David Beresford Another Country In the final analysis, perhaps, one can only judge oneself and I guess I will just have to remember that voice and make of it what I will. ”Hello,” she would say tentatively, answering the telephone in her room, ”who’s speaking ?” ”Die baas!” I would sometimes declare sternly and wait for the giggles. It was a running joke between us, because I was becoming increasingly incapacitated with Parkinson’s and dependent on her for physical support. Whether or not she fully appreciated the irony, I do not know. She was a simple ”domestic worker”, Sheila (not her real name), and as some say in these parts, one never knows what’s going on in ”their” minds. Which prompts the thought: ”Not surprising, considering the difficulty I have in understanding what’s going on in my own.” We buried her on Saturday. By ”we” I mean myself and Ellen, Sheila’s family with whom we seemed to have made our peace and about 400 mourners who gathered in Soweto with us to say the last farewells. We first said hello to her eight years ago when she arrived on our doorstep, trudging along, looking mournful but determined. She got the job, because she seemed young and presentable and was first in the queue, I guess. She had a three-year-old daughter, which was nice, because the schools in Johannesburg’s traditionally ”white” northern suburbs had recently been thrown open to all races and our zoning meant the child would be attending one of the country’s better schools. ”Domestic service” is a difficult issue in South Africa. The system is deeply suspect politically, exploitative and (at best) paternalistic. But there does not seem to be much pressure to reform it, basically because the process would be too painful to the two sides (the masters of apartheid tried to destroy the system for ideological reasons, without much success). The relationships between employers and employees vary considerably in terms of their nature and their complexity. The interdependence is fundamentally unhealthy, but in ways almost as inescapable as is the heavily polluted air of the ”Big Sulphur” that is Johannesburg. Anyway, Sheila seemed to be happy with her job, home and us. She seemed to have an enviable extended family and network of friends. Her tiny cottage was always bustling with visitors, music and the noise of the latest needle match in soccer being fought out to a chorus of cries and moans – which Ellen, with a Latin past, greatly enjoyed. We took her on holiday to Cape Town two years ago to give her sight of the sea which she had previously seen only in bottles we had to bring back for her from our own trips. She loved it. For me, personally, Sheila was part of the background that was coming into the foreground. It was when I found that I was having trouble carrying a cup of tea from the kitchen that she began helping me, first to carry it, then to make it … which was when the ”baas” joke was born. She always seemed to have health problems – flu, ear-ache, shingles, pneumonia, allergies, unspecified pains here and there. It was difficult to discover the problem, because as soon as she contracted something she would start mumbling, the one symptom common to all her afflictions being the collapse of vocal facilities. We sent her to the hospital, took her to specialists – one for the ear problem, which left her partially deaf, and another to check for rheumatoid arthritis – and to our family doctor. The problems were treated symptomatically and seemed to disappear as quickly as they came. On occasion it would be irritating. ”Sheila’s sick again!” Sometimes she would disappear, ignoring our pleas to let us know where she was. It was Thursday, three weeks ago that we found a note in the morning informing us that she had gone to the Johannesburg General hospital. She returned with a diagnosis from a private clinic in Soweto: an ulcer. A few days later another Soweto doctor announced it was a bladder infection and she needed rest.
We decided it must be HIV/Aids. We had discussed the possibility before, of course. We both knew something about the subject and tried to take in the implications of Sheila having Aids. AZT is – leaving aside the side effects and difficulty of administration – an expensive, life-long treatment. The government is refusing to distribute, thereby shifting the moral responsibility for life-and-death decisions to the individual. We were receiving offers of financial assistance from shocked family and friends. But those were decisions we would face once we had the diagnosis. Again we both knew it was illegal to force an employee to have an Aids test. But surely we could persuade? I tried first, battling to control my waving limbs, to sound ”masterful”. Sheila seemed suitably impressed, at least by my agitation if not by my masterly qualities, and she agreed – she would be going to Soweto on Saturday and would have a test. Ellen repeated: ”Don’t worry, we’ll look after you …” On Monday we heard Sheila had been admitted to Soweto’s Baragwanath hospital. On Tuesday Ellen visited her. Sheila seemed OK. Tentatively Ellen asked what the doctors had said was wrong. ”… kidneys … something wrong with the bones …” mumbled Sheila. The Aids test was not mentioned. Half the patients in the beds seemed to be thin, young women. Sheila walked with Ellen out of the ward to say goodbye. On Thursday we found a polite message on the telephone answering machine from one of Sheila’s brothers. ”Sheila has passed away. Thank you.” Incredulous, we raced out to Bara, to find Sheila’s corpse wrapped in plastic and a blanket on a neatly curtained- off bed. We tried to find out what had killed her. Two seemingly senior nurses, asked if it could be Aids, replied: ”Even if we knew we could not say, because then we could go to prison.”
We saw the young doctor who had tended to her and he said her red cell count had been down, he had planned to give her a transfusion, but had been delayed and had not reached her before getting a call to say she had collapsed. They were unable to resuscitate her. ”Aids?” I prompted. He shrugged, said he would have to see the results of ”tests” which had not come in and carefully wrote down our telephone numbers with a promise to call when he knew. The call never came and we were unable to contact him again despite repeated phone calls and another visit to Bara. We did manage to ascertain, from the undertakers, the official cause of death on her death certificate. It was ”natural causes”. ”To say one has Aids is an insult to the family,” said an old man. In this society the advice of the old is often best respected and we accepted it. Ellen saw resentment in the eyes of some of the family, though, and – never being short of courage – drove back to Soweto to face it. How she managed the reconciliation without using the word Aids heaven knows. I made a gesture towards the appeasement of my conscience, writing a short speech – ”oration” if one likes – in which I referred to the terrors of being ill without diagnosis and offered the strangulated wisdom that ”there is nothing to fear, but fear itself”. Ellen read it, along with her own and other family messages of condolence, from the pulpit in a packed church across the road from Sheila’s Soweto home. Sitting in a pew towards the back I could hear my clichs clatter off the stony walls of incomprehension followed by a murmur of satisfaction as Ellen, her voice achingly simple in its clarity, read the last words: ”When I was told that she had died I felt the sadness, the grief I would only expect to feel if a close friend of mine had died. And when I thought about it I realised how important she had become in my life. She had, in fact, become a friend. I wish I could speak to her just one more time, to tell her that. To tell her that she was a friend and I will remember her as that.” In the low murmur which greeted these words I came to the appreciation that this was not the time or place for explanation and diagnosis. The family just wanted to bury her quietly and with dignity. Besides, what did I know? ”You don’t know it was Aids, do you!” a friend in the medical profession had demanded in an attempt to comfort me a couple of days before. ”I can offer all sorts of alternative explanations.” Which was no doubt true. A lot of burying is going on in Soweto at the weekends, nowadays. There was something of a traffic jam as we tried to follow the coffin, hearses and cars filled with mourners jockeying for position in rival processions. But we found the burial site eventually and I managed to make it into the fringes of the crowd and lean against a tombstone.
I could not hear the preacher from where I stood. But listening to the distant buzz of recitation as they went about the business of burying Sheila in the warmth of the mid- winter’s sun I found myself groping in my memory for another preacher’s words. The last time I had been in Avalon cemetery, so far as I could remember, was to see Queen Elizabeth II belatedly honour the dead on the Mendi – the South African troop carrier which sank after a collision in the middle of the English channel during World War I. On a memorial stone she unveiled somewhere in a corner of the sprawling cemetery are inscribed the words of the preacher who summoned the unarmed support troops to a military parade on the deck of the ship as it went down: ”Be quiet and calm, my countrymen, for what is taking place now is exactly what you came to do. Brothers, we are drilling the drill of death. I, a Xhosa, say to all my brothers – Zulus, Swazis, Pondos, Basuthos – we die of Africa. Raise your cries, brothers, because although they made us leave our weapons at home our voices are left with our bodies.” Sheila of course did not enjoy the comfort of such a gloriously rousing end. In retrospect, amid the awful silence attendant on her lonely death, one can imagine the fear this young woman suffered, twisting and turning from doctor to hospital in terrified search of an explanation, fleeing from the unspeakable terror which seemed to be stalking her, seeing treachery at the end even by us, the ones she had been counting on perhaps most of all for protection, who were now demanding she open the door and let the monster in to kill her. It is in the collective silence of denial that we, her survivors, are surely left to face what is an inescapable betrayal.