Читать книгу Postmortem - Maria Phalime - Страница 6

I was born in the Johannesburg township of Soweto in 1972, the younger of two children. In many ways my childhood was typical for many black children growing up in the townships during that period. My parents had settled in Soweto in 1970, the year my brother, Abbie, was born. They had met two years before, when they were both working at the Natalspruit Hospital on Johannesburg’s East Rand.

My father – who had been schooled at the Catholic St Francis College in the Mariannhill area of KwaZulu-Natal and then gone on to study towards a Bachelor of Science degree at Turfloop University, now known as the University of Limpopo – was an apprentice in the hospital’s pharmacy. My mother was a student nurse at Natalspruit. She was soft-spoken, pretty and petite – so petite that she was affectionately known as Tiny by her friends and family. When they met she was swept off her feet by the confident and sometimes boisterous person my father was. Her nursing ambitions were thwarted when she fell pregnant with my brother in her final year of study and was forced to return to her parents’ home in Soweto.

Like so many black South Africans at that time, where my family lived and worked was intimately linked to the prevailing apartheid laws. My maternal grandparents hailed from the farming town of Bothaville in the Free State. They moved to Johannesburg in the late 1930s in search of work opportunities. My grandmother initially worked as a washer woman before moving on to domestic work in one of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs. My grandfather’s efforts were somewhat more enterprising – he took advantage of his fair complexion and passed himself off as a coloured “Mr Stevens”, earning himself the right to own a small fleet of taxis. The venture didn’t last, however, and he worked as a driver for a furniture manufacturer until his retirement in the late 1970s.

They settled in the Western Native Township on the outskirts of Johannesburg but were compelled to uproot their young family of seven children when the apartheid government forcibly relocated them to Rockville location in Soweto. This was the house where I was born shortly before midnight on 14 November. It was my first act of defiance – my mother’s wish had been that I make my appearance the following day, her own birthday.

My father was new to Johannesburg. He grew up in the former homeland of Qwaqwa, now part of the Free State province. His family was desperately poor, and when it was noticed that he was academically gifted, a friend of the family facilitated an introduction to a foster family in Natalspruit. The respected clergyman’s family took him in and raised him as their own, and facilitated his schooling at Mariannhill.

We were a God-fearing family. At my grandmother’s house – where I spent most of my days while my parents worked – prayer was an integral part of our life. Evenings always ended with long prayers and singing, and church on Sundays was non-negotiable. My mother converted from her Methodist roots to Catholicism when she met my father, though he wasn’t much of a churchgoer. He had grown up Catholic and, though he loved the rituals and traditions of the Catholic Church, he saw little reason to observe the practice of attending mass regularly unless necessitated by an occasion such as a funeral or wedding.

As a child I didn’t feel particularly impoverished; my basic needs for food, shelter and clothing were always taken care of. It was only as I grew older and became aware of racial inequalities that I was able to appreciate the relative hardships of our daily reality. My grandmother would often refer to herself as modidi o ithatang – a proud peasant; we made the most of the little we had.

We didn’t have a house of our own until I was in high school. Until then my parents rented a garage in a neighbour’s backyard, and my mother did her best to turn the meagre single-roomed space into a home. A cupboard was used to partition the room; on one side was the space where my parents slept, and the other side served as a kitchen, dining room and TV room. Abbie and I would move the kitchen table aside after the evening meal to make our beds on the floor.

Even though I did not experience much material hardship in my childhood, my source of suffering lay elsewhere. Ours was an emotionally unstable home. My father was an alcoholic, and so much of what we did and didn’t do was determined by his level of inebriation at any given time. My mother did all she could to manage the mood swings that accompanied his drinking. I grew up surrounded by the constant static of low-grade tension, which would erupt into a full-blown tirade with hardly a moment’s notice. I drew comfort from the adoration that my brother, who was two years older than me, heaped upon me. In his eyes I could do no wrong, and having him there made it easier for me to cope with what was going on at home. He was my rock in a family that was often teetering on the verge of collapse. Abbie was more than a brother; he was an ally.

Abbie was as laid back as I was studious. He did okay at school, and he was very popular. It wasn’t particularly difficult for Abbie to get in with any crowd. He was one of those people who you instantly warmed to, with his ready smile and easy charm. I, on the other hand, excelled on the academic front. Though our childhood was fairly typical for a working-class black family in apartheid South Africa, unlike many I had two things going for me. My parents were firm believers in the value of education, and they’d saved and made sacrifices in order to send us to Sacred Heart College, a nonracial Catholic private school in the Johannesburg suburb of Observatory. I was also blessed with an enquiring mind and acute intelligence, and I diligently applied myself to my studies with considerable success.

I thrived in the school’s multicultural environment, and I immersed myself in its academic, sporting and cultural life. Many of the children at the school came from wealthy families, and I often marvelled at the luxury cars that dropped them off in the morning and the palatial mansions they called home. This was a far cry from the garage that I returned to every afternoon. I sometimes felt like an interloper in this world of wealth and privilege.

Life at home became tricky when Abbie entered his teenage years. He had many run-ins with our father, and I was often caught in the middle. On weekends he always found a party to go to, and he would stumble home at all hours of the morning. When I could, I would let him into the house when he got back, but on occasion I was given strict instructions not to. On those nights I would lie awake, tortured by the thought of him sleeping outside. But in the morning, in quintessential Abbie style, we’d find him sleeping soundly in the car or on the neighbour’s lawn, oblivious to the mental anguish his absence had caused.

When I was thirteen, he developed a habit of showing me off. He’d insist that I dress up and make myself look pretty, and then he’d take me for a walk around the neighbourhood, introducing me to all his friends along the way. I say “friends” but it was just about any teenage boy we met – they all seemed to know him. I never asked him why he did it, but it was a clever move. Of course he was proud of me; I could see it in the way he bragged about me to his friends. But he also understood how street law worked in Soweto, and I think that by introducing me to the local young men, he was trying to ensure that they knew who I was so they would not bother me if I wasn’t with him. And it worked a lot of the time; I was often greeted with a distant respect, and some even came to my rescue whenever I was harassed by outsiders.

Abbie died when I was only fourteen years old. Bizarrely, he was struck by lightning while walking back from the shops near our home in Diepkloof. In a way I think it’s just as well that it was such a freak occurrence; in my mind it was easier to deal with an incident that was out of our control.

I was alone when he died. Our parents had gone away for the weekend and Abbie had just nipped out to buy something at the shops. He’d planned on going to a party later that evening; his white LACOSTE golf shirt and matching sports shoes were laid out in his room, but he never made it back to wear them. A neighbour came to tell me that he’d been struck by lightning on the soccer field between our home and the shops. I didn’t get to see his body but I overheard a callous neighbour in the days after his death saying: “O ne a butswitse [He was cooked through].”

Abbie’s death shook my family to its very core. We were overcome by a mixture of shock, grief, anger and a deep, deep sense of loss for someone who was so easy to love. For me it felt as if the bottom had fallen out of my world; I had lost my rock in an unstable home, the one person who adored me. I felt vulnerable without the protective cloak he had draped around me.

Girls cried hysterically at his funeral; under different circumstances I probably would’ve found this public display quite funny. And all sorts of people visited our home for some time afterwards to pay their respects. There was even one young man who came to tell us what good friends he’d been with Abbie, and how his incarceration in the local prison had prevented him from attending the funeral.

I sometimes wonder what would have become of Abbie had he lived. At the rate he was going my guess is he’d either be in prison or in rehab. Or maybe he’d be fabulously wealthy, living the life of an international playboy.

Abbie’s death was the first in a macabre chain of deaths in my extended family. Within four years, three of my mother’s siblings all lost their sons, and another lost her husband. When my father died in April 1989, I started to wonder whether we were cursed. There were some whisperings about witchcraft, but my mother immediately dismissed those suggestions. She’d been brought up in a deeply religious home, and for her this was all God’s will. I struggled to understand God’s ways.

After Abbie died I retreated inside myself. I buried myself in books; they became my sanctuary away from the drunken dysfunction inside our house. I lost myself in solving mysteries with Nancy Drew or sharing teenage gossip in the corridors of Sweet Valley High. By then my mother was working as an administrator for an adult education organisation and she would bring home some books from the Afri­can Writers Series. I revelled in the tales told by Bessie Head, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe. So many times I’d be lost in a story only to be snapped back to the present by my father in the throes of a rant. I’d panic, worried that I’d missed something that I should have been paying attention to.

I became hyper vigilant; I was always on the look-out for situations that could trigger an outburst from him. In my child’s mind I assumed that my father’s outbursts had something to do with my actions or omissions, and I was always second-guessing myself and working to prevent yet another one. I didn’t yet understand the complexities of a tortured mind.

As with Abbie, I was alone when I found my father. It was the last day of school before the Easter holidays, and I’d gone to the Wimpy in town with some friends to celebrate. It was nearly five o’clock in the afternoon when I got home, and I crept in quietly, grateful when I thought he was asleep on the couch. It was only some time later, when I saw the odd way that his body was slumped, that I knew he was gone. He’d had an epileptic fit – a consequence of suffering a head injury some years earlier – which caused his airway to be obstructed. I waited with his lifeless body until my mother got back from work. It was only years later that I was able to forgive myself for not being heartbroken over my father’s death.

The last of the deaths, a teenage cousin of mine, was in 1990, and by then we’d all had enough. My uncle cried out at the funeral, begging God to stop taking the men in our family. “Go lekane [It’s enough]!” he shouted, raising his arms up in exasperation. Murmurs of agreement rippled through the church, and thankfully God heard our plea.

I was in my final year of school at this time, and I was desperate to leave Johannesburg and find my own way in the world. The year had been a memorable one, and I remember one day particularly clearly. It was 2 February 1990, and I was in my matric year at Sacred Heart College. For me, the day itself had a particularly tender quality, for it was on that day that my brother had died tragically four years before. As with every second day of February since that fateful Sunday afternoon in 1986, I had woken up acutely aware of its significance, and I was filled with memories of times gone by and musings about what might have been. My mother and I had sat over breakfast talking about Abbie, wondering where he’d be had he lived, and laughing over some of his more outrageous antics. As we sat reminiscing, I had no idea that another event, later that day, would further mark the date prominently in my mind.

There was excitement at school throughout the morning. That evening was our annual prize-giving ceremony and for the matric class, it would also be the occasion when the student body leadership positions would be announced and honours blazers awarded. Chatter was widespread throughout the morning as we speculated about who would be chosen, and the excitement continued into the lunch break. When we stood at assembly after lunch, however, we were stunned into silence when the school principal broke some startling news. “It was announced in parliament this morning that the liberation movements are to be unbanned and that all political prisoners will be released,” he said.

We stood in silence for a few seconds before we turned to each other to confirm what we had just been told. I saw uncertainty on some faces; on the faces on my black classmates, sheer joy. And then we broke into song, singing “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika”, and for the first time the hymn had a ring of promise. For me, 2 February took on an almost magical quality. It was capped off that evening when I received my honours blazer and was named one of the leaders of the Student Representative Council.

In 1990 my future as a young black South African looked very different to what my parents had known. In the 30 minutes it had taken FW de Klerk to make his historic speech, the prospects that were suddenly available to my classmates and me were blown wide open. We were all on the threshold of a future not previously possible in South Africa. Though we didn’t realise it then, the announcement, along with our private school education, opened the way for many of us to occupy leadership positions in business, the arts, academia and public service. For me the future shone brightly with the promise of a successful medical career.

I hoped that I would make a fresh start in Cape Town, away from the claustrophobia and dysfunction of my childhood. If my mother was nervous about me leaving home, she didn’t show it. I’d grown up quickly after Abbie’s death, had learned to take care of myself. My mother was away often; she spent long hours at the office, at conferences and workshops. I made my own decisions and I was responsible; I’d never given her reason to be concerned. She gave me her blessing and as I packed my suitcases I shut away the pain and loss, resolving to overcome my past and to create a new future for myself. Little did I realise the enormity of the challenge that lay ahead.