The convent girl ate rapidly these days, spilling from the side of her mouth where the husband had knocked out her teeth. She no longer brushed her hair or her teeth and she had more or less ceased to wash. Her thick hair, matted and bushy, gave her a somewhat Neanderthal look, her legs and forearms lined with fine black hairs.
On the day when the police came by, it was Dora who acted as interpreter. She drew a picture for her mistress, of prison bars with a stick man stuck behind them, cartoon mouth downturned. She tapped at the stick man on the page and each time she said, ‘Madam, it’s the master.’ The convent girl got the message.
When notice to repossess the house appeared, it was Dora who opened the letter. She hadn’t been paid for three months by then and she had come to the end of the line. Way down the south-east coast was Durban, where her mother Prudence lived, not in a poky backyard room, but in a township house of her own. Pru worked for Bernie and Ida Silver, who treated her needs with respect, so she wasn’t the regulation on-call skivvy, to be summoned at all hours, like a genie from a bottle; no boyfriends, no drink, no visitors. Not that Pru did boyfriends these days. She got her highs from Jesus, who had proved an altogether more reliable male companion. Pru worked nine to four with two half-days and Sundays off. She had a pension plan, thanks to her employers. And every Sunday, without fail, she was in attendance at the St Moses Holy Apostolic Church, down by the riverside.
Two years earlier, when the Silvers relocated from Johannesburg, they had made special efforts to get their maid permission to move south with them; a thing that took an eternity of form-filling and standing in long apartheid queues. Unfortunately, there were no forms in the land that, at that time, could swing it for little Dora to come with her.
Now, at four in the morning, as Dora planned to cut loose from the convent girl for good, she placed a banknote from her own meagre savings under a jam pot on the kitchen table. Then she slipped out into the darkness and headed for the ‘non-white’ bus depot. Yet, uncannily, her mute mistress, via a sort of animal radar, had managed to get her sussed. Shoeless and trance-like, her child tied clumsily to her back in a parody version of Dora’s blanket, the convent girl had left the house and was following at twenty yards’ distance.
Dora clicked her tongue.
‘Hamba!’ she said. ‘Go back!’
But her mistress kept on coming. Dora stopped; the convent girl stopped. Stop, go. Stop, go, all the way to the end of the road. Entreat me not to leave thee. Finally Dora gave in. Fearing for Josh’s safety in the badly knotted sling, she took the child from the convent girl and tied him to her own back. Then she returned for the banknote, which the convent girl had left untouched, lying under the jam jar.
People may become brown persons as much by context as by physiognomy or pigmentation, and the convent girl already had dark and curly hair. People may become brown persons by dint of poverty, body language and the expectation of exclusion. So nobody questioned the convent girl as she followed Dora on to the bus that was reserved for persons of colour. It was only that she proffered no fare. Dora paid for them both. And then, in a filthy cloud of exhaust fumes, they were off for the south-east coast.
In the yard of Pru’s tiny township house, the convent girl gnawed at a heel of bread and drank strong tea from a mug. Then she went to sleep, on a mattress in a lean-to shed-like extension, roofed with corrugated iron. Dora and Pru then sat down at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table while Dora told her story.
‘This is a white woman?’ Pru said in disbelief. ‘This is your madam from Boksburg? Dora girl, you bring trouble. Your madam – she can’t stay here.’
But Pru had no way of shifting the convent girl, who, once she woke, sat mute and unresponsive on a plastic chair in the sloping sun of the yard. Meanwhile, Josh was staring at Pru with two enormous, myopic brown eyes and Pru was staring right back at him.
‘Hey-hey, hungry boy,’ she said.
She took a small tin of condensed milk from a blue-painted shelf and pierced it in two places. Then she mixed its contents in a mug with warm water and dipped in a piece of bread.
‘Bread, baby,’ she said.
Josh reached out his hand and took the bread from her.
‘Bread, baby,’ he said.
This was the first thing that Josh had ever said. By the second chunk of bread, he had offered her a smile. She clapped her hands. He clapped his hands. His eyes were fixed on hers.
‘You got sleep in your eyes, Mr Baby,’ she said. ‘Come here to Mama Pru.’
It was Friday night, but by Sunday, though the convent girl had remained impassive as ever, impossible to shift, bedded on the mattress, or making little rushes upon chunks of bread and mugs of tea, Josh was following Pru round the house like an eager, jaunty puppy.
‘What’s your name, baby?’ she said.
‘Gorsh,’ Josh said.
‘Hey-hey, Josh,’ Pru said. ‘Sawubona, Josh.’
Then, when it was time for church, while Dora stayed home to mind the convent girl, the child was hoisted in his blanket and tied to Pru’s back.
And Josh, whose memory has held no image of his own wretched mother, finds that, all through his life, his earliest recollections are all bound up with Pru. There is Pru and there are the Silvers, with their house – his house – on Durban’s south ridge. And there is the St Moses Holy Apostolic Church. He has an idea that his interest in the performing arts must have begun with that introductory Sunday visit to Pru’s church. Within the silence and gloom of his early life, it was his first theatrical experience; a transfiguration via joyful noise; clapping hands and swaying hips; trance states and ululations; fabulous harmonies of the human voice; down by the riverside.
By Monday morning, Pru had still got nowhere in her attempted communications with the convent girl, though she had tried in English, Afrikaans and Zulu.
‘Where do you come from?’
‘What is your name?’
‘Where is your home?’
And, having decided upon a day of spring-cleaning in the Silvers’ house while the couple were away in Cape Town, Pru tied Josh in his blanket and took him with her on the bus. Upon her arrival at the house, she had the bad luck to run into the next-door neighbour, a person already suspicious of the Silvers’ way of life – white people letting the side down, ‘spoiling the native girl’, letting in callers of African and Asian aspect, who, in defiance of local etiquette, went in and out through the front door.
‘Nanny, whose is this child?’ he said, looming at Pru over the fence. Above the low growl of his Dobermann, he added, ‘This not a native child.’
‘No, master,’ Pru said, all too aware that, thanks to her nightly baby-bathing efforts, Josh’s hair was now less matted and less densely curled. It was revealing itself as distinctly non-Afro and its colour, in the vivid sunlight, was showing up as chestnut brown.
‘No, master, this is my daughter’s madam’s child,’ Pru said. ‘She is very sick, master.’
‘And does the sick madam know you’re running round with the kleinbaas tied to your back like a piccanin?’ he said. ‘Where’s your daughter?’
‘She’s looking after her madam, my master,’ Pru said.
The interrogator, half satisfied, decided to change tack.
‘Your madam and your master’s gone away,’ he said. ‘How you going to get in?’
‘I’ve got the key, master,’ Pru said, slightly regretting that Ida Silver had given her the front-door key, where a back-door key would have been a better thing for the purpose of appeasing the neighbour.
And then she was indoors and the episode had passed. Pru sighed with relief that Josh had kept on sleeping throughout the exchange because, these three days past, the child had burst into speech and his talking had become incessant. The problem was that his accent was tellingly like her own. Josh was not as yet speaking in the accent of the master race.
So the Silvers returned from Cape Town to a small, dark-eyed child, who confronted them with
a winning smile and with Pru-like hand-clap gestures. He offered them a welcome-home song that he’d picked up at Pru’s church. He sang to the tune of ‘What A Friend We Have In Jesus’ but, naturally, he did so in Zulu. Namhla Niyabizwa.
Bernie and Ida Silver, who existed as a sort of two-person Citizens’ Advice Bureau, were swiftly alerted to the problem of the mute white woman, whom, they could fully appreciate, had the potential to spell a bundle of trouble for Pru. Ida promptly broke the law to drive back with Pru and the child into the native location, where the two women entered the yard. The convent girl was seated on her plastic chair, staring expressionless at the wall.
And then, a sort of miracle occurred – or at the least a stroke of good fortune. As a one-time Polish refugee, Ida Silver had spent five years of her early adult life in British Mandated Palestine. There she had not only chatted with Arab children in the street and bought falafel from the street vendors. She had also worked as a teaching assistant in a small convent school run by French-speaking nuns.
Now, as she scrutinised the convent girl, she had a lucky hunch.
‘Bonjour, Madame,’ she said. ‘Comment vas-tu?’
The convent girl swallowed hard and kept on staring at the wall. Then she turned slowly, very slowly, and she began to stare at Ida.
‘Je veux rentrer chez moi,’ she said.
‘Je comprends,’ Ida said. ‘Madame, où habites-tu?’
The convent girl turned her gaze back to the wall and stared so fixedly that Ida thought she had lost her.
‘Beirut,’ said the convent girl at last. Then she added, ‘J’étais volée de mon couvent.’
‘Volée?’ Ida said, though nothing startled her these days, what with the stories people brought to her; people tricked, hijacked, enslaved, abused; people taken far from home; coerced into unspeakable forms of labour.
‘J’étais volée de mon couvent,’ the woman said again. ‘Je veux rentrer chez moi.’
‘Tu es religieuse?’ Ida said.
‘Le couvent,’ said Josh’s mother, ‘est mon chez-moi.’
‘Et l’enfant?’ Ida said. ‘Ton enfant, Madame?’
The convent girl glanced, expressionless, indifferent, from Josh to Ida, from Ida to Josh.
‘L’enfant peut rester,’ she said.
The women agreed that the convent girl, along with her child, needed to be transferred at once to the Silvers’ white suburban house, where at least her presence would not be illegal while the business was properly thought through. So the convent girl, on the arm of her redeemer, was coaxed into the front passenger seat of Ida’s VW Beetle.
The convent girl appeared to have no papers, though, at last, she had her own name. Lilette Habibi. She had no passport, no birth certificate, no nuptial document, but she remembered her address. That is to say, she remembered her address in Beirut, not her address in Boksburg. It was Dora who provided this last.
And Bernie Silver, though he made the tedious train journey north and gained access to the repossessed mock-Tudor house, found that the place had been stripped bare – that was except for some undated pages of cursive French handwriting, neatly executed on the back of what looked like ripped-up drawer-lining paper. He put them in his pocket for Ida.
Scouring the public records, he found evidence of the woman’s marriage in the summer of 1952. He was also able to locate the Mother Superior in Beirut, who, after a space of only four years, was unsurprisingly still in place and patently delighted to contemplate the return of la petite chère Lilette. So the convent girl, bathed and sluiced – her teeth fixed, her hair trimmed, her feet once more in shoes, her documents replaced – eventually made the long journey home, this time in the company of a Lebanese Catholic priest, though she made it without her heirloom linens and handmade lace. Also, without her child.
Lilette returned into the arms of the order, in which she at last became a novice and then a fully fledged nun. That was until 1967, when, along with one of the other sisters, she was caught up in an Israeli bombing raid on a village south-east of Tyre. Lilette was undertaking her first and only visit to the place of her mother’s birth.
Josh’s father, initially traceable, thanks to his prison sentence, died by fire, with uncanny symmetry, in 1967. The fire was in the Boksburg boarding house, still owned by the convent girl’s cousin. Started one winter’s night by a trio of muddle-headed druggies, who had set light to the furniture in an effort to keep themselves warm, the fire soon engulfed the proxy husband who was sleeping in the room directly above.
So Josh, unimpeded by either of his birth parents, grew up in the house of two benign and bookish human rights activists, whose long-ago decision not to have any children, given the high-risk nature of their lives, was pleasantly confounded by the coming of the convent girl’s dark-eyed child.
As the product of neglect in infancy, Josh was never bothered that both his adoptive parents spent long hours at work, or that he was required to share them with that mass of needy humanity which passed through their front door. Then, of course, there was Pru. That was until she eventually retired, by which time Josh was fifteen.
And he was fifteen when, though quite able to drive but as yet without a licence, he offered himself in an emergency to undertake an illicit mercy errand for his mother. He drove into what was then rural northern Natal with several boxes of food and clothing for the indigent family of a black political prisoner. And on his way back, in rainy darkness, he almost collided with a woman – a pregnant woman – who was walking in the middle of the road. She was carrying a suitcase on her head and she had lost her job that day. She had also lost her papers, which her employer had withheld. Josh gave her a soft drink and coaxed her into the car.
‘Come home with me,’ he said. ‘My mother can get your papers back. She’s a lawyer. It’s what she does.’
So the woman spent the night – and many nights thereafter – in the unused servant’s room in the backyard of the Silvers’ house. And after four months her little son Jack was born.
Though Josh turned out to be an academic sort of boy, this always ran in tandem with his enthusiasm for performance; an inclination which was somewhat alien to his adoptive parents, though they enjoyed the diversion of his home theatricals, his love of toy-cupboard puppet theatres, his flair for backward somersaults and singing and mimicry. From early on, Bernie Silver took note of Josh’s impromptu abilities whenever those dreary white church services were relayed over the radio. In the past he would simply have reached out and switched them off but, with Josh’s coming, he noticed that, where the congregation sang in unison, the boy – and no doubt he’d learned it from Pru – could ad-lib his own alto line. Bernie bought him a piano and arranged for him to have lessons. Later on, Josh saved his pocket money and bought a red electric guitar. While at junior school he joined the gym club, in which he was the only boy in a group of nineteen little girls; a lone male participant in black shorts and T-shirt, enveloped in a cloud of feminine pastel.
As a high-school student, Josh was small, popular and comfortable with himself; a curly-haired, myopic person measuring five foot three, who involved himself with the school orchestra and acted in all the school plays; an uncircumcised, sort of Jewish-unJewish boy from a secular, agnostic Jewish-unJewish family; a boy with a bent for Zulu harmonies and a repertoire of Apostolic hymns. And, though he was required to tolerate the odd teasing pleasantry with regard to his family’s politics – ‘Sir, sir, Silver’s reading Pravda, sir’ (that’s if he was ever observed reading the New Statesman under the desk) – Josh was never seriously picked on, except briefly in his sixteenth year and by one particular pupil: a public-school thicko, as Josh assessed him; a tall, handsome boy, who had entered the school well into the fifth form and stayed for a mere five weeks.
Josh remembered him for not much more than that he stole the red guitar and that he was endowed with an idiotic name; like something out of Molesworth. James Alexander Marchmont-Thomas. He was a boy who liked to waylay youn
ger boys in the toilets and shake them down for money. He considered it the soul of wit to use curiously dated insults, such as ‘Commie’ and ‘Yid’. He had a little archaic chant that tended to stale with repetition. ‘Crikey Ike-y, King of the Jews, sold his wife for a pair of shoes.’ The boy was sent down for reasons undisclosed. Naturally, the whole class knew that it was for dealing drugs in school.
Then at university, where white males were on the whole signed up for engineering and accountancy, Josh opted for French and drama; both areas in which he was once again enfolded by clouds of pastel-clad girls, with whom he happily sketched theatrical costumes from the court of King Louis XIV and staged scenes from Molière and Lully and from Shakespeare’s late romantic plays. And, while the predominant mood was for Chekhov and Ibsen, he was more preoccupied with baroque theatre and strolling players and masques. He wanted to connect the drama he was studying with acrobatics and dance. So he was once again a bit of an oddball, but one who was proving extremely useful for playing Ariel and Puck. Then one day, hoping to sign up for lessons, he took himself off to the ballet school, which was where he met Hattie Thomas; Hattie who, on the instant, became the love of his life.
She was sitting straight-backed on the church-hall floor when he approached on a Saturday morning. He could see her through the glass panel in the door. She had placed herself in the centre of a ring of little girls; ten little girls in pink leotards. They all had their hands sticking upwards in the air, palms pressed against their temples, sitting tall and straight, as they mimed putting on their royal crowns. Next, they did wiggling their fingers. They did looking up to the ceiling; looking down to the floor; up and down; up and down. They did lying on the floor making star shapes. They did high-stepping walks; Puss-in-Boots walks, paws bent in front of them. They made frog’s legs, knees apart, bending down at the bar.
Sex and Stravinsky Page 12
