Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  Good heavens, there she goes tearing up again. Theresa shoves the letter back into the box. To think that even her unloved mother-in-law’s prosaic words can drive her to tears tonight.

  She forces herself to sift through the rest of the contents. A chain and a silver tag engraved with his service number and his name and blood group and religious denomination, a copper bangle and a broken string of beads, a few newspaper cuttings about persons ‘killed in action’ being buried with full military honours, and, right at the bottom, a small green notebook that he’d apparently used as a sort of journal – short scribbles that look as if they were scrawled in a hurry, but also columns of numbers, rows of names, random notes. No way is she going to try and decipher these right now. Perhaps some other day when she is feeling less vulnerable.

  Just before she replaces the lid, she notices a rectangular envelope poking out between the pages in the back of the notebook. She slides it out, carefully, because the paper has almost perished from too much handling, with brown stains, and multiple creases that suggest it was folded smaller at some point. It is the back of a light-brown envelope, the kind used to mail official documents, half covered with a large dark-brown stain on the left. Perhaps the envelope with his call-up papers, Theresa guesses, although she can’t imagine why he would fold that so many times like something you had to hide.

  Then she flips the envelope over and sees the address: Mercedes Perez Amat, Calle Obracate. La Habana Vieja. Cuba.

  Now more careful, she slides the letter from the envelope, because the three sheets of paper are even flimsier than the envelope. It is written in Spanish, to someone called – Que … ja? Queleda? Querija? She has to guess the name because the same dark-brown stain as on the envelope makes the words illegible. From someone called Angel.

  Angel?

  Angel Perez Gonzalez.

  The brown stain on the paper is blood, she realises. What else?

  2. TWO TEENAGE JOURNALS

  Over the next few days Theresa tries dutifully to decipher the entries in Troep Theo van Velden’s little green notebook. Some of the entries are clearly dated, 18 October 1975, 3 January 1976, sometimes also noting the day of the week or the time of day. Sunday morning, late afternoon, at the crack of dawn. Here and there the time has been recorded with a soldier’s pedantic precision, the hour and minute, 10:12 or 23:25. Other pages are just scrawled with garbled words or disjointed phrases, no markers to help Theresa stay on course in her quest.

  Theo apparently smuggled the little book across the border into Angola. Wrapped in plastic, Theresa gathers, and hidden out of sight. Where, she would rather not guess.

  He would have had to do that because such a notebook filled with words in Afrikaans was a personal possession that would have betrayed his nationality if it fell into enemy hands – for the same reason the branding on his toothpaste or the labels on canned food had to be carefully disguised – and if the enemy were to broadcast that news to the world, everyone would become aware of the massive hoax being perpetrated by the South African government.

  Although at that stage of his young life Theo would not yet have described the Angola excursion as a hoax. The disillusionment and the bitterness would set in only later. Initially it seemed like an adventure, a terrifying, deathly dangerous adventure that no one could criticise without being considered a traitor or a coward, but an adventure all the same. It was his patriotic duty to protect family and friends back home against terrorists and communists. That was how he thought of it, at least before the first time he got involved in an oh-fuck-this-is-where-I-die skirmish, when his border experience still consisted mainly of heat and flies and boredom and hours of loafing in the sun.

  For example, on 9 October 1975 he writes:

  So here we are on our way to the Border at-long-fucking-last after all those months of training and bloody torture and getting fucked up. Sorry, Ma, I hope you’ll never have to read this little book, but in case something happens to me and it ends up in your hands, well, blame the army. It is called swearing like a trooper for a reason. It’s a survival tactic, like learning to leopard crawl and learning how to shoot. I suppose this is where the shit’s really going to hit the fan, but the guys around me are laughing and joking as if we’re going on a trip to the seaside. Maybe just to hide their nerves. But we’re excited too – a change is as good as a holiday! – and we’ll finally get the chance to do what we’ve been trained to do since the beginning of the year. I’m going to be sitting in an armoured vehicle handling a gun the size of a bloody cannon and the targets will be people, actual people, and I will be a target too. But we try not to think about that too much. Too late now to start running scared. We have to do what has to be done.

  That is one of the easy ones, Theresa thinks, spending her lunch hour at her desk on the tenth floor of an office building in Cape Town, grateful for the blessing of air-conditioning, because down below the streets are shimmering in a late-summer heatwave. A specific date, complete sentences with verbs and punctuation, the handwriting perfectly legible. He’d had enough time to formulate proper phrases, and write everything down calmly. Swear words and all.

  Where was she on 9 October 1975? In standard seven in Worcester, sweating in her ugly school uniform as they stood outside in the sun watching the national flag being raised. Or sprawled across her bed in her bell-bottom jeans and her tie-dye grandpa vest, listening to a Pink Floyd lp on repeat?

  On some of the other pages, her self-imposed task turns into frustration. In the open-plan office with its breathtaking view of Table Mountain, she can spend hours staring at the same three sentences without even noticing the mountain or tasting the stale sandwich she’d be washing down with a mug of lukewarm coffee, and the next thing she’d look up and all her colleagues would be back from lunch, the empty desks around her reoccupied. She’d have to stow Theo’s little book in her handbag and continue with the text editing of boring magazine features, which is what she gets paid for. Without being any the wiser about what Theo had meant to say in those three sentences. Her impatience grows by the day, because if she can’t decipher the little green book, she also can’t solve the riddle of the Cuban letter.

  Within days it becomes such an obsession that the little book occupies her evenings in her cottage as well. She sits in front of the electric fan, and while she is eating a plate of pasta and drinking a glass of cold white wine and keeping one eye on the TV and responding to emails on her cellphone with one hand – she has always been a proud multitasker – the little book is always beside her. Open at one of the pages where she got stuck.

  It reminds her of the way her father, a teacher, used to tackle difficult crossword puzzles. Adriaan Marais’s technique was to carry the magazine with the incomplete crossword puzzles everywhere with him, from his study to the bathroom, to the toilet, to bed. As if he would find the missing word if he only stared at the empty squares long enough. Now her father’s entire life has turned into an empty crossword puzzle. All his words are missing; even his children’s names are lost.

  But Theresa doesn’t want to think about that now. Instead, she turns to a page with an intelligible entry. It is 20 November 1975. And again she wonders where she had been on that day.

  Deep inside the bush. Way beyond the border. Beyond all limits it sometimes seems because we exceeded our own limits long ago for hunger and heat and being fed-up and short of sleep, for everything the body can take or for what we thought the body could take. For what the mind can take – no, fuck that, that we don’t talk about, except for cracking jokes about the poor bastards who go mental. Bosbefok. The bush around here is incredibly dense, everything looks different from the wide-open plains where we were trained, and death may lurk behind every bush. The Eland can’t move fast enough on this terrain, we can’t see far enough to shoot properly, and if we end up in an ambush, shit’s going to fly.

  By the second evening, she digs an old trunk out from under her bed and looks for the black hardcover book wh
ere she regularly poured out her heart at fifteen. The last time she tried to read it, easily a decade ago, the sentimental rubbish sprouted by that schoolgirl made her cringe so, she gave up after a few pages. But it suddenly seems important to remember what it was like to be a teenager – a white Afrikaans teenager – in this country during the seventies.

  Theo was a teenager when he was sent to the border, she reminds herself. If she hadn’t been a girl, she would have had to do military service too. What would she have done if she had had to fight in a secret war across the border in a foreign country? Would she have gone mental, wounded herself in order to escape, opted to go to jail rather than shoot at people, surrendered to the enemy with her hands in the air? Or would she, like most of the other troops, have drunk too much and reasoned too little and obeyed orders?

  She thinks she may know the answer.

  Back on the living room floor, with the fan next to her breathing cool air over her sweaty body every few seconds, she reads what Theresa Marais wrote in the black hardcover book in early October 1975. With a multitude of hearts and flowers scribbled in the margin.

  I have to study for exams but I can’t concentrate because I am hungry and crazy with excitement because HS spoke to me today!!! He’s in matric and he plays in a band and I think he’s so gorgeous I want to cry just looking at him and I thought he was completely out of my league, why would he even look at a standard seven like me, and then today he did look at me, in the corridor between classes, AND HE SPOKE TO ME!!! Now I am more determined than ever to lose 3 kilos before Karien’s party next weekend because she’s invited him too and if I could only be 3 kilos thinner I will look much better in my tight jeans, so now I’m not eating anything, just drinking Ricoffy all the time without milk or sugar, but all the suffering will be worth it if I can get just ONE CLOSE DANCE with this guy.

  PS: He actually just wanted to know if the maths teacher was in a bad mood. He could probably have asked any girl in the school. BUT HE ASKED ME.

  PPS: I can’t wait to tell Karien!!!

  PPPS: Or maybe I shouldn’t say anything because I think she fancies him too.

  For the middle-aged Theresa, who has become a respected copy editor at a popular magazine, the teenaged Theresa’s hyperbolic use of language is a trial. Her fingers itch to delete the superfluous exclamation marks and capital letters, but she manages to restrain herself and flips the pages to a paragraph the frivolous young Theresa penned sometime in November 1975. This time the margin is decorated with drawings of tears and broken hearts, and swirls and flourishes so savagely applied with a black pen that it ripped the paper.

  I hate exams. Especially in summer when it’s too hot to study. Especially when I think of my friends tanning next to a pool. It just seems so terribly unfair. Why does my dad have to be a boring history teacher who can’t afford a swimming pool, why can’t he be a doctor or a businessman or something? And I can’t even THINK of going to tan at the municipal pool because I have already put all 3 kilos I lost before Karien’s party back on! Plus an extra one as well! So now I have to lose 4 kilos before we go to the sea for the summer holidays!!!

  She gets up and walks over to the fridge, empties an ice tray into a plastic bowl and carries it back to the living room. The two teenagers’ journals are lying side by side on the wooden floor, the green one smaller and dirtier and far more tattered than the sturdy black one. While she thumbs through the green one with her right hand, she uses her left hand to run an ice cube over the back of her neck. It offers some respite, delicious goosebumps on her arms, before the heat wraps itself around her body again like a blanket.

  4 December 1975

  Just a matter of hours before all hell breaks loose again. Too scared to sleep and too tired to stay awake. Clothes are in rags, have had it up to here with rain and mud, the armoured cars keep getting stuck in the mud, the contact at Eno was a fucking catastrophe. Operation Savannah they call it, ‘a top-secret operation’, no one back home can know about it, don’t ruin their Christmas holiday with bad news, see that you stay alive, troep, it’s your fucking duty. Don’t think about the people you’re shooting to hell, especially don’t think about the corpses of children, in this damp heat even the tiniest corpses rot really fast. It’s the Cubans’ fault, if they hadn’t come and interfered we wouldn’t be here to try and drive them out. It’s not their war. Whose war is it? I have no fucking idea.

  And in the sturdier black book the silly schoolgirl wrote nothing about the war early that December. There’s no hint of war anywhere in her journal, just more self-pity and self-absorption.

  I am no longer counting the days, I’m counting the hours until we go to the seaside. Can’t wait to get away from this stupid town full of boring people, get away from our street and our house and just see new people in a new place for a change. There’s a French author who says hell is other people, but I think hell is the same people over and over. New people would seem like heaven to me right now.

  She should probably be grateful that the internet didn’t exist back then. If she were a teenager now, in 2016, she would be broadcasting this sort of rubbish on social media, on Twitter and Snapchat and YouTube. At least an old-fashioned handwritten journal can be hidden inside a trunk under a bed, but how will today’s teenagers keep their youthful indiscretions secret in their declining years?

  She should rip up this journal or burn it. It isn’t bringing her any closer to her high-school days. On the contrary. It’s as if she’s standing on the deck of a ship, staring at an island that is suspended on the horizon like a mirage, but as the ship gets nearer, the island keeps receding into the distance. The past is a country to which you can never return. She knows you cannot go home again; she knows there are boundaries you simply cannot cross.

  And yet she keeps reading the two teenagers’ journals, because there is too much she still doesn’t understand, too much she can’t even explain to herself.

  3. PORCELAIN CUPS IN PASTEL COLOURS

  The old man’s faded blue eyes are entirely without expression.

  His hands, twisted with rheumatism and marked with liver spots and bulging blue veins, lie motionless on his thighs. The legs are shockingly thin in a pair of grey tracksuit pants that hang from his waist as loosely as a skirt.

  Theresa kneels in front of the armchair – the weathered leather chair where he used to sit and read for hours – and takes his hands in hers. Cold hands. Perhaps death starts in the hands rather than the feet. Her own hands are no longer those of a young woman either. She is often startled by the wrinkles etched around her wrists like rows of thin bangles, the loose, saggy skin around her knuckles, but compared to these warped old person’s claws, her hands suddenly seem almost youthful.

  ‘Pa,’ she says again, her voice hoarse, ‘it’s me, Theresa. Your middle child. You have three children, Pa. Ouboet Jacques lives in another country, far from here. I live in Cape Town, not so far away, and you, of course, live with your youngest daughter Sandra here in Somerset West.’

  She watches him closely, desperate for a sign of recognition, a flicker of light in those dull eyes, a nod or a gesture. Nothing. She leans forward when he opens his mouth, stares in fascination at the threads of saliva between his dry lips, waits for a word. But he doesn’t emit a sound.

  In the doorway behind her, her long-suffering sister sighs in her long-suffering way.

  Theresa turns around to look at Sandra. ‘Is it the medication that makes him like this?’

  Another sigh from Sandra. ‘He is almost ninety years old, Theresa. And he has Alzheimer’s.’

  ‘Yes, but he at least responded the last time I was here. I know he doesn’t recognise me any more, but he spoke to me as if I was someone he knew from his childhood …’

  ‘The last time you were here.’ Theresa hears the silent reproach in her sister’s soft voice. ‘It’s been a while, hey?’

  Don’t react, Theresa cautions herself. Be grateful that Sandra is prepared to care for him.
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br />   ‘These days he’s like this most of the time. The “good days” are becoming fewer.’ Sandra’s voice is back to sounding as patient as always.

  This time it is Theresa who cannot suppress a sigh. If only this entire situation didn’t make her feel so damn guilty. In a traditional family set-up, she would have been the one tending to the frail parent. The eldest sister, and the unmarried, childless one at that. But she hadn’t felt up to it. Dammit, she had a life to live! And it wasn’t exactly her fault she had this obliging, kind-hearted bloody Snow White for a younger sister.

  Sandra has always been a sucker for punishment. Just look at all those years she turned a blind eye to her husband’s relentless skirt-chasing and sleeping around. If their youngest child hadn’t almost drowned, she would probably still be pretending that she was happily married. After the accident, the boy was mentally disabled, which finally made Anton head for the hills, like any coward would. He married a younger woman and left Sandra to deal with their disabled child and all her other worries.

  Worst of all for Theresa was that her faultless younger sister never displayed the slightest hint of bitterness. Theresa was the one who would have liked to twist off her former brother-in-law’s balls with a blunt pair of pliers. Because he had made her little sister suffer so.

  Not that her little sister has ever complained.

  Sandra is the kind of woman who constantly makes you feel guilty, not because she complains, but because she doesn’t. And heaven knows, she has enough to complain about. Her adult children who can’t seem to find direction (not that she would ever admit it), the two eldest sons gallivanting abroad, the daughter who became a drug addict and who now lives with her mother and her grandfather ‘just until she’s back on her feet’. And the disabled son for whom she wore herself out for years, for whom she sacrificed literally everything, ultimately even her marriage. And now that Klein Adriaan (his grandfather’s namesake) has finally been admitted to a good care facility for adults, now that Sandra can at last enjoy a measure of freedom, now she insists on caring for her senile father. Insists on it.