Borderline
BORDERLINE
BOOKS IN ENGLISH BY THE SAME AUTHOR
PROSE
Entertaining Angels
Childish Things
Breathing Space
Travelling Light
There is a Season
Where the Heart Is
Short Circuits
Time Out
Just Dessert, Dear
Forget-Me-Not Blues
A Fountain in France
You Lost Me
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
All I know
The Hidden Life of Hanna Why
Mia’s Mom
Rhinocephants on the Roof
COOKERY BOOKS
Summer Food in Provence, with Alain Claisse
Winter Food in Provence, with Alain Claisse
BORDERLINE
MARITA VAN DER VYVER
Translated from the Afrikaans by Annelize Visser
Published in 2019 by Penguin Random House South Africa (Pty) Ltd
Company Reg No 1953/000441/07
The Estuaries No 4, Oxbow Crescent, Century Avenue, Century City, 7441, South Africa
PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa
www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za
© 2019 Marita van der Vyver
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
First edition, first printing 2019
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
ISBN 978-1-4859-0381-9 (Print)
ISBN 978-1-4859-0392-5 (ePub)
Cover design by publicide
Text design by Chérie Collins
Ook in Afrikaans beskikbaar as Grensgeval
In memory of David Bishop
Dedicated to all the men who didn’t want to go
and all the women who couldn’t stay
Contents
1. A Store of Memories
2. Two Teenage Journals
3. Porcelain Cups in Pastel Colours
4. A Spanish Dictionary
5. Crochet Doilies
6. A Black Journal
7. A Map of Havana
8. Blue Nail Varnish
9. Cuban Soapies
10. Beechies, Brut, and Boerewors
11. Mosaic Mermaids
12. Christmas Crackers
13. Rum and Cigars
14. ‘We Shall Overcome’
15. Sun Hat, Scarf, and Sunglasses
16. Jaws
17. Broken Toys
18. A Ruby-Red Dress
19. Hemingway’s Bed
20. A Firearm
21. Ropa Vieja
22. Munch’s Scream
23. A Stethoscope
24. A Droning Computer
25. The Dark Side of the Moon
26. A Small Green Notebook
27. Mi Querida Hija
28. Sweet Potatoes
29. A Final Memento for the Army Box
Acknowledgements
1. A STORE OF MEMORIES
She sees a middle-aged woman with an ancient shoebox in her lap. The woman is sitting on a wooden floor, comfortably cross-legged, because after three decades of yoga she can spread her legs as gracefully as butterfly wings so that both knees touch the floor, despite her silver-white hair and furrowed face. And she is crying, this woman, without making a sound.
She could cry out loud if she wanted to; she could sob dramatically, she could wail and weep, because she lives alone and no one would hear her. But crying doesn’t come easily to her, tears are her enemy, and fifty-five is no time to capitulate to just any old enemy.
‘There, there, Tété,’ she soothes herself with the pet name from her childhood. ‘there, there.’
She can see herself sitting there, in her cottage in Observatory, as if she were watching the woman on the floor with someone else’s eyes. She folds her arms across her chest – she is cold, she realises, when she notices the goosebumps on her upper arms – despite the sultry summer evening outside the open sash windows. Beyond the burglar bars. She listens to the sounds of people in the street. Lower Main Road is close enough so she can hear the bustle from her quieter side street.
Observatory means a place from which you can observe things, like planets and stars, but tonight her house in Observatory feels like a place where she is being observed. Countless invisible eyes are watching her – everyone who knew her and her former husband together, their friends and family, colleagues and neighbours.
Her erstwhile, departed husband. Erstwhile first, twenty years ago already, and recently departed.
How do you grieve for someone to whom you said farewell over twenty years ago? For Theresa Marais, Theo van Velden died long ago. The initial rage and sorrow that charred her insides – like scorched earth after a fire, she felt that way for years – are just a distant memory, now. The denial, the guilt, the unbearable sadness have dwindled to a harmless little flame that now and again illuminates a small corner of her past, the candle on a cake that is inadvertently lit on certain days – birthdays, anniversaries, the first time when, the last time when – before she quickly blows it out again.
She had thought that was all in the past. She was too busy; she didn’t have room for the pain – how did that Carly Simon song go again? – and she refused to let the sadness gain another foothold. She rocks gently back and forth, back and forth.
So where does this torrent of tears come from then?
A tear plops onto the yellowed photograph lying inside the open shoebox. Good grief, if she carries on like this, all the pictures will suffer water damage and become even fainter than they already are, even harder to decipher. At the same time, she wishes she could cry so copiously that the pictures were washed away, so that her tears became a river on which the old box and everything inside it floated away like a boat carrying all the unwanted photographs, letters, memories, away, away, away.
It is an ugly brown box for a pair of men’s shoes, size eleven; she can’t remember the shoes, thank God, not that as well. There is far too much she does remember tonight. The top picture looks blurred. She doesn’t know if the blurriness is caused by her tears, or because the photograph is slightly out of focus, or because she isn’t wearing her reading glasses. Probably the result of all these things combined.
A group of conscripts in tattered, faded green clothing in a lush green landscape somewhere. Some are shirtless and some have hacked their long pants into shorts; the sleeves have been ripped off some of the shirts to reveal sinewy arms. Most of the bare chests and arms don’t belong to men; they are the hairless chests and skinny arms of boys who aren’t getting enough to eat. Some of the faces look too young for the moustaches on the upper lips. From a glance at the long fringes and too-short shorts, you can tell that the photograph dates from the seventies. The unkempt beards of the time look so different from the fastidiously manicured beards young men are wearing now. The hipster in the house next door to hers, pop stars and rugby players, the tattooed and bearded role models of contemporary youth.
If she had children, they probably would have looked like that too.
If.
Theresa wipes her eyes, reaches for her spectacles on the coffee table beside her, peers through them at the picture to try and recognise Theo. This was several years before she got to know him as a postgraduate student in Stellenbosch. Which one of these smirking teenage boys would turn into the tortured man she came to love? Could it be the skinniest one in the middle, the shock of black hair, the wry smile – then already? Yes, she recognises the calves below the frayed cut-off pants. She remembers how beautiful she always thought his legs were, the long, lean thighs, the sharp knees and muscular calves and slim ankles and narrow Greek feet.
Troep Theo van Velden in the summer of 1975/76 ‘somewhere on the border’.
Only, by then he was in fact already far across the border.
In Angola they weren’t allowed to wear the brown army uniforms, she only learned much later. Instead, they wore green ‘prison garb’ that rotted on their bodies. Bata tekkies instead of army boots. Removed the chains with dog tags from their necks, erased the branding from tubes of toothpaste and soap, carried no personal belongings that betrayed the fact that they were South African. In case they were killed or wounded or captured. Because it was of course supposed to be a secret incursion. Some of these details she heard bit by bit over the years, always unexpectedly and usually unasked for, on evenings when he had had too much to drink or later at night when he woke up from a nightmare, struggling for air.
But there was so much she never heard.
That she probably hadn’t wanted to hear.
At the end of 1975 she’d been fifteen years old, in standard seven in a Boland town about an hour outside of Cape Town. ‘Carefree’ wasn’t the word she would have used to describe her life back then, because her teenage years were beset with misery and discontent. She wasn’t as thin as she wanted to be, not nearly as popular among her classmates as she longed to be, and her parents couldn’t understand why she spent hours lying in her stuffy bedroom listening to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Over and over. She had no idea what she wanted to become; she barely knew what she was, except confused, isolated, bored.
Her geography teacher touched her too often, running a supposedly paternal hand over her back or teasing her by tugging on her ponytail, and she was so naive she couldn’t even figure out why it made her uncomfortable. She was secretly in love with the young art teacher with the soulful dark eyes and slender fingers, but because her father refused to let her take art as a subject – how would that help her get a decent job someday? – she was forced to admire the art teacher from afar. ‘Stalk’ might have been a better word for it. Between lessons she kept running into him ‘by accident’ – literally colliding with him, to feel his body against hers, as if she were blind. Blinded by puppy love.
‘If only he was the one touching my ponytail!’ she confessed to Karien, giggling. ‘Actually, he’s allowed to touch any part of my body.’
Karien was the neighbours’ daughter, a year or two older and rumoured to be a ‘wild girl’. According to the gossips at school, she had gone ‘all the way’ with more than one matric boy. But when Theresa tried to sound her out on this fascinating topic – what exactly did ‘all the way’ mean? How far was ‘too far’? What did you have to do to become a ‘wild girl’? – Karien just smiled mysteriously.
And the art teacher never showed the slightest bit of interest. Years later she heard he was gay.
These were the things that troubled her during that summer of discontent. Her weight, her appearance, her lack of popularity, her stupid crush, her conservative parents who just didn’t understand her.
All of it trivial, she now knows.
In that same year, in that same country, other children the same age as her were dealing with far bigger problems. Poverty, hunger, homelessness, parents without jobs, classrooms without books, family members who were in prison not because they were criminals, but because they had risen against the government, because they had attended a forbidden gathering or read a forbidden book or expressed a forbidden thought.
Of these kinds of cares, fifteen-year-old Theresa Marais knew precisely nothing.
And ‘somewhere on the border’ her future lover and husband – and thousands more conscripts like him – were killing people, not only ‘terrorists’, but also sometimes women, children, old people, babies. Across the border, in another country, nineteen-year-old Troep Theo van Velden discovered a big black hole inside himself, saw and heard and did things he would never forget for the rest of his life. A hole he would conceal for many years – by day at any rate – behind a façade carefully constructed to deceive everyone.
At night was a different story.
Until at last it all fell apart, in broad daylight, the façade blown to pieces like a building struck by a bomb. After that, not much was left of Theo van Velden.
Of these unspeakable and unimaginable things too, the fifteen-year-old Theresa knew nothing. But that doesn’t exonerate her. She knows that now. Guilty by association.
She glances through some of the other photographs, picks up one or two and quickly drops them, as if the paper might scorch her fingers if she held them a moment longer. All army pictures. An entire box filled with army memorabilia he couldn’t share with anyone. Least of all with the woman he had married.
In the chaos of the divorce, the box was left behind in their old house in Tamboerskloof. He had disappeared, leaving her alone with her rage and her guilt and a hoard of memories from a time before they knew each other. When, a few years later, she had to move for a second or third time, she discovered the unfamiliar cardboard container among her personal possessions. Army 1975/76 written on the lid, in fat black felt-tip pen letters, in a slanting hand she recognised right away.
But by then it was already too late to give it back to him.
She opened the box – it was around the year 2000, if she remembers correctly – saw it was filled with yellowed photographs and letters from his mother and personal papers, and immediately closed the lid again. Nothing to do with her. Besides, back then she was still struggling to come to terms with the divorce; her skin felt raw and blue and bloody – not enough time had passed yet to form scabs.
Pandora’s box, she decided, best to keep it tightly shut. To push it right to the back of the highest shelf inside a dark cupboard. And to get on with her ‘healing process’.
It was a long road she had to travel.
She thought she had reached the end of that road, gone all the way. Finally, in her fifties, she was beginning to understand what ‘all the way’ meant, and that it sometimes had nothing to do with teenage sex. It was a journey you undertook as a pilgrimage while you contemplated your losses. The loss of a marriage and a partner, of a picture of personal happiness you had believed was your destiny, and later on the loss of professional ambitions and political illusions too, until at last you arrived at a kind of acceptance.
You have so much less than you hoped for, but enough nonetheless to continue living more or less happily. A comfortable cottage in a neighbourhood that seems more dangerous every day (but not yet as dangerous as many other neighbourhoods in the country, you tell yourself). A fulfilling job at a big media company (even though you sometimes dream of resigning and becoming your own boss, you opt to stay safely where you are; you’re getting too old now, anyway, to take those sorts of risks; it’s better to hang in there a few more years until you can retire with a decent pension), enough friends with whom to go to movies or eat out or go hiking on weekends.
But tonight she has the sense that she has spent the last twenty years walking in a circle, because here she is, back where it all began. With the damaged man she once loved, the part of him that he had wanted to hide, the memories he hadn’t been able to share with her, all stuffed inside the shoebox in her lap. The only tangible object left of his life before her.
Theo before Theresa.
She will never be ready for the contents of this box. But now that its owner has died, she no longer has a choice. It’s not as though she could just throw it away. Because no matter what happened between them, she owes him at least this: that she will look inside the box. The letters from his mother she should perhaps return to her? As far as she knows, the old woman is still alive somewhere in Pretoria, perhaps even in the same apartment where, in the early nineties, she looked down her nose at her unwanted daughter-in-law for the last time. Although surely she must be in a nursing home by now? But, unless she is senile, she is entitled to reread these long-lost letters to her son. Or at least decide for herself if she wants to read them again.