You won’t admit you love me and so
How am I ever to know.
You only tell me
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
Rosélie would be lulled to sleep by this little night music.
She had prepared herself for any further requests by Judith by buying a simplified version of The Arabian Nights, which she practiced reciting: “‘Scheherazade stopped when the day began to brighten Shahryar’s apartment. The following night she went on with her story…’” But that day Judith had something else in mind. She was carrying a satchel under her arm, which she opened mysteriously and from which she pulled out a bundle of large sheets of paper. Rosélie took them one by one, marveling at these bright drawings done with that freedom of form and color associated with the blitheness of childhood. What a miracle! What human ingenuity! These drawings signified that her imagination had been purified. She was cured. She had been able to survive her past with no trace of an indelible scar. While Rosélie was searching for words of encouragement and admiration, Judith drew her head close to hers, put her mouth against her ear, and whispered:
“Don’t tell anyone. Especially Mummy. It’s a secret. When I grow up I want to be a painter. Like you.”
Life’s like that. Sometimes it presents you with an innocent, spontaneous picture like those wildflowers growing on the side of the highway at the spot of a fatal accident. Rescuers take hours to cut the victims free from the wreckage and then lay the corpses among the buttercups, the poppies, and the cornflowers.
TEN
Like the distribution of toys with Simone a few years earlier, the distribution of Stephen’s souvenirs were not what Rosélie expected. Her disillusionments began with her visit to Mrs. Hillster. In the space of a few months, Mrs. Hillster had aged considerably. A gash had left a scar on her forehead that disappeared amid her snow-white hair. She limped and leaned awkwardly on a cane. Above all, she bore the expression of those who have experienced injustice and demand reparation from society, society in general. Rosélie was treated to yet another telling of the day that had marked the end of Mrs. Hillster’s peace of mind, dwelling at length on the misfortunes of her beloved Bishupal.
“Those police brutes treated him as if he were guilty. They beat him, they almost killed him.”
Taking advantage of a moment when Mrs. Hillster stopped to catch her breath, Rosélie placed her offer. Would she accept the collection of Stephen’s CDs? Mrs. Hillster seemed contrite.
“You haven’t noticed, then?” she said, indicating a “For Sale” sign in the window.
“I’m selling everything. My house in Rondebosch, my shop. I’ve already had several offers, but nothing I like. I want to leave. I want to leave Cape Town. I’m too old for all this violence, I’m scared, I can’t take it anymore. If I accepted your present, you would be giving it to someone else.”
Rosélie remained speechless. Mrs. Hillster had been saying all along that South Africa had replaced England in her heart. She had arrived a blond twenty-year-old bride and followed her husband, Simon, from posting to posting. She waxed lyrical about her favorite region, KwaZulu-Natal, its sweltering natural parks, its lacy coastline, and the jewels of little towns strung along the shore. Politically speaking, there had been no shortage of difficulties given Simon’s liberal views. He was on first-name terms with the ANC leaders, gave them shelter and money. They had been living in Johannesburg at the time of the Soweto and Sharpeville uprisings, and in Cape Town when it was the turn of the Crossroads squatters. Each time, the government accused Simon of colluding with the rioters and threatened to send him back to England. Rosélie was stupefied. Witness to the darkest hours of the country’s history and to the most appalling events of injustice and inhumanity, Mrs. Hillster, now that two petty crooks had mugged her, was clearing off! How self-centered!
As if she could read Rosélie’s thoughts, Mrs. Hillster explained:
“You see, I was not prepared for the victims to take their perpetrators’ lessons to heart and that the blacks would learn to strike, kill, and rape so quickly.”
Something they have always done. But you didn’t want to admit it. You always thought them to be innocent, smiling angels, ready to proffer the other cheek. For better or for worse, they are showing you they are men, quite simply men. Neither devils nor angels.
“You’re going back to England, then?” Rosélie merely asked.
Mrs. Hillster made a face.
“No, of course not! I’m going to live with Cecilia.”
Good heavens! Cecilia, her only daughter, lived in Bermuda. Every time she came back from visiting her, Mrs. Hillster would rant about this Disneyfied England, as artificial as a dolls’ kingdom with its little, white-roofed houses fit for Snow White’s dwarves. One Christmas, Rosélie and Stephen had taken refuge there to escape the snow in New York, and she recalled her malaise. The island of Bermuda had deliberately transformed itself into a Garden of Eden for wealthy tourists. But at what a price! The restaurants dished up that tasteless cuisine called continental, capable of adapting to any palate. What continent? Atlantis? They had attended a cultural week, visibly designed for the clientele of American cruise ships. The highlight had been a gala evening when a local singer, who was black in skin only, sang a medley of Sinatra songs, vigorously applauded by the spectators.
Encore for “The Lady Is a Tramp”!
It’s as if you need shantytowns, ghettos, and racial inequality to produce a specific culture. And that was where Mrs. Hillster was going to retire to after fifty years in a smoldering land where the most bitter of combats had been waged?
At that moment, Rosélie met the gaze of Bishupal as he looked at her while perched on a stool, a book between his hands. She was about to smile at him when a mask of hostility veiled his face. He lowered his head and ostensibly plunged back into his book. Surprised, she asked Mrs. Hillster:
“And what about him, what will he do if you leave?”
Rosélie noticed for the first time that Bishupal, whom she had seen a dozen times without paying him any attention, was handsome. He couldn’t be more than eighteen.
“He doesn’t want to stay here either,” Mrs. Hillster replied sadly. “He wants to go to England.”
“England!” exclaimed Rosélie.
“He’s just spent his vacation there and claims he made friends,” Mrs. Hillster said, even more sorrowfully. “I keep telling him London is one of the most difficult places to live, but Stephen convinced him it’s paradise, that there’s plenty of work and housing.”
Stephen, who loathed England! Who every summer swore he would never set foot there again!
So everyone was going off on their own. Life is a carousel that never stops turning. Only those sleeping under the earth stay put.
“And what about yourself?” Mrs. Hillster asked softly.
Rosélie gave the usual answer.
“You know full well I couldn’t think of leaving him alone.”
It might be objected that she had no scruples about leaving her mother and father. It’s true, but they were different. They were not alone. The family mounted guard around their graves. Elie had survived Rose by very little, scarcely six months, as if, unbeknownst to him, she alone made his life worth living. At present, husband and wife, united in death as the saying goes, lay in the Thibaudin vault, two stories of expensive black-and-white marble. At the Feast of All Saints the monument was scrubbed, polished, and covered with candles like a birthday cake. But if she left Cape Town, there would be nobody to take care of Stephen. He would be abandoned. Stephen Stewart, aged fifty-four, born in Hythe, England, lying under a bare tombstone, facing the immensity of the ocean and the infinity of time.