Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  ‘A fertile raked garden,’ Nini grins. ‘Wow.’

  Theresa clicks her tongue impatiently. ‘What I mean is just … I’ve realised … that maybe something could still grow in this garden after all?’

  They don’t seem to understand what she means.

  A week after she and Sandra and Nini have dinner in the Cuban restaurant she scrapes up the courage to phone Elize van Velden’s attorney. His name is Ernst Taljaard, she has meanwhile discovered, and according to her Gauteng colleague he’s ‘a helluva nice guy’. Whatever that means these days.

  She waits until a morning when she is working from home, because this isn’t a conversation she wants to have in her open-plan office where anyone might hear her.

  The minute she introduces herself as Elize’s former daughter-in-law, even before she can tell him why she is contacting him, he says: ‘Ah! So you were Theo’s wife?’

  The eagerness in his voice makes her hesitate, perplexed.

  ‘Did you know him well?’ she asks, looking through the burglar bars outside the window at the high wall in front of her cottage. She has tried to soften it with creepers, but a wall remains a wall. And ever since her return from Havana, the struggling pale-purple bougainvillea has made her miss Cuba constantly.

  ‘We were in the army together. That’s how I became his mother’s attorney. After his dad died he asked me to manage her affairs. I think he just wanted to keep her away from him.’

  ‘You were together in Angola?’ Her voice sounds high and surprised.

  ‘Yes. Operation Savannah.’ He gives a sad little laugh.

  ‘I can’t remember him ever mentioning your name,’ she says after reflecting for a moment. ‘But he never really mentioned any names. He didn’t really talk about that chapter in his life.’

  ‘Like most of us who were there.’ Another cheerless little laugh. ‘He knew me as Spook. Because my hair was so white. These days I’m a bald old ghost.’

  ‘Ah.’ The rows of names in Theo’s green notebook. Spikkels. Spook. Hilton Hotels. ‘Was there someone with you who was called Hilton Hotels?’

  ‘Hilton le Roux.’ This time the laugh sounds slightly warmer. ‘A slacker from a very rich family. Sugar farmers from Natal. We called him Hilton Hotels because even in the bush he was always tanning as if he was lying on a hotel deck next to a swimming pool …’

  ‘And Noddefok? Was that a nickname too?’

  ‘I can’t remember his real name at all. I suppose he was what in those days we would’ve called a poor white. Never saw more crooked teeth in my life. Not exactly talkative. All he ever said, no matter what you asked him, was “Noddefok”. Do you like the army? “Noddefok.” Do you have a girlfriend? “Noddefok.” Are you homesick? “Noddefok.” But in Angola he pulled his weight. Saved Hilton Hotels’s life, once …’ He is silent for a moment, as if to control his emotions. ‘Do you have any idea when last I heard these names? The last few years when Theo was here … in the institution … we never talked about that any more.’

  ‘So you used to visit him?’ She swallows with difficulty. ‘While he was there?’

  ‘Now and then. His mother asked me to. She had invested a bit of money for him in an account. I had to look after it. I guess I did it for old times’ sake.’ He talks more and more slowly, the pauses between his sentences growing longer. ‘Towards the end, those last few months, he was catatonic. Didn’t talk, didn’t respond, just a scrawny body lying in a bed, suffering. Nothing left of the clever and funny Veldkak I got to know in the army.’

  ‘Veldkak?’

  ‘His nickname. Van Velden.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Theresa murmurs, overcome with regret.

  28. SWEET POTATOES

  Between Theresa and Ernst Taljaard, it doesn’t take much effort to find a doctor Egbert Engelbrecht who lives in Tshwane and works as an anaesthetist at the Steve Biko Academic Hospital. It takes Ernst just three phone calls to acquaintances in the medical world to confirm that Doctor Engelbrecht indeed has a Cuban wife whose name, according to a nursing sister at the same hospital, ‘sounds like a car … Polo? Paula? Mégane?’

  ‘Mercedes?’ Ernst prompted hopefully.

  ‘Mercedes!’ she confirmed right away. ‘Of course. She’s a luxury car, that one, not just any old rattletrap.’

  Ernst couldn’t figure out whether this was intended as a compliment or a slur.

  But at least they now knew they had the right Doctor Engelbrecht, Theresa said when he phoned her with the news.

  How strange that after so many months searching for Mercedes Perez Amat with almost no hope of finding her, Theresa suddenly feels as bewildered as Robinson Crusoe on his island. There are clear footsteps in the sand right in front of her. All she has to do is follow them.

  She is relieved that she can contact Mercedes’s husband rather than Mercedes herself. A middleman, as she finds herself thinking of him, a shock absorber. Because it would be an enormous shock to receive a letter from a loved one who has been dead for forty years. Even if it is an agreeable shock. But even of that Theresa can’t be certain. The blood-stained letter is a voice from the dead – and who can say whether Mercedes wants to hear voices from the realm of the dead at this stage in her life?

  Theresa is also glad that she can write to Egbert in Afrikaans, because such a difficult email must surely be easier in her own language.

  Or that’s what she thinks. She just wants to tell him briefly how she discovered the letter, without the gruesome details. The bloodstain on the paper. The fact that her former husband probably shot and killed Mercedes’s father. He’ll be able to draw his own conclusions. All she really wants to say is that she has searched far and wide for Mercedes, even in Cuba, and that she would like to meet her to hand over the letter in person. That’s all.

  But she spends days agonising over the right words and scraps dozens of versions of her email until at last she wonders if it might not have been easier in a second language after all. At least then she wouldn’t have been able to edit her sentences so ruthlessly. No, it’s too late, she decides, she cannot start from scratch agonising in another language. She has to wrap up this matter.

  She forces herself to push the ‘Send’ button – and feels as though she can breathe properly again for the first time in days.

  A week later, her breathing is troubling her again, because Doctor Engelbrecht hasn’t replied to the email. Another week drags past so slowly it seems like a month, while the mild Cape autumn makes way for a cold winter. Cold and dry, because the usual winter rains stay away this year. By the third week her mood is starting to feel like the weather, colder and drier every day. Perhaps Egbert has not received her email; sometimes things like that disappear into cyber space. She will have to try again.

  But what if he doesn’t want to reply?

  Perhaps he doesn’t even want to tell Mercedes about her father’s letter, to protect his wife because he’s afraid the news may upset her too much. Or simply because he’s a domineering bastard who makes decisions on behalf of his wife.

  After yet another icy week of waiting, she nevertheless risks sending another email. Even shorter, this time, and in English to be safe. Maybe Egbert doesn’t want to be Afrikaans any more; most likely he and his Cuban wife hate all Afrikaners. So why would he respond to an Afrikaans message from a stranger whose husband may have murdered his wife’s father?

  When she considers it in that light, she doesn’t have much hope of ever hearing from him.

  After all, what is hope but delayed disappointment, Theresa finally tells herself. She will have to find another way to reach Mercedes.

  For the first time in years she relives the absolute despair that enveloped her after her mother’s death. That too had been in winter, an old-fashioned wet Cape winter a few years after Theo’s public breakdown, when she still believed she could keep age and loneliness and everything unpleasant at a safe distance by maintaining a frenetic social life. She went out all the time, accepted eve
ry invitation to a party or a book launch or an exhibition opening, cultivated new friends and rekindled old friendships. Anything rather than sit at home alone and examine her own life.

  The news of her mother’s brain tumour stopped her dead in her tracks.

  The diagnosis came much too late, when it was already impossible to remove the tumour without causing massive damage to the brain. Theresa suspected that Hannie Marais had long feared the worst, that she had deliberately avoided going to the doctor because she wanted to keep the peace as always, to put herself last, that she didn’t want to upset her husband and children with such devastating news. But there wasn’t even time to be angry with her mother. Her condition deteriorated so fast that Theresa couldn’t work through the usual stages of grief; had to start saying farewell right away. And there wasn’t really enough time even for that, because within three weeks Hannie slipped into a coma from which she would never wake up, and two months later she was dead.

  The morning after her mother’s death, Theresa stood in front of her bathroom mirror, deranged with grief, staring at herself. Everyone always said she looked like her mother, but she had never been able to see it. Or she hadn’t wanted to see it. That morning she didn’t recognise her reflection at all. It wasn’t Theresa Marais; it was Hannie Marais looking back at her, with her drooping shoulders and washed-out eyes and deep grooves around her lovely mouth.

  When had she grown so old?

  Theresa was in her early forties, her long hair not yet grey, her face not yet too wrinkled, but there was no question that her youth was behind her. The woman in the mirror was tired and middle-aged and inconsolably sad. Her mother was dead; she was the next in line – that was how it worked. She would have to start taking care of herself, because there was no one else left who would.

  Her despair lasted a few weeks until one day she heard her practical mother’s voice in her car, clear as a bell, as if she were sitting next to her in the passenger seat. ‘Come on, sussie, life goes on.’ Then her mother started to sing, a little out of tune as always: ‘Smile though your heart is aching …’

  Theresa listened to her mother. She smiled and carried on living. But not as recklessly as before. She stopped smoking, drank and partied less, started to eat more healthily. Slept around less too, although that wasn’t a conscious decision, merely the result of her age and a more careful lifestyle and lack of opportunities.

  That was how her sex life came to an end. Not suddenly and dramatically like a meteor hitting the earth and obliterating everything, more like insects becoming extinct. Gradually, without anyone making a fuss about it, almost without you noticing. One day Theresa realised that it had been years since she last had a real live sexual encounter with someone. And that she didn’t miss it quite so much that she wanted to spell out her need on her chest. Imagine, a T-shirt with a slogan like in her ECC days: Desperately seeking sex.

  At least there was still something like self-gratification, she consoled herself.

  But that was why Cuba and everything that had happened there – or, more precisely, hadn’t happened there – overwhelmed her so. Many weeks after her return she still gazed with longing at the bougainvillea against her garden wall and wondered how Ruben was. Cuba had been for her a sensual reawakening.

  She realised she wasn’t as terribly old as she had thought.

  In fact, on the morning of her fifty-sixth birthday, she feels younger than she has in years. It is a perfectly ordinary Tuesday morning at the office, but she opens her email a little more eagerly than usual because on her birthday there are always at least a few messages with birthday wishes.

  She is more honest with herself these days. She doesn’t need dozens of friends any more; she’d be satisfied with just a few. Just as long as they remember her birthday.

  Then she sees an email from Egbert Engelbrecht.

  Dear Theresa,

  Apologies for only responding now, but the past few weeks have been a nightmare. Mercedes and I became parents for the first time, but our little boy was born far too early and there were all kinds of medical complications and we didn’t know if he would make it. We were with him at the hospital almost day and night. A few times we were about to give up, but he’s an incredible little fighter. He amazed us every time, and now we feel like the luckiest parents on earth, because a few days ago we could finally bring him home.

  He is still terribly small, but healthy and normal and to us of course the most beautiful baby ever born. We have decided to call him Angel, like his Cuban grandfather. Angel Engelbrecht Perez. If you have been to Cuba, you will understand about the father’s surname and the mother’s surname, but here in South Africa Perez will probably be used as his second name.

  Mercedes is completely overcome by the news that you have a letter from her father. Now that she has a child of her own, it means even more to her. If it weren’t for Angel, she would’ve jumped on a plane right away to come and fetch the letter from you in Cape Town. Now we hope that you will have an opportunity to come to Tshwane soon. Thank you, meanwhile, for all your efforts to find us.

  ‘And why are you sitting there smiling like the Cheshire cat?’ asks a colleague who happens to be walking past her desk.

  Theresa realises that she has been staring at her computer screen grinning idiotically for several minutes, blissfully unaware of telephones ringing and people talking and all the noisy activity around her.

  ‘I just received an unexpected birthday present.’ She smiles even wider.

  Later that morning Sandra calls to wish her a happy birthday: ‘Come have lunch with us on Sunday. I’m cooking a traditional Sunday feast. Specially for your birthday,’ she says before Theresa can come up with an excuse. ‘The way Ma made it.’

  ‘Chicken pie with sago?’ Theresa asks hopefully.

  ‘And sweet potatoes and sweet carrots and malva pudding. All the things you like.’

  ‘Funny, when Ma was still alive, I wasn’t all that crazy about her food.’

  ‘Because you were always on a bloody diet,’ Sandra quips.

  ‘But now I miss her chicken pie almost more than I miss her.’

  ‘I have a feeling that is what my children are going to say about me some day when I’m no longer here,’ Sandra says with a resigned laugh.

  It’s fortunate that her exemplary younger sister has always been a better cook than her, Theresa thinks when she ends the call, or she would never taste her mother’s food again.

  But before they can eat, she has to help her sister feed their father first. Or try to feed him – in vain, because he refuses to open his mouth for the spoonful of sweet potato they take turns to hold up to his lips. He just sits in the wheelchair, motionless, staring with dull bewildered eyes at the two unfamiliar women in front of him.

  Somewhere behind those pale blue eyes, somewhere inside this emaciated body, the real Adriaan Marais is hiding. That is what Theresa tells herself while tears of frustration roll down her cheeks.

  Sandra is less emotional, because she is more used to this torturous process. ‘Let’s call Hanna,’ she suggests. ‘She usually manages to get him to eat something.’

  And indeed, when Hanna sits down on a low chair in front of her grandfather and with a sweet smile brings the spoon up to his mouth, he opens his mouth meekly, like a good baby. Something in his watery blue eyes changes when he looks at Hanna. It can’t be recognition or recall, because Hanna’s hair is dyed bright purple and she is wearing a nose ring that makes her look like Ferdinand the gentle bull. No one in Adriaan Marais’s distant past ever looked like that, of that Theresa is certain.

  ‘He likes her purple hair,’ says Sandra proudly.

  Theresa doesn’t know if Sandra is proud of her daughter’s flamboyant hair colour or of her father’s permissiveness. ‘He would have had a fit if you or I dyed our hair purple,’ she says.

  Theresa is sitting next to her sister on the raised hospital bed her father sleeps in these days, in a sunny room filled with frame
d photographs of his late wife and his children and family and friends, all people he no longer recognises. Sandra believes that the photographs make him feel at home. Theresa wonders if it is possible to still feel at home when you no longer know where you are.

  ‘I probably remind him of a clown,’ Hanna says, carefully placing another spoon of sweet potato on her grandfather’s tongue. ‘Maybe he liked clowns a lot when he was small. Right, Oupa?’

  Adriaan’s mouth contorts into what to Theresa looks like a grimace of pain, but which could, who knows, be an attempt to smile.

  ‘You have a knack with him,’ she tells Hanna.

  ‘I’m a simple-minded creature, so dogs and babies and old people usually like me. The downside is that I don’t really have a love life, because normal guys are scared of me.’

  ‘Ah, never mind, I don’t really have a love life either,’ Theresa says consolingly, ‘and I can’t even claim that dogs or babies like me.’

  ‘Speaking of babies,’ Sandra says, ‘first tell us more about this little Cuban baby called Angel.’

  ‘An-keel,’ Theresa corrects her pronunciation. ‘He isn’t Cuban; he is Afro-Cuban. Or Afrikaans-Cuban, if such a species exists.’

  ‘Or else he is the beginning of a new species,’ Hanna says while she waits patiently for Adriaan to eat another spoonful of sweet potato. ‘How cool is that.’

  ‘So when are you going to deliver the letter?’ Sandra wants to know.

  ‘As soon as I find an excuse to go to Pretoria. I can’t just jump on a plane, unfortunately. My bank account hasn’t recovered from Cuba yet.’

  Sandra looks down at her hands folded in her lap, her skin even paler than usual because it’s winter, her nails a shiny pastel shade and perfectly manicured as always. ‘You know, when you told me you were going to Cuba to go find this woman, I thought it was a crazy idea …’

  ‘I know,’ Theresa says. ‘You made that very clear.’

  ‘But now I think what you did is fantastic.’

  Theresa looks at her sister, surprised.