0
0
0 0
w
0
Prologue
0
0 0 0
1
1 It is fifteen years before Mandela becomes President,
1
and South Africa, a country I left at seventeen, is still in the
1
grip of apartheid. It is my thirty-eighth year. It is October,
1
which the Afrikaners call die mooiste maand, the prettiest
1
month, our spring.
1
My mother calls with the news. My brother-in-law, a
1
heart surgeon and protégé of Christiaan Barnard, the first
1
doctor to transplant a human heart successfully, has man-
1
aged to drive his car off a deserted, dry road and into a
2
lamppost. Wearing his seat belt, he has survived, but my sis-
2
ter was not so lucky. Her ankles and wrists were broken on
2
impact. “She died instantly,” my mother assures me. I won-
2
der how one knows such a thing and think of that moment
S2
of terror in the dark.
N2 •
1
•
sheila kohler
w
1
I take a plane out to Johannesburg and go straight to the
2
morgue. I am not sure why I feel I must do this. Perhaps I can-
3
not believe my only sister, not yet forty years old, the mother
4
of six young children, is dead. Perhaps I believe the sight of her
5
familiar face and body will make it clear. Or perhaps I just
6
want to be beside her, to hold her one last time in my arms.
7
I stand waiting with my hands on the glass, looking into the
8
bright, bare, empty room with the sloping floor made of reddish
9
stone, which dips slightly in the center to provide drainage from
0
the dissection table. Then they wheel her body in. I cannot
1
touch her, hold her, comfort her. I cannot ever heal her. Her
2
whole body is wrapped in a white sheet, only her flower-face
3
tilted up toward me: the broad forehead, the small, dimpled
4
chin, the slanting eyes, the waxy skin. It is my face, our face, the
5
face of our common ancestors. It is the heart-shaped face she
6
would turn up to me obediently when, as children, we played
7
the game of Doll.
8
This moment is the beginning of endless years of yearn-
9
ing and regret. It is also the beginning of my writing life.
0
Again and again, I will turn to the page to recapture this mo-
1
ment, my sister’s life, and her spirit.
2
With her death, too, comes a flood of questions. How
3
could we have failed to protect her from him? What was
4S
wrong with our family? Was it our mother? Our father? Was
5N
it our nature, the way we were made, our genes, what we had •
2
•
Once We Were Sisters
w inherited? Or, more terrible still, is there no answer to such a
0
question? Was it just chance, fate, our stars, our destiny? It
0
was not as if we did not see this coming. What held us back
0
from taking action, from hiring a bodyguard for her? Was it
0
the misogyny inherent in the colonial and racist society in the
0
South Africa of the time? Was it the Anglican Church school
0
where she and I prayed daily that we might forgive even the
0
most egregious sin? Was it the way women were considered in
0
South Africa and in the world at large?
0
I am still looking for the answers.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
2
2
2
S2
N2 •
3
•
0
0
I
0 0
w
0
Snow
0
0 0 0
1
1 It is snowing, the big damp flakes falling quietly,
1
strangely, on the dark fir trees, when my sister first mentions
1
the name of the man who will be responsible for her death:
1
Carl. We are in New Haven, Connecticut, in the new tall
1
apartment building, University Towers, where my first baby
1
is born. My husband, a student at Yale, is twenty-one years
1
old. My sister, Maxine, two years older than me, is twenty-
1
two. She has come to be with me for the birth.
1
We watch my new baby suck on my breast and the snow
2
fall slowly from a ghostly sky with equal wonder. My sister
2
and I are not used to new babies or snow.
2
2
S2
N2 •
5
•
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0
1
2
3
4S
5N
Crossways.
0
0
II
0 0
w
0
Together
0
0 0 0
1
1 We are born in South Africa and grow up together in
1
an L-shaped Herbert Baker house, called Crossways, in Dun-
1
keld, a suburb of Johannesburg. Pale jacarandas line the long
1
allée that leads up to our creeper-covered house. The thick
1
walls and closed shutters keep the rooms cool in the hot after-
1
noons. The vast property, with its swimming pool and fish
1
ponds, a tennis court, a nine-hole golf course, an orchard and
1
vegetable garden, and acres of wild veld stretches out to the
1
blue hills.
2
An army of servants keeps up the estate. Servants roll the
2
butter between wooden slats with serrated surfaces until it
2
forms small balls that are placed in shell-shaped silver dishes;
2
they polish the silver, the furniture, the floors; they cook the
S2
roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, the two green vegetables
N2
•
7
•
sheila kohler
w
1
and the roast potatoes; they simmer the inferior boys’ meat
2
(“boys” being how we refer to our adult male servants) into a
3
delicious-smelling stew; they stand in their thin white gloves,
4
their soft silent sandshoes, and starched suits, a bright sash
5
going slantwise across their chests, as they move behind the
6
Chippendale chairs to serve dinner; they go out into the back
7
patio to stoke the coal fire.
8
Sometimes gangs of convicts are brought in to dig and
9
smooth out the lawns with heavy rollers, to weed the flower
0
beds planted with bright cannas, foxgloves, and nasturtiums.
1
My sister and I stand, holding hands, staring at the men in
2
their striped shirts, their feet bare, digging with the evening
3
light behind them. We listen as they sing in sad harmony be-
4
fore we are told not to stare, to move along, move along, girls.
5
We are always together in the pale green nursery where
6
we sleep with our nanny—the blackboard along one wall
7
and along the other side, the three beds, each with its green
8
bedspread, a wooden bedside cupboard, and a round enamel
9
chamber pot. We are together in the sun-filled breakfast
0
room, where we swallow the thick porridge, the boiled mut-
1
ton with caper sauce, the Marmite sandwiches with hot milk
2
tea, the heavy English food that makes us sweat; we are to-
3
gether in the corridor with the Cries of London lining the
4S
wall—the series of prints showing nineteenth-century city
5N •
8
•
Once We Were Sisters
w vendors calling out their wares— and in the shadowy pantry
0
with the pull-out bins for flour and cornmeal and the big
0
bags of oranges that perfume the air.
0
We are together in the sunshine in our identical smocked
0
dresses, our sandals, our fair bare heads. We have identical
0
Airedales, Dale and Tony, two big dogs with the same soft
0
fluffy light-brown fur, who are not allowed into the house, but
0
who roll around with us on the lawn and sleep in their ken-
0
nels outside in the garden.
0
Together my sister and I explore the vast garden. We are
1
left to roam in the sunshine, often barefoot, free to dream.
1
We know all the flowers and trees intimately like the famil-
1
iar characters in a favorite book.
1
They are part of our games, our imagination. They are
1
half real, half made-up, part of our fantasies and our reality,
1
our transitional objects.
1
We smash mulberries on our faces for war paint and play
1
Cowboys and Indians. We climb the jacaranda trees. They
1
are all good except for the last one on the left, which is
1
wicked, and which we avoid assiduously. We set up a pulley
2
between our respective trees and send it back and forth with
2
little notes written to one another, though I cannot yet read
2
or write properly, and we can call out to one another much
2
more easily.
S2
N2 •
9
•
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0
1
2
3
4S
5N
Maxine and me in the garden at Crossways.
Once We Were Sisters
w We make up our own secret language, a complicated sys-
0
tem of spelling backward: “cat” is “tac,” though there are few
0
words I can spell, and I keep forgetting the rules.
0
We give our identical dolls swimming lessons, tying
0
string around their rubber waists and dragging them up and
0
down the pool, instructing them to kick. We lie on the con-
0
crete around the pool in the sunshine and play the game of
0
Touching Tongues, giggling. A bee stings me while we are
0
doing this, and our nanny tells us this is what happens to
0
naughty girls.
1
I sit in front with my sister behind me, her legs around
1
my waist, using our hands as paddles sailing around the big
1
enamel bath, with its claws for feet, visiting foreign coun-
1
tries, going “overseas,” traveling around and around, splash-
1
ing the water on the black-and-white-tiled floor.
1
We whisper together in the shadows in the back of the
1
nanny’s square green Chevrolet. “Let’s make a bunch,” I say,
1
and together we slip off the seat, crouch down, and strain,
1
producing a small malodorous gift for the nanny. We run
1
down to hide in the bottom of the garden, terrified at our
2
wickedness.
2
We climb the stile and hide down in the wild part of the
2
garden, listening to the wind in the swaying bamboo. We
2
play the secret game of Doll. Alternately Maxine is the “doll,”
S2
N2 •
11
•
sheila kohler
w
1
lying stiff and obedient to my wishes, or the mistress, who
2
makes me do whatever she wants me to do.
3
It is this game I think of later, when the Roman men call
4
out to us, “Che bambola!” What a doll!, and much later still,
5
when I see my sister, her shattered body wrapped in white as
6
in swaddling clothes.
7
8
9
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0
1
2
3
4S
5N •
12
•
0
0
III
0 0
w
0
First Glimpses
0
0 0 0
1
1 In New Haven my sister holds my new baby girl up in
1
the air and admires her dark slanting eyes. Maxine says she
1
is beautiful. She props the baby’s head over her shoulder and
1
pats her back and tells me about the man she has just met,
1
who wants to marry her.
1
We have both laughed at, flirted with, and danced with many different boys.
1
1
In Johannesburg we were known as the Kohler girls:
1
Maxine, the elder one, the sweet one, with her soft blond
2
curls and long-lashed violet eyes, her pale delicate skin that
2
bruises so easily, the shy smile; and Sheila May, two years
2
younger, darker-skinned, with straight hair, gray-green sloe
2
eyes, and narrow, boyish hips.
S2
Maxine is the one who never suffers from spots, the one •
13
•
N2
sheila kohler
w
1
who is said to look “like an English rose.” She is dreamy, good-
2
natured, and merry. Her kindness does not mask her intelli-
3
gence, but it is obvious her sympathy comes first. She seems
4
placid, but as with a calm sea on a sunny day there are sudden
5
squalls.
6
I torment her in the nursery by touching her bed with the
7
tip of my finger, which I know annoys her. I lean across from
8
my bed and poke. “Please don’t touch my bed,” she says again
9
and again, “please don’t touch my bed,” and finally, when I con-
0
tinue to laugh and touch the bed, she throws the glass of juice
1
she is drinking in my face.
2
3
When we fight as children in the back of the car, Mother suggests we both get boxing gloves.
4
“I hate her,” I tell Mother in a rage.
5
“No, you don’t, you love her,” Mother says.
6
I do, I do.
7
Maxine laughs and cries easily, her big eyes quick to fill
8
with tears at a glimpse of someone else’s sorrow. She will
9
pick up someone else’s baby on the beach, if it is crying. She
0
is the musical one, the one who learns the Mozart sonatas
1
and plays with feeling, the one who gets the Steinway, when
2
Mother takes it out of storage. When I try to play nursery
3
rhymes to my children on the piano, they will run away.
4S
5N
We are both readers, curious about people, the past, and above all, about love. •
14
•
Once We Were Sisters
w Now Maxine holds my baby, Sasha, in the Viyella night-
0
dress with the drawstring neck, that my mother and sister
0
have brought into my small room in the Grace–New Haven
0
Hospital in a carry-cot filled with clothes for my baby to
0
wear. She tells me about the young doctor she has met in
0
Johannesburg. I am not sure how much she tells me that day,
0
or even how I react to her words. I am unaware of their im-
0
portance in our lives. I am preoccupied with my new hus-
0
band, my new baby, and with the blood that flows from my
0
own body. Much later, her children will fill in the blanks
1
with words that ring with significance.
1
She has caught a first glimpse of Carl at a tennis party
1
in Johannesburg. He is playing tennis, hitting the ball hard
1
in the sunshine. She finds him dashing in his tennis whites
1
and is, her son later tells me, “immediately smitten at the
1
sight.”
1
At twenty I have already married the American I first
1
glimpsed at nineteen standing in the shadows outside our
1
ground-floor flat in Rome. He was slouching slightly in the
1
dim light, before the iron gate in the Parioli. A long, lanky
2
twenty-year-old with high cheekbones and a blond forelock
2
that tumbled into his slanting eyes, he was slim-hipped in
2
his blue jeans, the white shirtsleeves turned up to the bony
2
elbows. He was ringing our bell in Rome. I stood hesitating
S2
in the twilight, my hand on the ornate wrought-iron gate.
N2
•
15
•
sheila kohler
w
1
Grinning his big baby grin, he announced that he was the
2
friend, Michael.
3
“Enrico’s American friend,” he said. So I let him in the
4
door and eventually into my bed and then into my heart,
5
my heart of hearts. He has become my conduit into life as
6
my sister was once.
7
8
9
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0
1
2
3
4S
5N •
16
•
0
0
IV
0 0
w
0
Suitors
0
0 0 0
1
1 Now Maxine tells me she, too, is thinking of marrying.
1
“But what’s he like?” I ask.
1
He is a blond and blue-eyed Afrikaner who grew up in
1
Ermelo, a small town in the Transvaal, and his father works
1
as a superintendent on the railways, or perhaps she says he
1
is a caretaker of gardens. He seems to like flowers. Carl’s
1
mother’s name is Azalea, which does not suit her at all, I will
1
think, when I meet her years later. There is nothing flower-
1
like about Ouma, as we will call her—using the Afrikaans
2
name for grandmother— a large, solid lady with a heavy
2
hand. Her youngest son, Louis, will say much later that his
2
mother tried with increasing bitterness to get her children
2
to continue to speak Afrikaans by taking them to the Dutch
S2
N2 •
17
•
sheila kohler
w
1
Reformed Church, something they resisted. English has be-
2
come their language, the language of what Ouma probably
3
considers the oppressor.
4
Carl, a nerd at school with thick-rimmed glasses, one of
5
his daughters will tell me later, had been teased as a boy. He
6
passed his matriculation at sixteen and is already a doctor at
7
twenty-one.
8
9
“I don’t think he’s had time to read Dostoyevsky,” Maxine says and laughs.
0
My sister and I have sworn we will never marry anyone
1
who has not read Dostoyevsky. We have copied out long pas-
2
sages from Ivan Karamazov’s speeches about the existence of
3
evil in the world into our black hardback notebooks.
4
“And what about James and Tom and Neville Rosser?” I
5
ask. She laughs and strokes the soft fair fluff on my baby’s
6
round head.
7
I know my sister, at twenty-two, has seriously considered
8
several suitors: James, a good-natured South African who
9
owns a large banana farm with blue trees and many big dogs
0
in Natal; Tom, a slim, fair Scot with curly hair, who wants to
1
become an Anglican priest; and Neville Rosser, who took her
2
to the school dance, and who has glossy black hair, a dimple
3
in his chin, and will become an engineer and even find oil in
4S
his backyard, I find out later.
5N •
18
•
Once We Were Sisters
w Then there is Henry, the distinguished Englishman, the
0
member of the Grenadier Guards, the son of a friend of Moth-
0
er’s who took Maxine out the night of her presentation to the
0
Queen, she tells me.
0
My sister dropped a curtsy before the Queen in a pale
0
mauve, pleated dress with a décolleté that showed off her
0
smooth young skin, and a little mauve pillbox hat that perched
0
on the back of her blond curls.
0
Mother, who is friendly with the wife of the South African
0
ambassador to England, Harry Andrews, had my sister’s pre-
1
sentation arranged, though Mother’s accountant, a Mr. Perks,
1
who manages our money, protested. He considered a presen-
1
tation to the Queen would encourage her to “live above her
1
station.”
1
My mother, like many white South African women, rarely
1
speaks of politics, hardly reads the newspaper, or only the
1
kind with headlines like “Monkey Steals Baby from Carriage,”
1
but anything about the English royal family, on the contrary,
1
has an almost sacred glow. She reveres the Queen, who has
1
been so brave, she says, during the war, the Queen who will
2
become the Queen Mother in 1952.
2
We were even taken to see the royal family, including the
2
two princesses, in 1947, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret,
2
when they came out to South Africa for a visit. I remember
S2
N2 •
19
•
sheila kohler
w
1
the crush of the crowds and a terrible moment, when my
2
sister let go of my hand, and I was lost for a few moments of
3
panic.
4
I still have a photograph of Maxine in her presentation
5
dress on my bedroom wall, and sometimes people ask me if
6
it is a photo of me, which makes my heart tilt with sorrow.
7
There is something so unworldly about her with the cloud
8
of light behind her head, a misty English countryside sug-
9
gested in the background. She sits there in her ethereal love-
0
liness in her pale mauve dress with the pleats, a curl on her
1
forehead, her shy smile. Why did I not sense she would es-
2
cape us all? Why did I not see how soon this would be, and
3
how tragic?
4
I remember how my sister told me Prince Phillip, poor
5
man, looked very bored at this endless procession of young
6
girls, peered down the front of her décolleté to get a glimpse
7
of her smooth breasts.
8
After the presentation she was asked out by this young
9
Englishman who invited her to his flat. At his door she made
0
the embarrassing error in etiquette of shaking hands with his
1
batman, a sort of superior servant of an officer, she tells me.
2
She has told all these suitors she will make up her mind
3
soon. Now she has met someone new, which adds to her con-
4S
fusion. She often has difficulty making up her mind.
5N •
20
•
0
0
0 0
0 0
0 0 0
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2 Maxine in her presentation dress.
2
2
2
S2
N2
sheila kohler
w
1
“Mummy’s against it,” my sister says, smiling ruefully. She
2
holds my little girl so lovingly against her shoulder, her hand
3
on her head. My sister loves babies.
4
5
“Why? A handsome doctor, and you always said you wanted to be a doctor yourself,” I say.
6
“Well, the Afrikaans background, though he speaks per-
7
fect English—and you know what she thinks of them, going
8
around saying they beat the natives with a sjambok and com-
9
mit incest on their deserted farms.”
0
Mother maintains her grandfather was a Russian noble-
1
man, whose land was usurped by a wicked uncle. He had to
2
leave his vast estate, his serfs, the forests of white birch, and
3
flee his country. He wandered through many lands, learning
4
the twelve languages, not including the native ones, which he
5
supposedly spoke. Passing through Salonika, he adopted the
6
name of the place and came out to South Africa. I will later
7
discover he started a grocery store there, though Mother
8
leaves this less-glamorous part out of her story.
9
Was he perhaps a Greek? I wonder, later in my life, seeing
0
the picture of the dark-haired merchant, standing outside his
1
store, his apron tied around his waist, surrounded by his large
2
family. Wherever her family came from, Mother looks down
3
on the Afrikaners, the Boers. She considers them uncouth and,
4S
though she herself has never finished high school, uneducated.
5N
She makes fun of their simple guttural language and cites their •
22
•
Once We Were Sisters
w translations from the Bible with derision. She maintains the
0
Afrikaans translation of “Gird up your loins” is “Maak vas jou
0
broek,” which makes her laugh because of the sound of the
0
simple words. Since the bitter Anglo-Boer War at the start of
0
the twentieth century, there has remained great enmity be-
0
tween the two white tribes.
0
My sister says the family is quite poor. Carl is the only
0
one who seems to have succeeded so brilliantly, thanks to a
0
good brain, a capacity to focus on the task at hand, and hard
0
work. There are innumerable brothers and sisters, and a
1
niece will later tell me his mother, Azalea, would run after
1
them and beat them all hard with a hairbrush.
1
“The mother is rather plump and wears terrible hats. You know what a snob Mummy can be,” Maxine says.
1
1
“Do you love him?” I ask.
1
“I like how frank he is with me, that he tells me the truth,
1
says what he thinks. It’s refreshing,” she says.
1
“I know what you mean,” I say, smiling at her, thinking
1
of how we have both scoffed at all those “nice” boys our
1
mother has introduced us to, all seemingly called Cecil or
2
Montague. We don’t give much weight to Mother’s opinion
2
on the subject of marriagable men, or indeed on anything
2
else. On the contrary, we are open to others, ready to take a
2
chance. We both know that Mother, who has not had the
S2
privileged childhood we have had, nor the education, feels it
N2
•
23
•
sheila kohler
w
1
is important to marry someone wealthy and live in a large
2
house with many servants as she has been able to do.
3
When I tell Mother I would like to be independent, to
4
find meaningful work, she stares at me blankly and says with
5
genuine surprise, “What on earth would you want to work
6
for, dear?” Much of her life has been a successful struggle to
7
avoid any work.
8
9
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0
1
2
3
4S
5N •
24
•