Jacques, the wealthiest and most reckless of the three Marais siblings, had sent word from Australia that, if his sisters could find their father a place in the ‘best old-age home in the Cape’, he would pay for it. Theresa immediately said that she would contribute her share, even though she had far less money than her brother; it was the principle that mattered, wasn’t it, each according to their means?
But Sandra decided no and put her foot down. (Her small, delicate foot.) ‘We can’t do that to Pappa.’
(Pappa no longer knew what we were doing to him, Jacques argued.)
‘He would die in an old-age home!’
(He was well into his eighties, Theresa pointed out as diplomatically as possible; he was dying anyway.)
‘He can come live with me. I will look after him. There’s enough room in the house with the children starting to leave.’
Precisely, Theresa said to Jacques. Now that her children are finally out from under her feet, now she wants to take care of her senile father. I always told you she was a masochist.
‘Come, I’ll make us some tea,’ Sandra offers.
Theresa gets to her feet, relieved to escape from the bedroom, satisfied that she has at least done her duty. In the doorway, she glances back a final time – no matter how anxious she is to get away, she is always afraid that it could be the last time, that she may regret not having tried one final time, tried a little harder – and feels her heart contract when she sees the gentle morning sun on his downy snow-white hair. Like a chicken, she suddenly thinks, not a cute yellow baby chick, no, an ugly baby vulture with his sinewy neck and tufts of down on his almost bare head.
Then she catches her breath, because he has said something.
‘Tété.’
She swings around to face Sandra. ‘Did you hear that? He recognised me!’
But Sandra smiles her long-suffering smile. ‘He calls me Tété too, sometimes. He even calls the nurse who comes to wash and dress him, Tété. I think it must be one of the few words left inside his head. Because it is such an easy baby word?’
Still, Theresa thinks as she follows her sister into the kitchen, it had been her pet name and no one else’s. It was what her brother and sister called her when the three of them were small. And it means something to her that it was her name that stayed behind in her father’s head, like a forgotten item of clothing in an empty cupboard. Yes, that’s what the inside of his head must be like these days. A dusty, empty cupboard.
They drink tea in the kitchen, from the cups Sandra inherited after their mother died, paper-thin and pastel-coloured and iridescent like the insides of perlemoen shells. Theresa had been quite jealous when the cups went to her sister – the set of thick blue Liebermann Pottery plates she herself inherited never seemed as desirable as these cups – but if the porcelain cups had ended up in her possession, they would have been in pieces by now. Sandra has a knack for taking care of precious things. Even with four children in the house, she managed to use the cups often without a single one chipping or breaking.
‘How are you really, sis?’ Sandra’s soft voice is so full of genuine concern that Theresa has to fight back the tears. ‘Isn’t Theo’s death very hard for you?’
‘Oh no, it isn’t all that bad,’ Theresa lies and sips her tea.
‘I worry about you, you know? You are so alone in that house and just the other day I read more statistics about burglaries in your neighbourhood and—’
‘I’ve been alone for a long time, Sandra,’ Theresa says quickly before her sister has another go at telling her how much happier she would be in a security complex further away from the city. ‘Nothing to do with Theo’s death.’
‘Yes, but it’s becoming more and more dangerous for a woman to live on her own.’
‘But you also live alone?’
‘I have Pa and Hanna in the house.’
As if her senile father and her spaced-out daughter could protect her from intruders.
‘And I have two dogs. And at least there’s no one selling drugs on the street corner.’
‘Nowhere is safe any more,’ Theresa says impatiently.
‘But if you could only get out of the city … These days I really miss the time when Anton and I were still living in Knysna.’
It would be cruel to remind Sandra that Knysna had not exactly been a safe harbour for her marriage either. Her husband slept around there just as much as he did in Cape Town. And Klein Adriaan suffered brain damage when he almost drowned in the Knysna lagoon.
‘Ag, you know, Theo and I have been apart for such a long time – it’s not as if his death makes any difference to my life or my aloneness.’
Sandra shakes her head, smooth dark hair swishing around her pale face, a nostalgic little smile playing around her rosy Snow White mouth. ‘Anton and I have also been apart almost fifteen years, but if he had to die tomorrow …’
‘That’s different. Your children will always be a bond between you. Theo and I …’
They never had children – all their descendants had been miscarriages – so the only tangible bond between them was an old shoebox filled with letters and photographs. Of course she doesn’t tell Sandra that; it would sound way too self-pitying.
‘Still. There was a time when you loved him. And love isn’t something you can just scrub out … like a stain from a piece of fabric.’
‘Gonna wash that man right out of my hair,’ Theresa hums.
She doesn’t dare have a serious conversation about Theo right now, or she’ll start bawling again. Ever since she opened that bloody shoebox, she has constantly been on the verge of tears. Not at all like the person she thought she was. She blinks them away determinedly and concentrates on her sister’s fingers around the porcelain cup.
Everything about Sandra has always been small and delicate, her hands without any rings or trinkets, her feet almost childlike in flat sandals, the toenails painted the same iridescent mother-of-pearl shade as the tea cups, slim ankles sticking out from under a long, loose summer dress, the thin bare arms of a ballerina, fine little nose in a pale little face with its frame of shiny dark hair.
‘Do you colour your hair these days?’ Theresa asks. ‘Or are you still not going grey?’
‘Oh, there are more and more grey threads, believe me,’ Sandra says softly, as if commiserating with her elder sister.
‘But not enough so you have to colour it.’ Theresa hears the ridiculous resentment in her own voice. ‘When I think of all those years I coloured mine to try and look like Goldilocks.’
‘I’m glad you stopped. And got rid of the locks. It suits you, short and silver-white like that. It doesn’t look old; it looks … funky.’
That last word sounds strange coming from Sandra’s mouth. Theresa suspects that she heard it from her daughter and has only started to use it recently.
‘I don’t mind looking old,’ Theresa lies again. ‘It’s a lot less effort this way.’
Her sister has always, despite her many worries, looked years younger than her age. She was blessed with immaculate pale skin which she instinctively kept out of the sun from childhood. Unlike Theresa, she never spent hours broiling herself in a bikini to get a suntan; instead, if she wasn’t practising the piano, you would find her behind her mother’s sewing machine. And unlike Theresa, she never smoked or drank too much wine; she didn’t even like coffee, she adored raw vegetables. Now, of course, she was enjoying the fruits of a lifetime of sobriety and moderation. She is barely three years younger than Theresa, but the skin on her face is smooth and flawless, her cheeks glowing with robust health, her body without a trace of middle-aged spread. She still has the same slim, slightly built figure Theresa so envied when they were teenagers.
‘You were always the pretty sister,’ Theresa says, her tone nostalgic. ‘Pretty and sweet and musical …’
‘But you were the clever sister.’
‘That didn’t count when we were at school. Pretty was infinitely better. And I was “clever”
with languages, which also didn’t count with Ma or Pa. Jacques was the maths boffin, the sports hero, the head boy, all those things that mattered to them.’
‘We both grew up in Jacques’s shadow,’ Sandra says, no hint of rancour in her voice.
That’s not the way Theresa remembers it. She had been the middle child who was overshadowed from both sides, not as academically gifted or as good at sport or as self-assured as her elder brother, not as pretty or as gracious or as musical as her little sister. No wonder she listened to The Dark Side of the Moon all the time.
She finishes her tea, puts the cup and saucer down on the kitchen table, quickly stuffs another homemade almond biscuit into her mouth, and confesses while chewing: ‘I contacted Theo’s mother.’
‘I’m glad. It’s time to bury the grudge.’
Theresa shakes her head, irritated by her sister’s careless choice of words. ‘You hold a grudge. You don’t bury it.’
‘I mean the unnecessary hostility between you and your former mother-in-law.’
‘You mean I should bury the hatchet.’ Her pedantry about language is pathetic, Theresa knows, but she can’t help herself. It’s her job; she has spent a lifetime policing the written word, and the boundaries between writing and speaking occasionally get blurred. ‘We were never really enemies. We just tried to forget about each other’s existence after her son and I were divorced.’
‘But now … she has lost her only son … and you have lost the only man you ever really loved.’
‘Not the only one. I am not a one-man woman like you, Sandra.’
‘The only one you loved enough to marry.’
‘It was precisely because my only marriage was such a fiasco that I was too scared to ever do it again. Too scared or too cynical or whatever. But there have been other men in my life.’
Why was it so important to rub Sandra’s nose in it? To call attention to the difference between her own varied sexual history and her sister’s exemplary monogamous life?
Sandra smiles the way you smile at an obstreperous teenager and steers the conversation into safer waters: ‘How did you get hold of her?’
‘Phoned. Imagine, she’s still living in the same flat in Sunnyside. Same phone number after all these years, can you believe it?’
‘And? Was she friendly?’
‘Well. At least she wasn’t quite as rude as I had feared.’
‘Ag, shame.’
‘I discovered a bunch of old letters she wrote to Theo while he was in the army. I said I would bring them back for her.’
‘It will do you good to see her again. Get closure, hey?’ Sandra looks at her sister, pleased. ‘But surely you’re not going all the way to Pretoria just to deliver a few letters?’
All the way. It’s as if this phrase is following her around.
‘I was thinking of flying to Johannesburg at some point anyway,’ she says as airily as possible. ‘On my way to Cuba.’
Sandra stares at her, stunned.
‘Cuba? Wow! But can you afford a holiday like that? I’ve heard that it’s very expensive to get there …’
‘I can’t afford it at all,’ Theresa says. ‘But it isn’t really a holiday, it’s something I feel I have to do. In the same box where I discovered Theo’s mother’s letters, there was another letter. Written by a Cuban soldier, addressed to his child. I think he was already dead when Theo got his hands on the letter. And I just feel … you know … as if it’s my duty to go and deliver the letter?’
Sandra is now staring at her open-mouthed.
‘But it can’t be … The address has probably changed … How do you know the person is still alive?’
‘That’s the reason I can’t just mail it,’ Theresa says. ‘I can’t take the risk that it might get lost. I have already sent a postcard to the address, just to see what happens …’
‘And?’
‘Nothing yet, but apparently it takes ages for mail to get there. I only wrote a few words, translated into Spanish with help from Google, just said I had a letter from this soldier called Angel and added my postal address. Email as well. So now I wait …’
‘Angel?’ Sandra asks, wide-eyed.
Theresa nods. ‘If the soldier’s family are no longer living at that address, I will see if I can trace them. I know I’m looking for a needle in a haystack, but I keep telling myself I should at least try.’ She leans forward, tears once more pricking her eyes. ‘It could be the dumbest thing I will ever do in my life – and heaven knows, I have done some dumb things in my time – but it seems to me I have no choice.’
Sandra takes Theresa’s hand. ‘It’s about closure, sis. Unfinished business. And you’re right …’
‘You think what I’m doing is right?’ Theresa asks eagerly.
‘No, I think you’re right when you say you’ve done an awful lot of dumb things in your life.’ Sandra is smiling as sweetly as always. ‘So one more dumb thing probably won’t matter, hey?’
4. A SPANISH DICTIONARY
At first she tries to translate ‘The Letter’ herself, with the internet as her only guide. In her mind’s eye it’s written like that, ‘The Letter’, like the title of a poorly written magazine story she has to knock into shape before it can be published. But she manages to understand just enough to realise that she, in fact, understands nothing. The first step towards wisdom, her father-the-history-teacher used to say.
And what is left of all her father’s supposed wisdom now? The king of crosswords who has lost his words. It used to be one of his favourite sayings that a little bit of knowledge was a dangerous thing. It equipped you with just enough false confidence to behave like an idiot, Adriaan Marais believed.
This is no time to behave like an idiot. She reaches out to her friend Nini, a travel agent who speaks fluent Spanish and who has been organising tours to South America for decades. They became friends when Nini organised the first overseas trip Theresa and Theo took together, to Spain, in 1985. She sends a scan of ‘The Letter’ to Nini’s email address – the original is too precious to entrust to anyone – and Nini calls her back the same evening.
‘You will have to go to Cuba,’ she announces. ‘You have no choice.’
Theresa hears the breathless enthusiasm in her friend’s voice, but reminds herself that that is Nini’s default tone, a childlike quality that always makes her seem younger and more naive than she really is. It is a quality she has learned to wield like a weapon, one of the many gifts that has made her a formidable businesswoman. These days she owns her own travel agency.
‘I was afraid you might say that.’
‘I must admit when you first started talking about the letter, I thought, there she goes, overreacting again, but—’
‘Again?’
‘You know what I mean! Because you constantly feel guilty about Theo and now you imagine it’s something you have to do for him. But now that I’ve read the letter, well, it isn’t even about Theo any more, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a letter a father wrote to his baby daughter and which that child ought to read. And you are the only person on earth who can bring that child and that letter together.’
‘That child must be over forty now, Nini. She could be living anywhere in the world and I don’t know—’
‘She’s most likely still right there in Cuba. You know they can’t just up and go live in another country. They can’t even visit another country – they’re stuck there.’
‘Hmm, almost like us South Africans, hey?’
If only Theresa had a British or Dutch grandmother or grandfather; if any of her ancestors had been born in Europe rather than in Africa in the past century, there’s no way she would have passed up the opportunity to obtain foreign citizenship. Not to run away, necessarily, but at least to have an escape route if things really go pear-shaped around here. She believes in South Africa, and she would love to keep believing in the country of her birth, but these days her belief keeps faltering. It is as though the distrust between races was a w
ound just temporarily covered with a band-aid while Madiba was still alive, but now the plaster has been ripped off and everyone can see the disgusting wound, oozing pus and apparently incurable. She has no idea how much longer she can stand the putrid smell. But she has no choice. She will have to hold her nose, cover her mouth and her eyes and her ears; she will simply have to find a way to keep believing, because she has no open backdoor.
Nini is so carried away, she doesn’t even hear Theresa’s wistful remark.
‘Just imagine, Theresa, if your father had written such a letter to you. If somewhere on earth a letter existed that your father wrote to you before he died and you will never get to read it because the person who has that letter can’t be bothered to bring it to you.’
‘Look here, Nini, if I actually knew where to find this Mercedes Perez Amat – even if I just knew she was still alive – I would spend my last cent to deliver the letter into her hands. But I don’t have the money for a wild goose chase to a remote island.’
‘You will never forgive yourself if you don’t at least try.’
‘These days I’m quite amazed at all the things for which one can forgive oneself.’
‘And I promise you won’t regret the journey. Even if you don’t find the woman. Come on, Theresa, Cuba has always been on your bucket list.’
‘Ag, I don’t really have bucket lists any more.’
When she was younger and imagined herself at this age leading the comfortable life of a well-off wife and mother of adult children, or even just a career woman at the top of her game, she used to dream about the exotic places she still wanted to visit. But her life didn’t turn out that way. Nothing in her life really worked out the way she’d imagined. Not everything is necessarily worse, some parts may even be better – when she hears her friends complain about their husbands and children, when she thinks of her poor sister’s circumstances – but it isn’t the life she had expected to live.
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