The Housemaid's Daughter (43 page)

‘Sign here,’ said the guard. ‘It was paid for at the Jo’burg end.’

Chapter 58

W
e have buried Dawn across the river near the railway station, where there is a small coloured cemetery. Lindiwe came, and Dina, and Mr Dumise, and a scattering of friends who still remembered her. My students formed a choir and sang ‘You’ll never walk alone’ into the trembling air, and the tune rose up and swept over the
koppies.
Out of Mrs Cath’s inheritance I was able to pay for a stone above the grave with her name and her dates, and the words ‘Our beloved Dawn’ on the front.

I think she is happy there, for the cemetery is not fenced in but is open to the Karoo veld. Low bush and wild golden grasses surround her. The
koppies
look down on her, the Groot Vis murmurs to her. The trains heading for more exciting places go past where she lies.

Thebo and I go there often.

I show him the furry dassies that sunbathe on the nearby rocks. He follows shiny ants along tiny paths. I point out a bony thorn tree, like the one above our
kaia.
He giggles at the grasses that tickle his legs as he runs.

Thebo is a happy child now. And he has brought happiness to me. I don’t ask him about his life in Jo’burg. I’m not sure I want to know. Maybe one day he will tell me, but perhaps it will fade from his mind and that will be better. Certainly, he is whiter than Dawn ever was. I am nervous about his whiteness, and about the possibility that he may have a white father even though Dawn has given him an African name. I remember Mrs Pumile: ‘Don’t parade the child about…’

There was no mention of his father in the letter the train guard gave me.

Dearest Mama

This is Thebo. He is my beloved boy, now three years old. I am dying and there is no cure for what I have. I will give this letter to a friend of mine. She will get it to you. Don’t cry for me, Mama. Dancing was all I wanted to do, but Thebo is now the most important part of me. Please take him and love him for me.

Dawn

The writing is spiky and uncertain. I have had no word from any of Dawn’s friends in Jo’burg.

* * *

I bought some strange material at N.C. Rogers General Dealers that I used to stick the glass lightly back into its space in the kitchen door. This means that if anyone looks around the house, they will not notice that the door has been tampered with. Then it is easy just to take the glass out whenever I want to.

We take a risk and go into Cradock House during the day now. We can do this because the garden has grown up and the shrubs reach over our heads and they screen the house from the road. Mrs Cath would be horrified, but this cover not only hides us, it also muffles the piano that I play each day.

‘More!’ shouts Thebo at the
marche militaire.
And, ‘Teach me, Grandma!’

And so we begin.

From the book with the piano keys drawn and named on its pages, he learns one note at a time. Then he puts them together, notes making phrases, phrases turning into a melody that you want to sing over and over again.

‘Magic, Grandma!’ he cries, bouncing on the piano stool.

It’s just like learning to read. Letters making words, words gathering into sentences. One day I’ll show him how these collections of words and notes can take on moods far removed from their individual parts.

Soon he is playing simple tunes,
Dance of the Gnomes,
Come to the Green Wood.
My black, swollen hands on either side of his light ones, his feet dangling from the piano stool, his tender forehead creased in concentration.

I teach one day a week at school now. And on that day, Lindiwe comes from her house in Lingelihle all the way to Dundas Street to take care of Thebo in the
kaia.

‘We’ll explore the garden,’ says Lindiwe. ‘We will search for snails.’

I am careful with Thebo. I follow Mrs Pumile’s instruction that I disregarded with Dawn. I don’t parade him about. I keep him away from the township. I don’t take him out if I hear sirens or chanting, or if I see smoke.

Lately there has been a lot of that because the young township men – now called the Cradock Four – who arose to start new civic organisations on behalf of their fellow blacks, have been murdered. More brutally, it appears, than would be necessary if robbery was the only motive. I gasp when I hear this and hold Thebo close, for Matthew Goniwe, their leader, was known to me.

Johannesburg has its Sharpeville martyrs, now we have ours. White Cradock turns away, not wanting to look, but black Cradock is convinced the men were assassinated. Our wild youngsters goad the security forces that surround Lingelihle. It will only take one more provocation, one more stone to reach its target for the white soldiers to lower their sights. Bullets that once ripped over our heads will now find flesh.

‘
Amandla!
’ they scream, as the dust rises beneath their drumming feet. ‘
Amandla ngawetu!
’

They are ready to die too.

I creep home beneath the guns and the noise that is now more than mere ‘Township Bach’, all the while fingering my sharpened bicycle spoke – although my arm is too weak to use it as Lindiwe taught: thrusting in and up towards the heart. To avoid trouble, I learn that it’s best to avoid the youngsters, even those that want to protect me, and walk among old people instead. Old people don’t usually carry stones in their pockets. Old people are less of a target for the soldiers.

After several days, it is reported in the
Midland News
that the bodies of the Four were found on the sand dunes by the sea, outside Port Elizabeth, not far from the railway station where I waited all night for the train back to Cradock after burying Mama. Vast, swaying crowds attend the funeral of the Four. A white bishop speaks, and his face and words are captured by the cameras that arrive from overseas to record what is happening in our poor, dusty world. Green, black and yellow ANC flags snap in the brisk Karoo wind and ANC slogans are chanted to the skies, in defiance of their banning. The police sit on the edge of the township during this time, their tear gas and their guns and their truncheons stowed. They do not wish the cameras to be turned upon them. When the cameras leave, and the bishop and other dignitaries depart, the police and the soldiers move back. The attention of the world, like the beam of a powerful torch, shifts away from Cradock. Some people hoped that its blaze might bring some lasting benefit, but it has not happened. Cradock has returned to being a small town in the Karoo known mainly for its dust and its rocky
koppies
and its brown river, and – briefly – for its savage treatment of skin difference.

After the murders, I considered giving up my teaching altogether, but Dina and Lindiwe talked me out of it.

‘If children come to school at all, then they come for the music,’ Dina said intently. ‘Not for my lessons, or anyone else’s lessons, but for the music.’

‘They need you,’ added Lindiwe.

And they’re right. There is little joy left for our youngsters. If they make the effort to attend, then they deserve their musical escape. But I don’t take Thebo with me, as I once took Dawn with me to the school across the Groot Vis. It’s too dangerous. I will not risk it. He is too white. Whiteness, even in a child, can be a spark.

I make a will. The money will go to Thebo to send him to a private school that will take blacks – or whatever colour it is decided that he will be.

Seasons pass. My head troubles me. The memories that I once could call up as fresh as when I first made them now reappear with reluctance, faded at the edges, like Market Square seen through the dust of horse carts, before tarred roads. While I struggle to hold on to the past, some people say there is now hope for the future. I have not felt it yet – that rising newness that I have known twice in my life – but others are convinced it is here. Fragile, as easily damaged as apricot blossoms in a late frost, but finally here.

Perhaps Mrs Cath was wrong. Perhaps apartheid will pass from the country in my lifetime?

* * *

When Thebo is asleep in his mother’s bed, I read from the red diary, and I read from the brown diary that I saw in Mrs Cath’s bedroom when she died. I found it again recently. It had been pushed into a dressing-table drawer, perhaps by Miss Rose.

Helen has grown so tall!

I am thrilled to see she has somehow contrived a mind of her own, despite the trenchant views of her mother. Once again, I’d hoped that Rosemary would have mellowed, but it’s not to be.

I am so weary these days. Ada summoned Rosemary and Helen, of that I’m sure. How can I ever tell Ada what she means to me? I know she still carries deep shame over the affair with Edward, and I wish I knew some way to tell her that she was never to blame. But alas, I don’t think she will believe it from my lips. So that is why I have decided on another way, a public way, provided the minister follows my wishes.

I must rest, as I said to them just now. First a little of my favourite perfume, then sleep and the thought of seeing my lovely granddaughter again tomorrow. If only Dawn were here too
…

Chapter 59

A
 key turned in the front door. The hinges squeaked. The door has not been opened for some time. I grabbed Thebo and picked him up with my good arm. Then began to limp back to the kitchen. Even with the stiff door, I was too slow, I wouldn’t be able to get out in time, they would discover me and throw us out—

‘Who’s there?’ A female voice. Tentative steps.

I stopped. My heart pounded in my head, squeezing it, hurting my eyes.

‘Anybody there?’

I set Thebo down and put my finger against my lips to keep him quiet. I shuffled back, peered through the crack in the door. A young woman stood with keys in her hand. She had golden hair. She was a little younger than Dawn would have been. I thought I’d seen her somewhere before, but the pounding in my head was starving it of memory. I stepped out from behind the door.

‘Ada?’ She started forward, a shy smile forming on her face. ‘Ada?’

‘Miss Helen!’ I gasped. ‘Oh, Miss Helen, you’ve come home!’

I felt the floor tilt and I reached for a chair and sat down heavily. It wouldn’t do to fall over like I’d done before – when was that?

She looked about her, at the open piano with its propped sheet music, the gleaming furniture, the ordered interior compared to the wilderness outside. I felt a rush of feet.

‘Hello,’ I heard Thebo say. ‘Can you play the piano too?’

‘No,’ Helen said, and squatted down to his level. ‘Nothing like Ada.’

‘You’ve got hair like me,’ said the boy, reaching out and touching Helen’s blond strands. ‘Did you know my mama? She was Dawn, but she’s in heaven, now.’

‘Yes,’ said Helen gently, with a quick glance at me. She stroked the child’s arm. ‘I knew her. She was a wonderful dancer. She danced for me when I was about your age.’

And so it began. The new hope that people talked about. God the Father’s new plan. It could not bring back Jake, or Steve Biko, or the Cradock Four, but even so it rose up in the country and threw out the laws on skin difference and the people that policed them. It ripped the signs off the benches in the Karoo Gardens for good. It began to string wires for electricity and telephones in the townships. It gave Lindiwe her electric light. It allowed people of different colour – like Phil and me – to love each other and to marry. It flung open Mandela’s prison cell and led him blinking into the sunlight. It changed my belief that skin difference would continue while men had eyes to see the difference between black and white. This new hope proved to be stronger even than that.

It ended the war.

It ended my war. It banished enemies-in-waiting, it healed inside wounds, it softened the shame I have carried with me all my life.

And it opened up Cradock House.

It brought Helen to stay, it tamed the wild garden, it fired up the stove and the laundry, it gave Thebo a room of his own, it welcomed me back to the old room I’d once shared with Mama. It welcomed me home.

* * *

Helen is going to stay. Once she has finished restoring Cradock House, she intends to work on some of the other old houses nearby. This is her talent. She has also decided to become Thebo’s guardian so that when I’m gone he will have a family. She has enrolled him in the school which once would not hear of me, and where I later played a concert, and where Dawn danced with abandon behind the back row. The school where Mrs Cath used to teach. They have given him a place without any questions.

And as for me, my greatest joy is teaching my grandson to play the piano. Somehow, my head is still good enough for this, and my damaged fingers still know their way over the keys. We sit at the old Zimmerman, and the music rises in both our hands, and we play together. A little classical, the
Moonlight Sonata
with him on the melody line and myself working the difficult base, a little jazz, then perhaps some African jive like his mother’s favourite
Qongqothwane
– the Click Song.

Dawn is here with us, now. I can see her, hair flying, slender legs flashing, hands twirling above her head. Helen is watching too, and clapping her hands. Or maybe it is Thebo clapping …

Then, in the evening, when the purple light falls through the window and the beetles fall silent in the plumbago hedge, I will play Debussy. Tunes that wander about in your head the next day. And the next, slowly revealing their meaning.

I can see Phil. He comes to stand by the piano, he touches my shoulder, he smiles at me with eyes light as the earliest Karoo dawn.

Mrs Cath will come into the room too. Or maybe she has been here all along? I know what she will ask.

‘A little Chopin? The
Raindrop?
Please, Ada.’

Glossary