He couldn’t expect any help from them either.
No, Theresa realised alone in her bed, Theo would have to save himself, or she didn’t know what would become of him.
But not even in her most distressing nightmares could she have imagined how it would all end. That he would come apart so spectacularly in public.
Precisely what happened that Sunday in the Groote Kerk in Cape Town, she would never quite establish. She had to piece together the story from a few newspaper reports and bits of gossip from friends who had also not been present. There weren’t many regular churchgoers among their friends. And no one she knew had been in that church on that day – except for Theo.
Why did he choose the Groote Kerk for his insane protest action? Because it was the oldest church in the country, a kind of symbol of the Dutch-Reformed Nationalist propaganda he’d grown up with? Or just because it happened to be the closest church to his temporary home?
Theresa didn’t know.
She could only guess, theorise, try to visualise, as with so many other episodes from her husband’s life: before she met him, after they went their separate ways, while they were living together under the same roof. Even during the years they shared a bed, to her mind the closest connection possible between people, there were parts of him that would remain an unknown wilderness to her. Terra incognita.
It happens on a perfectly ordinary Sunday morning towards the end of the nineties. The service in the Groote Kerk is led by a visiting clergyman, a retired dominee, but, in all other respects, proceeds exactly like on any other Sunday morning. (Did Theo choose this Sunday on purpose because he knew he wouldn’t have to confront the congregation’s regular shepherd?) The reassuring ritual of the opening prayer, followed by tarrying hymns accompanied by an enormous organ, the dominee’s arms in his black gown spread out like the wings of a black angel, high above the congregation on the majestic pulpit that was designed by Anton Anreith over two centuries ago. It is an ornate sculpture that looks as if it would be more at home in a town square or inside a museum, completely different from the sober pulpits, with ‘God is love’ embroidered on a single pulpit cloth, in the Dutch Reformed church congregations Theo knew as a child.
Perhaps that was the real reason why Theo chose this church: the smug ostentatiousness of the oldest building, the most beautiful pulpit, the biggest organ, its proximity to parliament, the seat of power. White male power in the Old South Africa. Black power, albeit with more colour variation and more women than before, in the emerging country. But might is might, whether it is white, black, or red. And Theo was fed up with power and authority and the way the ‘guys up there’ could fuck up his life. But these were words Theresa put into his mouth.
Afterwards. It was just more speculation.
It happens shortly after the reading from the Scriptures. The thin, grey-haired dominee reads a few verses from Job in a surprisingly sonorous voice. (Poor Job, whose faith was so cruelly tested beyond breaking point.) When he has finished reading, he gazes into the distance for a few moments, at a point far above the sea of pale faces looking up at him, almost like a sailor who has hoisted himself up the mast of a sailing vessel to look for a speck of green land on the horizon. Because that’s what dominees do, isn’t it? They look for something on life’s furthest horizon, beyond death, in order to rekindle hope in the weary passengers on this earthly ship.
But at least one passenger didn’t come here today to have his hope rekindled.
The church isn’t full. Several of the pews are empty, and Theo has slipped into one at the back, a strategic position from where he can make a thorough appraisal of the entire congregation before he swings into action.
Some members of the congregation would later claim that he was already seated when they entered the church, in a position he must have chosen in advance, while others would insist that they saw him outside the church until just before the service began. A thin, dark-haired man who spoke to no one, made no eye contact, just paced up and down restlessly, smoking all the time. Odd behaviour, they’d thought, but no one was really concerned. After all, church was the last place where you’d expect to find trouble.
Theresa was almost as baffled by the bit about the smoking as by what happened afterwards. She’d been under the impression that Theo hadn’t smoked in years. Perhaps he’d started again that same day, like someone who has been sentenced to death and requests a last cigarette even though he quit ages ago. But this was several years after their divorce; she’d heard he had moved to Johannesburg, she had no idea he was back in the Cape.
‘It can be terribly difficult to hold on to hope when it seems as if the waves of life keep knocking us down,’ the dominee says when he is done gazing into the distance, his voice now soft and intimate.
And at this very moment Theo van Velden jumps up at the back of the church, with a shout that sounds like the bellow of a dying bull, and rushes down the aisle towards the pulpit, brandishing a gun.
A few churchgoers scream in terror; some leave their seats to attempt an escape; others fling themselves onto the floor to try and hide between the pews, but most remain seated, frozen with shock.
‘Everyone back to your seats or I’ll shoot,’ Theo roars. ‘With your hands in the air! I want to see everyone’s hands!’
And when not everyone obeys right away, he fires a shot in the air, just to let everyone know that the weapon is loaded and that he is serious. Now there is silence in the church; only somewhere in the middle pews a little girl with pigtails starts crying and is lifted onto her terrified mother’s lap.
‘Hands up!’ Theo orders the mother and her child.
The mother raises the crying child’s arms with her own, her eyes wide with fear.
By now Theo has reached the pulpit. He races up the stairs at the back and shoves the startled dominee onto the chair behind him, his eyes roaming across the congregation, his hand sweeping the gun slowly from side to side. When someone looks as if they’re about to lower their hands, he points the gun directly at that person, and their hands fly back up right away.
‘That’s better,’ he says, his voice now cold and calm. There is no need for him to shout any more, because the excellent acoustics mean everyone can hear him, and on his tall throne everyone can see him too. ‘If all of you would just stay where you are and listen to me, no one is going to get hurt. I have a very important message to convey to you, more important than anything you will ever hear from any dominee, and this is unfortunately the only way I can do it.’
He isn’t wearing a suit or a tie, just a pair of creased black pants and a sky-blue shirt that brings out the blue in his eyes. Afterwards, those sitting in the front will mention his unusual blue eyes. Some will talk about a manic glint in those eyes, his terrifying smile, the three-day-old stubble, the unruly mop of black hair. But the people further towards the back of the church will see nothing but his broad outline, the top half of the blue shirt and above all the gun in his right hand whose side-to-side movement keeps them hypnotised.
‘I know I don’t have much time,’ Theo says. ‘I know I am going to be arrested and then all of you can hopefully go home safely, but all I ask is that you listen to me for a few minutes. We have all been deceived. It’s a swindle that began the moment we were born and it will continue until the day we die. We have been deceived by the dominees who baptised us and by the teachers who taught us at school and – worst of all! – by our own parents who were supposed to take care of us.’ Now Theo’s voice is becoming louder again and more urgent, his breathing faster and deeper as if he is running, a long-distance athlete desperate to reach the finish line at any cost. ‘But it isn’t their fault because they were also deceived, because the deception comes from right at the top, from the same government that “protected” us against the Swart Gevaar and the Rooi Gevaar, the blacks and the reds, and any fucking other gevaar they could think of to keep us scared and compliant.’
An incredulous and unhappy little laugh
explodes from his throat. ‘I am cursing from a pulpit! Cover the children’s ears. No don’t, keep your hands in the air!’ The gun sweeps the room again, menacing. ‘I know it’s all over for me – I’m going straight to hell. But it doesn’t matter, I don’t believe in that hell of yours any more. I have already been to hell, and it was our own government that sent me there. Not the new black government, although it’s just a matter of time before they too will send a bunch of people to hell – it’s just what governments do. Power drives them mad and then they fuck up everything. But I am talking specifically about the previous government, the one that sent me and my—’
No one would ever know what Theo was going to say next, because at that moment a powerfully built middle-aged man appears in the back door, hands in the air to signal that he is unarmed, and asks Theo in a calm, commanding voice to drop his weapon before anyone gets hurt. A bigwig in the police, it would later emerge, not in uniform on this Sunday morning, a colonel experienced in hostage situations and merely intent on distracting Theo for a second.
Because at the exact same time a cordon of policemen in bulletproof vests and face masks explode through the door behind the pulpit and surround Theo, all their weapons trained on him.
For one endless moment Theo just stands there, a helpless animal caught in its hunters’ searchlights, with a heartbreaking little smile. Not really surprised, just regretful. He’d known that the security forces would soon arrive on the scene; he just hadn’t expected them quite this soon. He’d so badly wanted just another minute or two to convey his message.
Now he knows he will never have another chance. It is all over.
It later emerged that the women in the mothers’ room at the back of the pulpit had called the police the instant they had heard ‘the mad man’ shouting over the loudspeakers. And because the police station in Buitenkant Street was so close to the church, and parliament’s own security team right next door, they were able to spring into action surprisingly fast, much faster than Theo had counted on. He probably hadn’t even known about the mothers’ room. Why would a childless man who was no churchgoer, someone who hadn’t been in any church for a wedding or funeral in years, think of a mothers’ room?
Listening from inside the mothers’ room, the out-of-uniform colonel quickly gathered that ‘the mad man’ on the pulpit didn’t want a bloodbath, just an audience who would listen to him. He couldn’t allow him to keep talking, however, for fear that one of the churchgoers might do something that forced the man to resort to violence. Besides, the colonel later told the police spokesman, the guy on the pulpit was talking meaningless crap. A message that the police spokesman conveyed to the media in somewhat more diplomatic terms.
But, for now, Theo is holding his ground on a pulpit for the first and last time in his life. He knows this desperate act will change his life forever. He has revealed the big black hole of chaos inside him to the outside world and it’s the kind of gesture for which there can be no forgiveness. He just wants to cling, for a second longer, to the illusion that it had been worth it.
Then he puts the gun down on the pulpit in front of him, folds his hands behind his head, and walks slowly down the stairs.
The instant he reaches the foot of the stairs, two burly policemen grab hold of him and force him to the floor so roughly that his nose starts bleeding. A few people gasp, relieved because they feel safe again or pleased that the police are acting so aggressively, a handful perhaps from shock because they have started to pity the man on the pulpit, because he has evidently lost his marbles and they are good Christians who think that he may not deserve such rough treatment.
And Theo seems to agree, because his entire body is jerking now as he struggles, but he only gets pinned to the ground even more firmly. His shouting is muffled by the blood streaming from his nose. His face is pushed into a pool of his own blood. Meanwhile, police usher the congregants out of the church as quickly and as orderly as possible, out onto the street where police vans and ambulances and a photographer from a newspaper are already waiting.
The photograph Theresa sees in the newspaper the next day is taken just before her former husband disappears into a police van. He has fought so hard, with almost supernatural power in his wiry body, that it takes four strong policemen to force him into the van. His face is covered in blood, even his hair is matted with blood, his eyes wide with horror, and his screaming mouth looks like a black cave.
Munch’s Scream. The coffee mug that had smashed to pieces on the stone floor of their living room.
How could she not have predicted this ending?
Because this was indeed the end of Theo van Velden. The end of all the guises in which she had known him, her clever fellow student, her trusty friend, her sharp-witted colleague, her skilful lover, her terror-stricken husband, her fleeing ex-husband.
He was transported directly from the police station to the nearest state hospital for psychiatric patients. There he would end up in hell for the second time in his life. That was how he would describe it later, in the journal Theresa would read only after his death on her flight to Cuba. It was a different kind of hell from the war he’d been caught up in as a teenager. In here, his comrades didn’t lose their limbs before his very eyes. He didn’t have to scrape up pieces of their bodies after they were blown up by landmines. The only bloodshed was caused by self-harm. Fellow patients with damaged souls who wanted to damage their bodies too. Or, if everything became unbearable, to try to erase themselves altogether, body and soul, to make an end to their suffering.
And this time he couldn’t get out of hell. He was almost a quarter-century older and more tired and more desperate than when he had been a reluctant soldier. He no longer had the strength to carry on fighting. For the rest of his life his bipolar disorder would only get worse, the lows becoming steadily longer and deeper and darker, the highs more manic, psychotic, schizophrenic.
For almost two decades, until he died in an institution in Pretoria, he seemed to Theresa like a shadow on a wall. The vague outline of unfulfilled promises. An absent presence that would always haunt her.
It was only after she discovered her former husband’s wartime diary, after she had finally read his journal of insanity on a plane, that he became three-dimensional again. But by then it was hopelessly too late. What can you do with a three-dimensional dead man?
26. A SMALL GREEN NOTEBOOK
On her last night in Cuba she lies in bed as filled with regret as an actress who has missed her cue. Her moment on stage has passed; she has ruined the entire performance. She will not get a second chance.
But the scene keeps playing out in her head, over and over, unstoppable. If only she had behaved differently. If only she were younger, if only she were braver, if, if, if.
Again she sees herself and Ruben standing in the living room, after they turned off the droning computer with Miguela Morales’s message and the room became eerily quiet, the traffic down in the street suddenly much too loud.
They are still unwilling to say goodnight, but they also don’t know what else to say to each other.
‘Do you want some coffee?’ Ruben asks.
‘No thank you.’ She already knows she will struggle to fall asleep; she doesn’t need coffee to keep her awake as well.
‘A glass of water for the night?’
She shakes her head again.
‘Anything else you still want?’
For a moment – just one moment – she looks straight into his eyes. I want you. Just for tonight. If only she could say that. But she just licks her dry lips and shakes her head again.
She is still waiting for him to give her a sign.
But he just stands there.
She takes a step closer, catches him off-guard, hugs him clumsily, the way you would hug a brother or a cousin. Some things don’t become easier when you grow older, she thinks while letting her cheek rest against his broad chest for barely a second. Some things only become more difficult.
; Because you are more afraid and you are more fragile, and everything breaks more easily, your bones and your heart, and when something breaks there isn’t an awful lot of time left for it to heal.
‘Thank you, Ruben.’ She retreats from the embrace just as he folds his arms around her. ‘For everything you have done for me.’
‘I wish I could have done more. Buenas noches, Theresa.’
‘Buenas noches, Ruben.’
I wish I could have done more. Surely that had been the signal she’d been waiting for? Well, now you mention it, there is something else you could do for me. Isn’t that what she should have said?
It doesn’t matter. It is too late now; she has lost her chance. She wished him goodnight, in Spanish, and fled to his son’s room. Took off her clothes, all of them, even her underwear, and lay down underneath the thin sheet.
Through the window opposite the bookshelf, filled with his dead wife’s English books, she can see the three-quarter moon. She has been staring at the moon for so long by now that it has made its descent from the top of the window frame to the bottom.
For the first hour or so she lay tensely listening to the sounds coming from the rest of the apartment. While she could still hear him, all wasn’t lost. While he was still awake, there was still a chance that something might happen. But as soon as she tried to picture what this ‘something’ might be, her imagination let her down.
Surely he wouldn’t knock on her door nervously – like a naughty schoolboy outside the principal’s office – knowing there was a chance he could be embarrassed. No, forget it – he wouldn’t do anything. He would go to sleep.
And what could she do? Drape the sheet around her naked body and glide towards his bedroom like a ghost and crawl into his bed next to his sleeping body? Good grief, just imagine how embarrassed they both would be if that wasn’t at all what he wanted.
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