You Give God a Bad Name [Part 1]



This morning we visited my brother-in-law in the physical rehabilitation centre where he has spent the last few months lying flat on his back. Before that he lay flat on his back in Tygerberg since the beginning of the year, unable to move as much as a finger to scratch an itch. I wiped his eyes, I shaved his hair, I learnt more about administering physiotherapy than I'd ever wanted to know, I felt compassion for someone trapped inside a body that had become a coffin.

Guillain-Barré is a bitch.

So is a tumour the size of Kimberley's Big Hole in one's chest, from nipple to nipple, reaching right down into the breastbone. My husband says it's like staring straight into hell, to look at the eruption of flesh in his brother's chest. Between the two of us we've christened it The Crater. It is the result of neglecting a simple mole.

For ten years.

Tomorrow, a bit more mobile but with his recovery from Guillain-Barré now being hampered by the open tumour, Anton will go to Groote Schuur to start radiation treatment. I hope they've got some powerful rays. They'll have to reach right down into the abyss without frying his lungs or his heart.

Let me tell you a bit about my husband's boet. A man of science, the only one in the family to attend university, he left his beloved Rhodes in the seventies with a degree in Botany and Zoology and an unfortunate marijuana habit. A conscientious objector at a time when choosing not to go to the army still held some truly unpleasant consequences. A husband, a father, an adventurer. A brave man, who loved the sea and was happiest when fishing or gardening. A thinking man.

Anton worked at the JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology when I met the family and we'd stay with them for the Grahamstown Festival each year. It was a heady time of immersing ourselves in Glühwein and academia and what I used to call "art movies" back then and of gawking at the display of subcultures (hey, I came from De Aar, ek was aan niks gewoond nie and I used to think the Goths were Satanists until I met one and learnt they were harmless; Anton called them Cupboard Kids on account of their pale appearance). The two brothers would spend a lot of time talking and fishing and talking about fishing. In short, Anton was part of the unshackling of my mind. I admired his erudition and his passion for natural things, his extensive knowledge of trees and plants and the effortless way he shared what he knew. And his hair. How shallow of me to remember his long, auburn curls twenty years later.

The cracks were already apparent though. The drinking had a desperation to it; his marriage failed, his family split apart. We saw less and less of him and when we did, the brothers argued to the extent that we booked into a room at the Osner Hotel when visiting East London. Anton had found religion, you see. By that time he was living alone in Mdantsane where he ran a seedling nursery for the municipality. Not much later, the funding for the project would dry up and he would stay on at the house in the township because it was free. But it was not safe and he became more and more isolated from family and friends.

While Leon grew increasingly intolerant of Anton's religious convictions I practiced the "live and let live" philosophy that I adhered to until this morning. The brothers grew apart. Anton was convinced that God would heal his tumour without medical intervention. When healing was not forthcoming it was because his faith was not strong enough. He drank a bottle of whiskey a day and killed off his beautiful brain cells with ganja, self-medicating while waiting for God to do something about the by now massive tumour.

His children stopped visiting the house in the township because he lived in filth. He aged so much that strangers would mistake him for his octogenarian mother's partner when they were seen together as he was unrecognisable as her son. His teeth rotted and fell out. He could not walk far. He stopped speaking to his sister for two years because she insisted he get medical treatment. The tumour bled through his shirts. He carried its stench everywhere with him. Still he believed he would live forever, because Allen Wilson said so.

Part 2 to follow

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