I had not taught Emily to make that broth, where had she learned?

Helena’s broth simmered for twenty-four hours in my apartment in New York. The smell, so rich and deep and many-faceted, permeated every room. It smelled of everything, you couldn’t say what it smelled of. It smelled of every deep-marrowed thing. And I thought of Emily, and the winter of 1972, when we were all so sick. Including Joseph, who got sick too.

And then I said to Helena, d’you remember 1972 in Johannesburg, do you remember, Helena? Oh, she said. Yeah. I guess so. Joseph Weiss was staying with us. We called him ‘the man in the room,’ she said. It’s not funny though, she said. No, I said. It isn’t. We were silent then. Mom, let’s go sit in the living room, she said, she didn’t need to be standing over the pot any more.

Helena was looking at me as we sat then in the deep chairs of my living room, me — an old woman — I suddenly saw myself through her eyes.

HELENA LEFT after her visit that weekend, she left me with a pot in my fridge, of the bone broth — marrow soup, I called it. She also left several jars of it in my freezer. We had both stood in the kitchen and sucked the bones dry, spooning the deep marrow from them. I’ve never seen you eat that, Mom, she said. I didn’t remind her about Emily, I didn’t trust myself to talk about that.

THE WINTER OF 1972 continued, we ate Emily’s soup, I ate the fragments of marrow, scooped onto slices of white bread where they melted, the rich fat soaking through onto my fingers. Perhaps we would all make it through, perhaps we would. That’s what I thought.

A doctor working for the underground was finally brought one night by the comrades, to Joseph’s room. He diagnosed pneumonia, prescribed antibiotics, and then Joseph recovered, at last. Emily told me, and Joseph himself told me two weeks later, when I finally went to see him again.

I’d felt I must make amends, amends for my coldness.

I imagined Joseph’s life split into two separate halves: there was his daytime, in the cold stone room, in solitude, but for a twice-daily delivery of food by Emily. Bread, eggs, milk, tea. Soup. The silence of the trees that hid him.

And the white woman of the house: a cold woman. Me. I saw myself: my aloofness. I prefer to call it reticence, but what does it matter, anymore?

And then there was Joseph’s life in the dark, night hours: a knock on his door, soft in the stillness and blackness outside. A comrade, a tall man, another white man: let’s go, man, you ready? And Joseph, stepping out, pulling his wooden door — my door, that I knew so well — shut behind him, and following the man, walking briskly up the dark grass. Two shadows. Past the pool, glittering black. Past the patio and the table where I’d be, for breakfast. Along the side of the house against the tall white wall. Opening the yard gate, into the concrete yard where the dogs were. The dogs: a bark, but then, wagging. The dogs knew them now. Hey, Chester, Joseph would say, Chester! Past the silent washing lines, the servants’ rooms dark and still on their left. And now, the back gate: unlatched. Through the gate. Pulling it shut, its latch clicking behind them. A few minutes’ walking along the empty quiet street, past other white walls, other hedges and deep trees: my neighbours’ houses.