In 1979, when Sheila Kohler was 38, her beloved sister Maxine – Kohler’s only sibling, not quite 40 and the mother of six children – died in a car crash. Evidence suggests Maxine’s husband Carl deliberately drove their car off the road. The image he presented to the world was that of a respected cardiothoracic surgeon, but behind closed doors he abused his wife and children for years.
Kohler's memoir, Once We Were Sisters, weaves together three distinct but fundamentally interdependent stories. First and foremost, it's a deeply personal account of a close sibling bond, the events that led up to Maxine's death, and the repercussions of this loss.
Elegantly intertwined with this is the story of a particular political backdrop, that of South Africa under apartheid, seen from the point of view of white wealth and privilege, but, as far as these two sisters were concerned, certainly not power.
Thirdly, it’s the story of how Kohler became a writer. “As is so often the case,” she explains, “truth is much crueller than fiction,” but it’s the latter to which she initially turned, both in an attempt to give Maxine the voice she lacked while she was living, and as a space within which to work through her own feelings of complicity and guilt.
At the start of the book comes a “flood of questions” – How was this tragedy allowed to happen? Why didn’t Kohler do more to prevent it? Could she have, or was it set in stone? And if in some way fated, who or what was to blame?
Over the course of nearly 40 years and via the medium of nine novels, three short story collections – all of which, she explains, have dealt with this tragedy in some shape or form – Kohler has dealt out revenge and comeuppances, played out alternative endings, and given Maxine a life beyond her death. When it comes to real life, however, she’s “still looking for the answers”.
The sisters’ childhood reads like something out of a fairytale. Cossetted on a large estate in a Johannesburg suburb, which employs an “army of servants”, their father is driven to work every day in a “shiny” Rolls Royce, while their mother, a cocktail always in hand, spends his money and is waited on hand and foot.
Their father dies when the girls are still children, but money is not a problem, both bringing substantial inheritances to their early marriages – Kohler at 19, Maxine at 22. This buys them a freedom of sorts – sojourns in Europe (Kohler leaves South Africa at 17 and lives in Paris for 15 years, while Maxine stays behind in Johannesburg), large houses, enrolment at universities – but the main identity of each is wife and mother. “We need more white babies,” Maxine’s white, male South African gynaecologist tells her.
Deeply uncomfortable moments like this pepper the pages ("John, clean it up, it smells Zulu," their mother commands their house servant, a "tall, very dark-skinned, distinguished Zulu" forced to dress in shorts and knee socks). Once We Were Sisters is not an obviously political book but the story of apartheid must be read between the lines.
Maxine is beaten “black-and-blue” by Carl for years before her death, held down by their female black servants, helpless in the face of their white master’s commands: “the classic scenario with a South African twist”. Kohler and her mother both know about this. As far as the latter is concerned, keeping up appearances is the most important thing. Kohler meanwhile, counsels her sister not to abandon her children. Only too late she realizes what she thus failed to prevent – not an accident at all, but murder.
“What held us back from taking action, from hiring a bodyguard for her?” Kohler interrogates herself after the fact.
“Was it the misogyny inherent in the colonial and racist society in South Africa at the time? … Was it the way women were considered in South Africa and in the world at large?”
In tracing what she describes as “the pernicious effect on all in an unjust system of caste and sex,” she lays herself open to accusations of ignoring the true victims of this barbaric regime. For the purposes of this particular book, however, Kohler can, of course, only write what she knows, and in that regard she excels, not least because she never claims any heroism.
On the contrary, she is honest to a fault about her shortcomings. The result is an elegantly told warning of the abuses of power.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist based in London.
