Bloodlines (18 page)

This is where my father came to reflect deeply on his life, to remember, and to regret. This is where he grieved for his lost life; where he relived the love he felt for my mother, and his anger and grief over losing her, and where he must have revisited the decisions he made that so affected us, and our relationship. As I set up my easel and looked out at the sun-drenched seascape, I thought about my parents. My father had never been able to let me see who he was, but in his manuscript, he was able to give me an understanding of what motivated him, what he feared, who he needed to protect—my mother—and who he most loved.

In the writing of his story, he retained control of the way information was divulged, forcing me to learn the history before he revealed the truth about my mother. In so doing, he defused the rage I might otherwise have aimed at him for withholding information. What he and my mother had done to me was unforgivable, and he knew it. There were reasons that had once been clear, but they became murky and questionable with the passage of time. Now he had explained them, and the rationale was again clear—but the consequences of those decisions were permanent.

I had promised to call Mandla—he knew how the manuscript would end. I was still reeling from the idea that my long dead mother lived on a farm in KwaZulu Natal, and that I could actually call her and ask her the questions I had rehearsed over and over as a child. Only now the question, “How could you leave me?” had a very different meaning. And while I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear her answer, there was a part of me that couldn’t wait to pose the question. All I had to do was decide whether I wanted to contact her. And then I had to decide what—if anything—to tell Sally and Greg.

Thick blotches of cadmium yellow, pthalo green and scarlet erupted up through the surface of my painting; they fought to escape the confines of the canvas. And superimposed on this chaos, looking as if it had been chiseled into the pigment, was a controlled filigree of burnt umber and titanium white, and swirls of manganese and cobalt blue. There was rage on my canvas; rage and sorrow and guilt. And the fury of an impotent child. Dariya was waiting for me on the beach when I came back.

“Thank you for trying to tell me,” I said.

“You couldn’t hear it until you were ready.”

“Yes.”

“While you were out there, I thought about when I first knew. It wasn’t just how your father was revealing information—it was also your conversation with Mandla,” she said. “He asked you to suspend judgment until you finished the manuscript, so he knew that your father would keep whatever revelation he had until the end.”

“And he got it just right—finished in time to lapse into a coma.”

“I think it’s the other way around,” she said. “The only thing keeping him alive was his drive to finish the document. When he was done, there was no reason to keep fighting. He just let go.”

I imagined my father fighting against pain and morphine to retain control of his thoughts and his fingers. The document he left on his computer for me was error free—no typos or grammatical mistakes. It was a measure of his determination.

“I suspected everything,” she said, “except the last thing.”

“Which last thing?”

“What was probably most difficult for him to bear—that his whole life he professed a belief he never really subscribed to, and couldn’t live by.”

“You mean his feelings for Mandla.”

“Yes. He was a closet hypocrite—and he lived in the shame of that all his life.”

“I wonder whether Mandla has any idea.”

“You could ask him,” she said.

“I suppose.”

“Are you going to call him?”

But I hadn’t gotten that far.

“Steve? You are going to call him, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m going to call him.”

I put the phone on speaker so that Dariya could hear, and made the call. A woman answered, and I asked to speak with Mandla.

“May I tell him who it is?”

“Yes,” I said. “Steven Green.”

“Steven,” she said with delight. “This is Miriam, his wife. He will be so glad you called. Hold on a moment–I’ll find him.”

While I waited, I wondered who his wife was, and what had happened between him and my mother. But I reminded myself that what I knew of their affair was forty years old, and that anything could have happened in the interim. It struck me for the first time that my mother might not only be my mother, but someone’s wife, and the mother of other grown children.

“Steven,” he said warmly. “I’m so happy to hear your voice.”

“You asked me to call, when I finished my father’s manuscript.”

“You’ve read it, then.”

“I have.”

“I don’t know the details, but I imagine that I feature as the villain in your father’s history.”

“It’s not so cut and dried,” I said. “His feelings for you seem to have been far more complex than that.” I cleared my throat. “You asked me to call you by the name your friends call you, Khabazela. My opinion may change, but the impact you’ve had on my life doesn’t encourage me to think of you as a friend.”

“I’m sure that’s true. And I am sorry for my part in the events that separated you from your mother so long ago.” He stopped. “It was a very long time ago, Steven, and much has happened since. In all our lives.”

“I suppose it has,” I said. “Tell me, why did you ask me to call you when I was finished reading? Are you trying to make amends for the past?”

“In some ways, perhaps I am. But there are other reasons for my call to you, and for my request. I was certain that your father would mention me, and if you had chosen not to call, I would have assumed his portrayal of me to be so villainous that you found yourself unwilling to speak to me. That would have posed its own difficulties, but I would have called you eventually. I have learned that people can work out their differences, if only they’re willing to talk to one another. And although you may not know it yet, you and I have common interests. Anyway, you did call—and even if you know nothing else about her, you know that your mother lives.”

“I’m not sure what I know,” I responded. “I’ve been told that she lives. Whether I actually believe it—or whether I care—is another question.”

“That is about to change,” he said.

“How?”

“For obvious reasons, I had to wait until you had completed reading your father’s history. Now that you have, I will be sending you pieces of the story that your father couldn’t have known. Part of it is your mother’s; part of it is mine. You may find it strange that I am so involved in this, but your mother and I have been important players in each other’s lives, and I think I can shed light on Michaela that neither she nor your father could.”

“So you want me to withhold judgment until I’ve read your versions of what happened?”

“Correct. I don’t know how your father positioned all the facts, but even if he presented them even-handedly, there is another side to the story. I’m sure you have mixed feelings. It’s all very new to you, but as you can imagine—or maybe you can’t—Michaela has hoped for years to hear from you one day.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I replied, “but that’s hard for me to take in.” I paused. “After more than four decades of no contact.”

“We have lived very different lives, Steven,” he said, “but this is as new for me as it is for you. Perhaps I should start by speaking for myself, and let your mother speak her own words. I can tell you that, having been close to her all those years, and having heard about you, I have hoped that you would call. I have wished it for your father, whom I would have liked to see again—but I have wished it also for your mother, and for you, and for myself.”

“You think she wants to hear from me?”

“With all her heart. I would stake my life on it.”

“You know her that well?”

“I know her very well.”

“Despite being married to someone else.”

There was a brief pause; I wondered whether I had offended him.

“Much can happen in four decades,” he said. “We can’t explore your life, or ours, in one telephone call, and we shouldn’t try. I hope that you and your family will visit South Africa, and we can come to know each other better. Before you arrive, however, I’m sending you some of the story in writing that will I hope cast light in a few dark corners. In the meantime, would you take some advice from an old man?”

“I’ll listen,” I said.

“For years I was deeply involved in Truth and Reconciliation hearings in this country, and I have seen many confrontations between people harmed by our struggle, and by those who did the damage. You and your father—and your mother as well—are as much victims of that time as those who lost family to state-sanctioned violence. This was all set into motion long ago, by political movements bigger than the little human lives they upended, and by emotions that we do not always effectively control. I have learned, Steven, that those who emerge whole from this process of confronting loss, are the ones who remember that you cannot change the past, but you can control how you respond to it. That’s something you can do for yourself, and that you must do for your children.”

We drove home late Sunday afternoon, stopping at the seafood diner for an early supper. We ate fresh corn as we waited for our fish and chips at an outside table. Dariya gave me plenty of space, and I watched the children chatter on about the week to come at day camp. Greg was sitting next to me, concentrating on his corn. Sally sat across from me, next to Dariya, and she kept looking at me out of the corner of her eye. She had bright blue eyes and honeyed skin, and before she ate her corn she put her hands behind her head and clipped her hair into a pony tail, the clip in her mouth and her eyes on my face.

“What’s up with you, Dad?” she asked as she completed the job, running her fingers over the clip to make sure her pony was tight enough.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You always say we don’t keep secrets in this family, but you’re doing just that.” She tossed her pre-teen, all-knowing head. “I’ve seen that big book Grandpa Lenny left for you—and I know you and Mom are reading it out loud to each other, which is really cute. But something in the book’s made you really unhappy, and you won’t tell us what it is.”

“I noticed, too,” said Greg. In order to speak he had to stop rotating the corn through his teeth and held it poised in both hands before his mouth, ready to start again.

“Please eat your corn like a human being,” said Dariya, “not like a combine.”

“What’s a combine?” he asked. “Is it like a transformer?”

“It’s a machine, Greg,” said Sally patiently, “for picking lots of vegetables on a farm.”

“I’ll show you one when we get home,” said Dariya. “Why don’t you tell us what you noticed about Dad?”

“Well, usually when Dad comes back from painting in the morning he leaves his canvas on that, you know, that special thing—that ledge—he built in the fireplace room. He leaves it there to dry, I think, and we can all look at it and see if we like it. But yesterday he hid it from us.”

“I didn’t hide it from you,” I said.

“Then why did I find it in the little bedroom under the stairs?” asked Greg.

“What were you doing in the little bedroom?” asked Dariya. “You never go in there.”