Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  That is how she feels now.

  Whenever deciphering the writing becomes too much of a struggle, a word or a phrase recaptures her attention. A sequence of letters that almost looks like her name, or a cryptic reference to a woman who could be her. Or not. A description that reminds her of the man she once loved, a long time ago, makes her hunt eagerly for more, until once again the phrases lapse into gibberish. And whenever her eyelids grow heavy and her head flops forward from fatigue, she is yanked right back, eyes wide open, by something he writes about Angola, about his military service, about the death and destruction that he reaped and sowed.

  Now and again he even mentions a letter, but she can’t tell if it is ‘The Letter’, the one she has stowed in her handbag next to her passport. In these instances his handwriting becomes so shaky that there are entire paragraphs of which she cannot decipher a single word. It may as well have been Chinese.

  And nowhere is there any indication of a date. Impossible to determine which part was written in which year, in which month, on what day. Presumably it all comes from his final decade, by which time his mind had become deranged beyond rescue, but she can’t be certain.

  She can’t be certain of anything.

  Listening to Satie’s Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, which is actually eight pieces if I remember correctly, Satie of course was an old joker whose jokes people usually didn’t get, just like my shrink who is dead from cancer now, cancer of the testes, cancer in his balls, every time he told someone about it they thought he was joking because he was the kind of guy who would joke about anything, even about death, even when it became clear he was dying, they still preferred to believe he had a different sort of cancer, maybe lung cancer like old Spikkels who died the other day, just like in Angola he always said he wouldn’t get killed because he knew he would die of lung cancer like his dad and his dad’s dad before him, heavy smokers all of them, and that was why he never even tried to quit smoking, why would be punish himself for no reason, he said, he liked smoking and he knew how he would die one day and that was more than the rest of us poor bastards could say.

  Theresa gasps for air when she finally reaches the full stop at the end of this protracted sentence, as if she has tried to swim under water for too long. She vaguely remembers the name Spikkels, but she doesn’t know when he died, had no idea that he was dead.

  Even the sequence of the entries makes no sense. They are like entry and exit stamps in a passport, no chronological order; wherever he found a blank page, he made his stamp. Almost as if he opened the book the way a believer might flip open the Bible to look for meaning in a verse that happened to appear on that page – and then kept flipping to the first blank page he found to carry on writing. Some entries even read backwards – like Chinese! – and then with the next one the ‘normal’ sequence is restored, from left to right, from the front of the book to the back.

  Although by now, after a day and night grappling with these words, Theresa is no longer even certain what ‘normal’ means.

  The next entry is written with a different pen, in green ink, and this is where the handwriting becomes completely unrecognisable. The letters on this page are bigger and rounder and further apart, as if they were made by someone else, or by the same person at a much earlier age.

  What will happen is that Cuba is going to float until it’s right up against Angola, not over millions of years the way the continents drifted apart, but overnight like a ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean, only much faster than any ship can go. We will wake up one morning and Cuba will be lying next to Angola, like a child behind its mother’s back, a tiny island next to a vast country. No one believes me when I tell them that, so I rather don’t talk about it any more. They think I’m stark raving bonkers as it is.

  Theresa feels giddy as if she is about to faint. She unbuckles her seatbelt and gets to her feet. She had requested an aisle seat as usual, so fortunately she doesn’t have to climb over sleeping passengers. She feels her way down the dark aisle towards the back of the plane, to the kitchen area next to the toilets where two young flight attendants are whispering and giggling. On a tray near them there are several plastic tumblers filled with water and orange juice. Theresa reaches for a glass of water. Her hand is shaking so, some of the water splashes out when she raises the glass to her lips.

  ‘Are you okay?’ one of the flight attendants enquires, a tiny frown between the perfect arches of her sculpted brows.

  Theresa nods and drains the glass. Just a little dizzy, she apologises, must be the stuffiness from the air conditioning, the heat from all the bodies around her. She is surprised to discover the black Moleskine journal still clasped in her left hand. She escapes into the toilet, locks the door behind her, tears off her glasses and splashes water onto her face. She is pale as death, the mirror tells her, her eyes even more bloodshot than an hour earlier. Terrifying like a vampire, with silver-white spikes of hair ranged around her scalp. No wonder those poor little flight attendants had seemed concerned. She splashes more water, watches wet stains form on her shirt, sees water running onto her socks and onto the floor.

  Why do Theo’s scribbles upset her so? After all, she has known for years that he had ‘psychological problems’, the euphemistic phrase she still uses with people who never knew him. Bipolar, psychotic, catatonic, paranoid, you name it – she mastered all these words; they became familiar as pets, and she diligently researched every one. Back when she still believed she could help him somehow.

  Or at least understand what was happening.

  But in the end she gave up either trying to help or trying to understand and abandoned him the way you abandon a fellow swimmer whom a dangerous current has carried so far into the sea that you know you can no longer reach him. You have to save yourself, swim back to safety, rely on professional lifesavers to venture into the deep.

  Finally there is nothing more you can do but hope that someone else can save them, because you know you can’t.

  When at last she unlocks the toilet door and walks out on her wet socks, Theresa gives the flight attendants what she hopes is a reassuring nod. She has no idea how long she spent inside there. It could be two minutes or two hours. She imagines that is how Theo must have felt when he began to lose his grip on the concept of time. He stopped noting dates in his journal, stopped caring about chronology, because why would ‘normal time’ matter when you are always surrounded by darkness?

  Back in her seat, she opens the black book again. Time to persevere and be done with this report of insanity before the plane lands in Cuba. After a few more pages she can barely decipher, one of the final entries hits her like a landmine. Opens fire on all her guilt, shatters every last certainty.

  Rereading the book by that Polish journalist whose name I can never remember about the war in Angola and I came across a phrase about the ‘incommunicability’ of war that I must have written down somewhere because it sounds so familiar probably in the Bible my mother sent here.

  I will have to find it.

  It wasn’t that hard to find because the only thing I ever read in that Bible is Revelations and I found the quotation in the margin at Revelations 3:1. (‘I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.’) Kapuściński was his name – the Pole whose name I can never remember – and he wrote: ‘the image of war is not communicable – not by the pen, or the voice, or the camera. War is a reality only to those stuck in its bloody, dreadful, filthy insides. To others it is pages in a book, pictures on a screen, nothing more.’

  It cannot be any other way.

  Because how the fuck do you describe the stench of rotten corpses and pieces of what used to be people, but are now just intestines and blood and pink flesh sticking to white bones, the smell of torrential rain and mud and subtropical trees and sweat and fear and piss, there are guys who literally shit themselves from fear among the screaming bullets and exploding bombs and afterwards no one ever mentions it again, it becomes just another pa
rt of the incommunicability of the entire mess, and how do you describe the sound of war, the crackle of machine guns fired in despair, not to hit the enemy but to blast away at your own cowardice, and the shouting and the cursing and the praying and the wailing, the noise that wraps itself around you like a plastic bag and squeezes the air out of you until nothing else remains, just this tremendous noise, and for as long as the noise is still around you, you know you’re still alive, which is why you scream and shoot and curse in order to make even more noise because fuck knows, when the noise is gone, and all the sounds suddenly seem far away as if there’s a bandage covering your ears, that’s when you are in shit, that’s when you are wounded and probably dying, because death is silent, everyone knows that.

  Cold and silent.

  Dead silent.

  These were things I could never share with anyone.

  Nor the eyes of a young man dying, in the moment before he dies, like a light being switched off, such a bloody cliché but so bloody heart-rending when you can tell the guy is desperate to keep the light burning a little while longer, he is fucking terrified of the dark, whether it’s one of your comrades or the enemy, it isn’t something you’ll ever forget. The first time you are close enough to someone to see his eyes when you kill him. For me that was the Cuban with the letter.

  Theresa stops breathing for a moment, terrified that the rest of the story will turn out to be illegible, perhaps even more terrified that she will be able to read it. But she has apparently become adept at deciphering the writing, because her eyes fly over the next several sentences. She stumbles here and there, but when she stares at a jumble of letters for long enough, they rearrange themselves so she can recognise each one and make sense of them in their proper sequence.

  He was lying on his side, in a massive pool of blood, he would probably have died anyway, I always told myself that, but then as I get closer he slips one hand in under his body and I think you fucker you are reaching for a gun you stinking communist what the fuck are you doing here anyway in this war so far from your home I will kill before you can kill me. And then I pump him full of lead. All those clichés that sound as if they were written by Konsalik. Was that really the way we talked in the bush? We were a bunch of shit-scared schoolboys forced to play war games but that was the day I knew it had never been a game nor would it ever become one. I watched the light go out in that guy’s eyes, I had no choice, the eyes were all there was to look at, everything from his neck down was a bloody mess.

  I was nineteen years old.

  He didn’t look much older.

  I only saw the letter in his hand when he was already dead. He hadn’t been reaching for a weapon, he had wanted to give me a letter. Why the fuck did he want to give it to ME?

  Theresa wants to leave her seat to find more water and try to calm her pounding heart, but at this exact moment the plane starts rattling and shaking and the red warning lights overhead go on and all around her she hears the click of seatbelts being fastened hastily. The same flight attendants who, moments ago, were chatting and laughing outside the toilets, are now struggling to maintain their balance as they patrol the aisles to make sure that even the sleeping passengers are safely buckled up. The captain comes onto the loudspeakers to announce that they have encountered some turbulence and to order everyone back to their seats.

  Theresa is usually a neurotic passenger, the kind who’s convinced the plane will drop out of the sky whenever it starts to shake a bit, but right now she is completely calm. Ever since she started reading this black journal a day ago, she has found herself in such emotional turmoil that this unexpected physical turmoil, the result of clouds and weather conditions, almost comes as a relief. Besides, like Spikkels who was so convinced that he would survive Angola because he was destined to die of lung cancer someday, Theresa feels safe, for the moment convinced that no harm will come to her before she has arrived in Havana. Because she has to find someone, or find something, somewhere in Cuba.

  7. A MAP OF HAVANA

  Walking out of the modest airport building, she feels like Michael J Fox in Back to the Future, as if she has suddenly arrived in another era. Another century. Most of the people around her are clearly her contemporaries, dressed in the sloppy casualwear that has become the modern tourist’s travel uniform, burdened with the heavy suitcase on wheels that is every present-day traveller’s personal albatross. She knows she looks just like them in her loose black pants and black T-shirt with a creased denim jacket flung over her shoulders, possibly even worse than them because she has been in transit for over thirty hours. There’s no getting away from it: black is practical for travel. Black and creased and makeup-free – that is how Theresa Marais travels.

  But the street outside José Martí International Airport looks like a movie set from the fifties. Cadillacs and Pontiacs and Buicks and Chevrolets everywhere you look, sharp tail fins and long low bodies, chrome finishes and an astonishing variety of colours. Where Theresa comes from, cars are mostly white – white or black, solemn silver-grey or predictable dark blue, occasionally a splash of reckless red – but here the cars are parading their plumage like parrots. Every colour of the rainbow, and a few she has never even imagined, from shocking pink and pale purple to turquoise and lime green.

  She turns towards the guide beside her, surprised. ‘I thought the old cars were only kept around for the sake of tourists. Like the rickshaws in …’

  This young guide wouldn’t have heard of the rickshaws in Durban and she is too tired to explain. But she had indeed thought of the famous old cars of Havana in the same way as the elaborately decorated passenger carts on the KwaZulu-Natal coast, drawn by men wearing animal skins and horns on their heads, just a bit of local colour to entertain visitors. It is inconceivable that any Durbanite would ride to work in a rickshaw.

  And now it’s apparent that here in Havana residents actually drive around in their movie-prop cars.

  It’s the first of many surprises.

  No, the first surprise had been the guide waiting for her in the arrivals hall, holding a piece of cardboard with her name written in neat capital letters: THERESA MARIAS. Wrong spelling, she’d almost pointed out, but the intrepid young fellow with the American baseball cap (New York Yankees) had looked so radiantly happy to meet her, she couldn’t bring herself to correct him on such a brief acquaintance. Forget about the editing for now.

  ‘Welcome to Cuba!’ he’d called out in English, jovially, his arms wide open as if she were a long-lost relative. ‘My name is Oreste Torres Santana. Nini from South Africa asked me to be your guide in Havana. I look forward to showing you my beautiful city!’

  ‘Oreste?’

  She’d been genuinely amazed. Of course Nini had warned her that she had arranged a guide and interpreter for the first few days, a reliable and capable young man she often used as a guide for tour groups. Not at all expensive, according to Nini, and the time Theresa would save if he helped her find places and communicate in Spanish would be worth every cent. According to Nini. And as with all the other arrangements her friend made for this journey, from the cumbersome flight route to the first few nights’ accommodation in the legendary Hotel Nacional de Cuba – which Theresa thought unnecessarily extravagant – she hadn’t put up much of a fight. Nini knew Cuba (much better than Theresa did, at any rate) and Nini knew Theresa (for a full three decades); therefore she would know the best way to bring Cuba and Theresa together.

  That was what Theresa had told herself every time she wanted to object to one of Nini’s suggestions.

  But such a jovial little guide – his head barely reached her shoulders and his smile never left his face – with such an unlikely name, that she had never expected.

  ‘Isn’t Orestes from Greek mythology?’

  ‘Was the chap who killed his mother,’ Oreste had confirmed with evident pride, still smiling from ear to ear, before taking her heavy wheelie bag from her.

  She had tried to stop him – after all she was bi
gger and probably stronger than him, and she never needed guides or porters when travelling – but he’d laughed off her protest: ‘Relax, Mrs Marias. You are in safe hands now!’

  She’d looked at his tiny hands without feeling particularly safe.

  ‘My surname is actually …’ Oh, what did it matter? ‘Call me Theresa, please.’

  Oreste had nodded, satisfied. ‘If you are friend of Nini, you are my friend too.’ And whoosh! He was off, weaving through the crowds of tourists with her suitcase in tow.

  She had to break into a trot to keep up, amazed at the speed with which such a short little man on such stocky little legs could move. He was wearing pristine white Adidas sneakers, neat dark-blue jeans, a light-blue short-sleeved shirt with three buttons at the neck and a tiny green crocodile on his chest. Could the shoes and the shirt be fake designer labels? Or gifts, perhaps, from well-heeled tourists for whom he’d worked as a guide? After all, Cubans were supposed to be poor; there was a shortage of everything, she had read on the internet, from food to toothpaste, and here a cheerful chap with a name from Greek mythology was walking beside her with all these expensive international brands on his body.

  When they exit through the glass doors, she sees the clear blue sky and the windblown palm trees and the swaggering parrot cars from half a century ago. Which inevitably reminds her of all the new luxury cars in her own country, the bmws and the Mercedes-Benzes and the Volvos in predictably sober colours, and the new owners of these new cars, the politicians and entrepreneurs who keep getting richer (while the wealthy whites of old become no poorer), the greed that displays itself ever more brazenly while the gap between rich and poor just seems to be widening. That’s what has become of the socialist democracy she once believed in.