Because I Couldn't Kill You - Kelly-Eve Koopman

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kerksaal tea. My mother connected with the mutual friends and family members who do not avoid her. And overheard my grandmother, in response to the genially masked question, ‘Where is Andre?’, explain to the assembled collection of vultures and extended family that my father had ‘gone overseas’. A holiday. A long business trip. A business trip meets holiday, somewhere nice. Only the First World or a tropical paradise for the prodigal son. My mother understood this to be her cue to leave. She, functional responsible adult, single earner, the mother of his children, was a liability, a messy reminder of a dark and fatalistic reality. We do not really speak to this particular cross-section of my father’s kin and co-conspirators anymore. When my mother divorced my father, when we started cautiously acknowledging his madness, his abuse, instead of moving closer to us they moved further away, as if we were tainted. My mother has been denied her pain too many times over. It’s no new story. Men are exiled to tropical islands and women must stay behind to be ignored or become punching bags for skinner and ill repute.

      My mother tells me this story about the funeral gossipers with incredulity, with disdain even, but without any visible evidence of rage. We’ve been speaking about it a lot lately, my mommy and I. Now that it has become clear that he is missing. Definitely not ‘overseas’. Sarah again generously has offered to help me track him down. To visit the homeless shelters and institutions, to fill in police paperwork, to prepare for the emotional damages of the process, to prepare for the myriad possible devastations of whatever we might find. ‘We’ makes it easier. The way she loves me is bold and in resistance to artifice, it requires emotional excavation, the revealing of both the beautiful and the vile. It is a life-altering and terrifying kind of love.

      Coincidentally (or not), during this period, a little while after the funeral I receive the hero’s call to action. My uncle, my father’s brother, a kind man who I haven’t seen in many years – the same uncle who is mourning the untimely death of his son – sends me a WhatsApp. ‘I am worried about your dad. Haven’t seen or heard from him in over a year. Don’t know if I must report him missing. Any advice from your side?’ I don’t know. To seek or not to seek. To go chasing after ghosts. What you seek is seeking you.

      There is nothing about my father that can be simply answered. As much as I resent the families I come from for covering our deepest wounds with the gauze of convenient truths, I understand the complexities and vacancies the name of my father invokes. On those days I think about him too much, a lot of what I come up with is fog and mist, a deluge of murky questions. What is wrong with Andre? This is the one that has been wedged in the silences we preserve between us. Schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder? A toxic sense of self-importance? An accumulated compendium of trauma and disjointed dreams that simply jammed the system? Also, why have the adults never set aside the protection of their own virtues and driven him to a mental institution, instead of harbouring a dangerous fugitive from sanity in a musty room? It would have saved everyone a lot of pain. But people have different ways of loving, and surely as an entire nation we are only now learning the dangers of forever living in hope.

      There are always the questions. Who was he truly? What was wrong with him? Was he in the MK? Or was this a rumour? Nobody was sure. A skilled fighter, it seemed that he knew his way around weapons and vice grips and he certainly had the ideology down. He was always ready for the thief in the night, the assassin, the external threat, the markers of PTSD as distinctive as indelible Purple Rain. Once, I guess I was about nine years old, we were on holiday at Club Mykonos on the West Coast, the imitation Greek village that is ubiquitous of Middle-Class Coloured Kids. We were carrying our bags up to our newly clean chalets. It was a little after dark and there was not much light in the faux fishing town. Andre, my father, at this point could still leave the house. I came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder to ask a question. I used to think he was the cleverest person on the planet.

      He whirled around in boxing stance, ready, heavy hand thrust out to be aimed at an assailant’s throat. I was still smallish, at least not thug- or assassin-sized. I dodged and the blow went just over the top of my head. He cried out when he made out the shape of me in the dark. Daughter not enemy. Later on, these lines became much more blurred, he believed we were all, children included, implicated in the insidious plot against him. ‘Don’t ever sneak up on me again,’ he said. ‘I could have killed you.’ Thinking back, this was perhaps an overly dramatic line, pumped up by the ego men attach to their physical strength, but it stayed with me. ‘I could have killed you.’

      I remember the hand-inked tattoo on his wrist, I think it said MK like a token of remembrance. But it could have said AK, his initials, or the gun symbolising the anti-Apartheid struggle, which he promised me he would one day teach me to shoot. I can’t shoot an AK47, or any gun for that matter – I’d be a useless cadre in the revolution. My military training is only one of many discarded promises. He also did not teach me to ride a bike.

      After a certain age I learned to stay clear of my father’s hands. But then again he was martial arts trained since childhood and had a reputation for adept physical violence. Always in resistance, in the pursuit of a noble cause. The mythology of this ‘necessary’ violence gifted him with a manly corporeal reputation that followed him around like a peacock’s plume. Except when it cost him his job. Allegedly he had lifted his editor by the lapels and thrown him across the room. (My father was a journalist at the time.) The violence followed him around like a black mark, like phosphoric ink. But when he started beating on my mother, comrade, lover, there was very little nobility in that. That was something nobody liked to talk about and so it went, if not directly opposed, uncelebrated.

      His is an ordinary story. As much as he would like to, he will never go down as a hero. My mother was a teacher, my father, a journalist – two of the thousands and thousands of everyday people who would lay down their lives for the struggle for justice. He was an ordinary man and a weak man with a broken heart and a bruised ego. I believe he felt unjustly deprived of the iconography we bequeath to our favourite freedom fighters. The statues and street names that erase inconvenient details like wife-beating and family abandonment. Gilded histories that wax the past lyrical and solidify a solid gold future. Far from a back room of a suburban house filled with overflowing ashtrays, mouldy paperbacks and PTSD.

      There are only more questions now. New ones. Old ones. Where is he now? Is he alive? Why do I feel this responsibility to hold on to him, to preserve him in my personal history, perhaps as compensation for his erasure from the larger histories? Am I scared he will be completely forgotten? Do I feel sorry for him that he is alone and unloved? Does he deserve anything from me, even my pity? And how do I know if what I am seeking deserves the onerous effort of the search?

      CHAPTER 2

      Scavenger hunt

      This is the part where I must go searching for clues. Start a private investigation, to figure out the evidence, to make the map, intrepid, idealistic. I think of the books of my early childhood. The Famous Five, Harriet the Spy, stories about kids going on uncanny escapades, armed with pens, notebooks, an attitude for high jinks and Blyton’s iconic lunches of hard-boiled eggs and lemonade. Beautiful stories that are easy to grow out of and not because the stories are dated, but because the characters don’t fit anymore. Now there are bogs and quagmires and swamps that cannot be navigated with the help of a good pair of sneakers and a healthy picnic lunch.

      I will start searching for you, placing together the symbols and signs, the markings and droppings, the jumbled evidence of you. Step one of the hero’s journey, according to the canon, is to search. I do not have to look far. Although I have tried my best to erase you, to forget, this has been a pathetic assassination attempt on memory, a botched exile of the heart.

      There is no need for trawling through the bars, or homeless shelters, mental institutions or morgues. There is no need for a dead body. Or for a body of any kind. I can’t forget you. I understand the concept of being triggered but you are more like a landmine. I am a young adult, I am cultivating my own life; you are not a part of it. But the memories of you detonate all the time these days, abrupt and explosive. You make yourself known all around me, everywhere, inappropriately, inconveniently – in the dead giants behind the glass cages of a museum, in the worn-out titles of many much-loved

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