Once We Were Sisters. Sheila Kohler
Mother Tongue
For my sister’s children:Vaughan, Lisa, Simone, Alexia, Claire, and Winnie
The killed object, from which I am separatedthrough sacrifice, while it links me to God, alsosets itself up in the very act of being destroyed asdesirable, fascinating, and sacred.
JULIA KRISTEVA, Powers of Horror
ONCE WE WERE SISTERS
PROLOGUE
IT IS FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE MANDELA BECOMES PRESIDENT, and South Africa, a country I left at seventeen, is still in the grip of apartheid. It is my thirty-eighth year. It is October, which the Afrikaners call die mooiste maand, the prettiest month, our spring.
My mother calls with the news. My brother-in-law, a heart surgeon and protégé of Christiaan Barnard, the first doctor to transplant a human heart successfully, has managed to drive his car off a deserted, dry road and into a lamppost. Wearing his seat belt, he has survived, but my sister was not so lucky. Her ankles and wrists were broken on impact. “She died instantly,” my mother assures me. I wonder how one knows such a thing and think of that moment of terror in the dark.
I take a plane out to Johannesburg and go straight to the morgue. I am not sure why I feel I must do this. Perhaps I cannot believe my only sister, not yet forty years old, the mother of six young children, is dead. Perhaps I believe the sight of her familiar face and body will make it clear. Or perhaps I just want to be beside her, to hold her one last time in my arms.
I stand waiting with my hands on the glass, looking into the bright, bare, empty room with the sloping floor made of reddish stone, which dips slightly in the center to provide drainage from the dissection table. Then they wheel her body in. I cannot touch her, hold her, comfort her. I cannot ever heal her. Her whole body is wrapped in a white sheet, only her flower-face tilted up toward me: the broad forehead, the small, dimpled chin, the slanting eyes, the waxy skin. It is my face, our face, the face of our common ancestors. It is the heart-shaped face she would turn up to me obediently when, as children, we played the game of Doll.
This moment is the beginning of endless years of yearning and regret. It is also the beginning of my writing life. Again and again, I will turn to the page to recapture this moment, my sister’s life, and her spirit.
With her death, too, comes a flood of questions. How could we have failed to protect her from him? What was wrong with our family? Was it our mother? Our father? Was it our nature, the way we were made, our genes, what we had inherited? Or, more terrible still, is there no answer to such a question? Was it just chance, fate, our stars, our destiny? It was not as if we did not see this coming. What held us back from taking action, from hiring a bodyguard for her? Was it the misogyny inherent in the colonial and racist society in the South Africa of the time? Was it the Anglican Church school where she and I prayed daily that we might forgive even the most egregious sin? Was it the way women were considered in South Africa and in the world at large?
I am still looking for the answers.
I
SNOW
IT IS SNOWING, THE BIG DAMP FLAKES FALLING QUIETLY, strangely, on the dark fir trees, when my sister first mentions the name of the man who will be responsible for her death: Carl. We are in New Haven, Connecticut, in the new tall apartment building, University Towers, where my first baby is born. My husband, a student at Yale, is twenty-one years old. My sister, Maxine, two years older than me, is twenty-two. She has come to be with me for the birth.
We watch my new baby suck on my breast and the snow fall slowly from a ghostly sky with equal wonder. My sister and I are not used to new babies or snow.
Crossways.
II
TOGETHER
WE ARE BORN IN SOUTH AFRICA AND GROW UP TOGETHER IN an L-shaped Herbert Baker house, called Crossways, in Dunkeld, a suburb of Johannesburg. Pale jacarandas line the long allée that leads up to our creeper-covered house. The thick walls and closed shutters keep the rooms cool in the hot afternoons. The vast property, with its swimming pool and fish ponds, a tennis court, a nine-hole golf course, an orchard and vegetable garden, and acres of wild veld stretches out to the blue hills.
An army of servants keeps up the estate. Servants roll the butter between wooden slats with serrated surfaces until it forms small balls that are placed in shell-shaped silver dishes; they polish the silver, the furniture, the floors; they cook the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, the two green vegetables and the roast potatoes; they simmer the inferior boys’ meat (“boys” being how we refer to our adult male servants) into a delicious-smelling stew; they stand in their thin white gloves, their soft silent sandshoes, and starched suits, a bright sash going slantwise across their chests, as they move behind the Chippendale chairs to serve dinner; they go out into the back patio to stoke the coal fire.
Sometimes gangs of convicts are brought in to dig and smooth out the lawns with heavy rollers, to weed the flower beds planted with bright cannas, foxgloves, and nasturtiums. My sister and I stand, holding hands, staring at the men in their striped shirts, their feet bare, digging with the evening light behind them. We listen as they sing in sad harmony before we are told not to stare, to move along, move along, girls.
We are always together in the pale green nursery where we sleep with our nanny—the blackboard along one wall and along the other side, the three beds, each with its green bedspread, a wooden bedside cupboard, and a round enamel chamber pot. We are together in the sun-filled breakfast room, where we swallow the thick porridge, the boiled mutton with caper sauce, the Marmite sandwiches with hot milk tea, the heavy English food that makes us sweat; we are together in the corridor with the Cries of London lining the wall—the series of prints showing nineteenth-century city vendors calling out their wares—and in the shadowy pantry with the pull-out bins for flour and cornmeal and the big bags of oranges that perfume the air. We are together in the sunshine in our identical smocked dresses, our sandals, our fair bare heads. We have identical Airedales, Dale and Tony, two big dogs with the same soft fluffy light-brown fur, who are not allowed into the house, but who roll around with us on the lawn and sleep in their kennels outside in the garden.
Together my sister and I explore the vast garden. We are left to roam in the sunshine, often barefoot, free to dream. We know all the flowers and trees intimately like the familiar characters in a favorite book.
They are part of our games, our imagination. They are half real, half made-up, part of our fantasies and our reality, our transitional objects.
We smash mulberries on our faces for war paint and play Cowboys and Indians. We climb the jacaranda trees. They are all good except for the last one on the left, which is wicked, and which we avoid assiduously. We set up a pulley between our respective trees and send it back and forth with little notes written to one another, though I cannot yet read or write properly, and we can call out to one another much more easily.