The Year of Facing Fire: A Memoir

By Helena Kriel

An astoundingly written memoir, the book traverses universal themes of love, death and sex.Set in the mid 1990's, as South Africa emerges from the darkness of apartheid, at the heart of the story is Helena's terminally ill gay brother who's been keeping his illness a shameful secret. Conscious, terrified and trying to hang onto sanity, he becomes paralyzed, then blind as death draws closer. But it is Evan who leads the family through the fire.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melinda Ferguson Books
• Release date: Mar 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781928420637

Helena Kriel

Award winning screenwriter, Helena Kriel is a world traveler, moving between Hollywood and South Africa. She also teaches and takes people on adventures through India. She is the founder of Baby Rhino Rescue, and counts herself happiest when she is in the middle of nowhere with just a rhino for company.    

Book preview

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 Indian husband and year-old son. This left my mother and me in Johannesburg alone with Evan in the hospital, facing the unknown and the fact that Evan has galloping lymphoma. We were standing in the study, clumped together in a room, floor to ceiling with my father’s books, Dr Kriel stamped onto the front page of works on Shakespeare, poetry, art, literature, Hitler. He was legend while alive, admired, revered. It brought honour to be his child, to have one’s photo in his office stared at by the thousands who sought his expertise. He lived hard, smoked three packs of unfiltered Camels a day, changed lives, could not be moderate – or look after himself and died young. My mother has been a widow for six years. She is still attached to the fact of his life. His clothes hang in the cupboard; his toothbrush is still in the blown green glass by the basin in the bathroom, poking out head first, the bristles leaning sideways from too much hard brushing.

But lymphoma? The only chance for Evan’s survival was the strongest chemotherapy, as toxic as it comes. Desperately, we complied. It dripped into Evan’s body over four long hours, those translucent, trembling teardrops, making their slow, insistent way from the plastic udder to his blood. He was unconscious a day later, his body in shut-down; too much chemotherapy, we were told after the fact.

Sitting on a chair at the nurse’s station, in the gentle haze of the little white pill now taking effect, the order of the world reshuffles. My brother does not have cancer. He has AIDS and lymphoma is a result of it.

Why didn’t you tell me? I ask my mother when I get back into the ward.

She looks up, haggard eyes peering out from inside her mask. It comes out: they made a pact; my mother, father and brother decided ten years ago to keep it a secret so the rest of us could live undisturbed. Evan was nineteen when he was diagnosed HIV positive, and in the same week my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. My father’s lung cancer was an immediate, irrefutable fact: chemotherapy brought on hacking behind the closed bathroom door, his hair, his eyebrows and eyelashes fell out. There was no hiding any of it. He was sick, then intermittently well again, his black hair grew in grey, but he went into remission for a year before the cancer made an appearance in his brain, so he had an operation to remove the tumour and lived another year. But it returned, all tentacles and branches, rampant, determined, and braided itself into his brain, weaving through the grooves of that grand walnut, rooted and impossible to eradicate. The doctors tried. The operation took all day and afterwards he slipped into a coma, lay in intensive care, his closed eyes sunk to pitch-black craters, those kind hands, flattened on the bed, unmoving, no matter how hard we held them, or appealed to him: Squeeze my hand if you can hear me … Can you hear me? And three days later, with all of us gathered around his bed, staring at one another, fumbling, confused, he died, the heart monitor gone straight and delivering the news in a solid, unbroken tone.

And now Evan very sick also? Dying?

Why? I ask Melida, the black woman who has worked in the house for ten years and is as close as family. I trust her and her kind woman’s knowledge of all things; maybe she has the answers. She stands in the kitchen, her face shiny from Vaseline, missing a front tooth, very floral uniform ironed crisp. She is making us a salad we will not have the appetite to eat, cutting the radishes into flowers, into pale, open roses.

Eish! Uh-huh. She shakes her head. The life! We can’t understand.

No. We cannot.

But God. He knows.

Does he? She is so sure about that.

We head into night in the isolation ward; it has been hours in here, watching green dials. I send my mother out to get some tea, to take a break. I want time with Evan alone and I am not even sure why. All I know is that I cannot – will not – let him die. I am trying to metabolise what I have just been told. I sit mute, staring at his body lying stricken, hands stripped of all colour, his irises rolled back in his head.

I know, I know, I intone. It’s okay. I intone that also. I love you. I say it over and over, the first time I have ever said it to my brother, because we somehow don’t say those words, don’t need to, but now I do. I sit, and beyond those words I don’t know what else to do. I am not religious; I feel rudderless. I have no belief system to hold on to, or any ritual to follow, but prayer becomes the way I am able to focus my mind in this keen, stark moment. I offer up a plea to whatever is up there, to spare my brother’s life. I am focused, one pointed, passionate. I beg and plead for an hour. My mind does not stray, not one extraneous thought penetrates this concentrated appeal. I begin then to muster up images of Evan being well. I sit by his dying body, with my eyes closed and I will him to health, imagining him swimming with dolphins, his body strong and running on an endless beach. I have never done this before, but it is all I can do now, because it manages the situation and controls my mind and staves off chaos. I remain this way for a long time, claiming Evan to life, surrounding him with dolphins, warm turquoise water and sunsets turning the ocean to orange and fireflies at night. I do not move until a spontaneous heat floods through me and I open my eyes, feeling oddly hot and calm, a smile broken all over my face.

Ev. I call to him. He is unconscious. How could he hear me? This is not a time for reason. I call to him again. Oddly, he rolls his head towards me; white eyes stare at me blind.

I want to tell you where we are. Sentences tumble out of me. We’re on a tropical beach. It is paradise here. The sea is calm and turquoise and the beach is so flat, we walk out into the shallow water. There are dolphins all around. I continue, describing the way we float in the warm water, as the day turns to night and fireflies come out, pulsating from the clouds of jungle in pinpricks of pink and green. As I talk the brown irises slide slowly back into his eyes. He is staring at me, his eyes so stricken become receptive, seeing even, and I know suddenly that my brother is not going to die. Yes, it goes against all the medical information – aren’t his organs shutting down? But I don’t care. I know he is going to live, it is an immutable fact; it rings in my mind, like a clear Zen bell.

My mother is sitting outside, her head heavy with her prayer that has not stopped.

She lifts her eyes, asking for answers.

He’s turned the corner. Let’s go home and sleep.

What happened in there? my mother wants to know.

I prayed. And then I took him to a tropical beach and we went for a swim with dolphins.

My mother does not try to poke through the absence of all logic. My certainty has penetrated enough to get her to leave off her watch. We need to sleep. We know it. We drive home.

Johannesburg is in highveld summer now. On any other day my mother would comment, nothing going unnoticed; she would relish the flatness that makes sculpture of every sudden rise of rock, the yellow grass like silky tails, draw my attention to the bishop birds swooping between the reeds at the creek, like red streamers, or the sunset across the city, like blood, uncompromising. On any other afternoon, she would pull to the side of the road to watch the birds a while, or have some complicated discussion with the teenager selling Bic pens at the traffic light, or his friend selling umbrella hats, with the umbrella part sticking up off the top of the hat, a bright, striped mushroom, or the blind beggar from Zimbabwe, unseeing eyes gone milky blue, like sky.

But today she just stares ahead as she drives home. We reach the light at Oxford where the prostitutes have staked their corner at the Steers steakhouse. They’re out and about already as afternoon makes its way into evening, parading up and down in their lurid skirts; one’s orange-sequinned shoes get my attention, all bejewelled, like Dorothy’s shoes from Oz, the ones she just clicked to go home. But this young woman is not going home anytime soon. We head through the suburbs. High walls encase the properties. Freedom has come at a price and South Africa now follows Colombia as the most dangerous country in the world.

It is evening by the time my mother and I arrive home. We shower and climb into her day bed by the window, unable to be alone. We have been reading Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet. My mother picks the book off the windowsill and hands it over.

Anything? I ask.

Anything.

I read the first poem on the opened page.

Along the hard crust of deep snow / to the secret, white house of yours / so gentle and quiet – we both / are walking, in silence, half lost.

One stanza and it is enough. We surrender into the world of deep snow under a hard crust. And walking in silence.

Lovely, my mother says. And sighs.

We sleep tip to toe, like two dead women, on our backs. Our rest is so deep that we rouse ourselves only when the phone rings, shocking us into day, the sky long gone light. My mother lunges for the phone, listens, nightclothes pooling round her feet and nodding frantically, then she puts it down.

That was the doctor … He says he can’t account for it. Evan is sitting up in bed. It’s a miracle! She shakes her head. Something somehow saved him.

I go outside. It is going to storm. The tall trees are wind puppets, the light is an eerie yellow, the sky is stew, molten and black. The rain comes pelting down. I watch it plummet into the green lake of lawn. Birds sit exposing themselves, opening their wings high up on the poplars. I listen to the symphony, and it is that, for each leaf in this garden park of two acres records the rain differently: the hissing and the dropping, the seething and the puddle puttering. The thunder quakes beneath it all, percussion, a gentle drum roll. I am sodden in a second. After last night, I need it.

I go back into the house soaked and find my mother in her study.

I said to him, don’t get HIV, I say. We were standing in the kitchen and I remember saying to him that people are getting infected.

My mother is still in her dressing gown, at her desk, trying to pay bills. She turns.

Too good looking, too out of control. That’s what happens when you’re too popular. Going to gay clubs. Every weekend. What was the name of that club?

Mandy’s. I sit.

"Mandy’s. Staying up all night. He was completely dissolute. He had rings, rings under his eyes. Everything he did had this dissolute look. He was playing the piano in that jersey, with the whole sleeve unravelling. I don’t know why he was so intent on wearing that jersey, but he was. It started with one stitch and then unravelled all the way up his elbow and he refused to take it off. And he was living in that flat in Hillbrow. Who knows what was going on there. He was completely dissolute. We went out to see this film, your father and I, Fitzcarraldo, about a man who wanted to build an opera house in Peru but he needed money, so landed up pulling a boat over a mountain to claim a field of rubber. Do you know that film?"

Werner Herzog. I haven’t seen it.

"Anyway, he was a completely obsessive character. We were watching the film, and I suddenly got an image of Evan, looking dishevelled and dressing in the jersey that was unravelling and I said to your father, Just take me up to his flat! I’d never been there before, but I knew where it was. I knocked and some boy answered. I could see Ev in the background, standing there looking depraved, looking sloppy and exhausted, black circles under his eyes, unkempt, as though he’d been up all night … you know, that dissolute look."

I nod. I know that look. I have had that look.

"So, I went inside and I said: What-have-you-been-DOING? Where have you been? I started punching his arms, smacking him across the face and screaming at him: Look at you! And beating him, trying to knock some sense into him. And then I walked out. I was shaking."

We sit in silence.

I don’t want to talk about Mandy’s, or any other aspect of his life. She sighs and turns back to her bills.

We all went to Mandy’s, I say. It was the thing to do.

It didn’t matter if you were gay or straight, you’d take drugs and dance at Mandy’s all night; Obex and Welconal, it was the art of the perfect mix, one-and-a-half uppers went well with half a downer. It took the edge off the speed and you came down easily into sleep. We would sit; the weekend just started, those pills in the palm of our hands, down them, and wait for the world to speed up, and dress – lurid silk shirts that could have been seen from outer space, peasant skirts like parachutes – then head to Mandy’s and dance all night in those darkened rooms, the boys in leather gyrating on top of large speakers, blaring YMCA, and the smell of cigarettes, beer, poppers, any behaviour welcome, there was no code. And for Evan it must have been an invitation to a place without shame. You were innocent at Mandy’s because finally two people of the same sex could indulge without fear, bodies moving to eighties’ pop, in that sorcerer’s brew of everything’s allowed in here, the sexual energy, the dripping and sweating and shirtless men dancing close with other shirtless men, six-packs tanned and toned and, at the bar, you’d just stop for a quick something to drink, ice to the forehead; you’d see them disappearing intently into the bathrooms that stank of semen and piss, or making their way upstairs onto the roof to step behind the potted plants, that green border, on the other side of which was another world, a place you couldn’t go to unless you were a man with a man, with downtown Joburg lit up and spread out three-sixty, the Hillbrow Tower and Brixton Tower like two needles administered to cool the heat, the pulse, the frenzied beat of the city underneath.

And then at five, with dawn taking the sky to grey and the newspaper boys assembling their stacks on street corners, we would head to Fontana’s for fast food, dozens of barbecuing birds, going round and round on a rod, varnished dead things in a slow-motion ballet, and we’d sit in the car with everyone pulling the chicken apart, the hot cooked bird coming unstuck so easily, like it never was alive and held together by proper sinew, and spurting oil, falling into ponds on the silver foil, coming down off that night high, sucking the chicken off our fingers.

I would see Evan at Mandy’s, inside the stew of it all. He didn’t acknowledge me and I made no attempt to say hello to him; I’d catch a moment of him only, dark young man in lounging discussion, leaning against a wall, thick head of Romeo hair, shirt hanging over his belt, tall and coasting above the dense circle that inevitably surrounded him. I would lose him to the crowd and forget he was there, involved in my own sexual politics, my own dancing and flirting, but he was no doubt vanishing into those bathrooms and disappearing behind the green borders on the rooftops.

Eventually Evan was beaten up outside Mandy’s, said he saw them get