Still Breathing

By Marita van der Vyver

For the first time in twenty-five years, a group of friends gathers to celebrate Adriaan’s birthday. One by one, the guests arrive at Adriaan and Yvette’s beach house on the West Coast. Some bring their children and their exuberant grandchildren with them. In the years since they last saw each other, some have had to say goodbye to life partners and dreams; others have found new love and meaning. And then there’s Yvette, who can’t yet bring herself to tell everyone about her journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Sep 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9780624094067

Marita van der Vyver

Marita van der Vyver het drie romans vir jonger lesers geskryf voor haar eerste volwasse roman, Griet skryf ’n sprokie, die literêre landskap verander het. Sedertdien is sy ’n voltydse skrywer met vele topverkopers agter haar naam, soos ​Dis koue kos, skat​, ​Die dinge van ’n kind ​en ​Griet kom weer. Sy woon in Frankryk.

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Still Breathing

Marita van der Vyver

Tafelberg

For my oldest friends,

including those who have left us

but who live on in our thoughts.

They had to make much of the trifles, lest they should give in to the big thing, and their human independence would go smash. They were afraid, so they made light of things and were gay.

– DH Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

No pleasure could equal, she thought … this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank.

– Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

What guarantee do I have, as an exceptionally pale woman who speaks and writes in Afrikaans, that in the new South Africa I will have the freedom to say and to write what I want?

– Emma Nel in Breathing Space

If only he had the words to describe something like that. If only he had the words. His life-long longing.

– Ralph le Roux in Breathing Space

Who is who

Adriaan and Yvette, who have been together almost forty years, are the core of a circle of friends formed in 1985. Back then, Adriaan and Yvette rented a house in Yzerfontein; these days, they divide their time between South Africa and Portugal.

Yvette, Liane and Emma were student friends in the seventies and shared a house in Stellenbosch. As a young journalist Emma befriended her older colleague, Mila, and introduced her to the others.

Emma used to be married to Philip, who died in the nineties. She raised their daughter, Sasha, on her own. She lives in Stellenbosch and spends about three months of the year with her daughter in France.

Liane was married to Paul when the friendships were formed. He has been living in California for many years. His great love, Riaan, died in the nineties.

Max and Liane have been friends since school. They got married in the nineties and live in Cape Town.

Ralph and Mila have known each other since their student days in the late sixties. In the nineties Ralph married a widow, Leslee, who has since died. Ralph lives in Somerset West.

Mila was briefly married to Ralph’s best friend, Stuart, and later to her Flemish love, Herman, who died two years ago. She has lived in Belgium for more than two decades.

Bobby was Max’s colleague at the University of Cape Town in the eighties, and was introduced by him into the circle of friends. She and Zelda have lived together in the southern suburbs of Cape Town since the nineties and were married in 2007, soon after same-sex weddings became legal.

Mona and Frida are Adriaan and Yvette’s adult daughters. Mona is married to Dylan and they live in Britannia Bay with their toddler son, Stephan. Frida has been working in Mpumalanga for the past year.

Nelson and Alexander are Max and Liane’s adult twin sons. Nelson works in Cape Town and Alexander in Johannesburg.

Dylan, Kathleen and Oscar are Leslee’s adult children and Ralph’s stepchildren. Kathleen is recently divorced from Henri and lives in Cape Town with her little boy, Finn. Oscar also lives on the Cape Peninsula.

Sasha is Emma and Philip’s daughter. She lives in Lyon with her French lover, Romain.

Jo and Ben are Bobby and Zelda’s children. Jo is a student at the University of Cape Town and Ben is in high school.

Group photo 1 January 1995

It’s an old-fashioned colour photograph on glossy paper you could crumple up, a bendable, tearable relic of an era before everyone preserved their memories on smartphones.

It was the last time they’d all got together, on Yvette and Adriaan’s smallholding outside Stellenbosch, and the exuberance of the previous night’s New Year’s Eve celebration had left traces on some of their faces. Along with more permanent marks left by grief and other suppressed emotions, the first wrinkles, receding hairlines. Old age starting to breathe down their necks, but they were all still young enough to pretend they didn’t feel its chill.

Yvette sits in the middle of the red couch, her satin shoes exactly the same shade as the upholstery. A coincidence – she’s not the kind of woman who chooses her bohemian outfits to match her secondhand furniture. Liane and Max sit on either side of her, all three of them with a baby in their arms. Liane and Max hold their twin boys, Alexander in his mother’s lap, Nelson on his father’s knees, although no one else can tell the two black-haired infants apart. Tintin’s Dupont and Dupond, prettily dressed in matching shirts with sailor collars, black hair neatly combed, faces scrubbed clean. In stark contrast to Frida, in nothing but a disposable nappy in Yvette’s lap, an unruly mop of curls, a brown streak on one cheek, chocolate maybe, or mud, or even paint from her father’s studio.

Paul is on the armrest next to Liane, to whom he was previously married. They used to be the glamour couple in the circle of friends, Gatsby and his Daisy. Since the divorce they have each remained attractive on their own, but no longer so dazzling that you blink when you look at them. As if they’d been mirrors constantly reflecting each other, and then the reflection vanished. His eyes look sad, her mouth looks tired. Understandably: He is still coming to terms with the death of his beloved, and sometimes she feels the twins’ birth has left her shellshocked.

On the other armrest, next to Max, is Mila, in a red dress with red lips a shade brighter than the couch and Yvette’s shoes. Behind her, with his hand on her long neck, is her new Flemish lover Herman, quite a bit older than her, older than anyone else in the group. Silver hair, classic blue-and-white striped button-down shirt. Classy, Liane’s verdict had been when they’d met him the day before, and they’d believed her. She had always been their arbiter of style.

Although Adriaan, sitting flat on the colourful carpet in front of the couch in faded shorts and a tattered straw hat, has never taken any notice of Liane’s style rules. He is cross-legged and barefoot, just like his nine-year-old daughter in front of him. Mona is clearly her father’s child, the same unkempt outdoorsy look, the same hard-boiled attitude. She isn’t satisfied with her position in the photo, stuck in front of her father like a flower in a bouquet when she would rather be sitting with the other two children at the far end of the row in front of the couch. She strains forward so she can watch them, but they’re not looking at her. Dylan stares sullenly into space, his arms wrapped around his knobbly boy’s knees. His little sister, Kathleen, a blonde beauty of a child, flirts with the camera as if she is already rehearsing to become a movie star.

This was the day Mona and Dylan’s story began, although they themselves would only realise it years later.

Bobby and Zelda sit on either side of Adriaan, each with a dog in their lap. Hey, Zelda had said, if everyone’s children were going to be in the photo, their dog children had to be there too. Representation was important. She should know. Hers was the only brown face in the group.

Mona had tried to make her Labrador pose too, but he got bored and sauntered off at the last minute. Only his tail is visible in the bottom-left corner near Dylan, who looks as though he wishes he could also behave like the dog and walk away. He is eleven years old, ill at ease in his own body, and in no mood to smile for a camera.

Ralph stands behind the couch, tall and erect like a column, his five-year-old stepson in one arm and his other arm curled around Leslee’s shoulders. She fits neatly under his arm, her compact body nestled comfortably against the column, her eyes hidden behind heavy glasses. Nana Mouskouri, that was their pet name for the widow with the black hair and black-rimmed glasses who’d managed to tame Ralph’s lion heart. She domesticated him, rewarded him with children and a suburban household, when his friends had started to believe it would never happen.

Oscar, the little boy on Ralph’s arm, holds out a tentative first to the other toddler in the back row, something he wants to offer to her, a biscuit or a sweet, perhaps. But Sasha sits placidly on Emma’s hip, unaware of Oscar’s overture, her chubby fingers tangled in the wild curls that grow around her mother’s face like an unpruned shrub. Emma is a whole head taller than Leslee, maybe even a fraction taller than the man grinning between the two of them. He looks as awkward as a casual visitor who has ended up in a family photo by chance. When they looked at the photograph years later some of them would indeed struggle to remember his name. It’s Charl, whom Emma had slept with on New Year’s Eve, a sexual adventure that had astonished everyone. Emma perhaps more than anyone else.

The first rain after a long drought, Adriaan had teased. But the drought would soon return.

Emma would raise the little blonde cherub on her hip alone, her and her late husband’s child; hard to believe that Philip with his sombre cynicism could have produced such a vision of innocence. The one good thing to come out of that stormy relationship, according to Emma.

She stuck the group photo on the wall above her writing desk, above several writing desks over the years, and sometimes gazed at it unseeing for minutes on end when her fingers would snag on her computer’s keyboard.

Liane displayed the photograph in an old-fashioned photo album with stiff black pages, held in place with four gold photo corners. Only Liane would know where one could still find such elegant retro albums. She sometimes paged through it with Max or the twins.

Paul and Mila stored the photo in a digital cloud because printed photographs and paper albums took up too much space in the shipping containers in which their possessions were transported to new homes on other continents.

Zelda stuck the picture on the fridge in her and Bobby’s Cape Town kitchen after their dog children had been replaced with human children, to show their offspring a picture of their parents’ former lives. Us before you. Something like that.

Ralph forgot about the photo, which got lost in a drawer somewhere, until he had to pack up the house after Leslee’s disappearance. Then it slipped out from between a stack of papers, an unexpected gift that offered unexpected solace.

Yvette put the picture up in Adriaan’s chaotic studio recently, simply attached it to the wall with a drawing pin, among the hundreds of other pictures, snapshots of friends and strangers, clippings of famous buildings and works of art, postcards, sketches and illustrations. In such visual chaos he wouldn’t spot it right away, maybe only notice it months later. Perhaps it would comfort him, she hoped.

A perfectly ordinary group photo that told a story of a thousand words. Or a lot of different stories. Merely a matter of perspective, Emma would tell herself, depending on whose eyes you were looking through.

1. No one told me when to run

Friday the thirteenth. Just as well he’d never been superstitious, Adriaan said to his wife when he realised the ‘unlucky’ date on which this festive weekend began.

Yvette reminded him that it was about far more than the celebration of his seventieth birthday. In fact, his birthday later that month was just an excuse to get their oldest group of friends together once more. And because these friends were now spread far and wide across the globe, the weekend in the middle of March was the only one that would suit everyone to gather in their shared homeland. Emma and her daughter were here anyway to attend the Woordfees in Stellenbosch. Mila always escaped to the south for a few weeks at the end of the European winter. ‘Just to feel sun on my skin again before I turn into a vampire.’ Paul would presumably jump at any excuse to escape from Trump’s America. ‘Make America ridiculous again,’ he’d grumbled in a WhatsApp voice note just last week. ‘That’s all the fucker has accomplished so far. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better.’

But it will get better, Yvette had said. The eternal optimist.

Even now that she has less reason for optimism than ever before.

Adriaan shakes his head so vehemently that his weathered straw hat almost falls off, and bends down to prise another mussel off the rocks in the shallow water.

‘Wow, this one’s a whopper.’

He whistles admiration through his teeth and passes the shiny black shell to his four-year-old grandson to keep in an old string bag with the rest of the harvest.

‘What is whopper, Oupa?’

‘It means it’s a really big bastard.’

Stephan studies his grandfather in silence for a moment, an uncertain smile hovering at the corners of his mouth. He has inherited his grandmother’s rosebud mouth, the plump pink bottom lip, the small nose, the enormous eyes of a Manga character.

‘Mamma says bastard is a bad word.’

‘Well, you know your oupa doesn’t give a fig about bad words or good words.’ Adriaan winks at the child before prising another mussel off the rock and passing it to him.

‘Big bassstard.’ Stephan samples the phrase, with the s deliberately drawn out because he has only recently mastered the sound. Just the other day he would have said ‘big bathtard’.

Tonight Adriaan will be in trouble with Mona again for teaching her child to swear.

Funny, when she was younger, her father’s ‘bad words’ never used to trouble her. It was only once she had a child of her own that this prissy puritanical streak started coming through. Not that she’d ever been much of a swearer, not even in her teens. Must have been the saving grace of her mother’s influence. As with so many aspects of his life with Yvette, the language they used could be yet another example of opposites attracting and complementing. The result was that their eldest daughter nearly always ‘spoke nicely’ like Yvette, while the younger one could swear like a trooper. Her father’s child.

Perhaps Frida will also become prim and proper if she has children someday. Parenting remains an unknown and unpredictable land until you find yourself in it – and once you’ve crossed that boundary, you can never return to the same side of the fence as your childless friends.

You were trapped on the opposite bank, like Philip always said.

Old Philip, who crossed the most distant boundary of all long before the rest of them. That final frontier, which draws nearer every day for those he left behind.

Sometimes the longing for his departed friend blows through Adriaan’s chest like a sudden gust of wind, more than a quarter century after Philip drove his car off a seaside cliff. He wonders, for example, what Philip would’ve said about being a grandfather, if he’d been here. Or about a seventieth birthday celebration.

‘What the fuck is left to celebrate?’ Something like that, probably, sharp and cynical. Shorter of breath and one day closer to death? As in Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’ that they listened to so much a thousand years ago.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement, Yvette read aloud from a poem by Mary Oliver earlier in the week, curled up in the big wicker chair on the stoep, her face hidden in the shade of a floppy hat.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Whoa, slow down, before the downhill gets too steep. Rather leave these sombre thoughts for four in the morning when the next panic attack pins him to his bed. When the pounding in his chest grows so loud he fears it will wake his sleeping wife beside him.

He bends down to weigh the bag with mussels in one hand, automatically pressing the palm of his other hand against his lower back as he straightens up. A low groan makes Stephan glance up briefly from the shallow rock pool where he is trying to touch an anemone with his finger.

‘I think that’s enough.’ And then, as if to stick his tongue out at his eldest daughter like a naughty child: ‘A bag full of big bastards.’

Yvette stands at the kitchen window rinsing a few large glass vases in which she wants to arrange flowers. St Joseph’s lilies, sunflowers and long white gladioli are waiting in a galvanised bucket on the kitchen island behind her. But she’s not looking at her hands in the sudsy water, Mona notices, her eyes keep searching the long white beach in front of the house.

‘We can’t see them from here, Ma,’ she says softly while drying one of the vases. ‘They’re on the rocks around the corner from the beach.’

Yvette nods and brushes her fringe off her forehead with wet fingers. She is past sixty but her hair is still miraculously dark, a thread of silver gleaming only here and there. Her pale skin is still smooth, probably because she’s kept it out of the sun since her student days. Unlike her eldest daughter, who is always turning her face heavenward like a sunflower. Mona is in her early thirties, but she is convinced she already has more wrinkles than her mother will ever have.

‘I just wonder why they’re staying away for so long,’ Yvette says, her eyes still on the sparkling blue sea that stretches out before them. It’s a perfect early-autumn morning, cloudless and still.

‘Oh, Ma, you know what Pa is like. He won’t be satisfied with a handful of mussels. He’ll bring enough to feed an army.’

‘He’s not allowed to take out more than thirty.’

‘Per person,’ Mona reminds her. ‘That’s why he took Stephan along. Two people can take out sixty mussels.’

‘But Stephan is too small to count as a person.’

‘Ma!’ says Mona with mock outrage, her eyes wide. ‘You illustrate children’s books! How can you say children aren’t people?’

‘Ag, you know what I mean.’

Mona does know what her mother really means. The eternal fear that hides behind her worried words. The sea, the hungry sea, that took her only son when he was even younger than Stephan. Since the day Pablo drowned, Yvette has never been able to relax when one of her children – and now even her grandchild – is playing on the rocks beside the sea.

She has washed all the vases but keeps standing at the sink gazing outside. There are a few walkers in the distance, tiny black dots along the water’s edge, and in the middle of the bay two children play in the shallow waves.

Mona wonders why they aren’t at school. Overseas tourists perhaps? This peaceful area around St Helena Bay is drawing more and more foreign visitors. One of the attractions in the past few years has been the restaurant her husband opened next to their house.

A woman in a long white dress is watching the children play. She stands with her feet in the water, her upper body in the shade of the umbrella she is holding in one hand. Too small for a beach umbrella, an ordinary rain umbrella doing duty as an old-fashioned parasol instead.

Definitely foreign visitors, Mona decides. White South African women don’t walk around carrying parasols. Your skin gets weathered and wrinkled by the sun from when you’re small. By the time you’re an adult, the damage has long since been done. That is the cruel lesson her mother’s illness has taught her.

Still, maybe just to placate her mother, these days she rubs a thick layer of sunscreen onto her body every morning, as faithfully as she used to apply mulberry-red lipstick to her mouth. Back when she used to work in world cities, when she hoped that a dark mouth would make her appear more worldly-wise than she felt. Now she doesn’t brother with makeup any more. What you see is what you get. That has become her motto.

She turns towards the bucket of flowers on the kitchen island and carefully hoists her body onto a tall bar stool, her left hand under her belly which feels more like a watermelon every day, heavier and harder. Now she can watch her mother while her mother watches the woman on the beach. It reminds her of the picture on the iconic little red baking-powder tin with a picture of the same little red baking-powder tin with a picture of the same little red baking-powder tin.

Or the mystery of an infinite mirror, inside another mirror, inside another mirror.

Her mother remains a mystery to her. She doesn’t look old, she looks like someone who will never grow old.

No. Mona steers her thoughts in a different direction.

Even if Yvette lived another twenty years, she would still not look like an old woman in her eighties.

Perhaps it’s her inherent innocence that protects her, the way she still gazes at the world with childlike wonder. Alice in Wonderland, as her oldest friend, Emma, used to tease her.

Emma may be the only person outside her small family circle she has confided in about her illness. And she has forbidden her nearest and dearest from discussing it with anyone else, especially on this ‘festive weekend’.

It wasn’t deceitful, she had argued with Mona, it was considerate. There was no need to ruin everyone’s weekend, was there?

But wouldn’t they feel even worse later when they realised this may have been the last time, Mona had wanted to know.

At our age every encounter could be the last time, Yvette had said, her rosebud mouth pursed in a stern pout. It wasn’t necessary to rub each other’s noses in it.

‘There they are now.’ Mona hears the relief in her mother’s voice when she catches sight of Adriaan and Stephan at the far end of the beach. The sturdy male figure with the bag of mussels slung over one shoulder, the slight little boy trotting beside him.

Yvette turns around and joins Mona on a bar stool at the kitchen counter, draws the bucket with flowers and one of the glass vases towards her, starts pushing sunflowers into the vase. Casually, as if she has been arranging flowers all this time with her back to the sea, that’s the impression she wants to create when her husband and her grandson come through the door just now.

‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,’ Yvette says with a satisfied smile. ‘I have always thought it one of the most beautiful opening sentences for a story.’

‘Mrs Beyers said she would buy the flowers herself,’ Mona improvises. ‘And arrange them herself.’

It is also a beautiful beginning for a weekend together with old friends.

She can feel her unborn child kick spitefully against her skin, or maybe it’s a knock from an impatient elbow. She pulls her oversized T-shirt up over her bulging suntanned stomach. You can see how busy it is in there, like a cat trying to escape from a sack. Yvette catches her breath and reaches out to touch her daughter’s belly, to feel her unborn grandchild move. Mona covers her mother’s hand with her own and slides both their hands gently to the side where she has just felt the kick or the knock.

‘There it is again,’ Yvette whispers, as if she’s afraid she might wake her grandchild.

The look on her mother’s face moves her so much that Mona has to blink back the tears. She’s not a weepy woman, she doesn’t know what’s the matter with her these days, probably just the hormonal swings of the final month of pregnancy. There is another sentence in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway that has always reminded her of her mother, but she suspects they will both cry if she had to say it out loud, so she keeps quiet. Repeats it only to herself.

She had the perpetual sense … of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the