Читать книгу The Year of Facing Fire - Helena Kriel - Страница 9

CHAPTER 3

Tentative Grasp

Evan is released from hospital and we drive him slowly home.

He lies on the back seat of the car, vulnerable as a newborn. I keep turning around to check on his slim form, which shows very few signs of life. I have delayed my return to America. I cannot leave my mother alone with this. I should be concentrating on the script I am writing, using the ancient principles of love as explored in the Kama Sutra. I am co-writing with Mira Nair, an acclaimed and multi-award-winning director, considered an über talent, every writer’s dream. But my work recedes deeper into the void. All that matters is keeping my brother on this side of the divide, where we blaze briefly in form, recognisable, understandable, before we vanish into the formless, unreachable, beyond that final border.

We park the car in the driveway of the house called New Place. New Place was the name of William Shakespeare’s house. It is the name of ours too, because my father was a Shakespeare scholar. The Bard saved my father from a savage childhood. His entire family, all five, lived in one room on a railway siding in Arlington, a remote part of the country. They barely existed on the meagre money my grandfather brought in from selling livestock. When he shattered his legs – really badly – my father, at eight years old, took over the business, keeping the books, and bringing in the money to keep the family going. He dreamed about escaping that life, and each afternoon, when the train to Johannesburg pulled into their siding, he would jump aboard and ride that train out of the station, only to leap off before the train went whistling around the bend. He would stand watching, promising himself: one day my train will come in. He eventually hopped on the train and stayed on it, all the way to Johannesburg. He was sixteen, considered a genius, but with not one cent to his name. He became a journalist by day, and studied by night, and at twenty-one he had enough money to buy Damelin, which was an old college in the bad part of downtown Joburg. He revolutionised education in the country, becoming an expert on teenage rebellion and reinvented his life. He returned to Arlington once when his mother died young from stomach cancer; his father was inexplicably found dead soon after. He would not talk about his childhood; it was too painful. I do know that reading Shakespeare saved him. He continued this into his adulthood. Rereading Romeo and Juliet for the twentieth time was a way to spend a quiet evening, and when he bought our place, he decided to call it New Place, the name of Shakespeare’s home in Stratford-on-Avon. There will always be something new, he said. We park the car in the driveway that flanks the long white house. Evan’s illness is new now.

The days are desperate and we cannot relax. Every half-hour I check to see that Evan is still breathing, still alive, as he lies in one of the bedrooms we shared as children. His dark brown hair falls out, leaving itself in wavy traces across the pillow. When he walks, he needs propping up, is insubstantial, a scarecrow left out in a field in the rain. When he sleeps his tentative grasp on life makes his sleep too still, and mine too fitful. The night is long and the morning terrifying, at least until I have confirmed that he has made it through. It’s only when I see the rise and fall of breath that I am able to move through the quiet house and into the piano room, so called because it houses my grandmother’s upright piano, which Evan plays. I open the sliding door. The grass is cold and wet but I have to walk barefoot across this lawn, thick from summer rain. I follow the brick pathway that leads between this park of trees, once a deep donga.

My mother had her first three pregnancies in short succession. Lexi, Evan and I grew up in a tangle, like creepers around one another, a little like the wild land my mother was slowly, with the help of some gardeners, trying to tame. It took the rubble of a whole house to fill the donga. We weren’t afraid of the spiders that were displaced; we were accustomed to the snakes, the spitting black cobras, and we sometimes found them coiled up like black hosepipes in amongst the trees. I trailed one along the brick path, holding fast to the tail before Lexon, the gardener, saved me from being bitten.

And here I am now, an adult, sitting where the donga used to be, now a green haven inhabited by birds. Leaves pattern against sky, half-white up there, addled with clouds after last night’s rain. Tiny insects catch the light to shine silver, otherwise invisible all day. Green knits itself into green. I need a hundred crayons to find the names of all these greens.

My mother calling brings me back into the present. She comes to find me.

“I’ve just heard from the doctor. Evan was wrongly diagnosed! There never was any galloping lymphoma is what he’s just told me.”

We walk around the lawn, my mother exclaiming. She uses fuck as a noun, a verb, an adjective.

Bloody-fucking moron doctor.

I want to fuck him up.

The pathetic little fuck!

It punctuates every sentence:

We never needed any bloody-fucking chemotherapy in the first place.

I’m so furious; I could tear him bloody-fucking apart!

She walks between the fig and the pepper tree, swearing and trying to assimilate this information.

“We need to know exactly what is going on!” I say. Not using fuck.

So we take Evan back to the hospital. We need concrete proof that he does not have lymphoma. He is tested for all and sundry, and the result comes back positive for tuberculosis only, a common ailment brought on by activated AIDS. But TB is easy to manage. It means a few pills. This is all good news. Well. Kind of.

Because doctors have nearly killed him with their drugs, their drips, their probes and poisonous drops, their chemotherapy bags, my mother and I seek out alternative methods. I find a Russian healer. I have never consulted healers before but I am determined to keep Evan alive.

The healer lives near the zoo with his wife. I sit like a stone in the cool, semi-dark room, waiting as Vadim, this Russian miracle worker who says he can cure HIV, examines my brother. A clock ticks, punctuating an otherwise consuming silence. Evan lies in a room off left, behind a closed door. There is a calendar hanging on the wall, photo of a white-blonde girl: she sits on a suitcase on railway tracks winding its way through a wheat field. The scene looks Russian, Dr Zhivago-ish. The girl could be Lara. There is porcelain garlic in a pyramid and two guitars leaning against the wall. They sing then, the Russian healer and his wife. She makes a brief appearance, is bleached, as though she’s been washed up on shore, clean, like driftwood strewn on a white beach, her eyes sea glass, pale and smooth, rubbed clean by wind and weather, floral skirt hanging to her knees like a tattered flag. Vadim is dark, with the kind of exotic looks I would on an ordinary day be attracted to, Rasputin-esque, and I would have been drawn to his charisma. But not today.

“His body is here,” he informs me after he has completed his examination and healing. “But his soul, his spirit, what we call his etheric body, is gone. You will have to slowly root him back here again because otherwise it is easy for him to go over to the spirit side.” He stares at me. “What I am saying is it’s easy for him to die.”

“How do I root him?” I am desperate.

“Firstly, correct diet.” No sugar, wheat, salt, dairy, no vinegar or tins, no packets, no deadly nightshade, which means no tomato, eggplant or potato and nothing instant; fruit before meals and plenty of grated carrots and beetroot. And hot water and lemon, first thing in the morning. I take it all down and we set up the next appointment. Evan will need to return for healings twice a week.

“And you!” The Russian looks at me. “For you to root your brother, you need to be rooted yourself. Do you know what I mean by that?”

I shake my head, my eyes finding Lara on the railway tracks.

“Take nothing for granted.”

He brings my eyes back from that Russian wheat field. “When you walk, feel the wind against your face, feel the earth beneath your feet, and smell the air. See the shade that the sun makes. I call it active meditation. While being active, meditate on everything.”

“I see,” I say. And I do and don’t.

“You have a very strong energy but it is still underground. You must bring it to the surface and use it.”

I support my brother as we walk through Vadim’s rainy garden, back to the car. Everything is drip-dropping. The bougainvillea, growing tangled through a jacaranda tree, scatters a pattern of raindrops onto us as we pass underneath. We become spotted. Evan feels light as though made of balsa wood, a model of a boy.

Each day begins slowly. We need to stabilise Evan, I have told my mother, and we are trying to claim his body back. He loves the garden, my mother says, so our plan is to root him by connecting him to the garden he helped create. He attained his honours in Psychology, then gave it all up. Decided to be a gardener instead. Adam was a gardener, was his reply to my parents’ confusion.

For a year he worked these two rangy acres. He would arrive, a car full of bulbs and new trees; a jungle in the back of his car, branches poking out of the open windows. He would head straight through the house and be off, weaving through the wild grasses. It didn’t matter if it was raining; he would have his hands in the soil for hours, planting without order, letting the seeds fall randomly so it would look wild and natural. With the digging done, he would walk slowly, hands at his sides, palms gone brown as though made entirely of clay; that Adam out walking, staring into nothing, completely sated.

And now he can hardly put one foot in front of another, but we manage to get him to the pool so he can sit with his feet in the water. Later it is salad for lunch. I grate the beetroot and carrots he needs into fragile two-tone towers. I turn radishes into flowers and cucumbers into rows of light green moons. Because I don’t have the energy or focus to write, all creativity goes into preparing food. I stand in the kitchen and make my art. And then we sit down to eat. We drizzle my sculpture with lemon juice and we dig in.

I take Evan to Vadim twice a week. He lies in the treatment room, in the semi-dark house near the zoo. And I sit in the semi-dark living room and look at the porcelain garlic, the guitars, Lara, and wait for him.

“What do you think?” I ask as we drive home after the fourth treatment. “You feel any difference?”

“I don’t know. All I do is lie there. He doesn’t do anything.”

I look over to where he leans against the side of the car door, no energy to even sit up straight or be rebellious about something the old Evan would have had no patience with. Because this isn’t medicine, it isn’t science, it isn’t real! But we’re going along with it, because, well, you never know … The new Ev just goes along with it, because, well, he’ll try anything. At the end of three weeks something seems to be working though because Evan’s body becomes less concave. We do simple things like sitting in the garden and cracking pecan nuts together. It is late summer now and the light is mellow. Rain has made a deep green carpet of the grass. Sometimes we lie down in it.