Bloodlines (19 page)

“Dad’s painting wasn’t anywhere else in the house, Mom,” he said, explaining slowly so that we would understand. “That was the last room.”

“So you were looking for Dad’s painting, right?” asked Dariya.

He nodded in agreement.

“Why, Greg?”

“I always look at your paintings, Dad, just like you always look at mine. It’s like, you know, we tell each other what we like, and what works, and what doesn’t work. Like you showed me.”

I imagined Greg scouring the house in search of my missing canvas, and I was touched by the idea that he took our interaction around painting so seriously.

“I see,” I said, looking at Dariya and finding her staring at me. “That’s great.”

“So tell us,” asked Dariya, “what did you think when you found the painting?”

“At first I was surprised,” he said. “I didn’t think Dad painted it.” He wrinkled his nose in thought and lowered his corn to his plate. “There were too many bright colors—you know, the main colors—and they didn’t all smoosh into each other smoothly like Dad’s colors usually do. The colors crashed together, as if they were mad. And all these weird dark designs were trying to cover them over, and all I could think about was that the bright colors were mad because they wanted to get out from under, and they didn’t know how.”

Dariya grinned at me from across the table, her face bright with pride.

“Wow,” she mouthed silently.

“That’s pretty accurate, Greg,” I said. “I was feeling a lot of those things when I painted it. But I wasn’t hiding it from you—I was hiding it from myself.”

“Why, Dad?”

“Looking at that painting,” I said, “made me think about some things that I really didn’t want to think about.”

“Things you read in Grandpa Lenny’s book,” said Sally. “Right?”

“Right,” I said.

“What things?” asked Greg. “What did Grandpa Lenny write that you didn’t want to think about?”

I looked at the puzzlement creasing my son’s smooth forehead—my serious, often silent son, who looked like me, with my coloring and my disposition; about whom I sometimes worried because he seemed sad.

“Nonsense,” Dariya would say. “Stop projecting your own sadness—he’s just thinking.”

Sally had reminded me that in our family, we don’t keep secrets; and according to Mandla, for the sake of my children I needed to remember that while we can’t control the past, we can control how we respond to it. It was clear that in the present, that translated into telling the truth. There had been no secrets among us, and there would be none now.

“We did make a discovery today.” I looked at Dariya to see whether she was signaling me to hold back, but she was smiling, so I went ahead, not knowing quite where I was going. “We’ve told you that my mother, your Grandma Michaela, who was married to Grandpa Lenny, died a long time ago, when I was a child, right?” They both nodded. “Well, that’s what we thought for a long time. But part of what Grandpa Lenny wrote about was what really happened to my mother. She didn’t die. She’s alive.”

Greg reached across the table and took Dariya’s hand. She looked at him and smiled, and I knew that he was comforting her because I had had my father, and now I had my mother, but Dariya had neither. She was still an orphan.

“Where was she all this time?” he asked. “Was she lost or something?”

“Well, for a long time she was hiding,” I said, “but now she doesn’t have to do that anymore. She lives on a farm. In South Africa.”

“Wow, Dad,” said Sally, “how great is that? Just as Grandpa Lenny dies, and we think we have no more grandparents, we find out that we have a grandmother.”

“On a farm,” said Greg in amazement. “Do you think she has animals? Or maybe it’s a vegetable farm, and she has a combine.”

“When can we visit her?” asked Sally.

“Do you want to?” I asked.

“Of course. Who wouldn’t want to see their long-lost grandmother?” She looked at her brother for confirmation. “Right, Greg?”

“I suppose,” he said cautiously. “Does she know about us?”

“I suspect she does,” I said.

“Then—” he stopped, trying to find the words “—then why hasn’t she come to see us? You know, like grandparents are supposed to? Like Grandpa Lenny did?”

“I don’t know the answers,” I said. “That’s why I said Grandpa Lenny’s book made me think of some things I didn’t really want to think about.”

Sally’s little girl face across the table suddenly took on an adult expression, as if she had in an instant catapulted out of childhood and into the next state of being.

“I’m sure there was a reason, Dad,” she said, looking at me out of big brown eyes.

“I’m sure you’re right, Sally,” said Dariya, turning to me. “From the mouth of babes,” she whispered.

“I hope you’re right,” I answered, “but I don’t really know. I guess when you meet her, you can ask her. How does that sound?”

About two weeks later, DHL delivered a package from South Africa containing the manuscript I had been promised. As I opened it, I imagined the man behind the voice I had come to know, and I saw Mandla as an old man, writing with a fountain pen on parchment, in a formal and old-fashioned script. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. The manuscript was composed on a computer, and he had sent me a photocopy printed on both sides. It was spiral bound, in an elegant cover of soft, textured, honey-colored leather. Carefully handwritten on the front in dark brown ink, was the following inscription:

To Steven

In Truth, and for Reconciliation

Mandla Mkhize

I put the manuscript back in its package, unopened. Later that night, once the children were in bed, I showed it to Dariya.

“What a beautiful cover,” she said, running her hands over the leather as she read the inscription. “Mandla put a lot of thought into this,” she said. “I think he must be a very special man.”

In answer, I opened the front cover and began reading.

.

twelve

MANDLA

Soweto, 2001

Dear Steven,

When we spoke on the phone, I mentioned the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings. I was referring to them in relation to Lenny’s confessional writings. I was thinking, I suppose, of the opportunity they provided him to tell you, in his final moments, the truths of his life. I had not originally intended to relate the hearings to my own life, but there is a natural connection.

Initially, I thought that this writing would be my way of educating you. I thought I was creating a doorway through which you could enter the world your mother has inhabited and see how she became the woman she is now. I thought I was writing about Michaela.

The road your mother and I traveled diverged a long time ago, but in many ways our paths ran parallel, and at times we trod in each other’s footsteps. But having now written my own version of events, I realize that I could not tell her story without revealing part of my own. And so I discover what Lenny already knew—that this kind of writing is by definition confessional.

In sending this to you, I have no expectation that my words will repair the past. Much of my life has been spent committing acts of violence that in other times would have been unthinkable, and that even as I was committing them ran counter to my own essential self. For years I justified what I did in the name of freedom, in the service of people and country. But the acts are mine; the blood on my hands long ago congealed into scabbed wounds that are a permanent part of my flesh. In my frequent nightmares, the blood I have shed is my own, and it runs glistening, thick and hot from my veins. I sweat and tremble into wakefulness to reach for the solace of my wife’s arms, and until now she has been the sole repository of my night terrors.

In all the years I have waited to speak to you, it never entered my mind that I might come to see you as my confessor, or that in the process of revealing to you my love affair with your mother, and the life we lived together, I would find the relief and self-forgiveness for which I have searched unsuccessfully for years. I suppose, Steven, that in the parlance of South African national forgiveness, this is my personal Truth and Reconciliation Hearing.

Sophiatown, 1954

Imagine that hundreds of children stand and wait silently at your doorstep; their school is closed, and it is forbidden for teachers to open any institution that looks or operates like a school. Many of the children have had no breakfast, because their parents left to catch the bus for work at 5:00am. What do you do with them? I didn’t know the answer, and I had already been teaching in school for five years. But that’s what we were faced with in the 1950s when I first met Michaela.

She was volunteering in the afternoons at the Mission School at Christ the King Church, and she wanted to help. And I will tell you, I came very quickly to love her, which did not simplify matters. But in those days, nothing was without problems.

It was government policy that beyond certain forms of basic labor, there was no place for the black man in the work force. It was the kind of stupidity that led to the end of apartheid, because it was an unsustainable fiction. But they were smart enough to recognize that unless they controlled the education of young black laborers, their vision would not last. So every school had to be licensed, and was compelled to teach the curriculum set by the Ministry.

Education was compulsory for white children; for black children it was not. In fact, it was discouraged, and most black children who were being educated were enrolled in Mission schools. A few unemployed teachers held private classes in abandoned garages or empty halls, but when it became mandatory for schools to be registered with the Ministry, many of these schools and classes chose to shut down rather than to teach a required curriculum. Now, in addition to two thirds of the children who weren’t attending school, we had to address the needs of children whose schools were closed.

Under those conditions, teaching was all but impossible. We set up cultural and social clubs where the children could gather, being careful to avoid anything that would give the appearance of schools. No blackboards, no desks, no books. When the Mission school closed in protest, several women from Johannesburg came to help me and the other teachers. Michaela was one of them.