LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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