by Lee Barnett
I can still conjure up the terror that I had felt that day, but the truth of all this is that I felt that fear, or some measure of it, each and every day of the 7132 days that I spent eluding the FBI, waiting to be caught. I cannot think of one day over that entire period of time that I didn’t look over my shoulder.
What became crystal clear to me around that time, however, was what a godsend my less than ordinary upbringing really was, because without it I would never have been able to have made life as comfortable for us as I did. I realised that my childhood hadn’t been so bad after all, and that I hadn’t really missed out on all the things I had thought other people had. Perhaps I’d gained a few things myself instead. I knew clearly that if it were not for my mother being the type of person she was, I would never have had the resilience to get Samantha and me through so much.
Not long after the helicopter scare, a girlfriend asked me to drinks at the local running club with her. While there I was introduced to Juan Geldenhuys (he pronounced his first name like the actor Jean-Claude Van Damme). We started dating and immediately I responded to his kindness, interest in me, and in Samantha, too. Juan had never married and we started a whirlwind relationship with Samantha at its centre. It sounds crazy, I know, but just short four weeks after our first meeting, Juan asked me to marry him.
‘Marry so soon?’ I said.
‘Why not?’ was his reply.
I told him that if we agreed to do it, I needed to tell him something first. I stuttered and reached in vain for the right words, trying to figure out what to say to the person who had just asked me to marry them, but who didn’t really know who I was, or the past I carried with me. Finally, after several excruciating minutes of stumbling about with my words, I handed him Samantha’s diary and told him to go outside by the pool and read it before we spoke any more of weddings.
An hour later, a tear-streaked Juan came back into the bedroom and hugged me tight.
‘I don’t know if I could ever be as selfless as you have been. This makes me want to marry you even more. Let’s do it next weekend.’
‘Next weekend? What’s the rush?’
‘There’s no reason why you should pay for your place while I have this three-bedroom house. And I know how you feel about living with a man and exposing Samantha to a relationship outside of marriage.’
On Friday, 24 February 1995, Juan and I became husband and wife, married in a Catholic church. He had called all his friends a few days earlier asking them what they were up to that day and they assumed he was inviting them for a braai (barbecue). Instead, he told them he was inviting them to his wedding! But who on earth was he marrying?
Juan’s parents were totally caught off-guard by this announcement and his father took me aside for a private chat, presumably to see if I had any ulterior motives. He was such a dignified man and I would grow to love him deeply over the years. He became the first father figure I had in my life – and I called him Dad.
Bringing Juan into my covert world wasn’t easy. He always tried to help, and the first step was for him to legally adopt Samantha. Remember that at that stage, Samantha’s only form of official ID listed her as a boy. Juan and I were both interviewed separately and then one evening the lady in charge of the adoption dropped in. We sat in the living room chatting away with Samantha, and I saw how smitten that lady was by my daughter. When Juan came in the front door Samantha stopped playing with her kitten and ran to him with open arms shouting, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ He swooped her up in his arms and kissed and hugged her while she shrieked with joy. The adoption lady looked at me and smiled. ‘There’s nothing further to discuss,’ she said. ‘Your adoption is complete.’
A few weeks after that, however, I realised I still had no accurate identification for Samantha, and without it I could not secure her South African identification and finally a South African passport to make her legitimate at long last. I hemmed and hawed at this before I eventually settled on a plan. I scoured junk shops to find a used typewriter, then secured two bottles of correction fluid – white and yellow, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Then I created a new birth certificate for Samantha, inserting Juan’s name as father. I placed strategic dots of yellow white-out around the certificate replacing the ones eliminated from my forgery.
‘Okay, before I type in Samantha’s name, why don’t you give her a middle name?’
‘I’ve always loved the name Morgan.’
‘Beautiful. Samantha Morgan it is.’
Juan became teary-eyed when I showed him the end result: Samantha Morgan Geldenhuys
Next we both took dressmaking pins, placed the document on our antique dining room table over the natural crack which ran down its middle, and poked the pins into the paper to simulate the perforations of the original document.
‘Job well done,’ I said when we had finished. ‘Welcome to a life of crime.’
For the next step, Juan completed the application forms for a South African birth certificate, using the fake US birth certificate naming him as Samantha’s father. He sent it off and we waited. And while we waited there were so many ifs running through our heads: what if the FBI had figured out my passports, thus leading them to the birth certificates? Would they be on the lookout? What if the South African adoption agency had a link to the birth certificate department of the government?
Within a month, Samantha’s South African birth certificate arrived and the three of us went out to celebrate.
We were officially a family.
Juan was always moving. He rose before the sun and, no matter how hard he tried, would invariably knock something over and wake the household. When she was really young, Sammy would be up with him, or if staying at her grandparents she was up with Granddad making oatmeal and chatting away while he did the crossword.
Very soon into our marriage I became pregnant. I remember how the doctor walked in grinning from ear to ear, holding the result in his hand. I contradicted him because I was on the pill and had only just discovered that Juan had had mumps and, apparently, as a consequence had a sperm count of zero. The doctor laughed at me still holding the results. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘you have yourself a miracle baby!’
I wondered how Juan would take the news. He was struggling in his job, a job he had only had for a year or two after being let go from a geotech engineering company. He had graduated in engineering geology, but had mostly worked in the sales area of the industry. At this point, however, he was selling life insurance, which he hated, and he was on the brink of losing his job.
I had mixed emotions while driving home. My initial feeling was one of pure elation, but it would have been nice to have had more time to really get to know my husband before we added to our little family. I was also concerned because of the last time I told my husband I was pregnant. But then I thought: miracle baby, eh? How incredible and what a gift for my little girl.
I swung past an office supply store to buy a huge sheet of paper and bright textas. Once I was home, Samantha and I spent the rest of the day blowing up balloons and writing ‘Congratulations Daddy’ on the paper, then put it on the wall. When we heard the front door open we popped out of our hiding places and watched a puzzled Juan staring at the sign.
‘I’m pregnant,’ I said.
‘How can that be?’ he asked. I told him the doctor had said it was a miracle baby and his smile grew larger and larger before he embraced us warmly. Sammy was jumping for joy, holding on to two brightly coloured ballons, saying, ‘Mommy has a baby,’ over and over again!
I was scheduled for a C-section on 7 December. I had to have an amniocentesis because of my age, which was when I discovered I was carrying a boy. On the way out of the doctor’s office I asked the receptionist when they were closing for Christmas. She said 8 December. I felt the doctor was bringing this baby into the world too soon so he could accommodate his Christmas holidays.
Unfortunately, Juan did lose his job with the insurance company so we sold his house and briefly moved
to a town called Van Wyksdorp, which was surrounded by barren, rocky desert and quite magical in its own way. His old girlfriend and her husband were growing roses there and had convinced Juan he could be his own boss and make a lot of money. But there were some complications with the place to do with buying the land that Juan had wanted, and so we moved to the Western Cape instead and bought a lovely house in a charming historic village called Groot-Brakrivier (Great Brak River). Juan got a job in George, a town about twenty-five kilometres away, but six weeks after starting it he lost it, and with it our health insurance. We needed to find a gynaecologist who we could pay upfront to deliver our baby. We found a female doctor who was willing to deliver our baby in a free public hospital in a nearby town called Mossel Bay. She arranged for the anaesthetist and scheduled the delivery for 18 December 1995, a delivery date I was much happier with. I also asked for a paediatrician to be present; however, the doctor insisted that she was also an expert in neonatal care.
On 17 December, I entered the shabby hospital. I was the only white woman in the building and I was nervous, knowing that if something did go wrong the closest hospital with a neonatal emergency department was in George. The next morning I was wheeled into surgery. Juan was videoing everything. The anaesthetist decided on a spinal tap instead of an epidural but when the doctor came in she was surprised to find I wasn’t numb at all. We waited and waited; nothing. Then she said she would knock me out. I was very much against that and we argued for a while.
‘Either I open you up and have you feel everything or you get knocked out.’
Ultimately I had no alternative but to agree to her wishes.
I woke up back in the room, and Juan was grinning from ear to ear.
‘Is he okay?’ I asked.
He said the baby we named Reece was fine and a few minutes later a nurse with a worried look handed my baby to me. I smiled at him. ‘Wow, look at that nose,’ I said, because it was so big. Then I kissed his sweet head before the nurse took him away again. I wondered why she took him away so soon. Juan said that it was probably to weigh him or something. He was on a high; I was nervous.
The doctor came in and said that the nurse thought our baby needed to be taken to the neonatel section of George hospital, forty minutes away, to be checked. She agreed to send him even though she felt it was uncessary.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
The doctor said the nurse didn’t like the way he was breathing, so as a precaution that’s what they were going to do.
‘But I want to be with him,’ I pleaded.
‘No, you stay here and if we don’t bring him straight back we will take you to him.’
So there was more disagreement between the doctor and I. I turned to Juan and told him to go and not to let our baby out of his sight.
On their way to the ambulance, the medical team brought my son to see me one more time but in a plastic incubator, so I couldn’t touch him. All I could think of was would my only words to my son be, Wow, look at that nose?
For three days I sat alone in that room, my milk leaking from my swollen breasts, compounded by each scream from a newborn in the delivery room which happened to be across from my room. I had no phone and no way of knowing if my baby was dead or alive.
At last, Juan reappeared looking mournful. I was beside myself demanding he tell me what had happened. He said our baby was still in an incubator.
But he was alive!
‘Get me the hell out of here!’ I shouted.
‘You’re supposed to be here for two more days.’
‘I don’t give a damn. Get me a wheelchair and take me to him.’
Juan and I escaped from the hospital, but our car broke down and we ended up flagging down a car to take us to where our baby was. In the neonatal section of the hospital our baby boy was splayed out in an incubator with tubes coming out of his nose and tubes embedded in his chest. Apparently he was born with pneumonia and if it had taken another thirty minutes to get him to the hospital he wouldn’t have made it. His prognosis was good, he just needed to get stronger. The attending doctor also said it was the nurse in Mossel Bay who had saved him. My guardian angel, I whispered to myself.
Living by the coast in Great Brak was beautiful. We were some of the few people in the village whose first language was English. Samantha started at a play school a few days a week and one day came home and said, ‘Mommy, all the children keep saying “Wat se jy” to me.’ Later, Juan explained that the children were asking her ‘What are you saying?’ Samantha’s solution to that was to become fluent in Afrikaans. Within a few months she was my translator for the maid and soon refused to speak English to her brother. We even had a video of her angrily saying, ‘I am Afrikaans not English,’ all said with the most hideous bray.
Juan got another job, this time in sales for Geosynthetics, and he relished it but it meant he had to travel. It was tricky in a way because he also loved being a father so much. There wasn’t a night that Juan wasn’t the first one up to change a nappy or when Reece needed a supplemental bottle, feeding him in the wee hours of the morning. ‘I can’t understand,’ Juan used to say, ‘why fathers don’t want to change nappies or bathe children. It is the most rewarding and bonding time a father has.’ Home after a long day at work Juan would first go to Reece, who was always the first to bed, and scratch his back until he fell asleep. Then he would lie next to Sammy and do the same while telling her their favourite made-up stories of Floppy Poppy. As fathers of young children go I couldn’t have wished for a better one. He loved them with all his heart.
After about a year, Juan decided it would be better for work if we moved back to Cape Town. I agreed and thought my job prospects and the kids’ education might be improved there too. I found a house I fell in love with, an older home built for railroad engineers and their families back in the day in Somerset West. It had to be restored but it was perfect for us. The view from the front porch allowed us to see down the strand and to False Bay, while behind us was a view of Helderberg Mountain. What made Juan happiest was that a short drive away was Stellenbosch where all the world famous vineyards were.
Somerset West was predominately English-speaking, which naturally made life easier for me. Sammy excelled at kindergarten and was sent to Mensa to be tested. The report came back that Sammy displayed real talent, was ready for grade one and needed some outside stimulation such as piano. I was worried she might be too bright like her Uncle Tommy who was bored by school and never accomplished much, or too bright like Harris who lacked regular social skills. So I enrolled Samantha for her to start school when she was five years old.
Over the years in South Africa there were times I was sure we’d been caught.
On one ocassion I was home and looked outside from my large bay window in the middle of the day to see two white men across the street near the primary school looking directly at me. Now, in most countries that wouldn’t be strange, but in South Africa white men did not generally hang around anywhere during the day – white men were at work. After a few days of seeing them there I decided I had to confront them. They danced around my questions, which made me even more nervous. I reasoned they must have been watching us, waiting for the FBI to fly over and capture me. Then after a couple of weeks of them still being there, I called the police. I pretended to be a concerned mother but I knew the police were not being honest with me. Something was up. I began pacing the floors with worry. Then, hanging out the washing in our backyard one day, I overheard our elderly German neighbours speaking in Afrikaans to these same two men.
What was going on? I couldn’t take it any longer. Later that day I knocked on my neighbours’ front door. They invited me inside and then checked to see if anyone was watching. I slipped into the house and after a couple of questions they confessed that they had been working with detectives for the past couple of months, all to do with surveillance.
My heart just about exploded out of my chest.
‘Surveillance on who?’ I quie
tly whispered.
They walked me over to their big picture window and pointed to a house across the street. ‘That house.’
Whew, I thought. And then immediately another thought popped into my head: What if they were lying?
‘What’s up with that house?’ I asked.
‘They’re Chinese, and they are stealing perlemoen.’ This is perhaps better known as abalone, and apparently in the general Somerset West area where we lived, many thousands of rand worth of abalone had been stolen for the overseas Chinese food market.
Once Reece started at play school, I decided to get a part-time job. But for that to happen we needed some help at home so I interviewed for a maid. Eugenia, who was nicknamed Gigi by Reece, immediately became a member of our family and one of my closest friends and confidants. Gigi was a warm, loving and fun lady from the Xhosa tribe with a smile that lit up the room when she entered.
It was during this time that I began to work for wine estates in the Stellenbosch area.
It was strange, really, that during all of this wild happiness I also felt such pain in missing the people I had left behind. Maybe it was because I wanted to share my children’s achievements, disappointments and happiness with the people who knew me best. All I could be sure of was that they were desperately missed. Every night since Samantha had been old enough, we said our prayers on our knees: ‘God bless Mommy, Daddy, baby brother Reece, Granny, Grandad, Annamare, Danel, my other Granny, Auntie Susan, Auntie Patty, Uncle Cliffie and Uncle Tommy.’ Sometimes Samantha asked me questions about them but usually she simply sensed how much I missed them and didn’t want to make me sad.
We loved Somerset West and developed friendships that will last a lifetime. We spent Christmases with our good friends the Wilsons, who happened to be British. We travelled with them to Kruger National Park and enjoyed an authentic African adventure while renting a house in the middle of the bush. Zebras scratched their heads on our porch, warthogs licked our braai and giraffe ambled about, while late at night when playing cards by candlelight we listened to the long roaring of lions. We were so happy. The kids enjoyed school, and I had a job working for a stunning winery, now five days a week, but then Juan suddenly lost his job.