As my tears dripped on to Sister Joan’s holy veil, I thought about how she had shaved off her hair which she called her weeds of ignorance. She had told me to say my thoughts out loud but I had tried writing them down instead. Sometimes I showed her what I had written and she always made time to read everything. She said I should have told her I could read and write. Why hadn’t I told her? I said I didn’t know, and she said I shouldn’t be scared of something ‘transcendental’ like reading and writing. She was on to something because there was a part of me that was scared of the power of writing. Transcendental meant ‘beyond’, and if I could write ‘beyond’, whatever that meant, I could escape to somewhere better than where I was now. I was bitten with love for Sister Joan. She had told me that faith was not a rock. God was there one day and gone the next. If that was true, I felt truly sorry for her on the days that she lost God. I searched for the French words for goodbye and when I found them, ‘Au revoir Sœur Jeanne,’ I realised she had the same name as Joan of Arc. For some reason this made me cry even more. My bemused Godmother who hadn’t a clue what was going on snapped open her handbag and took out a scrap of paper.
‘Melissa said to give you this.’
It was a note scribbled in Pitman’s code.
‘Goodbye my crackers little chum.’
6
Two days to go! Dad’s coming home!’
I was now nine years old and Sam five. Sam had last seen his father when he was one. At breakfast we ate toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar and practised out loud the sort of things we would say to our father when he walked through the front door.
‘Hello. Do you want me to show you the way to the bathroom?’
‘Hello! I’ve drawn you a rocket.’
‘Hello! My feet are size three now.’
Meanwhile Mom was out at the shops buying clothes for my father to wear when he came home. My chest went tight when she carefully laid the clothes out on the floor and summoned us to come and have a look. There on the kilim rug were a pair of men’s trousers, smart new shoes, socks, two shirts and three brightly coloured ties. Sam and I stroked the cotton of the shirts, pressed our thumbs in to the toes of the leather shoes, adjusted the position of the socks. Yes, these were the sort of things fathers wore. We talked at length about what kind of food we should give our father for his first lunch and Mom said we must try not to be too shy and just be ourselves. We nodded gravely and went off to practise being ourselves.
When Sam went to the park he collected a handful of stompies, cigarette butts that had been ground out on the grass. He saved them in his pockets until he got home and then put them in a little glass jar. Sam was convinced that all dads liked stompies. Maria put on her best dress, the dress she wore when she went home to her house where her real children lived. But before she put on her shoes, she sat down and instructed me to rub Vaseline into the dry skin on her heels.
‘Do you know what they found in the Zoo Lake?’
‘What?’
‘A human head. Put some Vaseline on this leg too.’
‘A child’s head?’
‘No. A man’s head.’
‘Is it Dad?’
‘No. Your father is on his way home.’
I knew my father would be arriving with Mom in a car from Pretoria Central Prison. But I was not sure what he looked like now. To be certain of recognizing him, I held in my lap the black and white photograph my mother had propped up by the telephone in the dark hallway. The photograph that for nearly five years had represented the father who sent his love to me in letters and messages. Kisses and hugs, XXXXX OOOOO written in biro on prison note paper. Sam and I climbed up the two stone gate posts outside their house and I held the photo in my lap, glancing at it every now and again just to make sure. The gateposts were six foot high and looked straight out over the road. Every time a car went past the house we waved. Our hands had been scrubbed clean with a brand new bar of Lux.
For some reason, I thought my father was going to return home in a white car. The same car he was taken away in. So every white car made my heart thump under the white daisies stitched on my dress. The panic of my father not turning up made everything very slow. Clouds moved across the sky slowly. People walked on the pavements slowly. Dogs barked slowly.
A small red car turned left at the golf course and swerved into their road. I stiffened my toes inside my patent shiny shoes and waited. The door opened and a man jumped out and ran towards us. He did not even wait for the car to stop. We knew who it was and I did not bother to look at the photo lying in my lap. It took us a while to get down from the very high gate posts. Dad was waiting for us but we couldn’t get down. Now we were all legs and arms and trying to slide down and the man who was our father grabbed our legs and then lifted us in to his arms. He was wearing the shirt we had admired when Mom laid them out in the living room.
Dad hugged us and we didn’t know what to say. And then he hugged us again and put us down on the pavement where moss grew in the cracks. We walked through the gate and into the kitchen. When Maria saw him she embraced him and I heard him say the word ‘Thandiwe’. Mom poured three glasses of wine, one for Dad, one for Maria and one for her. They raised their glasses and we all looked at Dad. He took a tiny sip, paused and put the glass down again.
‘I haven’t seen a glass for five years.’
My father was thin and his face was pale. He sat down at the table and sipped his wine again. And then he picked up a plate and ran his finger over it. ‘I have forgotten the feel of porcelain. I’ll have to learn how to handle a cup again and to manipulate a fork.’
Dad put down the white china plate he has been examining for the last five minutes and stood up.
‘Where is the garden?’ He cocked his head to one side and smiled at me. ‘I want to see the snowman.’
There was no snowman in the garden. Sam wrapped the ends of the new white linen tablecloth around his small wrist and looked down at the floor. Mom tried to remove a fly from the window with the back of an envelope.
‘Take your father into the garden.’ Maria waved her hands at me.
My father is standing in the garden. His face is pale grey like dirty snow. Only his eyes move. His arms hang stiffly by his sides. Dad is back, so very still and silent, standing in the garden. He looks like he has been hurt in some way. Very deep inside him.
‘Daddy, the cat died while you were away.’
He squeezes my hand with his cold fingers.
‘It’s lovely to be called Daddy again.’
Two months later we left South Africa for the United Kingdom. When the ship pulled away from Port Elizabeth docks in the Eastern Cape province, the passengers were given rolls of toilet paper to unravel from the height of the deck. The other end was held by friends and family standing on dry land waving goodbye. As the ship edged out to sea, Melissa who had come to see me off held the other end of my toilet roll. The ship’s hooter wailed into the blue sky. I could see her jumping and shouting but I couldn’t hear her. Her words got scrambled in the wind, drowned by the roaring of the tug boats as they pushed the ship out towards England. Melissa was the first person in my life who had encouraged me to speak up. With her blue painted-on eyes and blonde beehive that was nearly as tall as I was, she was spirited and brave and she was making the best of her lot. I couldn’t hear her but I knew her words were to do with saying things out loud, owning up to the things I wished for, being in the world and not defeated by it.
I would like to forget the image of the ship’s crane at Southampton docks when it lifted into the sky, the three wooden trunks which held all that my family owned. There is only one memory I want to preserve. It is Maria, who is also Zama, sipping condensed milk on the steps of the doep at night. The African nights were warm. The stars were bright. I loved Maria but I’m not sure she loved me back. Politics and poverty had separated her from her own children and she was exhausted by the white children in her care, by everyone and everything in her care. At the end of the day, away from the people who stole her life’s energy and made her tired, she had found a place to rest, momentarily, from myths about her character and her purpose in life.