other 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 sand-shoes.  Red sashes  ran slant-wise 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. 

     he Zulu my sister and I loved best was John Mazaboko. 
He called  my sister Mk-Mk- Mkatie 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, Mkatie," 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 little 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 Sawubona.
	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.

fter 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.  She 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
white-washed wall of  the empty servants' quarters, smoking his pipe in
the sun.  My sister sits beside him on the red earth. 

 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.  
 
·	·	·
 
or 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; 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 headmistress pointed out, most of  us were
destined to be mothers and wives.

hen my
sister first 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, Mkatie, " 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 fiance'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.

t 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."

 he 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 agapanthus grew by the pool, and the jacarandas were in
bloom again.  We were wearing our swimsuits and sunhats, rocking 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 did,
saying it was because of the 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."

y
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."

orrow 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 more 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, "Mkatie, 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. 
 
hortly
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, 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. 

e 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.   

nce, 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 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. 
 	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 breasts, her face.

							For John Mazaboko

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