But I think she had less strength in her arms than the children did, so it was they and Howard who were carrying the bags and suitcases, and she just fluttered along beside them, like a bird.

HOWARD AND I SLEPT in the room I’d had as a girl. Now it had two narrow beds pushed together, so two people could sleep there. There was a net curtain at the window, the window which overlooked the peach trees, and the circular washing line, hanging with white sheets, with sheets: how many sheets did Maggie wash, in her lifetime? There was no washing machine in that house, just the stone sink, large, that I’d see filled with soapy water, Maggie bending over it with the washboard, back and forth, back and forth, as she washed the sheets, the clothes. And then, the hanging on the line. Maggie had more strength in her arms than I thought.

I could imbue those motions over the washboard, the clothesline, with beauty, make a painting of them. But I never, ever did. You know that, there is no such painting in my work, no such tableau. Then again, I’ve never done figurative work, my paintings are abstract. So I leave it with the critics, the journalists, to say what they see. They have said it, too.

You can make beauty out of any ugliness, any great sin, and the question is why, why would you do it? Why must you do it? And what is left, when you have made it — a beautiful thing — out of ugliness?

What, what have I left?

HOWARD BROUGHT a box of special cigars for my father, sometimes he did that. There was a cigar shop on Rissik Street, a dark shop with a humidor and crimson walls, I’d been past it. Howard didn’t smoke but he’d have a cigar with my father, then they’d go out onto the porch together and sit, beside my mother’s miniature cacti on their stands, and smoke, and talk, looking out towards the iron gate, and the empty grey street, beyond. A street in a small country town. My mother would complain about the smell, my father’s pipe was one thing, she said, but cigars . . .

I had brought my mother the copy of Nadine Gordimer’s story collection, a hardcover, ochre-coloured. My mother would enjoy it. And a puzzle, then. How is it that my mother enjoyed Nadine Gordimer, who wrote about apartheid, when she was ignorant and oblivious of the structure of the country around her, the meaning of it?

Something I understood only years later: my mother recognized the real world in Nadine Gordimer’s stories, she appreciated the realism, the vivid realism of the stories. The books described my mother’s world. But the imperative contained within the works: the search for and advocating of a new state; the profound moral critique; the desire and search for justice; these, these all, escaped my mother. I may be wrong, but I don’t think so. My mother was not educated beyond high school.