My Year of Fear and Freedom

By Marita van der Vyver

When Covid-19 pulled the rug out from under Marita van der Vyver and her Frenchman's feet and they were forced to sell their old, large house in the French countryside, they decided to get rid of most of their earthly possessions and travel far across the world. In this journey, which spans three continents, a lifetime of memories from one of Afrikaans’s greatest writers is explored. Sometimes you have to lose a lot, and also be willing to lose yourself, before you can truly gain freedom.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Aug 1, 2025
• ISBN: 9780624095712

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.

Book preview

TO BEGIN

Travel and see the world. Stay home and save the world. It’s the kind of slogan that makes travel a complicated affair these days. Because although millions of people depend on an income from tourism, mass tourism undoubtedly has a negative impact on ancient cities and historical buildings and previously unspoilt natural landscapes. Too many planes emitting harmful gases into the air, too many cruise ships polluting the water, too many vehicles everywhere on earth.

Travel has lost its innocence, you could say; it has become just another thing that tugs at your conscience, like eating meat or fast food, or buying too many cheap clothes, or enjoying a movie by a director accused of sexual misconduct, or, or, or. The list is endless.

I suppose you could also say that living has become a complicated affair, a constant balancing act on a rickety bridge over a precipice of moral and ecological concerns. Everything gives you cancer, as Joe Jackson sang. Or helps to destroy our only habitable planet.

And yet most of us will keep travelling, just as we will keep living, with adjustments and compromises, aware of the traps, sometimes deliberately blind to the dangers, because spending your whole life in the same place, like a tree, has become almost unthinkable.

I am old enough to remember a time when any overseas trip was an exotic experience, not for the masses, when no one in my family had ever been inside a plane. When I was a child, our family would sometimes drive to the old DF Malan airport outside Cape Town on a Sunday afternoon to stand on a balcony and watch the planes take off and land. Throughout my school years that was the closest I got to flying, except in my imagination and in my dreams.

When friends of Pa and Ma, or even just an acquaintance from our street, were lucky enough to go overseas, the whole street would be invited to an endless slideshow of every monument and scenic view. Or to watch a silent home movie, with long sequences that were out of focus or overexposed or had been filmed in the dark, and the parts you could see didn’t mean anything anyway because they were just names from books or magazines. The Eiffel Tower. Trafalgar Square. The Colosseum. Manneken Pis. (That one made us giggle, at least.)

When Afrikaans writers like André Brink, Elsa Joubert, Jan Rabie or Uys Krige travelled abroad, they could articulate the experience better than the uncle down the street with his slideshow, and because we were so incredibly unworldly, we’d eagerly read what they wrote about places we had never been.

Then the era of mass tourism arrived, and in the past decade or two, smartphones and social media have turned all of humanity into travel journalists. Instead of words, you now share mostly photos and videos of your travels, and because nearly everyone you know is travelling too, you just show each other pictures everyone has already seen ad nauseam, the only difference being that you’re now in the picture too. Me in front of the Eiffel Tower. Me on Trafalgar Square.

Are words even needed to describe a journey any more?

This is the question I had to keep asking myself while I was writing this travel book. And then any account is further complicated by the mixed feelings a thinking writer these days has to have about the very idea of travel. I am addicted to travel, and throughout this book, I look for the reasons for this addiction, explanations to soothe my conscience, justifications for why travel remains so irresistible. In spite of it all.

One thing that became clear in fifteen months of wandering across three continents is that you cannot switch off your conscience while you’re travelling the way you turn off a bedside lamp to sleep better. You carry that little moral lamp with you, and in its light, you see everything differently.

These days, boasting shamelessly about the number of countries you’ve visited, even if you barely spent a day in some of them, is like bragging about the number of times a day you shower or water your garden despite strict water restrictions. Even if you use your own borehole water. It just sounds tone-deaf, even somewhat indecent.

It is possible to travel more sensitively, though, to avoid mass tourism, to choose the road less travelled, to connect with locals and help the local economy in a modest way, to give something back, too, in exchange for everything you gain from the experience.

My husband Alain and I got so much more than we expected after a series of unfortunate coincidences turned us into roofless wanderers for over a year. I, an Afrikaans writer who, after more than a quarter of a century in Europe, remain burdened by my particular cultural baggage, and ‘my Frenchman’, as I like to call him, at my own expense, because his French perspective on all our experiences makes me see differently too, deeper and wider than would have been possible on my own.

In many ways it was a forced journey, the result of financial distress aggravated by a pandemic, combined with depression and addiction that brought us to a breaking point. This was the context, which I will explain later, of an adventure we embarked on like an adrenaline-fuelled leap off a high cliff, hand in hand, into a pool of water so far below us that we could barely see it. There was a chance we’d lose each other in the leap or in the water, but there was a chance, at least, that we’d come out together on the other side.

Had we kept hesitating on the cliff’s edge, everything that had driven us there would have caught up with us. And then there may not have been an ‘us’ about whom I could tell this or any other story.

During our wanderings, I often thought of Joan Didion’s advice in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She tells herself to see enough and write it down. And then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder … I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there.

That is what the best travel writing is, a ticket to the world out there, to wonder and awe. A good travel story carries you away from the humdrum here to a seductive elsewhere, bringing you back inside your own body at the same time, back to your own emotions, to what you’re feeling while you read. Like good fiction, it transforms there and someday into here and now.

During our journey I often turned to other travelling writers for advice and inspiration by opening their books and reading their words. And now that I’m living in a house again, I sit in an armchair and continue to travel with them.

Maybe you need to be very brave or very stupid to believe that people still want to read stories about travel when they can just look at pictures of travel. On the other hand, you probably need a strong dose of bravery and stupidity to write any story at all and hope that someone will want to read it. And yet, I’ve been doing it for more than forty years.

It’s too late to stop writing. It’s too soon to stop travelling. No more excuses.

Let’s just do it.

These are the words with which this travel story begins.

PART I

WANDERING THROUGH EUROPE

1. LET’S JUST DO IT

In the country of my birth it is Spring Day; all the fields are flowering, tra-la-la, nature coming back to life. Here in France it’s autumn and things around us are starting to die. But even in the European autumn, September is symbolic of a fresh start, a new academic year, children going to school for the first time, students starting their studies, new careers, new opportunities.

It’s called la rentrée here, The Return, and for the first time in the quarter century I’ve lived in France, I don’t have a child or a husband in my house who needs to return to school or work after the summer holiday. In fact, I don’t even have a house any more.

Instead, The Return becomes a Biblical Exodus. The Sense of an Ending. You Can’t Go Home Again. Titles of beloved books suddenly sound like ominous warnings.

Because on 1 September 2021, we set off on the long road to who knows where, with all our earthly possessions for the coming year packed into our old Renault Kangoo. We’d sold my little red car a month ago already, along with a lot of our furniture and other belongings that suddenly felt strangely superfluous. What is indispensable, mostly items with sentimental rather than monetary value, has been stored in a shipping container.

‘Like refugees fleeing a war-torn country,’ Alain mutters, glancing over his shoulder at everything we’ve crammed into the Kangoo after folding down the backseats. Along with two large suitcases for our clothes and two smaller ones with winter clothes we will probably need later, and two cabin bags with our laptops and personal documents, there are a box of wine and olive oil from our region that we want to give to friends along the way and two bags of my books to give away and sell. And a wooden giraffe, almost as tall as a person, which we have to deliver to our son Daniel in Switzerland because he can no longer live without this memento of his birthplace. Also a skateboard, a rolled-up carpet, a handknitted patchwork blanket and other ‘essential’ items our daughter Mia can no longer live without in her new little apartment on the outskirts of Paris.

Hugo, the youngest son, has already come to collect a lorry load of belongings – ours, not his, because Hugo has always lived lightly. But now it’s our turn to learn to live more lightly, and Hugo needs furniture for his rental house in a village north of Lyon. We invited all four children to come and fetch what they wanted before we got rid of it, but only Hugo accepted the invitation. (Possibly a sign of how undesirable most of our worn-out furniture and electronics are to our trendy children.) Thomas, the eldest, had been quick to let us know we were welcome to visit his apartment in Lille, but there was no need to bring anything, thank you.

So, we wrapped Daniel’s giraffe in Mia’s carpet and draped the knitted blanket over the whole caboodle in the back of the car, in a probably futile attempt to look less like homeless refugees. Because although we are indeed homeless after handing over the keys to our house to its new owners earlier this morning, we are not running away.

Well, not really. We’re not running away from our problems; we know we’re taking them with us in the overloaded car, but we hope that our quest for new landscapes will also teach us to see, as Proust put it, old landscapes – and old problems – through new eyes. In the meantime, we are, as Frances McDormand’s character in the movie Nomadland says: Not homeless. Houseless. There is a big difference.

After all, your home is supposed to be wherever your heart is, and for the foreseeable future our heart lies on the long road, sprawled across the world map, beating with excitement about unknown place names, pounding with fear about being driven out of our comfort zone. Above all, blazing with curiosity about where the wind will carry us.

Perhaps I need to venture on a gap year like this every twenty years or so, I’m starting to think, to gain a new perspective on my life. My first time was in my early twenties right after graduating from Stellenbosch, back in the days when a gap year wasn’t a widely known concept yet. For me, it was simply a chance to get away from everything familiar, an irresistible leap into the exotic ‘overseas’, like all those nineteenth-century travellers who wrote so inspiringly about their Grand Tour through Europe.

I was far poorer than my romantic role models of old, though. My guidebooks were George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, or Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, or James A Michener’s The Drifters, which made many young readers dream of carefree wanderings in the seventies. Armed with an oversized backpack and an undersized budget, and as brave as it is only possible to be when you’re ignorant and inexperienced, I drifted through Europe for a year.

The year 1980 blew my mind, swept away my prejudices, shifted my perspective for the rest of my life. I had to survive in all sorts of humble ways – by babysitting in France, waiting tables in a Greek restaurant, pushing a tea trolley through the corridors of Rio Tinto Zinc’s London headquarters. In a white overall behind my trolley full of teacups and snacks, I, a spoilt white girl from Africa, soon perceived that I was invisible to the office staff. Most didn’t even glance up when I poured them a cup of tea.

It made me aware, to this day, of workers in uniforms and overalls who often move around large buildings like ghosts. Cleaners, servers, security guards, the whole quiet horde rarely noticed by better-paid professionals in offices or by hurried travellers at airports or guests in hotels. Since my first gap year, I have tried to make eye contact wherever I encounter them because I will never forget what it feels like to be invisible.

Twenty years later, on the eve of my fortieth birthday, it was once again time for a leap into the unknown, to get out of a rut that was starting to feel just too comfortable. This time, daring a gap year took far more courage because I was older and more fearful, with a house that needed to be rented out, a car to be sold, accounts and premiums to be paid, and too many possessions I couldn’t take with me. Also, I was a single mother of a small child who would need to travel with me. It was precisely the fact that Daniel would soon be starting school – which would scupper all further wandering for the next twelve years – that made this escape seem so urgent and necessary.

As irony would have it, during my second escape I was writing a novel about a series of escapes, the title of which literally meant ‘escape’ (although it would be published in English as Breathing Space) – and fell head over heels in love with the Frenchman who is now, a quarter century later, my fellow traveller on this third escape. Who said life wasn’t full of unexpected loops and circlings?

On our way to who knows where in our overloaded Kangoo, we listen to music from our youth that suddenly sounds brand new again. Written just for us. Like Janis Joplin’s raspy-voiced version of Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, with a line that could well become our motto for this Year of Living Bravely: Freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

Because we’ve had to lose a lot indeed to gain this kind of freedom. Although we’ve always dreamt of going on a long trip when Alain retired, we always imagined we would have a home to return to when we got tired of travelling. Imagined that we would rent out our house, like I did my Stellenbosch home two decades ago during my second gap year. So much for imagining.

We hadn’t reckoned with Covid-19. With how this pandemic would shrink the income of an Afrikaans writer in Europe to the point where she could no longer afford the payments on her house. Or how the lockdown and the isolation and successive waves of loneliness would cause my husband’s depression to start ticking like a time bomb until the inevitable explosion.

Alain had been on a year’s sick leave before Covid broke out, and during the first panic-stricken months of the pandemic, it was impossible to find adequate psychological support in France, as was probably the case in most countries, because all medical services were focused on the population’s physical rather than their emotional health. In other words, if you were already suffering from depression before the lockdowns, the chances were slim that you would miraculously recover on your own.

Besides, the so-called black dog is an uninvited guest that doesn’t usually crash your party alone. He drags along a sly friend we know as addiction. People who suffer from depression are often also addicted to alcohol or nicotine, illegal drugs or prescription medications or even food. Sometimes addiction sneaks in first, and then that dreaded dog comes sniffing after it, but as with the chicken and the egg, it’s almost impossible to determine the sequence.

For many years Alain had been a sober alcoholic. On the wagon, falling off a few times and getting back on again, as wagon rides go, but each time more determined to stay on it. When the depression overpowered him the wheels began to buckle. And then came the pandemic. The addictologue (a French doctor specialising in addiction) he saw regularly had to close her practice. His psychologist and psychiatrist became unavailable. And all AA meetings were cancelled.

In this perfect storm, our little boat began to sink. The more depressed my husband became, the stronger the temptation to drink again, and every time he yielded to temptation he became even more depressed. A vicious circle that dragged us under like a whirlpool.

Due to his extended sick leave, he couldn’t earn his full salary either, which made me stress even more about my own shrinking income during the pandemic, and in the end he had to retire earlier than we’d planned. The result was that for the rest of his life, he would receive a smaller pension than we had counted on.

In short, it was a convergence of circumstances that ripped the financial and emotional rug out from under us. And the financial rug had in any case always been more of a small prayer mat than a luxurious carpet.

This forced us to sell our big old house in the French countryside. And from the moment we made this decision, everything happened at an accelerated pace. A video on fast forward, that’s what I see when I look back at the weeks leading up to 1 September 2021.

Our house literally sold in a day. The very first couple who came to see it fell in love with ‘the spirit of the place’. (The woman had been a yoga instructor for forty years, which may explain why she didn’t notice the dust and cobwebs.) Alain and I looked at each other in alarm – as in, what now? – until it dawned on us that it wasn’t essential to find a new house straight away to replace this one.

Our youngest child had just flown the nest, and we didn’t need to find a house near Alain’s work because he no longer had a job.

Our next home could be anywhere on earth.

It was a terrifying yet deeply liberating thought.

That’s how Nomadland became our new home. We would spend at least the next year wandering – that journey of the retirement years we’d always dreamt of but would only have been able to afford for a short time if we’d had to cover a mortgage every month, along with water, electricity, taxes and everything else ownership entails – and while we roamed, we could take our time to reflect on where we wanted to start the next chapter of our lives.

Or maybe we’d part company to start separate chapters.

Travel is a test of any relationship, and we have never travelled together for this long, but we are hopeful. During the past several weeks of preparing, of selling and giving away possessions so we can travel more lightly, of excited planning about new places we can discover together and old places we want to rediscover, my husband has begun to shed that suffocating blanket of depression. As the pandemic blanket is also slowly but surely being lifted, at least in Europe, he can see his doctor and psychiatrist again and gradually reduce his medication with their guidance. And he is sober again, he’s looking forward to something again, he’s ready to face life again.

I know there’s no guarantee that this adventure will cure my husband’s depression or keep him sober, but I also know we can’t keep treading water in the same place. Our little boat has sunk; now we must swim for the shore – or drown trying.

We plan to travel through Europe first, to visit old friends and family and strengthen ties that the enforced isolation of the pandemic has strained. France, to begin with, and then southwards through Switzerland to Italy and Greece, in search of the last bit of sun before winter is upon us. If the old crock of the Kangoo doesn’t give up the ghost along the way, we hope to sell it before the end of the year and head for the American South where for a month or three we can house-sit for a friend. That is if by then the Americans have decided to reopen their borders to travellers from Europe who can prove they’ve been vaccinated against Covid-19.

If, if, if. If there’s one lesson this ghastly pandemic has taught me, it is to live from day to day, to be more adaptable, to always have a Plan B, Plan C and even Plan Z on hand in case Plan A doesn’t work out. It’s a tough lesson for a self-confessed control freak, and I’m still learning every day. But after this Year of Living Bravely, I swear I will be as adaptable as a chameleon.

So, Plan A is to spend three months travelling in Europe, three months in the USA, and then, hopefully early next year, at least three months in South Africa. Although Alain has accompanied me to the land of my birth many times, his job with the French education department meant he usually couldn’t stay for longer than a week or two. Now we will finally have enough time for a proper exploration, especially in places from my past that he’s read about in my books but never visited himself. For him, it will be a journey of discovery; for me, a search for lost time, as Proust described it.

For both of us, this journey will also be a quest, even though we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for yet. A kind of freedom, probably, but freedom to do what?

Maybe just the freedom to be adaptable because if Plan A is ruled out due to the ongoing pandemic or for any other reason, we will make other plans. This world is indeed our home, no matter what it says in Hebrews 13.

‘Let’s call it a geriatric gap year,’ I suggest as we listen to Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’ in the Kangoo. Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time / Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines.

‘Who says only young people can enjoy a gap year? Let’s just do it.’

And I laugh, a bit too boisterously maybe, so I cannot hear my fearful heart pounding in my chest.

2. FAREWELL TO A FIG TREE

It’s always hard to leave a home you love. If it also happens to be the first home where, with clumsy hands and a fertile imagination, you created a garden, planting roses and lavender and fruit trees in soil so rocky that you had to use a pickaxe for every hole for every plant, until your hands were covered in rough calluses and your back was constantly aching, the parting is even harder. If you’ve managed to get your own fig tree to grow here, and you have to leave exactly when the figs start to ripen, it can feel as though your heart is going to burst like an overripe fig.

In the frantic final weeks of packing and sorting before our move, I watched that crooked tree with growing impatience as the dark-purple fruit ripened slowly – far too slowly – in the late summer sun. All I wanted was one last chance to eat a few of those tantalising figs before we handed the keys to the new owners.

I’d been relieved to hear that they liked figs too. It was at least some consolation knowing the fruit wouldn’t just rot on the ground. The tree had been tiny, little more than a branch, when I planted it against a wall near the washing line. I’d chosen this unassuming spot because the fig trees in my childhood memories always grew in the backyard. Fig trees never flaunted themselves in front yards among the roses or dahlias. They were the shy Cinderellas of the yard, the beautiful sisters who were kept out of sight so they wouldn’t outshine the haughtier flowers. Next to the chicken coop behind my Ouma Tina’s house. Next to the washing line in my mother’s final earthly home.

But, as with Cinderella in the fairy tale, a fig tree’s humble surroundings cannot hide her nobility. After all, her lineage can be traced back to the Garden of Eden, where according to tradition Adam and Eve used her generous leaves to cover their shame, and her majestic fruit is celebrated in myths and legends.

My mother’s homage was to make the most delicious green fig preserve every year, whole figs floating in thick syrup, and after Ma’s death Pa carried on the tradition. He learnt to make his own green fig preserve, using Ma’s recipe, and within a year or two he was boasting that his version definitely outshone hers. Now Pa is also gone, and I accepted a long time ago that I cannot make green fig preserve. Maybe the figs are different in France, or it’s just my lack of patience that causes my preserves to fail. Or maybe it’s because I will always rather eat a fig straight from the branch.

The proper way to eat a fig, in society, DH Lawrence wrote, is to split it in four, holding it by the stump, and open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled, four-petalled flower. And if that doesn’t make you lust after a fig, Lawrence takes the sensual promise of the fruit a step further: But the vulgar way is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.

Fortunately, a few of the figs on our tree ripened in time for me to eat them in the so-called vulgar way. And just before we drive away from our empty house for the last time, I jump out of the overloaded Kangoo to pick three soft, dark-purple figs. Provisions for the long journey ahead, soul food to nourish my memories.

What I cannot guess, as I watch the fig tree grow smaller in the side mirror, is that figs will comfort me in surprising ways during the first days and weeks of our wandering year. Sometimes, it will feel as if we’re following a route from one fig tree to the next.

Our first night away from our home among the vineyards of Rochegude (or from everything we must now unlearn to call ‘home’) is spent just a few kilometres further in the village of Saint-Roman-de-Malegarde, where our story began a quarter of a century ago. Exactly the right place to embark on this new chapter, we agree. We sleep in the stone house of our American former neighbour, Edith, and have dinner with the Italian Armando and his French-Japanese wife, Odile. This impromptu multicultural gathering becomes the perfect prelude to a year in which we will have to cross many borders – national borders, regional borders and even those that exist only in our imagination.

One of the guests brought a few ripe figs from the market, and the next morning we eat the remaining figs with Armando’s homemade bread on Edith’s balcony.

‘Our first breakfast as roofless wanderers.’ My voice is thin, struggling to get past the lump in my throat, for there is no turning back now.

‘I’d rather be roofless than breakfastless,’ Alain says to comfort me. ‘There’s nothing a good breakfast can’t improve.’

‘I’ll remember that if I start feeling anxious again. Better roofless than breakfastless.’

If he notices a hint of sarcasm in my tone, he ignores it.

From Saint-Roman-de-Malegarde we head to Lourmarin where André and Louisa, old friends from South Africa, now farm with olives. In the kitchen, our hostess is lining an oven dish with fig leaves for a deboned leg of lamb, which is quickly seared over an open flame before being wrapped in the leaves to be slow-roasted in the oven. When we sit down for lunch at a long table outside, the meat is lifted from the fig leaves like a Christmas gift, crispy brown on the outside and juicy pink on the inside.

We have no idea where we will be for Christmas – in which country, or even on which continent – which is exactly why this early gift tastes as precious as the gold, frankincense and myrrh of the Three Wise Men sounded to me