IN THE KITCHEN, JOANNA MADE HERSELF a cup of tea and slunk to her study to sulk. She roamed around the small room, painted apple-green because it was the colour of safety, of nursery schools and happiness and growth. Jan hated it. She had been so pleased to get the job at the Valley Museum! She was being paid a decent salary to do what she liked to do anyway – to read about old things, and then, if they were close enough, to go and look at them and then come back in dusty shoes and write them back to life. She hadn’t thought then that the neglected dead were better off.
Joanna had seen her share of archaeological sites, but she still got excited about the school outings the Museum sometimes organised for the previously disadvantaged. She was the only one who did. “More PDs coming,” Viola would say and roll her eyes. “Anything to avoid teaching.”
Joanna would have to set it all up, phone the bus companies – Silver Arrow (The Plus Bus!) or Christians’, driven by the eponymous Mister who ate his lunchtime sandwich behind the wheel as if he was stuck in the seat like a Lego man – and haggle over the fee. While Viola lolled like a seal in the drydock, Joanna would check and recheck what time the school started (the kids rolled in after nine a.m., and the teachers sometimes not at all), and make sure that there were drinks and snacks for a hundred hungry teenagers at a time. They didn’t bring their own; they didn’t have the kind of mothers who made lunch the night before. Joanna thought of them every time she packed James a set of Provitas and raisins, or cut up cheese and apple blocks, or measured out the yoghurt that would proof his bones against greenstick fractures. How did children survive?
Her favourite trip had been with a Grade Seven class from Ruth First High in Langa to see the ghost track at the lagoon around Langebaan. When they set out, Joanna was the only one who knew what they were going to find when they got there, hot and road-mad. Scientists called it Eve’s Footprint, the single print of a woman’s foot preserved in the mud and laid over with ash, hardened across the centuries. She had been hesitating, looking back at something behind her.
When it was first found, they posted guards around the print and the National Geographic Society came to cast it in resin although, like Peers Cave, you hardly ever heard about it now. The trace fossil was around 117 000 years old, even though footprints, of course, couldn’t be dated. Researchers like Joanna had had to look sideways instead at what lay around the indentations, the radioactivity of the surrounding quartz and feldspar where the sun was trapped and zeroed. She wondered now about the usefulness of examining the past. What is it that we think we’re going to find by going back and doing things over? Joanna thought. They aren’t going to change.
The bush started at Milnerton, and Joanna pretended to watch it from the passenger seat. The little birds flew up from the path of the bus, their tail feathers elongating like whips; their corporal colours changed as soon as they were outside the city limits. In the buses the kids shouted and played tinny carnival music from their cellphones for the two hours it took to bundle everyone down to the West Coast Fossil Park. They didn’t believe that they would see anything interesting, so they didn’t look out of the windows. Their jaws moved, grinding chips into pulp. Joanna sent her mind away from the noise behind her, but she had seen the driver clenching his teeth while they were still in the road outside the school. It’s going to ache tomorrow morning, Joanna wanted to tell him. It’s better to let it go through you.
They trooped into the tiny theatre, where the guide made them sit with the blinds down, like throwing a blanket over a budgie’s cage. The kids quieted, greedy for story. Secretly they wanted to be impressed.
Companies had been mining phosphates in the area since the 1950s. Chemfos hadn’t expected to turn over the white bones, so massive and heavy that they could not have belonged to any living species. The operator of the front-end loader thought he had found the elephants’ graveyard, but it turned out to be something more revelatory: one of the richest fossil sites in the known world, a separate species for each of the two hundred students on the trip. Still, it had taken another forty-odd years before mining came to a complete halt. Now companies were applying for licences again, a kilometre away from the heritage site. Joanna snorted. They waited for December to place their notifications in the newspapers. People didn’t read during the holidays. The companies gouged craters in the ground, discarded the work of millions of years, ransacked the body of the Earth, turned its pockets inside out. And all so that phosphates didn’t have to be trucked down to Cape Town from Phalaborwa. Fertiliser, thought Joanna. These fossils are used to make fertiliser!
The guide herded the Grade Sevens outside to the live excavation of the site. As they walked they raised the five-million-year-old dust so that it coated their legs. Inside each one of them there is a skeleton, thought Joanna. There is one inside of me.
The guide led them to a giant marquee that had been set up over the diggings, as if for a wedding. Walkways and guide-ropes criss-crossed the air in lines of latitude. They looked down on the earthworks below and the light came in, blinding as heaven or a Star Wars set. There was no river there now, but there had been, once, thousands of years ago. And where there are rivers, there are floods. The bodies of the drowned animals (sabre-toothed, gargantuan, helpless) had washed up into the single place where the river deepened and cut away the banks. There the corpses rotted, and their bones sank to the bed, changing the course of the water. The remains of the old-world animals lay there like alphabet blocks: in death they were vivid, simultaneous, white.
The kids filed back out into the sun, the less impressive footprint of Eve wiped from their memories. The light dazzled them; they were completely quiet for the first time. The guide shepherded them over to the long trays that had been set up at waist height and filled with local sand. He showed the kids how to sift the earth for fossils. Joanna, who should have been used to the magic, watched, unbelieving.SBut they were there – they were always there – the tiny bones and beaks and claws, enough to make the students keep searching, silent and intense, as if by looking hard enough they could find everything that had ever gone missing.
She thought that the alchemy was in the application.
On the bus back Joanna had watched the birds grow drab as the familiar skyline filled the windscreen. She knew then that she would have to try to talk to Jan – about wanting to quit her job and about the other, more horrible things that she was afraid were going to happen – even though she didn’t want to.
Joanna had always thought that staying together for the sake of the children wasn’t a solution. You just kept on rubbing against one another, didn’t you? You couldn’t just decide to live peacefully in the same house with someone: the place was permeated with a dreadful consciousness, the miasma of resentment.
The truism was dispiriting. She and Jan didn’t talk, or when they did, they asked each other questions that didn’t need answers. Before the move to Fish Hoek, things were bad going on terrible. He would shout from the shower, foaming at every pore: “Joanna. I don’t understand. I give you money to live on. I give you a space to write. What do you do with your time?”
He had towelled himself, maddened, vigorous, ready to leave her alone with the yowling James for another whole day, and then another whole night. And another, and another, and another. Life was bearable, thought Joanna, if you didn’t think of it as happening all in one go. She would spend stretches of time telling herself, If I can just get through the next hour, everything will be fine. It was thinking about the next hour, and the one after that, and then the next six months she still had to go before James was old enough for playschool that kept Joanna awake in the dark, chasing sleep, pleading with it to come to her. The Greeks had thought there was a literal, physical place that the dreamer visited: demios oneiron, the border between the village of wakefulness and the successive stages of sleep that would end in death. Joanna had never in her life wanted to travel more, to escape. How would you like it, she wanted to say, if everything you wanted to do was taken out of your reach?
Trapped like a trilobite under the duvet, she had stared at Jan blankly as he kitted himself out for work, knowing how it enraged him. “I want you to know what I’m thinking without my having to say it,” she would say under her breath. “I want you to read my mind.”
Familiarity and contempt: Joanna had never thought it would happen to her, and she was cross to find that it had. Why must the things that we love about our partners be inverted? If you knew at the beginning what was going to happen, she thought, you probably wouldn’t start. Those fossil animals at Langebaan were done with the struggle. They knew where they belonged. They didn’t marry and, married, find that kindness was a commodity. Joanna wished herself back at the start of it all – not because she would do anything differently, but because she still wanted to be able to choose.
Before they had been married, Jan had only dated black girls. Joanna couldn’t believe he had picked her, and she still didn’t really know why. The most she had ever managed to surprise out of him was near the beginning, when he’d seen her naked and blurted, “Your nipples are so pink.” Sex was magic. A man disappeared into someone else, and survived to tell the tale.
Her nipples weren’t pink anymore, that was for sure. Even when they fought Joanna kept the duvet over her boobs. Six months into the pregnancy she had been dismayed to see her aureoles darken and spread like stains on her chest, throwing her back to her marked eight-year-old face in the mirror. The first illustrations she’d searched for of Saartjie had presented the same hypersexuality: the woman had nipples like dinner plates, like targets. “They’ll go back to the way they were,” said the midwife, laughing at Joanna. And they had, sort of, but the brown stripe from her navel to her pelvis had taken a year to fade. Joanna had never felt more like an animal – and she wasn’t the type of woman who was in thrall to porn, either. Her body image had been fine before she’d had James. It was just horrible to have no say about what was happening. She had thought that she would feel more collegial towards other pregnant women now that she knew its stages, but the reverse was true. When she saw them on the street, as excited and proud of the bumps under their shirts as eleven-year-olds with breast buds, she felt only pity and horror because she knew exactly what they would have to go through.
It was not the sort of thing she could say to Jan. Joanna, who had discarded feminism like a scratchy corset after university, had never felt so acutely that there was a gender divide. No wonder Saartjie had seemed strange to the Cesars family, and to Dunlop, and to Reaux: she magnified the grossness of the human form. Female anatomy was punishing and crude. There was no getting away from it.
And Jan. Jan was so whole and handsome, his skin finely pored as suede. Even as he thrust his limbs angrily into the clothes he would need for the outside world, Joanna liked the way that he looked. Women didn’t lose the trick of looking at their partners from the outside. It was men who were bereaved of the knack of attention.
His foreignness tugged at Joanna.
“Scandinavians don’t age the way we do,” she had told Devi, who worked as a beauty therapist. “Their faces are always so smooth.”
“Well, they don’t get the same kind of sun exposure.”
“But they do. They tan nicely too. It’s not fair. It means you can never tell what they’re thinking.”
“They’re thinking about trolls or getting drunk.”
It turned out that Jan was more interested in the tokoloshe than his native trolls, but he remained other, exotic. Sometimes she wanted to poke him to see if he was real. It was comforting to Joanna that he would not grow old as she would grow old. He was eternal, dependable, there, a stone balanced against the weight of her unreliable childhood. If his fine skin sometimes looked like a mask, she could live with that. We make our choices, she told herself. It can’t always be disco-inferno. You don’t even have to like the person you love. Hundreds of thousands of people the world over live contentedly in their arranged marriages, or settle for safety instead of companionship. It isn’t a crime to compromise, so don’t be such a baby.
Joanna stood at her pinboard, holding the hot cup between her palms to send the blood to the tips of her fingers. She had no regrets about breeding with Jan, not really. She loved that James, against the odds, had inherited his blue eyes. So Jan lacked humour. It wasn’t the end of the world. The entire universe was powered by the humourless, millions of hamsters impervious to the undignified squeaking of their wheels. It was what made them so efficient. And besides, Joanna was funny enough for both of them. She was keeping her own yellowed copies of The Hee-Hee-Scree! Book and 1001 Jokes for Kids against the day that James learned to read, so that she would have another person in the house who thought she was amusing.
Some people – Jan, for example – never learned what was funny and what wasn’t. He liked to introduce her as “Joanna, my wife. She’s a doctor, but not the useful kind.” It was worse after the incident on saa when a grey-faced flight attendant put a hand on Joanna’s shoulder and softly said, “I see from the passenger list that you’re a doctor. Would you please come forward with me to Business Class? A passenger there needs your help.”
After that, she opted for a bureaucratic Ms, unless it mattered.
“I pretend to be interested in his photos,” Joanna complained to Devi. “He could at least try to read my books.”
The conversations that Joanna and Jan had had before the move always ended with his asking how much money she would make from Saartjie’s Ghost. “I’m not charging you for childbearing and child-rearing,” she told him, trying to keep things light so that she wouldn’t fly at him and flay the skin from his fluent face. “If it’s a problem, just add it to my bill.”
You’re a grown up, Doctor Renfield said sternly. You chose him. And now you have to live with him.
But now that she had actually quit her only steady source of income, living with Jan was going to be murder. They had made a child together, and Joanna was trapped. She kept thinking of the fat little Cupid riding shotgun on Saartjie’s rump in the cartoon, with the speech bubble that said, Take Care of Your Hearts! Women were packhorses, loaded with expectation: motherhood and money, sex and love. It was all too much. She just wanted to run away.
You’d have to lose a few kilos first, said Doctor Renfield spitefully. You’d have to turn back, otherwise. AWK-ward!
From the asylum of her green room, Joanna reran the miserable scene with Viola. What had she been thinking?
“Joanna, I warn you. This outburst will not be tolerated!”
“Oh, fuck off. I quit. I quit. I quit! Good luck finding somebody else to do all your work for you!”
But it was the final sally about Saartjie that had quite undone Joanna.
“You people won’t ever understand, will you?” Viola had hissed. You stupid mlungu! was the subtext. “The ancestors are crying for justice! They are outside you, just like your father is separate to you. But they are also inside you, just like your father’s blood runs through you. They are always here. They are in this room! They are telling me what to say to you!”
Joanna had no answer to that. She thought, That’s insane. Isn’t it? Your father’s blood! Or your mother’s. Did Viola really think that she was related to Saartjie Baartman?
She sat down at the pc, set the tea beside her, feeling clumsy and slow, a farmhand on a tractor. God, if she slouched, her stomach actually rested on her thighs! The stitching at the seams of her jeans was loosening. At least she still had the Doc. The Doc was a funny guy. And funny was what you needed on days like today.
She pressed the on button. From her Inbox came a ping.