Come Stand

What follows is one writing, whole ... nothing cut, nothing explained ... The silence after it is the room ... The morgue in Soweto has run out of everything except grief and two women named Grace and Fadima who refuse to let the children go unnamed. Grace holds the brush. Small brush. The kind meant for watercolor birds, delicate things. Not this. Not faces that need to be remembered before the forgetting begins. "R43.20," Fadima says. "Including VAT." The brown paint from the school supply closet. The only shade that might approximate — Grace does not finish the thought. The first child is Thabo. Seven years old. The placard says cause of death but Grace does not read it. The placard says date but Grace does not need to know the date. The placard says mother's name: Nomvula. "Nomvula," Grace says aloud. Giving the name air. She paints. The brown is wrong. Too red. Then too dark. The children's paint was not made for this. The children's paint was made for paper suns and grass that reaches toward those suns. "Can't see his face anymore," Grace says. "Try." "Can't." But she can. The face comes back as she paints it. Not the face she sees on the table — that face has started its journey somewhere else. The face she paints is the face that ran through the township dust, the face that asked for bread, the face that fell asleep against his mother's chest. Fadima writes in the ledger. Date. Time. Name. Paint type: Student Watercolors, R43.20 with VAT. Artist: Grace. Witness: Fadima. The ledger is seventy pages now. Seventy pages of children who will have faces in the memory book because two women refused to let the facility's poverty become the children's anonymity. The next child has no placard. No name. Found by the water processing plant. Age estimated six to eight. Grace paints anyway. She gives the child Thabo's smile. Just around the edges. Just enough that whoever sees this portrait will think: this child knew joy. "That's not accurate," Fadima says. "Nothing here is accurate." They work until the light through the small window changes from morning to afternoon. Seven portraits. Seven children. One tube of R43.20 brown, nearly empty. Grace holds the tube up to the light. "Enough for two more," she estimates. "We need to go back to the school," Fadima says. "They won't have more brown." "They'll have something." Grace looks at the seven faces drying on the wall. Watercolor on institutional paper. Not archival. Will not last twenty years. Will not last ten. Does not matter. The photographs will last. The ledger will last. These portraits are just the passage — the moment between dying and being remembered. She cleans the brush in the jar of clouded water. The brown makes a spiral as it leaves the bristles. "Tomorrow," Grace says. "Tomorrow." They close the door behind them. In the room, seven faces dry. The brown deepens as the water evaporates. By morning, the portraits will be ready to be photographed. By next week, they will be in the memory book. By next year, someone who loved Thabo will turn to his page and say: "Look. He had that smile. I remember that smile." That is what R43.20 with VAT can buy. A remembered smile.