The End of an Era
My mother and I entered the little room at the bank, her safety deposit box in hand. It was time to catalogue the contents, which no one had looked at for several decades. I helped her open the box and then stood back. This is the past she shares with my father, and the contents were hers to handle and unpack.
Carefully, she picked out each item and lay it on the desk.
Brown manila envelopes containing documents that looked antique, even to me. Among them, my father’s 1924 birth certificate from South Africa. U.S. naturalization papers, 1968.
A tiny gold ring, a gift from some far-seeing, long-dead relative, given to my mother when she was 3 years old.
It’s been exposed to little light of day, having been locked in successive safety deposit boxes, in two countries, for 88 years. Still bright and shiny.
A set of proof coins from Australia, presented to my father when he lectured there in the early 1970s, along with the accompanying letter of appreciation. Current value: $16.
I expected no surprises, but there was one. Not so much the item itself, but my reaction to it. A small canvas bag tied at the neck that clinked as we opened it and poured out the contents.
Coins spilled out of the bag and lay gleaming on the desk. Krugerrands—South African gold bullion. Seeing them catapulted me back to 1962, my 14th year, the year we left South Africa.
We lived in Johannesburg, called in Zulu eGoli, the Place of Gold. My parents didn’t want to leave South Africa without having visited a gold mine. The week before we left, they took a day tour of a mine on the outskirts of the city.
I remember the tour as if it were yesterday—the long journey down to the depths of the shaft in a rickety old lift, the helmets we wore with little battery-operated lights in front, the way the rock around us dampened sounds. We rode in a little cart down a track to where miners were working, past heavy wooden supports that held the rock ceiling up. Watched the ore being loaded into carts and tracked back to the lift and up to the surface for processing.
I recall the sound of the fans that blew clean air into the shafts, without which miners would have suffocated, and the long ear-popping journey back up to sunlight.
The gleaming Visitors Center, where bars of gold were on display, and where anyone who could lift a bar by gripping its sloping sides with one hand, could take one home (no one ever did). I could even smell the air in the mine shaft, dank and wet, dusty and unfamiliar.
And yet, if asked, I would have to admit that I was never there. As clearly as I remember the experience, I also remember the sense of betrayal I felt at discovering that you had to be 16 in order to take a mine tour. I wasn’t permitted to go, and my parents were unwilling to do anything to make it possible. I waited at home with my younger sister and brother, worrying about the danger our parents faced being so deep down in a mine shaft.
How is it possible to remember two simultaneous versions of reality with such clarity, when only one of them could be true?
The answer, I think, is that I write novels. The writing of fiction carries with it certain perils. One is that we confuse what happened with what we research. I can no longer tell with certainty what is family history, and what I invented as I wove fictional characters into that history in On the Sickle’s Edge. And clearly, what I remember about traveling down a gold mine shaft has become indistinguishable from the research I did for The Third Power, written and published almost 40 years ago, which takes place, in part, in the bowels of a South African gold mine. Ironically, I think my father’s lecture in Australia, for which he was given that set of proof coins, might well have been about the phenomenon of False Memory Syndrome.
But that’s another story.
Back to the Krugerrands. My mother had forgotten they were there, and doesn’t need them. She no longer requires a safety deposit box, and feels that at her mature age it’s time to simplify life. Please sell them, she asks. Not by mail. Find someone—a living person—who will buy them.
It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. The reputable bullion dealers I was familiar with thirty years ago are all out of business, or now specialize in currency exchange. One of the currency exchange companies I called didn’t even know what a Krugerrand was, and wasn’t much interested in finding out.
Finally, someone referred me to the sort of dealer I was looking for. On a narrow side street in Boston’s oldest business district, I entered a storefront crowded with antique watches and coins, gold chains and jewelry. As we waited, a mail carrier arrived with several registered packages from around the globe for the owner to sign. Customers milled around, looking for deals, searching for a particular coin to complete a set, wanting to know the bullion value of strands of gold chain. None of them looked particularly well-heeled. If they bothered to look around, they probably thought the same thing about me. It struck me that we no longer dress up for air travel or to go to the attorney or the doctor’s office. I was wearing shorts and a grubby T-shirt. Perhaps the last bastion of dressing, I thought, should be to the gold dealer when you make your once-in-a-lifetime visit to part with your mother’s few coins.
The elderly man behind the counter, using a loupe in one eye, could tell immediately whether chains were real or fake. He looked closely at our Krugerrands, checked the day’s bullion value, and made me an offer. I had already looked up the day’s gold price, and I knew what ballpark I needed in order to feel that I had prudently executed my mother’s request.
The dealer gave me a check and I left the store. When I handed it to my mother to be deposited, I felt, in so many ways, a sense of finality. The South Africa we left 57 years ago thankfully no longer exists. Whatever dreams my parents had as young immigrants filled with hope for themselves and their children, have been realized. Those young children are themselves grandparents, aware with some certainty which dreams are likely to be realized, and resigned to the impossibility of others. Personal history, memory, and research have all begun to converge, coalescing into a thick goop that, sooner or later, will merge with whatever consciousness exists after us.
One of the things we learn to recognize is that if one’s end is not imminent, it may as well be at an infinite distance. In more colloquial terms, you’re alive until you’re dead. I sense that infinite distance now, and am happy to live with the uncertainty of minutes or decades. But it does feel as though this is the end of many eras, all at once.