Bloodlines (12 page)

“Mandla Mkhize asked me to say to you that he was at the demonstration, as planned—but he was not hurt, and he managed to get away before the police began rounding people up. So the first message is that he is safe. And the second is that he wants to meet tomorrow at the usual place.”

“What usual place?” I asked.

There was silence as he recognized that he had made a huge error and delivered a message to the wrong person. Then he hung up.

I must have been an idiot, because I still didn’t understand the message, and for another moment, I didn’t get what it implied. As I lowered the phone I looked up at Michaela, puzzled, thinking that together we might be able to decipher what it meant.

“What do you think he’s talking about?” I asked. “What usual place?”

She stood across the room from me, one hand covering her open mouth. Without answering me, she rushed from the room. Then I understood.

That moment is embedded in my flesh like a razor. Outside the window there was a willow tree, and the late afternoon sun shone through the glass at an angle that gave the light in the room a warm, greenish hue, as if we were underwater. Your mother wore a light brown skirt and a soft, beige blouse, and as she ran past me I smelled her perfume—an almost undetectable fragrance of gardenia—and it mixed with her skin in a way that made it her personal scent. Until that moment I thought I was the only man in the world who could smell that fragrance and know what it was to make love to the woman whose body created it.

After she rushed by me, all I could do was to stand there. You were five, Steven, sitting on the Persian rug, playing with a set of big wooden blocks. They were white—the carved letters were royal blue, and the numbers were red. You loved those blocks.

We never discussed it again. I don’t know for sure what ‘the usual place’ was, and I don’t know whether she went to him the next day as he asked. But Sharpeville put the country at war with itself; and that telephone call changed my life, and yours, Steven. It wounded our family and devastated me—and for the first time, it crossed my mind that perhaps we should cut our losses and leave while there was still something to save. I don’t know whether your mother would have come with us had I asked her, but I was too paralyzed to act. I waited too long; events overtook us. By the time I did decide to leave the country it was too late, and forgiveness was long beyond me.

I have no doubt you and he will eventually meet. He will tell you much that I’m not capable of sharing with you, and much that I don’t know, and he can shed light on events that occurred both before we left South Africa, and after we arrived in Boston. I believe you knew him as a child; you may have met several times, although I was never present. I didn’t learn until much later that your mother had taken you to see him. He is a charming man. You will like him.

When the occasion presents itself, I have a message for you to give him.

Tell him I want to set the record straight—that I long ago forgave him for what he might have done; that I hold him responsible for nothing. He did not then, and does not now, have the power to put a sour taste in my mouth or bitterness in my heart. I’ve always been the only one capable of that. If I taste sourness and choke on bile as I die, they are the recognition that I am less a man than I would have liked to be. I’ve been unable to live up to the standards I set for myself; unwilling to honor the truth that is the underpinning of all we did and all we risked to make South Africa a free country. I’ve had to live with that truth and with its consequences for over forty years.

Tell him I said perhaps it’s a good thing my dying is happening now, because if South Africa were to ever become the paradise it can be, I would not be fit to live there. I leave it to the next generation, and to the one after that, to discover what has become of the place I left. And when you do finally get there, you will discover precisely what it was that Mandla did or didn’t do. Perhaps you, too, will find it in your heart to forgive him.

.

five

S
TEVEN

Boston, 2001

I
was curious, but I wanted to read my father’s manuscript quickly, deal with whatever it was he needed to tell me, and then shake the emotional baggage off me like a wet dog and get on with my life.

Dariya knew that it couldn’t possibly be so simple. She understood that my father’s revelations carried more weight than I anticipated, and that if I took it all in at once I would miss half of it and still be left reeling. She suggested gently that we read together, slowly, taking time to discuss and digest each section. She said it would give us time to think about what he had written, and to absorb the emotional impact of whatever he had kept to himself for so long.

As usual, she was right. We began by reading a short section of the manuscript together after dinner, once we’d put the children to bed. We sat at the kitchen table and she read aloud, while I cut and peeled a piece of fruit. When she came to a stopping point we would remain sitting and eat the apple or pear I had sectioned. But after this particular revelation that my mother and Mandla Mkhize had apparently been lovers, I couldn’t remain still, let alone eat.

I rose from the table and loaded the dishwasher in silence; she watched, peering at me from over her reading glasses. As I began washing pots and pans she came to stand beside me, and I handed them to her to dry.

“Are you alright?” she asked finally.

I nodded. “He remembered,” I said.

She glanced in my direction, and I wondered why she put down the dish towel and walked towards me.

“Remembered what?” she asked softly.

She stood before me and took my face in her hands, and as she wiped my cheeks, I realized that the salty taste in my mouth was tears. I wept silently, with no awareness of my grief. I was numb.

“He remembered my blocks,” I said, burying my face in her hair. “And he remembered what they looked like.”

Dariya put her arms about my neck. “I love you,” she said.

“You’re in love with a man who’s over forty, standing here crying about his blocks,” I said. I laughed, and what emerged was a cross between a chuckle and a sob. “What an idiot.”

“Your father remembered that you loved your blocks,” she said, “which I find out of character for him. But you’re not crying about the blocks. You’re crying for a little boy who lost his mother, and a man who lost his wife.”

“My poor father,” I said. “I had no idea.”

“He was carrying a lot all by himself for a long time.”

“I’ve always thought of my mother as an avenging angel; I was angry with her because she died early and left me. I guess she left him, too—long before she was killed.”

“Now we know what he’s been hiding,” she said. “There must be some relief in that for you.”

She took my hand and led me upstairs, and she latched the bedroom door. Still numb, I stood and watched as she quickly undressed herself, and I felt the pink heat coming off her body as she undressed me, pulled back the top sheet and blankets, and led me to the bed. She turned out the lights, and in the darkness she made love to me with her hands and her full, bountiful mouth, and then she straddled me and kissed me with her tongue. Filled with love, and with joy and thankfulness that I had Dariya in my life, I put my hands on the warm rounds of her hips, and we rode gently into the night.

My job was to go about my life, take care of my family, paint my canvases and teach my students, and somehow integrate my mother’s infidelity into my history. I was furious with her—but I kept reminding myself that she was long dead, that I never knew who she really was, and that it was all emotional baggage, sentimental and immature at best. I’d be doing myself a favor if I could empty my head, discard the whole story, and give up on my attachment to a small boy’s fantasy, carried into middle age. It didn’t do much good—everything I painted looked like an angry earth-colored blob, which accurately reflected my state of mind.

Dariya, on the other hand, was ever the good researcher. My father had understood her well, and he was correct in assuming that she would continue her research even as we read his manuscript. Confident that the truth was out in the open, she searched for documentation that supported my father’s version of events. She immersed herself in the periods leading up to and following Sharpeville, but she shared none of her discoveries with me. Dariya’s silence continued for several weeks, during which time I was essentially absent. I was withdrawn and silent, and when I occasionally caught her looking at me intently I glared at her, and she dropped her eyes without saying a word. And then, one weekend at the beginning of Christmas break, she said she had some things to show me.

We rose early—Sally and Greg were up at the crack of dawn, ready to take advantage of every hour of vacation. We ate cereal and cooked scrambled eggs and toast together, and by the time we finished with the breakfast dishes the children were content to leave us for friends and video games. I made a fresh pot of coffee and carried two steaming cups into Dariya’s small office adjoining my studio. Newspaper headlines and articles from old South African newspaper databases lay in a neat pile beside her printer.

“You’ve been busy,” I said as we sat beside each other at her desk.

“Very,” she said. “I have these moments where something your father writes about is confirmed by the historical record, and all of a sudden I’m right there, watching history as it happens.” Her eyes were bright with the adrenalin of discovery, but her movements were flustered and anxious. “I’ve gone through daily newspapers page by page. It was a frightening time, and I understand why he felt such a need to get you out of that environment.”

“Did you find references to my mother?”

“I’ve discovered something, but I’m not sure exactly what it means. Let me show it to you as I found it,” she said, “so you can understand the sequence of events the same way I do, and come to your own conclusions. Okay?”

Dariya flipped quickly through her pile of newsprint. “Sharpeville changed the political climate,” she said. “The government was petrified, and they became even more restrictive than before. Then they put out a warrant for Nelson Mandela’s arrest. He went underground, and the next day they printed a transcript of his statement.”

Dariya pulled out the next article, featuring a picture of the young, bearded Nelson Mandela. It was an impassioned call urging the black population to mobilize their resources, and to withdraw all cooperation from the Nationalist government. It was a call, finally, to make the work of government impossible.

“They forced Mandela underground, and that was the beginning of violent opposition. Then look what happened.”

Dariya placed the articles in front of me one by one, and I read them in silence. Over the following months there was a surge in acts of sabotage. Most were conducted at night, against military and electrical installations, utilities, munitions factories, or police stations. It was clear by the nature of their targets that they were following Mandela’s instructions to make governing impossible.

But the government response was predictable. Minimum punishment for sabotage was raised to five years, and the death penalty was invoked. Some of those responsible were captured and tried; many were imprisoned without trial, executed or disappeared. When I was finished reading, Dariya held one last piece of paper in her hand. She said nothing, but removed all the pages from the desk, and placed this single sheet in front of me.