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She switched to M-Net, the twenty-four-hour movie channel, and swallowed the
other half of her sleeping pill. Her thoughts drifted uneasily to Stefan.
She'd been tempted to call him from JFK to tell him she was flying to South
Africa. A need for earnest, decent Stefan to say, "That's great, Eva. You're
going home." But she still felt ashamed of the way she'd behaved with him.
She'd met him in the summer of 1991 on the set of a TV commercial where she
was working as a gofer. De Klerk had released Mandela from Pollsmoor Prison the
year before, and to say you were a South African was to be an ambassador of
hope. No longer a pariah, you were now a desired guest at parties, where you
were supposed to speak eloquently about the struggle, to tear up and talk about
the walk from the darkness into the light. But Eva didn't reveal her nationality
to Stefan right away; she mumbled her usual nonsense about New Zealand and had
to field several questions concerning fjords and sheep.
They began seeing each other, Stefan patiently pursuing, Eva feeling
squirrelly about it all. He worked as a part-time set painter and photographed
New York with a pinhole camera. He also took photographs of Eva. The
transformation of her face into an eerie poltergeist-like blur appealed to her,
and soon she had more than a dozen of them taped to her refrigerator.
"I should have one for my passport photo," she joked one August afternoon
after they'd idly been discussing traveling somewhere together. They'd just made
love, and she stood naked in front of the refrigerator, trying to pry a tray of
ice cubes from the depths of her frost-blocked freezer.
"So let's see your passport," Stefan replied.
She turned, the cool air a blessing on her back, and studied him. He hadn't
put his glasses on, so she knew he couldn't see her. He was unassuming and so
terribly kind and polite, like Neels, and she was tired of lying and feeling so
lonely. Abandoning her quest for ice, she dug her passport out of a drawer and
handed it to him with his glass of cool water from the tap.
"South Africa? But you come from New Zealand."
"I lied."
"Why? What's happening in your country is astonishing. When I saw Mandela
walk out of that prison -- "
Eva was stunned; sensitive Stefan had tears in his eyes. The tears she was
supposed to have. She pulled on her panties. "You don't know what it was like in
the late eighties. When I first arrived in the city, a Jamaican threw me out of
his cab after I told him I was a South African."
Stefan patted the bed. "But you don't have to lie about it anymore."
Reluctantly, she sat beside him.
"Tell me something, Eva van Rensburg. Anything."
It was the hour when sunlight graced her studio apartment. Sparrows were
hopping through the ginkgo tree outside her window and her neighbor had the
baseball game on his TV.
"I grew up on a farm," she said.
Within the week, Stefan bought a copy of Cry, the Beloved Country and carried
it in his backpack. Alarmed by his growing passion for all things South African,
Eva told him that she was not interested in politics, or discussing her
childhood. But often, after making love, she'd stare out her window at the
yellowing leaves of the ginkgo tree, the sleet, and tell him about life on
Skinner's Drift. The day she was riding her horse and came across a huge knot of
python uncurling in the morning sun, the Limpopo running muddy and strong after
summer storms.
It was Stefan who told Eva that expatriate South Africans, even those holding
foreign passports, "Even Kiwis like you," could go to the UN and vote in the
country's first democratic election. He urged her to go and she did. And she
lied, telling him how wonderful it was to cast her vote when in truth she'd felt
too ashamed, too filthy to join the line, and she'd fled to a bar and ended up
in a stranger's bed. Soon after that, in a wash of self-loathing, Eva broke up
with him.
Copyright © 2006 by Lisa Fugard. reproduced by permission of the publisher, Scribner.
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