Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary to employ any torture methods. Her mere presence seemed to be torture enough.

  He was visibly upset when he discovered her in the living room, but merely greeted her abruptly and started taking his books from the shelf next to the fireplace, and packing them one by one into a box he had brought along.

  She stood and watched him with her arms folded so tightly against her chest that she could barely breathe. She had to control her arms or she might assault him, she thought, but perhaps it was just a way to keep her broken heart from falling out of her chest. To keep her grief and rage from turning into a spectacle.

  As he selected the books he wanted to take with him, the shelf began to resemble an old tramp’s mouth, full of black holes and gaps where teeth were supposed to be. He took no novels or volumes of poetry from the shelf, only non-fiction. History, politics, philosophy. His days of reading novels were apparently behind him, just like so many other things were behind him. By the mid-nineties, Theo was a non-fiction editor at a small publishing house that was increasingly struggling to compete with the big international players in the book industry. This professional stress – and the accompanying financial uncertainty – probably also contributed to his state of despair.

  Everything in his life was falling apart, his career, his marriage, his home life, his mental health.

  Theresa looked at the twisted line of his shoulders, like an old wire hanger pulled out of shape by a too-heavy coat, and tried to guess whether the muscle spasm in the region of her heart was caused by love or hate. Or perhaps by something as simple as pity.

  In his fortieth year on earth the ghosts of the past had caught up with Theo van Velden, their icy breath constantly blowing in his neck, cold enough to drive away all joy, any hope of ever sleeping peacefully again, or even just enjoying good sex for a change. Recently, his ever-reliable sex organ had started letting him down. That last stand against the darkness also falling flat.

  ‘Can I make us some coffee?’ she asks carefully. If he senses the slightest hint of pity in her voice he will refuse.

  ‘I try to drink less coffee,’ he says curtly, ‘so I can sleep better.’

  ‘What about rooibos tea?’ she asks his back.

  ‘Since when do you drink rooibos?’

  ‘Since we started the divorce and I also battle to sleep.’

  He flashes her a quick glance, his blue eyes filled with distrust, before accepting the offer with a shrug.

  In the kitchen she switches on the kettle and waits for the water to boil. It’s as if all her suppressed emotions reach boiling point along with the water, as if the thin whistle of the kettle is echoed by a high-pitched wail inside her. This is the last chance she will have to talk to him. Right now, while they are drinking tea. What do you say to your husband – who will soon be your ex-husband – when you know that this may be the last thing you will ever say to him?

  ‘Let’s try to stay friends’ isn’t going to work. Not for them.

  ‘I don’t have milk or sugar,’ she says when she carries the tray with two mugs of tea to the living room and places it on the low table in front of the fireplace. ‘But I stirred in a bit of honey.’

  ‘Why?’ His voice still combative.

  ‘Why don’t I have milk or sugar?’

  Because there’s no longer a man in this house whom I have to buy milk and sugar for, she wants to scream. And what the hell does it have to do with you what’s in my fridge and grocery cupboard?

  ‘No, why did you put honey in my tea?’ He has turned away from the bookshelf, his full attention on the mug of tea she is holding out towards him.

  Something in his attitude, or in his eyes, frightens her.

  ‘Because I … I don’t know … You do like honey in your tea, don’t you?’

  ‘Give me the other mug.’ It’s an order, not a request.

  ‘But this one is your mug.’

  It’s a mug with a picture of Munch’s The Scream that she bought him years ago in the gift shop of a museum in Europe. He always drank his morning coffee from it. Her own mug, bought at the same museum, had a picture of Van Gogh’s golden sunflowers. ‘Because you have more existential angst than me,’ she’d joked when she was back home and unpacking the mugs from her suitcase. ‘I can’t start every morning with a scream. I would rather look at the sunflowers.’

  The sunflowers didn’t save poor Van Gogh from going mad, he’d reminded her.

  That’s true, she’d answered, but she would rather go mad looking at sunflowers than go mad any other way.

  ‘And mine also has honey in it, so what’s the difference?’ she says impatiently and takes a step closer to force him to take the mug from her.

  He shrinks back, his eyes as wild as those of a trapped animal, and knocks the cup out of her hand with a desperate gesture. Munch’s Scream flies through the air as if in slow motion. She feels a few drops of the piping hot tea splash onto her bare arm, hears the mug hit the stone floor and shatter.

  She stares at the brown stains on her white T-shirt, at the red patches of skin on her arm where the tea scalded her, but she is so shocked that she doesn’t even feel the pain.

  ‘What the fuck is going on with you, Theo?’ she screams. ‘Have you completely lost your mind?’

  ‘How do I know you aren’t trying to poison me?’

  ‘With a mug of rooibos tea?’ She doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  ‘I can’t trust you any more, Theresa. I can’t trust anyone any more. I know they want to take me out and I don’t know if—’

  ‘Take you out?’

  ‘Whether they have you in their power as well, I don’t know, I only know they—’

  ‘Who is “they”?’ she asks urgently.

  ‘Powerful people up there.’ He gestures towards the ceiling while he paces up and down in agitation. ‘People who know that I know things that we people down here aren’t supposed to know.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Hah!’ He barks out a laugh and glares at her, wagging his index finger as if he’s imitating P W Botha. ‘If I tell you, you might tell someone else, and then it’s tickets for me. As long as I keep my mouth shut I can stay under the radar, but once I start talking …’

  He keeps pacing up and down between the bookcase and the couch, his eyes rolling in his head, confused and terrified.

  Is this what insanity looks like?

  Theresa sinks down onto the couch, her knees weak. She listens to her husband’s garbled words – she can’t think of him as her ex-husband yet – his voice sounding higher than usual and strangled with fear, and she realises that insanity has many manifestations. And that one of them sounds like her husband is sounding now.

  ‘These things that you aren’t supposed to know …’ She has to choose her words carefully, or he’ll clam up again. ‘Does it have to do with what happened on the border? In Angola?’

  ‘On the border, in Angola, in South Africa, everywhere! There were people who went mad from the lust for power, big guns like PW Botha and Magnus Malan, but unknown guys among them too, people who will always claim that they were only following orders, but they were all in cahoots – they did forbidden things, unforgivable things – and they will do anything to keep the rest of the world from finding out.’

  ‘But, Theo … surely you aren’t the only one who knows about these things … Do you really believe they are going to … take out all of you?’

  ‘I have contacts, Theresa. I was a journalist. I work for a publisher. I can write about these things. That’s why they have to silence me.’

  She shakes her head slowly, the stinging pain on her arm now forgotten. ‘But people have already written about these things. What about all the stories from border literature?’

  ‘Stories!’ Contemptuous. Sneering. ‘Fiction! No one takes it seriously because it isn’t the truth.’

  ‘I think stories can sometimes be truer than the truth,’ Theresa says, but he isn�
��t listening to her. He just keeps pacing faster, his voice rising, becoming more urgent.

  What could she know about ‘the truth’ of that war anyway? That’s what he must be thinking. ‘But it’s so long ago, Theo … You know those people don’t have power any more?’

  ‘Hah!’ Again that barking laugh that makes her blood run cold. ‘Do you think I would have divorced you and gone to hide in a creepy boarding-house room if I thought they didn’t have power any more?’

  ‘So that’s why we’re getting divorced.’ She cannot keep the sarcasm out of her voice. ‘Because you have to hide from the people up there.’ She points at the ceiling the way he did a few minutes earlier, too disheartened to continue arguing.

  ‘Don’t you understand, Theresa?’ He has paused in front of the couch and looks straight into her eyes for the first time tonight.

  But she no longer recognises her husband’s eyes. It’s a stranger standing here in front of her, a thin dark-haired man who has lost his marbles, someone with an attractive Slavic face who is off his rocker, batshit crazy, mad as a March hare. Strange how many synonyms and metaphors for insanity suddenly pop into her head.

  ‘Either you’re on my side, in which case you are also in danger and I must go away to protect you, or you’re on their side and then I am in danger, and I must go away to protect myself.’

  ‘Whatever.’ She gets up with a sigh. ‘I can’t any more.’

  She left him to pack up the rest of his books in peace. She walked to their bedroom – her bedroom, she kept having to remind herself – without looking back at her past life like Lot’s wife. There was nothing left to see there; it was all ablaze.

  When half an hour later the front door clicked shut behind him, she went to sweep up the shards of the shattered mug in the living room. One of his books had stayed behind on the coffee table in front of the fireplace. When she saw the title of the book – Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety – she briefly wondered whether he had left it there on purpose, whether the book might contain a message for her. No, she decided, if she was going to look for messages in books randomly left on tables she was on her way to becoming as crazy as her husband. Her husband who would soon be her former husband.

  23. A STETHOSCOPE

  ‘I’m sure I’m going to be punished for pretending I’m sick,’ Theresa whispers to Ruben in the waiting room at the policlínico.

  Her right hand rests dramatically on her chest while she acts as if she’s struggling to breathe. The sympathetic glances from a few other waiting patients make her feel so guilty that she may soon be struggling with her breathing for real.

  ‘Who is going to punish you?’ Ruben raises his bushy eyebrows and allows a smile to tug at the corners of his mouth – but not too much, because he is playing the role of the concerned friend of the foreign woman who cannot breathe.

  ‘I don’t know. It was what my mother always said when I pretended to be sick because I didn’t want to go to school.’

  ‘What you are doing now is not the same as school sickness. You are doing it to help someone.’

  She remembers to take another slow, deep breath, all the way down to her abdomen, like in her yoga class. Still with her hand on her chest. Closes her eyes and peeps through her eyelashes at the toothless smile of a blind little woman opposite her who looks at least a hundred years old.

  ‘This poor granny is going to have to wait an extra half-hour to see the doctor because I’m faking an ailment. And at her age she can no longer afford to wait.’ She is still whispering, just in case one of the patients can understand English, but there’s a distinct note of panic in her voice.

  Ruben drapes his arm around her shoulder, whether to calm or encourage or comfort her, she doesn’t know any more. She makes another exaggerated attempt to take a deep breath in order to convince everyone around her that she has to see a doctor urgently.

  Ruben has already spoken to one of the nurses he befriended the previous day and told her that his South African friend has developed this inexplicable pressure on her chest, and that they don’t dare drive back to Havana until she has been examined by a doctor. The nurse promised to tell Doctor Casanova that they were in the waiting room. But that was half an hour ago already. And Theresa doesn’t know how long she can keep up this performance. She feels like a talentless actress who has to play a part for which she is hopelessly unfit. Not even the blind woman with no teeth could possibly be fooled by her improbable panting.

  Above the granny’s head is a mural of Che Guevara’s eternally youthful face with the black beret and beard next to one of his famous sayings: Vale más la vida de un ser humano que todo el oro del hombre más rico del mundo. The life of a single person, Ruben translated for her earlier, is worth more than all the gold of the richest man on earth. He’d certainly had a way with words, this freedom fighter. If only the writers of the magazine stories she edited at work had half his talent. But then they probably wouldn’t be writing magazine stories; they would be revolutionary heroes.

  If you ignore Che’s iconic face, the room looks like any other waiting room at any other state hospital. Perhaps a little shabbier, the generic plastic chairs that stick to your thighs in the heat even older than elsewhere, the synthetic floor covering even duller and more worn. But that is pure speculation. She is a privileged white woman, as Ruben rightly reminded her, with precious little experience of state hospitals.

  It is definitely stuffier than any waiting room she has ever been in. The windows are small and arranged in a row high above their heads, as if a sadistic architect decided that the patients would have no use for fresh air. And the ceiling fan doesn’t work. Or maybe it is only switched on during the hottest summer months. She can’t imagine what the smell must be like in July or August. Even the sharp fumes of antiseptics cannot disguise the sweaty body odour of her fellow patients. And who knows, maybe she, with her privileged white superiority smells exactly like them by now.

  It is such an awful thought that she rests her cheek on her right shoulder and discreetly pushes her nose into her armpit to check whether she applied enough deodorant this morning.

  Ruben gives her a strange look.

  Luckily Doctor Casanova appears in the waiting room right at this moment and rescues her from further embarrassment.

  He is wearing a white doctor’s coat, which makes him seem more formal than when they were drinking beer together the previous day, and politely bids them to follow him to his consulting room. You would swear he has never laid eyes on them before. She aims a last apologetic smile at all the waiting patients, but no one looks particularly cross or indignant because a tourist and her Spanish interpreter are being given preference.

  Perhaps that is all an undemocratic society really means, Theresa reflects on their way out of the waiting room. That in order to survive you have to master endless patience. Any sign of frustration or dissent could land you in trouble. Like the slaves on this island who couldn’t rise up against their colonial masters long ago, the descendants of those slaves still cannot rise up against their socialist masters. And while one would have to concede that the slaves’ descendants lead better lives than the slaves themselves ever could, this was still not a democratic existence.

  Will she be able to share this insight with Ruben tonight, on her final night on the island? She still doesn’t know whether she knows him well enough. But how does one ever know whether you truly know anybody?

  If there is one lesson her tempestuous relationship with Theo van Velden taught her, it is that even the people living closest to you can have hidden cellars filled with secrets. Not the poetic secret gardens that we are all permitted or even encouraged to grow. In Theo’s case it had been an impenetrable secret jungle, nothing at all like a neatly domesticated garden.

  She thought she knew him when they got married after years of friendship. By the time they were divorced she figured that she had also come to know the dark side he’d been able to hide from her before the wedding
. Only afterwards, when he was arrested and ended up in a psychiatric hospital, did she realise just how dark that side in fact was.

  Pitchblackfuckingnightdark.

  To this day she remains scared of allowing any man too close to her because heaven knows she couldn’t bear seeing even just a glimpse of that kind of darkness ever again. Keep it light and superficial, became her motto. Friendship was welcome, sex more than welcome (although at this stage of her life it would seem more like a miracle), but too much intimacy would only disturb the calm surface.

  And as Ruben has such an exceptionally calm surface, she really doesn’t want to throw rocks into that dam.

  In his spartan consulting room, Oscar Casanova Quintero sits down behind an old steel desk covered in papers and files – no sign of a computer or any other electronic equipment – against a wall that has been painted the same clinical green as the gowns medical personnel wear in operating theatres. Theresa had secretly hoped the hospital decor would be as delightfully colourful as the old-fashioned cars in the street and the façades of houses everywhere on the island. But it turned out that a hospital was just a hospital. Even in Cuba.

  When they take their seats on the two plastic chairs in front of the desk, she glances at Ruben, unsure if she should continue with the performance she gave in the waiting room. Doctor Casanova knows perfectly well she doesn’t really need medical assistance. But Ruben’s face stays deadly serious as he tells the doctor about the pressure his foreign friend was experiencing on her chest. He is speaking in Spanish, but his body language is so exaggerated that she understands the gist. He slams the palm of his hand against his chest, while he repeats ‘el pulmón, el pulmón’, which sounds as if it has something to do with lungs. ‘El corazón,’ he says, while pointing at his heart. ‘Dolor, dolor,’ he says, screwing up his face as if in pain.