I climbed carefully over Thabo and made my way outside into the crisp, clean morning. Steam was rising from the red earth and birds were singing in a post-storm cacophony. I filled a bucket with rainwater from the tank at the back of the building and knelt down on a bed of damp pine needles to wash my face. The icy water stung my cheeks.
Suddenly there was a warm hand on the back of my neck.
“It’s such a beautiful day for you, Miriam,” Thabo said, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He was still in his boxer shorts and vest, sunlight bathing his toffee-brown body.
We joined the circle of hostel dwellers perched on old tomato crates around a single Primus stove. Breakfast here was a communal affair—everyone’s offerings placed in the middle of the circle on a small square of tarpaulin. It was a cheery gathering of strangers.
I had two triangles of bread smeared with butter, and a mug of coffee sweetened with condensed milk.
As I sat there in the pine forest, surrounded by the gentleness of people and place, I felt a deep sense of belonging. I couldn’t have explained it and dared not analyze it too deeply, for fear of it being lost in translation, but it was the perfect mix of everything—a strange, tentative sort of homecoming.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The car shook up our bones as Thabo negotiated the uneven ground and numerous potholes. Hills of gray-green scrub and patchy red dirt undulated around us. Dwellings dotted haphazardly across the countryside boasted great ingenuity—mud and wire, bricks and branches, all held together somehow—and falling fences demarcated small sections of cultivated land. Scatterings of chickens scratched busily in the earth; mangy donkeys strained as they hauled lopsided carts; children in bright rags with backs as straight as poles balanced pails of sloshing water on their small heads.
Thabo slowed as we drew up behind a woman bent under the weight of a bulging hessian sack she was balancing on her head. She swayed as she walked in a sort of perpetual motion, which worked to keep her load righted. She appeared to be talking to herself, but when I wound down my window, I heard her words ring out across the veld.
“Gr-ee-n m-ie-lies,” she cried.
“What’s she saying?”
“She’s selling green mielies.”
“Green mielies?”
“It just means they are freshly picked, their sheaves still green.”
As we passed the old woman, she carefully extricated a hand from her load to wave. I waved back.
Thabo stopped the car a little farther down the road and walked back through the dust toward her. The old lady had already undone the rope sealing her sack by the time he reached her. As I’d come to expect, there followed some signaling and pointing, then the shaking of hands. Was this it? Surely not! Was this my mother?
Thabo climbed back in the car with five heads of corn. He pulled down the green sheaf of one to reveal plump golden beads of corn. “Now that’s fresh.” He lifted it to my nose. It smelled sweet and grassy.
I was relieved the mielie lady wasn’t my mother. I didn’t want to just find her on the side of the road by chance.
We were moving again and soon we’d turned off the main road onto a narrower, even bumpier track. After some way, Thabo pulled up under the sparse shade of an acacia tree. My eye followed his down a track to a hut nestling in a shallow valley.
The house stood alone, with no other dwelling nearby. The walls were fashioned from a variety of bricks, the roof a patchwork of blackened corrugated iron. Two ill-fitting windows toyed with my sense of alignment and proportion, as if in a photograph taken on a slight angle. A couple of branches, bowed like an old man’s legs, supported a small thatched vestibule. Some piccanins squatted in its shade. To the left of the dwelling was a sagging clothesline, its vibrant passengers twisting in the breeze. To the right was a green patch of corn.
“Are you ready?” Thabo rested a hand on my knee.
“This is it?”
“I’ll go in first if you like.”
I nodded.
Thabo got out and walked down the red-dirt path. At the bottom he pushed open the dislocated gate that stood alone—no fence attached to either side. The piccanins leapt up from their game to crowd around the newcomer; their jumbled chatter and laughter transported back to me on the breeze. Then they were pointing in the direction of the mielies.
My heart started hammering in my chest, my throat, my mouth. I turned my gaze to look where they were pointing. As I squinted into the sun, I spotted a bent black figure working in the maize patch–a woman. I watched as Thabo approached her. She stood slowly, supporting her back on one side. They greeted one another and conversed, silhouettes against the sun. Then Thabo was putting his arm around her and together they started to walk toward the car.
I opened my door and stepped out. The earth seemed to move beneath me and I had to steady myself against the hot body of the car. Then I was putting one foot in front of the other as I made my way across the clearing. Dry grass poked through my sandals and pricked my feet; red grit worked its way between my toes.
Thabo stopped a short way off. The woman and I kept walking.
As she drew closer I saw that on her head she wore a brown felt beret and around her neck hung a string of bright wooden beads. A floral pinafore was gathered at her solid waist, and beneath it, a faded orange T-shirt hugged her sagging bosom. The sleeves defined strong, muscular arms. Her ankles were thick, and her feet cracked and hardened, but not her face. She had the loveliest face I’d ever seen, and a peaceful, almost regal, countenance. Her chin was pulled back in on itself, and her curly eyebrows arched evenly over eyes that were gentle and wise and shining with tears. They hungrily took in my face, my frame, my features.
She would have seen my hair was a mass of loosely woven knots and my face, a light milky-brown color. She would have noted the frayed jeans hugging my long limbs and the crisp white T-shirt outlining my tiny breasts. Around my neck was a simple gold locket. She would also have seen my brown eyes were awash with tears.
We stopped. Two meters and twenty-five years separated us. She stretched out her arms—matte black skin robbed of its gloss by age; hands crusted with the earth she’d been working.
I faltered.
No dune collapsed. The figure before me did not melt away. I took her hands in mine, fingering the residue of crushed African clay between our palms and inhaling that heady cocktail of Sunlight soap, wood smoke, and freshly toiled earth.
Memories rushed in.
“Miriam. Mbila.”
I was caught off guard. I’d heard my name countless times before, but never had it sounded like this. It encircled me and said all the things that could not be said.
“Mme.”
And then she was kissing me on my cheeks, my eyelids, my head, my arms, my hands . . .
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Inside my mother’s hut it was cool and dark and smelled of the compacted dung floor, of earth and grass and cooling embers. The table was set as if we’d been expected—three tin mugs and a plate of assorted cream biscuits arranged on a plastic tablecloth decorated incongruously with Christmas motifs. A fine net had been draped over it all to keep off the sluggish horseflies, which droned around the room in lazy flight.
“I sent word to your mother,” Thabo said, answering my puzzled expression. “I didn’t want it to be too much of a shock.”
A dented and blackened kettle began to rumble and shudder as the water came to the boil. Celia—my mother—carefully lifted it off the fire and set about making us tea. I recorded every movement she made. Years of agony, doubt, anger, and hope were concertinaed into this unlikely reality. She was standing in front of me, my mother—her bent body no apparition, her soft eyes no mirage. The importance of the task at hand—making tea for her daughter—weighed heavily on her.
But her solemnity was punctuated with joyous exclamations of disbelief. “Hau,
my Miriam! I can’t believe it!” Then she would clasp her hands and look to the heavens, and we’d all laugh.
Tea made, she sat down on the chair beside me, and for the entire afternoon held my hand, never once relinquishing her prize. We drank tea and ate countless biscuits as music from a crackling radio lent the atmosphere a festive air. The four piccanins danced excitedly around the room, while we talked and talked, filling in the missing years.
“This is my dear friend David,” I said, pulling out a picture from my purse. “He should have been here too.”
My mother screwed up her eyes and held the photo at arm’s length, scrutinizing it. Milky cataracts clouded her eyes. After a time she nodded. “He has a good face.” Then she looked across at Thabo. “You have a good face too.”
We conversed in simple conversation suited to my mother’s English and the vastness of the years and culture that separated us. With a university degree on my wall, business clothes in my wardrobe, and London—with all its tubes and taxis, theater and sophistication—woven into my heritage, I was sometimes unsure of what to say or how to say it. Thabo periodically rescued me, using his native tongue to fill in the pictures I tried to paint. They sounded beautiful—the words—in that velvety, melodious language.
“These are your brothers,” she said, pointing to a long, narrow photo frame. “Nelson and Alfred and . . .” Her face darkened. “Christian.”
“I know.” I squeezed her hand. Three unknown faces smiled back at me, one I would never come to know.
After tea, she took us around her small plot. We admired her crop of corn, the sheaves robust and strong despite the arid earth. We stooped under the sparse branches of her pawpaw tree and inspected the limp leaves of her diseased tomato plants. She insisted on collecting me some eggs from the chicken run, and she spoke excitedly of electricity coming soon to the area.
“But what do you use now?”
She was puzzled by my question and frowned, deep ruts crumpling her forehead. “Fire, my child, and kerosene, of course.”
As the afternoon wore on, all barriers dropped away and our interactions were as effortless as the love between a mother and child. “The parcel!” I exclaimed, suddenly remembering. I darted out to the car to retrieve the square brown package.
My mother opened it slowly. I’m not sure if it was her arthritic fingers or apprehension that delayed her. Inside was a note from Sylvia Eloff, a bag of cashew nuts, a crocheted tablecloth, a small tray of dried peaches, and two bars of Peppermint Crisp. There were also some odds and ends my mother had unwittingly left behind when she’d left the Cape—a woven grass coaster, a scarf, nail scissors.
“Chocolate!” cried the piccanins. These happy urchins were my brother’s children, and I was their aunt. I closed my eyes and drank in their giggles and exclamations.
“There’s something else,” Thabo said.
My mother was lifting out a book from the bottom of the box; its cover was faded, its spine torn. She held it with great care so the pages wouldn’t fall out. I was intrigued. Written in a big, childlike scrawl under the title was a name. My name. Miriam Mphephu.
I looked at the title of the story the book seemed to automatically open to—“The Gift of the Magi”—and in an instant the years disappeared and moments that had been lost were magically retrieved. Once again I was five years old, sitting excitedly in the dip of a sagging mattress recounting the tale to my mother.
“I loved that story so much,” I said to Thabo. My mother nodded. As I paged slowly through the book, great holes in my mind were filled. “It’s exactly as I remember it!” I looked up at Celia. “Do you remember Michael would tell me stories at supper? He was such a good storyteller. I loved his stories.”
My mother smiled, but her eyes told a different tale. She was in some other place.
“Why don’t I read it to these scalawags,” Thabo said, taking the book off me. “I’ll translate it. I’m keen to find out what happens in this famous story.”
Neither my mother nor I took the hint.
“Go on, you two. Outside! Have some time alone together.”
So we headed out and sat down on a rickety bench beside the front door. A bee trapped in an empty Fanta bottle was buzzing around its plastic prison, disturbing the stillness of our afternoon.
After a long pause my mother began to stroke my hand. “Master Steiner, he was good to you?”
I looked across the hills, nodding slowly at first, but with more conviction as I summed up Michael in my mind’s eye. I was no longer angry with him. “Yes. He always was, and still is, very good to me.”
She smiled, and I saw in her smile several different stories. I saw relief that I’d been cared for and the residue of exhilaration at our reunion. I also saw a mysterious coyness.
Then she told me she’d met Patrick when she was just fourteen. They’d lived on adjacent farms, walking the same road every day to fetch water. On one of these trips they promised one another that when they were older they would marry. I listened closely to this piece of unexpected history, unsure of where it had sprung from or where it was leading, but I sensed its importance.
“When Patrick is fifteen, he leave Louis Trichardt to find work in Johannesburg. After he find a job on the mines, he write to me and tell me to come and be with him in the city where the jobs are many and there is much money too.”
She’d followed him to Johannesburg and found work as a maid, cleaning white people’s houses. But they couldn’t live together because Patrick was forced to live in the mining hostel and she in the suburbs.
She started to cough. What initially sounded like a tickle in her throat grew into a prolonged gasping rattle that for a few moments hijacked her whole body and wrestled her into breathless submission.
Eventually, after several sips of water, she continued. She went on to tell me how she and Patrick missed each other very much, but only got to see one another when their annual leave coincided. Then they would meet back in the homelands for a week. And nine months after each meeting, a baby was born—first Christian, then Nelson, and finally Alfred.
“After that, I don’t know why, Patrick stop coming home. The mines, I think they made him wrong.”
I waited for more.
One day when she was already working for the Steiners, she overheard them having a terrible fight. A door banged and she found Michael outside in the yard, crying quietly. She had never seen a man cry before. “He is very sad, so I make him tea and he sit on the steps, talking for a long time.” He spoke of his mother and father—good people who had died in a car crash when he was at university. He spoke of meeting Rita soon after, and his rush to marry her to fill the emptiness. “But when he talk about her, his eyes are empty. I think his heart is empty too. Then he tell me it is too hard for the Madam to have babies.”
She shook her head and stared into the distance as though watching the scene she was describing to me unfold again before her—the scene where Michael kissed her.
I couldn’t hear the trapped bee any longer, nor did I notice the hills stenciled against the burnished horizon. I was floundering in my mother’s words.
“He is a very kind man and we make much happiness, but always in secret and always scared for the police or Madam Rita to find out. Then . . . then I am pregnant and we worry too much because a colored baby is no good in South Africa.” She dragged a hand over her eyes. “We pretend Patrick is the father, and when the child is born we are lucky because it is looking more like a black baby than a white one. So we pretend, and we make a promise never to tell anyone.”
My mind danced on the periphery of comprehension.
“You mean . . .”
“Yes, Mbila. Master Michael, he is your father.”
I gasped. Michael, my father? I turned and looked my mother in the eye. I expected to find regret there, and shame, perhaps an apology. But all I saw was
forbidden love and an indomitable strength. Then my mind was turning back the pages, trying to reinterpret my life—my adoption, Rita’s infidelity, Michael, the pull of two cultures, two colors, two places, two people.
As the sun started its slow descent, slipping gracefully behind the hills, my mother and I sat in silence, holding hands and letting the evening wash over us. It had been an unbelievable day. Words were inadequate.
Eventually Thabo and I took our leave. Our little red Beetle would soon disappear in a cloud of dust sent on its way by the self-appointed farewell party of piccanins. I would not get to meet my brothers this time. Alfred was in Johannesburg for a long weekend and Nelson lived in Pretoria. And I had a plane to catch in less than forty-eight hours. But I would be back.
My mother kissed me good-bye, tears driving new tracks down her dusty cheeks. Then she turned and moved slowly toward her mielie field. With about twenty minutes of half-light left, there was still work to be done.
We’d been driving for almost an hour when I broke the silence.
“He’s my father,” I said, a smile creeping across my lips.
Thabo turned. “What? Who?”
“Michael. He’s my father. My mother told me.”
I pulled down the sun visor and looked at myself in the tiny rectangle of mirror. The amber light of dusk, which had lit up the car, was falling on my milky-brown complexion and spongy curls. The last piece of the jigsaw had slid into place. The picture was complete.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“This is the final boarding call for British Airways Flight 0034 to London. Please make your way immediately through customs to gate number five. Hierdie is die laaste aankondiging om aan boord te gaan . . .”
Still we lingered outside the opaque glass doors. In a moment I would have to walk through them and they would shut behind me—one chapter closing, another about to begin. People and places would become names, photographs, and marks on a map.
Another Woman's Daughter Page 21
