A Beautiful Family Read online

  ‘No, you locked my camera in the boot.’

  ‘Jesus, Precious. Why’s your camera still…? Here are the keys. Get the damn thing and do your job.’

  The private security guard walked threateningly towards them. ‘No photos,’ he snarled.

  Tracy looked appealingly at the police officer.

  ‘You can take photographs outside the house. But nothing else.’

  Everything looked very quiet down at the house. A couple of police cars and a grey mortuary van stood in the driveway. As Precious snapped away, Tracy called Kingmaker and told him about her sighting.

  ‘I’ll check it out,’ Kingmaker promised.

  He called back fifteen minutes later. ‘The MEC’s office denies he’s been at the Silverman house. Did you get a pic of him?’

  Tracy glared at Precious. ‘No.’

  ‘You sure it was him? One darkie looks pretty much like another to you lot.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Anyway, I saw the MEC at a function last week. It was him. And, if it wasn’t, then who was in that blue light brigade? I’m coming back to the office. There’s not much to report here.’

  Mpho was right. So far, it really wasn’t much of a story at all.

  ***

  The next morning, Tracy tottered into the kitchen, still pulling her dressing gown on over her shortie pyjamas. She was not a morning person. Her mom was. Despite her girls’ night out last night, Maxine was already up, sitting at the table paging through the newspaper. The kettle was warm, but Tracy switched it on and added a heaped spoon of Ricoffy and two of sugar to her Barbie mug while it boiled again.

  ‘Morning, Mom. What’s the front page lead today?’

  ‘I didn’t read it. Something about some new ANC corruption thing again. I’ll let you have the paper in a minute.’

  The kettle clicked off and Tracy poured the bubbling water into the mug. She dunked a buttermilk rusk, impatient for the coffee to cool. Kingmaker hadn’t told her he was working on anything big. Must be a bit of the same old, same old...

  ‘Wow, Trace – listen to this!’ Maxine was pointing at a story at the bottom of the page.

  PROMINENT JOHANNESBURG SOCIALITE DIES

  By Tracy Jacobs

  The wife of Alan Silverman (50), one of Johannesburg’s leading property tycoons, died at the family’s palatial home in northern Johannesburg yesterday.

  Police spokesperson, Captain Beauty Mogane, told the Daily Express that Mrs Brenda Silverman (44) was found in her bed by the domestic worker.

  ‘There was no sign of a struggle or forced entry. We don’t know what caused her death. It was a complete shock to the family, because she had been in excellent health.’

  According to her family, Mrs Silverman went to bed at 10pm the previous night. Mr Silverman never noticed anything wrong when he left for the office in the morning, but the domestic worker was unable to wake her when she took her a cup of coffee at around 9am.

  An autopsy is expected to be held as soon as possible to determine the cause of death.

  Mr Silverman is believed to have close ties to the ruling ANC.

  A prominent member of the Gauteng provincial legislature and MEC for Housing, Mr Sipho Mphahlale, was spotted leaving the Silverman home after paying his respects to the family yesterday.

  After refusing to serve in the apartheid Defence Force, Mr Silverman fled the country in the 1980s. He is said to have met many of today’s leading political figures while in exile.

  He and Mrs Silverman, who had been married for more than 20 years, returned to South Africa before the first democratic elections in 1994.

  He started his property development business, Silver Properties, soon thereafter. It has been billed as one of the country’s largest listed property development and investment companies although its share price has been under pressure for the past few months and the company failed to declare a dividend at the close of its last financial year.

  Mr Silverman, an active member of the Jewish community, was named as the South African Jewish Businessman of the Year some years ago.

  Mrs Silverman was said to be involved in charity work for Johannesburg’s underprivileged. Despite being an Orthodox Jewess, which required her to dress modestly and cover her hair, Mrs Silverman once featured in South African society’s “Best Dressed” lists.

  Mrs Silverman is survived by her husband and three children, twins Yair and Aviva (23), and Zivah (17).

  Details of the funeral arrangements have not yet been made public, but Mrs Silverman is likely to be laid to rest at West Park Jewish Cemetery as soon as the autopsy is complete, in accordance with Jewish tradition.

  Tracy sighed, not bothering to interrupt as her mother read her story to her. Maxine still didn’t associate the “by Tracy Jacobs” by-line with her daughter.

  ‘Heavens! Trace, did you know about this?’

  ‘Mom, look at the by-line. It’s my story.’

  ‘So why didn’t you tell me last night before I went out? The girls would have wanted to know.’

  Tracy smiled to herself. Maxine would have loved to be able to break the news – and be the centre of attention, no doubt embellishing every little detail with her journalist daughter’s “inside” information.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be interested,’ she teased.

  ‘Of course I’m interested. She was so young. What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Maxine looked up from her third dissection of the story. ‘Come on, sweetie, you can tell me. There must be more to it than what’s in the paper. Surely.’

  ‘Why? What have you heard?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know her very well.’

  ‘Oh, pu-leeze. You didn’t know her at all.’

  ‘Well, maybe we weren’t close. Now that I think about it, there was something about her in the Jewish Voice a while back – some row or other at some function. I can’t remember the details, but I remember thinking she’d behaved very stupidly and that she’d better be careful.’

  ‘Really? You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘It was a while ago, sweetie. I think you were still at university. Anyway, you wouldn’t have been interested in Brenda. I thought you were only interested in the son. Didn’t he invite you out once?’

  Tracy flushed, got up from the table and put Barbie in the dishwasher.

  ‘I’ve got to get to work early, Mom. I’ll shower first, okay? But if you hear anything more, let me know.’ Maxine had an amazing network of contacts across the community. If anything happened, she would know. She was an even better source of gossip than the Johannesburg Jewish Community Forum website.

  CHAPTER 3

  Tracy steered Buttercup through the stone gateway at West Park Jewish Cemetery and the little car laboured up the tree-lined road leading to the memorial hall.

  She parked under one of the plane trees and climbed out. Buttercup’s aircon was temperamental and the shade should help to ensure they didn’t bake after the funeral. You couldn’t drive in that part of Jo’burg with your windows open. You didn’t drive in any part of Jo’burg with open windows.

  ‘Take your cameras,’ she told Precious and turned to Kingmaker, who was laughing, his merriment an affront to the regimented ranks of grey granite tombstones at attention behind a low diamond-wire fence.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Eish, T.T., I didn’t know you had a skirt. I’d like to say it looks good on you, but, shit man, it’s horrible.’

  She flushed and yanked at the black garment, pulling it lower on her hips, where it was held in place by a red belt. Her legs glowed lily white in the gap between the tops of her ankle boots and the hem of the skirt. Maxine had only told her about Brenda Silverman’s funeral late last night when she had got home from book club, so she hadn’t had time to organise a decent skirt. She’d hauled one out of her mother’s wardrobe this morning. She knew it looked ridiculous on her, but she wanted to speak to Alan Silverman – if possible – and he woul
dn’t be happy talking to a woman in pants. Not at his wife’s funeral.

  ‘Here, I’ve got my grandpa’s old yarmulke for you. Put it on.’

  She handed the blue skullcap to Kingmaker. The silver braid was coming loose, and it was quite grubby. Grandpa had worn it for as long as she could remember, keeping it in a tatty blue velvet bag along with his old fringed tallis and taking it out for Shabbos and holidays, weddings and funerals. ‘It’s the only one that stays on my head,’ he’d always said when they tried to persuade him to get a new one. They’d bought him a new one for his funeral, and held it in place with his yellowing tallis prayer shawl.

  She marched up the long, wide stairway to the open, tiled veranda and then into the empty memorial hall foyer. Precious scampered after her. Kingmaker strolled along behind. Their footsteps echoed on the highly polished parquet floor. Kingmaker examined the lists and lists of names etched in gold on the wooden boards that lined the walls.

  ‘So now what?’

  ‘Now we wait, here, where we can see everyone who arrives.’ Tracy positioned herself at the top of the stairs. ‘The family should be here soon, if they aren’t here already. I remember at my grandfather’s funeral we had to come early to hand over the death certificate and his ID book. The body’s probably already here – in that room over there.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Precious pointed at a fenced off area with six white hands holding up six ram’s horn shofars to form three archways.

  ‘It’s the memorial to the six million,’ Tracy said.

  ‘Six million what?’

  ‘Jews. The Holocaust?’

  Precious stared at her.

  ‘Never mind.’

  A large silver Bentley swept up the road, almost to the foot of the stairs. Alan Silverman, Yair and Zivah emerged. The men were wearing black suits, open-neck white shirts and wide-brimmed black hats. The older man was tall, good looking in a distinguished kind of way, with thick grey hair just visible under his hat. Little Zivah was in a long-sleeved white blouse, buttoned up to the neck and tucked into her long white skirt. A white Alice band held her long blonde hair back. She looked like a wraith, her unseeing dark eyes enormous in her pinched, deathly pale face. She looked a lot younger than seventeen – or was she eighteen now? Reports differed.

  Yair’s hair, dark like his late mother’s, curled up at the collar. Like his father, he was unshaven. He looked briefly at Tracy’s little team waiting silently at the top of the stairs, and then followed his father and sister into a room just off the foyer. Zivah was clinging to her father’s hand.

  Tracy’s heart was thumping. Shit, she’d thought she was over her schoolgirl crush. But he’d always been pretty nice to her, not like the other boys… and certainly not like his snooty twin, Aviva. He’d even apologised at school that Monday after his Barmitzvah party, for the way the other kids had teased her.

  ***

  ‘I thought you were going to speak to Silverman,’ Kingmaker hissed at her.

  ‘Not now,’ Tracy hissed back. ‘There’ll be time later – or maybe at prayers tonight.’

  More cars were driving up through the stone gateposts. A minibus taxi – as incongruous as Buttercup among the 4×4s and Mercs – snorted its way to the foot of the stairs and discharged a crowd of black women. They joined the throng climbing up to the hall.

  ‘Look who’s arrived,’ said Kingmaker. ‘That’s the first ANC person I’ve seen so far.’

  ‘Where?’ Tracy looked around. ‘I don’t see anyone from the ANC.’

  ‘That’s because you’re looking for darkies. There are also whites in the ANC – and that’s one of them.’ He indicated a bird-like woman dressed in a brown jacket, black slacks and sensible black shoes. Her grey hair, cropped off just below her chin, looked like an old warrior helmet. ‘Mrs Annette Davies-Smedley. She must have come up from Cape Town especially because Parliament’s in session.’

  Tracy tugged at Kingmaker’s sleeve. ‘Let’s get inside. I want to be as close as possible to the front so we can see who gets called as pallbearers.’

  ‘The family, surely?’

  ‘No, every man here can be a pallbearer. The family usually gives the Chevrah people a list of names to be called out – it’s as bad as arranging the seating at a wedding. I’ve heard of family feuds resulting from that list if one person gets called out before another, or worse, gets left off. But, as your name isn’t likely to be called out, you can always volunteer as a pallbearer at the end.’

  ‘No thanks.’ Kingmaker shivered.

  A hush fell over the waiting crowd as a door opened and the three Silvermans emerged, the front of their shirts weeping around jagged rips. White undershirts preserved their modesty. The men looked grim. Zivah looked on the verge of collapse. Yair put his arm around her, but she shrugged it away and clung to her father.

  ‘Shit, what happened to them?’ Kingmaker muttered in her ear.

  ‘They always tear the clothing of the chief mourners. My mom wore her oldest shirt to my grandpa’s funeral. They ripped it so badly she couldn’t even give it away afterwards.’

  Suddenly, a pair of double doors banged open and a pale wooden coffin draped in black cloth was wheeled into the foyer by six Chevrah men. Alan, his arm around Zivah, fell in behind. Yair followed, on Zivah’s other side. The men hauled the coffin into the memorial hall. The crowd surged forward, filling the hall and overflowing back into the foyer. Sun poured through the high, arched windows and framed the coffin.

  ‘That’s a crappy coffin. You’d think the Silvermans could afford something better,’ Kingmaker muttered.

  Tracy grinned. ‘We all get buried in the same pine box – rich and poor. Death is a great leveller.’

  ‘You sure it’s not just Jews being Jews?’ Kingmaker asked.

  She glared at him.

  A tall, bearded rabbi began to chant.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Kingmaker whispered.

  ‘Dunno. Shh.’

  The rabbi fell silent and one of the Chevrah men stepped forward with a sheet of paper in his hand and called out, ‘Gary James.’

  An elderly man shuffled forward and moved to the front of the trolley. He looked like that big deal at the Zionist Federation, but she wasn’t sure. She wrote down his name.

  ‘Hedley Finkelstein, Lawrie Greenblatt, Arno van Zyl…’

  As their names were called, men emerged from the crowd and took up a position around the coffin. Then the procession started moving, out of the far side of the hall and up a tarred pathway between row upon orderly row of closely packed tombstones, grim grey memorials to the departed. They had gone no further than ten metres, or so it seemed, when the procession stopped and the eight pallbearers stepped aside. The man with the list called out more names and another eight men stepped forward. Again and again, the procession stopped, the rabbi chanted, names were called out and the pallbearers changed. Some of the names were familiar to her – pillars of the Jewish community, captains of industry.

  ‘Who’s he?’ Tracy asked Kingmaker when a black man stepped forward to act as a pallbearer.

  ‘Not sure – I think he’s something at Luthuli House. He looks vaguely familiar,’ Kingmaker whispered back. ‘Odd that there are not more ANC luminaries here. I didn’t expect the president, but some ministers or at least some of the Gauteng ANC elite. Very, very odd.’

  ‘Maybe they got lost – or are just keeping African time,’ she suggested.

  It was Kingmaker’s turn to glare.

  ‘Or maybe the Jewish grapevine isn’t in tune with yours and they don’t know about it.’

  The procession stopped again. The Chevrah men moved forward and manhandled the coffin trolley across a stretch of stony ground to an open grave. They lifted the coffin onto straps held in place across the grave by a rectangular frame, and, slowly, the grave swallowed the pale coffin. The men pulled up the straps and walked away. Alan and Zivah moved to the graveside, his arm around her. Yair stood, solitary and inscrutable, a little to
the side. The crowd swirled forward. The sun beat down and a young woman – her hair covered in a headscarf – opened an umbrella and held it up to shade the visibly shaking Zivah.

  The rabbi chanted again. Alan and Yair stepped forward and, without looking at each other, quietly chanted, ‘Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba…’

  ‘What they saying?’ Kingmaker muttered into her ear.

  ‘It’s the mourner’s kaddish – the prayer for the dead.’

  The rabbi picked up a spade, dug it into the red earth piled up next to the grave and threw it onto the coffin. Thump. The crowd shuddered. Zivah uttered a high, thin wail and stumbled forward. Yair grabbed her and pulled her into his side, his arm around her shaking shoulders. The rabbi thumped in two more loads, then planted the spade into the sand. Alan took it and gingerly trickled three shovels of the red earth down the side of the grave. He planted the spade in the pile of sand and Yair handed Zivah over to him, stepped forward and added three tiny shovel loads into the grave. One by one, men came forward, picked up the spade, added their three shovels and planted the spade. Slowly, the grave began to fill.

  ‘Hope Precious is getting good shots of all these rich Jews doing manual labour. The gravedigger union should strike over this,’ Kingmaker muttered.

  ‘Shut up. You should do your bit too.’

  ‘Not me – I didn’t join the struggle to become a gravedigger for rich Jews.’

  Tracy giggled, then snorted as a large woman in an elaborate navy headscarf glared at her.

  ‘Brenda Silverman was a good woman,’ the rabbi said. ‘Taken from us far too young. She was a loving mother to Yair, Aviva and Zivah; a faithful, supportive wife to Alan, standing with him through good times and bad, keeping a wonderful kosher home. Her Shabbos dinners were a marvel. A very, very good woman. She will be missed by us all.’

  The Chevrah man stepped forward. ‘Prayers every night this week, except for Shabbos, of course, are at 6:15 at the Silverman home. Donations to the Chevrah Kadisha in memory of the late Brenda Silverman can be made at the office on your way out.’