Does it Hurt to Die (2 page)

‘Mum, did you know about all of this?’

‘
I’m not sure that I’ve ever fully understood what your father was involved with outside of his surgery. I’m not certain whether the blog that you’ve just read is true, but neither can I be certain it’s not true. I never said anything to you, as I made a conscious decision that I wanted you to remember him for all the good things.’

‘
But I always sensed that, and it’s been so frustrating that you wouldn’t tell me anything.’

‘
I know, but I thought it was for your own good. I also knew there’d be a time when I’d need to tell you as much as I know.’

‘
Mum, that’s what I’ve wanted to talk to you about all these years. I’ve decided I’m going to take a year off now and go back to Cape Town to see where Dad worked and find out more about him. I don’t think he would support terrorism, and someone needs to clear his name, our name!’

‘
Think about this. You’ve worked so hard and done so well in your Year 12 exams. I’m sure you’ll be accepted into medicine. Don’t you think you should go with the momentum? Maybe once you’re qualified you can go back and find out what happened to him or even work there? I think that’s what your father would have wanted.’ She paused slightly to ensure she had his full attention before continuing. ‘And besides which, all that work that you’ve done in biometrics and iris recognition software development during your school holidays may be lost. I believe they were going to involve you with the new upgraded addition and even provide you with a salary increase these holidays.’

‘
Foul, Mum. That’s an attempt at distraction.’

Renata stopped talking and looked at her son. He had Jannie’s skin, with its propensity to tan in the summer, and reluctantly admitted they looked very similar. She had always known that he had the essence of Jannie within him and that she might, as in this instance, have to confront the spirit of his father—the resilience, determination, the sense of challenge, the I-want-to-show-you-I-can-overcome attitude. Christian had inherited many of his father’s traits and these, she suspected, had partly caused him to be the achieving teenager that he now was. Perhaps it was true, she thought, that you can take the Afrikaner out of Africa but you cannot take the Afrikaner gene out of their progeny. She realised there was no sense in denying it; she needed to handle it as best she could.

She looked at him again and laughed in a way that Christian had not seen for a while.

‘
What, Mum?’

‘
It’s just that you, at times, are so unbelievably like your father. Here’s the deal, then—I’ll tell you all I know about him, and then you can decide if you need to go.’

‘
OK. And thanks, Mum. This is the first time I’ve heard you say that I’m so much like my father—that means a lot to me.’

Christian saw tears in her eyes and felt a little embarrassed, but his mother quickly closed the gap between them and hugged him.

‘Hey, Mum, this tactic won’t work either; you know I’ve got to go.’

Renata laughed again dabbing at her eyes.

‘Can we start now?’

‘
Yes, we can. In a way, it’s the fulfilment of a time that I knew would come, a time when the Afrikaner in you could no longer be denied. In order for you to progress to adulthood you need all the pieces in place that you can find, but they may not be the pieces that you were hoping to find.’

‘
So, how about starting with the terrorist attack? Tell me what happened, and then fill in whatever else you know. The news only gives a basic outline and I need to know what it was really like for Dad.’

‘
Come through to the kitchen. I have some books and letters to show you, and I’ll do my best to remember everything that happened that evening and the events afterwards. However, I warn you, it may not be what you want to hear. After that, we need to have a serious talk. Perhaps I should tell you a bit about your father before we get to the killings in the church…’

‘Your father was very tall, with broad shoulders and slim hips. He was quite handsome in a rugged kind of way, as you’ve seen from the photographs,’ Renata said. ‘He was raised on a farm in the Paarl region, about an hour from Cape Town, and was used to hard physical work. His father insisted on him supervising and working alongside the black and coloured workers, and as a result, he was quite muscular. I often thought that without that background of hard physical work that he may have chosen a medical specialty more suited to his awkward height.’

Christian looked at her, taking in all that she said. Although he wanted to ask questions, he decided to let his mother continue in case his interruption derailed the information he had so long waited for.

‘His family were staunch conservative Afrikaners, third-generation Boers, who had always been farmers. Your father was the only son and there were expectations that he would continue the tradition and take over the farm from your grandfather.’

‘
So they were against him doing medicine?’

Renata nodded.

‘You have to understand that his parents were passionate supporters of segregation of the racial groups and early and vigorous supporters of apartheid, something which they had constantly instilled into your father from a young age. Afrikaner sons were not expected to question the philosophy of segregation, which was something which troubled your father. I remember when he told me that he first tried to question his father about the basis for racial segregation he received a backhander that left his ears ringing and drew blood. As he grew older, he came to realise that talking about the non-whites as potential human beings was regarded as heresy, to be expunged from patriotic Afrikaner families. Legislated separation of the races was considered the only way a white South African would survive in Africa in the nineteen fifties and Afrikaner sons like your father were expected to unquestionably uphold that belief.’

‘
That must have been really hard for Dad if he didn’t believe in that system.’

‘
That kind of upbringing was very typical for many of the Afrikaner men of that era. Their families were direct descendants from the early settlers, and as such, they had to be tough to survive. Initially, the early settlers were everything from priest to police officer. Because the blacks that they came into contact with had had no education, they assumed that they were no better than animals and that’s the way they should be treated. They also saw their role in preserving their inheritance as ensuring that their sons and daughters understood, sometimes forcibly, that the only solution for South Africa was segregation of the races.’

‘
Doesn’t sound like he had a great childhood, with all that indoctrination and then being beaten by his father when he disagreed with him. How did he get away to study medicine, Mum?’

‘
From the time he was about ten years old he decided that tending vines on his father’s farm didn’t satisfy him. It wasn’t all the physical work that was required—he quite enjoyed that aspect of farming—it was the treatment of non-white workers as little better than slaves that he became more and more uncomfortable with. He could see that segregation ensured that the family farm was financially successful, as labour costs were minimal. But he was most concerned with the way his father treated the workers and abused them. He couldn’t stand seeing them kicked or punched. He knew he couldn’t be part of his father’s succession plan; there had to be an alternative. He determined his way out after he’d had several conversations with Dr Wauchop, their local general practitioner, when he came to the farm to do home visits. Although the visits primarily were to check on his mother’s hypertension, the doctor would find time to talk to your father about medicine. Your father soon realised that medicine was challenging and about helping people—an alternative to what he considered a lifetime of servitude on his father’s farm. There also didn’t appear to him to be any abuse in medicine. While Dr Wauchop never treated the black or coloured workers on the farm, your father had noticed that he always greeted them warmly. From that time he was convinced that if he worked hard enough, medicine could be the way out for him.’

‘
That sounds like he wanted to get away from racism, not enforcing it through some terrorist act. And it doesn’t sound consistent with what was said on that blog at all.’

‘
Honey, that’s just the background I wanted you to have so you could understand where he came from, and the fact that there might have been deep-seated influences for the decisions that he subsequently made. It must have been really difficult for him. Then there was an incident, which I’ll tell you about later, on the night of his twenty-first birthday, when his father told him never to come back. In addition, he never did return to his family or the farm. That was incredibly difficult, as he was his mother’s favourite, but in the Afrikaner family the ultimate allegiance was to the husband, and his father never wanted to see him again.’

‘
That must have been awful,’ said Christian, ‘and so confusing, going from such a rigid belief system to one where you were allowed to question whatever you wanted.’

‘
It was, honey; there were many days when we all thought he was making a smooth transition, and then suddenly all that Afrikaner past would surface. When he made his announcement to the media after the terrorist attack, none of us really knew which Jannie was going to speak. We all prayed that he would not revert completely to his family values and say that blacks were not fit to govern.’

‘
I read that part in the news story.’

‘
Yes, it wasn’t as bad as we had feared, but then it wasn’t as good as it could have been either.’

‘
I understand all that a bit better now, Mum. Can we fast forward to the terrorist attack, as that’s where it seems most of the questions about my father started?’

‘
That was a night I’ll never forget. I can describe it almost exactly as it happened, but there are lots more bits of information that I need to give you for you to understand him. And I have to warn you that there may be things about me that you may not like either.’

‘
I can’t imagine that, Mum,’ said Christian, cheekily, relieved to lighten the discussion.

‘
Very cute, young man, but let’s go back to the story. The night of the shooting, your father was waiting for a call to do a liver transplant on a young African boy. The proposed recipient of the donor liver was a young African boy, Sibokwe Tamasala, who had developed hepatic failure. He was particularly concerned, as this young boy was an African high school pupil in one of the remote townships of the Cape Province, which meant he only had a limited window of opportunity to get him to Cape Town and do the transplant. Your father knew Sibokwe wouldn’t survive more than a few days unless he could receive a new liver. But there were also other pressures which made the transplant more stressful than it normally would have been.’

‘
What kinds of other pressures?’

‘
Sibokwe Tamasala was the son of Thompson Tamasala, who was falsely suspected of being an anti-government activist and was killed by the Bureau of State Security (BOSS)—the apartheid state’s sinister security service. Not only was Sibokwe the son of an innocent black man who had been erroneously killed, but he was an incredibly photogenic young African boy, who, for both reasons, had captured the attention of the nation’s left-wing anti-apartheid groups. Your father knew that the transplant meant more than just saving a boy’s life; it also meant possibly assuaging a little of the white nation’s guilt over the meaningless killing of his father. That in itself created an enormous pressure to succeed. That was the lead-up to the terrible night when your father was shot and is really where his story begins.

Jannie de Villiers lay stretched out on the king-size bed, his size twelve feet hanging over the end. He tried to remember when he had last made love to Renata, and decided it was at least six months ago. Their relationship, he knew, was deteriorating, and he wondered whether it was partly the difference in their upbringing. Renata came from a liberal English speaking third-generation South African family, while his family were staunchly conservative Afrikaner farmers. Looking up from the bed at the whitewashed walls of the Cape Dutch cottage, his thoughts drifted to the family he had been cut off from. How far, in many ways, he had come from a farm in Paarl; a place which his father had asked him to leave and never come back to, brandishing him a traitor to the Afrikaner because he wanted to go to the liberal English-speaking University of Cape Town. Jannie’s success in becoming the head of the liver transplant unit at Groote Schuur, he knew, was partly to prove to his father that he could succeed without him. The unit had become one of the most successful in southern Africa, and now they were waiting to do the first transplant on a young African boy—not any young African boy, but the son of an anti-apartheid activist who had been tortured and killed by the security police.

The Groote Schuur team had been waiting several days for a donor liver, without any success. He knew that unless they got a liver within the next thirty-six hours, the young African patient, Sibokwe Tamasala, would probably die from fulminant liver failure. Strangely, he thought there would be many among the conservative Afrikaner community who would not be unhappy if that happened. Africans were not seen as equals in any way, especially when it came to sophisticated medical care. They were cheap labour, expendable and replaceable; with his conservative Afrikaner upbringing, he could identify with that feeling. Jannie felt the immense pressure to not only succeed but also to fail. He did wonder to himself what his family would think if he saved this young African boy’s life. Having been ostracised for going to an English-speaking university and marrying an English-speaking woman, he assumed that they would consider he had completely rejected Afrikanerdom.

The pager then beeped, interrupting his thoughts. He pushed the illuminate button on the pager several times but, for some reason, he could not read the message. The light would not come on.

He called down the hallway. ‘Renata, I don’t think this pager is working. Can you phone the paging service to ask them to test it?’

As he elected to try to fix it, he suddenly noticed Renata standing in the bedroom doorway, hands on her hips, glaring at him
. ‘Jannie, ever since you were a medical student, you have thought that the world revolves around surgeons. You think that everything must be dropped to accommodate you—that whatever’s happening, if not now, shortly, will become a major emergency. Why don’t you just phone them yourself?’

Jannie wondered where she had come from. The old Cape Dutch cottage they owned had long hallways. Although they had Karakul mats covering the floor, he could still usually hear her approaching the bedroom. While he thought about the quietness of her approach and the ultimate meaning of her lecture, his pager went off again, but this time the light came on and he could read the message
. ‘Donor liver acceptable, HLA and volume match, hepatitis negative.’

‘
I think it’s working now,’ he said, somewhere in her direction as she disappeared down the hallway.

There was no reply, which did not really surprise him too much. Thinking about whether he should try to say something again, he looked up and saw one of the Golden Cocker Spaniels poke her head into the bedroom. Her tail was wagging energetically, and she had that playful or expectant look on her face. He was always surprised at how delightful their dogs were; how much unconditional love they had, and he reflected how much easier it might be to have a relationship with them compared to Renata. He stroked Tasha around the ears and noticed her tail wagged even more enthusiastically, and knew the previous thought was a bit of a cop-out; it was just an alternative far more attractive to him than conflict resolution. It was not that he thought that he deliberately avoided
‘crisis solving’, it was just that crises always seemed to arrive when he had something much more important scheduled, like now.

The relationship with Renata had initially been both interesting and confronting to Jannie. Their diverse backgrounds produced challenges in understanding their differing viewpoints. Many of these, in the beginning, were diametrically opposed, especially when it came to politics. Renata thought the apartheid government was destructive and inhuman. She believed that all peoples, irrespective of colour, should have equal rights. Jannie, on the other hand, thought that while equality should be improved, having blacks run the country was tantamount to anarchy and chaos.

There were many animated discussions during the early part of their courtship, and he had been surprised initially that he had been able to adapt to Renata’s more liberal views on certain aspects, especially integration. However, as the demands of being the head of surgery and the liver transplant unit escalated they had less time for discussion, and it seemed more time for disagreement. Now, with their first ever child liver transplant looming, their relationship, he realised, was under significant strain.

‘
Renata, the pager is working,’ he repeated, on entering the bathroom, where she was now undressing Christian, pushing repeatedly the illuminate button on the pager so that he could read the message about the transplant.

‘
Yes, I heard you the first time.’

‘
Well, why didn’t you say so?’

‘
You know, Jannie, for a supposedly intelligent man, you sometimes display a remarkable lack of insight.’

Now is the time to keep quiet, he told himself. If you have any intelligence, keep your mouth firmly shut. This had all the signs of a championship fight. There was something clearly irritating her and this was going to be an excuse to discharge it. Sadly, it was a fairly familiar scenario for them nowadays, but the pre-fight manoeuvring was still enough to sadden and depress him.

‘Forget it, Renata. I’m sorry I spoke.’

‘
Isn’t that just typical. You refuse to face the problem and then you make out as though you were the martyr. It’s all well and good when it’s one of your precious transplant patients, but when it comes to us as a family, well, we can just wait.’

The outburst from Renata was inviting. He was not sure whether it was his Afrikaner background, but it was rare that he would back away from a skirmish, be it in his private or professional life. There was something in his genetic makeup that did not tolerate other opinions easily, and he was constantly ready to debate them. The pager beeped again and distracted him from a reply to Renata, and possibly further irretrievable relationship damage.