The Year of Facing Fire
The Year of Facing Fire
Helena Kriel
This experience was very intensely shared by five people, who would all no doubt have their version of it! This is mine. I have attempted to tell this story as truthfully and kindly as possible. Memoir is subjective and therein lies its beauty.
Most names, apart from those of family members, have been changed.
Also by Helena Kriel
Plays
Pigs on Passion (co-written with Paul Denham)
Arachnid
I Can’t Wait to Tie You to the Sofa
Films
The Day the Mercedes Became a Hat
Kama Sutra - a Tale of Love (co-written with Mira Nair)
Skin (co-written with Helen Crawley and Jessie Keyt)
For my family: Maja, Alexis, Ross, Drumie, Evan and Isaac, who share this story with me; for their friendship, wisdom, good conversation and occasional combat, with all my love.
PART 1
South Africa
BLACK AND WHITE IN COLOUR
CHAPTER 1
We the Living
Where the dead rest is peace and silence, a foil for bird song, for the subtle sound of wind in trees.
I stand facing my mother across my father’s grave. He lies long buried, his pine box, his bare bones, resting in the hot sun, under rocky ground. I listen as she makes her halting way through the Book of Psalms, her finger pausing at each foreign letter in a language we do not speak. She screws her eyes shut tight, intoning, appealing to my father, the ancestor. We stand begging him to intercede, to help. This is how desperate we are.
She finishes her prayers. “Okay?”
I nod and place a stone on the top of my father’s tombstone, noting that his grave has been visited. I touch it, this rich and creamy Jerusalem marble. Then we walk together without talking, graves flanking us. It is ordered, like a planted field. If we’re untidy in life they clean us up for death. The dead rest in neat rows. We, the living, have not slept for three nights. We are wild, unbrushed, unwashed, ragged as witches and I feel like I am walking through water.
The drive back to the hospital takes half an hour through suburbs, sprucely sorted and kept safe behind high walls in the so-called New South Africa. Park Lane Clinic rises up from behind sculpted foliage, all five storeys of sick people in beds. We park, get out, walk. The corridor is long and lit by neon, peopled by experts in crisp white coats. It is cold in here. And clean. It smells of antiseptic. We continue, up the stairs to the isolation ward. We have one imperative only. Life is stripped clean: bare-boned and bare-branched, winter landscape, reduced to one essential.
The doctor meets us outside the bleak, closed door. He is a small man. His waxen hands, those fingers that cut into bodies and dig about in the cavities, are thin and sallow looking. He knows beneath the order of skin we are pus and blood. He stands all neatly decked out in white, as doctor and official, as bearer of bad news.
“There’s nothing we can do.” He tries to sound warm, but ends up sounding cold and harsh, like he lives in a frigid climate and just this morning excavated his car from his icy driveway, to stand here in the passageway, under the neon lights, his breath making steam. He blinks hard, concentrating and making eye contact. I smell coffee on his steamy breath and he’s no doubt had his super-dark triple espresso, to give him added vooma, as he relates all his wondrous news of the day.
Where we live it’s been baking, one of those bright, blue days, under an unusually blazing African sun, no rain to cool it down. This is the kind of heat I expect in Los Angeles, that City of Angels where I live most of the year. White South African families are fractured: half live here, committed to this rock, this hard place; the other half tough it out on different continents, trying to find their stumbling way in strange new worlds. I fall into the latter, am four years into the grand experiment of making Southern California my new home. And in that foreign place – above the Equator and in another hemisphere, across an ocean, two continents and in an entirely other time zone and cultural mindset – the rain pattern too is different and it falls in winter, turning the hills to rumpled green. But summer is dry and heats to baking and in the canyons of the city vegetation fades from green to yellow to brown, till it crunches underfoot, like good all-bran, and coyote scat left on hillsides dries to jerky. But, in a city with a summer rainfall, I don’t expect heat like this. I am sweating into my clothes. My mother’s face is slick. We stare at the doctor, this small, cold man in a uniform.
“The infection has gone into his bloodstream. He has septicaemia. We’re in a race and it’s not looking good. The problem is we don’t have time for the antibiotics to react.” We stare. “Septicaemia is a severe, life-threatening infection. The death rate from multiple organ failure is high. This is where we are now.”
We don’t move.
He hesitates, then delivers the hatchet: “Go in and say goodbye.”
We fumble with the white gloves, the masks; we are shaking and nauseous as we enter the isolation ward, semi-dark in here, no windows, dials wink and blink. This is shadow land. My brother Evan lies eyes rolled back in his head. No irises. Very white are the eyes without those coloured marbles that cast their gaze out. His heart is attached to a monitor. It shows a regular beat, a good, strong zigzag. But blood poisoned and dying then? We sit on either side of him. Our eyes catch one another’s in an undiluted panic. Say goodbye? The cold man outside intimated it would be easy to say goodbye to one sliding out into the void, eternity, the place for which we have no real language, the experience for which we have no training. I am reeling. My mother and I, we two masked witches, sit for a long time, our gloved hands on his body. Morning turns to afternoon.
A nurse comes in. She needs me to go across to her station, so I follow her out, squint – neon lights are hard after an afternoon in shadows. I lean on the counter for support. My gaze finds the list of patients there. Highlighted in a bright yellow marker is my brother’s name. Alongside is written HIV positive. I check and it is his name, but HIV positive? My knees go to liquid and I am falling. The nurses come running. I hit the floor and crumple. They have water and a small white pill.
“Swallow.”
I do. Valium. “HIV positive?” I am stammering.
“Yes.” They are confused. “Didn’t you know?”
No. I did not.
“We will have to take it as it comes,” my mother said the day I arrived. My younger brother Ross was away in Mozambique on holiday, diving with sharks, camping on remote islands, way off the grid and not even managing to write postcards home. My sister Lexi was living in India in a temple with her South African-born
