the most friendly and sometimes falls into step with me. We walk in dappled sunlight down the middle of the street, partly from pleasure, partly from habit; you are advised not to walk too close to the edge of the park where Siya and his friends disappear to at night.

He tells me he has come from the Transkei to make his fortune. He says this with an ironic smile that acknowledges the fact he is living in a park. He owns a guitar and has started songwriting. He asks me to let him know if I hear of any jobs or empty garages going.

“I could be your night watchman,” he says. I tell him about Albert. Siya nods thoughtfully.

I offer him part of the Chelsea bun I am eating, and Siya takes it and looks around as if wanting to return the gesture. He points to a house with a sign on its gate that reads, “Beware: this property is protected by live snakes.”