Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  On a koppie opposite her, the square mass of the Voortrekker Monument rises against the sky that is still the same blue as the day before when she’d stood and cried beside Elize van Velden’s grave. A footpath has apparently been installed, leading from Freedom Park to that monument from the Old South Africa, a building that commemorates the Battle of Blood River. It is called the Path of Reconciliation. But this morning it seems to Theresa that she and her fellow countrymen still have a terribly long way to walk to arrive at true reconciliation.

  A quarter of a century ago she and Theo and millions of their fellow citizens ventured onto this path full of hope and courage. Meanwhile, Theo has died, and her courage keeps failing, her hope draining away faster and faster. There are times when it seems as if the path has become a via dolorosa. The intolerance between races and classes appears to be more blatant than ever before. The corruption of political leaders and the greed of unscrupulous businessmen have tainted everything; the violent crime and contempt for human lives regularly drive her to despair. Then all she can do is to replenish her broken jug with good intentions, once more, and hope that not everything will drain away while she continues on this via dolorosa along with her fellow countrymen.

  But she is starting to fear that it may in fact be impossible to go all the way.

  Every time she looks back, as in the Garden of Remembrance this morning, she realises what a short distance they have travelled thus far. How long the road ahead still is.

  She takes the transparent plastic envelope with Angel’s letter from her handbag.

  ‘Here it is,’ she says, echoing the words Mercedes spoke a few minutes ago with her fingers on her father’s name. ‘Safely in your hands.’

  Mercedes takes the envelope from her, takes the letter from the envelope, looks silently at the bloodstain in the top left-hand corner for a moment, presses the page against her face, smells it. A senseless gesture, as if her father’s scent could still cling to the paper after forty years, which makes her laugh with embarrassment just before she bursts into tears.

  ‘This wall has been the only place where I could still touch his name, the only way I could feel certain that he really existed, do you understand? And now his name is written here in his own handwriting. He wrote it on this paper himself …’ Her husky voice fades away. She swallows a few times while staring at the letter in her hands. ‘I actually wanted to go home to read this, to be private, because I was afraid I would make a fool of myself by starting to sob without control.’ She gives another embarrassed little laugh. ‘But now I am already crying anyway, and I don’t think I can wait a minute longer, so will you excuse me while I read it now?’

  Theresa just nods. Right at this moment she doesn’t trust her own voice.

  Mercedes walks a short distance away, her back half-turned towards Theresa, an attempt to establish at least a degree of privacy before she reads the letter.

  Her straight back and long neck remind Theresa of a dancer rather than a doctor, while her broad-shouldered husband looks more like a rugby player than a doctor. He is a few years younger than Mercedes, solidly built with muscular legs and bulging calves below a pair of shorts, flip-flops on his feet. A boerseun, had been Theresa’s first thought when she saw him, probably someone who was raised on a farm.

  Perhaps Egbert is a rugby-playing doctor, she speculates, and Mercedes a dancing doctor. One doesn’t always have to be one thing or the other. Not everything is always black and white. Sometimes black and white can flow into each other and then you have grey. The sleeping baby boy in a baby carrier against Egbert’s chest is living proof of how lovely this grey can be.

  Theresa had marvelled at Angel Engelbrecht Perez, his one pink cheek squashed flat against his father’s body, his eyelids like shavings of mother-of-pearl, his pouting mouth making soft moaning sounds. A tiny pink fist sticking out above the top of the carrier. ‘Little fighter’, his father had called him in his email.

  If, like a fairy godmother, she could make one wish for this little Cuban-Afrikaans boy, it would be that he would never have to fight in a war. That his generation would escape those lifelong scars.

  Mercedes is reading her father’s letter, but to Theresa she seems to be making painfully slow progress. Every few seconds she lifts her head and gazes at the blue sky for a long time, wipes her cheeks, takes a deep breath. Only then does she dare to look back down at the letter and continue reading.

  Theresa thinks of Nini’s translation, which by now she knows off by heart like a long poem, while she looks at Angel Perez Gonzalez’s name on the grey wall. And at all the other names that surround his.

  Mi querida hija

  If you hold this letter in your hands, it means that I did not survive the war. And if I must die here, so far from home, it will be a miracle if someday you read these words. But sometimes it is necessary to believe in miracles.

  If I survive, I will throw the letter away. Why would I give you dead words on paper when I still have many years before me to tell you all the things I must now squeeze onto a piece of paper?

  My father died when I was still too young to remember him. And now I will also disappear before you have a chance to remember me. It breaks my heart that I could have been so stupid, that history must be repeated so senselessly. My father, your grandfather José Perez Laredo, was also a soldier who wanted to fight the battle against fascism and capitalism and all sorts of big words. In the fifties he fought alongside Che and the Castro brothers for the freedom of Cuba. And died.

  Died unnecessarily, I now believe.

  I have always wished that he wrote me a letter before he died. I thought he would have wanted to console me, tell me how proud he was to sacrifice his life for his country. But now that I myself have landed in a war, I don’t think that way any more. Now I think that anyone who has experienced the horror of a war on the inside should warn his only child not to follow in his footsteps, unless he is so blind and deaf with patriotism that his child’s life no longer matters to him.

  That is why I am writing to you to ensure that you will not someday glorify this war (or any other war). I know the families of dead soldiers all want to believe that the soldiers died as heroes, but the awful truth is that very few soldiers ever die glorious, heroic deaths. We die stupid, messy, bloody, unnecessary deaths.

  I am sorry if these words will make it harder for you to come to terms with my death. Now you won’t even have the consolation that I was a hero. But I am definitely not sorry if my words will convince you to stay out of any future war. I know, sometimes you have no choice, the war comes to find you, in your country or your city or your street. But that isn’t what happened to me, mi querida hija.

  I came looking for this war. In a strange country, on a distant continent. I thought that doing so was my patriotic duty. Your mother pleaded with me not to go to Angola, but I thought it would be cowardly to stay away when so many other brave young men did it.

  And of course I had also wanted to follow in my brave father’s footsteps. Now I see that my father’s footsteps lead straight to my own grave. What kind of father would want that for his child?

  Only now do I realise that it would have been far braver to stay with your mother and to help her raise you.

  The army won’t send this letter to you if I die, its tone is too bitter and too unpatriotic. I will have to find another way to get it to you. Because I want to tell you I am sorry, I am so terribly sorry that I will not see you grow up.

  There are so many things I would have liked to do with you. Something as simple as building a sandcastle on the beach suddenly seems a thousand times more important than making war. Or looking at bugs and butterflies with you. Teaching you not to be scared of spiders. (Your mother is terrified by things with eight legs. Without me you may never learn what a wonderful thing a spider is.) Or teaching you to ride a bicycle, running after the bicycle, holding it and letting go without you noticing and watching you ride further and further away from me.


  I could go on – the list is as endless as my love for you – but I don’t have enough paper to imagine an entire life with you. So press this letter to your heart if you read it someday, because into it I pour all the love I will never be able to show you in any other way. I am so sorry that I won’t get to know you, but I will never regret that you were born before I died.

  For a short while you allowed me to feel what it is like to be a father. Every time I tell myself that I have a daughter who will remember me, a child who will one day think of me with love, it doesn’t seem so terrible to die so young.

  From your loving father

  Angel Perez Gonzalez

  After Mercedes has read the letter, she stands motionless for a long time with the thin sheets pressed against her heart.

  Theresa waits patiently, studies the Cuban names on the walls, wonders whether she shouldn’t rather leave Mercedes alone, join Egbert and the baby. But when she finally turns away from the wall, Mercedes starts walking towards her, quickly and with open arms. Theresa opens her own arms too and folds her in an embrace. While Mercedes cries like a child against Theresa’s shoulder, Theresa strokes her hair without saying a word, like a mother. And perhaps Mercedes also misses a mother’s comforting touch, because she stays in the same position even after she has stopped crying, resting her head against Theresa’s shoulder a few more minutes.

  Until, at last, she sighs deeply and looks back up. ‘Let’s go find Egbert at Uitspanplek,’ she says with a determined smile.

  The last word lies so strangely on her Spanish tongue that Theresa smiles too.

  ‘Shall we take a picture?’ Egbert asks just before they say goodbye, because Theresa has to catch a flight back to Cape Town. ‘This is after all an occasion to remember. The day the two of you finally met each other.’

  ‘Let’s make it a selfie so that you and Angel can also be in it. Please,’ says Theresa when he grimaces. ‘You are a part of this story.’

  ‘Let’s take him out of his carrier so you can at least see his face in the picture,’ Mercedes says while carefully lifting the baby out. ‘It’s time to feed him anyway. My breasts are starting to leak.’

  Angel opens his eyes, large dark eyes like those of his mother and his Cuban grandmother Luisá, while Mercedes rocks him in her arms. He looks around with amazement, struggles a little to focus on something, and then fixes his gaze on Theresa.

  ‘Is everyone ready?’ Egbert asks, his arm extended to hold the phone slightly above their heads. He and his wife are on either side of Theresa, with one of Uitspanplek’s thorn trees in the background. ‘Smile!’

  By the time Theresa fastens her seatbelt inside the plane, Egbert has already sent half a dozen pictures to her cellphone. In the first five she gazes at Angel rather than at the camera, but in the final one she has managed to tear her eyes away from the baby. In this one everyone, even the baby, is looking at the camera. Or perhaps Angel was just fascinated for a moment by his father’s hand holding the cellphone camera so high in the air. Or by the blue sky behind the object in his father’s hand. How would she know what babies can see?

  She will have a print made of this photograph and keep it inside Theo’s box of army souvenirs.

  The green notebook from Angola has already been restored to the box after her trip to Cuba. Along with the black Moleskine book she got from Theo’s mother, and her own silly diary from the seventies.

  She finally understands that her foolish scribbles, with too many capital letters and far too many exclamation marks, also belong among these souvenirs. It is the other side of Theo’s bush war, the naive ignorance of a white teenager in a small town. Far from the border, untouched by the war, blind to everything that was happening in the country. Temporarily blind, anyway.

  The fifteen-year-old Theresa Marais’s diary is like the photograph of a falling mirror, taken a split second before it hits the floor and shatters into countless, irreparable shards.

  And there is no question that the selfie taken in Freedom Park today also belongs in Troep Theo van Velden’s box. When she was younger and still believed in happy endings, she probably would have said that the photograph was proof that Theo’s story didn’t have such an unhappy ending as everyone believed.

  But now she doesn’t even believe in endings any more.

  Troep Theo van Velden’s story continues. Only the main characters have changed.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This story began with a phrase about the ‘incommunicability’ of war that I discovered years ago in the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński’s moving report about the Angolan war, Another Day of Life. This book was published in the heat of battle, as it were, in 1976 – in Polish – and only translated into English more than a decade later. The quotation in my novel comes from the Penguin Classics edition of 2001.

  But because war is so incommunicable – and because as a woman I was excluded from the action of the South African border war – I had to read far more widely than usual before I could write the first sentence. Among the non-fiction books that provided important background information, I can single out a few: Suid-Afrika se Grensoorlog 1966–1989 by Willem Steenkamp (Tafelberg’s edition of 2016), Die SAW in die Grensoorlog 1966–1989 by Leopold Scholtz (Tafelberg, 2013), and An Unpopular War: From Afkak to Bosbefok by JH Thompson (Zebra Press, 2006).

  I spent weeks watching documentaries, including, among others, Across the Border (1999) by the Dutch director Saskia Vredeveld, the complete television series Grensoorlog/Bush War (2008), which was produced by Linda de Jager, and several episodes in the series Die Afrikaners (2018), presented by Hermann Giliomee and produced by Herman Binge. Carl and Gerrie Hugo’s YouTube videos, Operation Savannah: Angola 1975/76, also deserve mention for offering an intensely personal view on that part of the war.

  Websites such as www.warinangola.com and many similar ones helped me gain an understanding of the bigger picture, as well as take note of smaller personal experiences. Where writing fiction is concerned, personal experience is always more useful than years of research. The conversations I was able to have with former conscripts – on the internet and in the flesh – helped more than anything else to give free rein to my imagination. Thank you to everyone who shared their border experiences with me, and a special thank you to Johann van der Merwe, who was prepared to talk at length about the trauma of serious injuries, answered all my questions patiently, and recommended further reading.

  James Scott, who’d been involved with the defence force as a psychologist, read an early version of the novel and provided valuable input about post-traumatic stress and other ‘invisible battle wounds’. Kerneels Breytenbach and Riana Barnard also read the manuscript, and like so many times before in my writing career, they both made practical suggestions for improvement. My publisher, Fourie Botha, stood by me during the drawn-out process of writing and rewriting, offering advice and assistance, and Marietjie van Rooyen edited the final text with great respect and a firm hand. Annelize Visser provided a powerful translation, edited with precision by Claire Strombeck.

  Thank you to all these helpers behind the trenches.

  But if Kapuściński’s quotation about incommunicability was the spark for this novel, then it was my trip to Cuba that provided the fuel that was necessary to get it onto paper. A sincere thank you, therefore, to Kitty Snyman who helped get me to Cuba, as well as to the small group of enthusiastic travellers who accompanied me on my journey of discovery.

  Although my characters and their lives are pure fiction, I tried to stay true to historical dates and geographical facts. A few ‘mistakes’, such as a street in Havana that doesn’t really exist, were made on purpose. Fiction always demands a partial obfuscation or falsification of facts, or else it wouldn’t be fiction.

  As with my two recent adult novels, I once again kept a writer’s log while working on Borderline. It will be made available on my website (www.maritavandervyver.info) for readers who want to know more about the everyda
y trials and tribulations of the writing process. Further information can be obtained by joining ‘Marita van der Vyver – official group’ on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/78346169084/.

  Finally, as always, the most profound thank you to my life partner, Alain Claisse, for his support and understanding when I disappear into the telling of a story.

  France

  August 2019

  Did you enjoy this ebook? Please rate or review it online or get in touch with us at queries@penguinrandomhouse.co.za.