Title Page
ELBIE LÖTTER
It’s Me, Anna
Translated by Marianne Thamm
KWELA BOOKS
Dedication
To Lovey and C.J.
Part 1
I was eight years old when my mother brought Uncle Danie home. Eight. From then until I turned sixteen, my life was . . . different. That’s the only word I can think of to describe it – different. That’s why I’m in my car now, on an eight-hour journey – so that I can wipe out eight years of injustice, eight years of hell. If all goes well, at three o’clock tomorrow morning I’ll be standing at their door. Three o’clock on a weekday morning in Bloemfontein. That’s good. They’ll still be fast asleep. Most crimes take place in the dead hours of the morning, don’t they? But before I get there, before I am able to do anything, I have to make myself see all those things that I’ve suppressed for so long, that I’ve driven from my mind. Then, when I remember the pain, when I feel it, I’ll have the courage to do what I need to do. I have to see it all again, feel it. Like I’m going to see him now, like I’m going to smell his fear.
I was six when I first realised that all was not well between my mom and dad. I went to nursery school during the day when they were at work. My father was a sergeant in the South African Police and my mother worked in Bantu Administration. We lived in a small town in the Eastern Cape.
My mother and I were in the lounge. The radio played softly in the background. I was busy building a tower with my wooden blocks and my mom was just sitting there. Like a dead person. Or someone who wanted to die. Then my father walked in and she suddenly came to life.
“Look at him. Look at your father!” she shrieked. “He doesn’t love you any more, Anna. Or me.”
“Johanna!” my father warned, but my mom was beside herself.
“Do you want to hide the truth from your child?” She struggled for breath, then screamed even louder: “He loves another woman with three children more than he loves us. A slut! He wants to be with her, Anna. Alta the slut and her three children!”
Alta. I still hate that name with a passion. And I can’t distinguish that Alta from others – when I meet one, she immediately becomes the woman who stole my father, the one with three children whom my father loved more than me. I’m immediately antagonistic towards anyone with that name.
Without a word, my father walked past and went to shower. Then he lay on the double bed, smoking a cigarette. My mother got up and walked out. I went and lay down next to my dad, held tightly in his arms, like always. Then she walked in with his service revolver in her hand.
“You pig! You fucking pig! I’ll kill you. That’s what a man deserves for pushing his wife and child aside for another woman!”
I wasn’t scared. Maybe because I didn’t realise that you should be scared when your mother threatens to shoot your father and he pulls you across his chest and says, “Shoot, then.” Afterwards, whenever I remembered that incident, I wondered
who’d really loved me. My mother, who didn’t shoot, or my father, who used me to prevent her from shooting him like . . . a pig?
My father was the approachable one in our family. The one who always made time for me. Who dragged me off, sometimes unwillingly, to rugby and cricket matches. At these matches, he’d bring out oranges and roll them between his palms to soften them. The oranges were packed into two separate containers. Mine were plain orange – the sweet juice would drip down my chin and make my fingers sticky. My father would doctor his with syringes full of brandy the night before, and he was usually very jolly by the time the final whistle was blown. When we arrived home, full of laughter, especially when our team had won, my mom’s face would loom over us like a dark thundercloud. She wouldn’t say anything. Just send me off to my room after supper. She’d keep it all inside until she couldn’t stand it any more. Later, a torrent would explode from her mouth. She screamed at my dad, not at me. Not back then. As I lay curled up on my bed, wrapped in my blankets against the biting cold, words or snatches of conversation drifted through the walls. “How could you? Can’t you be more responsible? Think about how scared she must be when you look like this. Car crash . . . accident . . . You’re supposed to be a father, someone she can look up to.”
On and on until, eventually, I’d fall asleep from sheer exhaustion. I never heard my father’s voice. It was as if he wasn’t there, as if he had already left.
I mustered up enough courage to talk to my mother one Sunday morning after church.
“Mommy, Daddy looks after me when we go to rugby. I’m not afraid.”
“Anna,” she said, and went down on her haunches to look me in the eye, “I know you have fun, but it’s not the right way of doing things. Your father is supposed to protect you, with his life if needs be, and not place you in danger. That’s unfortunately what happens when he drinks and drives. He can make errors of judgement, and it gets dangerous. Do you understand?”
I didn’t, but I nodded. How could having fun with your father be dangerous? After that day, I was forbidden from going to watch rugby with my dad. I had to sit on the stoep and wave goodbye as he drove off.
The Saturday after my mom scolded my dad about his drinking and driving, we went fishing. I don’t know how my dad convinced Mom to allow me to go with him, but this time she didn’t say a word. She just hugged me tightly before I got into the car.
We never went fishing in the sea, even though it was close enough to our home. “Too rough,” my father would say. “I was born in the Free State. We catch fish, we don’t go angling – and definitely not in the sea.”
That’s why we went to the dam. It wasn’t a big dam, just large enough for fishing. It was a beautiful day, sunny and windless, and my father had packed enough food and cooldrink for both of us, so that we wouldn’t go hungry.
“Anna,” he said, not looking at me, but staring out at the water as if looking for help, “your mom and I have decided to get divorced. Do you know what divorced means?”
“Yes.” A lot of the parents of the children in my nursery-school class were divorced. It meant they had two houses and got two presents on their birthdays and at Christmas.
“Daddy wants you to know that Mommy and I love you very much. It’s not your fault that we’re getting divorced. We, your mom and I, just can’t be with each other any more. Do you understand?” He looked at me. “Anna, I’m so sorry that I’m doing this to you.”
The tears welled up in his eyes.
I held his hand and gave it a little squeeze. “It’s okay, Dad.”
I don’t remember much about the divorce itself. Only that my cat was run over on the same day and that my father came to tell me just before we moved out. My heart was broken. Was it because of the cat? The divorce? I don’t know. I just know that my heart still aches when I think about that day.
After the divorce, my mother and I moved to the city, near the sea. My father asked for a transfer and also came to live in the city. He rented a house close to the sea – “because I just miss my little girl so much,” he said.
My mom worked during the day and I stayed with Paulina. Paulina Willemse knocked on our door for work shortly after we’d moved in. You could see she’d lived a hard life. My mom must’ve felt sorry for her because she started working for us the very next day. Paulina stayed with us for many years. She sometimes used her own bus fare to buy me ice cream, especially when my mom had shouted at me. I’d lie on the mat and lick one side of the ice cream while Snowy, the white cat my mom bought me after we moved in, licked the other.
“Why do you buy me ice cream, Paulina? This afternoon you’ll have to walk home, and it’s far,” I asked.
“My children live with my sister. If I’m good to you, then the Lord will make sure that