When I walk into the garden in my pajamas I ask the snowman a question. I speak to him like people speak to God, I talk to him in my head and he answers me.
‘What is going to happen?’
The snowman tells me: ‘Your father will be thrown into a dungeon and tortured and he will scream all night long and you will never see him again.’
I can feel someone stroking my hair. Now the large brown hands of Maria cover my face, her palms pressing in to my cheeks. Maria is a tall Zulu woman who has a secret stash of chewy oblong sweets called Pinkies wrapped in waxy paper hidden in her pocket. Maria is crying too and she is saying, ‘If you don’t believe in apartheid you can go to prison. You have to be brave today and tomorrow and so do lots of children have to be brave because their fathers and mothers have been taken away too.’
Maria lives with us and she is my nanny. She has a daughter my age called Thandiwe but Maria says Thandiwe’s other name is Doreen so the whites can say her name. Maria’s real name is Zama. I can say Zama but she says to call her Maria, which my mother says is a Spanish and Italian name.
‘What is Thandiwe doing now, Maria?’
Every time I ask Maria about her own daughter she makes a clicking noise with her tongue. I think the click means STOP, stop asking me about Thandiwe. When we get back to the kitchen, she tells me to rub Vaseline into her feet. Maria always keeps a pot of Vaseline in her pocket as well as the Pinkies. She takes it out now and I sit on the floor so she can put her right foot on my lap. The skin on the back of her heels is dry and cracked which is why I am instructed to ‘polish’ her feet with the oily jelly until my fingers become hot. At the same time I watch my mother make phone calls to lawyers and friends while my one-year-old brother, Sam, sleeps on her shoulder. When Mom makes a sign with her eyes to Maria, I know she doesn’t want me to hear what she is saying.
‘What is Thandiwe doing now, Maria?’
A week ago Thandiwe had come to the house and Maria put us both in the bath and scrubbed us with a brand new bar of Lux. We stared at each other and took turns to hold the soap. Maria even gave us both a Pinkie so it must have been a special day and then she put some Vaseline on both our lips because we were all ‘cracked up’ from the sun. When Thandiwe had to leave the house she cried like a hose pipe that had been slashed. Tears spurted from her eyes onto the towel wrapped around her belly. She cried while her mother held her in her lap and dressed her in the brand new school shoes she had bought from her wages. Her little girl arms that smelt of Lux were wrapped around her mother’s neck. Thandiwe was not supposed to be in our house because she was black. I had to promise not to tell anyone, no one at all. Sometimes I called Thandiwe Doreen, sometimes I didn’t. Doreen was still crying when Maria left the bungalow to walk her to the ‘Blacks Only’ bus stop where she would return to where she lived in the ‘township’. Maria told her she had to be brave and that her Grandma was waiting to see her new shoes. Watching Thandiwe try to be brave was the worst thing that had happened in my life so far apart from Dad being taken away. I don’t know what happened after I had rubbed Vaseline into Maria’s feet, but later I was in bed and my mother was lying next to me. When our heads touched it was pain and it was also love.
In the morning the snowman had melted. It had disappeared just like Dad.
What is a snowman? He is a round paternal presence built by children to watch over the house. He is weighty, full of substance, but he is also insubstantial, flimsy, spectral. I knew from the moment we gave him ginger biscuits for eyes that he had become a snow ghost.
2
Two years later I was seven years old and Dad was still gone but my mother said he would come back. I stared into my Barbie doll’s painted-on eyes and thought about this. My father was gone. He was gone because he was a member of the African National Congress and the government had banned the ANC because it was fighting for equal human rights. Everyone had to be brave.
I searched Barbie’s blue eyes for any signs of her not being brave. To my relief I found none at all because her eyes had been painted on. She was as calm and pretty as it was possible to be and I wanted to be like that too. I was glad my doll came with four wigs and a hair dryer. Barbie was clearly untouched by anything horrible that happened in the world. I wished I had blue eyes that were painted on with long black eyelashes. I wanted eyes that held no secrets (where’s your father then?) because there were no secrets to hold (he’s in a dungeon being tortured). Barbie was plastic and I wanted to be plastic too.
At school when I tried to speak, it was a big effort to make my words come out loud. The volume of my voice had somehow been turned down and I didn’t know how to turn it up. All day I was asked to repeat what I’d just said and I had a go, but repeating things did not make them louder.
‘Are yoo dumb?’
I told the children that my father was away in England.
‘Where?’
‘Ingerland.’
I wasn’t sure where England was or where exactly my father was but my Afrikaans teacher stared at me as if she knew everything. I was thinking about the phrase ‘out of the blue’. It was so thrilling to think about the blue that things came out of. There was a blue, it was big and mysterious, it was like mist or gas and it was like a planet but it was also a human head which is shaped like a planet. Out of the blue my teacher asked me how I spelt my surname?
L — E–V — Y.
It was obvious to me she knew my father was a political prisoner, but then she said in an excited voice, ‘Ja, you are Jewish,’ as if she had just discovered something incredible, like a Roman coin stuck in the paw of a kitten or a dragonfly concealed in a loaf of bread. And then she blinked her liver-coloured eyelashes and said, ‘I’ve had enough of your nonsense.’
Her comment did not come out of the blue. Not at all. The clue was that for weeks now, she had written angry things in my exercise book.
ALWAYS WRITE ON THE TOP LINE. START HERE.
I had ignored her red biro correction because writing on the top line was impossible. I did not know why but I always started on the third line so there was a gap between the top of the page and the line I started on. She said I was wasting paper and she had filled up the empty spaces between the first and third line on every page with her own writing.
START HERE.
START HERE.
START HERE.
When she shook her finger at my face it went right through my eye like a ghost slipping through a brick wall.
‘Read out loud to me what I’ve written in your book.’
‘Start here.’
‘I can’t hear you!’
‘START HERE.’
‘Yes. Why are you the only child in my class who thinks she can start any where she likes? Take your book and go to the headmaster’s office. He is expecting you.’ That came right out of the blue. I didn’t really want Mister Sinclair to expect me.
As I carried the offending exercise book under my arm, I peered through the window into the other classroom. In class 1J there was boy called Piet who had a purple mark on his forehead like a bullet wound. All the children knew that a teacher had shaved his hair and dabbed iodine onto his forehead with a ball of cotton wool because he swore in class. Now his forehead was stained purple so everyone could see he had done something wrong. I wondered whether the mark would ever go away. When I learned about Jesus Christ and the way nails were hammered through the palms of his poor carpenter’s hands I thought of Piet. Would he walk around for the rest of his life with a hole in his head just like Jesus who came back to life with holes in his hands? I could see Piet through the window, his milky white forehead stained with the purple mark while his finger traced words on the page. Would Lux take off the purple stain or had it gone in too deep?