Bloodlines (62 page)

We spent two days with Khabazela and his family. He wanted to show us the house I had grown up in. I had little interest, but Dariya insisted.

“The children will never have the opportunity to see where I came from,” she said, “but it’s nice they can have a picture of your history. It will mean a lot to them as they get older. And for me,” she said, “seeing where you grew up adds to the impact of what your parents wrote. I think we should go.”

So he drove us by the house my parents and I had lived in, and we went into the parking lot of the elementary school where Miss Coetzee and I threw marbles at a brick wall. I remembered none of it, but the children were delighted. On our final day, we stopped outside the home my mother had grown up in, where my grandfather Samuel had his dental office. He showed us the garage where my mother had parked her father’s car, covered in his blood, and pointed to the kitchen, where my grandfather had removed a bullet from his thigh on the kitchen table.

On the third day we loaded up our rented four-wheel-drive Toyota wagon and equipped ourselves with a map. Khabazela came by our hotel to give us detailed directions, and to say farewell.

“Thank you so much,” said Dariya, giving him a hug. “This has been a fabulous introduction, and meeting your family was a real treat.”

“It’s been wonderful to meet you all,” he said. “Miriam and I are driving up to the farm late next week, so we’ll have the chance to spend some more time together. I think Hlengiwe and the children will all be there, too. I think by then you’ll feel a part of the family. In the meantime, I wish you a safe journey.” He looked at me. “And a smooth reunion.”

He kissed Sally and Greg; he and I hugged each other, hard.

“Thank you,” I said, and he patted my shoulder.

Then he waved us off, and we began our journey to visit my mother.

From Johannesburg we took the N3 highway, driving southeast towards Durban, on the coast. We went past towns that spoke of the country’s colonial past—Harrismith, Ladysmith, and Estcourt. Once we left Johannesburg behind us, the
veld
seemed to extend forever, a rolling flatland of dry, winter grasses ranging in tone from light yellowish-ochre, to a straw color with hints of pale grass-green. It moved in the wind like a huge living thing, like an animal with volition.

Occasionally I saw acres of
veld
grass change direction in an instant; more often, when there was a wind, the grasses seemed to move arbitrarily, a pale sea of disorder waving gently back and forth. The highway crossed multiple rivers and streams, each one breaking the
veld
with a strip of greenery and trees along its banks, and the landscape was increasingly dotted with
kopjies
, small hills, and stark, eroded sandstone formations that increased in size as the elevation began to rise.

Aside from the beauty and grandeur of the landscape, what struck me most was how much space there was, and how few people lived in it. We passed signs for the occasional village, and when we changed from one highway to another we did so by driving through small, rural towns. But for the most part, the only signs of human habitation were collections of small homes or huts in the distance, many of them without an obvious connection to any road.

In Johannesburg, Dariya noticed the particular scent of the air. It was stronger in Soweto, and it was familiar to me at some level that I couldn’t identify. It was a not unpleasant scent, mildly acrid, as if something had been burned long ago, and what was left was this residual odor, a thin shadow of the original smell.

As we drove out of the city and through the
veld
, it became stronger, and I noticed that at any given time, there was smoke from a grass fire somewhere—on the horizon, on a hill in the distance, or more often, close to the highway. Khabazela had told us that in the winter season, when there was little rain, the
veld
was like a tinderbox waiting for an excuse to go up in flames. These were precautionary burns to create fire breaks.

It was especially dangerous along the road, where a spark from a discarded cigarette stub could ignite a major grass fire. We drove through many controlled burns along the highway, where smoke obscured visibility, and where we could watch a team of men directing the fire, with a water truck present in case the wind took off in the wrong direction.

After the first few hours of driving Greg and Sally fell asleep, and Dariya and I drove in silence through the majesty of the
veld
, the Drakensberg visible in the distance. Dariya held my hand in hers on the console between us.

“Is this what you remember?” she asked.

“I don’t remember much,” I said. “And after listening to Khabazela for two days, whatever I might remember has been replaced by other images.”

We drove a few miles in silence, and I knew that she was waiting for me to speak.

“You know,” I said, “I tried once to exorcize my mother from my life.”

“Really?”

“It didn’t work, of course. But I’ve imagined for months how when we finally met, I would tell her the story of how I tried.”

“Tell me,” she said. “How did you do it?”

I told Dariya what happened to me when, in the eighth grade, one of my classmates lost his father in a car accident.

“He still had his mother,” I said, “and the rest of his family. But my mother was dead—or so I thought—and it was my first conscious awareness of how small and intimate my world was. It was terrifying—the first time I recognized that my father and I were our whole universe. We had no one else.”

“Didn’t your father have any friends?” asked Dariya. “There were plenty of South Africans in Boston. What about people he worked with? And didn’t he have any women friends?”

“To my knowledge, he never had any women friends. And he couldn’t afford to have any contact with other South Africans. He wouldn’t even talk to them—it was the only way he could be sure that no one would ever ask me a question, or discover anything about how Michaela had disappeared. So no, there were no friends.”

“I had no idea,” she said slowly.

I continued with my story, telling her that when my friend’s father died, my first concern was for my father—what would he do if I died? I was a little in awe of the fourteen year old boy I had been—the boy whose first thought was for his father—but perhaps I ought to have been angry or resentful that my father carried his loss, his grief or his longing, in such a way that it placed such a burden on my shoulders.

The crisis in my friend’s family gave me a new impetus to attempt a dialogue with my father. I wanted to connect with him; to get access to the parts of him that were walled off. Talking directly about my mother had never worked—but now I had a different avenue of access, or so I thought.

After supper one night as we finished washing the dishes, I readied myself to broach the subject. I wasn’t aware of being anxious—but I must have been, because I remember feeling my heart hammering against my chest as I spoke, and wondering whether he could hear it, too.

“I was talking to Billy about his father’s funeral,” I said as I opened my knapsack and began to take out textbooks. “He’s going to visit the cemetery every year, and put flowers on the grave.”

“That’s a nice gesture,” my father responded without looking up from his book.

“His mother says it’s a way to keep his father’s memory alive,” I continued. “And Dad, I’ve decided that I want to keep Mom’s memory alive, too. I’m fourteen, and I don’t have any idea where she’s even buried. Don’t you think it’s time you told me?”

Now he looked up, and I saw from his expression that the wall was not coming down anytime soon. I made one more attempt.

“She’s not buried here, but couldn’t we have a memorial ceremony for her? She wouldn’t need a day of her own—she could share Memorial Day.”

“The best way for you to memorialize your mother is for you to work hard, be the best person you can, and make a difference in the world, as she wanted to do. And the place to start—” he pointed to my textbooks—“is right there, right now. Besides,” he said in a monotone as he looked back at his book, “there is no cemetery. She always wanted her body cremated.”

“Wait a minute,” Dariya said. Even after all she had been privy to, there was incredulity on her face. “Cremated?”

“My question came at him out of the blue,” I said. “How else could he have responded? Anything he said would have been a lie. My mother left him holding the bag—it was his job to keep her alive by not giving her away, and I had convinced myself that she was dead. What was he supposed to say? It was a terrible position for him to be in.”

My father could not have imagined what message I would take away from his bald-faced lie. But at fourteen, I was outraged when I realized just how little she had loved me. It was bad enough that she involved herself in dangerous activities that took her away from me so early, but she had seen fit to leave me nothing—not even a headstone in a cemetery where I could go to put flowers in her memory, or to touch the ground where she was buried. The night he told me that she had wanted to be cremated, I woke in a steaming sweat, enraged; when I got out of bed in the morning and remembered, I was furious.

“Anyway,” I continued, “if she didn’t want to be remembered, fine. I wouldn’t have a memorial ceremony—instead, I would have an exorcism, and erase her from my memory.”

I told Dariya how I removed my mother’s photograph from the frame beside my bed and took it with me when next we went to the Cape. And I took with me a yellow silk scarf—found years earlier among my father’s things in an old trunk, assumed to be my mother’s, and hidden since in my dresser. At dawn on a Saturday morning in June of my fifteenth year, while my father was still asleep, I made my way down to the beach carrying a little plastic bag. Close to the high tide line I dug a small hole and built up the windward side, and in the cold, moist cavity I lay the scarf. On top of it I placed several pieces of crumpled newspaper, and on top of that I slowly tore the photograph into as many scraps as I could. Then I opened the prayer book to the mourners’ prayer, the
Kaddish
. As I read it in my halting and inaccurate Hebrew, not understanding a word but familiar with the litany and the rhythm, I lit a match and, shielded from the wind by the sand barrier I had built, I ignited the little pyre.

I had planned to wrap the remains in the scarf and carry them back to the house for burial in the yard, but all that was left when the flame died was a small pile of ash atop a fragment of wet, yellow silk. I replaced the prayer book in its plastic bag; carefully shoveled sand back into the hole to avoid disturbing the ashes, stamped it down and roughed the surface. Then, confident that I had permanently exorcised my mother, I turned away, went back to the house and climbed into bed.

“What an awful thing to do,” said Dariya. “But you can’t possibly think of telling your mother.”

“I was going to,” I admitted. “I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about my losses—but now, knowing what we do about her life, I don’t think I need to tell her the story. It would be like twisting the knife. All I feel for her is sorrow.”

.

twenty-nine