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Mother preferred Zulu servants. She said they had been disciplined warriors. They were obedient, conscientious, and fiercely loyal. Their society was built on loyalty. They had had great, autocratic rulers, who were astute military strategists, and who conquered much territory in a series of bloody wars. There was Dingane. There was Dingiswayo. There was the cruel Shaka who armed his men with short stabbing spears and made them walk barefoot for greater speed and mobility. He taught them new military tactics and obliged them to remain celibate until they were forty. He ordered his impis to walk off a cliff to prove their loyalty. They were our Prussians, Mother said.

Mother preferred the men over the women because, she said, they worked even harder, did not fall pregnant, did not indulge in unnecessary chatter, and did not hesitate to perform whatever was asked of them. They rose before dawn to brush the carpets, to polish the silver and the floors, piling all the furniture in the middle of the room. They scrubbed the kitchen floor on their knees.

When they served at table, they dressed in starched white jackets and trousers, which rustled as they floated quietly and efficiently about in soft sandshoes. Red sashes ran slantwise across their chests from shoulder to waist and ended in tassels that dangled on their hips like decorations of valor. They wore white gloves and tapped an opener against the bottle to ask us what we would like to drink.

The Zulu my sister and I loved best was John Mazaboko. He called my sister Sk-Sk-Skatie because of the initials on her silver christening bowl, which he polished almost into oblivion. Whenever he saw her, he would chuckle as though they shared some secret understanding. We followed him around the house and watched him as he polished the floors and the furniture and the shoes, even the soles of the shoes.

He was unusually tall, and so strong he was able to catch the ancient armoire when it fell forward and almost crushed my sister as a small child. But his hands were gentle. Mother said he could not bear to hear us cry when we were babies and would beg the severe Scottish nanny to allow him to hold us in his arms.

He taught us how to ride bicycles and ran down the bank beside my sister under the flamboyants, waving the dishcloth at her and shouting, “Khale. khale. Skatie.” warning her to watch out, as she wobbled along.

He told us stories about the Tokolosh, the evil spirit who lived in the fish pond at the bottom of the garden. He told us all the jacarandas in the garden were good except for the last one on the left, which was bad. We never went near it.

He was the one my sister called when she accidentally stepped on her beloved budgerigar, a small brightly colored parrot, which lay flapping its broken wings, on the floor. He took its pulsing neck between his fingers and wrung it swiftly. “Better like this,” he told her.

He brought us freshly squeezed orange juice in the early mornings, entering the nursery with a tray and the newspaper for the nanny, drawing back the lined curtains to let light into the room and wishing us a good morning with a grave, “Sawmbona.”

Once, the Scottish nanny, a diminutive woman, known as a “white nanny” to distinguish her from the black ones, summoned him to clean the inside of a malodorous cupboard. Wrinkling up her nose, she said, “It smells Zulu.” He bent down from his great height onto his hands and knees and scrubbed the closet clean.

*  *  *  *  *

After our father’s death, our mother withdrew, closed many of the rooms in the house, draped the furniture with sheets, and gradually fired all the other servants. Even the Scottish nanny was fired for stealing Mother’s knitting needles and hiding them under her mattress, so that Mother would not find them. The nanny slammed the door behind her and mumbled, “These children would be better off in an orphanage.” Only John remained.

It was South Africa in the forties, and he was looking after two little girls and their mother. He seemed sad. “He’s not too pleased,” Mother told us. “He’s actually a bit of a snob, you know.”

Sometimes, when we came indoors, we would find Mother slumped on the sofa, food trickling down her chiffon dress, a cigarette burning her fingers, an empty glass on the floor. We would call John, and he carried her to bed.

I can see him, in a brief moment of reprieve, leaning against the whitewashed wall of the empty servants’ quarter, smoking his pipe in the sun. My sister sits beside him on the red earth.

*  *  *  *  *

I remember my sister running into him in the narrow corridor after emerging from her bath. A slip of a girl despite all the food she consumed, she was totally naked. John lifted his eyes to the ceiling and gasped in horror.

For some years we did not see John except during the holidays. Mother sent my sister and me to a boarding school, run along the lines of an English school from the last century: we wore green tunics measured four inches from the knee, kneeling; we read nineteenth century authors and studied history that stopped before the First World War, which was considered too recent to be taught objectively. We slept in long dormitories, the little ones crying out for their mothers. My sister dreamed that she had passed John on the stairs without knowing who he was.

We were kept busy. We spent most of our time after class doing sport to combat sexual urges, and to learn team spirit. My sister, who was tall and athletic, won prizes. But ambition was not considered seemly for Christian girls. We were taught meekness (for the meek would inherit the earth) as well as obedience, diligence, and like the Zulus, loyalty. As our head mistress pointed out, most of us were destined to be mothers and wives.

*  *  *  *  *

When my sister told me about her decision to marry, I was living overseas with my husband, and home just for a visit. It was raining hard that afternoon, and hailing, as it does so often out there, and we could hear the hailstones beating against the long windows. We were in the big kitchen with the pull-out bins, where the flour and the meal were kept, near the small, dark pantry where the big sacks of oranges were stored. There was the familiar smell of wet coal from John’s fire in the courtyard. The room was dimly lit, and John, as usual, was polishing the silver with a toothbrush. His head was bent, and he whistled softly as he worked, the newspaper spread before him. He lifted his head and tilted it with interest listening to us.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“A doctor, a heart surgeon,” my sister said.

“You said you wanted to be a doctor, Skatie,” John reminded her and chuckled.

My sister hesitated. “He’s an Afrikaner. You can imagine how much mother likes that.” She paced back and forth, restlessly. Lightning lit up the room. “She’s dead set against the match, thinks the family is common, and keeps talking about his mother being too broad in the beam. Some old girlfriend of my fiancé’s called mother and begged her not to let me marry him.”

John waved the toothbrush at my sister as he had the dishcloth when she wobbled down the bank on her bicycle for the first time. “What did this woman say?” he asked.

“She just kept saying, Please don’t let her marry him.” My sister went on, “He’s really very handsome and clever. Passed his matric at sixteen. Did all his studies on scholarship. Father does something on the railways. Doesn’t have any money.”

“What is he like?” I asked her.

“Frank, brutally frank. It’s refreshing. Do you know what I mean?” I nodded my head, and John stared down at the toothbrush in his hand.

*  *  *  *  *

At the wedding my sister stood in her white dress, the handsome groom and all the bridesmaids and flower girls at her side, on the stone steps of the church. Naturally, John was not with them.

My sister said, “Thank goodness Mother has let me have John.”

“What did he say!” I asked.

“I didn’t even ask him. I can’t imagine starting up housekeeping or life, for that matter, without him. I don’t know how you do without help. Mother will move to the cottage, and he will stay with us in the big house.”

*  *  *  *  *

The next time I visited my sister, John greeted us in the driveway of the house. “Nkosazana.” he said, addressing my daughter with the Zulu title of honor and bowing his head, holding her hand.

My sister told me that something had happened. We were enjoying the December weather. The garden was green and filled with flowers: blue and white agapanthi grew by the pool, and the jacarandas were in bloom again. We were wearing our swimsuits, sandals, sun hats, swinging back and forth on the swing seat and sipping lemonade, the ice melting in our glasses. The shifting light from the water shimmered in the feathery leaves of the acacia tree. My sister paused, forcing me to pay attention.

“Go on. So what was it?” I said.

She had given a party for her husband’s family, inviting all the brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, and their friends. She had done the flowers, great bowls of arum lilies and peonies, and ordered champagne. John had roasted chickens, baked gem squash and apple pies. He had laid them out on the trestle table on the veranda, next to the bottles of champagne, which were lined up like soldiers on a field of damask. He was wearing his starched white uniform and the red sash with the tassel.

In the middle of it all, my sister noticed that her husband was not in the crowded room, so she went looking for him.

Her husband had seemed short-tempered that evening as he often was, saying it was because of fatigue, from the long hours in the operating room, or because of my sister’s careless housekeeping. He insisted that she be at home every day for lunch, and complained there was no discipline in the house. They had argued over the state of his white linen pants. John had not pressed them properly, her husband claimed.

Now she could not find him.

It was a particularly fine night, the air warm, the sky wild with stars. She burst into his study, where she discovered him on the floor, embracing another man.

“It was such a terrible shock. His whole family was there, all of our friends. What could I do?” my sister asked me.

“Screamed,” I said. “Kicked them in the balls. Turned them out of the house. Made a scandal!”

“But I couldn’t, you see. He would have been ruined, struck off the doctor rolls.”

*  *  *  *  *

My sister’s husband made their boy exercise in the morning to keep slim. He had him do sit-ups and scrub his fair skin with a loofah in the bath. When the boy brought his friends home to play, his father followed them into the changing rooms by the swimming pool and stared at them and touched them. The boy grew silent and sullen.

My sister asked, “Will you go to the lawyer for me? I can’t. He follows me. He will find me anywhere. I am afraid of what he will do.”

*  *  *  *  *

“Sorrow seems incongruous here,” my sister said to me, as John brought us a cup of tea in the garden. It was late afternoon, and I was visiting again. All those visits, year after year, have run into one another. Only certain moments remain clear in my mind. By then my sister was keeping the shutters down and sleeping for hours in the afternoons. We could hear the flapping of wings, the cry of the swallows. Someone was singing in the bamboo. It was spring and already hot out there. The three of us, she, John and I, strolled down into the cool of the garden together and sat in the shade of the flamboyants, where John had taught us to ride our bicycles.

He had grown thinner over the years, his face gaunt, as though he had turned inward, and was bent on polishing himself into oblivion. Life in that house had worn away at his spirit. His slanting eyes had lost that glimmer of humor when he looked at my sister.

Now he sat beside us in his impeccable khaki trousers and shirt. Big, bulbous clouds floated across the sky. He looked at my sister and said, “Skatie, you are not eating enough. I keep telling you. You don’t listen to me anymore. You are losing too much weight.”

“How can I eat?” she said. She told us she had awakened one night and found her husband digging up the rose garden outside Mother’s cottage in order to plant cabbages. He had thrown a glass at her, cutting her lip, the blood streaming down her chin.

*  *  *  *  *

Shortly afterward, my sister left for Rome and Istanbul. She wrote to me that she had met someone there. “He was at the airport, and I watched him stride across the runway. He looks like a David, Donatello’s and Michelangelo’s.”

When my sister arrived back home, her husband found a letter from the Turkish lover and cut his wrists and lay at the bottom of the stairs and called John and all the children to come and watch him die. John came and clucked his tongue and shook his head and did what he was asked to do. All the children stood in a hushed circle with John at the bottom of the stairs and watched the blood running down their father’s hands. My sister found them all there, unmoving, the light behind them, “like a chorus of angels in some medieval painting,” she wrote. They rushed her husband to a clinic where he recuperated and came home to fly into rages if anyone spoke of Turkish delight.

*  *  *  *  *

He beat the children with a belt, especially the boy, broke his bones. He beat the eldest girl unconscious. My sister did not submit to his beating her or her children without a fight. She was stronger than he when she was angry, grabbing his hair and biting, kicking his shins.

Once, she had him at her mercy. He shouted for the servant. “John, help me,” he screamed.

They were in her bedroom, the long windows open on the lawn.

“Yes, Baas,” John called and came as usual, swiftly and silently, looming in the doorway, watching my sister hold her husband, his arms pinned.

“What are you standing there for, help me, for God’s sake,”
his master cried.

For a moment, John did not move.

“Do what I tell you. Put her on the bed.”

John grasped my sister and pulled her down. At first she struggled, called out to John, “What are you doing!” but when he did not reply, and she saw no glimmer of response in his eyes, she gave up.

I imagine her lying on the blue silk counterpane, her face swollen as if she has soaked up water. All the delicate colors have run. She can hear the cries of children, see the sprinkler turning, a rainbow in the spray. Her hair blows across her pale forehead, a flush spreads over her cheeks like a stain. There is a scar on her lower lip. Her small chin trembles. Her eyes are round and strained, shaded by thick lashes, awash with tears, and as soft a blue as the silk beneath her. She looks up and sees the faces bending over her, a blur of black and white.

The white baas takes off his belt and beats her across her legs, her breast, her face.