of promise. I wanted desperately to continue, not to be sick.
But the other part of my life was washing away beneath my feet, eroded by microbes and attacked by fungi coursing through my veins and wasting my muscles and bodily reserves, leaving me tired and panicked and isolated in the waiting room. The radiologist’s assistant called me in. I stripped off my jacket and shirt and donned a flimsy examination gown for her to take the X-rays. Her brisk efficiency as she manipulated the heavy X-ray negatives made me feel even more isolated. ‘Dr Jacobs will see you in about twenty minutes to discuss his assessment,’ she promised.
But twenty minutes passed, and then thirty. Once more in my suit, I waited in the corridor outside the viewing room. I had never been more conscious of my breathing. As the doctors walked in and out, one in particular glanced several times at me. But still I was not called in. Eventually my mobile phone rang. It was Dave Johnson. ‘The radiologist has just phoned. He’s sitting with your X-rays. But he can’t believe what they tell him. He’s scared of giving you a wrong diagnosis. He says they seem to show PCP. But he can’t believe it. He says you don’t look like you have AIDS. So he phoned me first to check whether you are at risk.’ Dr Johnson suggested that I bring the X-rays to his home that night to double-check.
I felt helplessness mixed with despair. If the radiologist was thinking media stereotypes, of course I didn’t ‘look’ like someone with AIDS. I was not in bed. I was not emaciated or entubed. I was fresh from a long working day in court – still in a suit. My medical insurance details at reception must have revealed my judicial status. And judges don’t get AIDS. (Nor are they gay.) In any event, Dr Jacobs’ practice didn’t look as though many black or gay patients – those most ‘at risk’ – frequented it.
At last he called me in. He spread out the X-rays on his light table. Both lungs shone bright with the tell-tale signs of PCP. He pointed out its white spots crowding both organs. His manner was kindly, respectful. My doctor would prescribe highly effective antibiotics, he reassured me. This usually cleared the infection within ten or fourteen days. I should come back then for a further check.
That evening I took the X-rays to Dave Johnson’s home. He held them up to his study lamp. ‘Yes, that’s what I thought, Edwin,’ he said. I had AIDS. On the way home I stopped at the pharmacy to pick up the fourteen-day course of bactrim he had prescribed. And faced a long, hard evening alone at home.
People sometimes say that they couldn’t go on living if they knew that they had HIV. Or that they’d ‘just’ kill themselves if they ever got AIDS. It’s a stupid and unreflective thought. I know, because I used to think it myself. I used to tell myself that I could not carry on living if I were ever diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Then, I fancied, life could surely not be worth continuing. So I would take the simple course. I would just allow PCP – or whatever horrific opportunistic infection arrived to herald AIDS – to take its course, and let my too solid flesh melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew. Without treatment PCP would make quick despatch of me.
Reality is less poetic. Or it was for me. Impending death did not arrive gracefully in the form of sensible choices. It was fetid, frightening, intrusive, oppressive. Too often I had seen friends and comrades die of AIDS. Had seen how day by day, week by week, they would redefine wellness, adjusting it downwards each time, but never losing its goal, no matter how wasted, disabled or physically dysfunctional they became. Getting better always seems to remain attainable, even when from the outside it was plain that it no longer was. I had seen too many friends choose life, right until the end, even when they knew – must have known? – that it was receding from them, no longer an option, that it was death only that awaited them.
Like them, I now experienced no existential hesitation. I just wanted to keep on living. I wanted my health back. Urgently. I wanted to breathe easily, freely again. I could not let diagnoses of PCP and all that they seemed to imply get in the way. And I had plenty to distract me. My imprudently chosen lover seemed to want to play a game of chase. Perhaps my inner commotion was more palpable to those closest to me than I had thought. To them I spoke about HIV. And to some I even mentioned PCP – or just ‘a chest infection’. But the accompanying diagnosis and its implications I did not reveal. The word AIDS was too big, too frightening, too fraught with implication. Too final.
My sister Jeanie, who for forty years had nurtured and protected me, worried over the phone. She listened carefully to what I described of my visits to Dave and the radiologist, and urged me to get into bed. I refused. How could I? There was court work to be done. The judge-president had included me on the roster of duties for the rest of the year. And I had meetings to attend. And committees to run. I was needed. Thank goodness. When Jeanie offered to travel the 60 km from Pretoria to Johannesburg to bring me meals, I assured her that it wasn’t necessary.
To accept sympathy and support means acknowledging weakness and dependency. I wasn’t ready for this. AIDS had to wait. Months before, Judge-President Eloff had circulated a court roll posting me to a six-week out-of-town session of the High Court. The circuit was due to begin on Monday in Vereeniging, an industrial riverside town ninety minutes’ drive from Johannesburg. I had already arranged for two young lawyers – promising black practitioners at the Johannesburg Bar – to join me on the bench as assessors. For them the work would bring good exposure. For me (like most white South Africans, miserably only bilingual in a country where people generally speak four or more languages) their assistance in understanding issues and clarifying meaning would be indispensable. While I would determine legal questions alone, on factual issues we would vote together – and in case of disagreement their vote could prevail.
Both had set aside time – and perhaps turned away briefs – to perform this public service on the Bench with me. So cancelling the Vereeniging circuit seemed unthinkable . . . Of course it was. Apart from anything, getting into bed and acknowledging how sick I was would cause talk. And that was unthinkable . . .
On the Monday we started the daily drive to the Vereeniging circuit court. I was relieved to have an agreeable young clerk do the driving while I leaned back into the passenger seat, willing the antibiotics to work as quickly as possible. Some of the cases on our roll came from Sharpeville, a township adjoining Vereeniging with intense historical associations. Twice in thirty years the name focused world attention on the excesses of apartheid – first when white police killed some sixty unarmed protesters at the Sharpeville police station in March 1960; and a second time twenty-five years later when a judge sentenced six township activists to death in December 1985 for the murder of a local councillor serving in apartheid structures.
When the first Sharpeville disaster happened I was five weeks from my seventh birthday – newly arrived with my older sisters Laura and Jean at a children’s home in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape province. Some of the other children were orphans, others had been abandoned. Most were from impoverished broken homes, their parents unable to care for them. My older siblings and I fell into the last category. After a succession of moves from city to town and back to city, as my alcoholic father drank his way out of job after job, our fragmented family finally fell apart. My mother, sad and angry and not coping at all, finally gave up on the marriage and divorced him a second time. Well-meaning church friends persuaded her that it was best to send us 700 km away to the children’s home.
If news of the Sharpeville massacre reached us there – and it surely did, for the Eastern Cape was alive with resistance to apartheid rule – it had to contend with other issues to make a mark on my boyish perceptions. There was talk of attacks by ‘Poqo’, the ‘pure’ armed resistance wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, a breakaway faction from the African National Congress. We were told that attacks were imminent. I imagined black warriors like those depicted in the stilted history books the older children used, streaming over the hilltops surrounding Queenstown.
The intervening twenty-five years transformed not only my circumstances but my consciousness. Queenstown seemed very far away. But the journey from the children’s home
