Once we were settled in the apartment, I took Wade on a tour of my South African childhood, starting with Sunny Way Preparatory School, then the Rustenburg Junior School for girls. We visited Rustenburg while school was in session, walking about the playground surrounded by girls who ignored us as if grown-up visitors were commonplace. The school uniform hadn’t changed since I left in 1969—a cornflower blue tunic and tam, black shoes and white socks. I tried to imagine a foursome of these girls sailing away from home forever on the Edinburgh Castle as my sisters and I had, Canada their final destination. I couldn’t believe I’d gone to school there. It was as if I was remembering someone else’s life. “It makes me feel kind of sad,” I said.
“Time sick,” Wade said. “It’s not quite the same as homesick.”
I nodded. But I was really feeling nostalgia for a life I’d never had. I wiped a tear away, but laughed when I saw how concerned he looked. “I’m just being silly,” I said.
From Rustenburg, we went to Westerford, where I’d gone to high school in 1975, when we’d been back to Cape Town for Dad’s sabbatical. Older, much more subdued girls hung about on the playground in small groups, their expressions ironic, detached, aloof, as if they knew exactly where they were headed after Westerford, which they had already outgrown. The uniform was also the same as the one I had worn—a maroon plaid tunic and a boater hat with ribbons of maroon and gold, just like the one that was on the dresser in our apartment, one of my few school souvenirs. Wade had taken a liking to it in St. John’s and suggested that we bring it with us.
“I was not happy here,” I said. “I just wanted the year to be over so I could get back to Canada and my boyfriend.”
“You had a boyfriend at thirteen?” I said.
“No,” I said. “I just thought I did. His name was Jeff and I worshipped him from afar. But he wasn’t the reason I was unhappy here. I was the Anne Frank fruitcake and I wasn’t sure we’d ever leave. I thought I’d be stuck in South Africa forever. I thought Mom and Dad might have sold the house on Freshwater Road to pay for the trip. I was terrified that Dad would get a job at the University of Cape Town. I was alone a lot. Bethany had stayed in Canada, at Dalhousie. She was fifteen—another grade skipper, like me—and only came to visit at Christmas, and Gloria was in Quebec at Laval. I was stuck with Carmen and Fritz. Carmen had only just met him but she was already spending some nights in his house on the Flats. I woke up in their house a lot of weekend mornings having no idea how I got there.”
As we toured, Wade asked me the names of flowers, plants and trees and, almost always, I drew a blank. “I’ve seen them a thousand times,” I said, “but I don’t know what they’re called. I should know. I’m a terrible guide, aren’t I? You know the name of everything that grows in Newfoundland.”
“Only because not much grows there,” Wade said. I laughed.
“I know one version of South Africa’s history,” I said. “The Boers who settled the cape before the Bantu even found it, the Great Trek. Most of it’s not true. But the true history—well, I only know bits and pieces. The true history of South Africa isn’t easy to find in South Africa.”
The effects of it were easy to find, though. I wished that I could hide them from him. Everywhere—on benches, the gates of swimming pools and beaches, the doors of public bathrooms, train cars and restaurants—there were signs that read “Blanke” or “Nie-Blanke,” Afrikaans for “White” and “Non-White.” Wade said he doubted that he would ever get used to seeing them or having to abide by them.
I told him, “I’m not saying I think it’s right, but you might be surprised how fast you get used to it.”
We went by cable car to the top of Table Mountain, from which the view in all directions was spectacular—the sea, the city, the harbour, Devil’s Peak, Lion’s Head, the Twelve Apostles mountain range, with Max and Gloria’s house in the shadow of the first Apostle. And the semicircle of black townships in the distance from whose outdoor fires streams of smoke rose straight up in the air. Gopher-like rodents called rock dassies, seeking shade and safety, peered out from under every ledge and bush. A tourist, definitely North American, declared loudly to his wife that he hadn’t travelled five thousand miles to photograph cute rats.
It was sunny but somewhat chilly up there because of the onshore wind. Wisps of low-level cloud drifted by like fog. “I like to watch the ships,” I said, staring out at the sea. “They always look so purposeful, going somewhere, making progress.” Wade stood behind me and wrapped his arms around me. “Snow fell up here when I was three or four,” I said. “Enough to collect on the ground and stay all day long. The whole city went nuts. Everybody crammed onto the cable cars and came up here to touch real, natural snow for the first time in their lives. Snowball fights broke out. The snow didn’t last until the next day, but I’ve seen newspaper photographs. Dad didn’t think it was any big deal because he had seen snow plenty of times in Holland, but Mom was pretty amazed. Apparently, they took my sisters and me up here so we could play with it, but I don’t remember.”
For a few days, we went to restaurants and, for next to nothing, dined on steak-like slabs of butterfish, rockfish, kaberle—at least Wade did. I had one Cobb salad after another and never finished one. “This country is not used to vegetarians,” I said. “These salads are pretty bad. What I wouldn’t give for an omelette and some Brussels sprouts.”
Wade laughed but I thought he suddenly looked homesick.
What I didn’t tell Wade: When the family went back to South Africa without her in 1975, Bethany came to Cape Town for Christmas and brought with her a book that contained the painstakingly calculated calorie counts of every known food and recipe. A friend of hers had lent it to her, her only friend, a skinny girl named Sarah Barnes. I had never thought of food in terms of calories before.
Bethany regarded herself as neither odd nor ill, and the rest of the world as both. For her, the sole point of living was to rid herself of the fat that seemed to increase the less she ate. She’d eat the white of an egg but be unable to stand the weight of it in her stomach.
The two of us, naked, side by side, looked at ourselves in the bathroom mirror one day. “Methinks I doth ingest too much,” Bethany said. The bathroom scales told her she’d lost weight. I told her that she had. But mirrors, photographs and the looks she got from every person she encountered told her otherwise. Almost all of her energy was spent devising ways of avoiding food without being caught doing so, and getting rid of food she had no choice but to eat lest she arouse the suspicion of people who, inexplicably, couldn’t see how fat she was. When our parents had people in during Christmas and insisted on showing off their beautiful daughters, Bethany wore light, full-length dresses that bared nothing but her arms, seeming to think she was fooling everyone.
Bethany cried in my arms for hours the night before she went back to Canada. She only spent a short time in Halifax before returning to St. John’s to stay with a girlfriend who had a basement apartment in her mother’s house. She soon wound up in hospital after taking an overdose of pills. She was found on the kitchen floor by her friend, who had been brought downstairs by the incessant howling of her dog. My parents and I did not go back to Canada. Bethany insisted that we stay put, that she had “learned her lesson” and was intent on recovering, which she thought she’d be better able to do if she had no choice but to fend for herself. I begged Mom and Dad for us all to go home, but Bethany had chosen the words she knew they wanted to hear. “She’s hit rock bottom,” Dad said, ignoring me when I reminded him that her being smart enough to make it into Dalhousie at fifteen hadn’t made her old enough to live on her own. “That was her choice,” he said. “She has nowhere to go but up. She’s right. We mustn’t interfere.”
Word came from her that she was getting better, then better still. “She’s recovered,” Mom proclaimed one evening at the dinner table as though Bethany had rallied from some form of womanly fatigue. (Her illness was never given a name in our house.) Soon, it was as if she had done nothing that couldn’t be explained away or ignored completely, nothing as ostentatious as dropping out of college in mid-term and being hospitalized and hooked up to a feeding tube. Even Bethany and I did not acknowledge between us in our letters that she had had a full-fledged breakdown and a long stay in a hospital.
Nor did anyone openly acknowledge that I was in decline, reading Anne Frank’s book for hours on end, writing in my diary furiously, as if I was trying to write a message to Anne Frank about the imminent arrival of the Gestapo before someone snatched my pen away. Our parents pointed to my perfect grades as proof that, isolated, introverted, friendless as I was, there was nothing more wrong with me than that I was going through a phase.
In September, when Bethany wrote to say that she was back in college, I felt betrayed—she had got better and I had got worse. She had left me to fend for myself. I began to dodge school. I dodged it for almost three weeks before the principal informed my parents. I spent every school day of those three weeks riding the Southern Line rail route that ran east for several stops from Cape Town station before it turned at a right angle and headed south, eventually hugging the western coast of the cape. A round trip cost less than half a rand, leaving me enough of my lunch money to buy a melktert, a very bland, very light pastry, near the end of the line in Simon’s Town at Mrs. Top’s Tea House. Some days, one melktert was the only thing I ate till I got home.
Twenty-eight stops from Cape Town to Simon’s Town. It got so that I could riddle them off, forwards and backwards, as fast as I could say the alphabet. For three weeks, my days, and my South African childhood, were measured out in station stops: the first and last stop was Cape Town, where the station let you out at Adderley Street, the main street downtown; Rondebosch, from which I walked to the Rustenburg Junior School for Girls; Kenilworth, where a woman named Mrs. Kennedy had taught me how to swim; Muizenberg, five minutes from the beach that we went to almost every weekend of the summer, where row upon row of brightly coloured change huts seemed to sparkle in the sun; Mowbray—there was a horse farm there that we used to visit because my mother had been a good rider as a child and wanted us to be good riders too, but we never took to it; Kalk Bay, where my mother went to the Star of the Sea Convent School and she and Dad first lived together after they were married—Gloria came home to that house after she was born; Newlands was my stop when I went to Westerford in 1975—there was a brewery close by the station that sent forth the sickening smell of barley malt; St. James, the most nondescript of all the stops; Plumstead, my favourite for no reason but its name; Fish Hoek—there was a marina there that Tante, a distant relative of my mother, painted from a postcard. Ptolemy, the 150-year-old tortoise that lived in Tante’s backyard, more or less immobile, once snapped at my mother and sent her running to the house as if she thought Ptolemy was chasing her. It was the only time I ever saw Tante laugh. Glencairn. Directly across from the station was what had once been my grandmother’s tiny house, and behind the station was the open sea. Mrs. Top’s Tea House was a short distance down the road toward Simon’s Town. There was a large naval base at Simon’s Town, the end of the line.
Because I boarded at Cape Town station, and reboarded for the return from Simon’s Town, I was always able to get a window seat, and I often opened my window to feel the breeze and smell the sea. A round trip, fifty-six station stops, took about three and a half hours. I sometimes did two in one day. I read and scribbled in Het Achterhuis almost constantly, looking up from it when the conductor came by to punch my ticket, or when he or one of the regular commuters spoke to me, which they did more and more often as the days went by.
So as not to be too obviously skipping school, I changed out of my Westerford uniform in the bathroom at Cape Town station and put on a T-shirt, a pair of jeans and sandals, stuffing my school uniform into my knapsack. Still, the conductor repeatedly asked me how old I was and why I was riding the train day after day for no apparent purpose but to use it as a place to read the same book over and over—I only wrote my diary at home. “It must be a very good book,” he said. I answered him by nodding or shaking my head, or shrugging. “Where are all your friends?” he often asked. Shrug. Then he answered my shrug with one of his own and moved on.
Fifteen return trips. During the first half of each, I felt hopeful, as if I was escaping my life, but on the way back, as I drew closer and closer to Cape Town, I felt as desolate as if I was being taken back to prison. More than once, at the southern end of the line, I got off the train and surveyed the sea, wondering if I could stand the cold of it long enough to drown myself. Sometimes I cried, my face pressed flat against the window of the train as if to better examine something that had caught my eye. Men twice or three times my age often sat across from me, blatantly poring over every inch of me as if they were committing me to memory for future use. This often prompted the conductor to say, “You shouldn’t be travelling alone,” which sent the men scattering to other seats with their briefcases or satchels pressed against their crotches. Sometimes, when the train swayed from side to side, I closed my eyes and wondered what it would be like if it jumped the tracks.
Africa. Africa. Surely it was possible to vanish into a continent the size of Africa. Other people leading other lives got on board or left the train; other people leading other lives stared at the train as it went by, or watched it from the windows of their houses, looking like they wished that they were on it, that they could trade places with the solemn-eyed girl who clearly didn’t understand how fortunate she was.
When Anne Frank was fourteen, she had already spent a full year in the Secret Annex, pent up with seven others, hiding out from men who meant to kill her. I put myself in her place, pictured myself knocking down the bookcase that hid the secret entrance, climbing over it and running down the stairs just to revel for one second in the freedom of the outdoors before I was arrested for being born a Jew.
Eventually, the principal phoned my mother, who asked me what I’d been doing for the past three weeks. I told her the truth about everything but the book, and assured her that I was getting one hundred in every one of my courses, which was true because the only grade in which they could find room for me was a year behind the last one I’d completed in Newfoundland.
From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
RETURN TO HOUT (1985)
At least we’re in one place again,
though one of them has brought a man
who thinks that I’m an also-ran.
For years she doesn’t meet a soul
and then she brings a writer home
(she’ll only settle for the best)
a real one, not some hobbyist.
The poor girl even lives in code:
with him she’s found the motherlode.
The world’s not what it seems to be;
it’s something else that only he
can understand, a mystery
that he will solve, or maybe not—
he might not get around to it.
The boy’s a message meant for me;
he’ll be a genius, wait and see.
So far a master piece of ass,
someday he’ll write a masterpiece—
compared to him, I’ll seem absurd.
He’s waiting for the right first word;
until it comes, from heaven sent,
my charity will pay his rent.
They’ll wind up in some basement room,
then she’ll get bored and come back home,
or he will find a paying job
but never be like Bill or Bob.
He’ll find something ordinary,
permanently temporary.
It won’t be what he really does;
he’ll find some fellow geniuses.
They’ll know his worth and he’ll know theirs;
they’ll each make fun of their careers.
They’ll read their work to one another;
“The others write such awful rubbish—
we’re not like them, we should be published.”
What will be his consolation?
Posthumous appreciation.
He’ll tell himself that, when he’s gone,
they’ll see, at last, that they were wrong.
She fell for him; who must I thank?
Who else but Her, that fraud, Anne Frank.