LITMIR.BIZ

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Till one body dropped, a nameless black child collapsed at the side of the road, lying there dead. He was reported as a statistic only. But the second child who died was given a name, helping to establish ‘the struggle’. I remember my father saying the name. Hector Pieterson!

      Our geese, Gandolph and Moon, were honking outside the piano-room door as my father read from the newspaper, waiting for him to walk into the garden so they could follow behind, squawking and goose-stepping after him all the way to the mulberry bush as though he was an African dictator with his own armed guard. My father was too distracted to notice the geese or take a walk to the mulberry bush. He was standing with a photo of Hector Pieterson in The Star.

      I peered over his shoulder: the schoolboy’s slim body in uniform – clean, white shirt so perfect that it must have been ironed for school last night by his mother – which fell at the corner of Moema and Vilakazi Streets. I stared at the photo of Hector Pieterson dangling from the screaming arms of another schoolboy, his sister running alongside, her hands out, pale palms to the air before her as if wanting to stop the truth and the future. There must have been a photographer crouching in the crowd, waiting dangerously for his moment, and there it was. Hector’s photo was emblazoned on the front page of The Star.

      “It’s the beginning of the end of apartheid,” my father said.

      My mother put her palms together as though in prayer. “Let’s get rid of the bastards,” she said, of all the politicians we would see on television, all dressed up for church on Sundays, so dapper in suits and ties with carnations in their buttonholes, so all-turned-beautifully-out, so religious and righteous, singing psalms to the Lord. All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, they would sing in church, as we would sing in school assembly: All things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all. Yes, all we whites, singing praises to the Lord who had apparently, according to the Bible, cursed the black sons of Ham and made them slaves, which made the politics in this country all right. We, after all, were just following what the Bible said.

      My father was right; it was the beginning of the end of injustice that had this country in its grip for forty interminable years.

      And now we’re riding through Roodepoort twenty years later. Could we have imagined that day, looking at the photo in The Star, that Nelson Mandela would ever be released, that apartheid would actually come to an end, that a black government would be voted into power? It was unimaginable. Mandela was in solitary confinement on Robben Island. On the day he was released from jail we all gathered around the television in the piano room. My grandmother was still alive. She was standing, neatly decked out in a crisp white shirt, collar turned up, and black skirt, silver hair neatly brushed. She was staring as Mandela, hand in hand with Winnie, took his first steps to freedom. You beauty! she said, her Russian accent still intact after sixty years in South Africa. We watched on TV as the crowd surged, blacks and whites, whistling. We stood, anxious, waiting for his first address. “Never again shall this kind of racial tyranny raise its ugly head. You will all be welcome.” Watching and feeling vulnerable, we whites, wondering what this meant for our futures, there in the piano room together, my grandmother holding a cup of tea, about to drink it with a spoon of jam, the Russian ritual still holding fast after all this time.

      And now here we are in transition, with a brand-new constitution considered the most advanced in the world. The African National Congress, Mandela’s freedom party, is in charge, manning a country with forty-five per cent unemployment and crime on the rise. But unemployment doesn’t stop the city growing. Even here in Roodepoort it’s easing out towards the ridge, houses banking up into the rocks, those little boxes made out of ticky-tacky, laying claim to the hillside.

      “I hope they’re not going to drive the eagles out. Humans take over everything! We need space for black eagles too!” my mother says, fulminating.

      “The development won’t chase away the eagles. Eagles roost in the skyscrapers in New York. Don’t worry about it,” I say to appease both of us.

      “I do worry about it,” she says as we park and walk slowly with Evan to the consulting rooms. My brother’s illness has set off an anxiety in both of us. We worry about everything now.

      “There are too many people in the world.” I walk on the other side of Evan. “But nature will take care of it. Nature will neatly snuff us all out, so there’s space for tigers again and snow leopards. Floods. Climate change. Deadly hurricanes. Plagues. Bring it on. I’ll go first.”

      “Don’t talk like that!” she shouts.

      “Sorry,” I say realising that Evan is afflicted with a plague and the last thing I want is for him to go anywhere any time soon.

      CHAPTER 5

      Place of Love

       Mataji is a short, square, seventy-year-old woman in a white sari.

      Grey hair. Neat bun.

      Everything in her office is cheerful: the walls are painted bright Tiffany blue, the sun streams in, and Mataji is super cheery like the good witch in all the fairy tales, like Sabrina and Glinda.

      “Very good looking. What a beautiful young man.” Her stumpy hands bracket his cheeks. “You are scared, hey, Evan? Nearly dying has frightened you.”

      He blinks. I know that blink – it’s holding back tears.

      “I want you to listen carefully to me. It is important to stop feeling afraid.”

      I sit across the office listening. I am also afraid.

      “You must use all your mental concentration for something other than this terror you have of dying.”

      But how do you pull that off? When you’re facing death and you’re not even thirty. It all sounds easy in words. Words are so neat and clean, with definable borders, they’re manageable. I know, I spend my life in their company.

      “You must begin to think of your illness as a gift. Can you do that, Evan? You have had to remember death. How fortunate, actually.”

      My mother and Evan are listening to Mataji; apparently she’s making sense to them, but I want to confront her, say: Fortunate? Fortune is having your health and freedom, expressing yourself, finding a compatible mate, looking into the future without that thick black wall. That’s fortune! Having options. I’m relegated to sitting in a blue corner, wanting to rail at Mataji and Evan and God; Thanks for this, God, I want to shout.

      “Your mother has told me about all your charity work every night! You have become a virtuous person. Someone who is kind to others, who serves, is fulfilling the true meaning of being alive. The Buddha says that if a man lives a pure life nothing can destroy him and you have been living a pure life, I see it in your eyes. I see great kindness.”

      My mother is apparently going along with this, the notion of the pure man being inviolable. Not me. He’s being destroyed in front of us. This quiet, depressed, sombre, walking wounded, walking dead, dead and walking person is not my brother! My brother was an alive person leading an alive life. Easy to say that facing death is okay, is fortunate, if you’re seventy.

      “What I want you to do is see the beauty inside you and let that inform you,” she’s saying. “I want you to practise gratitude. There is a story about the famous violinist Itzhak Perlman. He had been stricken with polio, so was crippled. He was in New York to give a concert and made his way slowly across the stage; he signalled to the conductor, and began to play. Then a few bars into the music one of the strings on his violin snapped. He could have brought the concert to a halt and replaced the string, but he waited, then signalled the conductor to pick up where they had left off. He had three strings to play his violin solo, so he had to rearrange the music, on the spot! Imagine that, Evan, in his head so that it all still held together. He rearranged the symphony right through to the end. When he finally rested his bow, the audience rose to their feet and cheered. Afterwards, he said that it is the artist’s task to find

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