Sacrificed

by Chanette Paul

  After that, Hentie never called her Caz again in his father’s presence. Both he and Magdel stuck to Sandra. A name that made her feel estranged from herself. As if she had been poured into a fresh mould. As if Andries had branded her as part of his domestic herd.

  At the wedding, the two sets of parents ignored each other. As a final insult, Hans’s towering choux artwork never made it to the dessert table.

  That, Caz thought, had been the worst possible slap in the face for Hans and Josefien. Worse than the fact that their request that there should be no dancing at the reception was ignored by Andries. There were two bands, taking turns, and the guests made the most of the opportunity.

  Caz sighed and got to her feet. Tieneke’s call had opened up a tunnel to the past and she could not find a way to plug the bloody thing again.

  Three

  Wednesday, September 3

  Caz

  Overberg

  Exhausted after another sleepless night, and fed up with Tieneke for failing to give her their contact details, Caz got hold of the Moerdyk practice only to draw a blank.

  Old Mr. Moerdyk, who had dealt with the Colijn file, had recently been replaced by his grandson. Apparently the grandson was still finding his bearings and the Colijn file was not part of the bearings he had thus far found. Thankfully the secretary remembered Tieneke Colijn’s email asking Moerdyk to trace Caz’s phone number in South Africa. She undertook to forward Tieneke’s email and see whether she could find the Colijn file.

  Well, well. Tieneke had a computer and used email. It was probably silly to be surprised in this e-era, but Tieneke and technology just didn’t seem compatible to Caz.

  The forwarded message landed in Caz’s inbox moments later. It was written in polite, faultless Afrikaans, every comma and full stop in the right place.

  Mrs. Colijn’s health was rapidly deteriorating and Miss Colijn was urgently looking for Cassandra Colijn’s telephone number to inform her. Her last known address was in Sunnyside, Pretoria.

  Caz was quite impressed by the secretary who had found her number in the Western Cape with so little information at her disposal. She was also slightly worried that it was so easy to trace her.

  On the spur of the moment, she googled her name in the electronic white pages. There were no results for Cassandra Colijn. There were two hits for “C. Colijn.” The first was a doctor in Pretoria, whose first name was Colijn. Below that was the entry “L. Colijn” with Caz’s landline number and address. Of course, the house was registered in Lilah’s name, and the telephone as well.

  Fact was, George Orwell’s dystopic fiction had become reality. Privacy was an obsolete concept.

  Time to make a decision. Go to Ghent or stay. Both options were equally unpleasant. If she didn’t go, she would wonder for the rest of her life what Josefien had wanted to tell her. If she went, she would be exposing herself to Tieneke’s reproaches and spite, and to Josefien on her deathbed.

  For a moment Caz felt guilty. Josefien might have chased her away, but she had also spent two decades looking after Caz to the best of her abilities—limited as they might have been.

  Fien had considered herself a civilized woman in a savage country. A skylark among crows. Nothing about South Africa had met with her approval. The Reformed Church wasn’t reformed enough. The apartheid government not apart enough. Nothing was ever clean enough, except her own conscience.

  On the last night of her parents’ visit to Liefenleed, Caz had been somewhat embarrassed by her boring father, who could talk about little other than his bakery and the hard times he had known during the Second World War. But she had been mortified by her mother.

  She had seen Fien through Andries’s eyes: an unattractive, endlessly complaining woman, unimaginatively dressed, discontent etched into her face.

  The contrast with Magdel could not have been more marked. Magdel was attractive and stylishly clad, gentle and agreeable. Or so it seemed.

  Magdel’s timidity, Caz gradually discovered, was a method of survival. A soft answer turneth away wrath. Turn the other cheek. A virtuous woman’s worth is far above rubies. Magdel had deliberately made those adages her own. And she had been rewarded with support, loyalty and a very comfortable life.

  Ultimately, Magdel’s compliance had stemmed from a kind of selfishness that blindly ignored moral concepts like right and wrong. Her loyalty lay solely with herself and her personal needs and only by default with her husband and child, but especially with her husband. As long as she kept Andries happy, she could do as she pleased.

  Caz developed a kind of reluctant respect for Andries. Andries was Andries. You always knew exactly where you stood with him—on the back foot, of course.

  With hindsight, Caz now knew her love for Hentie had been reaped too soon. There had been no lack of passion, but there simply hadn’t been sufficient gravity in their relationship to face the onslaughts outside the bedroom. Magdel’s passive resistance toward anyone who wanted to share her kingdom was no less destructive than Andries’s overbearing personality.

  Caz looked from the crumbs on the side plate to the coffee ring in the mug, remnants of a sandwich and coffee she truly didn’t remember making, eating and drinking.

  Relationships. The dynamics between people. That was where her thoughts kept returning. With good reason.

  She didn’t need a crystal ball to know what lay in her future. She would have to go to Ghent. She would have to try to discover the truth. Before it was too late and she was left wondering for the rest of her life where she actually came from.

  Luc

  Damme

  With the dishwasher running and the dishcloth rinsed, Luc poured himself a final glass of wine. Although he had noted that the witloof dish tasted exceptionally good, he had been lost in thought during the entire meal.

  He had been too hasty when he agreed to visit Ammie. Why rake up the past now? Ammie was old and senile, Jacq was dead. And did he really want to know what had broken Jacq’s spirit?

  Some things were better left alone. Life had taught him that. Like the scrap of gossip a so-called friend had thought fit to share with him. “The giraffe,” Suri had apparently called him behind his back, telling all and sundry what a boring lover he was.

  He couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it. Never before had he met a woman who enjoyed sex with such shameless abandon as Suri. With him too. No matter what she said.

  A particularly adventurous lover he might not be, but he was a meticulous one. Perhaps because he realized he was no Jean-Claude van Damme. More of a John Cleese—without the moustache, and with a thick mop of hair.

  He had shrugged it off as a petty lie Suri had spread out of spite, but the remark kept niggling at the back of his mind.

  Still, Suri belonged to the past, painful as it might be. He had lived through it and emerged on the other side. Maybe not unscathed, but not completely shattered either. Unlike his father.

  After all these years, Luc was still plagued by guilt. Any idiot could have seen Jacq was in his own personal hell. And it got progressively worse. Especially after Ammie remarried.

  Yet what did he do? Did he offer his father a shoulder or an ear? No, he convinced himself that his father valued his privacy, that he dared not intrude. That his father would exorcize his demons in his own way.

  Luc DeReu had simply carried on with his life, lecturing, grading papers, struggling through theses and dissertations, writing articles and academic papers. But his father’s once proud, erect posture had become more and more stooped and his words seemed to dry up.

  Jacq died a few months after his retirement. Without the students and his status at the university, there had been nothing to keep him on this earth.

  His father had not been one for a dramatic gesture. Jacq’s hypertension, cholesterol and heart condition were perfectly controlled as long as he took his medic
ation. After his death, Luc came across a number of sealed containers. Jacq had continued to fetch his prescribed medicine every month but had left the containers unopened in the drawer of his bedside table. The dates indicated that this behavior had begun six months before his retirement.

  Yes, Jacq had died of a heart attack, as stated on the death certificate. But he had wanted it that way. Because his heart had been shattered thirteen years earlier and no one, not even his son, had tried to help him put the shards together again.

  And now that same son was going to visit Ammie? To cheer her up?

  Caz

  Overberg

  The calculations she made were terrifying. She would have to delve into Lilah’s deposits, faithfully made every month despite Caz’s protestations. Money actually meant for extreme emergencies.

  Caz opened her email program. She felt reluctant to mention the bomb Tieneke had dropped, but with a bit of luck she and Lilah might be able to see each other. Paris was just a stone’s throw from Ghent. Lilah was used to travelling all over the world. Unlike Caz who was a house mouse. Travel was not her favorite pastime.

  “You don’t have a comfort zone,” Lilah had once said in despair, “you have a strictly cordoned-off comfort precinct.” “Recluse” was another word Lilah liked to use in connection with her mother.

  Lilah’s reply to Caz’s email came barely ten minutes later.

  Fuck it, MamaCaz, you know you don’t have to ask about the money! It’s yours to do with as you please. How many times must I repeat it? Let me know if I need to transfer more.

  It’s wonderful news. Not the deathbed part, obviously not, but that you’re finally dragging your arse over here again.

  The second time in ten years! Hell, we might make a traveller of you yet. :-)

  I won’t be able to meet you in Amsterdam, unfortunately. No use landing in Paris so I can take you to Ghent either. The timing is off. I leave for a shoot in the Bahamas on September 14 and from there I go on to Morocco and then Dubai. I’ll be back in Paris late in the evening of October 7, just in time for my birthday the next day. God help you if you don’t spend it with me and stay for at least another week so we can catch up. I’ll come and fetch you.

  Keep me posted. And, oh yes! Those platform boots I left there last time? PLEASE bring them along. And Mrs. Ball’s chutney. And Ricoffy. Will send list later. Also some Afrikaans books and CDs. You know I like the real thing, not the e- and MP3 versions. Not in Afrikaans, anyway. They’re not just for reading and listening, they’re my most treasured possessions.

  Have to run.

  Love you

  P.S. Come to think of it, it’s strange you agreed. Considering the bad blood between you and those two and all that. After all these years. Everything OK? L.

  “Those two.” Caz sat back and ran her hand over her tired eyes. The grandma and aunt Lilah had never known. The grandma who had refused to know or even recognize her grandchild.

  Lilah was eleven when Josefien and Tieneke returned to Belgium in ’94 without ever having laid eyes on her. Lilah knew there was conflict in the family but Caz had never given her the details. Just said there were old disputes and that was why her grandma and aunt weren’t a part of their lives. She might never have told Lilah that the two had left the country if Lilah hadn’t walked in while she was reading a letter from their lawyer.

  Caz hadn’t cried because she was sad. She was furious. Tieneke and Fien hadn’t even deemed it necessary to let her know personally that they had returned to their fatherland. A bloody formal lawyer’s letter had to inform her. Not that that was what the letter was about in the first place. A few problems had arisen, which they hoped Caz could help them sort out.

  The lawyer said he could do it himself but the Colijns felt it would be cheaper if Caz did it on their behalf.

  The so-called problems were trivialities. A quibble about an unpaid municipal account. Someone who had bought their furniture and not paid because something was missing. Some problem with a safe-deposit box, but by that time Caz was so incensed by their audacity that she had stopped reading.

  Caz flatly refused. She assumed they subsequently used the lawyer to solve the problems and paid him his due.

  She did not tell Lilah any of that. At age eleven Lilah had too many problems of her own to saddle her with Fien and Tieneke Colijn’s arrogance and events that took place before Lilah was old enough to understand.

  Catya jumped onto her lap and Caz was startled out of her reverie. For the past few minutes she hadn’t been present, here in her study. She had been back in Sunnyside. In the cramped apartment where she and Lilah had been forced to live so that she could afford Lilah’s fees at the Waldorf school. It was an astronomic amount, but the alternative was unthinkable.

  On Caz’s lap Catya coiled herself like an ice cream in a cone until she found a comfortable position. “Well, Catastrophe, now your devout subject needs to find a travel agent she can phone early tomorrow morning,” Caz muttered aloud, stroking the cat’s head and drawing the telephone directory closer, her stomach in a knot.

  Four

  Friday, September 5

  Caz

  Overberg

  The traffic out of Cape Town was moving at a snail’s pace.

  Through Somerset West, it was even worse. Every single traffic light was either red or changing to red just as Caz reached it. Every time she stopped, street vendors descended. Sunglasses, cellphone chargers, junk that surely no one wanted to buy. How did these people make a living?

  Going up a windswept Sir Lowry’s Pass, she landed behind a pick-up trying without success to pass a truck.

  The delay gave her too much time to think. To allow fears to fester.

  Not that she could change anything now. She was on her way, her flight booked and paid for. The Belgian consulate just had to get cracking. A Schengen usually took three weeks. But with a dying mother it could be fast-tracked, the lady in charge of visas had told her. If everything went according to plan, Caz would pick up her visa the morning before her evening flight. In less than two weeks’ time.

  She had to get there as soon as possible, in case Josefien’s decline was rapid. The thought of spending three weeks in the same house as Tieneke and Josefien before Lilah arrived was unthinkable, but she didn’t have much choice. Even the cheapest accommodation was beyond her means.

  Caz had been abroad only once before: four years earlier, when Lilah contracted German measles, of all things, on one of her excursions. The doctor gave strict orders that Lilah wasn’t to leave her apartment for two weeks. Caz, who had had the disease as a child and was immune, reluctantly set off for Paris.

  As it happened, she did not see much more of Paris than the inside of Lilah’s tiny apartment and the route to the closest pâtisserie and superette de proximité, but it was good to be able to care for Lilah and spoil her a little, even though Caz was hardly the nursing type. Nor the motherly type.

  Any motherliness she might have had at the outset had to be unlearned in order to raise Lilah strong and independent. There had always been enough love, but from an early age Lilah had had to fight her own battles. Only for the wars could she ask Caz for help.

  For those, Caz had the complete armor, modeled on the relentless, non-negotiable belief that her unusual child had the same rights as any other child. And that she had to be treated the same as any other child.

  An arsenal of apt, sometimes cutting words in her combat vocabulary enabled Caz to convey this conviction with incisive arguments. Obstinacy, determination, perseverance and her firm refusal to leave a thing alone, saw to the rest.

  Caz often had misgivings about her decision to leave the battles to Lilah and fight only the wars for her, but today Lilah was a successful, independent, self-assured woman.

  Yet Lilah’s success had not come overnight. Caz would never forget the day, nine years earlier
, when her child’s exotic features had first gazed back at her from the cover of Vogue. Smoldering silver-blue eyes, high cheekbones, and lips that would make Angelina Jolie green with envy.

  Subsequently Lilah had often graced the covers of Elle and other glossy fashion magazines. Just last month there was an article about her in the Dutch edition of Cosmopolitan. One in which she declared it was thanks to her mother that she succeeded where others failed.

  Lilah currently lived in a penthouse. Spacious, according to Lilah, but judging from the photos she sent, still too cramped for Caz’s taste.

  All the years of the cheapest possible accommodation had given Caz a distaste of small spaces and densely built-up areas. That was why she preferred to live on a patch of land outside of town. Even if the house was old. Fortunately it was still safe around there. Not like other parts of the country.

  Lilah had already started to climb the ladder of success when Caz headed for the Cape to enjoy her first-ever, proper holiday. En route she came across the village of Stanford. It was love at first sight. After an effusive email, bubbling with enthusiasm for the little town with its Victorian houses and interesting shops and restaurants, Lilah had offered to buy Caz a house there.

  Initially she wouldn’t accept the offer, but Lilah assured her she could afford it. Now Caz was glad she had swallowed her pride. Soon afterwards property prices went through the roof and it had turned out to be a very good investment.

  The place was registered in Lilah’s name, so Caz told herself she was actually just taking care of it on Lilah’s behalf. Which didn’t stop her from doing exactly as she pleased. She had altered and renovated. Made a garden. Lilah had let her have her own way.

  Her home was her sanctuary; the hectare or so surrounding it her piece of Africa. There Caz could isolate herself as far as was humanly possible. Once a week she went in to the village of Stanford for the bare essentials. To Gansbaai if she needed a pharmacy or a doctor and once a month to Hermanus for bigger shopping. And to spoil herself with lunch at a place where she could gaze at the ocean and watch the whales in season. For her, these excursions were more than enough connection with the outside world.