On Sunday mornings we all used to make a dash for my parents’ bedroom. Each child got a chance to sit on Daddy’s knees; he’d hold our little hands like reins. The sun shone in through the window, hazy with minute particles of dust.
Daddy would sing, ‘She’s got rings on her fingers, bells on her toes, elephants to ride upon, my little Irish rose.’ It never occurred to me to wonder who the Irish rose was or why she needed an elephant to ride upon, because the smell of jasmine, the love and laughter twinkling in the sparkly make-believe eyes that held the reflection of my laughing morning face, made me an enchanted princess in an enchanted kingdom. And it was enough.
One perfect spring morning years later, Gigi phoned. ‘Rahls, I’ve got bad news. It’s Daddy. He’s died.’
I cannot describe the absolute shock of my father’s death. Nothing in life prepares us for the mortality of our parents. From early childhood we’re taught to revere them, to defer to them on every dilemma. In adolescence we’re conditioned to rebel against them. But even the act of rebellion is an act of respect. They’re important enough to rebel against. Nothing in our society teaches us that they will die, that they won’t always be around to debate with and love and have revolving around us unconditionally. My father was so much larger than life that he seemed to transcend the laws of nature. He’d been sick so many times before, but this time it was flu, and his body simply stopped fighting.
Jason and I had just got engaged. My last grand memory is of the speech Daddy made at our engagement party, when he spoke about Jason being a Renaissance man. Now he was gone, so suddenly, so suddenly.
That night all of us congregated around the familiar old Georgian dining table. All except for David, who had yet to arrive on an aeroplane from Israel. I was still wearing the emerald-green dress I’d worn to take my exam to be an Ayurvedic practitioner. It occurred to me that Daddy would never see the dress or watch me practising Ayurveda. He wouldn’t walk me down the aisle or carry my baby or make Livicky laugh again. She wouldn’t laugh; no, she wouldn’t laugh again.
We ate food that kind friends and neighbours had brought for us. After a death, there’s suddenly so much food, as though eating will bring the loved one back. All too suddenly we were basking in the crazy legacy he’d left, a legacy of love. He didn’t make money and he didn’t make sense, but he made magic.
That Friday night around the table, a summation of all the Friday-night dinners of our lives, we all made perfect sense of it. We dealt with his death the way he had taught us to live: by laughing and loving and eating and talking nonsense and having great, glorious memories of the world he had brought us all into. ‘Child, hold my hand that I may walk in the light of your faith in me.’ And so we walked and lived and danced in the divine light that Daddy had carried around in his relenting heart.
There was always excitement and a sense of occasion surrounding Daddy. Children were drawn to him; he was terribly funny and not entirely predictable. Daddy ran his practice in a surgery upstairs, and sometimes he would come down from work at 10 p.m. and take us all in our pyjamas and slippers to Chinatown to celebrate his brilliant matric results – achieved thirty years previously. He sang. And he made us all laugh. He adored my mother. He insisted that we, the siblings, should never fight. Thank God we don’t.
I always valued my family and I rather enjoyed being Jewish. I love the traditions. I love the emphasis on family values and I love to light candles on a Friday night to bless the new week. After my father’s death, my family and my religion made the process of mourning bearable. The Jewish way of mourning is called sitting shiva. Every night for seven nights people came to the house to say prayers with the family. The rituals carried us through, picking us up and guiding us, step by step, through each emotion.
I was amazed at the incredible amount of love that poured forth. All my father ever held dear in the world was love – and that was his legacy. He had had a successful life, because he had realised his dream. People loved him; people around him loved one another. He might have left a financial mess, but all the people in his life were bundled up in love. Daddy neither cared for nor understood money. He was a people person. People filled our house at prayers for Daddy, and the overflow of the crowd stood in the garden.
We, the Fensters, cried a lot, but I think we laughed even more. I love my family. As a tribe, I think we are a marvel. I think we are the funniest, cleverest, happiest, craziest family in God’s entire green universe.
Daddy enabled our childlike faith in the world as a candy-coated journey, the belief that people are intrinsically good and want to help. Seeing the world through rose-tinted lenses was not only sensible, but the only way to look at life. Happy endings are the only logical conclusions, and never-never land exists wherever you lay your head.
Once, Livicky was abroad looking after her mother. We were left in the care of the domestic worker, Melita, and Daddy. We ate takeaways from Bimbos and ice cream from Milky Lane. Pnina got everybody to enter the Sunday Times colouring-in competition. A couple of days later we were playing in the garden when a twinkling strand of candy hanging out of the postbox caught David’s eye. On closer inspection it was discovered that the postbox was literally overflowing with sweets. Daddy explained that it was our prize for winning the colouring-in competition. Many years later, as we sat around the table at Shabbat, Gigi said, ‘Daddy, we didn’t really win the Sunday Times colouring-in competition, did we?’ But it didn’t matter, because all our lives we were the winners in the golden glow of Daddy’s light.
Of course there were flashes of twilight and uncertainty in my childhood. Daddy was expansive and funny, but his temper surprises me even now, in recollection, because it seemed to have had nothing to do with his naturally compassionate, gentle personality.
A common trait among doctors is an inclination to self-medicate, and he was not beyond it. Sometimes after nights of relentless insomnia he’d knock himself out with a sleeping pill for at least a day. Then appointments would be cancelled and the world would shut down. I don’t recall the household falling silent, but we knew something was wrong with Daddy. He’d been working too hard, worrying too much, wasn’t well physically. Livicky knew what to do with him. We didn’t. Sometimes even she didn’t.
Then he’d wake up and we’d hear Livicky’s laughter resounding through the house, the neighbourhood and even – or so it seemed – the world. Daddy would bundle us up in our pyjamas and take us to Café Wien to eat slices of Black Forest cake.
When I was in high school, I got a casual job waitressing on Saturday mornings. Until then, Saturday mornings had been reserved for Daddy and me to spend time together while my mother taught. One morning, he came into the restaurant and ordered a black filter coffee. When I brought him the bill, he said, ‘How much do they pay you in this dive? What about I double it and we split to the movies?’ Even to me, his daughter, his charm was irresistible and his logic irrefutable. So he paid the bill and we bolted.
On Sunday afternoons, when the streets of Johannesburg’s suburbs were deserted, we’d drive home from his ward rounds at the clinics and he’d play the soundtrack of A Chorus Line on the car stereo. We’d go dancing in his navy-blue Peugeot, swerving left to right along the broad streets framed by jacaranda trees. With a carpet of purple blossoms popping under the wheels, he’d swerve the car gracefully in time to the lyrics, ‘One thrilling combination …’
He was famous for being fun. It was only after his death, as I began to examine my own mood swings, my own expansive, impulsive behaviour, that I recognised the similarities in our patterns.