by Ruth Hartley
Lara’s heart imploded and her throat filled with the bitter acrid taste of old smoke.
“Tim! Liseli!” called Enoch Junior, “My father says that Oscar is back on tonight’s flight and he wants us out of here so he can get the place cleared up for his return. Tiyende! Allons-y! Let’s vamoose!”
Chapter Six
Madness
It was a long week before Lara saw Tim again. He phoned her, he sounded miserable and uncertain.
“Lara – I must see you – there is something really wrong with Liseli. Please can I come and see you? Have you seen Liseli this week? I don’t know what’s going on.”
A few moments later Liseli’s mother, Safina, called Lara; she sounded cold and distant.
“Liseli has asked me to phone you. She says she must tell you something very important – it’s urgent, she says – do you mind?”
“I’ll come right around if you like.” Lara said. She didn’t know who had upset her most, Liseli or Tim, but she thought there was a better chance she would find out more from Liseli and within 20 minutes she was sitting in Liseli’s bedroom staring at her dramatically altered friend. The room was dark, the curtains drawn, Liseli had pulled her beautiful carefully styled plaits to bits and her hair stood out around her head in a scruffy frizz. She was sitting hunched up in bed against the wall with a look of terror on her face plucking at the bedclothes. Both Liseli’s parents were at home; they looked tense and worried but something about their demeanour told Lara that this was not a new experience for them. Liseli’s father had been sitting with her but as soon as Lara arrived he left the room with a look of relief that he couldn’t quite hide. Liseli’s desperate plucking at her bedding intensified. She also started pulling at her hair. Lara was shocked and puzzled but Liseli was so distressed that it was clear that anger was an irrelevance. Lara reached out to hold her friend’s hands and to still their manic twitching.
“Liseli what is it? What is wrong? Tell me!” but for a while Liseli remained speechless. She began to rock herself back and forwards drearily shaking her head. At last she spoke.
“Forgive me, Lara!” she pleaded, “Forgive me! I am such a terrible person. It wasn’t Tim’s fault – tell him it was my fault – tell him I am sorry – tell him! I am so bad.”
There was very little else that she said. Her mother came in ostensibly to offer Lara a cup of tea but in fact to try to persuade Liseli to get up and eat. At this invitation Liseli lay down and pulled the blanket over her head. Eventually Lara got up to leave. She touched Liseli’s shoulder through the coverlet.
“Can’t I do anything to help you, Lise?” she said using the shortened names from their school days. “Please can Lar help you?” but Liseli just rocked herself harder.
As Lara reached the door, Liseli turned over and muttered at Lara just loud enough for her to hear.
“I am mad! I am mad! I should be dead! I am bad, Lara! Sorry! Sorry!” and she flung herself back into the bed and rocked even harder.
“Thank you for coming.” Liseli’s father said.
“What’s wrong? Can I help?” Lara repeated uselessly. He shook his head.
“No, the doctor’s been. She has been like this before – she’ll recover eventually we hope but we may go back to England with her. It started this time when she was sacked from her job.”
Tim and Lara went into the garden where years before Lara and Liseli had gone to plot ways of surviving their university education. They were both awkward with each other, Tim most of all. Lara took the initiative.
“Liseli is very ill I think.” she said, “I went to see her – she asked me to come – she wanted me to tell you that it is not your fault and that she is sorry
“What does she mean?” Tim was also distressed, “What has she done? What have I done to her? I don’t understand!”
Poor Tim. Lara felt for him and once again anger and hurt pride seemed irrelevant and unhelpful.
“Honestly Tim, I am sure it is nothing that you have done. She seems to have arrived back here in a terrible state because she lost her job. I didn’t realise – and she didn’t say. From what her parents say she seems to have had a breakdown. I mean when she arrived she was so over the top and wild that I didn’t altogether recognise her – she didn’t seem like the Liseli I knew.”
The Liseli who had been her friend would not have had sex and gone to bed so quickly with Lara’s own best friend. How could she put that to Tim?
Tim said slowly, “I was surprised too how fast things happened between us. I thought you must have had an idea – sorry – this is probably wrong – but girls talk to each other – so I thought you would know somehow – and that it was okay – that you didn’t mind?”
Lara, silent, shook her head but after a moment she touched Tim’s shoulder. It seemed to reassure him.
“No, I didn’t know. It still seems out of character for Liseli. She did seem – well – high I suppose – but she wasn’t on drugs – at least that would also be out of character for her.”
Tim said, “There wasn’t anything weird while we were sleeping together – that seemed normal – except that Liseli couldn’t sleep at all afterwards.”
Lara found herself laughing.
“Oh Tim, when and how is sleeping together and sex and love ever just normal and easy – how would one know? It just always seems so individual and sometimes too complicated to explain, even for me who isn’t that experienced!”
Tim gave Lara a look of relief and they both smiled. When he got up to leave they hugged each other and Lara gave Tim a kiss on his cheek. Tim wanted to go and see Liseli but Lara said to wait till she had spoken to Liseli’s parents and to Liseli. Liseli did not want to see anyone, Lara was told, and within a week Liseli and her family had left for England.
It was Junior who explained what was wrong with Liseli to Lara. Junior and Liseli had been friends since primary school and had also dated while they were studying in England.
“Liseli is a manic depressive – nowadays the medical term is bi-polar disorder – I haven’t done my psychiatry training yet but Liseli told me of her diagnosis a while ago when we were still going out together. She made me go through some text-books with her.”
“What does that mean?” Lara asked, “She isn’t mad as far as I can see and I didn’t think she was depressed till the last time I saw her – that was horrible – she was so desperate!”
“It’s a pretty miserable illness to have.” Junior agreed, “When you are up you think you are invincible as far as money and sex and life goes – when you are down you are in danger of committing suicide – the medication isn’t great either.”
“Will she get better?” Lara asked, wanting to be hopeful, but Junior rocked his head while making a face.
“Kind of depends – I think you have to learn to live with it.”
Lara asked no more questions. That Liseli might kill herself seemed horrible but after the last week not impossible. Lara wondered what to tell Tim but it turned out he had found out about it by asking Junior himself. Lara remembered how good Tim was at getting information. Somewhat hesitantly at first but soon as easily as before, Tim and Lara resumed their friendship and spent time together again. As Oscar was now back, Tim was more circumspect about using his house as a base. Even so he always had some new piece of information or news about Oscar to discuss with Lara and she was always ready to hear it.
Chapter Seven
History and Politics
“Oscar’s German and originally from Dresden as I thought,” Tim said. “Came to South Africa in his teens.”
Lara said surprised, “He sounds so English – well – he has no obvious accent – but everything about him seems English and looks English – his manners and his way of doing things – I was sure he must have lived in England for a while even if his sister didn’t. How did you find out?.�
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“He tells you if you ask him directly but then he doesn’t give away too much. I still like him but I am beginning to feel more and more than there is a lot that he keeps hidden – he is consistent with what he says but it is so little. Enoch also knows surprisingly little about Oscar’s past but then he is such a polite man that he can easily be deflected from being too pushy.”
“Now there’s another interesting person – Enoch’s father, Samuel, served in the Second World War – in Burma, Enoch says. Many Africans served with the British Army, you know, in the worst places too and without much recognition for their bravery and their losses. Battle of Arakan mean anything to you, Lara?”
Lara shook her head. Where had she seen that name?
“Samuel arrived back committed to the idea of freedom from colonial rule and determined to educate his children when he had them. I like the idea that Oscar’s and Enoch’s fathers were on different sides in the war but that Oscar and Enoch became friends! Don’t you?”
“Oscar grew up during the war – in the region that’s East Germany today but somehow or other he arrived in South Africa from West Germany as a boy of about 16 – with his sister Hanne of course – she was older than him by 3 or 4 years. He must have been – well he still is – very clever and determined – he worked down the Rand mines for a bit but he told me it was tough and had no future so he quit as soon as he could.”
Tim and Lara were lounging in the shade in the International Hotel garden as they talked about Oscar. A press conference on a new regional economic policy was to take place in the ballroom following a summit. That kept being postponed as the various leaders had not agreed on their final statement. Tim, bored with waiting, had persuaded Lara to leave her studio for a swim in the hotel’s Olympic-sized pool and to get a taste of the hotel’s new poolside lunchtime speciality – a toasted ham sandwich. A first for Chambeshi.
“Oscar must be the same age as your Dad, Lara – wouldn’t you say?”
Lara had wondered if Oscar and her father were contemporaries. She didn’t like that idea much.
“That old!” Then she laughed for no obvious reason.
“Go on.” she said.
“Well – I work out that he must have been about 9 or 10 at the end of the war – old enough to see and understand really horrible things were happening – but he never talks about it. What do you know about that time, Lara? Anything?”
“History stopped in 1945, didn’t it?” Lara grinned, “At least my history lessons did, but we did get the feeling that history had concluded as something that was capable of being analysed. I think my teacher quoted something smart like – um – ‘Santayana said, History is always written wrong and needs to be rewritten’. At any rate I am still waiting to learn about modern history because so far it hasn’t been written ‘right’!”
For a moment a dark shadow crossed her sight and she looked up to see if a cloud had passed overhead. What might Oscar have seen as a boy? She felt a moment’s coldness but sunshine was Lara’s element and the sun was shining. She shivered the feeling away and smiled again. Tim gave Lara an amused look.
“We are living our history, if you hadn’t noticed!” he said, then he continued, “At the end of the Second World War my darling Lara, it wasn’t the good Doctor Zhivago-types in love with Lara, the heroine, who marched on Berlin. It wasn’t Pasternak’s righteous army of Russian men finally winning a just war – it was a rough and ready disorganisation of an army using old trucks and cars and horses to pull their guns. Some were serious communists, most were soldiers who had been brutalised by their experiences of war with Germany. They had been fighting in appalling conditions for four years without a break, their numbers halved, tens of millions dead, unthinkable stuff – and it was payback time. Europe was an extraordinary and enormous mess of refugees and devastated cities and revengeful Russians bent on rape – on at least two million rapes in fact – that was probably the Europe of Oscar’s experience at the age of 9 or 10.”
“Anyway Oscar doesn’t talk about it – he just smiles and changes the subject so I don’t think I’ll find out from him.”
“How come you are staying with Oscar when you seem to be so suspicious of him? I mean how did you get to know him?” Lara wanted to know.
“One of my editors had met Oscar and thought he would be “a mine” of information about mines. My editor likes to pun! He gave me a letter of introduction. I did some research but didn’t turn up much. Oscar seems to have been one of the key advisors to the President at Independence – a rather unlikely person for that role in some ways – but I guess President Chona felt in need of advice from people who weren’t part of the colonial government and Oscar was for a time useful for his business expertise. Possibly that was when Oscar and Jannie Oosthuizen got to know each other. The Tin Heart Mine seems to have changed ownership without much documentation – so perhaps Jannie adopted Oscar as his son and heir?”
Tim smiled at his invented scenario.
Lara was quiet for a while thinking. At last she asked,
“What about Hanne? What was she like – as a person? What does Enoch say about her?”
Tim raised quizzical eyebrows at Lara.
“You really think I am capable of anything in my search for information, don’t you Lara?”
Lara grinned, rather ashamed.
“Well you are, aren’t you Tim? Actually I am the one who is curious – I suppose – I would love to know.”
“Be careful Lara!” Tim warned, “I think you fancy Oscar – not only is he too old for you – but I think he may be quite dangerous – and I still haven’t worked out where he gets his money from and how – to me his businesses all sound a little far-fetched and unaccounted for.”
“I’m not all that interested in Oscar.” Lara lied.
Tim shrugged without looking at her, so Lara decided to cloak the reasons for her questions with some literary guff from Charlotte Bronte.
“I just think there is a bit of a mystery about Hanne though. She didn’t seem to have much of a life or many friends and people always look strange when she is mentioned – like Rochester’s woman in the attic in ‘Jane Eyre’ or something.”
It was absurd of her to be a little jealous of the only woman who apparently featured in Oscar’s life.
“As long as you aren’t going to be the Jane Eyre in that scenario and marry the corrupt older man.” Tim was sombre as he looked at Lara. Since his disastrous one-night stand with Liseli there had been a degree of physical awkwardness between Lara and himself. They both regretted it but did not know how to make it right.
“Have you heard from Liseli?” he asked, but he and Lara had spoken simultaneously. “I need that painting commission from Oscar,” she said.
They both stopped, laughed, started again at the same moment, interrupted each other.
Finally Lara explained, “Mum and Dad are going to retire in 6 months or so. They don’t plan on living in England and are thinking of settling in Cyprus. I can’t bear the thought of going back to England – my art is about Africa – I need to rent a flat but if I can’t sell my work I can’t afford one.”
“Dammit!” Tim said, “I am also going – well not exactly leaving for good. My editor wants me to do more travelling in Africa – I am to base myself in Chambeshi – they have found me a flat here but I won’t be living in it very often. You’ll know where it is – a rather grotty area with lots of small industries and warehouses. The flats above those units are reasonably secure as the premises are all under guard at night so I can leave my stuff there safely while I travel. It is fine for me. You could stay there if you wanted. Not very nice for a single girl though – a bit lonely and quite far away from the posher part of town.”
“Thanks, Tim.” Lara was touched, “Helen says she knows places I can stay if I house sit for people on leave. Mum and
Dad would prefer that for me – but I won’t be able to paint in those kinds of homes, they are too – well – ‘Homes and Gardens’ posh – so it’s a dilemma for me.”
“Well,” Tim looked more cheerful, “You can use my flat as your studio – there’s a spare bedroom there that would do – and you can sleep – well – live in the places that are more salubrious that your parents would like.”
“Oh Tim – you are a darling!” and Lara leant across and gave Tim a sideways hug and kiss. Tim caught her hand as she sat back in her chair.
“Lara,” Tim said, “I am so sorry about that business with Liseli – I liked her but not half as much as I like you – I’m still this travelling journalist but I wish you could come with me – I wish you wanted to.”
Lara looked at Tim.
“Everything is so uncertain right now.” she said half-apologising and squeezed Tim’s hand back. She liked him so much, her bespectacled, beaky-nosed, gangling, tall friend with the too-large ready smile and the intelligent eyes. In fact she was very fond of him but everything in her life was starting to shift and move. Her parents, Liseli, Tim, the elusive jet-setting Oscar. She wanted to stay in one place and paint and draw, live the imagined life of some artist in a bohemian community and perhaps have a lover one day. What was on offer was a studio in a spare bedroom and to keep moving from one house-sit to another. It would do for the moment. At least she wasn’t shut away like Liseli.
“Liseli has been admitted to a psychiatric ward for 3 months.” she told Tim. “They hope to get her stabilised on medication.” She had heard this phrase from Liseli’s father.
“It’s not the first time she has been in hospital, Tim. Apparently she did the same kinds of things the last time too. She got high then, slept with her boss, got the sack and almost killed herself. At least, she took an overdose of sleeping pills, I think. It was not your fault. None of us realised what was happening and even her parents didn’t see it until it was too late. Honestly Tim – it isn’t any more your fault than it is mine.”