Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  ‘Me too,’ Hanna says with her back towards them, all her attention on the last spoon of food she wants to get into her grandfather’s mouth. ‘You’re my hero.’

  ‘Stop,’ Theresa laughs. ‘I didn’t do anything special, I just discovered a letter in a box. I couldn’t just close the lid and forget about it, could I?’

  ‘It makes me think of that poem by Mary Oliver,’ Sandra says pensively. ‘Someone gives you a box full of darkness and only much later you realise it was actually a gift.’

  ‘A box full of darkness.’ Theresa tastes the phrase on her tongue. Perhaps that’s indeed what Theo gave her.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to eat any more, Oupa?’ Hanna asks.

  He opens his mouth as if he wants to say something, and they all look at him expectantly. ‘Tété,’ he says, his voice as unrecognisable as the rest of him.

  Theresa’s heart jumps in her chest. She knows he isn’t talking about her; she knows he forgot that it had been her pet name ages ago, but still. Every time he says ‘Tété’, it is as if he is telling her goodbye.

  Every time she thinks that it’s the last time she will see him.

  She gets up from the bed to kiss him gently on the forehead, the way he always kissed her when she was small. His skin feels like a dry autumn leaf under her lips. Even his smell has disappeared. He always used to smell of coffee and cherry tobacco and peppermints. Now he just smells of old age.

  And then it isn’t her father who dies that same month, but her former mother-in-law.

  Ernst calls to tell her that Elize van Velden has died – suddenly, in her sleep, not murdered by the criminal element she had been so afraid of – and Theresa surprises herself by promptly asking if she can attend the funeral.

  ‘There won’t be much of a crowd,’ he warns her. ‘She wasn’t exactly what you would call a popular woman.’

  ‘That’s exactly why I ought to be there. I didn’t like her, but she was after all family. By marriage. I don’t know if she has any other family left …’

  ‘It’s a lovely gesture.’

  She looks out from her office window on the tenth floor, at Table Mountain covered with a blanket of white clouds. Down in the street, pedestrians are fighting to stay upright in the raging Southeaster. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I just want to get away from the awful Cape weather. I hear it’s sunny where you are.’

  ‘Theo would have appreciated it.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ she mumbles, which makes him laugh. ‘But let’s just say I am doing it for him. I don’t know if one can get compassionate leave for a former mother-in-law’s funeral, probably not, but I could try. Otherwise I will take two days’ unpaid leave.’

  ‘You have no paid leave left?’

  ‘No,’ Theresa sighs. ‘I used up everything on my wild goose chase in Cuba. But you know I’ve been looking for an excuse to fly to Joburg and deliver that letter for weeks. Last favour I owe my ex.’

  Although by now she has known for a while that she is doing it for herself as much as for Theo.

  She wants to meet the Cuban doctor and her Afrikaans husband and their Cuban-Afrikaans baby to satisfy her curiosity, to finally get to the end of this search, to carry on with her life.

  To get to the end of Theo.

  But a week later, beside an open grave in a rundown cemetery in Pretoria East, she begins to think that she may never get to the end of Theo van Velden.

  Not even the warm weather and the clear blue sky can make this dismal affair seem any less pathetic. Barely twenty people turn up for the memorial service in the Dutch Reformed Church, a mundane brick building from the sixties, and there are considerably fewer at the grave. Aside from her and Ernst, and the dominee who is both ancient and hard of hearing, she counts just three unfamiliar old ladies. And four men in cheap suits who were apparently rounded up by the undertaker to help carry the coffin out of the church and create the impression that the deceased hadn’t been quite so unloved.

  If not even enough people turn up at your funeral to carry your coffin, you should probably know that you did something wrong somewhere along the way.

  It would have been infinitely more practical if Elize had been cremated, but she had insisted on this heavy, shiny black coffin. She had wanted to be laid to rest beside her husband, as in a marriage bed.

  Theresa stands next to Ernst watching the coffin descend slowly into the large hole. Earlier today was the first time she met the attorney face to face. Until now he has been a pleasant voice over the phone or on the internet, like a radio personality you invariably picture differently from the way they look in real life. And as so often happens when you meet a radio personality you admire, Ernst Taljaard’s appearance turn out to be a disappointment rather than a surprise.

  He isn’t necessarily uglier than she’d thought he would be – he doesn’t have a bigger paunch or worse taste in clothing or whatever. He is simply more tired and much older. A bald old ghost, as he had quipped, a colourless man with a grey face and a lush grey moustache. The moustache reminds her of Bernoldus Niemand’s song about Pretoria. Of the way Theo used to laugh when he listened to ‘Snor City’. Long, long ago.

  But it is Ernst’s age that shocks her beyond anything else.

  Of course she knew he had to be around sixty – he is Theo’s contemporary after all – but he looks so much more elderly than she could ever imagine Theo being.

  It makes her feel relieved all over again that she didn’t see Theo in his final years. That she could remember him the way he had been, thin and sinewy with lovely legs and unbrushed black hair and clear blue eyes and lush eyelashes and sharp cheekbones in a suntanned face. Not the stooped old man with runny eyes and a wordless mouth that he became in the end. Nothing left of the clever and funny troep, student, news reporter, or publisher, just an empty shell. Nothing left of the man she had loved.

  Whom she still loves, she realises with bottomless grief when she looks at his name on a black marble gravestone. Theo Wilhelm van Velden, born in 1956, died in 2016. On the same gravestone as his father, the one on which his mother’s name too will soon be carved. This is where his ashes are stored, between his parents, in this sad graveyard in Snor City.

  Ernst looks at her, concerned, because tears are streaming down her face as she stares at Elize’s coffin at the bottom of the grave and tries to ignore the stentorian voice of the hard-of-hearing dominee. She isn’t crying about Elize, she wants to tell Ernst; she is crying about her mother and about all the other loved ones who have vanished from her life too soon. For her father, in advance. And for Theo, of course.

  It is as though his name on that gravestone brings home to her, for the first time, the finality of his death. As if, until this moment, she had believed she might run into him somewhere, someday, by chance on a street or on the escalators inside a shopping mall. While she was being carried aloft, he would be on his way down and they would glide past each other and make eye contact for a moment. And, with a nod, forgive each other for everything they had done to each other.

  Now she knows that he is dead. Dead as a doornail, stone dead, pushing up daisies. Nothing left of him aside from her memories, from which she will never escape. Unless someday she becomes as senile as her father, which would be a bloody high price to pay in order not to remember the man to whom she had been married.

  She will remember Theo, she realises, as the letters of his name on the black marble stone swim before her eyes. She will try to remember him the way he was when she began to love him.

  There had been enough in that man that she could love forever.

  29. A FINAL MEMENTO FOR THE ARMY BOX

  ‘Here it is.’ The woman’s voice is soft and husky, her English accent still heavily burdened with Spanish intonation. Her fingertips caress the letters, dark grey against a pale grey background. ‘Perez G, Angel.’

  Theresa looks at her gratefully. There are more than two thousand names of fallen Cuban soldiers on this wall, not a
rranged in alphabetical order, with no date of birth or death, just the simple grey letters. Some with both Spanish surnames and full names, some with only a single surname and initials. On her own she never would have found Angel Perez Gonzalez’s name.

  But of course this isn’t Mercedes’s first visit to this park outside the city of Tshwane. She had guided Theresa here without hesitation, through the Garden of Remembrance to the section known as S’khumbuto, with its amphitheatre and the Eternal Flame in a tranquil pool of water and a sculpture of symbolic steel reeds that from a distance look like flag poles without flags, right up to the impressive winding wall with the names of some eighty thousand heroes from South African history, fighters against slavery and colonialism, soldiers from the South African War and both World Wars and the more recent freedom struggle against apartheid. In the section allocated to Cubans who died in the border war, she had walked straight up to her father’s name, a modest little row of letters installed at chest height amid a multitude of other names, and placed her forefinger on Angel.

  Then, with the rest of her fingers, she caressed the remaining letters, like a blind person reading braille.

  Theresa is intensely aware of the irony of fate that brought her to this wall today. Her former husband’s death signalled the start of her search for a Cuban soldier’s daughter. And her former mother-in-law’s death was at last bringing this search to a close. Three months after her return from Cuba, Theresa could finally meet Mercedes Perez Amat face to face, in a garden of remembrance that Elize van Velden would never have visited as long as she lived, even though she’d lived only a few kilometres from Salvokop, because her idea of freedom had nothing in common with the freedom that was being celebrated here.

  And now that Theresa is standing in this garden, among the names of thousands who died in battle, it does seem sad somehow that the soldiers of the Old South Africa who died in the border war had not also been granted a place on the wall. Especially the conscripts who had been too young to know what they were doing, the brainwashed cannon fodder exploited by the government and the generals to retain white power on the southernmost tip of Africa. All those boys who were goaded on by their parents and teachers and dominees to fulfil their patriotic duty. For our land, South Africa. She would have liked to see their names here too. She, who’d supported the End Conscription Campaign when she was young. Probably more irony. But after reading Theo van Velden’s war diary and Angel Perez Gonzalez’s letter, she can no longer think of any fallen soldier without sympathy. Everyone who died stupid, messy, bloody, unnecessary deaths. Like Angel wrote in his letter.

  Even if that meant that the name of an ignorant bully and racist like Lynette’s brother, the career soldier Waldie Raubenheimer, would also appear on such a wall? That is a question she cannot answer. Waldie’s death as a result of drunk driving in an army vehicle had certainly not been heroic, but it was no less stupid and unnecessary than all the others. Because surely there were devils like Waldie Raubenheimer on both sides of any war? And angels too? Or at least soldiers with names that invoked angels.

  ‘I cry a little every time I come here,’ Mercedes murmurs beside her.

  Her eyes are hidden behind dark glasses. Her black brown hair hangs smoothly down to her shoulders. Theresa remembers the curly-haired teenager in a bikini in Aleja’s photograph and wonders how she got rid of all those curls. Certainly not by wrapping pantyhose around her head at night like Lynette during that holiday in Stilbaai.

  She has inherited her mother’s lovely smile – that was the first thing Theresa noticed when she met Mercedes and Egbert and their baby at the entrance to Freedom Park fifteen minutes ago. Egbert and the baby stayed behind at Uitspanplek, the only part of the huge multilingual complex that had been given an Afrikaans name. That had brought a smile to Theresa’s lips, such an old-fashioned Afrikaans word that conjured up images of ox wagons and the Great Trek, here among the Isivivane and the Lesaka and the Lekgotla and all the other indigenous names.

  Even her former mother-in-law would have been pleased.

  Now Mercedes isn’t smiling any more. She is waiting for Theresa to hand over her father’s letter and her face has become tense. Theresa can see that her features are less delicate and feminine than those of her mother, a longer nose, a squarer chin. She is her father’s rather than her mother’s child, Theresa realises now that she finally knows what Angel Perez Gonzalez looked like. Mercedes sent two faded colour snapshots from the early seventies to her cellphone the day before. So you will recognise me, was the message that accompanied the pictures.

  In the first, Angel is wearing his khaki-coloured soldier’s uniform with the distinctive cap Fidel Castro always wore. Wide smile, shining excited eyes, not much of his black hair visible underneath the oversized cap. Young and prepared, ready to go do his patriotic duty in a distant land on another continent. Of course that was before he knew what exactly that duty would entail.

  In the other picture he is sitting on a wall with a highly pregnant Luisá beside him and the glittering sea behind them. Theresa instantly recognised Havana’s Malecón. Funny, she had always thought nostalgia was something that took quite a while to hatch, and now she discovered the thing could come out of its shell surprisingly quickly. Only a few months after leaving Havana, she remembers the place with a yearning nostalgia, like thousands upon thousands of expatriates who can never return.

  She, however, can return, she tells herself. It’s not impossible that she might one day smoke a cigar beside the Malecón again. Unlikely, but not impossible.

  In the second picture Angel is wearing a T-shirt and shorts, Luisá a brightly coloured summer dress that stretches too tightly around her rounded belly and emphasises the deep groove between her breasts. Angel’s hand is draped possessively around her bare shoulders. She cradles her belly in both hands, the way a fortune teller might hold a crystal ball, but she isn’t gazing into the ball to try and predict the future. The two smitten teenagers are gazing into each other’s eyes, smiling at each other, as radiant with faith in the future as you can be only when you are terribly young.

  The only picture of the three of us together, Mercedes had typed below the picture, even though I am still hidden away inside my mother’s belly.

  ‘I am as nervous as before a school exam,’ Theresa told Ruben this morning from her Airbnb room in a tree-filled garden near the centre of Tshwane.

  She sent him a WhatsApp voice message, because her feelings were too complicated to be captured in text. Keep it light and superficial, she had decided. Until now, they have stayed in touch mostly via email because phone calls are too expensive and internet calls too complicated due to the time difference between Cuba and South Africa. And even the emails have been quite scarce, mostly just reports of how her search was progressing, nothing too personal or intimate.

  What was the point of becoming intimate now?

  ‘I am finally going to meet our Mercedes in the flesh,’ she informed him.

  The ‘our’ that slipped out so unexpectedly made her wonder briefly if it might not be best to send an email after all. Then at least she would be able to avoid such slips of the tongue, to choose her words more carefully.

  ‘Yes, I do think of her as “our Mercedes” because if you hadn’t helped me, I would probably still be looking for her. Oreste also helped, of course,’ she added quickly. ‘Please give him my best wishes. And to the others too. I miss all of you …’

  Before she could embarrass herself with all sorts of emotional declarations, she told him that Mercedes had suggested they should meet in Freedom Park, and that it would be her first visit to this park.

  ‘It’s where all the dead war heroes are commemorated. Not the defence force soldiers or conscripts like my ex-husband. Well, of course he didn’t die in the war, but in a way he did start dying there already.’ She had to pause for a second or two to organise a tangle of thoughts. ‘You know, I’ve been wondering more and more about these invisible wounds, like Mil
es says, that soldiers carry long after their war has ended. And I wonder whether those scars might not be even worse if you were fighting on the “wrong” side. Everyone who is told by the history books that they were fighting on the side of evil … German soldiers after both World Wars … American soldiers after Vietnam … South African soldiers after the border war …’

  She lifted her finger from her cellphone screen and accidentally sent the message too soon. She immediately recorded another message, this time almost in a panic: ‘Sorry, I didn’t want you to hear that, I can’t believe I’m sitting here whining about a war that ended ages ago. Of course it no longer matters who won and who lost. Your people were on the “right” side and mine on the “wrong” side, but the two of us still became friends, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?’

  Seconds later his text message appeared on her screen. Perhaps he hadn’t trusted his voice. We could have become more than friends.

  Such a quick response she hadn’t expected. It was still night in Cuba, so she’d assumed he would be asleep and would only listen to her message in a few hours when he woke up.

  She stared at his words, elated because the short sentence confirmed her own feelings, surprised that he was finally admitting it, devastated because it was too late.

  We could have, she typed, but we were too scared. And friendship isn’t a bad Plan B for middle-aged cowards like us.

  His response was an emoticon, a smiling yellow face, as if he didn’t even trust words any more.

  When she thinks of Ruben, and of Lazaro and Miles and all the other Cubans she met, she can’t but feel glad that the Cuban soldiers who died so far from home are commemorated on this wall. They had probably been as thoroughly brainwashed as the South African conscripts. Still, the question was whether the wounds of a civil war could ever truly heal when the former enemies were kept apart even in death. After all, more than forty years after this war began – and a quarter of a century after it ended – the Cuban soldiers and the freedom fighters, whom the previous government had branded terrorists, and the South African soldiers, whom the freedom fighters had regarded as racists, were all equally dead.