She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (11 page)

There was moral order in the house, but it was very confused. The grandfather's moralizing did not stop him from endorsing the racial pecking order as it appeared in the country at large: white northern European, white Afrikaans, white southern European, black African, and, at the bottom of the heap, the Chinese, who took the most dangerous jobs in the mines. At school, Afrikaans was despised and the African languages completely ignored, as was the history of the country prior to colonization. In America, children might play Cowboys and Indians and consider it an honor to be the Indian. Not so here.

The children spoke Dutch at home and English at school. J. M. Coetzee has written about the terrors of South African schooling, and although his experiences were several decades later, nothing much seemed to have changed. Cornelius recalled two types of teachers: young women from England out looking for adventure or a husband, and sadistic ex–British Army officers who continued to fight the Boer War in the classroom, dividing pupils into the conquered and the conquerors. When white South Africans were officially made subjects of the British Empire, Cornelius wrote in his diary, “I am now a British object.” With delight, he recounted how one day the Afrikaner boys who filled the back row and were always being beaten by the teacher got up, en masse, and sauntered down the aisle. The teacher fled. They left the classroom and were never seen again. By the end of high school, not a single Afrikaner pupil remained.

Looking back, Cornelius put his success down to two things; one was, indeed, a sympathetic teacher, a gentle Welshman who encouraged him to go to university. Cornelius went first to Witwatersrand University, then to the University of London, and from there on to America and Cornell. The other pivotal moment in his young life was something he witnessed as a child. The children weren't allowed out after dark, when the streets were full of drunken miners, staggering from the pub to pass out in the street. One night, Cornelius watched through the window as a drunk white miner beat a black man almost to death. The thing that stayed with him wasn't the violence itself so much as the fact that the man didn't fight back. The next day, all that remained was a bloodstain in the dirt. His education, said Cornelius, began when he saw it.

The greatest influence, however, was unavoidably his and Jimmy's grandfather, the old tyrant who, when he fell ill, told his family, “This is not a sickbed, it is a deathbed and leave me alone.” He was taken to the hospital, where his loud and unstoppable orations from the Bible annoyed the staff so much they called his wife to come and collect him. She arrived just as they were pulling the sheet over his head. The grandmother returned to the shack and wept until she was blue in the face. Nothing her children said could console her. The old man's last act of spite had been to die first, forcing her to spend all she'd saved on his funeral. By way of estate, he left his family the cigars in his vest pocket, a pouch of tobacco, a copy of the Bible, and a pamphlet entitled “The Speedy Spaniard.” But Cornelius remembered him fondly. “My boy, what have you done today?” he would ask his grandson every evening, and Cornelius, in fine detail, would tell him.

•   •   •

MY GRANDFATHER JIMMY
did not go to university. Perhaps the Welsh teacher had left by the time he came along five years later. My mother said he boasted of having been a medical student and dropping out, but who knows if this was true. In adulthood, he had little to do with his family. In the paperwork from his murder trial I noticed that his mother had testified as a character witness. And he had maintained vague contact with his sister Cornelia, known as Nelly, who had the misfortune of thirteen children and a husband who gambled, and thanks to whom my mother had thirty-two first cousins. “Shame, auntie Nelly,” she would say. Beyond that, my mother knew nothing of her father's family, although she was, in a general way, proud of her Dutch origins. She thought the Dutch were, by and large, sensible people, her father being the exception.

I wouldn't have found out about any of this myself if, in the 1990s, I hadn't written a piece in the newspaper about ancestry software. It was when tracing your origins was all the rage and you could, I wrote, decide on any line of descent for yourself if you sifted the dirt skillfully enough. To illustrate the point, I fed my mother's maiden name into a family-tree database and within five minutes established that we were descendants of Rousseau. After the piece came out, a man with my mother's maiden name e-mailed from America to say he was a distant cousin and did I know we had family in England? It was through him I met Caroline, Cornelius's granddaughter.

I thought my mother would be uninterested. Every few years or so, retired Canadians would pop up via e-mail, asking if I could shed light on the mysterious branch of my mother's family that seemed to end with my grandfather. It made my mother and me laugh—the idea of going around the world
looking
for people you are related to. But when the piece came out, illustrated with photos of her mother as a young woman and her father as a young man, she took a copy next door to show off to the neighbors. She was furious about a spelling error in the picture caption. She was a proud person, but I had never seen this before: pride in where she had come from.

The relative in England was an elderly lady called Theodora, who turned out to be Cornelius's sister—a first cousin, then, of my grandfather's. She was living in the East Midlands, and my parents and I drove up to meet her. My mother was nervous and excited. Forty years earlier, she had got up the nerve to write to Cornelius, and he had replied kindly, owning to the connection and expressing a desire to meet her so he could tell her about “a very interesting group of people”—her father's family. She kept the letter all her life. It was a source of great regret to her that they never managed to meet up.

And now here was Theodora, framed by her front door, built like a little bull and with her hair up in a bun. She looked at us with sharp blue eyes, and we followed her through to her living room.

She had grown up, she said, in a mining district in northern Johannesburg, a very rough-and-ready sort of place in those days. She had been very close to her older brother Cornelius, who had been her great champion and who, in the face of wider opposition, had campaigned for her right to apply to university—although he had disapproved of her chosen subject. Chemistry, he said, was too hard for girls. Nonetheless, Theodora had applied to university in England, and in 1930, won a scholarship to read chemistry at Oxford. She had stayed on to do postgraduate studies under the tutelage of her mentor, Sir Robert Robinson, who in 1947 was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering the molecular structure of morphine and penicillin.

My mother had almost to be physically restrained on receipt of this news. When I went to Oxford, a work colleague of my dad's had said unthinkingly to her, “She must get it from her father.” Now here was this woman, elegant, articulate, sober, confirming my mother's lifelong fantasy that beyond the swampy genes and terrible scenes and hints at some public disgrace there was something else: scholarships to Oxford, houses filled with art, a woman with mettle equal to her own who had pulled herself out of the dust and the darkness. Finally—finally!—some external evidence of what it had been necessary for her to believe all this time: that it was not fluke but, as my mother always said, it was Who We Were.

It was an extraordinary scene; my motherless mother, no family, no history, whom I had never seen defer to anyone, bowing in an almost courtly fashion to this elder of the family. Theodora put on a green hat with a feather in it and we went out to lunch.

“No,” said my mother, on the way home in the car. Her eyes zipped this way and that. “No, she is a very impressive woman. Not a barrel of laughs, but impressive.” Whatever internal dialogue was taking place my father and I let proceed uninterrupted; it didn't require our input. My mother wondered how different her life might have been if, in those early years in London, she'd known Theodora had been living a mere fifty miles away in Oxford. It made me think of that scene in
The African Queen
when Bogart and Hepburn, at the end of their tether and still stuck in the swamp, finally give up, whereupon the camera cranes upward and with a jolt you see how close to open water and safety they are.

“But of course,” said my mother quickly, “then I might not have made my own way.”

•   •   •

I SAW THEODORA AGAIN,
for the last time, in that period between my mother's death and my trip to South Africa. She was in a nursing home by then and was well into her nineties. Still the same fierce look, but furious with frustration at her dependency. Something else had changed, too. Floating at the rim of the crocheted blanket was the broad face, bumpy nose, and wide, penetrating eyes of the woman my mother became in the last two months of her life, when cancer accelerated her aging. There was something almost Mongolian about the planes of that face. “God, she looked like Mum,” said my dad, on the way home in the car.

Theodora hated the nursing home. “They're all mad,” she said. She kept to her room and read texts on alternative medicine. When her eyesight went, she got what she could on audiotape from the mobile library. My dad went out for a walk and left us to talk. While her brother, in his memoir, had remembered his grandfather, it was the grandmother Theodora remembered. She would put duck eggs in her cleavage to hatch them, she said. Although she was illiterate, she was a great storyteller and would entertain her grandchildren with stories from European history; she was very good on the Napoleonic Wars. “She was a clever woman,” said her granddaughter, “not that she got any credit for it.”

Of the grandfather she recalled only meanness. There was an incident she had never forgotten. When Theodora was a very young child she had dropped a penny in the yard, and a chicken had eaten it. Giggling, she'd run into the shack to tell her grandfather, and without saying a word he had picked up a knife, raced out into the yard, and without further ado slit the chicken down the middle to retrieve the penny. At almost ninety years' distance, Theodora looked horrified anew.

Did she remember Jimmy, I asked, her cousin, my grandfather? “Yes,” she said. “He was younger than us, and of course I was in England from my early twenties and rather lost touch with the wider family.” She looked at me curiously for a moment. “There was some trouble there, I think?”

Theodora dissolved once more into the middle distance. “I expect he was quite bright. We all were. But, of course, you never know which way a person will go.”

Friends Are Like Jewels

JOAN FLINGS OPEN THE DOOR,
Danny fighting for a look-in behind her. “Oh, my darling!” she exclaims. “Oh, so tall and so like Pauline!” She whips around to address her husband. “Step back, old man, you're crowding me. I said
step back
. Oh, it's so good to see you!”

Joan is one of the most marvelous people I have ever met. She has bright blue eye shadow, yellow hair, and a turtleneck jumper the color of fish paste. She has a way of talking in great bursts of energy that ground themselves, in crackling fashion, down the tall, thin figure of her husband. Although broadly South African, her inflection is just like my mother's, more so than my aunt's, in fact, and I think of how friends in their youth grow to sound like each other. Joan recently had a triple heart bypass—she is seventy-five—which means she limits her alcohol intake to neat whiskey. She and Danny moved to this apartment as a retirement measure, but she still misses the house and fumes at her daughter Jennifer for letting her sell it. All this I get in the first three minutes while she shows me around. From the large, airy terrace there are views over a communal pool to the suburbs of Johannesburg and beyond. It is very striking. “Ach,” says Joan, batting a hand, and I follow her back into the kitchen.

“Now,” she says, “all I have to do is chop some parsley. It's only canned soup. Do you like soup? I don't have a milk jug anymore—where's my milk jug? Ask Mrs. Zinn, that's Jennifer. All sold in the move—so many things I've lost. My beautiful fridge-freezer. My dining-room table.” She throws her head around the corner. “DANNY, DO YOU WANT COFFEE? He doesn't hear a word. I might as well talk to the wall. WALL, DO YOU WANT COFFEE? The old man irritates me now, I find him very irritating. If I had my time again, I'd hold out for someone more interesting. Never settle, Em, it isn't worth it.” Joan grips my hand and bursts into laughter. “Oh! It's so good to see you!”

•   •   •

I COULD SIT
here all day, watching Joan fuss. I haul myself up onto the kitchen counter to get out of her way. She darts from cabinet to cabinet, preparing the lunch.

I know very little of the history of her friendship with my mother. There was a photo of Joan with a soufflé of 1980s hair at Jennifer's wedding, on the back of which she had written “Mother Dear.” I liked her for that. But while her letters, on green airmail paper decorated with pictures of flowers from the southern hemisphere, were eagerly received and lovingly replied to, to me they seemed strangely impersonal—certainly compared with the vivacity of the woman in front of me—full of details of child-rearing and home ownership, wry digs at married life, the odd reference to current events; and my mother's, on blue airmail paper stamped with the queen's head, were just the same. They came of age in an era when “letter-writing” was perhaps subject to more formal requirements than now.

And yet a friendship maintained by mail over that distance is a strange and touching thing. It requires a dogged faith in the strength of the original connection. In my mother's case, it also required a faith in the rightness of her decision to move, a conviction that her change of circumstance had been for the best. The pride of those letters!

I found a great cache of them after her death, the rough versions she kept stuffed in a drawer. Over the years, my mother documented for Joan my achievements at the tennis club, the swimming club, the exam hall. In 1997, in a fantastic bit of showmanship, she attributed my failure to secure a job at
The
Wall Street Journal
to “the state of the Asian economy.” I have no idea where she got that from. She described the garden, the wildlife, and the cat, and the letters came back in kind, not just from Joan but from others, too. They contained an increasingly huge cast of characters; pets, marriages, divorces, jobs, operations. “Darling Joan,” read the letters. “My darling Pauline,” or, from Jennifer, “Dearest Aunty Paul.”

Despite her best efforts, a note of regret occasionally crept into my mother's tone. “And how is my old friend Danny?” she wrote to Joan once. I'd stopped short when I read this. “Old friend” was a rare piece of sentiment. Danny, Joan's husband, was a young naval officer when they met. When she wrote, “And how is my old friend Danny?” my mother hadn't seen him for forty years.

At some point the letters came in from adult children. “Sorry to tell you . . .” “Sorry to break the bad news . . .” “Pauline, Mom was so very fond of you . . .” “I still remember your working days with Mum and Lily Sachs, dear Gertie and Bubbles. Those were very happy days in Mum's life.” Whole lives conducted by letter.

“Well Paula I will say ‘
totsiens'
for now . . .”

“God bless you Paul and write again soon.”

“Well I suppose I must go now, hugs and kisses.”

“More and more as the years go by I see that friends are jewels . . .”

“And love, always, to you Paula.”

“God bless.”

•   •   •

IT IS MY MOTHER'S
lunch table. Cold things: ham, boiled eggs, mustard, tinned asparagus, sweet corn heaped in a bowl. Joan shouts for Danny to come to the table. She pours herself a whiskey. “We like a drinky-poos, don't we, Roxy?” she says to the dog. We sit down to eat.

“Mayonnaise, Em? Mustard, Em? Pepper? More ham? Would you like a German biscuit?”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” she shouts at Danny, who winks at me. His wife has caught him in the act of slipping food into his pocket.

“He keeps it in his bedside drawer for a snack,” says Joan. “Sis, man. One day, I'm going to put a rat trap in there for him.”

After lunch, we repair to the lounge. Danny, shuffling papers, indicates he wants to show me something. Joan says, “He's become very boring about that. HAVEN'T YOU, OLD MAN? Very boring.” Danny gracefully ignores her and points a finger at the page. It's some kind of legal document. Sotto voce, his wife explains that he was assaulted in the street some time ago and has assembled a dossier on the assailant, a man called Strydom. “Dutchy,” spits Danny, and he falls promptly asleep, his hearing aid whistling.

Joan and my mother were barely out of their teens when they met at the offices of Pilot Radio, formerly I. A. Abrahamson, an electronics company in central Johannesburg. They were both office juniors. That was the era when they would stay out all night drinking Pernod at somewhere called the 100 Club, going into work the next day with wet hair. They had afternoon tea at a place called the Florian, and somewhere else called the Flying Saucer. After a few years of commuting from their respective family homes, they took the plunge and rented a flat together in town, on Clarendon Circle.

With Danny still snoozing, Joan reaches down behind the coffee table and drags out a heavy wicker basket, stuffed with mementos. “If only you'd come earlier,” she says. “I lost so much in the move. But let's see what we have here.” She starts rifling through papers, shifting about in her chair and talking excitedly.

“She had a very sharp tongue,” says Joan, “I'm sure I don't need to tell you that.” She is still smarting from the time she walked into the flat, hair tightly curled having come from the hairdresser, and my mother, looking up, grinned at her friend and made the motion of a judge passing sentence, lowering his gavel. “Oh, I was cross,” says Joan, and bursts out laughing. “I suppose it did look like a wig.”

I laugh. Danny sleeps on.

I ask: was my mother ever a Communist? Joan looks embarrassed and sips her whiskey. “Oh no, I don't think she'd have been involved in anything like that.”

“I thought, when she worked at the law firm . . .”

Although she gave politics as her reason for leaving, I never got much of a sense from my mother of the country's broader political life. For the first half of her childhood, they lived out in the sticks, and later, I suppose, they were wrapped up in their own drama. It was at the law firm that she first encountered white people, mainly Jewish immigrants from the Russian Caucasus, who sought actively to undermine the system. She was very drawn to it, she said, to the people and the cause. I remember how furious she was when the England cricket team broke sanctions in the 1980s (“that English scum” were, I think, her exact words), but there were occasional cracks in her attitude. I have a vague memory of her dithering in the vegetable section of the supermarket, where as far as I recall we didn't boycott Cape apples. There was, I think, a lingering sense that, however awful it was, it was disloyal to bad-mouth her country behind its back; that it equated in some way with shame of the self. My mother wouldn't permit that.

Joan smiles at me. It was a big deal to my mother when she got the job at the law firm, she says. “There was someone she admired very much there, I think?”

“Sima Sosnovik.”

“That's it.”

•   •   •

JOAN ROOTS AROUND
in the basket and pulls out a photo of my mother in wacky 1950s style glasses, standing in front of a signpost for Land's End. In those early years in London, she went on a coach holiday to the West Country. She'd told me about it; it had been rather lonely, she'd said.

Joan digs in again and pulls out a Christmas card, which to my amazement is signed “Marjorie,” my mother's stepmother.

“Yes,” says Joan. She raises her eyebrows. “She and I got along quite well. We stayed in touch for a while.”

There is a pause. I can't believe the mythical Marjorie is someone Joan actually knew. She tells me she met her when visiting my mother at home. There were children everywhere. Marjorie was polite. “Have you seen any of them yet?” asks Joan.

“Tomorrow.”

Joan sighs. “It was all very difficult. I understood that.” She looks away. I'm reluctant to push her, but I want her to say more. We sit in silence for a moment.

She ignites at a memory. “Pauline only had one shirt. An absolute scandal. Every time she stayed overnight at our house she was up at dawn, scrubbing in the sink. It breaks my heart to think of it. I blamed Marjorie for that.”

I croak, “Were you there when the trial collapsed?”

“I was.”

She shuts down. An angry pause. “She had a nervous breakdown.” I have done the wrong thing. Joan looks straight ahead, still outraged on her friend's behalf and protective of her privacy, even in front of me. I want to know what she means by “nervous breakdown”; I want to know how my mother pieced herself together again, what she said to Joan and what Joan said to her. I want to know how she managed to assemble herself every morning before work, with all this in the background. But Joan is so livid, I'm afraid to ask more.

We are quiet for a moment, and in the quiet I think Joan senses my need for her to come up with something momentous, some jewel-like word or gesture that will make sense of it all. “I had a panic attack once,” says Joan finally, wearily. “I rang Pauline in her flat. She had moved to her own bedsit by then. It wasn't much, but she was so proud of it. She took the morning off work and came straight 'round to see me.” Rather than consoling her friend, my mother gripped Joan by the elbow and frog-marched her to her office. The panic subsided and Joan did a day's work. “She was the only one who knew what to do.” That's it? That's it.

She sighs. “It's not for sissies, this life.”

Danny shakes awake, disrupting the dog and scaring the shit out of us. He gets up and disappears into the bedroom. “What's the old fool up to now?” snaps Joan, and the tension evaporates. I get up to leave. At the door, Danny comes back and presses something into my palm: a gold-and-onyx signet ring. I give him a big hug and a kiss; Joan gives him a prod in the lower back. I think, “And how is my old friend Danny?”

Joan remembered that visit to our house in the 1980s, when she was traveling around England with the friend she brought to lunch. Twenty years later, she grabs my hand in the doorway and with real anguish cries, “Oh, why didn't I tell that silly woman to find something else to do with the day? We couldn't talk. After all that time and we couldn't talk!”

•   •   •

THAT NIGHT
in the hotel I think, “She should never have left.” This was her home, she should never have left. She made good friends in London, but there was no one like Joan, who knew her before the walls went up. Joan was someone from whom she had nothing to hide. She had a good job, her own flat, and great friends. Why, when she'd worked so hard to establish herself, would she leave to start all over again?

It is only later that something occurs to me. This is after I have flown to the Cape to meet Denise, her other great friend from that era. In their early twenties, she and Denise lived a few miles apart and along the same bus route, about an hour south of the city. They traveled into work together. There was some rivalry between Denise and Joan that, it amuses me to note, doesn't seem to have subsided much fifty years on. “When Paula came back to visit us the first time,” Joan had said that afternoon, “I took two days off work, whereas she had to fit in around Denise.” She sniffed. “Paula always said that was the difference between us.”

Denise is softer than Joan. Her large blue eyes well up with tears several times. They used to go on holiday together, she says; once, they drove to the coast and laughed all the way there. Denise's mother was very fond of my mother; “my other daughter,” she called her, and once invited her to spend Christmas with them. On the way home from work, Denise got off the bus first and my mother traveled on to the more remote outpost where her family lived. “It was a long walk in the dark from the bus stop to her home,” says Denise, “and I used to worry for her. But, gee whiskers, she was always so cheerful.” I don't have the heart to interfere with this image; to ask Denise a lot of horrible questions about horrible events, although it's clear she knows there was something else going on. “Spot of bother in Pauline's home, wasn't there?” Reg had said to his wife when they picked me up from the airport. “That's right,” said Denise, looking pained, while jump jets in my brain fired up for takeoff.