At the Archive
I HAVE FRIENDS WHO, on visiting Israel for the first time, came back to report experiencing a powerful deliverance, a sense of recognition that at the extreme end is recognized by psychiatrists as Jerusalem syndrome: when previously balanced people set foot in the Holy Land and become instantly psychotic. (Lesser versions of this take place when Western teenagers set foot in India, Africa, or anywhere you can buy beads.) I had half wondered whether I’d have a similar reaction when I touched down in Johannesburg. Instead, to my relief, I have no reaction at all.
For the first time in six months, I’m in a place with no cues, no reminders. It is raining when I arrive; a mild English rain, not the African downpour my mother had threatened. In the early morning drizzle a taxi drives me through suburbs that look like Milton Keynes or Houston to an aggressively bland hotel in the north of the city.
I have been deliberately hazy about my arrival date. I want space to acclimatize before the pressure of a meeting. I am aware that what I’m doing is unfair, unethical, possibly unforgivable: flying halfway around the world to bother other people’s parents with questions I had been too afraid to ask my own. I’m also aware of the license I have. I’m the bereaved; I can do whatever I like and no one can say anything.
The hotel room is dimly lit and perfectly climate-controlled, the only distinguishing detail a note on my bed left by the hotel management advising me against leaving the premises alone on foot. My mother would have had a fit.
“Is it safe there?” I go through the old catechism, in my head now.
“Of course it’s safe. It’s a hotel, there’s a lock on the door.”
“But if there’s a fire you can still get out?”
I remove the note, lie down, and sleep for several hours with sudden, weightless abandon. Heaven, I think, might very well be a version of the high-end business hotel.
When I wake up, it’s still raining. I go downstairs and walk gingerly out into the parking lot. Nothing happens. I turn left and walk down a sidewalk running alongside the highway. There are glass-and-chrome business parks on either side and a well-manicured strip of grass down the middle, where black men in overalls are either sleeping or touting for work. They look like figures drawn on a laminate sheet, overlaid from a different reality entirely. They emphatically fail to molest me when I pass.
At the end of the street is a shopping mall, where I revel in the triumph of finding the adaptor plug I need and in the prices in Yo! Sushi, where even the purple plates are under a few dollars. By the time I get back to the room I’m euphoric. I have managed, in defiance of the hotel’s instructions, to walk along a road without incident. I pick up the phone and, looking in my notebook, turn to the first number on my list.
“Oh, my darling!” Joan’s voice bursts down the line as if released from a can. “Where even are you? In your hotel room?! Oh, I can’t bear it—what would your mother say? I’ll get Ted to drive over this instant and pick you up—”
“Oh, Joan, that’s lovely of you but—”
“I can have the spare room all ready. It’s a bit cluttered, but alone in your hotel room, and is it even safe there? Oh, I’m almost crying, I”—a muffling as her hand goes over the mouthpiece—“in her hotel room, yes I’ve told her, oh, I can’t bear it—”
“Joan, it’s the Crowne Plaza.”
A howl down the telephone. “How much must it be costing!”
I am out of sync, generationally, with Joan’s children because my mother had me so late. There is a more than twenty-year age gap between Joan’s daughter Jennifer and me. “Dear Aunty Paul,” wrote Jennifer to my mother once a year on her birthday. I reassure Joan I am happy in the hotel and arrange to meet her in two days’ time. I turn to the next number on my list.
• • •
THE PHONE RINGS for a long time before someone picks up.
“Hello?” The voice is faint. My heart drops as if the cable snapped.
Fay and I have spoken several times by now; there should be no taboo in it. But ringing from a distance of a few miles seems a different proposition to ringing her from England. Those conversations were distant, logistical, hampered by a bad line. Now, I’m nervous. It occurs to me it’s possible I’m about to embarrass myself. I have come all this way to claim a connection everyone else involved might think expired long ago.
“Fay, it’s Emma.”
“Emma!” Her voice soars. “Are you here?”
“I’m here!”
“Where are you?”
My aunt does not object to me being in a hotel; boundaries are being observed, as are certain formal preliminaries necessary when white South Africans of a certain age encounter anyone, of any age, from anywhere else.
I ask after her daughter, Victoria, and after telling me where she is and how she’s doing, my aunt assures me unbidden that her children were brought up to respect all human life. When her son was thirty-six, she says, he thanked his mother for teaching him to see everyone as equal, so that while some of his contemporaries are struggling to adjust to the new South Africa, he is not. When she herself goes on holiday, says my aunt, Maria, her maid, stays in the house and sleeps in the guest room like anyone else.
“It’s just so wonderful you’re here,” she says. Her voice is low and quiet. There is an urgency to the conversation that was absent from the previous ones.
“I’m glad I’m here.”
Fay doesn’t know precisely where all her siblings are, but there is a chain of command through which they can, if necessary, be reached and which is how news of my mother’s death spread. She tells me some family news, which I receive like a drink of water after crossing a desert. Since leaving Johannesburg, her sister Doreen has sold all her furniture and practically become a nomad. “I couldn’t,” says Fay. “I need the—what’s the word? Security.”
“What about Tony?” I ask.
“Tony is Tony. He means well. It just doesn’t always come out right.”
“And Steven?”
“Steven is Steven.”
I sit on the edge of the bed in the gathering gloom. The only light in the room is from the spots above the minibar and the glowing LED of the alarm clock. My aunt tells me about these people I have heard of all my life, whose characters, like those from a novel, I am familiar with as archetypes: Arty, Sporty, Sneaky, Fighty, Saintly, Baby, and Dead—although the designations overlap. By the sound of it everyone is a bit fighty and more than one is dead. “Fay was my baby, Steve was my baby.” Out of all of them, Fay, I think, is the one who will tell me what I want to know.
“You know your mother was called Pauline before she changed it to Paula?” says my aunt.
“Yes, I know.”
Fay says this was because “the first thing she did when she got off the boat in England was to buy a pair of shoes, and the label in them said Paula, so that’s what she called herself.” I laugh indulgently. There is nothing in the Story of How I Arrived on These Shores about this. Besides, my mother would never have named herself after a pair of shoes. She changed her name because she’d always thought “Pauline” was soppy.
Fay tells me my mother used to take her to the central library in Johannesburg when she was a little girl. She made her read Anne of Green Gables. “Me, too,” I say.
She tells me the story of Derek, an old boyfriend of my mother’s who once visited the house and made a profound impression on the younger siblings. He owned a station wagon—no one could understand why my mother didn’t marry him. She and Derek were going to a dance. When he came to the door, says my aunt, my mother stepped out in an exquisite navy dress with a white collar. Everyone gasped. And then, crossing the room, she caught the dress on a baby’s wicker pram belonging to Fay and it ripped. Fay was seven; it was just after Christmas. My mother didn’t shout, says Fay, which made her feel even worse. “I remember it so clearly. It was such a beautiful dress. I don’t remember Derek at all. But I remember that dress. She looked so beautiful. I felt terrible when it ripped.”
Several times, we push up against the boundaries of what can and cannot be said, buffeting and retreating like a boat trying to dock in bad weather. When I say, tentatively, that I find it useful to write things down sometimes, I sense her bristle and withdraw.
I tell my aunt I need a few days to settle in, and we arrange to meet at the weekend. I will stay over at her house on Saturday night and we’ll have Sunday to catch up. She asks what I’d like to eat and should she buy yogurts, “or yoggies, as your mother used to call them. I can just hear her saying it.” So can I. A chill passes through me. “Yogurt would be lovely,” I say.
Toward the end of the conversation, my aunt says, “I feel terrible, I never knew her mother’s name.” I sometimes forget they had different mothers, or any mothers at all, so absent from my mother’s narrative was her stepmother. Fay has barely mentioned Marjorie either.
“Her mother’s name was Sarah,” I say.
“Sarah!” says my aunt. We are so desperate for signs. “I had a plant called Sarah once. I gave it to my sister Doreen to look after. She killed it, of course.”
Fay asks me what I’m doing the following day. “Oh,” I say vaguely, “this and that.”
• • •
THAT EVENING IN THE HOTEL bar I take out my journal. It was given to me by my friend Merope as a leaving present, with an inscription on the flyleaf: “I am your South Africa book. Be nice and write clever thoughts in me.” If she hadn’t given it to me, I’m not sure I’d be keeping much of a record. Despite my journalistic camouflage, I’m going about this whole thing while looking through my fingers, as if watching a scary scene in a horror movie. It’s not that I want to find out what happened so much as to have found out, in the same way, I think, that my mother didn’t want to tell me so much as to have already told.
The bar is off to one side of the lobby, furnished in dark wood and with the TV tuned to an American sports channel. Lone businessmen sit, jackets off, ties loosened, craning up at the telly. I order a double vodka tonic, and feeling pleased with myself, record the day’s events: the buying of the phone adaptor (“panic, panic over”); how much my lunch at Yo! Sushi cost; my miraculous walk along the highway. I note my aunt’s determined “nothing surprises me” outlook and the strange, feverish tone of our conversation. I write joyfully of Joan’s joie de vivre.
In a separate notebook I keep all the names, numbers, and addresses, the evolving to-do lists and impressions scribbled at angles, to be transcribed later. It is these notes, unthinkingly produced, that, looking back, strike me as the truer record of what happened.
• • •
GIVEN THE CHOICE, I would rather see things written down first; you can control the flow of information just by looking up and don’t have to do anything particular with your face. The thing I had concealed from my aunt is that I am not going to sleep late or wander around the neighborhood acclimatizing the following day. I am going to hire a car and driver from the front desk and go to the National Archives in Pretoria. Taking no chances—I don’t imagine it’s a popular route—I plan for the trip as if driving myself. I study the map and in the second notebook scrawl: “Hamilton Street, Arcadia, via Mears, Jeppe, Beatrix, right into Savage, right into Hamilton.” If all goes to plan, I’ll photocopy the paperwork, take it back to the hotel, and, with a large drink in hand, read it at my leisure.
The next morning is overcast again. There is a women’s health conference taking place in the hotel and you can’t wait at the elevators or stand in line at the breakfast buffet without overhearing women wearing laminated badges loudly discussing chlamydia. Outside the foyer, security men in yellow vests mill redundantly around.
When the maroon BMW pulls up, I shake hands with the driver, who introduces himself as Paul, and say I will need him all day; after he drops me at the address in Pretoria, he will have three hours to kill before coming to collect me. While speaking, I monitor myself for signs of condescension, overcompensation, madame syndrome, visible race or class guilt, or any other tonal imperfections, while wondering if he is ripping me off. The rate is so high it is practically Western. Paul nods and we get into the car.
Pretoria, the capital, is not known for its charm; Johannesburg has the charm, the guile, and energy, although I have yet to see any of it. We pull off an arterial road into a leafy car park and Paul lets me out. He promises to be back at the arranged time.
I don’t match the profile, I suppose. I am too young to be here in the middle of a weekday, a lone female arriving at the guard hut eccentrically on foot. The two men in the booth eye me suspiciously. I slide my passport across the counter. They will see it, I think. They will see I am bringing unruly emotions into what is, after all, a library environment and they will not let me in.
“Purpose of visit?” says the man.
“Family tree.”
• • •
THE ROUTINE IS REASSURINGLY FAMILIAR. As at Colindale, I check my bag and jacket and go into the reading room with my pens in a plastic bag, as if for an exam. The smell hits me first: old paper, plastic book covers, more than one patron who has not showered recently enough. The comforting smell of every public library in the world.
The reading room is low-tech, a card-index system in one corner, a bank of photocopiers against the wall. The only decor is a Soviet-style poster of a woman raising her fist to the sky, under a slogan for the country’s biggest trade union. The procedure seems to be to fill in a slip, then wait in your seat until your order is brought up from the vaults. Every now and then a woman with a gray bun wheels a trolley across the floor, unloads a pile of ledgers, and leaves again, whereupon elderly men in khaki shorts fly over from all corners of the reading room to raid what she’s left, like beetles carrying off cubes of sugar.
I have no expectation of finding anything. That the numbers in my notepad might correspond with a physical object in this building or in the vaults under it seems to me as improbable as stumbling on a message in a bottle which, when unfurled, has your own name upon it. Not just your name, but your family’s darkest secrets, typed up by a third party and signed by witnesses. It seems outrageous that such a thing might exist, under cover of neutrality, on cool, indifferent paper and on a shelf with other papers just like it. Calmly, I sit and wait, and while I wait, I watch these quiet, elderly people grazing over open ledgers. Some of them have put on ties and jackets to come here. Good, kind people, I think, researching their family trees to pass on to their grandchildren and redeem in themselves a sense of continuity and purpose.
The first shock is that a file matching my request comes up from the vaults. The second shock is logistical. When I walk over to the table and find it, I see that photocopying it will be out of the question. It’s a huge ledger, labeled on the spine with a single year and containing every court case heard in the district in that period. It’s too overstuffed to fit on the copier. I haul it back to the table and, looking at the clock, see I have two hours to transcribe by hand whatever I find.
I have no month to go by and start paging through from the beginning. It is like playing a game of Russian roulette, each page containing the split-second possibility of an explosion in my face. A couple of breaking and enterings. A Mrs. Potgeiter molested in her own home. A long legal debate on what does and does not constitute rape. Mrs. Potgeiter’s assailant got twenty-five years, but he was black, and it becomes apparent, after thirty or so pages, that the only successfully prosecuted trials were ones such as this; the legalistic relish for the black man attacking the white woman rises up off the pages like mist. I am so engrossed in Mrs. Potgeiter and her troubles that when, three-quarters of the way in, I turn a page and see my mother’s name, I don’t keel off my chair, but take it as more or less part of the continuum.
Three words leap out of the summary page: “incest” and “not guilty.”
My mother never used that first word. I’ve never used it even in my head. I look up to see if anyone is watching me. I look down at the page again.
I take in the name of the prosecutor, Britz, and the defendant, acting “for himself.” The case has been brought, I see, not in my mother’s name, but in my aunt’s. Of course. At twenty-four, my mother was too old to be medically useful. I do the math. Fay was twelve.
There is a faint cough. I look up to find a man in the national costume of his people—khaki shorts, khaki shirt, khaki knee-length socks with a comb tucked into them—craning in my direction. In an avuncular sort of way he asks what I am doing here. “Family tree,” I say, and give him a look I hope communicates just how happy it would make me to see him go down, Leonard Bast–like, in a shelving accident. “Well, if you need any help,” he says, and writes his e-mail address on a scrap of paper.
I return to the ledger. It takes me a few moments to figure out what I am reading. There seem to be two charge sheets and two cover sheets recording verdicts from two different trials. In one, my grandfather is found guilty; in the other, not guilty. They are separated by a period of several months. I finally figure out what this signifies: the passage of the case from its preliminary hearing at the local court—the South African equivalent of a grand jury, held to determine whether there is sufficient evidence in the case for a full criminal trial—to the High Court in Johannesburg. He was found guilty at the first hearing and not guilty at the second. I flip the pages back and forth. Guilty/not guilty. Guilty/not guilty. On such words entire life histories turn.
I flip the page and the first hearing begins. There is a list of witnesses, with my mother’s name near the bottom. I see that her youngest sister, then seven years old, was required to appear as a witness. Her brother Tony is on the list, and her sister Doreen, but no sign of Mike. Her stepmother is the first witness.
A few pages in there are two sets of diagrams, cross-sections of the human body, beneath the names of the twelve- and the seven-year-old, with arrows alongside which a court surgeon has signed. It takes a moment for me to make sense of them. Oh, injuries. I look up from the page.
Over the next two hours, I transcribe the notes, shoulders hunched, hand cramping, brain disengaged. I don’t process much beyond the necessity of copying. It is a physical exercise. When I get to the end of the first trial, I turn a page to find a sheaf of shorthand notes—the original court records. I get to the end of these and there’s nothing more. I look and look again. There are no records from the second trial. It will be impossible to tell how the testimonies changed. (Later, to be sure I hadn’t missed anything, I employed a researcher with shorthand skills to go to the archive and translate the notes at the back of the file. She e-mailed me the findings and, as I suspected, they simply duplicated what I had. “What a terrible thing,” she wrote in her note. “My heart broke reading this. Who could do such a thing to children?” I hadn’t owned to the family connection and was mortified, both to see it reflected like this in a stranger’s reaction, and to have put this nice lady through an ordeal. “Yes,” I replied. “It is awful, isn’t it.”)
After returning the ledger and packing up my things, I leave the reading room, cross the car park, and to the concern of the guards in the booth, say I am going for a walk. I turn left and blindly climb a hill, which it turns out leads to the parliament buildings. These are large, classical structures with a panoramic view over Pretoria. Opposite is a small garden, behind a chain-link fence. I step over the fence and sit on a bench, looking out over Pretoria in the direction of Johannesburg. There are large red flowers, which I think I recognize as protea; I’ve seen them illustrated on Joan’s airmail letters. Flightless birds hop about on the lawn.
I am exhilarated. I have read the contents of the file and yet here I am, alive, sitting on a bench in the afternoon sun. I experience a surge of vindictive triumph and conduct a long exchange in my head with the dead man, who I don’t permit to speak. “Right, you fucker, you can answer to me.” This is mine, all of this. I am driving it now. “You have to own it”—one of those phrases in the therapeutic lexicon I have always despised, but which suddenly seems apt. I will own it so hard it breaks apart in my hands.
• • •
ON THE WAY BACK to the hotel I ask Paul to make a detour. From the court papers, I have addresses for the family going way back, including the place where my mother lived in Johannesburg at the time of the trial. It was here, during the course of one afternoon, that she resolved to carry on living.
“Do you know where Soper Road is?”
“Soper Road?” says Paul. He looks at me through the rearview mirror.
“Yes.” He carries on staring, so I add, “Someone I knew used to live there.”
We drive through the city in his air-conditioned BMW, around people pushing huge, baled loads, men selling cigarette lighters and smaller things from the depths of their palms, children running about in T-shirts that look as if the holes in them are holding up the fabric, like a viaduct. Paul hits the central-locking button with a flamboyance designed, I think, to enforce my sense of dependence on him.
At the corner of Wolmarans and Twist the names become familiar, not because I’ve been here before but because they borrow from London. The mansion blocks, great 1950s monstrosities, bear faded signs that read “The Hilton” and “Park Lane” and “The Devonshire” and then, incongruously, “Graceland.” Their windows are broken, stuffed with newspaper and front-loaded with balconies groaning under bits of trashed wicker furniture. It is as after a flood, when the water has drained, leaving tidemarks up the wall and the furniture stacked, teetering, in corners; the work of an angry poltergeist.
“What number?”
I peer through the window and count them down. The numbering is erratic. Either the place has been demolished or the street at some point renumbered. We park approximately where it should have been, and Paul glances nervously in his mirrors. I wait for something to happen, for my heart to respond to the moment or for my body at least to override the air-conditioning and break into a sweat. “I don’t think you should get out,” says Paul. I had thought that grief, like cat litter, had no secondary uses, but there it is. Blankness.
“OK. Let’s go.”
When I get back to the hotel, I go straight to the business center. The name of the judge at the High Court seemed familiar. I feed his name into a search engine and stare at the results. I feel sorry for all of us, then, shameful bit players on the periphery of history. Six years after acquitting my grandfather, this man had, briefly, become the most famous judge in the world. In 1963, while the world watched, Justice Quartus de Wet presided over the Rivonia treason trials at the High Court in Johannesburg, at the end of which he sent a young Nelson Mandela to Robben Island for twenty-seven years—a piece of exceptional leniency, it was thought at the time, since he was expected to be given the death penalty.
“Oh, love,” says my dad when I ring him from the room. “If you want me to fly out, I’ll come tomorrow.”
“No, it’s OK. I’m OK.”
I type the afternoon’s notes into my computer. I don’t look at them again for three years.