No. She’ll just keep lying right there. Try to forget about her sweaty naked body and think about Mercedes Perez Amat instead. About everything she has learned in the past few days about the Cuban soldier’s daughter. Inevitably also about everything she may never know about her. And, in the end, she must have drifted off after all. Because shortly before daybreak she is suddenly wide awake.
The moon has disappeared, the darkness no longer clinging to the window like mourning crêpe, and there is the beginning of a pastel-coloured glow. Soft footsteps in the passage. Perhaps he had coughed, or made some other sound that tore her from her sleep. He moves from the bathroom back towards his room, but right outside the door of his son’s bedroom his footsteps grow silent. For a few endless moments she stops breathing while she stares at the outline of the door in the dark. Should she also cough softly to let him know she’s awake? Then he shuffles on. His bedroom door clicks open and shut. His bed creaks when his heavy body sinks into it. And everything is quiet again.
From the street far below the window the first early-morning sounds of people and cars reach her ears.
She breathes out. It sounds like the last bit of air escaping from a balloon, a sigh that makes her lungs feel completely empty. Actually, everything inside her feels empty, deflated, flat.
It is over. She will never sleep with Ruben Torres Márquez.
She may never sleep with any man again. Don’t be melodramatic, she reprimands herself. This story is sad enough already.
But this taxi driver and trumpet player and barman from Havana will remain an unfulfilled possibility, a yearning what-if. What if she hadn’t been so scared, what if he had been more forward. What if.
This time she knows she won’t fall asleep again, so she switches on the bedside lamp and rummages through her luggage, which is already packed for her return flight later today. Right at the bottom of her cabin bag, underneath the Moleskine book full of insane thoughts imposed on her by Theo’s mother, she finds teenaged Troep Theo van Velden’s tattered green border notebook.
Now why had she packed it again?
Perhaps because she’d been scared that the plane might crash or that she might somehow come to harm in Cuba. She didn’t want her poor sister – whose task it would be to dispose of the deceased’s possessions in her Cape Town cottage – to come upon this little book.
Back on the bed she wraps the sheet tightly around her naked body and leans her back against the wall with pictures of deceased American jazz legends. Outside the window the morning sky above Havana is gradually turning rosier. Perhaps she had wanted to protect her innocent sister from Theo’s war experiences. Perhaps she had wanted to respect what remained of Theo’s privacy.
She never really thought about it, just instinctively stuffed the book into the suitcase. The same way she had tried not to think about her upcoming trip to Cuba too much, or she was bound to find an excuse to cancel it. Shakespeare’s ‘pale cast of thought’ that turns all our resolve into cowardice.
And here in Cuba she has barely had time to read her guide book. As for the tattered little war book at the bottom of her suitcase, she was too scared she might start agonising again over everything she found in it if she read it again. Sometimes it is more important to live than to read – isn’t that what Nini is always trying to tell her?
But now that there are only a few hours left before she flies home, she steadies her reading glasses on her nose and carefully pages through the little book in her lap. A way to pass her last few sleepless hours in Havana, she tells herself.
On a page with a brown stain of something like coffee (she hopes it isn’t blood – no, blood leaves a stain in a different shade of brown, as she knows from the letter in her handbag), she stops short at rows and rows of numbers followed by names in brackets. The numbers were dates, she had already concluded earlier when she was studying the little book at the office and at home, but she still hasn’t discovered the connection between the dates and the names.
21/10 (Spook) 24/10 (Sparks) 25/10 (Piet Poephol) 27/10 (Hilton Hotels) 28/10 (Shortie) 29/10 (Janneman) 1/11 (Spikkels) 4/11 (Kak Kobus) 5/11 (Noddefok) …
And so on, row after row, all of it equally baffling. Presumably nicknames of guys who had been in Angola with Theo. Hilton Hotels gives her pause, but she is convinced that Troep Theo van Velden never went anywhere near a Hilton Hotel on the border. Noddefok. He’d been deep, deep inside the bush. The dates couldn’t be birthdays, she decided long ago, because there were too many dates too close together. The first in October and the last in January. Surely not all of them could have had their birthdays between October and January? Dates on which soldiers were wounded or died? A terrifying thought she’d immediately pushed aside. Too many names, too close together.
Now she recognises the name Spikkels – the chain-smoker who would die decades later from lung cancer – which means it is definitely not a list of war casualties. There has to be another explanation, a reason she will never find, just another thing she will never know.
Distractedly she turns the pages until a passage Troep van Velden wrote on 11 November 1975 catches her eye:
Today this unmentionable country in which we are fighting a war which no one may know we are fighting becomes officially independent. What a fucking farce. It is the eleventh day of the eleventh month the same day on which a Great War ended long ago but in this country that may not be mentioned the real war may only be beginning. My dad always gets so maudlin about the fields of Flanders and the red poppies especially when he has had a few. I wonder what he would say about this war if he knew his son was taking part in it. Sparks is the cleverest guy who’s ended up in this shithouse with me. Not that it takes much to be cleverer than most of us dumb dicks but he is at least a few years older he has completed a degree or two and he has his long bespectacled nose in a book all the time. And he reckons this country that may not be mentioned is like Poland in a play called Ubu Roi that I am definitely going to read if I get back to the States someday. We are in Poland, Sparks says, in a war that may not be mentioned in a country that doesn’t exist which means we are nowhere. And my million dollar question is whether we can still exist if we are nowhere. I wonder, as Rodriguez sings, but I don’t really wonder about sex any more. Most of the time I just wonder if I haven’t perhaps died without knowing it.
A few pages on is another entry that at first she couldn’t unravel, because in order to squeeze all the words into the limited space, Theo’s handwriting was so small it became almost illegible. But once she’d started deciphering his handwriting at her office in Cape Town, she could recognise the titles of a few songs from the seventies. She’d gathered that it was some kind of playlist, of music Theo and his comrades listened to on the border, or may have wanted to listen to. But now, as she looks at the titles again, and the order in which they are written down, it strikes her as a kind of poem. As if Theo had wanted to convey a message:
Walk this way/ For what it’s worth/ Wish you were here/ Old man/ Welcome to the machine/ Behind blue eyes/ On the road again/ Born to run/ Why can’t we be friends?/ Eighteen with a bullet/ Knocking on heaven’s door
Or is she becoming as bonkers as her former husband? Looking for ‘messages’ in a series of random titles of rock songs!
She pages on quickly, until another undated entry makes her pause:
The landscape keeps changing as we fuck ever deeper into this unmentionable country. Keeps becoming bushier muddier more tropical. What doesn’t change are the abandoned settlements and empty farm houses like something from a disaster movie no people left everyone left everything behind just like that and fucked off. Some of the buildings are covered in graffiti usually communist slogans in red paint but last week we found a wall with obscene drawings of dicks and cunts in the middle of nowhere that we lot of horny soldiers gaped at.
Fuckit, Spook said, when it’s been so long since you last saw a fuckable woman up close.
I keep my mouth shut, they don’t ha
ve to know I have never fucked. I think Spook actually also bluffs most of the time.
The other day when one of the tiffies set off a landmine I realised I wasn’t the only one who thought it would be bloody unfair if I had to die before I had sex for the first time. This poor guy’s one leg was shot to hell and gone there was nothing left below the knee and while he was lying there in his own blood and getting paler all the time with someone trying to put a bomb bandage around what was left of his leg he kept saying: Jeez no, I can’t die now, I’m still a virgin!
I don’t know if he made it.
They flew him out to 1 Mil they say there’s a secret hospital ward there no one is allowed to know about because it is full of casualties from this war that no one is allowed to know about. But I hope with my whole heart that tiffie made it even though he lost his leg. I hope he gets to fuck dozens of girls for the rest of his one-legged life.
Outside the sky has turned powder blue. More and more cars and busses are filling the streets of the city that is slowly waking. A few more pages along she finds a string of movie titles from the seventies. This riddle she already solved in Cape Town, with help from Google, because she hadn’t recognised all the titles straight away. And once again she can’t help looking for a hidden message.
Love and Death, Deep Red, Death Wish, Night Moves, Bite the Bullet, Endless Night, Deliverance, Bad Company, Cries and Whispers, Black Christmas.
On the Black Christmas of 1975 Troep Theo van Velden writes a letter to his father, the kind of letter you of course could never send, which makes Theresa feel desperately sad on her last morning in Havana.
Dear Pa
This is the crappiest Christmas of my life thank you very much. Impossible to think of Hark the herald angels sing and peace on earth when you’re fighting a war.
Pa was never in a war that is why Pa can get so sentimental about the fields of Flanders and the fucking red poppies. And Churchill’s fucking speeches. We shall fight them on the beaches we shall fight them in the hills we shall never surrender. Easy to be sentimental about words like these if you don’t know what war really is. Kill or be killed. I have turned into a coldblooded murderer, Pa.
I hope you and Ma are proud of me.
My Christmas dinner is going to be battery acid and brake shoes and shrapnel. It isn’t as bad as it sounds it is army-speak for Oros and Provita and mixed veg from a tin. Well actually it is fucking bad when you think of it as Christmas food.
I hope to see Pa and Ma again one of these days. I hope you will never see the blood on my hands and the fear in my eyes. Fuckit, I hope I can learn to swear less once I’m back in the States. Besides that I hope for peace on earth but it doesn’t look like that’s ever going to happen, does it?
Happy Christmas from your loving son somewhere in the bush where Christmas doesn’t exist.
But about the Spanish letter, which he must have had in his possession by this time, not a single word. Nowhere in the green notebook does he mention the wounded Cuban soldier or how the enemy’s letter came into his possession. As if it was such a terrible secret that it couldn’t be revealed even in the privacy of a hidden diary.
He would only write about it decades later, after he had been in a psychiatric clinic for some time, in the Moleskine book Theresa read on the plane. An exculpatory backwards glance at what had happened on that day in Angola between nineteen-year-old Theo van Velden and twenty-year-old Angel Perez Gonzalez. And who knew if it was the truth? Had the Cuban really been so severely wounded that he would have died anyway if Theo hadn’t shot him?
Had he been wounded at all?
She draws the sheet more tightly around her body and drapes the thin bedspread around her shoulders, because she suddenly feels cold, goosebumps all over her arms.
She will never know ‘the truth’. The only two people involved are both dead. All that remains of them are words on paper. Theo’s Afrikaans words in his little war diary and his journal of insanity, Angel’s Spanish words in an undelivered letter to his daughter.
All she does know is that Theo smuggled the Spanish letter back into South Africa, where it kept tick-tick-ticking as relentlessly as a time bomb. His pathetic attempts to learn Spanish had been an attempt to disarm the bomb but it didn’t succeed. Once he was able to read the letter, the bomb only ticked louder than ever before, faster than before, ticktickticktick.
Until it went off one Sunday in a church in Cape Town.
After the fiasco in the Groote Kerk, Theo never ‘recovered’. He spent months on end in psychiatric hospitals, Valkenberg and Stikland in Cape Town, first, and then, at his mother’s behest – as the incapacitated patient’s next-of-kin she could take such decisions on his behalf – Weskoppies in Pretoria. Closer to her. Further away from Theresa, whom her former mother-in-law would always blame for the unravelling of Theo’s life.
Theresa was endlessly relieved when he was sent to Pretoria. While in Cape Town, he sometimes contacted her after discharging himself from the institution – when in a manic state he had stopped taking his medication because he was ‘feeling much better’ – and every one of those meetings had been torture. She could tell he was still deranged, his lovely blue eyes glinting with madness, but she couldn’t convince him to go back onto his pills or talk to his psychiatrist. And after every manic wave that he rode so jubilantly, the trough into which he crashed was even deeper than the one before.
The first year or so after his ‘breakdown’ – as everyone in their circle of friends called it, Theresa too, as if he were an old car that, with a bit of mechanical attention, could be push-started again – she quite frequently received snippets of news from mutual friends or random acquaintances. ‘He’s on the loose again.’ ‘Be warned. Shit’s about to go down.’ Someone told her that he’d gone to hammer on the front door of a former colleague in the middle of the night and when the colleague wouldn’t let him in because he was drunk and loud and she didn’t want to wake her toddler son, he slept right there on her veranda. The next morning she tripped over him on her way to work. Someone else said that he drove straight through Karin and Kobus’s garden wall, in a car they had lent him, and ended up in their swimming pool, car and all.
‘Luckily he didn’t drown. Ai, poor Theo.’
Within a year these anecdotes began to sound like urban legends. Theresa no longer knew what to believe, but she suspected that the reality was worse than any of Theo’s friends could guess. Or his former friends, because quite soon he had no real friends left at all.
After the last of the Bambis kicked him out of her flat, he no longer even had a fixed address. When he wasn’t in Stikland, he would scrounge a place to sleep from friends from his previous life, but in the end even the most long-suffering and helpful among them lost patience and asked him to leave. Because he’d kept the entire household awake night after night while he paced endlessly up and down, conducting thunderous conversations with them or with their children or with the dog or the cats or even with the pot plants. Because he’d pawned all the paintings in their guestroom to raise money for a cross-country road trip he wanted to undertake and about which he wanted to write a book that would become an instant bestseller. Because he’d ‘borrowed’ a laptop and a camera from them without asking permission, for the planned road trip and the bestseller book, and then, unfortunately, lost both laptop and camera in a bar somewhere.
The road trip never happened.
After another year or so no one had any idea where he found shelter any longer. His mental deterioration manifested itself in his physical appearance. His hair was too long and greasy, his beard too unkempt, his body too thin, his clothes dirty and creased, his once-handsome face with the high Slavic cheekbones terrifyingly hollow. Theresa almost didn’t recognise the dazed man she happened to run into on Long Street one morning.
She didn’t know that it was the last time she would see him.
She had her phone number changed after he’d called her twenty times in a single night.
‘Theo,’ she’d said, ‘don’t you realise that normal people need to sleep at night?’
‘Fuck normal people,’ Theo’d said. ‘Fuck sleep.’
‘Ah, fuck you too, Theo.’ She had pulled the plug out of the wall.
For a while afterwards, he kept bombarding her with email messages, often with attachments of up to a hundred pages at a time in which he spewed vitriol about the state of the world in general and South Africa in particular. If only he could harness all this manic energy to write about his own suppressed emotions instead, Theresa wished time and again. But, in the end, she changed her email address as well.
Theo’s final Cape Town ‘escapade’, as his former friends referred to his crimes and misdemeanours (still vaguely amused, as long as they weren’t the victims of his latest ‘escapade’), landed him back in prison.
‘What has he done this time?’ Theresa whispered when the police phoned her at work, her voice gone from fright. She still often dreamed about the final night at their house when he’d pointed the gun at her, but in her dream he always pulled the trigger. He usually shot her in the stomach, and while she lay on the floor in a puddle of blood, watching with amazement as her life flowed out of her, he placed the gun against his temple. She always woke up before he could pull the trigger the second time.
According to the friendly policewoman, Mr van Velden had spent a week living in a fancy guesthouse near the Waterfront, eating and drinking like a king, all on a tab, and when he’d had to pay the bill, he’d smiled charmingly and shrugged, and said that unfortunately he couldn’t pay because he wasn’t accountable. After he was arrested, he suggested the police should call his wife so she could pay his bail.
‘He said the missus would make a plan,’ the policewoman added hopefully.
‘I am no longer his wife,’ Theresa said. ‘I can’t make plans any more. Tell him the missus is done with him.’
Borderline Page 29
