“It’s a shul,” Dr. Norm says. He looks at Patient. “That’s a synagogue. You’re Jewish. I’m not surprised.”
“Why?”
He winces. “Let’s just say the tribal proboscis is a gift we both share. And you’re circumcised. Plus I’ve always had a gut feel.”
“It’s like I’m trying to build a bridge over a valley of mist. I can hear people on the far side, calling to me.”
“Interesting,” Dr. Norm says. He’s back from another of his absences, but he doesn’t seem all that rested. His winces a lot and his face is pale, with purple bags under the eyes. You can’t call him a cheerful man anymore. He’s lost some springiness, no doubt of it. He pours himself a big glass of wine—this is new—and says he is raiding bottles from the cellar. Excellent Burgundies down there. Those Linhursts had taste. “What you’re describing sounds like a metaphor for the neural connections that are linking up inside your brain as we speak. But there are still dead patches of suboptimal tissue that need to be circumvented or repaired.”
“Right,” Patient says blankly. “But am I ganna get the rest of them back or not?”
Dr. Norm yawns and looks away. “Undoubtedly,” he says. He doesn’t visit in the next week.
7
Progress is no straight line. Some days he regresses, so weak he lies in bed and moves only to vomit. But other times it’s the opposite, a sudden spike upward, as when he finds himself answering Dr. Norm with a feeling of fear at the speed of his own words from his own lips, like riding a precarious bike but somehow not falling, and then Dr. Norm holds up a thing. “Come on, think. One just like this was on your breakfast table. It’s a . . .”
“A watchacallit.”
“Three, two, one. You fail this round.”
“No, no. Wait. I can get it. Wait!”
“Calm down.”
“Wait! Fuck! What the fuck is it?”
“Sit down, chum. Don’t do that. Calm down, please.”
But it’s too late, the tantrum is on him and he’s howling and beating his hands on hard things while Dr. Norm sighs and rubs his face. This time he uses a stool on a filing cabinet with bad results. The damage surprises him, he’s been so weak for so long.
“You still don’t understand what you’ve become,” Dr. Norm says. “Not truly.”
“I don’t?”
“Friend, you’re a full-grown man now. You haven’t felt what that means because your body’s been so atrophied. Now you’ve filled out. Your nervous system is calibrating, your hormones are up to their levels. But meantime your brain still believes that you’re only a teenager. Mentally you are still one.” Patient studies his own face in the window glass. The jawline, the dark bluish stubble that would sprout into a beard if it were allowed to. His time in the sun has given him colour and the shoulders are wide.
“I think perhaps it’s time we started,” Dr. Norm says behind him.
“Started what?”
“Going there.” And he points at the glass, through him, to the outside world beyond the reflection.
8
But Patient doesn’t go anywhere, because Dr. Norm disappears again. This time there are no more tutors in his absence, no more nurses, just Mrs. Lobenza—and the work with her is no longer rehab but fully functional exercise. Patient can run and do push-ups, he can pull his chin over a bar. There is animal delight in the gorgeous feeling of this physical mastery, the sheer loveliness of movement, his body remembering what it was like to be the boxer he was, the rugby player also, and every day he feels more robust and strengthened—but then he also spends hours with his eyes closed and his fingers on his temples, rubbing, pushing, trying to force himself to remember. Remember.
So many months pass that he starts to think this time Dr. Norm is not coming back ever. But then he appears. And Patient can’t wait to tell him he’s got news. “I think I almost have my name, my family name.”
Dr. Norm is unshaven. He smells bad and there are stains on his collar. He is drinking Shiraz from a coffee mug. “Almost,” he says. “Almost is all you’ve got after all these years.”
“I know. It’s been a long time.”
“You opened your eyes three years ago.”
“My name, Dr. Norm. It’s something to do with hell.”
Dr. Norm sputters, burps up guttural chortling, curling forward. “Oh my. Your name is hell, hey?”
Patient’s face goes stiff. “I think so, ja.”
“Hell. Well, hell, man, Mr. Hell. Don’t look so hurt at me.”
“I don’t think it’s funny. I think it’s the truth.”
“Surely is,” says Dr. Norm. “You’re named after what we’re all in.”
“Dr. Norm,” Patient says. “What’s going on with you?”
He waves the mug, almost knocking the wine bottle over. “Nothing,” he said. “De nada, Comrade. Session over. Session ended.”
“But—”
“Get out of here, hell boy. Shut the damn door behind you.”
The next time he finds that Dr. Norm has set up a television and a DVD player in the office. DVD stands for digital video disc—these have replaced videotapes. There is something important about videotapes to Patient but he has no idea what. “Pull the curtains,” Dr. Norm says. They sit on the couch. There are two DVDs: one shows a documentary about the country of South Africa, the other is wedding footage, and wedding anniversary footage, and footage of children playing water sports in a place Dr. Norm says was near somewhere called the Vaal Dam. Patient doesn’t have to ask him how he could be so sure, because it’s obvious he was the cameraman and the children are his, the wife the same woman from his wedding, only more wrinkled and with shorter hair and wider hips. While they watch the documentary and the family footage, Dr. Norm drinks wine from the bottle and periodically breaks into paroxysms of quiet sobbing, his round shoulders shaking so violently that Patient puts his arm around them to keep him steady. Dr. Norm keeps skipping back to watch the same sections over and over.
In the first they see a flat mountain by the ocean. Cape Town. This is part of South Africa: our country. They see a convoy of vehicles, a thousand cameras, helicopters. A voice tells of Victor Verster Prison. They watch a lean old African man in a suit coming out of the prison gates, holding the hand of a woman with a thick mop of dark hair. He raises his fist. The corners of his mouth are down. His face is deeply lined. His hair is white. He looks hard, serious. Dr. Norm cries. “Nelson, Nelson,” he says. The documentary tells who Nelson Mandela is. It gives Patient a strange tingling in his chest but triggers no memory flashes. The man was in prison for twenty-seven years. He had been put away because he had fought for nonwhite people to have the right to vote. But they let him out and then they had an election for all. “It was headed for total war,” says Dr. Norm. “Blood in the streets. Instead we all lined up and voted together. After my wedding to Janine, and having Jamie and Simone, it was the greatest day of my life.”
They watch the lines of people waiting to vote, black and white together. The tears run down Dr. Norm’s face and drip on his shirt. They watch his wedding footage again, then again. It’s stuffy in the room. He keeps opening wine bottles, the sweetrot smell of fermented grapes spilling on his chin. Nelson Mandela again, coming out of prison. The man had held true, he had never wavered, he had been prepared to die in there rather than give in, and he was in the right. He was let out. Justice had won. Skip back: there he was again, he raised his fist. Triumph. The first president of the New South Africa was Nelson Mandela himself. His life story is a plot with a happy ending. “Miracles,” says Dr. Norm. “Miracles and wonders.” Then he says, “Ach, screw the cynics. You have to fight them too. The so-called realists.” Then he says, “Just because it’s like a fairy tale doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Fairy tales happened. Happy endings happen. Look at it. Look! There it is!” They watch Nelson Mandela again. They see South Africa win the world rugby cup and Mandela on the field with the team. They see the first elections again. T
hey see the prisoner become the president again. The plot is whole, the happy ending irrevocable. And back to the wedding. Dr. Norm had all his hair in 1969 and no belly—but it was him. “We believed in the same things. We were committed to the Movement, to the struggle for a nonracial society. We sent our kids to Swaziland for their education, we did our best to live our principles. I was no hero but I was arrested, so was Janine. We both did prison time. We were politicals. I can’t tell you how many times we came this close to leaving.” He falls asleep with his chin on his chest, snoring. Patient gets up and lowers him onto his side, then he switches off the television and leaves the room.
9
He has his body back and so he uses its energy to rove wider in the corridors, opening doors. He discovers old boxes full of documents in the east wing, dust-stacked pillars without order. He excavates, reading for days, and finds patient records, medical charts and files. He gathers all the H documents, looking for “Hell”—from the feeling it’s his name—and after a week of looking eventually he comes across a reference to a patient Helger. M. Helger. A second document has the same name. The patient number is 975-A12-89—his own. When Dr. Norm gets back, he tells him, “Helger—I must be M. Helger. Maybe Michael? This must be me. It is.”
Dr. Norm sniffs, rubs his stubble. “Has the sound of it helped you to remember anything new? Any associations?”
“No.”
“Where did you find these?” He nods as M. explains, and then he chuckles. “Unbelievable. They dumped the records when this place started using computers. But they were too lazy and disorganised to transfer.” He looks up. “Detective Patient,” he says. “I mean Detective Helger.” He shakes his head. “Well, go and get ready.”
“Ready?”
“Put on street clothes.”
They drive down the long driveway in Dr. Norm’s Mercedes and a uniformed guard opens the gate. “I didn’t even know we had one,” M. says. “I’ve never been down this far.”
“Everyone has fucking guards these days,” Dr. Norm says. He had never been a swearer but this too is changing. The way he spat the word makes M. glance at him. The steep road runs down alongside man-made cliffs of yellow stone until they reach the level and then drive onto the flatness of the lush treeland that is the view he’s been staring down at for so long from the terraced garden. In the dappled shade under the treetops, he sees signs for armed response everywhere. Certain roads are closed off, with guards waiting by gates. He notices thin wires over the walls everywhere—Dr. Norm explains they are electrified. They drive around, Dr. Norm saying he wants M. to “relax the mind” to “let the associations roll in” and “pay attention to your emotions.” He says the emotions are the way that the unconscious part of the brain sends important messages to the conscious part. They are signals to take action that will result in our survival.
M. says, “What should you do if you just feel sad?”
“Suck it up,” says Dr. Norm, snapping it out, bitter and quick so that M. looks at him, frowning. They are supposed to rove, to stop now and then to get out and let M. touch things, smell them. They are supposed to visit the library and look up information about the family Helger. Instead Dr. Norm parks outside a house in Northcliff. He has a bottle between his legs and he winces and drinks from it and stares at the house. M. sees a steel gate, more electric wires. A palm tree growing over the wall and a for sale sign in front. When Dr. Norm rubs the bottle against his face, all that greyblack stubble makes a scratching sound against the label. It isn’t wine anymore, it’s Mainstay—cane spirits. They drive to a high school and park there and Dr. Norm stares at an empty rugby field. They drive to the campus of Wits University. They visit a block of flats in Killarney. “Now what?” M. says. “What’s this place?” He doesn’t expect an answer, hasn’t been getting any. Dr. Norm’s eyes are red. “Our first,” he says. He starts crying. He wipes his nose with the bottle hand and takes a long drink.
“Who’s our?” M. asks.
Dr. Norm drives back to the institute in silence and drops him there.
10
He gets a stack of old newspapers from the staff and learns that Nelson Mandela is alive and well but no longer state president. He didn’t run in the second multiracial election this year, 1999. The new president is Mbeki. Mandela has a new wife too, having divorced his old one, that one who met him at the prison gates, Winnie. She had been charged with child murder and convicted for kidnapping and being an accessory to an assault in a case where a fourteen-year-old township boy, suspected of being a police informant, was abducted and tortured for days at her house. Then he was dumped in the weeds nearby and murdered with garden shears. M. reads of more atrocities uncovered—hideous things done by the white government to its citizens, but also those done by the freedom fighters. Gradually, in the pages of the Star and the Sowetan, the Citizen and the Mail & Guardian and the Sunday Times and the Express, he starts to discern some manner of reflection. Like him, this whole country is trying to remember. To dig up secret buried pains and turn them over in the light. There was a kind of court where people went to confess in public, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—it was the nation’s Dr. Norm. But when he brings this analogy up, Dr. Norm winces. “Ach, nobody cares anymore. It’s the hanky parade every afternoon. So Bishop Tutu can show off to the liberal wankers in London. What’s the point? Either hang the apartheid bastards or not.” Dr. Norm is looking like a bulldog, the weight he’s put on and the pouches under his eyes. Uncut curls lean over his bald spot.
“What’s going on with you, Dr. Norm?”
“Never bloody mind.”
“What about me?” M. says. “When’re we going to revolutionise the science of concussion?”
“If I publish what I’ve done they’ll probably throw me back in jail. This place. These days. Close the door, please, on your way out.”
“Did you find out anything about the Helgers?”
“Next time.”
It’s a seesaw: Dr. Norm dropping hard just as M. is picking up, flying. Every morning he’s been waking with a rush of new flashes. A boy’s face up close with lips peeled back. A shotgun. A river in flood where a section of broken pipe bobbed along. Now he begins to have knowledge in whole chunks. He is a Helger—that’s for sure. He grew up on Shaka Road, number two, in the suburb of Greenside. His father with that rough mug of a face is named Isaac. Isaac Helger. His mother is Arlene. He remembers he used to wash himself at the sink in the backyard, the same one his father Isaac used to scrub up over, coming home in his rattletrap Datsun bakkie every evening. From a scrapyard which he owned. While he, M. Helger, he owned a tuxedo. He liked boxing, was good at it. He remembers skipping rope and hitting the heavy bag. He’d been strong and fast and vicious. He’d had a squat green car and delighted in its ugliness and power.
Then one day he says to Dr. Norm, “I’ve got it. My name.”
“Michael? Mendel?”
“No. It’s Marcus. My name is Marcus Helger. No middle.” His hand goes to the doctor’s arm. “How about you get your car keys.”
11
The electric wires, the armed-response placards, the guards. The house in Northcliff no longer has a for sale sign in front of it. “We lived here for nineteen beautiful years,” says Dr. Norm. “Me and Janine and Jamie and Simone. A family. We met at varsity, UCT. Of all the times when we nearly left the country it was right after graduating that we came the closest. The system gave no hope, you know. But we decided we stay and fight. Joburg Jewish liberals both of us, but at varsity we turned radical. I refused to do the army. I had my degree, I would have had the rank of captain to start. They even offered me a choice of post, and reduced my national service to a year. No, I said. They stuck me in prison for three years. But I survived it. Me and Janine, we hid activists in our house. In that house, right there that you see before you. The neighbours would have had heart attacks if they knew. We were card-carrying ANC members when membership would get you twenty years hard labour.
The Special Branch tapped our phones, pulled us in for questioning. We carried messages for the ANC leadership in London. We fought apartheid the best we could every single day of our lives. Took risks.”
“But,” Marcus says.
Dr. Norm rubs his beard. He has on yellow sunglasses. “But what?”
“I dunno. Just sounds like there is one coming.”
He blows air through a sneer. “You don’t know how important it is until it disappears. The Struggle was our life. It gave us our meaning. We were a team, it united us with our secrets, our purpose. It’s like . . . all our lives we were leaning against this wall. Then someone took that wall down and we just fell over, we were down. We couldn’t get back up.”
“What happened?”
“Another no-fault divorce in the New South Africa. Just sign and rinse and overs kadovers.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Norm.”
“No fault. Nobody’s fault. And family court judges that believe the natural order is for kids to stay with Mommy, never Daddy. That’s what’s happened. I’m a white male dinosaur, Marcus. Being a Jew doesn’t count—the opposite actually. They just wish I’d hurry up and die off already.” He starts the Mercedes and drives off. He talks about the Movement, rambling. Says where he was on that February day in 1990. February the second. The day the new president, De Klerk, stood up in parliament and changed history. “It was a dream feeling, watching those words coming out of that mouth. I know them by heart. I wish to put it plainly that the government has taken a firm decision to release Mr. Mandela unconditionally—”
“Wait, wait. Stop the car.” Marcus leans forward, pressing his wrist to the forehead. Something coming loose inside. Botha. Bald man, stroke mouth. Talking on TV. And police. A township was a place with shacks made of corrugated iron with stones on their roofs and he was there. He was running there, police after him. “I was involved too,” he says. “I was in the Struggle too.”
The Mandela Plot Page 37