Once we were Sisters: a memoir by Sheila Kohler

Sheila Kohler was born in apartheid South Africa and spent her early childhood in an enormous house maintained by an army of black servants. Her father made money, and her mother felt sure that "appearance was everything." Money and privilege insulated her and her sister Maxine.

From the beginning, Kohler builds suspense, gradually revealing the dark underbelly of the violent, racist and misogynistic society that surrounded her. The reader knows that Maxine is dead, but must wait until the end for her grieving sister to learn the details of her demise.

After an early reference to childhood games of Cowboys and Indians, the violence escalates. In passing, the author alludes to the "great enmity between the two white tribes" dating back to the Boer War. Her half-page summation of the violently illogical apartheid state is jaw-dropping.

Following the pattern of their culture, both sisters marry young, and learn that "our husbands seem to prefer us pregnant." Maxine's husband, a doctor, works with the famed heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard. Carl "glowers," and the reader feels the first mild shudder of apprehension. We soon learn that "his life has been filled with narrow rules and regulations" which he has no compunction in breaking, but "cannot countenance others breaking." He "wants...above all, to be in control."

From the start, Sheila senses that her brother-in-law "does not take for granted that the world will consider him with benevolence." When he indulges in bouts of rage, "We placate and appease." Apartheid South African culture supports his anger and entitlement. Kohler shocks the reader with her vivid portrayal of the mass denial, the cotton wadding of lies and secrecy that surround her. From early childhood, Sheila is aware that "none of these people want to confront the truth." Instead, they "prefer to mouth banalities,"...'received text,' phrases that sound pleasant to the ear." The truth runs beneath in an underground thread of violence.

At boarding school, the girls live in dormitories named after "dead white men:... Kitchener, Selborne, Athlone and Milner." The teachers are "women, mostly spinsters, and some quite mad." Later, their widowed mother takes her teenage daughters to Italy for the summer. When an Italian friend asks her to let the girls stay on, the mother agrees, and Sheila speculates that "she is not unwilling to leave South Africa for awhile." After all, it is "only a few months after the Sharpeville massacre."

Riding his wave of white male entitlement, Carl has no shame about hitting Maxine. "He forces his black female servants...to participate in a particularly South African form of wife-beating, holding my struggling sister down on the bed while he beats her." His wife's sister sees "a man who feels all is permitted to him, that he can follow his desires wherever they might lead."

Carl has a gun in his closet. When his son finds it, he worries that his father intends to kill the whole family. Indeed, says the narrator, "A friend of theirs, another doctor, has attempted to do just this," to gas his entire family, but has "botched the job." Meanwhile, each time Maxine's husband beats her black and blue, she goes to her mother to recover. Afterwards, he seems remorseful, and "would apologize, promise, threaten with reprisals, the classic scenario with a South African twist."

And so life goes on. "This is a world where appearances, above all, count, where sorrow is not expressed," while people go on "pretending that all is for the best in the best of worlds." But the author cannot bear this painfully charged silence. In an effort to heal her grief, she has spent many years writing variations of Maxine's story. In this poignant memoir, she finally exposes all she knows and all she doesn't know about her beloved sister's death. She does so out of a deeply felt need "to share my story with others, a way of establishing a community of souls."