The Year of Facing Fire - Helena Kriel

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tracks winding its way through a wheat field. The scene looks Russian, Dr Zhivago-ish. The girl could be Lara. There is porcelain garlic in a pyramid and two guitars leaning against the wall. They sing then, the Russian healer and his wife. She makes a brief appearance, is bleached, as though she’s been washed up on shore, clean, like driftwood strewn on a white beach, her eyes sea glass, pale and smooth, rubbed clean by wind and weather, floral skirt hanging to her knees like a tattered flag. Vadim is dark, with the kind of exotic looks I would on an ordinary day be attracted to, Rasputin-esque, and I would have been drawn to his charisma. But not today.

      “His body is here,” he informs me after he has completed his examination and healing. “But his soul, his spirit, what we call his etheric body, is gone. You will have to slowly root him back here again because otherwise it is easy for him to go over to the spirit side.” He stares at me. “What I am saying is it’s easy for him to die.”

      “How do I root him?” I am desperate.

      “Firstly, correct diet.” No sugar, wheat, salt, dairy, no vinegar or tins, no packets, no deadly nightshade, which means no tomato, eggplant or potato and nothing instant; fruit before meals and plenty of grated carrots and beetroot. And hot water and lemon, first thing in the morning. I take it all down and we set up the next appointment. Evan will need to return for healings twice a week.

      “And you!” The Russian looks at me. “For you to root your brother, you need to be rooted yourself. Do you know what I mean by that?”

      I shake my head, my eyes finding Lara on the railway tracks.

      “Take nothing for granted.”

      He brings my eyes back from that Russian wheat field. “When you walk, feel the wind against your face, feel the earth beneath your feet, and smell the air. See the shade that the sun makes. I call it active meditation. While being active, meditate on everything.”

      “I see,” I say. And I do and don’t.

      “You have a very strong energy but it is still underground. You must bring it to the surface and use it.”

      I support my brother as we walk through Vadim’s rainy garden, back to the car. Everything is drip-dropping. The bougainvillea, growing tangled through a jacaranda tree, scatters a pattern of raindrops onto us as we pass underneath. We become spotted. Evan feels light as though made of balsa wood, a model of a boy.

      Each day begins slowly. We need to stabilise Evan, I have told my mother, and we are trying to claim his body back. He loves the garden, my mother says, so our plan is to root him by connecting him to the garden he helped create. He attained his honours in Psychology, then gave it all up. Decided to be a gardener instead. Adam was a gardener, was his reply to my parents’ confusion.

      For a year he worked these two rangy acres. He would arrive, a car full of bulbs and new trees; a jungle in the back of his car, branches poking out of the open windows. He would head straight through the house and be off, weaving through the wild grasses. It didn’t matter if it was raining; he would have his hands in the soil for hours, planting without order, letting the seeds fall randomly so it would look wild and natural. With the digging done, he would walk slowly, hands at his sides, palms gone brown as though made entirely of clay; that Adam out walking, staring into nothing, completely sated.

      And now he can hardly put one foot in front of another, but we manage to get him to the pool so he can sit with his feet in the water. Later it is salad for lunch. I grate the beetroot and carrots he needs into fragile two-tone towers. I turn radishes into flowers and cucumbers into rows of light green moons. Because I don’t have the energy or focus to write, all creativity goes into preparing food. I stand in the kitchen and make my art. And then we sit down to eat. We drizzle my sculpture with lemon juice and we dig in.

      I take Evan to Vadim twice a week. He lies in the treatment room, in the semi-dark house near the zoo. And I sit in the semi-dark living room and look at the porcelain garlic, the guitars, Lara, and wait for him.

      “What do you think?” I ask as we drive home after the fourth treatment. “You feel any difference?”

      “I don’t know. All I do is lie there. He doesn’t do anything.”

      I look over to where he leans against the side of the car door, no energy to even sit up straight or be rebellious about something the old Evan would have had no patience with. Because this isn’t medicine, it isn’t science, it isn’t real! But we’re going along with it, because, well, you never know … The new Ev just goes along with it, because, well, he’ll try anything. At the end of three weeks something seems to be working though because Evan’s body becomes less concave. We do simple things like sitting in the garden and cracking pecan nuts together. It is late summer now and the light is mellow. Rain has made a deep green carpet of the grass. Sometimes we lie down in it.

      CHAPTER 4

      Jungle Beyond the Border

       Vadim directs us to a Buddhist nun.

      We take Evan out to Roodepoort, the other side of the city where the mostly flat land of Johannesburg buckles up into a rocky ridge.

      My mother drives. “You know there are black eagles in the Roodepoort Ridge?”

      I sit in the passenger seat, window open, my arm making snake shapes as we drive. “Yes, you tell me every time.”

      There are white beggars at all the lights, toothless, leathered from highveld sun, their skin hanging in folds, hacking out some meagre life. This is new. There were never white beggars before, but South Africa is a country in transition. The ANC is in power and we have democracy now. It is twenty years since the black students walked from their schools in Soweto, across the smoky township, to protest having to take their exams in Afrikaans, the “language of the oppressor”. The riots that followed intensified the country’s march to end apartheid, with innocent black students who – on the instructions of their teachers – had intended to be peaceful and respectful, waving placards above their heads: Down with Afrikaans, making their peaceful way, singing, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, God Bless Africa. But they encountered the South African Police in their massive metal tanks, like they were lumbering into serious wars with unseen enemies in the thousands, not unarmed school children. They meant business, shouldered automatic rifles, stun guns and gas canisters.

      I was a student then myself, safe in the leafy-green suburbs of South Africa, taking my exams in my own language at a private girls’ school, rising to the level of my potential with nothing in the way of my future; I was going to be a film star and marry Timothy Dalton, who I’d seen smouldering on the moors as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights at least fifteen times at the whites-only cinema, because as a white child growing up in South Africa you could truly imagine and invent your future without anything getting in the way except, perhaps, the vagaries of your own destiny.

      The day the riots started it all seemed remote to us in the northern suburbs of the city. The activities of black students were so far removed, they might as well have been in another country. And their problems, the notion that all the future held for them were jobs as nannies, cooks, gardeners, miners, were not issues we wrestled with, not to speak of having to write exams in a foreign language. But that was the success of apartheid. We were simply kept separate from the rest of our countrymen, detached from their struggles. We sat, listening to my father who stood, just returned from town early, on account of the riots, newspaper in hand, saying: It’s all going to blow up. He could see it coming because he taught teenagers and he knew well the high-octane voltage of being that age. He read the newspaper report on the riots out loud. I imagined those innocent students stopped, to seethe in one big brown body, waiting peacefully and singing God Bless Africa, when a lone shark took a shot; that policeman couldn’t help himself, his hand just squeezed down on the cold trigger. The large simmering brown body broke up into pieces, like shards that explode outwards from a central point, ricocheting in all directions. The students had only stones, which must have simply pinged against the side of the armour of the Casspirs, ineffective as popcorn. All hell

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