JOANNA DID. OSWALD WAS WRONG. There weren’t lots of books, but there were enough. The Fish Hoek Library stocked a couple, and she was given her own librarian to aid her navigation of the Dewey system. Joanna didn’t tell the woman that she did this for a living. She sat herself down with the five books and flipped to the descriptions of exile conditions in neighbouring countries.
There were also websites that provided verbatim interviews with two women who had been commanders in Umkhonto we Sizwe, and who now perched in government. Joanna thought that exile was probably good preparation for running a country.
If Viola had really been one of these women, Joanna was in more trouble than she thought. It was one thing to deal with someone who was rational, who was working to the same set of assumptions that you were. It was another to understand that the terror and the brutality of training had sent some people’s minds away. They looked ordinary on the outside.
Joanna, who had grown more and more uneasy with each transcript that she read, was stopped dead by one. The interview, with someone identified as Ms Mosikare, was dated October 1998. It seemed to kick at the screen. She was quoting what the men from mk had said to her in their debriefing with – Joanna went back to check – the Khulumani Victim Support Group.
You have ten thousand men, and you have about fifty women. So now, what do you expect? We can’t just sit and look at the women. We were sent to go and carry out missions. We used to stay in the veld for about a week. Here is a woman next to you. Nobody can say anything: if I want to sleep with a woman, I just sleep with a woman. And the woman, there is nothing that she can do, because she is the only one among twenty men. So we do it at gunpoint. Any time we want it.
Joanna felt only the helpless pity and wonder that she did when she understood that she was looking at something truly evil. It was terrible because it was so mixed with pity and with shame – and with the tiny suspicion that women were built for suffering. To be raped – because that’s what they meant, even though the men refused to use the word – continually, and by the brothers who were meant to love and protect you, was nothing less than torture.
Sometimes the woman would complain to a male superior, and sometimes the gang-rape would stop.
But sometimes it wouldn’t.
How did you lock that particular piece of your life’s story into place with the other bits? How did you wake up, come to work, chat easily with your friends, get married, all along hearing the bones of the fossil knocking around in the back room?
Joanna thought that you didn’t. Joanna thought that she would have to reassess everything she knew about the puzzle of Viola, boil her down to her constituent elements, move the parts of her varnished skeleton.
No wonder the woman was obsessed with Saartjie Baartman. It was her chance at another travelling name, a chance to reinvent herself decisively, to move into the space between the original body and the mind that had been detached from it.
She’s not the first to want to start over, said Doctor Renfield. Is she, Jo-Jo?
That night was the worst one she had had since James was born. She dreamed of women endlessly changing into animals, their hooves and horns pressing through the flesh. They kept asking Joanna, with their snouts that had been mouths, What is your travelling name, sisi? Tell us your travelling name.
The next morning Joanna was back at the partition, nauseous with lack of sleep.
“Knock, knock.” Her throat hurt the way it had when she cried herself to sleep as a child.
Oswald looked carefully at her face, and then he got up in a hurry and shooed her in. He sat Joanna in one of the faded chairs. Then he busied himself boiling water.
“I see you’ve done your reading,” he said with his back to her, his shoulders rounded under his shirt. Joanna watched each movement, domestic and familiar. It was like having tea with the Seven Dwarves. He took two cups down from the neat shelves above his head, where rows and rows of jars were ranked. Over his theatrical bustling – “I know how you people like your sugar” – Joanna determined to come to him with the new pieces of her thin-skinned puzzle. She was beyond embarrassment. What was the point?
She cleared the obstruction from her throat.
“Oswald, what happened to Viola?”
He measured the leaves, poured the steaming water, stirred them in the pot, his hands steady and certain.
“You should never stir the leaves,” he said. “You’re supposed to wait until they’re ready.” His mouth made a little down-turned smile.
“I’m serious. What happened to her?”
He tapped the teaspoon on the pot, a speaker at a public function.
“You know the answer, don’t you, Joanna?”
“Was she raped?”
Oswald wouldn’t look at her. He studied the spoon intently. “Why do you think she has never been married?”
“I never thought about it. Not everyone has to be married.”
“African women are expected to have husbands or boyfriends. Children, at least.”
“That’s pretty sexist, Oswald.”
“Do you think that’s sexist?” He let go of the spoon reluctantly and handed Joanna her mug of tea. He could look at her again. “I’m just the messenger, Joanna. I’m telling you how it is.”
“Is that why she’s so … difficult? Are we talking Post-Traumatic Stress?”
“I think there are a lot of obstacles for women like her.”
“Do you mean black women? Or academics?” They were on safe and general ground again.
“Both. They have had to fight for their position, do you agree?”
“Yes, but is that an excuse to be such a, such a—”
“Bitch?”
Joanna burst out laughing, the ice broken and the water below, against expectation, swirling and warm.
Oswald sat down in the other chair draped in a cloth – the red, black and white kind they sold at the station. It had roosters on it. He patted the arm.
“Gladness – my wife – won’t let me have this chair in the house anymore,” Oswald confided. “But I think it is a pity to throw something out just because it is old.” He smiled at her, an offering.
“You must be worried that you’re next,” said Joanna. .
“Why do you think I keep coming in?”
“I was wondering about that.” They weren’t joking. Not exactly. It was more that he took her arm as they were negotiating a zebra crossing. She sipped at the scalding tea. Hot, hot, hot! Kushushu! was what she said to James.
“But why? Don’t you like coming to work here, Joanna?” He didn’t ever ask a question to which he did not already know the answer. She spoke around her burned tongue. “I did at the beginning. But I have been … overtaken by events.”
“I think we all have, somewhat. But not to worry. Onse Viola might be going on to bigger and better things.” He wiggled his curly eyebrows at her.
“God, I hope so. She’s driving me crazy. How have you been able to stand it for so long?”
He smiled beatifically at her. Blessed are the meek, thought the atheist Joanna. Blessed are the pure of heart.
“I’ve seen her kind come and go. I started at the bottom, don’t forget. Lots of people did. You have heard of Hamilton Naki.”
“Of course. Didn’t Mbeki just give him the Order of whatsit? Mapungubwe?”
It was in all the papers. When Joanna got them the day after Jan – he read them first – the news generally seemed secondhand and obvious. But Naki’s story was one of those bizarre blips, another confirmation that life was odder than anything she could dream up. He had been Christiaan Barnard’s laboratory technician. Now that he was dead the rumours were flying about who, exactly, had performed the heart transplants. It didn’t help that Barnard was on record saying that, technically, Naki was a more competent surgeon than himself. He had also said that transplanting a liver required more skill than transplanting a heart. Joanna, whose heart and liver were equally abused, had to take his word for it.
“There are lots of those stories around now. The underdog who makes good. That’s why Saartjie’s Ghost is such a hit.”
“Correct,” said Oswald. “There has been a place for clever blacks all the way along, starting with that tsotsi Herry—”
“And ending with yourself? I never doubted it,” said Joanna.
“Some people, regardless of their time and place, are just exceptional.”
Viola and her hurts and grievances were receding, thought Joanna in surprise. Oswald was talking her down, soothing her with words. The hard history was there, but there were other ways to talk about it. It was like being married. Orlike what being married should be, Joanna told herself. She felt the muscles in her chest unclench as the tea worked on her body. It didn’t always have to be Jan’s way, where you thought that everyone was like you. Or Viola’s way either, bluster and trauma and force. Oswald was happy because he understood that contentment was a by-product. Happiness was conjured up when you were doing something else.
He had begun as a gardener, because what else was there for black men in a white world? (“I was less like my namesake in those days. My wife Gladness could get her arms all the way around my waist.”) He had moved across into the Museum as its janitor, then its manager, in a colonisation by accretion over the years. He was reliable in the office, immune to the odours in the tiny taxidermy room, and probably the only person, Joanna thought, who knew where everything was. “I killed them with kindness,” said Oswald.
He had found himself mentoring the new employees and doing the orientation talks for guides and visiting lecturers. The Head of Acquisitions had decided that Oswald was safe enough. It was a small but very significant step to presenting some of the lectures. Two decades later he was awarded a dual Masters Degree in Colonial Archaeology and Sociology by the University of Cape Town: an honorary award. Joanna could see the certificate where it hung in his bathroom. The Museum staff had always called him Doctor, but he wasn’t one. Oswald wouldn’t be putting up his hand, either, when they asked if there was a doctor in the house.
“Fluit, fluit. My storie is uit.” He got up for more hot water. “So, after all that, why are you asking me about Onse Viola?”
“I just don’t think I can trust her.”
Oswald nodded.
“And that,” he said, “is why I took the precaution of removing this to a place of safety.” He reached up and felt along the shelf, and then he took down a small, greenish glass jar.
He held it out to her. For a few seconds Joanna felt everything around her vanish. Oswald’s armchair was gone and she was standing on an open plain, where the wind was rushing over her head. It was pitched high and screaming, and it hurt her ears.
Inside the murky jar was a lump of tissue, like a sun-dried tomato. It didn’t look like it could bring down a government, but it very nearly had. The French minister who had accompanied Saartjie’s crate was still not giving interviews.
Joanna yelped, the softness of the story dissipated.
“Oswald! Why is that here?”
He shrugged, pleased at her reaction.
“Why do you think? She kept it.”
“But how? And, Jesus Christ! Why?”
“Lots of reasons, I think. Insurance. Leverage. Something to bargain with if the Institute falls foul of the new government. Maybe she just likes to know that she has it. Maybe she thinks she’s keeping it safe. I don’t know, because I’m not going to ask her.”
He took the jar gently back from Joanna and settled it back on the shelf, next to the teabags and the sugar, the horror in the nesting domestics.
What a good spot! cheered Doctor Renfield. She’ll never make her own coffee, so she’s not going to find it there!
“Why does anyone do anything?” Oswald was in philosophical mode. “Life is full of these little decisions that come back to haunt us. Something just seems like a good idea at the time.”
“But she’ll know. Won’t she miss it?”
“She’s away on the press tour for a few weeks. And then there’s the memorial service. She doesn’t even know that it’s gone.”