My Holy Trinity

“Stop it,” my mom says.

“What?”

“You know what.”

“WHAT?”

“Don’t what me! You know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t.”

“That bloody twitch. That’s what.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Oh yes you can. You just don’t want to. You’re doing it to annoy me.”

“No, I’m not. And anyway, I got it from you. It’s your genes.”

“My genes, hey? Tell that to your father next time we visit him. And don’t be cheeky.”

>>>>>

I had two distinguishing features as a kid. My dad was in jail and I had a ferocious tic. I also stuttered for a while but I concluded early on that it was not a stutter destined for greatness. It was a shy, tentative stammer and far too much effort was required to make something of it. Even then, aged seven, I was bone lazy and lousy at multi-tasking. So, I let my mom shlep me to a speech therapist and I dropped stuttering from my repertoire.

My tic, on the other hand, was a class act. At its best, it could stop adults in mid-sentence and send toddlers scuttling into their mothers’ arms in tears. I once reduced a slavering Doberman to a whimpering heap of petrified puppy with a simple triple-wink and a nod. That intervention saved my baby brother from a fate worse than death. Or so my mom used to say, though she didn’t attribute it to my tic.

“This kid is going to be a vet,” she informed my uncles and aunts. “He has such a way with animals.”

But I knew better.

My tic began with a simple shudder of the nose, a mere frisson, like the slight sniff of disdain that a butler might emit at the sight of a bottle of port passed with the wrong hand. In time, the shudder developed into a tremor and then into a subtle flare of the nostrils, as if in reaction to a sharp smell or an irritating whiff of pollen. Before long, my bunny imitations, with synchronized nose and ear movements, were the hit of the nursery school. From such humble beginnings grow great things.

By age eight, I was already a twitching virtuoso, orchestrating an ensemble of facial appendages in a complex and difficult routine of quivers, grimaces, and astonishing jolts. That, however, was just the prelude; eight was also the year I discovered music.

It was a rare evening alone with my mom. With my dad in jail and my brother and sister also jostling for her attention, I didn’t get to spend much time with my mom. But that evening we were alone, sitting together on the large, floral couch in our living room and listening to Ravel’s Bolero on the cabinet gramophone. I will never forget that moment. The rising, rolling motion of the music, like thunder gathering slowly over the Karoo, was a revelation. It transported me. For the first time, I understood the range of artistic expression at my disposal; the possibilities of tempo, timing and harmony. That evening I determined to compose the Bolero of tics.

I shared a bedroom with my brother, which made rehearsal difficult. He had little appreciation for art or the creative process and my facial contortions scared the living daylights out of him. He would charge off to my mom or to Mary, our maid, screaming that I was making him cry and one or both of them would come running to kick up a fuss. It’s not easy to create under such conditions. I was reduced to composing my art under the blankets, gasping for air and using a flashlight and a small, oval makeup mirror that I had removed from my mom’s handbag. Mary caught me at it once or twice and, with her large body jiggling with mirth, warned me that I’d go blind and hair would grow on my palms. It was only years later that I understood what she was getting at.

When I had enough material, I transferred to the bathroom, where I strung it all together under the pretence of taking long, hot baths to calm my nerves and ease my twitch. I spent hours in there, with my siblings banging on the locked door and yelling at me to get the hell out because they had to pee. During the dress rehearsal, I stubbed my big toe on the sharp corner of a bath tile and got a pocket of blood trapped under the nail. The pain was awful. My mom took a hammer and a needle and drilled a hole in the nail to let the blood escape. It came out in a thin, crimson fountain, which frightened my brother even more than my contortions. But the pain eased immediately. Every performer should have a stage manager like my mom.

Finally, my bolero was ready. It was a masterpiece; a multicolored, swelling tapestry of tortured cartilage and abused flesh, surging to a jerking, twisting, writhing, gravity-defying crescendo. It was, I knew in my bones, a singular contribution to culture.

I tried it out on a bunch of mates during lunch break at school. Their response was intensely gratifying. George choked on his peanut butter sandwich and had to be whacked on the back until he coughed up everything including his Quaker Oats breakfast all over his shoes. The others stared at me in gaping-mouthed disbelief.

“That’s disgusting,” Barry uttered.

“I know. But do you like it?”

“It’s bloody amazing. Do it again.”

The girls shrieked and scattered when I approached them, convulsing like an epileptic. I was wearing one scruffy, white tackie due to my damaged toe and the odd shoes and pronounced limp that I had effected added an unintended dimension of pathos to my performance.

“Here comes Frankenstein,” one of them yelled.

“No, it’s the hunchback of snotty dame,” screeched another, her checked blue school dress billowing like a sail as she ran.

“We can see your broeks,” the boys shouted after her.

Flushed with the success of my first performance, I got a little carried away. I added my shoulders to the routine and at one stage I even developed a palsied pelvic movement that I thought quite compelling. I went so far as to do Stanislavski-like breathing exercises in my bed at night. Eyes clenched shut, I would imagine myself into the role of a tiny beggar in the snow, jerking frenziedly as I tried in vain to sell matches to Victorian ladies and gentlemen. The undiscovered Pygmalion of twitch.

But I soon noticed that I was losing my audience. George managed to keep his sandwich down and the girls turned their backs and ignored me when I approached. It was my first lesson in the intangible essence of performance. Even third-graders can tell when you’re faking it. It is a lesson that has remained with me until today. I dropped the exaggeration and refined my routine. Great art, I understood, does not need cheap trickery.

There was very little that my tic couldn’t achieve. Even Miss Lamb, unanimously acknowledged as the most formidable of the teachers, withered in the face of my grotesque twitch-and-shuffle when I stood to answer a question in class. It was a gift that I exploited shamelessly. Homework became a thing of the past, as did my participation in class activities. I would sit at my desk in the back of the classroom and chew on wads of toilet paper, flicking them onto the ceiling when they were mushy enough. Soon I had a forest of little stalactites dangling over my head.

“Look Miss,” I said to Miss Lamb one day, pointing at the mess above. “I think there’s a leak in the ceiling. Maybe we should tell the janitor?”

She looked straight through me.

That’s as good as it got. I enjoyed my notoriety but the truth is I was not a particularly creative soul. I didn’t have the restless, questing urge to take my art further and deeper. Instead, I rested on my laurels. I never created another twitch symphony after my Bolero and after a while I retired from the performing business. By then, my mates were playing soccer, which looked like fun, and I began to take an interest in girls that went beyond grossing them out with a tap-dancing nose and a squint that exposed the red-streaked whites of my eyes. My tic had played itself out.

So I reverted to the modest, bread-and-butter twitch that nature had granted me and took up soccer, girls and the other grubby pursuits of boyhood. I never lost my abiding interest in the ineffable mystery of the tic, though. While no longer a practitioner, I remained a dedicated aficionado.

>>>>>

Years later, I was fortunate enough to meet the master, the maestro of tics. He was a business guest from overseas who my wife and I were entertaining in a local game meat restaurant. It was early in the evening and we were getting acquainted over a few glasses of a deceptively potent Kenyan drink called the dawa. My wife, in her friendliest, most solicitous manner, asked him if he had any children. He opened his mouth to answer and then, without warning, let rip with the 1812 Symphony of tics..

For a split second I thought that something dreadful had happened, as his head dropped to his chest, mouth still open, and his jaw thumped into his sternum. The dreadful alternatives flashed through my mind; his heart had given way or he had suffered a cataclysmic aneurysm. I was about to leap forward to offer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, when he whipped his head sideways, as if trying desperately to swat a fly off his shoulder with his forehead. Having dealt with the fly, his head proceeded to do a complete circle, arcing backwards until it threatened to detach from its moorings and fly across the room into someone’s soup. His eyes bulged in their sockets and a staccato sound like a backfiring motor-scooter - “nda, nda, nda” – escaped from his straining throat. It was awe inspiring,

“Yes,” he said, when his head had completed its circuit around the room and his eyes had popped back into place. “I have two girls, Melissa and Jane.” He didn’t lose a beat,

I sat motionless, mesmerized by his performance. My wife, barely a social drinker at the best of times, knocked back her entire glass of dawa in one shot.

“Really?” she spluttered, a thin cord of honey dribbling out of the corner of her mouth. ”How nice.”

She leaned towards him in a confused, tipsy imitation of profound interest, her eyes warily scanning his rubber neck for signs of a repeat performance.

“And do they take after you?”

The rest of the evening was an anti-climax; a grinding chore of halting chitchat, punctured by bursts of my guest’s explosive tic. My initial, childish admiration rapidly gave way to a profound distress. Like a lapsed cultist, I felt trapped between a hankering after my past convictions and a new, poignant understanding of how sad it really was. He was a grown man with kids, not a schoolboy show-off with an itchy nose and a penchant for the grotesque. There, but for the grace of soccer and pre-pubescent girls, twitched I.

>>>>>

It was at about the same time as my meeting with the maestro that I made the connection between my long-gone tic and my father’s imprisonment. I was well into middle-age by then and my father had been dead for going on 40 years. To be honest, it was a shrink named Valerie who actually made the connection, though I supplied all the necessary background material. It came out of the blue, from an unexpected direction. We had been discussing my fear of elevators, a phobia that had filled the void left by my abandonment of a career in twitching.

“Have you ever considered that it might be related to your father being in jail?” Valerie asked.

No, I had never considered it.

I leaned back in Valerie’s severe armchair and gazed through the sun-screened window at the riot of purple and crimson bougainvillea in the garden. It was a torpid summer’s afternoon in Johannesburg, the sort of afternoon that seems to make sense of everything. I have only experienced such days in Africa; when nature is at peace with itself and all the imponderables of life seem to settle quietly into place. A throwback to the afternoons before Eve got suckered by the snake and ate the apple.

It didn’t seem right to be wrestling with the minutiae of my psyche on such an afternoon. But at R600 an hour I wasn’t going to quibble.

“How do you figure that out?” I asked.

“Look. You won’t go into lifts on your own but have no problem if there are other people in the lift. Right?”

“Right.”

“You have no problem flying in airplanes. Right?”

“Right.”

“But you do have a problem locking the door in public toilets. Right?”

“Right.” Put like that, I sounded more pathetic then even my own low self-esteem allowed.

“Well, it doesn’t sound to me like a classical lift phobia. Most people who are scared of lifts are scared whether they’re alone or with other people. It makes no difference. It seems to me that your problem is not with lifts but with being trapped; being trapped alone, to be more specific. I would say that you’re scared of being imprisoned. And that comes from what happened to your father.”

She paused, a note of triumph quivering in the lazy air of the room.

I was impressed. There was no way she could have known it, but I definitely was scared of being imprisoned; petrified wouldn’t be too strong a word. I had already established that several years earlier.

>>>>>

I had been called up to do another stint of Israeli Army reserve duty in the Gaza Strip. Not that I hadn’t served in the occupied territories before. In fact, I had done my basic training in a bleak, rain-swept military base beside the Jewish settlement of Bet El, the spot where the patriarch Jacob had laid his head on a rock and dreamed of a ladder reaching up to heaven. I had served my time and seen the latter-day manifestation of the Jewish dream first-hand.

But the Palestinian revolt, the intifada, had erupted since my last spell in the reserves and I could no longer rationalize my annual service in drab military olive as a fact-finding adjunct to my journalistic career. With the native population expressing their hatred for the occupation in a way that they never had before, I felt that answering the call would tar me with the same brush as the conscripts in the South African townships in ’76 or put me on the level of a German soldier facing members of the French Resistance.

Like my father, I was a committed left-winger, though, unlike him, I had little to show for it, other than a thin album of newspaper clippings and feverish letters on human rights abuses that I had written home during my university days in Jerusalem. I also had a grainy picture from a student newspaper of a group of self-styled Trotskyites occupying the university’s administration building, among them a long-haired yours truly with a defiant fist in the air. That was about the extent of my political activism. I had never doubted the sincerity of my political beliefs but I had come to accept a certain disjunction between the fervor of my faith and its practical expression. A child of the Sixties, I had always regarded sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll as perfectly adequate articulations of the gospel of the Left.

And then came the call-up to Gaza and, with it, the realization that this was crunch time. Even a die-hard political dilettante has to draw the line somewhere. Mine was patrolling the cheerless streets of Khan Yunis with an M-16 rifle in my hands, while threadbare Arab children whose cause I believed in threw rocks and bottles at me with a passion that I had never been able to muster. I knew it in my bones.

The alternative was military prison. A friend of mine had refused to serve in Lebanon and had been sentenced to 28 days in the stockade. When his time was up he was handed call-up papers for another Lebanese stint and had again refused. So he served another 28 days in prison. That happened three times before the army grew tired of the game and sent him home. I had heard of other guys who had served five or six consecutive jail terms for refusing to serve.

My call-up notice in its distinctive brown envelope with a triangle in the bottom-right corner arrived at a particularly bad time. The day before, I had received another distinctive envelope, a green one, from the Israeli tax man, who brusquely informed me that a routine audit of my tax returns had uncovered certain disparities and requested, demanded would be more accurate, that I pay him a visit to discuss the matter. I knew all about the disparities, of course, and had a good idea of how much his routine audit could end up costing me.

Besides which, Valerie and I had a already established that I had a deep-rooted dread of authority combined - incongruously - with a nonchalant carelessness for the requirements of the law. It was a subject we had discussed at great length, not to mention expense, before we deviated onto the elevator problem. That, too, was apparently connected to my father, though we hadn’t gotten to the bottom of it yet. Authority, in shrink-think, is synonymous with the father and a fear of authority is nothing less than … It’s not that simple, of course. Nothing is. It could also be rebellion against a father I never had time to rebel against, as every son must, apparently. But, as I said, we had only scraped the surface of that one.

Sitting a world away from Gaza, in the gentle, abundant tranquillity of Valerie’s study, I felt the creeping, choking anxiety from years before. Every fiber of my being, every minute of my upbringing and every shred of my self-respect obliged me to refuse service in Gaza. Every outraged political statement that I had ever made and every impassioned article that I had ever written in my newspaper career demanded that I choose the path that led to the stockade. God knows, I expected it of myself. But I was petrified. The prospect of imprisonment paralyzed me. I was crushed by a terror that I had never known.

The cumulative effect of the green and brown envelopes was a God-awful panic attack. It hit me at a sensitive moment on the night of the brown envelope. Standing at the toilet bowl having a quiet pee, I suddenly convulsed as an intense pain tore through my chest. I couldn’t breath; as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get air into my lungs. As I gasped for breath, the room started to swirl around me. I lost my balance, groped for something to hold onto but found only the smooth surface of the tiled wall. Then I passed out. I came to on the cold, damp floor, my trousers at half-mast and blood pouring from my nose, which had apparently connected with the toilet seat during my descent.

I crawled out of the toilet and dragged myself to my feet, zipping up my trousers out of some residual sense of propriety. I was convinced I was going to die and didn’t want to be found with my flaccid penis exposed, still dripping urine. My heart was pounding. I was gasping for breath and my body trembled as if it was being shaken vigorously by some demonic force. I staggered into the lounge where my girlfriend (now my wife) was watching TV and, in a tremulous voice, informed her that I was having a heart attack and was about to die.

She herself almost died at the sight of me. She propelled me downstairs and, leaving me in a pathetic heap on the sidewalk, hopped around in the middle of the road like a mad woman until a taxi stopped and took us to the hospital. There, they hooked me up to an ECG, sampled my blood and x-rayed my chest, a procedure that had to be repeated a number of times before I stopped shaking long enough for the technician to get a clear image out of the machine. After determining that my heart was in all likelihood sound, they swabbed and set my nose, which had been broken in its collision with the toilet bowl, sedated me and let me sleep the night. Early the next morning, a pimply intern with bad teeth suggested that I consider seeing a psychiatrist.

So began the chain of events that lead to my sitting in Valerie’s rock-hard armchair, gazing out of the window on a sublime Johannesburg afternoon. Needless to say, I decided against prison, served my time in Gaza and lashed myself with guilt from then onwards. My moment of truth had come and, out of weakness, I had fluffed it.

“Not weakness,” Valerie interjected. “Certainly not weakness. We’re talking about a very deep childhood trauma connected with your father.”

My father again.

>>>>>

“What about my twitch?” I asked Valerie at our next session.

“What about it?”

“You said it tied in with my father’s imprisonment.”

“Of course it’s tied in. Do you know what a twitch is?”

I was embarrassed to admit that I didn’t. I had given some of the best year of my life to twitching yet I hadn’t even bothered to understand what it was.

“A twitch is a short circuit of the nervous system. When the system gets overheated it sends an abnormal amount of impulses to the nerve endings, resulting in agitation of the parts of the body where the nerve endings are situated.”

I reflected on that. Frankly, I preferred my earlier artistic approach to her stark, clinical explanation. But at the rate I was hemorrhaging cash in her armchair, I wasn’t about to debate the merits of twitching. I wanted solutions.

“And my father?”

Valerie, in full clinical exposition mode, was not about to be sidetracked.

“Most tics are predisposed, or inherited. You’ve told me that you don’t remember when yours began but it’s a fair assumption that it began before your father’s troubles. However, in answer to your question, there is no doubt that the trauma of what happened to your father was an aggravating factor in the development of your tic.

“Look at it this way. You’re a young sensitive child. You already have a tic, which means that your nervous system is already highly active. Then your father gets imprisoned. How do you deal with that? Society tells you that people in prison are bad people, but your immediate surroundings, your family and friends of the family, tell you that your dad’s a good person. That he’s in jail precisely because of the fact that he’s a good person. Because he opposes the evil that is apartheid.

“Now, how do you deal with that inner conflict? You’re too young to be able to understand it on a rational level. So you internalize it. You walk around with the conflict inside you. But all inner conflicts are externalized in some way. Yours, or at least one of yours, is through an overloading of the nervous system. Your tic. Later, of course, you transfer it to a fear of lifts. And other modes of behavior too, of course.”

So there it was. The tic, the lift phobia and the panic attack. My Holy Trinity of obsessions.

We sat in silence for a short while. I disliked the finality with which she made her diagnoses, preferring to think of my life as being more random, more serendipitous than the textbook case that always seemed to emerge when I exposed myself to her scrutiny. But she certainly made the connections. Not once, as I trudged heavily up countless flights of drab, concrete steps with empty lifts glowing invitingly on every landing, had I ever thought of my father. I wondered whether having him to blame would put a spring in my step the next time I took to the stairwell.

“OK,” I said eventually. “I’m a fuck-up. I twitch, I’m scared of lifts and I dissolve into a palpitating mess whenever I have to confront a waiter. So where do we go from here?”

Valerie put on her suffering shrink face, a hybrid expression of knowing superciliousness and deep concern for the tragic individual in the nazi armchair.

“Tell me about when they took your father,” she said.

>>> >>

I found a footnote recently in a book about the white opposition to apartheid.

“Several hundred ex-servicemen had broken away from the main body of protesters and were preparing to march on the Union Buildings. This radical group was led by Jock Isacowitz, a communist and regarded as a revolutionary by the leadership of the Torch Brigade. Isacowitz’s group, armed only with flaming torches, was intending to take over the seat of power and overthrow the government.”

That was my dad, a footnote to history.

The torch-lit march took place in 1948, after the Afrikaner Nationalist Party had surprisingly beaten Jan Smuts’ United Party in parliamentary elections. It was the start of a half-century of Strangelovian racial experimentation that became known as apartheid. My dad didn’t take over the seat of power and had in fact left the stalinist South African Communist Party several years before the march, in an acrimonious schism with his old comrades. He met up with many of them a decade or so later in the Johannesburg prison called, appropriately if rather literally, the Fort, but by then they were beating very different drums. Stalin’s show trials were the last straw for my dad; though still a radical left-winger, he became a determined anticommunist.

That didn’t prevent the progenitors of apartheid from listing him as a communist and, later, arresting him under the Suppression of Communism Act. Twisted logic was their metier. A regime that was capable of kicking black students out of college in terms of the Universities Extension Act either had a wicked sense of humor or was somewhat lacking in the sagacity department. And no-one ever accused the Nats of having an over-abundance of wit.

My dad was detained three days after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, the closest apartheid South Africa came to a popular revolt until, 25 years later, the kids of Soweto went on the rampage, triggering the slow implosion of Afrikaner power that culminated in the formation of Nelson Mandela’s government a couple of years before Valerie and I set out on our exploration of the uncharted regions of my psyche. I was back in South Africa by then, after two decades in the bosom of another of God’s chosen people; one, moreover, which was making as much of a hash of things as the Afrikaners did. I seem to have a propensity for the self-appointed.

For me, at nine, those heady days of national crisis and mass detentions after Sharpeville were interminable. Not because the country was on the verge of popular revolt and chaos but because I was on the brink of celebrity. Not many other kids in King David Primary could lay claim to a father in prison. In fact, as far as I knew, none could.

It was a close thing. The authorities declared a state of emergency and started arresting opponents of the regime as soon as they realized that shooting 72 unarmed black protesters in the back might be inimical to law and order. After the second batch had been arrested, including many of my father’s political allies, I began to wonder whether they intended coming for him at all. It was bad enough that my father hadn’t been included in the initial swoop but to have been overlooked altogether would have been too much.

I hurriedly checked the doorposts of our house for daubings of ram’s blood. It was, after all, March and Pesach was just around the corner. The last thing I wanted was for the God of apartheid to have identified my father as a Jew and passed him over. But the lintels were clean and the mezuzot appeared to be in good working order. I was spared the indignity of one of the Chosen not being chosen. In fact, dozens of the Chosen were carted away that week. There could have been a minyan in virtually every prison in the country, had they been so disposed.

I needn’t have worried. They came on the third night.

I never figured out what delayed them. Nor did I ever understand why they only arrived after midnight. I guess it served their clichéd sense of the dramatic. The Afrikaners are a very literal people.

My dad knew they were coming, His friend Ernie was taken on the second night and Ernie’s wife and child had moved in with us. So we had an experienced player on our team. Rosemarie, Ernie’s wife, knew the drill. I didn’t go to school on the day of his impending arrest and we spent the entire day getting rid of incriminating documents and seditious literature.

The “we” is an exaggeration, of course. The only incriminating document I knew of at the time was the diaphragm instruction sheet that my neighbor and I had discovered under the lingerie in his mother’s dressing table drawer one day while she was out. The step-by-step insertion instructions, accompanied by rudimentary sketches, kept us agog for months. The sheet also mentioned a mysterious foam that apparently accompanied the diaphragm and the image of my friend’s enormously fat, naked mother inserting the rubber diaphragm and with foam bubbling out from between her flabby thighs was unbearably titillating and disgusting.

We tore their house apart, searching for the diaphragm and foam, but we never found them. A few months later, my friend burned the house down while experimenting with matches in the attic. We were devastated by the loss of the instruction sheet, our one, genuine artifact from the impenetrable world of sex. Such treasures were not easy to come by in the repressed, puritan South Africa of the Fifties.

So, while my mom, dad and Rosemary sorted through mounds of books, pamphlets and pieces of paper, scanning them for subversive sentiments, I sprawled on the living room carpet paging through a bound volume of The Springbok, a publication produced by the South African forces in North Africa during the Second World War. My dad had been chairman of the Springbok Legion, a radical ex-servicemen’s organization established in the last year’s of the war, and his picture was scattered through the bound volume. My favorite was one in which he was presenting s scroll of some sort to the venerable Jan Smuts, prime minister and field marshal in the British Army.

My dad had fought up north, in Abyssinia, Libya and Egypt. His uniform still hung in the cupboard, including one pair of battle-dress pants with a patch in the knee, where he had taken a piece of shrapnel. My brother and I would dress up in his gear and play war games. I preferred wearing the smart dress uniform, with its ribbons and medals on the chest and a red flash on the shoulder indicating that that the wearer was a volunteer. I was Montgomery. My brother, in the rough battle-dress jacket that came down to his ankles like a voluminous dress, was Rommel. He didn’t mind because I never told him that Rommel was a German.

“Go get Mary,” my mom said abruptly, sitting cross-legged in a sea of paper.

“Where is she?”

“In the back, of course,” my mom snapped, distracted and tense.

Of course. All servants lived in the back. Mary’s area in the back was extra-territorial, part of our white house but not of it. It was a foreign, exotic and frightening place. Everything about it was different. Mary’s soft, old bed was raised on bricks to keep her safe from the evil tokolosh while she slept. It was more than a bed, it was an enveloping, pungent place of refuge. She would lift me on to the bed when I was small and I loved and feared the feeling of sinking into her warm wool blankets, especially in winter, when the room smelled of smoke and sweat.

There were other, unrecognizable smells, one of which I got to know well several years later. It was the odor of marijuana, what we used to call dagga. As kids we believed it was the stuff that gave the blacks red eyes and made them mad.

I went out to the dark, dank rooms smelling of sweat, Sunlight soap and the bitter, pungent concoction, called skokiyan or Bantu beer, that Mary would brew in her spare time and sell to the denizens of the neighborhood. She ran a shebeen, an informal and illegal drinking house, in the yard and the loud, throaty sounds of their partying would penetrate into my room as I was trying to sleep. Two worlds, separated by a thin pane of glass and the snaking wires of a burglar alarm that went off at the wrong times, scaring the hell out of us. No doubt, it wouldn’t have gone off in the event of a real robbery but it was never put to the test.

A tiny yard with a rickety pergola-like structure enveloped in grape vines with inedible grapes divided the main house and the servants’ quarters. The latter consisted of Mary’s room, a room for the second maid, a laundry room that had been seconded by Mary as her shebeen, a bathroom and a toilet, all in a row. They were horrible. We called them Mary’s rooms, even though there was invariably another, junior servant in residence as well. But Mary was the ruling authority. She had been with us for years and remained with my mother until long after I had left South Africa. She must have been old by then but to me she was ageless.

I found Mary in the laundry room, bending over the vast concrete sink in which she did all the washing by hand. It was perpetually dark and chilly in the laundry.

“My mom wants you,” I said. “We’re chucking out things before the police come.”

A veteran of many police raids on her shebeen, Mary seemed relieved that it was someone else getting into trouble for a change. She accompanied me indoors, drying her hands on her apron.

Mary was a small, round woman, as wide as she was high. She waddled around on rigid legs like skittles, bloated from illness and hard work and wore a regulation servants uniform in sky-blue or vomit green (bought in bulk at OK Bazaars) and an apron. Beneath the ubiquitous colored doek on her head was a large face, puffy and creased but with pronounced features. Mary was incapable of a mild expression. When she was happy, her face would illuminate a room like a lantern. But the sheer anguish that would saturate every wrinkle of her face when she was sad was enough to break hearts, even a heart as oblivious as mine.

My mom instructed Mary to begin feeding the papers into the ancient, caste-iron stove in the kitchen.

“Montgomery here will be your assistant.” She turned to me. “If that’s not too much of a come-down for the victor over the Desert Rats?”