Reunion

As she stands there making coffee at the paediatric HIV/AIDS service at the Groote Schuur Hospital, she looks exactly the same she did the last time I’d seen her.

Mara* is still a sturdy woman with braided hair and fiercely intelligent eyes, her skin ravished by the effects of having lived with HIV for a good part of her adult life. Her face still seems tired, drained – a demeanour which seems to have become habitual for her.

She embraces me, then asks whether I’d been overseas. “I gathered you must have been really busy,” she says, frowning ever so slightly.

Looking at my feet, unable to face her, I recall Christmas-time four and a half years ago. I had prepared a turkey for Mara and her family, stuffed with bacon and almonds. My mother and I delivered it to the one-roomed backyard shack in Westlake where Mara lived with her three children and three other relatives.

They thanked us politely, after which we vanished to my parents’ spacious double-storey home in Claremont for our own Christmas Eve celebrations. On that day I closed the door on a relationship that lasted as long as it takes for a child to be conceived and born.

During those nine months I’d experienced the heaven and the hell of journalism: In our jobs we are afforded the rare opportunity to become intimately acquainted with our “subjects”, even if only for the duration of the story.

We become parasites to their most personal longings and fears, and then we remove them surgically from our hearts. We try to block them from our dreams and we forget their faces when they cry, as we move on to other stories and other people. If I had to house everyone I’d ever written about in my life, my heart would become a pretty crowded place.

But maybe this was different. In Mara’s case we became permanent fixtures in that crowded shack, which we sometimes visited up to once a week. Mara and her daughter Nora (she was 13 at the time) spoke to me about the “dragon” in their blood and how Nora had only found out she’s HIV positive by the age of 11. I spoke to Mara about her husband’s constant abuse and infidelities; about how peaceful he finally looked in death.

“Every time I see the body of a relative, I wish it was me lying in that coffin,” she said, her features gently caressed by the autumn sun.

And then Mara’s eldest daughter Rose (16 at the time) fell pregnant and claimed she was raped. Her mother’s greatest worry was that she had exposed herself to HIV. After the abortion I joined them at the Victoria Hospital in Wynberg. The theatre where the seven weeks old foetus had to be sucked from her was only metres away from where her father had died. During the procedure she screamed so much that Mara had to hold her down. Afterwards we went to my mother’s house for butternut soup. Rose stayed in the bath for more than an hour.

Before and after the abortion I also accompanied Rose to two HIV tests. The first time I had myself tested as well. “If we bleed together, it will not be so bad,” I said. The second test was just before Christmas. The leaves on the trees were green again, and there was a sense of expectation in the air. She almost jumped as she burst through the door of the clinic’s waiting room. Breathlessly she she told me she was negative.

I took her to celebrate with a milkshake at the Spur and felt blessed to be able to share that moment with her. For Rose a friendship was sealed.

But then I finished the story, took them the turkey and managed to secure a bursary for Rose which in the end lasted only a year. From time to time Rose would still SMS me, angry at blows life had dealt her, at times perhaps also angry with me. Finally, after about a year, she gave up thinking that we would go for a milkshake again. I had been just as unreliable as her father who had died.

And now Mara and I are facing each other in the cafeteria at Groote Schuur Hospital. Softly she tells me that Nora (now 18) has also had an abortion and Rose (21) is in her final year of studying financial accounting. Awkwardly we eat our carrot cake and sip our tea. “Rose has stopped asking about you,” she says.

I tell her about the new story I am working on – about why men sometimes leave when their female partners disclose. Briefly I think of enlisting her help, but then I abandon the idea.

I greet, saying we should all get together for butternut soup at my mother’s house again. She looks at me knowingly and says nothing. Eventually we hug somewhat awkwardly.

“Go well,” she says.

Willemien Brümmer is a fellow with the HIV/AIDS and the Media Project.