It is a story about sisters: my sister Nora, and me.
Perhaps I never told you, but even as small children, Nora teased me mercilessly. I was Giraffe Girl, Goosey, Noose-neck. I’m going to hang you high, Noose-neck, Nora would scream, threatening me with a length of rope. And then when I cried she would clasp me to her and say she didn’t mean it, No offence, Clare, it was all just joking, that’s what sisters did. I stopped loving her when I was eight, after she cut off all my hair while I was sleeping and burned it in the garden. I stopped thinking of her as my dear sister before I ever came of age, even before I was a teenager, long before Nora left home.
At sixteen, Nora was always threatening. She threatened our parents that she would marry that great bullock Boer, Stephan Pretorius, with or without their permission. She once threatened me with a hot griddle from the stove, chasing me through the house and screaming I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! after I used her lipstick. She threatened the cats with drowning and switches. She threatened our parents that she would never see them again if they refused to attend her wedding. She threatened to elope, never to let them meet their grandchildren (a blessing, perhaps, that there were none). She threatened too much. Why, I wondered, was she so unlike me? How do two people become opposites in every way while being raised by the same parents in the same house with the same values and rules? I hardly have an answer today. They were stricter with her, but not in a way that should have produced a tyrant. My father used to say the ghost of his grandmother, whom he remembered with terror, must be haunting Nora, for how else could one explain her wickedness? There were times when I wondered if you had inherited that haunting, Laura, if the echo of Nora’s name in your own betokened some generational curse.
Even as a child, I understood why she would marry Stephan. It was not about love. He was older than her, a man already — a man to replace our father, who was a better man by half. (I know you will protest — that I, too, married a man to replace my father, a man of the law like him, to take his place. Unlike Nora, I was conscious of my folly, and your father was — is — no monster.) Nora’s husband, so unlike our father, had a strong, stout body, florid with health and indulgence. What could our parents say but Yes, we give our blessing? And even though his was, if you like, a parallel branch of the same Christian tribe (if we can still speak of tribes these days), the Pretorius family seemed as foreign to my parents as we must have seemed to them. On my sister’s wedding night I heard my father weeping in his study in a way that he wept only when he remembered the dead.
One of our father’s clients loaned us a limousine for the day, and we paid the gardener extra to drive us to the church, then to the banquet, and then home afterwards. On the way to the church, the gardener was so excited by the car that he tested the windscreen wipers but could not discover how to turn them off, so we arrived in the blazing sun at the church in our borrowed limousine with the wipers screaming over the dry glass, and even when the car was turned off, the wipers kept screeching back and forth until the car’s battery died. After the ceremony, we had to walk through town to the wedding banquet because there was no room in the limousines that my brother-in-law’s family — dozens of them — had hired to carry themselves. Or perhaps they simply did not wish to risk such intimacy with us. My sister had become one of them, embraced their church, turned her back on our quiet Methodism. Stephan had caused scandal by choosing an outsider, but he stood his ground. He said he loved her. And who could not? She looked like Marilyn Monroe in those days, blonde and flawless as a goddess.
We arrived at the banquet sweating and covered with dust while my sister and her new family were dry and cool, already eating their chilled soup. There had been a ‘mistake’ with the seating arrangements, so that my parents and I were not at the long head table with the wedding party and my brother-in-law’s parents and six brothers and sisters, but at a separate table just to the side, with my aunt and uncle and cousins, a knot of slender, pale bodies, suffocating under all that beef. We were not in any of the wedding photos, except those taken by my uncle, with my sister and her husband out of focus in the background, chewing their braaivleis.
In the months after the wedding, when they moved to his grandparents’ farm, into the long white house outside Stellenbosch, Nora learned the ways of her new tribe, the formalities of the language with all its cloying diminutives, the little pot, the little sister, the little mistress. In private, our mother asked my sister if her new husband’s family was treating her well. My sister did not answer at first, then said, too brightly, Yes, Mother, they treat me well.
When we were visiting her I upset an antique plate hand-painted with delicate blue flowers, breaking it on the dung floor that was polished with ox-blood and studded with peach pits, perhaps imagining how my sister’s mother-in-law would react.
Years passed. By the time I returned from Europe my brother-in-law was something important in the National Party. My own politics had been, as is so often said these days, ‘radicalized’ — chiefly by my time in England, and the people I met there, the books I was suddenly allowed to read without fear of discovery or sanction. On returning home, I met your father. We found each other through like-minded friends who arranged for us to meet, and, liking each other well enough, we decided to get married. I had your brother Mark, and as your father became more cautious, more concerned not to jeopardize his newly won place in the university, I became more radical, writing and publishing and attending meetings the wife of a professor should not have attended. It was enough to get me noticed by people on both sides, and at a meeting one night I let slip that my sister and her husband were going to be in Cape Town for a few nights. One of my associates asked, as casually as you please, if they would be staying with me. Don’t be ridiculous, I said. My sister’s husband would never accept my hospitality. They’re staying at some fancy guest house. Did I know the name? The name of the guest house? Of course I did — and let it trip from the end of my tongue.
I did not know it was supposed to be a secret, or that their arrangements were for my ears only, that my sister, in trusting me, was trying to extend a hand of friendship, even of reconciliation.
You are right to protest.
Without doubt I knew. I knew the delicacy of the information I held. I chose to forget. I have spent the rest of my life speculating why.
I imagine the moment of horror, the two of them caught by the intruder in the room of the guest house. Nora and Stephan were in bed together, sheets slick with hair oil, sticky with him, socks on the floor, cold and sharp, sour in the hot room. Woken by the sudden opening of the bedroom door, pushing her body upright in bed, damp with perspiration, seeing the figure outlined in the intruding light from the corridor, she must have wondered, Where are the guards? It must have seemed impossible that they should find themselves bargaining for their lives. Logically, Nora would have expected her husband to intervene to save her, but she must have known there had never been much evidence to suggest he would do anything to endanger himself, to put anyone’s interests above the instincts of his own self-preservation.
I have read the testimony. My sister’s assassin reported that she threatened to scream, to call the guards, to wake the entire guest house. Why, I wonder, at that most crucial hour, did she threaten but fail to act? She looked to her silent husband clutching the bedclothes in terror, and the smell of shit filled the room. (The police, the coroner, they confirmed this.) The intruder went first for my sister while her husband pleaded for his own life, on his knees in the bed. And then it happened. He moved, but not towards the assassin; he scrambled from his bed to the open window, trying to escape, and in the instant in which his legs planted themselves on the floor and his bare white back turned against his wife, the gun moved from her eye and fired into her husband with a soft pffft. She did not scream, or move, but looked at the assassin, who was, the man said, surprised by her silence.