Her sister, who likes to use trendy words from pop psychology, such as ‘closure’ and ‘mindfulness’, would probably call it ‘karma’.
They sit on the sagging couch, uncomfortably close to each other, but there is nowhere else to sit. The couch, a floral affair with crochet antimacassars covering the armrests, stands directly in front of, and far too close to, the large flat-screen TV where an Afrikaans series from the eighties is being rebroadcast. The sound has been muted; it is only the vaguely familiar images of actors and actresses who must all be either doddery or departed by now that fascinate Theresa against her will. Two more chairs occupy the space behind the couch, side by side like a church pew, but one holds a tray carrying a great variety of medicine bottles and pills, while the other is occupied by a stack of women’s magazines, probably also from the eighties.
It’s like a museum in here. Outside, the New South Africa is hurtling along, but among these four walls, with the front door tightly shut against ‘the noise and the stench’, Elize van Velden has managed to preserve a fragment of the beloved fatherland she felt at home in thirty years ago. And the lack of seating makes it clear that this museum isn’t really open to visitors.
Only the modern TV screen seems completely out of place.
‘Tannie Elize …’ Theresa says, with difficulty. She could never bring herself to address her disdainful mother-in-law as ‘Ma’. While Theo and Theresa were married, they saw her so rarely that it never really became necessary to call her anything. Now ‘tannie’ strikes her as overly intimate, but addressing a former relative as Mrs van Velden is also not an option. And calling this woman by her name is unthinkable. Elize van Velden is not the sort of Afrikaans tannie who would permit anyone younger than her to take her name in vain. ‘How do you survive here?’
‘My husband made provision for good life insurance,’ Elize answers curtly.
Can’t have been all that good, or the racist widow would have moved to a whiter, more upmarket neighbourhood by now.
‘I’m thinking more about the practical set-up. How do you get to the shops to buy groceries or medicine when the lift is out of order? And the bedroom and bathroom on the top floor … with the walking frame?’
‘I can pull myself up the stairs using the railing. I only do it once a day. I’ve had a toilet installed underneath the stairs where the linen cupboard used to be,’ she says, pointing in that direction. ‘And the lift isn’t broken all the time.’
‘But now that it is broken … do you have your food delivered?’
‘Meals on Wheels,’ Elize nods. ‘And there is a supermarket close by that also delivers groceries. I manage.’
But don’t you despair of the loneliness? That is the question Theresa really wants to ask. The frosty atmosphere between them has thawed slightly, like when you turn off a fridge and the ice starts to melt, but there is still a lot more ice than water.
‘Sometimes I phone a restaurant to order something. The only thing is, it’s always these young blacks who deliver and I don’t think it’s a good thing for them to know I’m a widow living on my own. For all you know they’re all in cahoots with the criminal element. So I always pretend that I’m talking to my husband elsewhere in the flat when I open the door. And I never tip because I don’t want them to think I’m rich.’
For the first time a smile tugs at the corners of her mouth, as if her clever tactic for deceiving the criminal element amuses her.
‘But … can’t you go live someplace where you feel safer?’
‘You can’t feel safe anywhere in this country anymore,’ Elize snorts indignantly. ‘And the property values have dropped so since everything turned black around me that I won’t be able to sell the place. I won’t get enough out to afford a flat in a better neighbourhood.’
‘But what about renting? I mean, if you rent out this flat, you could afford a room in a nursing home …’
‘I don’t want to rent the flat out to blacks – they will just wreck it like they wreck everything in the country. And I don’t want to end up in a little rented room.’
No, Theresa thinks, you are going to end up right here in your own Apartheid Museum, possibly even murdered by one of the black deliverymen you refuse to tip.
She reaches for her handbag on the low coffee table that is wedged into the narrow space between the couch and the television, and accidentally upsets the crochet runner. She straightens it before she takes a clear plastic envelope from her handbag.
‘Here are the letters I brought you.’
Elize takes the plastic envelope from her and eyes the light-blue sheets that are visible from the outside warily, as if frightened by the prospect of reading her own words again.
Theresa feels sweat gathering in her armpits and wonders if any of the windows in this stuffy flat are ever opened. She can smell overripe bananas, rotten fruit, something that has started to ferment, and scans the room in an effort to pinpoint the source of the smell.
In a corner next to the television is a small but leggy end table with several framed photographs arranged on top of a crochet doily. Theo as a black-and-white baby in a long christening robe, safe in his black-and-white mother’s arms. The mother is young and quite pretty and seductively plump, decked out in hat and gloves. At her side the young father looks splendid in his church suit, hair plastered down with oil, pencil-thin moustache above his proud smile. More black-and-white photographs of Theo as a dark-haired toddler beside a Christmas tree, Theo smiling with missing front teeth in one of those formally posed official school photographs, Theo in shorts with comically skinny legs between his parents in a professional photographer’s studio. Colour photography makes its appearance in his teenage years. Another official school photo, this time of a serious high-school boy with striking blue eyes against a red velvet backdrop. Theo in a shiny suit with bell-bottom trousers and wide lapels next to a girl in a satiny purple dress, probably his matric farewell.
There is even one of Theo on his wedding day in 1990, in his cream wedding suit, which Theresa doesn’t recognise straightaway because the picture has been cut in half to eliminate the bride. A bit of her arm and her hand on Theo’s sleeve are all that is left of the bride – the only signs of Theresa Marais’s presence in Theo van Velden’s life that are still tolerated in this flat.
The biggest photograph in the shiniest frame is of Theo standing bolt upright in his army uniform, his hair clipped close, his clean-shaven face attractively suntanned, the image of youthful preparedness and blind patriotism. It is clearly his mother’s favourite picture, how she prefers to remember him, the son who did his duty for flag and fatherland. Especially in the light of what would later become of this son.
From the last two decades of Theo’s life, there is just a single snapshot, half-hidden behind the patriotic army photo: Theo’s head and shoulders, a little out of focus, a sneaked picture hastily snapped with a point-and-shoot camera or a cellphone. Longish dark hair and a wild beard streaked with grey. Blue eyes in which Theresa recognises, even from this distance, the glint of madness.
She quickly averts her eyes from this shrine to a lost son – just in time to see Elize’s face implode like a building being demolished from the inside with dynamite. The reading glasses she wears on a string around her neck are on her nose and, apparently still scared to take the letters out of the envelope, she has started to read the one that is visible through the clear plastic. And now tears are pouring from behind the glasses and washing away every trace of her customary stern expression. She weeps without making a sound.
Like me, Theresa realises.
Unable to stop herself, Theresa has draped her arm around Elize’s shoulders, her fingers patting Elize’s fat upper arm in what is supposed to be a comforting gesture. The sight of her dangling limb, so clumsy and uninvited, makes her flush with embarrassment. But her fingers carry on patting until at last Elize pulls herself together with one final shuddering, silent sob. Theresa gratefully lets her arm drop. The old w
oman digs in the folds of her enormous bosom to produce a tissue from somewhere in the depths of her underwear. She blows her nose like a trumpet and restores the damp tissue to her bra.
‘I have something for you too.’ Elize points to a black Moleskine notebook lying on the coffee table near Theresa’s handbag. ‘He gave it to me once, told me to hide it because if the security police or the Mafia or I can’t remember who it was got their hands on it, they would kill him.’
Elize’s colossal breasts heave with the weight of her sigh. She still finds it painfully hard to talk about her son’s paranoid episodes.
‘He also said it would be best if I didn’t read it, for my own safety, but now he’s no longer here … I thought I should at least look at what he wrote in it. But my eyes aren’t so good any more … and there are parts where I can’t even recognise his handwriting – as if a stranger took the pen from his hand … I decided to stop. It upset me too much.’
And now she evidently wants her former daughter-in-law to be upset as well.
‘No,’ Theresa says, shaking her head. ‘if he didn’t want us to read it, perhaps it’s best—’
‘He wanted you to read it. He gave it to me because you cut him off completely after you left him.’ Theresa hears the accusation in the old woman’s voice and bites her lip to keep quiet. ‘He asked me to give it to you. Said you were the only one who would understand. But I didn’t know where to get hold of you. Because of course you cut me out of your life the same as him.’
Theresa closes her eyes for a moment, as if to shield herself from all these unfair accusations, and takes a deep breath before she speaks: ‘Tannie Elize.’ She hopes she’s sounding suitably sympathetic because she knows the woman beside her doesn’t want to hear what she is about to say. ‘We both know he was … well, mentally disturbed when he gave it to you. Surely one isn’t bound to act on every request from a mentally disturbed person?’
‘He wasn’t “a mentally disturbed person”, he was my son.’ Elize raises all three of her chins to look down her nose at Theresa. ‘And he was your husband. If you hadn’t left him, if you’d been willing to help him, he wouldn’t have ended up in an institution.’
‘I didn’t leave him! I don’t know what he told you, but he didn’t want to live with me any longer. He said I was plotting against him with the security police – he accused me of wanting to poison him! He didn’t lose his mind from grief or shock after we separated, Tannie Elize. We separated because he’d been losing his mind for ages and he refused to seek help.’
Theresa gets up so abruptly that she knocks her shin against the corner of the coffee table. ‘Ouch, fuckit!’
Her former mother-in-law purses her lips with disapproval, the lips squeezed together so firmly she appears to have swallowed them, but Theresa is not about to apologise for her crude language. She snatches up her handbag, again upsetting the runner, but this time she leaves it that way.
‘I should go. I didn’t come here to listen to accusations. I only really wanted to return your letters to you.’
Elize’s eyes mist over again behind her glasses.
‘Listen here, child, I am old, I probably won’t live much longer, and I don’t know what will become of my things when I’m no longer here, so I am asking you, please, please take the notebook with you.’
Theresa stares at her former mother-in-law, taken aback by this blatant attempt at emotional blackmail.
‘You can do with it what you like – you don’t even have to read it; it’s just … I promised him that I would give it to you.’
Her tear-filled eyes stay fixed on the Moleskine notebook lying on the table like a flat black stone. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, Theresa decides and bends down to shove the book into her handbag.
‘Thank you,’ Elize sighs.
When she looks up at Theresa, it’s as if a blind were raised for a fraction of a second to allow Theresa to see inside her black eyes and catch a glimpse of something besides bitterness.
‘I found another letter in that army box of Theo’s,’ Theresa says in a more conciliatory tone. ‘I am on my way to Cuba to deliver it.’
‘The Cuban soldier’s letter?’ Elize asks, surprised.
‘You know about the letter?’ Theresa asks, even more surprised.
‘He talked about it sometimes – especially the last few years when he was already, you know … very far gone. I thought he was just … rambling. I never knew if it really existed.’
Theresa quickly makes her way back around the coffee table, knocks her shin again, manages to stifle a curse, sinks back into the couch next to Theo’s mother. ‘Please tell me what he said about it,’ she says, her voice soft, almost pleading. ‘Please?’
6. A BLACK JOURNAL
In the deep of night, high up in the heavens above the South American continent, Theresa reads her former husband’s black Moleskine journal. Painfully slowly, just a page or two at a time; then she has to pause, close the book and rest her eyes – her tired eyes and her turbulent heart – because the writing is small and uneven, faltering here and there and at times impossible to decipher, and the faint light in the ceiling above her seat makes the entire process even harder.
The passengers around her are nearly all asleep, with just here and there an electronic screen casting flickering shadows onto a viewer’s face, only a handful of lights blinking above the darkened rows of seats. A few souls like her who are trying to read something, a book or a magazine, or in her case a journal of insanity. She should also be sleeping, but there is no hope of that happening until she has reached the final page of this book.
Her body is weak with exhaustion, her muscles stiff, and when she visited the aeroplane toilet an hour ago, her face in the mirror above the basin startled her. She knows she’s no longer a young woman. She wears her hair cropped short and unrepentantly grey. Gone are the long blonde tresses she’d had since her schooldays, even if for the last decade or so the blonde had come from a tube. And although her body is still strong and supple and far from overweight, it’s nowhere near as lean as in the days when she used to control her weight by smoking instead of eating. Nevertheless, people generally consider her attractive – ‘for her age’ of course, always that nasty sting in the compliment – and most of the time she agrees that she doesn’t look at all bad for someone way past her fiftieth birthday.
Except when she’s standing next to her eternally youthful younger sister.
But in the unflattering light of the toilet cubicle, she had looked creepily old. Her eyes bloodshot behind the lenses of her reading glasses, the skin on her neck loose and wrinkled, her lips as thin as those of a toothless old crone. The lines between the wings of her nostrils and the corners of her mouth were deep crevices that looked as if they had been carved into her skin with a knife.
She has been travelling nonstop for over twenty-four hours, the first ten hours in a different plane from Johannesburg to Brazil, then nine hours at Guarulhos Airport in São Paolo waiting for this night flight to Panama. And in about another three hours, in the very early morning, she must catch yet another flight, from Tocumen International Airport in Panama City to her destination, Havana. Finally!
‘Is there really no easier way to get to Cuba?’ she’d asked Nini when she first heard about this cumbersome route.
‘There is,’ Nini had said, ‘but the tickets are two to three times more expensive than this route.’
So she was going to have to do it the hard way. She had already dipped into her retirement nest egg in order to pay for the trip. Reckless, yes. The more she thinks about what she is doing, the more hare-brained the project seems. But it’s too late for regrets, now. In a few hours she will land in Cuba, where she will have less than ten days to find a needle in a haystack.
‘Try to enjoy the experience,’ Nini had advised. ‘Drink a mojito or a pina colada, smoke a fat cigar, listen to music, shake your hips.’
‘I’m not going to Cuba to shake my hips
!’
‘I know, I know, you’re going out of Duty.’ She could hear the sarcastic capital ‘D’ in the way Nini pronounced the word. ‘But it is sometimes allowed to mix duty with a bit of pleasure.’
This, however, was no pleasure cruise; it was more like a pilgrimage or a penance. She was going to Cuba to discharge a debt on behalf of her erstwhile beloved, and hopefully redeem some of her own guilt in the process. Guilt about not being able to help Theo, having no way to relieve his suffering. And perhaps also because as a white South African she had been complicit in a war of which she understood nothing, but for which she now wanted to make amends, one way or another. Not that she could afford to think about her reasons much, because thinking about them made it only too clear that her actions were irrational.
‘There is also no need to be so preoccupied with your Duty that you ignore your senses altogether. Cuba is an irresistible mix of Mediterranean communism and hedonism. Could be exactly what you need to liberate you from all that Protestant decorum for once.’ Theresa had shot her friend an indignant glance, but Nini was on a roll. ‘Loosen up, girl. You’re not getting any younger, are you? It could be a while before you get another chance.’
‘I don’t think I’ll ever get another chance. By the time I get back I will be so broke, it will be years before I have another holiday.’
‘Even more reason to drink mojitos and smoke cigars,’ had been Nini’s retort.
So here she is, with a book she doesn’t want to read but can’t put down. She started paging through it on the first flight the day before, purely out of boredom, but within fifteen minutes she was hooked, as by a thriller written by an accomplished author. She hates thrillers, hates being manipulated into feeling afraid, but on the rare occasions she’s picked up a book by someone like Stephen King, she’s kept going right up to the final sentence, manipulated, hypnotised, powerless.
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