Bloodlines (14 page)

“I’ll do my best to keep you out of jail, Mr. Green. But your son deserves more than this from you, and so does your lovely wife. She may be misguided and easily misled, but if you can’t stand up to defend her honor and let her know how much she means to you, you don’t deserve her. And by her own actions, it’s obvious to me that she feels the same way.” Then he walked out with the other members of the Special Branch. All I could wonder was whether I hadn’t fought hard enough for your mother’s love.

Michaela was arrested early that morning, and she was held in a cell at Marshall Square, the main prison in Johannesburg. They could have kept her for an extended period without letting anyone know. But in their own minds they were lenient—they allowed her to call me at home the next day, from a public phone in the prison. I could barely hear her over the sounds echoing down the corridor behind her, and she spoke in a small, scared voice, which didn’t make it any easier.

“I’m so sorry, Lenny,” she said.

“I’m sorry, too,” I said. “But it’s much too late for sorry.”

There was a long silence. I didn’t know how to end it, so I spoke what was most on my mind. “Viljoen came to see me,” I said. “I couldn’t give him any information, being completely in the dark about what you were up to.”

She said nothing.

“He said a man who really loved you, and a father who deserved Steven, would have been strong enough to protect you from yourself. Was he right? Could I have done anything to stop you from turning our lives and our marriage to shit?”

I could hear her weeping over the phone. Aside from the guilt she felt over what this would all do to you, Steven, there had already been sabotage cases where people were sentenced to death, and she was terrified. I had to overcome my anger and tell her not to worry about us; that we’d manage. She never did respond to my question—but then, I probably wouldn’t have liked her answer, whatever it was.

Our lawyer went to see her—he called me later and told me that she was being treated as well as could be expected. He said the police thought they had a strong case—that’s why they were willing to divulge the fact that they had her in custody. They had nothing to gain by putting her through a lengthy interrogation.

Within days the news was out, and I knew very quickly who our real friends were. Some dropped us like hot stones. Others didn’t drop us so quickly, but they thought they had a right to criticize, or to condemn outright what she had done. One of my senior partners told me that the whole incident reflected very badly on our firm, and he suggested that I should have kept a tighter rein on my wife, the way he did on his. Very few people I knew believed the sexual charge was legitimate, but if it was, no one I knew condoned it. The few who shared, or at least understood our political objectives, rallied around us.

The government wanted to put a rapid stop to the acts of sabotage, and the prosecution was very efficient. The court wasted no time. They brought your mother to trial within a week, and it lasted all of two days. There were eyewitnesses to the sabotage, evidence that both your mother and Mandla had planned it, and at least one photograph of them in bed together, taken through the window of the farmhouse just before the arrest. And that was it. She was sentenced to ten years in prison—and I had to decide how and where I was going to raise you, and what to do with my life.

Your mother was supposed to be transferred from Marshall Square to the women’s prison the morning after sentencing, but she never arrived. I was convinced that the police killed her; they accused me of having been involved in her escape. They kept our house under surveillance, shadowed me from morning to night, and for weeks I had no idea what happened to her.

Then one day about two months later, I was in charge of the engineering plans for repairing a railroad bridge at an isolated site in the
veld
about two hundred miles south of Johannesburg. The foreman said one of the workers had found some cracks in the support pillars at the bottom of the ravine. He wanted me to come down and see if they were just surface cracks, or if they weakened the structure.

I climbed down the side of the ravine with him, a tall, heavy set Zulu man old enough to be my father, in a torn overall, shabby and stained, covered with rock dust. His head was shaved, and he had a thin, carefully shaped salt and pepper mustache. He carried himself with easy confidence, and he reminded me of Mandla. I found myself becoming angry as we slid down the side of the ravine.

“This better not be for nothing,” I warned. “I don’t have time to waste.”

“Yes,
baas
,” he said loudly, turning to look up at me. There was mockery in his voice, and a wide grin on his face, and when he smiled, his mustache disappeared. Then the smile disappeared, too, I looked into his eyes, and I knew that he was not what he appeared to be. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped to a low murmur.

“Just do as I say, Lenny. When we get to the bottom, for the benefit of anyone watching, I will point to a crack at the base of the pillar. While I’m talking, you follow my hand as I point upward. You understand?”

I was so taken aback by his speech and by his demeanor that I could only nod. Nowhere but in clandestine ANC meetings had I experienced this kind of interchange with a black man. I wondered briefly whether he was here to tell me that your mother was dead, or whether I was about to be killed, and the potential reasons why anyone might want me dead flashed through my mind. I had failed to warn your mother and Mandla when the police came looking for them; they suspected that I had been the one who gave away their location to the police; or perhaps, I thought, this was Mandla’s way of getting rid of me so that he could have your mother to himself. I even wondered if your mother wanted me dead so that she could steal you away and go live with Mandla in some less restrictive place.

When we got to the bottom, we stood together in the shadows at the base of a massive concrete pillar that rose forty feet above us and narrowed at the top where metal support girders emerged and arched widely across the ravine. He pointed to a small surface crack at the concrete base. As he spoke, he followed it up, and when it came to an end at about waist level, he continued to raise his hand, pointing at an imaginary crack that meandered back and forth across the width of the pillar, and rose to disappear into the scaffolding high above our heads.

“I have information for you, Lenny,” he said. “Look at the crack while I speak. You are curious, and concerned—but please show no emotion on your face. You understand?”

I nodded, looking intently at the concrete.

“Good,” he said, and he leaned in to me.

His clothes smelled of sweat and the distinctive smoky odor of burning
veld
grasses, and I found it strangely comforting. He had a rich voice, but he spoke softly, his words urgent and rapid.

“Michaela is safe. I saw her yesterday—she is in good hands. She asks me to tell you that she misses you; that she sends you her love, and her sorrow. She asks that you kiss your son for her.”

I stepped toward the pillar and scratched at the base with a screwdriver, hiding my face from view. When I had my expression under control again, I stepped back and resumed my place beside him.

“Where is she?” I asked. “Is she still here, in the country?”

“I can’t tell you—it would be better for you not to have information the police might extract from you. The government is embarrassed to have the world know that she escaped—but they’re hunting everywhere, so we’re being extra cautious. They suspect that you were involved. Your phone is not safe. You’re being followed, and they watch your office and your house day and night. The police are also keeping an eye on your son.”

“Steven? What for?”

“They think Michaela might come for him. Guard him carefully, but tell him nothing. If the Special Branch finds an opportunity, they will isolate and question him.”

That was all. He told me nothing else; said that he was in danger by merely being there; wouldn’t let me know where or when I could see your mother. As soon as it was safe, he said, they would get another message to me. Then we climbed back up the ravine, and he disappeared. In the weeks that followed I searched eagerly for him in the desperate hope that he might have news for me, but he was gone. He would never have revealed his real name, and I never learned who he was.

It was common knowledge in the community that your mother had been convicted, and the children at school with you all knew what she had done. They taunted you about your mother being a convict and a terrorist—and worse, there were lurid stories going around about her having been caught in bed with a black man. They said your mother was a
kaffirboetie
—the closest translation is nigger-lover; and they joked that your real father was a black terrorist.

I’m sure you didn’t understand any of it—and neither did your classmates. But you didn’t have to understand it in order to know that it was a terrible thing. As for me, at work I was suspect; my colleagues knew that I was being followed, and the senior partners were leery of the attention I was drawing. The police could have picked me up and put me away for ninety days at a time—and then where would you have been? Our lives had become intolerable, and it was clear that we needed a new start.

Slowly, I began to tease out the possibilities, discovering where I might be welcome. My advanced degree in engineering and a fair amount of experience in the narrow area of railway system bridge maintenance, made me employable all over the world. I wrote to people I knew in Boston, in Houston, in San Francisco; spoke to colleagues who had left the country and were working at engineering firms, or teaching in universities.

MIT was expanding their Graduate School of Engineering, and I submitted an application. They offered me an Assistant Professorship. It was more, and faster, than I had expected, and it forced me to rethink what had happened to our lives. I realized that any love I might still feel for your mother was wasted on her. She had gone too far; pushed my tolerance beyond its limits. I was done. And before we left, I wanted to let her know that we were through. But she still hadn’t made any attempt to contact me.

Wherever I went I kept looking for the man who had taken me down the ravine; I was constantly on the watch for new faces, or for eye contact that might indicate a message was coming. When someone brushed up against me or touched my elbow in the street I searched my clothing in the hope that a note might have been quietly slipped into a pocket. At home, or in the office, whenever the phone rang, my heart jumped in anticipation of hearing your mother’s voice on the other end. But there was nothing.

About a month after your mother disappeared, your headmaster, Mr. van Rensberg, called me one evening. He suggested strongly that I be present at a meeting in his office the next day. The meeting had been called by Miss Coetzee, your teacher, and she demanded that an officer from the Special Branch be present. Mr.van Rensberg was very uncomfortable—said he had no idea what the agenda was, but suggested that since there would be a member of the Special Branch there, and considering our current family circumstances, it might be wise if I were to consult my attorney.