September 1997
Eva pressed her forehead to the window and watched the ruffle of waves
rimming the coastline recede from view as the plane nosed its way toward
Johannesburg. The dirt roads were visible, clawed into a land pitted and
scarred by drought. She knew the hell of driving them, how dusty and worn
she’d feel after jolting along one, nothing to look at for hour upon hour
but rocks and thorn trees. Maybe, if she was lucky, a jackal, a snake.
Africa lay stretched beneath her like the ravaged hide of some ancient
beast, and something fierce shuddered inside her, a love that startled her
and set off another round of tears.
The girls sitting behind her were talking to one another. Sixteen hours
into the flight and she still couldn’t identify the language, definitely
not Xhosa, she hadn’t heard any of the characteristic clicks, and not
Sotho because she would surely have recognized the rhythms if not any of
the words. At least they weren’t singing.
It was September, the plane only half full. Unlike the other passengers
who had shifted around after takeoff to secure banks of seats for
themselves, the three girls had stayed together. They wore dark blue
pinafores and light blue shirts. They looked too old to be schoolgirls,
but then Eva thought of overcrowded classrooms in the townships, where
twenty-year-old pupils shared textbooks and wrote their matric exams
sitting on cement floors.
They sang for the first time just before the dinner service and their
voices, full of sunshine and honey and dust, had disturbed in Eva some
sodden longing for what used to be home. She wiped her eyes with a blue
South African Airways blanket. She was crying for her father, because of
her father. She shook her head in mild disgust at herself. Her mother was
dead, worthy of her grief, and yet here she was weeping for that miserable
ghost clinging to life in a hospital in Louis Trichardt.
She drank two small bottles of red wine with dinner and swallowed half a
sleeping pill. The soft voices behind her were murmuring something as she
drifted off. In her sozzled state she imagined it to be a lullaby, the
private twittering of doves in a thicket.
Now, with an hour left in what had seemed like a never-ending flight, Eva
stared at the cratered red earth giving way to a smooth dun-colored
expanse mottled with dark green. Sand rivers that flow for just a few
weeks each year if the rains are decent wound across the land like snail
trails. Someone kneed her through the seat. The girls were giggling,
piling on top of one another to look out of their small window, and she
impulsively leaned over her seat back, saying, “Isn’t it beautiful?”
They nodded, two of them immediately raising hands to demurely cover their
mouths, while the third, a young woman really, looked curiously at Eva.
She wanted to ask them what they’d been doing in America. Were they
members of a youth group or a choir? Had a church sponsored their trip?
The forthright gaze of the young woman deterred Eva from asking as she
realized that she, in turn, would be questioned. She already had her lines
prepared, she would claim to be an American tourist. She would lie to the
girls, as she had for most of her years in New York, changing her story
each time; one moment an immigrant from New Zealand, another a student
visiting from England.
She slid back into her seat. It had been ten years since she’d left the
country, and left her father standing in front of the Dutch Reformed
church in Alldays. Now he was dying.
The shadow of the plane slid across the turquoise pools of Johannesburg’s
northern suburbs, buckled over ocher-colored slag heaps piled beside
exhausted gold mines. The wheels thudded onto the runway, and the girls
launched into “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.” Other passengers seated in her
section joined in, the white South Africans humming because the Xhosa
words of their new anthem still eluded them, the blacks giving full voice.
A smiling American family seated at the bulkhead stood up to watch, the
father filming it all with a video camera. They were going on safari; Eva
had overheard them talking to the steward.
What did they think? That it was an African custom to launch into song
whenever a plane touched down? A way of thanking the great spirit in the
sky for bringing them safely back to earth? She looked out at the long,
dry, once green grass and the exhausted blue of the midafternoon highveld
sky. She doubted it would be an easy visit; hopefully it would be a short
one.
Eva had left in 1987, a month after her mother’s funeral. Lorraine had
been cremated, which was an unusual occurrence in the Limpopo Valley.
Farmers and their wives and their dogs were buried, resting in the earth
being reward enough for years of toil. Lorraine’s final act of rebellion
had been to deprive the community of the grim satisfaction of watching
Martin shovel earth onto his wife’s coffin. Instead, Eva and her father
stood in the shade of the marula tree beside the church while the mourners
nervously paid their respects. God forbid Martin should open his mouth and
subject them to the jaw and tremble and buck of his stutter. They needn’t
have worried; Eva held the fort beautifully. She clasped their hands in
hers. Some expressed condolences in English, others Afrikaans, and she
addressed each person in his or her language of choice. Within an hour it
was over, no one left apart from two little African boys staring at them
from beneath a thorn tree across the street and the dominee approaching to
talk about how God’s hand is present in even the most hideous of
accidents. Eva wanted to scream.
“I’m going to drive back to Jo’burg,” she said to her father without
looking at him. She would not give him that, not even a glance at his
hands to see if they were shaking, fingers of one hand worrying in the
palm of the other.
She wept in the car. The goshawks perched on the telephone poles, the
koppies rising out of the rock-strewn veld, the world that she loved
seemed incapable of offering any solace, and Eva was grateful when
darkness arrived and all she could see was the broken white line in the
road, the signs announcing the kilometers to Johannesburg.
Weeks passed. Her uncle Hendrik, who worked as a stuntman in the South
African film industry and who had secured her a job as a production
assistant on a soap opera, paid her a visit. She’d been fired, her hair
was unwashed, her flat filthy. Alarmed, he urged her to do something good
for herself. Take a trip, he said and he gave her enough money for a
ticket overseas. Eva chose a night flight to Amsterdam. The lights of
Soweto and Johannesburg scattered beneath her like diamonds and rubies and
tigers’-eyes when the plane took off. Darkness and stars for eight hours,
then the impossible green and density of Europe, the somber civilized
ocean beneath them as they flew into Schiphol Airport. She checked into a
hostel, crawling out once a day for an apple pancake and a beer, unable to
contemplate a future. Then one morning, a week after her arrival, she
realized one certainty: that she would not return home before his death.
She went out and bought a train ticket to Spain.
He will want to be buried, Eva thought as she waited with the other
passengers in the line leading to passport control. And she knew where.
The small cemetery outside Messina, where the plastic flowers beside the
graves melted during the summer months. Damn him for dying. She handed
over her South African passport, and an African man with an explosive
smile stamped it and said, “Welcome home.”
With the end of apartheid, Jan Smuts International Airport had become
Johannesburg Airport. The Witwatersrand, the area encompassing
Johannesburg, Randfontein, and a few other towns, and named after a
cascade of white water that the early settlers had seen, was now part of
Gauteng – Eva had no idea what Gauteng meant – and the conservative
Transvaal, province of stoic farmers, sofa-size rugby players, and
insatiable hunters, had been divided into the Northern Province and
Mpumalanga. A new country, and she sensed it the minute she passed through
customs.
Gone were the young, nervy-eyed white soldiers with their machine guns;
instead the terminal seemed overrun with black taxi drivers asking her if
she needed a ride. No, no thank you, she said, her eyes sweeping across
their faces. In the past she’d have handled them with a certain
confidence, an ongoing rapid discernment – trust this one, have nothing
to do with that character – her white skin at least giving her the
illusion of security. Now she felt uncertain of herself.
She stepped outside into the shock of the sunlight. Buses with spewing
exhaust pipes and ads for Sun City painted on their sides trundling past,
row upon row of cars in the vast parking lot – it would have been so
cosmopolitan if it hadn’t been for that light, wild and fierce, as if
gleaned from the eyes of animals that kill. She took a minibus shuttle to
the Holiday Inn, listening to the earthy lilt of the driver’s voice, the
white family sitting opposite her with their flattened accents that turned
each word into a roughly carved piece of wood.
After a plate of prawns peri-peri and a long shower, Eva made her way to
the bar. Two large fiberglass tusks flanked the entrance; inside, a group
of Indian businessmen crowded the red Naugahyde banquets. She perched on a
stool at the bar and ordered a glass of pinotage. In the mirror opposite
her, she studied the reflections of the two blond South African women
seated to her right. Long manicured nails, chunky gold jewelry, and cell
phones resting on the bar. She glanced at her own reflection. She’d worn
lip gloss and it hadn’t helped; her mouth appeared to be more downturned
than usual, her eyes vacant. She was twenty-eight years old, but with her
short haircut – it had been so chic in New York – and the emotional
tumult of returning etched across her face, she looked odd, like a
middle-aged teenager. She reached quickly for her glass of wine.
The blondes departed, and Eva ordered another glass from the bartender,
who wore a Nehru jacket cut from kente cloth.
“An American who knows that pinotage is South Africa’s finest wine.” He
set the glass in front of her. “So, what part of the States are you from?”
“I live in New York.”
“Ah, the Big Apple.”
She laughed. He made it sound like a piece of fruit. The bartender
wrinkled his brow as if he didn’t understand her amusement, and emboldened
by the velvety pinotage, she said, “Yup. Maar ek’s gebore in Humansdorp en
het op ‘n plaas -” The words tumbling out of her mouth like clods of
earth flustered her; she hadn’t spoken Afrikaans out loud in ten years,
and she knocked her wineglass over.
“No problem.” He wiped the bar clean. “Welcome home, Mrs. … or could it be
Miss?”
“Miss, Eva -” Her eyes fluttered away from his in embarrassment. She
must have sounded like a holdover from the old South Africa; Miss Eva was
the way the Africans who worked on Skinner’s Drift had addressed her. “I
mean, it’s just plain Eva.”
“Welcome home, not so plain Eva.”
Again she avoided his eyes. Surely he wasn’t flirting with her. “Van
Rensburg,” she added.
“Oh, that’s a nice boere surname.” He refilled her glass and slid it
toward her. “A few years ago I would have been scared of someone with a
name like that.”
“Cheers!” She raised the glass to her lips, unsure of how she should
respond.
A smile curled ever so slowly across his face until his cheekbones jutted
out like rock ledges.
“Eva, is everything okay?” He leaned toward her, close enough for her to
read the name tag pinned to his jacket.
“Great, Rapulana.”
“No, no, you make it sound too American. Listen. Rah …” His mouth opened
wide as a lion’s. “Puu …” His lips pursed as if he were kissing her.
“Lana!” He swallowed and sighed.
Eva turned scarlet. She ran her fingers nervously up the stem of her
wineglass – and abruptly stopped, realizing that the gesture might seem
provocative. “Rapulana -” God, even saying his name felt like a sexual
act. “Thank you. You’ve – well, you’ve given me quite a welcome!”
She finished her wine and scooted off the barstool.
“Eva. Wait!”
“Yes?”
“I like you, Eva, but you need to pay your bill.”
“Oh, my God, I’m so sorry!”
She fumbled with her wallet and pulled out a one-hundred-rand note. When
he walked to the register at the other end of the bar she fled, leaving
him a generous tip.
Back in her room she was pacing. Would she have been so flustered if a
black American had come on to her? Of course not. It was being back in the
country where, just a decade ago, a black man would never have flirted
with her that had shaken her confidence. She opened the blinds and stared
at three planes parked on a distant runway. Swissair with its comforting
red cross and two others, obviously from an African country, cheetahs in
full stride painted on the fuselages below rows of tiny windows. She had a
Visa card, escape was still a possibility. But it wouldn’t be once she
called Johanna. Her stomach turned over.
The cheetah planes glided toward the terminal. Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, the
names of African countries – countries that Eva could not place on a map
– came to mind. She looked at her watch – it was nine-thirty – and
picked up the phone. God knows what Johanna thought of her, wicked Eva
abandoning her father when he needed her so. She dialed the number.
“Hello, Johanna.”
“Skattebol?”
“It’s me.”
“You’ve come home. Liewe Here -” Johanna sobbed.
“Yes, I’m in Johannesburg.”
Johanna blew her nose and wheezed. “Eva?”
“Yes, I’m here.” A deep sucking sound followed, and Eva knew her aunt had
reached for her inhaler.
“But you are sounding like an American,” Johanna said, and then, as if it
were quite possible that an American was playing a horrible trick on her,
she demanded, “Eva? Are you sure that’s you?”
Eva grinned. She piled two pillows together and lay on the bed, relaxing
into the asthmatic gullibility of her aunt. “Johanna, I swear, it’s me.”
They chatted about the flight, Johanna wanting to know about the food
onboard and whether the plane had managed to fly the whole way without
stopping for petrol.
“Yes, we didn’t run out of fuel. So, how is he doing?”
Another trumpeting nose blow. “Oh, skat, I think he had another stroke
while he was incinerated in the hospital -”
“Incarcerated, but that’s not -”
“What’s that, Eva?”
“Nothing … never mind. Go on.”
“Well, it’s terrible. He doesn’t recognize anyone. He just lies there and
cries.”
Eva’s smile faded. The thought of her father in tears rankled her, and she
sat up and told her aunt she’d be in Louis Trichardt late the following
afternoon. Johanna gave her a brief lecture on how she must not give any
blacks a lift, “even the old women who carry all their belongings in a
bundle on their heads. A person just can’t tell these days.”
She hung up the phone, the image of her weeping father still vexing her,
and switched on the TV in time to watch the news. Fist-clenching black
workers picketing the Pepsi bottling plant, a white game warden detailing
the efforts to track a rogue lion that had killed several head of cattle
belonging to a tribe contesting the borders of Kruger National Park. And
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had wrapped up its hearings in
Pietermaritzburg with testimony from a distraught African woman who spoke
of gathering pieces of her husband after police firebombed their house. In
two weeks the commission would reconvene in the Northern Province.
She switched to M-Net, the twenty-four-hour movie channel, and swallowed
the other half of her sleeping pill. Her thoughts drifted uneasily to
Stefan.
She’d been tempted to call him from JFK to tell him she was flying to
South Africa. A need for earnest, decent Stefan to say, “That’s great,
Eva. You’re going home.” But she still felt ashamed of the way she’d
behaved with him.
She’d met him in the summer of 1991 on the set of a TV commercial where
she was working as a gofer. De Klerk had released Mandela from Pollsmoor
Prison the year before, and to say you were a South African was to be an
ambassador of hope. No longer a pariah, you were now a desired guest at
parties, where you were supposed to speak eloquently about the struggle,
to tear up and talk about the walk from the darkness into the light. But
Eva didn’t reveal her nationality to Stefan right away; she mumbled her
usual nonsense about New Zealand and had to field several questions
concerning fjords and sheep.
They began seeing each other, Stefan patiently pursuing, Eva feeling
squirrelly about it all. He worked as a part-time set painter and
photographed New York with a pinhole camera. He also took photographs of
Eva. The transformation of her face into an eerie poltergeist-like blur
appealed to her, and soon she had more than a dozen of them taped to her
refrigerator.
“I should have one for my passport photo,” she joked one August afternoon
after they’d idly been discussing traveling somewhere together. They’d
just made love, and she stood naked in front of the refrigerator, trying
to pry a tray of ice cubes from the depths of her frost-blocked freezer.
“So let’s see your passport,” Stefan replied.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Skinner’s Drift
by Lisa Fugard
Copyright © 2006 by Lisa Fugard.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Scribner
Copyright © 2006
Lisa Fugard
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-7299-4
