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The Syringa Tree

By Pamela Gien

Dramatists Play Service

Copyright © 2003 Pamela Gien
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822217923

Chapter One

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SOEKMEKAAR, LOOKING FOR ONE ANOTHER

e Newly six, I lay in the dark listening to the rattle of my shutters. The moon was gone from them.

Something moved in the passage outside my door. My heart banged up into my throat. I strained to listen, tried to be still. I must have called out. I felt warm fingers close my eyes. My father’s hands smelled of long hours and antiseptic soap. “It’s nearly midnight, Lizzy,” he said, in the hope I would finally submit to sleep in my Johannesburg bed. In the dim light, I saw he was still in his creased shirtsleeves rolled up from the day, but without his polished brown shoes. Usually at night, he left them by the front door. He must have had to go out again after we fell asleep, on another call, someone sick on a farm at Fourways, maybe, or further out at Honeydew, a child bitten by a snake, someone trying to be born, someone stabbed. Newly qualified as a doctor, he was not yet thirty, with dark rims beneath his eyes.

“Is Mommy still in her bed?” I whispered.

“She’s in her bed.”

He closed my eyes again and turned to go. Still no moon.

“Tell of the wild dogs,” I said.

He sat down around the middle of the bed where my feet ended under the blanket, and rested his head on his hands. He began rubbing his fingers against his scalp through his short-cut dark brown hair, slowly, like medicine for his head. “He loved the wild dogs,” he began. “His black eyes, like newly lit coals, glowed within the small, flat plane of his features. He had never seen the face from which he peered, Elizabeth, never caught sight of the fire within him.” He was the first, he said, the first to walk the African veld we now called our own.

The moon had not returned. In its place it had left only relentless night. Like the moon, I drifted away. It was the first of May, 1963, with the whipping dust of early winter already taunting the bleak Transvaal highveld with the promise of more drought. Evenings were starting to prick with cold. Veld grass blew flame-ready in dry whispers. Miles deep, men tunneled, dreaming of the beauty of the sky. Crickets kept the night awake, and outside, the city of gold lay quiet.

It must have been Salamina who lifted me in the dead of night from my sheets, her strong, brown Xhosa hands paper-dry from cleaning and washing. It must have been Salamina who wrapped my sleeping limbs tight within a musty blanket and heaved me, limp with dreams, up over her pregnant belly.

She must have carried me silently down the slate passage, through the kitchen door out to the waiting car, its headlights on, its hot breath steaming into the black highveld cold. It must have been her Xhosa tongue, clicking like soft rain on a tin roof, that kept me from crying out in my brief moment of waking, kept me from thinking it was the Tokolosh come to suck me away. “Tsht, Monkey . . . thula baba, jhe,” I must have heard her whisper.

“Thank you, Salamina,” my father said in the murmur of the house rustled into waking.

It must have been Salamina’s sound and smell that lulled me back to the safety of sleep as she ran with me quickly to lay me in the backseat of the car. And it must have been Salamina who closed the gate behind us, watching as we drove away, her stomach swollen, ready, with a child who was not to be mentioned outside the walls of our house.

Before the first gleam of dawn began to light the Great North Road on the outskirts of the city, I woke in my blanket on the backseat. Peering out into the night, I saw the piling yellow sands of gold mines ghosting by like dark castles, their glimmer robbed, long gone. I knew, with a leap in my chest, this was the way to Clova.

It was the acrid odor of smoke that woke me—thousands of fires already fueling the daily life of the native townships, Soweto and Alexandra—the same smell that seeped from the pockets and folds of Salamina returning from her servant’s day off each week—a black and sour smell. A smell I did not notice near my home, where electricity burned bright and there was no need of a fire except as a frippery on a chilly night. You are not allowed to go in there, not without a special paper, my sleeping head bossed me, into those townships. They lapped, silent as we passed, at the edges of Johannesburg.

Through the sweet, laden orange trees of Nylstroom we went, and out into the northern veld far from the lights of any city or town, where the sky was higher, blacker, and the early dawn deeper, quieter. It told you nothing. Only the swift rub of tires sounding their long, dark call.

My mother sat in the front seat, the promise of Clova in the distance ahead, her rough edges softened, calm again, with my father driving us further and further out into the veld. Too early for smoking but not finding a reason to wait, she lit a cigarette, filling the car with the scratching smell of a match. She opened the window, washing us in cool air, and rested her head back. From the backseat, I saw her eyes close down at the sides as she breathed out. The wet corners of her thick, black lashes wove top into bottom, like shongololo-worm legs folding together in the rain.

Not brushed or neat now, the soft curls of her Jacqueline Kennedy hair fell a bit over the neck of her green wool jersey, where the label stuck out. She managed to hold the cigarette and simultaneously finger her delicate pearl earring with the same hand, between her fourth finger and thumb—soothed, in her small cloud of smoke.

I did not risk tucking the label in for her, lest it scratch her skin, or aggravate her.

I thought, suddenly, of promising not to root in the sugar box when no one was looking. It was a promise I knew she would welcome, as it would cure the horrible, spiky condition called hyperactivity that routinely befell me soon after—prompting Salamina more than once to cry out, “Jheh, Miss Lizzy, you are jumping like a monkey!”

But on second thought, I decided to save the sugar box promise for later, if things got worse. For now, I would just be exceedingly quiet. I would say very little when we got to Clova, and would not appear like a pest too much in front of her, except maybe to stroke her feet as they peeped out of her blankets, if she napped there in the afternoons. Through sleeping eyes, she would not see me. I would smooth her feet, keeping my hand flat and gentle, the way she sometimes smoothed me.

As we drove, my head banged inside with the commotion of the day before. Usually, no one said anything about my mattress. Usually, Salamina and Iris, the newish nanny for baby John, carried it out to air in the sun. They’d lay it on the grass in the backyard for their lunch hour, then settle themselves, unbuttoning their cotton uniforms a bit under the powdery, yellow mimosa trees behind the house, eating doorstop-thick jam sandwiches and embroidering white pillowcases with jaunty flowers for their servants’ rooms.

Late in the afternoon, my mother had come into my room to lie down next to me on my cured bed. In her yellow linen dress, creased and slept-in like a crushed lemon-cream biscuit,...