She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (25 page)

This had made the boy laugh even harder. “Who wears hats to the dentist?”

It was this small mortification that stayed with her; that and the memory of her father's face in court. She remembers looking up and seeing him during her testimony and feeling paralyzed. All she could think was that she was letting her mother down. “Although . . .” She bends her eyes out of focus and tries to remember.

“There was something about a tissue, wasn't there?” says Doreen.

Yes, I say. There was something about a tissue.

Freedom Day

MY AUNT STANDS IN
the grass outside the small house and waves as I back the car up the track. I am sorry to be saying good-bye to her. As with all my mother's siblings, I am immensely touched by her willingness to talk to me. After my mother left South Africa, said Doreen, she was lonely for her sister and would sometimes look up her name in the Johannesburg phone book. It was listed for a long time afterward, and Doreen would pretend to herself that my mother still lived there. Then, one day, it was gone.

I am driving five hours north, over a mountain pass usable only in summer, down into the Karoo and a small town called Willowmore. It once took sixteen hours to get here from the coast, but it takes me five, through a semidesert landscape of bewildering emptiness.

It was here in 1820, three years after the Voortrekkers passed through, that a man called William Joseph Moore built a farm. It is also where, as my mother had it, the good genes were from. For decades, her mother's family, the Doubells, lived in Willowmore and made a living mending fences on the ostrich farms, until they moved to the coast in search of an easier life.

In his history of the town, Norrie Steyn makes the place sound idyllic, a settlement “beside a murmuring stream, winding its way through a bush-covered, game-infested basin, flanked by low hills and lying at the foot of a mountain above which vultures hovered.” There is a certain arid beauty to it, and I stop to take photos of the deserted road cleaving through scrubland to the horizon and beyond. Ostriches are still farmed here, and the farms are so large—or there are so few ostriches—that fifty miles can pass and you will see only a couple of birds at the fence, tail feathers hanging like mud flaps, heads poking over the wire with that look they all have, half daffy, half lethal. “Welkom,” reads a sign at the turnoff from the highway. It wouldn't take much, I think, for the Karoo to reclaim this town.

The high street is empty. There is an old Methodist church with a corrugated tin roof and a coffee shop with “1906” inscribed over the door. The only sign of life comes from a liquor store at the far end of the main strip. I can hear Elton John's “Nikita” blasting from somewhere within. When I knock at the door of the guesthouse, a block back from the high street and in a Dutch gabled building in traditional green and white, the man that opens it blinks and looks up the street, as if to see where I have landed my spaceship.

“Have you any vacancies?” I say.

There is a long pause. “You mean, is there anywhere for you to sleep?”

“Yes.”

Another pause. “I wouldn't turn a pretty girl away. Follow me.”

We walk down a dim corridor, decorated with framed photos and oil lamps and oppressively silent.

“Hot,” spits the man, by way of general introduction, “the Karoo.”

•   •   •

WHEN I EMERGE
from my room a little later, the man comes out from his office and shows me the photos on the wall. I've told him I'm here to do the family tree, and as it turns out, many of the photos are of my hatchet-faced relatives. Next to a picture of Queen Victoria and a sign that reads “Blessed Are the Meek” is a framed sepia shot from the turn of the century of town dignitaries. A man in the middle, square-shouldered, with a brushed mustache and a cigar in his hand, holding a homburg, is identified as an Oosthuizen. The man sitting next to him is a General Louis Botha. Next to that is a photo of the United Cricket Club of Willowmore, 1919–1920, with, surprisingly, a mixture of black and white players.

He asks what names I'm looking for.

“Doubell,” I say.

“Yes. There were Doubells.”

“And Oost—” I can't pronounce it. “Oosthuizen.”

He takes this calmly. “West-hazen. There.”

From the lounge comes the sound of a voice I recognize, although it takes a moment to place it: Geoff Boycott. The TV is tuned to a satellite sports channel and is broadcasting an England cricket match.

If I like, says the owner, he'll call his neighbor Stella and she'll drive me to the cemetery to meet the Doubells. Why not?

The
begraafplase
is up the hill. Stella says to watch out for snakes, but for once I'm not worried about the wildlife. To be bitten by a snake and keel over across the marble slab of a dead ancestor would be too contrived an ending, even by my mother's standards. It is enough that they, of the good genes, mended fences for a living. My grandmother Sarah died six hundred miles east of here in Durban, the photo of her grave offering no clues as to its whereabouts, beyond the gravestone next to it, a black marble monstrosity with the name Connic chiseled onto it. I had asked Gloria, my mother's cousin and the only possible source of information, if she knew where her aunt was buried, and she had looked distraught and said, “I never thought to ask my mother.” But it is definitely not in Willowmore.

Stella likes coming up here, she says. It's peaceful among the headstones. Looking out over the town to the desert beyond, she tells me they are trying to market Willowmore as a second-home location for rich people living on the coast. The words they are using are “authentic desert living” and “spiritual retreat.” She says this with enough dryness to communicate her thoughts on the matter.

“You don't mind if I look around for a minute?”

“No,” she says. “I'm fine here.”

Every other grave is a Doubell or a Van Vuuren. The women are Magdalena Magrita or Marguerite Madeline. The men are mostly Johannes. “God is Liefde,” it says on lots of graves, which are bleached white as bone. At the edge of the cemetery, a line of trees filters the last of the day's sun, sending fingers of shadow across the white stone. “Did you get what you wanted?” says Stella.

I eat at the guesthouse that night, where the meat is dark like duck and chewy like car tires. “You still happy, lady?” says the owner. We're alone in the dining room. I nod, and he sits down to join me. He tells me how he once bought an ostrich for 110 rand and sold it for thousands, although, he says, by and large ostriches disappoint. They are temperamental, like the women who used to wear their feathers. They die easily. I ask him about fence-mending. “
Draad-maker
in Afrikaans. It was a skilled job. As the farms got smaller they needed more fences. You had to get wood from far away, to make the corner pieces. Slate stones to plant in the ground. You had to make them jackal-proof, with three wires along the top. A skill, a real skill. Of course, only the blacks and the coloreds do it now.”

My mother at her mother's grave.

After dinner, the light outside is pale mauve and the temperature has come down to the low eighties. I walk across the street to the only place apart from the liquor store that is open, the Die Gert Greeff old people's home.

Outside the French windows the residents sit on benches, so old and sand-blasted that even without the shadows you can't tell what race or sex they are. It is a state-funded home, so I assume they are everything. I find a nurse and ask if I can talk to anyone about the town. She shrugs and says to try Gerty, upstairs. I climb the stairs and walk down a dim corridor. All the doors are open and the rooms mostly empty, except for one, in which a woman is awake and scrunched into a chair by the window. She could be three hundred years old. It takes a moment for us to find a common language, and then she says, in what sounds like a heavy German accent, that her name is Gerty Roux and she was born in the town in 1920, making her some ten years younger than my grandmother. I ask if I can talk to her about the town, and she nods. I mention my grandmother's name, and she says, yes, there were lots of Doubells.

“They were fence-menders,” I say. Gerty does not reply to this. It is one of those encounters that unfolds in non sequiturs, as in dreams.

“What was it like here then?” I say. It's not my finest moment in journalism, and to her credit, despite my inept questioning, she manages to dredge up a few details. They worked hard; they got up at five a.m.; they traveled in from the farms once a week to go to the bioscope in town. I can't think of anything else to say. I sit there with Gerty in silence for what is probably only a few minutes but feels like hours, looking, as she does, out the window. The lace curtain flutters. If you lived here long enough, I think, the day would come when you jumped up from your chair and ran screaming down the high street in your nightgown. Or fell in love with the first person who smelled of the city.

I leave Gerty Roux and go back downstairs. On the way out of the home, I run into a young nurse. She says she is on temporary transfer here from Cape Town. I ask if she misses the city, and she gives me a desperate look. “God, yes.”

The next morning, I get up at 4:00 a.m. The drive to the airport is only two hours, on a regular road with no mountain passes, and my flight isn't till noon. But I would rather sit in the waiting room for four hours than in this desiccated vacuum.

•   •   •

FROM WHAT BOTH DOREEN
and Tony said, the greater betrayal was not what happened in court, but the fact that their mother took Jimmy back afterward. In fact, Marjorie did divorce Jimmy, two years after the court case collapsed. My mother never mentioned this, and nor did anyone else. It must have seemed a hopeless gesture, too little, too late, and then he died anyway. But I am curious to discover she took a stand at all, something I find out about only by chance. When I get back to Johannesburg, I go online for one last trawl through the National Archives' database, and there it is. I don't know how I missed it the first time: Marjorie Violet divorced from James Mauritz, with a shelf and reference number.

I hesitate to go back to Pretoria. The divorce is probably summarized in a single line, and what's the point of driving fifty miles for that? In the end, I go less out of curiosity than as a kind of marker for how far I've come. I drive myself this time, park in the car park, and, entering the reading room, feel none of the terror of the first visit. I am so pleased with myself about this that when my phone rings as I'm putting my bag in the locker, I answer cheerfully. I must be less resolved than I think. It's my friend Sam, calling from the office in London. “Do you want anything from the trolley?” he says, very pleased with his joke—it is teatime at home—and it's all I can do not to burst into tears. “I'll have a peppermint tea,” I say weakly, and hang up the phone.

It turns out the divorce record is more than a line long. The restitution order was served on Jimmy personally by a Deputy Sheriff Lotz at no. 46 single quarters, West Rand Consolidated Mines, in Krugersdorp. He was ordered to pay £10 a month to Marjorie, plus £30 maintenance for the five children still living at home. When he didn't turn up for the hearing, the judge granted the divorce by default. The court charged Marjorie £1.50 for serving him with papers. To secure a quick settlement, the grounds on which she divorced him were, with cosmic-sized irony, “malicious desertion.” All their lives they had tried to get rid of this man, and now his absence—in the language of the court, his failure to observe “conjugal rights”—was the only legal way to dispense with him.

Looking at those divorce papers, I feel sympathy for Marjorie, the woman about whom no one has much to say—except for Steven, protecting his mother a little, who told me she had once wanted to be a Catholic missionary. She was of Scottish origin. She got pregnant not long after meeting Jimmy. Afterward, she would say she had always been afraid of her husband, thought him “a devil” right from the off, and was reluctant to marry, but her parents had pressured her into it. And yet, said her youngest son, there came a moment when he realized that “at some level, she must have loved the old bugger. And I thought, ‘I'll be damned.'”

Apart from the telegram she sent my mother telling her of her father's death, the only example I have of Marjorie's voice is a note she wrote to my mother on the back of a photo she sent to England shortly after she'd moved. “Dearest Pauline,” she writes, “I wrote to you last week and very stupidly lost the letter. This is just to say thanks to you. We are very grateful and the money was useful. Bless you! Anyway, you can be sure of getting it back soon but that doesn't mean that I am not grateful and very touched by what you did.” There follow several paragraphs of family news. Then Marjorie writes: “Hope you like the photo.” The photo is, incredibly, of my mother and her father, taken on the day she left South Africa, his arm around her waist while my mother stares like a statue into the distance. With lots of kisses, she signs off, “love, M.”

As with everything else, accounts of Jimmy's death varied among the siblings. Tony thought it was my mother who was asked to identify the body, but that can't have been the case; she was already in England. Doreen said she was walking to church from the children's home with Fay when Tony pulled up on his motorbike. When he told them their father was dead, “I was so pleased. That's all I felt. Pleased and relieved.” She said Fay started screaming and had to be calmed down. “I couldn't stop shaking,” says Fay. “When you've been frightened all your life, it's such a relief.” Steven said his mother was terrified there would be an open coffin at the funeral and she would have to see his face again.