When Frieda first met Min, with her golden hair and ivory bones, what struck her most was that Min was wearing a pair of African sandals, the sort made out of old car tyres. She was a silent, unhappy girl, dumped on Frieda’s exuberant family in Johannesburg for the summer of 1964 so that her mother could go off with her new husband. In a way, Min and Frieda were both outsiders – Min, raised in the bush by her idealistic doctor father, and Frieda, daughter of a poor Jewish saxophone player, who lived almost on top of a native neighbourhood. The two girls, thrown together – the ‘white kaffir’ and the poor Jewish girl – formed a strange but loyal friendship, a friendship that was to last through the terrible years of oppression and betrayal during the time of South Africa under Apartheid.
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Frieda: Things You Remember 1998
Book One: Friends 1964–1966
Frieda: The Summer Min Comes 1964
Min: Things Left Unsaid 1964
Frieda: Life Before Min 1964
Min: The Marigold Moment 1960
Frieda: Life on the Street 1964
Min: A Special Birthday 1959
Frieda: Chicken Feet and Giblets 1964
Min: Girl With a Breaking Heart 1960
Frieda: The Small Space Between Us 1964
Min: The Great Silence 1960
Frieda: The Man Who Came to Dinner 1964
Min: Things That Are Important 1960
Min: My Mother and Me 1960
Frieda: We Make an Occasion 1964
Frieda: Twenty-five Pounds 1964
Min: The Time of Great Silence 1962
Min: The Storyteller 1962
Min: We Know About You 1962
Frieda: May and September 1964
Book Two: Life Happens 1968–1976
Frieda: The Bar Mitzvah Boy 1968
Frieda: The Jewish Woman’s Daughter 1968
Frieda: Getting to Know Grief 1968
Frieda: Looking for Mr Right 1973
Frieda: Exactly Like Her Father 1974
Frieda: What’s the Rush? 1974
Frieda: A Girl Who’s Nothing But Trouble 1975
Frieda: What Lenny Wants 1974
Frieda: The Fanciest-Schmantziest Wedding 1976
Min: Going Home 1976
Book Three: Strange Songs in a Strange Land 1980–1981
Frieda: A Very Sick Boy 1980
Min: The Nameless Ones 1980
Frieda: The Things a Mother Knows 1980
Min: No. 735634 H 1980
Frieda: Facing the Facts About Lenny 1980
Min: A Little Piece of Paper 1980
Frieda: Mr Right is Dead 1980
Min: The Right Way 1980
Frieda: Getting Unmarried: The Beginner’s Guide 1981
Min: The Day of the Locusts 1981
Frieda: The Journey 1981
Min: No Gifts Allowed 1981
Frieda: The Most Natural Thing in the World 1981
Frieda: A Strange Song in a Strange Land 1981
Book Four: The Small Door in the Wall 1986–1987
Frieda: Life as an Unmarried Woman 1986
Frieda: Circumstances and Conditions 1987
Min: The Voice of the Beloved 1987
Frieda: The Small Door in the Wall 1987
About the Author
Also by Pamela Jooste
Copyright
This book is for Davey
THERE ARE THINGS you remember. About people. About the first time you saw them. The time when they were just the same as anyone else and you didn’t know how important they were going to be to you. Because we never know at first and by the time you realize you don’t want to forget anything you’re already forgetting.
Take Min.
All I remember about the first time I saw her are her feet. Bare feet shoved into African sandals. The ones made out of old car tyres with thick, rubbery soles with their tyre tread still on them and any-old-how strips for straps over the top.
They’re all the fashion now but they weren’t then. We used to call them tyre tackies and only chars and garden boys wore them.
In those days white people never did and certainly not doctors’ daughters who attended smart boarding schools like St Anne’s.
I’m never going to be the stuff a yeshiva scholar is made of but I go to Jewish day school to learn Hebrew and I know a few things and when I looked at Min, Solomon’s Song of Songs jumped straight into my head.
‘How beautiful are thy feet in sandals, O prince’s daughter!’
She wasn’t a prince’s daughter but she might just as well have been, we were so different. Yet there she stood with thin white feet, marble goddess feet, on those black sandals we see every day and never really see at all and all I could do was stare. I couldn’t take my eyes off her feet.
Those sandals are terribly hard to walk in. Once, when our maid Beauty was barefoot behind the washing line at the back of the house and her sandals were standing side by side on the back stoep I tried for myself so I know what I’m talking about.
You can cling on as hard as you like with your bare toes. It doesn’t help. With a sandal like this not even left foot and right are always in agreement. One may want to go one way and one the other. It doesn’t seem to worry the Africans. They wear them all the time and they seem to take them just wherever it is they want to go.
I suppose you get used to them. They keep the stones out and last for ever, which is a lot longer than people do, and rain and sun, good weather and bad, it’s all the same to them.
The only thing they aren’t good for is dancing. You can’t dance in a one-size-fits-all tyre tackie.
At least you wouldn’t think so but if an African feels happy enough it doesn’t matter what he has on his feet. If the music moves him he’ll dance anyway and those tyre tackies no white man can wear will stay right where they are on those black African feet and dance right along with them.
You’d think they’d fly around and away but they don’t. They rise and fall and thump on the ground right in time to the music so in the end you’d think they were a part of the song and meant to be there.
So, that’s what I remember about Min.
Her white goddess feet in their tyre tackies and that thing that I knew from the very first instant.
If she made up her mind and decided to dance that minute the tyre tackies would have danced too, right along with her, just because she wanted them to.
You could see it in her face even then. She was the kind of girl who only knew one way to go which, believe me, as you go along in the world you soon find out is not the easiest way to live your life.
BOOK ONE
FRIENDS
IT’S THE SUMMER Min comes when things begin happening.
All the signs are there.
Things happen that have never happened before.
I get my first date. My father gets signed up for regular work playing the saxophone Friday and Saturday nights at the Starlight Room which is in the ritzy-glitzy part of downtown Johannesburg.
And my mother says: ‘Guess what? You’re not going to be alone these holidays because we’re having a visitor.’
‘Who’s the visitor?’ Aunt Sadie wants to know.
Aunt Sadie is my mother’s sister who lives with us. The unmarried one. The one who lives in the hope of finding a husband. The one in a hurry to be sure this happens before she loses her looks.
The visitor, my mother says, is her friend Julia’s daughter, Min, and this daughter is just about the most wonderful girl in the world and the same age I am. Most of the time she’s a boarder at St Anne’s School. For the rest she lives in the lap of luxury on a big sugar farm in the wilds of Natal.
‘All the complaints I’ve had from Frieda,’ my mother says to Sadie, to me, to no one in particular. ‘Then out of the blue Julia wants to know if we can take her daughter for the summer and I said yes we could.’
Min we don’t know, but we know about Julia.
Julia once lived in Coronation Avenue, which is where we live, but she didn’t stay very long because people here don’t.
They grab any chance they can to move away. They’ll go with practically anyone who invites them, as long as the ticket is one way only, and my mother’s friend Julia is one of these leavers.
Her father was a shift boss on a mine which is what most people around here are but she landed in clover and married a doctor she met at a ‘welcome home’ dance for ex-servicemen at the Johannesburg City Hall.
His name was Tom. Dr Tom Campbell. What he had was a medical degree and a pilot’s licence, plenty of money in the bank and a very well-to-do old-money family.
What she had was blond hair and a nice laugh which men liked and a very pretty face.
Sadie told me there wasn’t exactly a shortage of men willing and anxious to show Julia a good time but when it came to slipping a ring on her finger it was a different story.
Julia likes to say that when Dr Tom asked her to marry him she didn’t say yes straight away. What she says is: ‘I made him sit it out for a while.’
Sadie says it’s probably true but only because someone actually asking Julia to marry him came as such a shock that just for a change she didn’t have one of her clever answers ready.
She couldn’t believe her luck. She thought she’d go to Sandton or Illovo or one of those places and live there in the lap of luxury with her new husband. In those days when they were girls together and neighbours this is what she told my mother.
She had it all worked out. She’d have a nice duplex, brand-new with a two-car garage and a swimming pool and a full-time, sleep-in maid to bring her tea in bed in the morning.
She’d have a part-time gardener and just whenever she wanted one or two casual girls in proper black overalls with white aprons over them and caps on their heads, standing ready to serve the soup when she had people over for supper.
She was going to play tennis in the morning and bridge in the afternoon and have dinner parties three times a week and when she went out people would point her out and say she was the doctor’s wife and probably his greatest asset because she was always beautifully dressed and twice a week she’d go to the hairdresser.
The whole idea suited her. It suited her very well. There are worse things to be than the wife of an up-and-coming doctor. Only it didn’t work out this way because in the end Dr Tom turned out to be not that kind of doctor.
He made no bones about it. He wouldn’t be caught dead in Sandton or Illovo or any other place even remotely like them. He’d been born in the wide open spaces and he couldn’t wait to get back there. All through the war he’d thought about nothing else and he wasn’t going to change his mind now, not for anything or anyone.
So where another man might have used some of the money piling up in the bank to buy a nice diamond ring Dr Tom took all of it plus the money he’d saved up from being a pilot and a doctor during the war and bought himself an aeroplane instead and a nice little practice in the bush with a landing strip close by.
All he wanted was to go back where he came from and work with the natives and he told Julia she could take it or leave it because there wasn’t going to be any other way.
She didn’t like the idea of ending up in a mud hut somewhere but doctors in love, with money in the bank, don’t come knocking on doors in Coronation Avenue every day of the week so she took him.
She said you can always make a man change his mind and because she’d managed everything so well so far people who knew her thought she’d manage this as well but she didn’t.
She went to the bush and got stuck there and had two children and there were as many natives as anyone could wish for but none of them had black maids’ overalls with white aprons over them or caps on their head.
Every time she wrote to my mother she said how badly things had turned out and how much she hated her life. Then things changed. She had a son and he died and she took it hard and couldn’t get over it and for almost a year while he was dying she lived in Durban and we heard hardly anything from her at all.
Then the letters started arriving again and Dr Tom took his plane out on a misty day and flew into a mountain and was killed and Julia was a widow.
‘But not for long. Not if I know Julia,’ Sadie said and she was right.
Her husband wasn’t cold in the ground when we got a letter to say she was marrying again.
‘No flies on Julia,’ Sadie said.
‘No decency either,’ said my father.
That’s the story of Julia and the whole idea is terrible but still when my time comes to meet her and her wonderful daughter who’s coming to stay, I’m interested. Mainly because I’ve never met anyone with what in our family you would call ‘a reputation’. Also because I’ve never met a girl my own age whose mother wants to dump her on strangers so she can go off and have a good time with a man.
‘What am I supposed to say to a girl like this?’ I want to know.
‘Don’t worry about that now,’ my mother says. ‘You’ll think of something. After all, you have all summer to do it in.’
Then for a little while despite the fact that we’re all ready it looks as if after all the fuss and carrying on Min won’t be pitching up at all.
Everything’s ready. We’re all prepared, all the arrangements are made and a special borrowed bed has been put in my room. Every time I turn around I fall over this strange girl’s bed that’s taking up all the space in my own room and she isn’t even in it yet.
Then the day comes and there’s a special supper. Soup and chicken and vegetables and Sadie’s pickled cucumber and honey cakes for afterwards and even a bottle of sweet wine and some glasses behind the pull-down section of the sideboard just in case Julia and her new husband care to step inside and we would like to offer them something.
‘Excuse me asking, Miriam,’ my father says, ‘but who exactly is it we’re expecting?’
He puts down his newspaper and looks at my mother in her second best shul dress with her hair just out of curlers and her legs shiny in Berkshire nylons.
‘You know who,’ she says.
‘I thought perhaps I made a mistake,’ my father says. ‘I thought maybe it was Mrs Oppenheimer and Mrs Rockefeller who were going to drop by and you just forgot to mention it.’
My father hates show. Anyone is welcome in our home as long as they take us as they find us and this applies to Mrs Oppenheimer or Mrs Rockefeller or anyone else who happens to come across our doorstep which includes Julia who these days is Mrs Gerald Delaney.
‘We better get used to this new name,’ my mother says. ‘We don’t want to make slip-ups and cause offence. From what Julia says Mr Delaney is a very important man.’
He might be but it’s Friday night and we can wait a little while but we can’t wait for him for ever. Not for Julia or Mr Delaney or anyone else either no matter how important they may be. Not on a Friday night. Not on shabbas.
On shabbas when the sun sets and the time comes we sit down and my mother lights the candles and when the moment is exactly right and we’re all seated and ready she raises her hands to her eyes and says the prayers.
My father fills the big silver goblet with wine. Then he gives the blessing and although we were ready for our visitor she hasn’t turned up and we can’t wait any longer. We must still do what we always do.
We break our challa with our fingers and eat it and the soup and vegetables and the chicken and what’s left over goes into the fridge where it lives for another day. Then the table’s cleared and we all go back to doing what we were doing before which is passing the time and hanging around waiting and then it’s time for the big complaint.
‘If we had a telephone she could have given us a call,’ my mother says.
This is a sore point at our house. All our neighbours have telephones. Even the out-of-work builder who lives on the corner has one and although the argument that’s coming is not just about the telephone, the telephone is usually where it begins. Everyone in the entire world has a telephone but we don’t because we can’t afford one.
There are lots of things other people have we don’t have. We don’t actually go without. What we do is make the best of what we have and we don’t complain. We didn’t land on Easy Street and except as far as a telephone is concerned no one is to blame for this. This is the one thing that sometimes gets too much for my mother and makes her look around for someone to blame. So, she blames my father. What else can she do?
In our family when this kind of talk starts it’s up to Sadie or me to change the conversation. We take it in turns and I’m never quite sure whose turn it’s supposed to be but Sadie always knows so it’s usually Sadie who decides.
Sadie is sitting behind a hair and beauty magazine. All you see is the sweep of hair on top of her head and her pretty white hands holding the magazine up and her neatly buffed nails but I see something else too. The perfect arches that are her eyebrows raise just a little bit and I know it’s my turn.
‘Who needs a phone?’ I say. ‘Where would we phone to anyway? How would we even know where to find them?’
‘Maybe there’s been an accident and they’re lying dead on the road somewhere,’ says Sadie.
‘In which case I suppose eventually we’ll get a visit from the police,’ says my father. ‘When you don’t have a telephone the police get sent over to tell you such things.’
‘Thank you, Aaron,’ says my mother. ‘Thank you, Sadie. That’s all we’re short of.’
There’s nothing we can do. So we sit and wait and time ticks by and we stay awake as long as we can but eventually we decide we may as well go to bed.
So, when at last the knock at our door comes we’re all fast asleep. Lights have to be put on. We have to find dressing gowns and slippers and while we’re doing it the knock becomes a bang, bang, bang as if someone is impatient and we’re the ones who’re a nuisance.
We stumble out of our rooms. Our whole house is blazing with light except Sadie’s room because if you want to keep being beautiful at least until you find the man of your dreams you need your sleep and nothing and no one should be allowed to steal it from you. Not even an atomic explosion would get Sadie out of her room once her light is turned out for the night.
My mother and I stand next to each other right in the doorway and my father fumbles with the key and then the Yale lock.
‘We’re coming, we’re coming,’ he says.
‘No need to shout,’ says my mother.
Her hands are over her hair to get it tidy. Then they’re pulling at the cord of her dressing gown.
My father clicks on the stoep light at the switch right next to the front door and then he opens the door and there on the doorstep with the light from the stoep all around her stands my mother’s friend Julia.
She looks like a film star on the centre of the stage and behind her is tall thin Minnie, the St Anne’s girl no one will have for the holidays except us.
She stands in the half-dark with a suitcase in her hand and a face you can’t see properly. All you see is a square white blur between curtains of hair and we haven’t even said hello or how do you do yet and Mrs Delaney is talking like a river.
‘You must have given up on us,’ she says. ‘It’s all my fault. I’m terrible and I’m sorry. The road was longer than we expected. Then we stopped along the way to get something to eat and everything took much longer than we thought.’
She’s talking and laughing and kissing my mother first on one cheek and then on the other.
‘It’s lovely to see you, Miriam,’ she says. ‘I love your letters. What would I have done without you over all these years? All your wonderful news about old places and old days and you and your family and Aaron.’
I thought she’d forgotten my father but I was wrong. One look and you can see Mrs Delaney isn’t a woman who forgets anything. She gets to things in her own time and that’s the way she gets to people too.
When the kissing’s over and all the explanations are given she turns to my father and holds out her hand as if she’s offering him a look at a very expensive item she knows he couldn’t possibly afford to buy.
How do I know? Because it’s the same look shop assistants give Sadie and me when we go into Spilhaus to look at the underneath of the china plates. Which we don’t do just for fun. We do it so when the time comes, which Sadie is sure it will, I’ll know what a good thing looks like when I see it.
That’s how Mrs Delaney looks and my father stands there in his dressing gown and slippers looking at her and she’s all laughing and happy and her hair’s like gold and you’d think she was going to invite him to dance.
‘This is so good of you,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t even know where to begin to say thank you.’
Then it’s my turn. ‘You must be Frieda,’ she says. ‘Your mother and I were very good friends once upon a time. A long time ago. A long, long time ago.’
There’s a gold charm bracelet on her wrist jam-packed with charms and her arm snakes out towards me and her bracelet shines and tinkles all the way.
Light suits her. It shines in her hair and smooths her face and she talks a lot and smiles all the time and every now and then she laughs. Her hair is such real gold that her bracelet and rings and chain necklace look cheap next to it and it’s long and loose and ripples down to her shoulders and she doesn’t look like someone who’d even know how to find Coronation Avenue never mind someone who actually used to live here.
She doesn’t sound like Coronation Avenue either. She has a funny fake film-star voice. One of those voices with nothing else to do but make men happy and catch husbands and bark back at dogs and order servants around.
‘Min’s been longing to get here,’ she says. ‘She’s never been to a proper big city before, you know. Can you imagine going along all this time and never once seeing any place that wasn’t anything better than a jumped-up little town?’
She pulls Min into the light and gives her a little push towards us and all you can see are her white feet sitting on top of their funny native sandals and her eyelashes making half-circles on her cheeks and the words that should belong to her are coming out of her mother’s mouth.
She stands in the half-light looking above our heads and her face is like stone. Looking at her it’s hard to know whether she wants to be here at all, never mind if she’s happy about it, and all the time her mother chatters on and she’s talking enough for both of them and a few other people thrown in for good measure.
Min’s tall. Her hair is heavy and straight. It hangs down on either side of her face and a thick fringe licks at her eyebrows. She has a high St Anne’s way of holding her head. To me she looks exactly the way those girls are supposed to look. As if her hair is actual gold and every single one of her bones is made of ivory.
There’s been such a lot of talk about her. Now at last she’s here and we’ve all been pulled out of our beds to see her and it costs nothing to look so I look my heart out and would go right on looking if my father didn’t decide it was time someone said something and that someone may just as well be him.
‘We can’t go on standing here for ever,’ he says. ‘I think it’s time we went inside. I’ll get the cases.’
He goes down into the street in his dressing gown. His slippers flop-flop down the steps and Mr Delaney gets out of the car like lightning because at last things are moving in the way he wants.
He says a few words to my father and opens up the boot of the car and while he’s doing it he has his back to us and Mrs Delaney takes a quick look over her shoulder and she starts talking all over again.
‘Gerald’s the best thing that ever happened to me,’ she says. ‘I think I must be the luckiest woman in the world.’
I look at Min and wonder what she’s thinking. I know what I’m thinking which is that her mother may be the luckiest woman in the world but her late father certainly wasn’t the luckiest man. Less than a year ago he was a young man and alive. Today he’s dead in the ground and his wife doesn’t seem to have lost too much sleep over it. She’s busy flicking her hair and every second sentence is about her new husband and she’s holding her hand out to show her ring.
‘Lovely,’ my mother says. ‘Very nice.’
A ring is a ring. What else can she say? As it happens she doesn’t have to say anything because my father’s back with the suitcase and Mr Delaney is standing out in the road with his shiny car behind him and he’s like a racehorse at the starter’s gate. He can’t wait to get away.
‘This is goodbye then,’ Julia says.
She gives a little sigh and a big smile and her eyes shine like stars. She turns to Min and holds out her arms and her hair flies and her bracelet tinkles.
‘Come and give me a big kiss, darling,’ she says. ‘And remember all the things I’ve told you. I’ll write often. I’ll bring back piles of presents. I’ll send a card every single place we go. I promise.’
‘Say goodbye to your mother, Min,’ my mother says but Min stands quite still. She doesn’t move one inch.
‘Don’t be like this, darling,’ her mother says. ‘I have to go. Really I do. You know I do. I hate it when you’re like this.’
Down in the street Mr Delaney makes a big show of holding out his wrist and pointing at his watch. ‘Hurry up, Julia,’ he says.
‘Have it your way,’ Min’s mother says. ‘Have it any way that suits you but I have to go. Really, I must.’
She turns away from Min and puts her cheek against my mother’s.
‘I’m so grateful to you,’ she says. ‘And so glad you decided to take the money. It was the very least we could do. I didn’t want us to argue about it and in the end we didn’t so everything worked out just perfectly.’
Then she holds out her hand and my father takes it.
‘Goodbye, Aaron,’ she says and when she’s finished all this she turns back to Min and this time her voice is small and barky and not nearly so lah-di-dah as it was when she was being nice.
‘I hate you when you’re like this,’ she says. ‘I know you do it on purpose to make me unhappy but I’m not going to let you spoil things for me. Not this time. Not any more. Not ever again.’
Then just like that with nothing else to say she turns on her heel and she’s gone down the front steps and Mr Delaney’s opening the car door for her and saying, ‘At long last.’
‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ we say.
My mother waves as if she’s afraid of disturbing the air too much and waking the neighbours and Min’s mother stands on the pavement for a moment longer and waves back. My father doesn’t wave and nor do I and Min doesn’t and nor does Mr Delaney. When Min’s mother gets to the bottom of the steps he puts his arm around her and bends towards her as if he’s going to kiss her but he doesn’t.
‘You didn’t say they were Jews,’ he says.
He doesn’t even bother to say it softly so we can’t hear except even if he whispered it we’d still have heard. When you’re Jewish like we are and someone says it the way Mr Delaney says it they need hardly go to the trouble of opening their mouth at all. Even if they were fifty miles away we’d hear. We always do.
We stand there and we are what we are and there isn’t a thing in the world we can do to change it and the Delaneys are climbing into their car and going on their way and not even bothering to look back at us.
‘Take Min in the house,’ my mother says. ‘Show her where she can put her things.’
I know what the matter is and it isn’t just the Jewish business. My mother didn’t tell my father she was taking money for having Min. I don’t think she told anyone. Who knows why? Certainly not my father because he’s just asked her that question.
‘Because if I’d asked you, you would have said no,’ she says.
The front door is open and although she’s talking soft for us not to hear we can still hear every word and Min is pulling her suitcase down the passage and I’m walking in front to show the way.
‘She offered it,’ my mother says. ‘She said he had so much money he didn’t know what to do with it. When I said I’d help her she said she couldn’t accept any other way. I didn’t ask.’
‘Are these the kind of people you’re willing to take money from?’ my father says and my mother doesn’t say anything at all. At least nothing that I hear.
It’s done. It can’t be undone. If you look at it from the outside it’s a very small story but at our house it’s just about the biggest story there is. Something special has been broken and the pieces hang ugly in the air and there’s nothing to say that will put them together again.
‘Come inside,’ my mother says. ‘All we’re short of is that you should catch pneumonia.’
‘In a minute,’ says my father.
We’re in my room and I’m helping Min lift her suitcase on to the bed that will be hers. I know I’m supposed to say something but I don’t know what to say. Not because of Min but because of this other thing.
My mother comes in the house but my father’s still outside and I feel what he feels and it’s not a nice feeling and I’m afraid he might be so upset he won’t ever come back inside our house again but after a while he does come in and when he crosses the threshold he does what he always does. He puts his fingers to his lips. Then he presses them against the mezuzah which stands at the doorpost of our house.
He does it every time he comes into the house only this time he takes a little longer because his mind is on other things and Min is sitting on the bed with her suitcase still closed sitting next to her and her eyes are on me all the time.
I don’t know how it is you begin to know things about people but I know eyes like hers that stay on you clear as glass and faithful as a mirror and always see more than they should.
I HATE GERALD DELANEY. If I could, I’d kill him.
I’d pull him apart limb from limb. Then I’d fillet him and when it was done I’d put him piece by horrible piece in a big plastic bucket. Then I’d take a walk and keep on walking until I found the mangiest, hungriest township dogs I could find. I’d look for the kinds of dog Gerald would despise most and when I found them I’d put my bucket down and walk a little way away. Then I’d stand and watch them while they ate.
It’s not what I call wanting very much. Not really. Just the satisfaction of knowing that such parts of Gerald Delaney that have any value at all be put to some good use.
I sit on this bed in a strange person’s house and this is the only thing I can think of that makes me feel better so I let the way I hate Gerald grow as big as it likes till it fills up my mind and I needn’t think of anything else.
Let some other poor creatures have their fill of Gerald.
I know I have.
‘Would you like to unpack?’
Frieda is round; a round soft girl with bright brown eyes and the kind of hair that curls any way it wants. She has a nice face, a small gap between her front teeth and some freckles across the bridge of her nose.
‘Would you rather leave it till morning?’ she says. ‘It’s very late. I’ll show you where the bathroom is. Then you can go and we can go to bed if you like.’
I don’t want the bathroom. What I want is to be in another place and another time. I used to think if I wished it hard enough and wanted it badly enough I could make it happen. Now I know I can’t.
‘Do you want to go or don’t you?’ she says.
I don’t want to go anywhere but I shake my head yes because it’s the easiest way.
‘I’ll be quick,’ I say.
‘Take as long as you like,’ she says. ‘At this hour of the morning no one’s queuing and that makes a change believe me.’
I do believe her. About the bathroom and anything else she likes to tell me. That’s one thing I’m good at these days. I know who you can believe and who you can’t but I don’t want to talk about it. It’s much easier to open my case and scratch around for my sponge bag.
‘You’ll get used to it here,’ she says.
I will. I know I will. I’ve learnt that if you try hard enough you can get used to just about anything. I know she’s trying to be nice to me and I wish I could say something to her. The trouble is I don’t know what there is to be said.
What I’d like to say is that my mother and Gerald don’t speak for me. They never have and never will. It may look like it but that’s only because I’m not old enough yet to have any real say but that will change. All I have to do is wait.
I can bear anything now but only because one day things will be different. My life will be my own and when my turn comes I’ll never do what Gerald did tonight. Not to anyone. Certainly not to people who have offered us nothing but kindness and the hospitality of their house.
One day I’ll be able to be myself again and say and do as I please.
I’M FOURTEEN YEARS old and the major worry in my life is that no one will ever marry me. It’s a real problem.
A girl who can’t find someone to take her to the Junior Dance at Theodor Herzl School is not a girl who’s going to have men falling over themselves to marry her.
This is a fact and even when we don’t like them facts have to be faced. Fourteen is fourteen. It isn’t eight or nine years old and something that can be joked away. These days boys are looking at girls and girls are looking back except no one is looking in my direction which in the long run can be a very serious matter although on this occasion things don’t turn out too badly.
If you can call Alvin Silverman a date in the end I get a date.
Long after I’ve given up hope, out of the blue Alvin turns up at our house. He knocks at the door. He asks my mother if he can see me and when I ask why all of a sudden he wants to make an appointment when he can see me any day of the week free of charge he says how would I like him for a dance partner.
No one is ever going to mistake Alvin for Paul Newman but I’m not exactly in a position to be fussy so I say yes and why not and it’s fine with me.
That’s what I say to him.
To God I say a big thank you because He knows what was worrying me and now I don’t have to worry about it any more. If I want the world to know no boy is interested in me I will put an advert in the Star newspaper. I don’t need people to find this out because I’m the only girl at Theodor Herzl sitting home on the night of the dance.
Mrs Silverman made Alvin do it. What I don’t know is how she managed it or how Alvin got to be the chosen one. For a woman with three sons to offer to pull out one of them is not such a big thing but I don’t think the Silverman boys were fighting over who would have the pleasure of being my date.
Their mother may have made them pull straws. Alvin may have been chosen because he’s the youngest and the other two are always shouting him down. His mother may even have offered him money to do it.
But in the end Alvin arrives on our doorstep in what I know is his brother Joey’s suit because I saw Joey wearing it at his bar mitzvah. He has a corsage of frangipani in his hand and no one could be more happy to see him than I am.
When Alvin arrives at seven o’clock I’m in my room, sitting on my bed waiting while my mother tells him she’ll have a look and see if I’m ready which is a big joke.
I started getting ready at three o’clock in the afternoon. By five o’clock I was as ready as I’m ever going to be and then I had to wait. This is how you do things on dates.
I have a lovely dress. My hair is teased so much it stands out like a pineapple and if my date or anyone else takes me out on the dance floor thanks to Wellatex it will be like dancing with a porcupine.
Our front room is full of friends and family to witness the great event of my first date. These are people who see us every day but if you could see the way they carry on you’d never think so.
When Alvin steps inside and I come out of my room to show what I look like in my new outfit they all scream and shout and say how fine we look and how grown-up we suddenly are. Alvin is a prince. I look like a queen and people are saying we make a wonderful couple.
They carry on as if the rabbi is going to come walking through the door any minute and my father and his friends are going to find a nice chuppah sitting around somewhere ‘just in case’ and Alvin and I are going to get married there and then which one look at Alvin’s face will tell you is not very likely to happen.
When we get to the dance everyone’s greeting everyone else and no one says anything about Alvin and me. Not a single word. They don’t need to. It’s no secret Alvin lives in the same neighbourhood as me. Everyone knows Ruth Silverman and Sadie are best friends. They never go anywhere without each other and our families have known each other for years.
People who don’t live here think everyone in Johannesburg is made of money although I don’t think anyone could make this mistake about us.
It’s no disgrace not to be rich but it’s no great honour either. Which is about the only thing you can say about it.
We don’t live in Houghton or Parktown where the houses and gardens are so big you need a map to find your way around. We don’t even live in Johannesburg itself. We live in Germiston which is on the old mining part of the Reef. The part that has small houses with tin roofs and sits almost right on top of a native location.
People aren’t fighting with each other to have houses here. Here people fight to do well enough so they can get out and go on to better things.
All that’s between us and the native shanties is the old mineworkings and the dump and a barbed-wire fence that used to be there when the mine was still working and a stretch of red veld and a stream in between.
You couldn’t forget the mine even if you wanted to. Our street is even named after it. If you stand outside and look up the road you can see the minehead sticking out of the ground. It’s still there even though the gold’s worked out and it’s all closed up these days.
Anyone who was going anywhere packed up when there were no more pickings to be had, except our family which is one of the ones who stayed behind.
Our house once belonged to my grandfather. My mother and Sadie grew up here which doesn’t mean we’re here for sentimental reasons. You wouldn’t have to push us too hard before we’d be willing to make a change.
In my mother’s day there were plenty of families around here to be friends with. Now it’s different and it’s different because we’re Jews. I’m not talking cruel or unkind or anti-Semitic. All I’m saying is ‘different’.
If you were a Jew who lived in our street your parents could call you Sean or Craig or Tracey, you’d still never have any problem with an identity crisis. Where we live it’s easy. Our house is the Jewish Woman’s House. I’m the Jewish Woman’s Daughter and Sadie is the Jewish Woman’s Sister.
We are who we are and we don’t take it as an insult when someone says it out loud. We don’t mind but we do notice.
‘Be polite,’ my mother says. ‘Polite is enough. You say good-morning and good-afternoon and answer if anyone asks you a question but that’s where you draw the line.’
So I go up and down the road saying good-morning and good-afternoon and answering when anyone asks me a question and I make my friends at Theodor Herzl School or at shul.
My mother loves shul. She’s there twice a week. You have to take either a train or two buses to get there and everything costs money but you couldn’t keep her away even if you tried. Where we live in Germiston she may be the Jewish Woman but when she gets to Waverley she’s the Queen of the Waverley shul. She spends so much time there you’d think she had shares in the building and was keeping an eye on her investment.
‘If you’re looking out for friends look out for someone at shul,’ she says. ‘And stop this nonsense about living in Germiston. If someone really likes you they wouldn’t care less where you live.’
My mother thinks because I go to Theodor Herzl which is a Jewish school where I can be with other Jews we’ll all be friends and stick together and help each other for the rest of our lives but in some ways Jews are just like anyone else. Waverley likes Waverley and Houghton likes Houghton and Germiston is left to carry on the best way it can.
‘Plenty of those nowadays hot-shot Theodor Herzl families started out here,’ my mother says. ‘I can give you names. So can Sadie, and if you don’t believe us next shabbas you can ask Aunty Fanny.’
I can ask Aunty Fanny until I’m blue in the face, it isn’t going to help me at all. I still have a friend and potential husband problem. It’s not just where I live, it’s also to do with the way I look.
‘There’s nothing wrong with the way you look,’ my mother says.
If I had ten cents for every time my mother and Sadie tell me what a beautiful girl I am I’d be a rich woman but even so no one is ever going to mistake me for a beauty queen.
Every time I suggest I could use a little help from maybe Gossard or Helena Rubinstein my mother says a girl of fourteen doesn’t need to look like a woman of twenty-five.
‘You’ll make yourself ridiculous,’ she says. ‘You look the way you look. Maybe you’ll grow out of it, maybe you won’t. Nothing’s going to change in five minutes. If you’re looking for something to do you should sit down with a good book.’
Sadie isn’t like this.
Every day she goes out powdered and painted and looking beautiful, hoping this will be the day she catches the eye of someone who isn’t just anyone and her troubles will all be over and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t happen.
Sadie’s beautiful. Her hair’s red. Her skin’s like milk. She has very slender ankles and lovely hands and eyes as green as bottle glass and it’s a pleasure just to look at her.
‘It doesn’t matter how pretty a woman is,’ my mother says. ‘Good men don’t grow on trees. You have to go out and look for them. It’s no good standing still hoping they’ll come to you. Life doesn’t work like this.’
Sadie is more than willing to look but so far no one has looked back. At least not in the way that counts.
When you’re a poor girl who works behind Muller’s music-shop counter for a living and live with your sister and brother-in-law in not exactly the ritziest spot in town, it doesn’t matter how pretty you are, men aren’t fighting their way to your doorstep.
‘She dreams too big,’ my mother says. ‘That’s the trouble. All I ask is I should live long enough to see with my own eyes a man my sister thinks is good enough for her.’
My mother isn’t the only one who asks this. We don’t say it out loud but that’s how we all feel.
You don’t know everything about a family in the first five minutes after you walk in the door, especially if you arrive in the middle of the night when half the house is asleep.
I don’t know what Min’s mother told her or how interested she really is in us or how much she knows. I suppose she knows about Davey. Not even someone like Mrs Delaney would expect a person to come and live in a house where such a sick boy is and not even mention it to them.
We don’t broadcast around the town about my brother which isn’t because we’re ashamed of him. It’s because people don’t understand.
Davey has something that’s wrong with his endocrine system. He’s been like this since he was born so we’ve had plenty of time to get used to it.
What other people see, all they’re really interested in, is that he’s enormously fat. It’s hard for him even to stand up and when he is on his feet he can move a little but only a very little and very slowly.
People think it’s a terrible thing having a brother like Davey. They don’t say it out straight though.
‘A special child.’ ‘God’s gift.’ ‘Gentle as a lamb.’ ‘A heart of gold.’ That’s what they say and they can say as much as they like what a sweet boy Davey is and how you can’t help but love him. The face tells the secret and what they really think is in their eyes. Life’s hard enough. Who in their right mind would want a boy who’ll never be able to look after himself properly or do anything really important with his life?
The difference between them and us is that we’re the ones who have Davey and he means the world to us and we don’t mind.
You can forgive my mother a lot of things if you know how hard she works with Davey. He’s the reason why despite being a clever woman she can only do a part-time job three or four mornings a week. Her full-time job is Davey and because of his needs he takes almost all our money as well.
We all love him but when he has bad nights my mother is the one he calls for. She’s the one who gets up out of her bed and goes to sit up with him.
When you stay at our house you get used to lights being switched on in the middle of the night and the sound of people moving around. You get used to the whispering. If it’s very bad my mother will sit by Davey and hold his hand and sing little baby songs to him in Yiddish.
‘Rozinkes mit Mendelins’, she sings, and ‘The Kid That Was Bought For Two Zuzim’.
She sings softly so the rest of us can get a good night’s rest and won’t be disturbed. If you have to get up in the night to go to the bathroom and you go past Davey’s room you can see her sitting by his bed. I think she would sit in the dark if she could but Davey can be afraid of the dark sometimes. He likes the light, so the night-light spills like water on the bedclothes and shines through my mother’s hair.
Davey’s fat is hidden under the covers and he looks just the same as any other person. All you see is his round face on the white pillow and the dark curls of his hair and his hand as small as a baby’s in my mother’s and my mother’s voice singing the songs her mother used to sing to her and to Sadie.
Now he’s more grown-up but when the pain is bad he still cries. Only now he thinks he’s almost a man and when he cries he’s ashamed so he turns his face to the wall because he doesn’t want us to see.
These aren’t things I talk about at Theodor Herzl. No one else I know has a brother like Davey and no one’s really interested in a boy they don’t even know. So there’s no one there who would understand.
But I can’t keep Davey a secret from Min.
It should be easy. ‘This is my brother, Davey.’ That’s all I have to say. Except it isn’t so simple and there’s more to it than that.
My first problem is when I should do it. Should it be sooner or should it be later? I decide sooner is better and on that very first morning, as soon as we’re awake and out of our beds I say by the way I don’t know if she knows but I happen to have a brother and I take her to see him.
We go into his room and he’s already awake and tidy for the day and sitting enormous on his bed with a mountain of white pillows behind him to keep him up so his head stays up straight and he can breathe properly.
He’s wearing blue pyjamas with long sleeves. Compared with the rest of him his hands are very small and they’re side by side on the turned-down piece of sheet in front of him.
We try with Davey but nothing ever fits him properly. In the end everything stretches. Even the biggest sizes. Eventually things begin to pop. Zips do it. So do seams even after Ruth Silverman has double-stitched them on her fancy Singer sewing machine to keep them secure. Pyjama-jacket buttons do it too.
It isn’t his fault. It’s just that Davey asks too much of them and although they try their best they can never quite manage it.
‘This is the girl I told you about,’ I say.
Davey may be sick and not able to get around much but he likes to know things just the same as anyone else does. He doesn’t like to be left out and everything I know I pass on to him. So Min may not know very much about Davey but he knows just what there is to know about her.
He doesn’t see many strangers because seeing new people and showing himself to them makes him shy. He can always see what they think about him. He can see it in their eyes and it makes him sad. There’s not very much he can do about the way he is and he wouldn’t upset anybody for the world but this is how he feels with every new person he meets.
Only I don’t think he feels it with Min.
I don’t know what it is about her. You look at her and she looks like every other girl. Her hair hangs down her back in a thick plait. Her clean shorts and her shirt still have iron marks bent into them the way things have when you iron them wet and don’t let them air properly. Her feet are bare and she walks soft and sure into Davey’s room as if it’s a room she walks into every day of her life.
She goes right up to him and sits down on a corner of the bed and talks to him as if he’s an old friend.
‘I like your room, Davey,’ she says. ‘You can see the garden from here.’
You can. That’s why this room is Davey’s and no one else’s. From his bed he can see the beans nudging up to the tomatoes and the tomatoes glowing on their trellis and the Slippery Jack grapes by the fence and the gardening shed and my father’s old striped deck-chair where he likes to stretch out with a book when his gardening work is done.
‘I suppose you can hear birds too,’ Min says. ‘I know everything there is to know about birds. There are lots of birds where I come from. More birds than anywhere else in the world. I could teach you or perhaps you can teach me. Perhaps you know more than I do and then we can teach each other.’
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