I had a friend called Frederik. He was not what I would call a close friend, just a man I knew who did motor car repairs and service for Miriam and me when our car needed attention. The amounts he charged for working on our car were modest and the work was always well done.
He had a live-in girlfriend who was sometimes present while he was working, passing spanners, cleaning parts and that sort of thing. In between she did car-guarding at a local supermarket. They lived in a wooden shack on a plot and spent most of every day in the bushveld sun and so both were burnt a rich brown colour.
They were not the sort of people to whom things came easily. Having grown up on the plots they did not expect a great deal from life. So, it was not specially a surprise when Frederik was involved in a road accident. His injuries were serious, one leg being badly damaged and disfigured and his stomach torn loose from his body.
A decision was made at the public hospital where he had been admitted that he was most likely going to die so there was no point in immediate surgery. The result was that he lay for a few days while the staff wondered if he was going to survive. One hopes they did not take bets on it.
Frederik refused to die. So eventually the doctors patched up his wounds. The entire mass of his intestines now hung in a bulge outside the normal framework of his body. His leg was held together by steel pins. And that is how he was discharged. He was told that he would have to return for an operation to put his innards back where they belonged and another to remove the steel pins. They would call him when they had space.
A few months later the pins were removed, leaving wounds on which maggots gathered, but the stomach stayed as it was. Because it seemed impossible that his intestines could remain that way without support, we gave him an old back brace that he wore back-to-front to counteract the force of gravity on his stomach.
He had been visited in hospital by an attorney who said he would get him four million rands from the accident fund, if Frederik just signed. This was wonderful news, the proverbial ship coming in. He signed.
Frederik had no income other than what he made from car repairs, so he went straight back to work regardless of the pain and discomfort in his gut that was always getting in the way.
He started making plans for the four million. He would buy his own plot. He had been renting before that. He was going to build a workshop and a brick house. He and his girlfriend would live in a brick house and he would not have to work outside in the sun anymore.
From time to time over the next three years he contacted the hospital and each time was told that they would call him when they were ready for him. In the third year since his accident, the day came when his innards, hanging in such an impossible way, gave in and he began haemorrhaging. He lived for a few more days before his brave heart stopped beating. He was still waiting for his operation and for the four million he had been promised.
It is to me personally, a measure of the state of our country that in the last two years, two of my friends have died violently. The noted journalist Jeremy Gordin was stabbed to death in his home by intruders. Frederik was killed by the negligence of doctors in a public health facility.
As for his girlfriend, she is a child of the plots, a tough kid who will find a way to survive without him. She may be a bit bewildered by the country in which she lives. But then so am I.
