Evan had hardly ever been in a synagogue but he went every morning and, suddenly moved by his ancient lineage, also began to study. Rabbi Berl saw the intelligence, the receptivity, and Evan became his protégé. Sitting here in the hospital ward, I realise that Evan must have been a serious student because he understood the value of using time. It took a year and my brother became passionate about the religion into which he had been born. He understood that the core tenets were to be a person with a kind heart, one who had self-respect and gave charity and organised their life around good deeds. And so he started to do this. There was his life before his diagnosis as HIV positive, and then the life after. Instead of going to clubs, dancing all night at Mandy’s, Evan went to halfway homes and volunteered to work with schizophrenics. When he started teaching he gave most of what he earned to charity. He met Dietmar and left off all other social activity. It was the early days in the AIDS epidemic. Little was known about the illness, but people were dying from it. Evan must have known suddenly that everything about his life had changed and that time – the one thing he had taken for granted – was limited. He was only nineteen and already he was mortal.
It is late Friday afternoon so Rabbi Berl has arrived with a candle, some bread and wine and a prayer book. He is going to do the Sabbath rituals with my brother. He places the covered bread and wine down on the table beside the apple martini teddy. “How are you, Evan?”
“I am feeling better.” His voice is so weak as to be almost inaudible.
“Thank God.”
“Rabbi, do you know Evan’s friend Dietmar?” I ask.
Rabbi Berl looks at Dietmar but does not acknowledge him, turns his back as he prepares the candles and asks me to light them.
I do this and the two candles burn in an affable manner on the table beside my brother. They turn this antiseptic place into something ceremonial. Rabbi Berl recites the prayers over the wine and bread. We sit silently and eat our bread. Dietmar does so slowly and with respect, large head bowed over the plaited hunk, thick fingers slowly breaking it apart, tattoos, the old-fashioned type: bare-chested men in dark blue ink, snake up his forearms and into his black shirtsleeves. It is an incongruous sight, this boilermaker from Germany breaking Sabbath bread with a rabbi, in a hospital ward in South Africa, a green teddy bear propped up against the wall. Flames from the candles are slow orange tongues in the dusk that ushers us towards night.
I drive home. It is Friday night and Johannesburg has that weekend energy. I take it in, this city of my birth. It is eclectic, aberrant, and blends into a sprawling mass of first and third worlds, and vital, even though all the houses are fenced in and patrolled. By day, it seems that almost every corner is under construction, with embankments of cranes sticking tall necks over building sites like giraffes, red craters everywhere, with labourers in bright yellow, digging. There is never an end to digging because apartheid is finally over, sanctions repealed and the world is investing in South Africa. Life here is unexpected. Nothing follows identifiable rules, so one never really knows where an afternoon will end, which makes it perpetually edgy, dangerous, vital, colourful, and unformed. The city is still shaping itself. It is early yet on creation day in Johannesburg, South Africa.
I drive with the windows rolled up. I am streetwise because, regardless of where you are in the city, you could be hijacked – gun to the head and get out of the car, left standing at the side of the road if you’re lucky or bleeding by the curb if you’re not, or in a box if you’re super unlucky, another statistic, a life reduced to a number in a file. In Joburg, one has to be aware, no diamonds, no pearls, no expensive timepieces or sunglasses and then you are safe – safe until you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then all bets are off. We have enough gambles with death going on, so I play by the rules and drive with the windows up as I head home through the tree-lined streets.
The house is in Sabbath candlelight and I open the door to the smell of freshly baked bread and roasted vegetables. My mother is dressed in a loose white Indian outfit and sitting outside in the courtyard by the fishpond, keeping an eye out for the moon, which will be just past new tonight.
“How is he?” she asks.
“Still weak, but he ate, and he managed to sit up. Rabbi Berl was there, and we did the prayers.”
I bend down to stare into the water. The goldfish cruise below the surface like slow ingots. We sit as the moon rises behind the hollow, knuckled, giant bamboo.
“Dietmar was there too.” I broach the subject and brace myself.
“Dietmar!” The name explodes out of my mother, like that alien in the movie that was suddenly born from the astronaut’s chest. “What was Dietmar doing there?”
I tread carefully. “He knew Evan was sick. He flew out from Germany.”
“I hope he didn’t smoke in the ward!” My mother is seething. “For God’s sake! Evan nearly died. I don’t want anyone smoking near him!”
“He went outside to smoke.”
“Bloody smokers. They’ll smoke on top of all of us. They don’t care. They don’t care if they give us their second-hand smoke and we all die.”
My father’s incessant smoking, his three packs of Camels a day, was the cause of endless fighting, his smoking in the car, in the study, in the passageways. Under duress, he pretended he had given up his Camel plains but he would blow his smoke out of the study window into the dark garden at the same time that I was exhaling the smoke from my furtive joints. We were visible to one another out of the windows of the L-shaped house, blowing our forbidden smoke into the garden.
My mother is fulminating. “Now we have Dietmar!”
I have to allow her this irritation, for her offspring have not been known for their good taste or reason when it comes to partners. I have specialised in men with pathologies: not attractive to me unless they come fully loaded with a narcissistic personality disorder or the undeniable charm, the charisma that accompanies sociopaths. My sister’s specialty has been drug addicts: don’t apply unless you are successful and have some addiction, usually cocaine. Her men have been cruel, rich and good-looking. Mine have been actor-artist types: struggling and good-looking. Clearly, we value looks. Men must be like a good pair of Italian shoes: nice to be seen out in. Wrong values, my mother says. Where did you get these wrong values? My sister, fried on material life, finally gave up her drug-dealing boyfriends and moved into a temple, to live a pure and sanctified life. She married a South African Indian devotee. With their one-year-old child they live in India now.
However, it is Evan’s choice of a mate that is the subject tonight.
“Do you know what Evan’s IQ is?” my mother asks as we sit outside watching the fish. “Over a hundred and fifty! He teaches English. He volunteers. He gives all his money away to charity. He’s refined, sophisticated. He plays the piano; he reads Dickens and Dostoyevsky and who is his boyfriend? A plumber!”
“Dietmar has stood by him,” I volunteer lamely. “That counts, you know.”
“Yes! Because his choices are entirely compromised. Do you know that he is on the list of the first twenty people with HIV in this country? Did you know that? Diagnosed at nineteen. Can you imagine? He cried when he found out he had HIV. And when your father found out he had lung cancer in the same week, we went out to eat, all of us and, sitting in the restaurant, we were laughing and crying. And now your father is dead and Evan is sick, and committed to a boilermaker, with no education, no upbringing and no breeding. I don’t know what they talk about!”
She’s on a rampage;