Borderline Penguin Random House South Africa

A letter among her deceased ex-husband’s belongings rips open Theresa’s world. For years she has turned her back on Theo, a man who spent the last two decades of his life institutionalised, and on their shared past in a country where teenage boys were conscripted to fight on ‘the Border’ in a war that those back home knew little about. Least of all Theresa, who spent her days dreaming of discos and first kisses.

Realising that the letter was written by a Cuban soldier and addressed to his child – who, if still alive, would be at least forty years old – Theresa heads for Cuba: to search for the soldier’s child, to deliver the letter, to atone in some way for Theo’s deeds and for her own ignorance.

In sultry Cuba, amid its picturesque 1950s cars and the fragrant smoke of its cigars, Theresa’s search connects her intimately with those branded ‘the enemy’ during the war in Angola as she begins to unravel what growing up in the South Africa of that time really meant.

EXTRACT

Observatory means a place from which you can observe things, like planets and stars, but tonight her house in Observatory feels like a place where she is being observed. Countless invisible eyes are watching her – everyone who knew her and her former husband together, their friends and family, colleagues and neighbours.

Her erstwhile, departed husband. Erstwhile first, twenty years ago already, and recently departed.

How do you grieve for someone to whom you said farewell over twenty years ago? For Theresa Marais, Theo van Velden died long ago. The initial rage and sorrow that charred her insides – like scorched earth after a fire, she felt that way for years – are just a distant memory, now. The denial, the guilt, the unbearable sadness have dwindled to a harmless little flame that now and again illuminates a small corner of her past, the candle on a cake that is inadvertently lit on certain days – birthdays, anniversaries, the first time when, the last time when – before she quickly blows it out again.

She had thought that was all in the past. She was too busy; she didn’t have room for the pain – how did that Carly Simon song go again? – and she refused to let the sadness gain another foothold. She rocks gently back and forth, back and forth.

So where does this torrent of tears come from then?

A tear plops onto the yellowed photograph lying inside the open shoebox. Good grief, if she carries on like this, all the pictures will suffer water damage and become even fainter than they already are, even harder to decipher. At the same time, she wishes she could cry so copiously that the pictures were washed away, so that her tears became a river on which the old box and everything inside it floated away like a boat carrying all the unwanted photographs, letters, memories, away, away, away.

It is an ugly brown box for a pair of men’s shoes, size eleven; she can’t remember the shoes, thank God, not that as well. There is far too much she does remember tonight. The top picture looks blurred. She doesn’t know if the blurriness is caused by her tears, or because the photograph is slightly out of focus, or because she isn’t wearing her reading glasses. Probably the result of all these things combined.

A group of conscripts in tattered, faded green clothing in a lush green landscape somewhere. Some are shirtless and some have hacked their long pants into shorts; the sleeves have been ripped off some of the shirts to reveal sinewy arms. Most of the bare chests and arms don’t belong to men; they are the hairless chests and skinny arms of boys who aren’t getting enough to eat. Some of the faces look too young for the moustaches on the upper lips. From a glance at the long fringes and too-short shorts, you can tell that the photograph dates from the seventies. The unkempt beards of the time look so different from the fastidiously manicured beards young men are wearing now. The hipster in the house next door to hers, pop stars and rugby players, the tattooed and bearded role models of contemporary youth.

If she had children, they probably would have looked like that too.

If.

Theresa wipes her eyes, reaches for her spectacles on the coffee table beside her, peers through them at the picture to try and recognise Theo. This was several years before she got to know him as a postgraduate student in Stellenbosch. Which one of these smirking teenage boys would turn into the tortured man she came to love? Could it be the skinniest one in the middle, the shock of black hair, the wry smile – then already? Yes, she recognises the calves below the frayed cut-off pants. She remembers how beautiful she always thought his legs were, the long, lean thighs, the sharp knees and muscular calves and slim ankles and narrow Greek feet.

Troep Theo van Velden in the summer of 1975/76 ‘somewhere on the border’.

Only, by then he was in fact already far across the border.

In Angola they weren’t allowed to wear the brown army uniforms, she only learned much later. Instead, they wore green ‘prison garb’ that rotted on their bodies. Bata tekkies instead of army boots. Removed the chains with dog tags from their necks, erased the branding from tubes of toothpaste and soap, carried no personal belongings that betrayed the fact that they were South African. In case they were killed or wounded or captured. Because it was of course supposed to be a secret incursion. Some of these details she heard bit by bit over the years, always unexpectedly and usually unasked for, on evenings when he had had too much to drink or later at night when he woke up from a nightmare, struggling for air.

But there was so much she never heard.

That she probably hadn’t wanted to hear.

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