Bloodlines (24 page)

You cannot imagine, today, how intimate that act was, or how electric our touch was when she handed me the cigarette lit from her mouth. We looked at each other for a moment, and I took in all the details of her face—strands of soft hair loose at her temples, high cheekbones, the curves of her lips, which I could have stared at all day. I looked at the shadows beneath her eyes and the length of her dark lashes, and then I peered directly into her eyes, and she returned my stare frankly and with openness. The color rose in her cheeks and she looked away, pushed back her chair, and got up from the table.

I thought she was going to leave, but she just stood, leaning on the back of the chair. She slipped off her tennis shoes and walked slowly back and forth across the wooden floor as she spoke. Her legs were long and tanned.

“I tried to tell Lenny what prison was like,” she said, “but it was so terrifying to him that he couldn’t listen.”

It was silent in the room and there was no noise from outside, and she spoke very quietly. “I’ve told no one else about it until now—and I’m sure there’s not much I can tell you about being in jail that you don’t already know.” She paused, looking away from me out of the window, and all I could see was the silhouette of her face against the glass. “They took away my watch, and each hour seemed to last for weeks. They kept me in isolation. It was cold—they moved me around and some cells had a blanket, some not. I slept a lot—but eventually I couldn’t sleep at all, and then the time passed even more slowly, especially the nights.

The food was inedible—cold tea, thin, lukewarm soup, congealed fat, stale bread—but I couldn’t wait for it to arrive because it broke up my day and I knew I had to eat whatever I could for my baby. I even looked forward to the interrogation sessions because they were the only chance I had for human contact, even if it was unpleasant. They had the power to withhold everything from me—food and water and air; light and silence; even the freedom to go to the toilet was taken out of my hands. And I understood in my guts what it means for a prisoner to identify with his captor—and what a terrible responsibility it is to have power over another person.”

She paused, smoked again, still facing the window, her shoulders hunched, arms folded in front of her as if to protect her heart.

“They treated me like a naughty little girl at first—if I gave up the error of my ways, they would find it in their hearts to be lenient, and forgive me. They promised me paper and pen, and books to read. But I didn’t have much of the information they wanted, and when I refused to give them what I did know—names, dates, and places—they became angry and abusive. That’s what Lenny couldn’t bear to hear about.

“They called me all the things you might expect—whore, kike,
kaffirboetie
; told me that I was bringing shame to my father’s memory, and to the memory of my people. I wondered over and over who they thought my people were—Jews, English-speaking whites, or all the white-skinned people in the country—but it didn’t matter what they thought because if I knew one thing, it was that nothing I did would bring shame to my father’s memory. When that tactic didn’t work, they accused me of being a negligent wife and a bad mother. They said it would have been better if my grandparents had all been killed in concentration camps during the war. I told myself, while they shouted in my face and leered at my breasts and my legs, no, I’m not a bad mother or a bad wife. I haven’t betrayed my father—he would be proud of me. And I haven’t betrayed my people—the struggle for freedom and fairness is the essence of Jewish teaching.”

She came around to my side of the table, and she took my hand.

“Then they asked me if I supported the anti-apartheid movement because I was one of those deviant white women who wanted to sleep with black men.”

She tugged gently, and I rose to stand close to her.

“I didn’t tell them,” she whispered, “but there’s only one black man I’m interested in.” And she led me into the bedroom.

I will spare you the details of my love affair with the young woman who was your mother, except to say that Michaela was a woman of extraordinary conviction and passion, and she was beautiful besides. In fact, the passion she felt for whatever she was doing was an inseparable part of her beauty, and it showed itself in her face with each change of expression. After being in prison, your mother was no longer only the daughter of a privileged family, wanting to do good in the world—she had become a freedom fighter. And in the time we had together, I learned a great deal about her.

She continued to love your father, even when her involvement with the movement became tiresome to him, and her devotion to the little boy she carried around with her wherever she could was complete and absolute. She was always the best mother to you that she could be, without giving up our political struggle—for that she had to make tough choices every day, and it was a bitter conflict in her life.

By the time Michaela and I became intimately involved, we had friends in jail, or being tried. Some were under house arrest; others had been hurt or killed, and there were those who had been forced to leave the country. The mood was such that we didn’t know when we might be picked up and imprisoned—or even whether we would survive into the next week. As a result we operated under siege mentality—we went from day to day with the mindset that exists in the midst of battle, where conventional rules that govern human conduct seem petty and unimportant.

Eventually we were captured together after blowing up an electrical plant and both sent to prison. But perhaps you know about all that already from your father.

In the story of what happened to us, there are many truths. One is that Michaela betrayed her husband and I betrayed my friend, and for that, we paid a heavy price, both then and afterwards. I ask forgiveness of those, like you and your father, who suffered as a consequence. But I have no regrets, because there is another truth: against all odds, at an impossible time, we found and loved and had great joy of one another. For that, I can never apologize.

.

fourteen

S
TEVEN

Boston, 2001

B
efore I married Dariya, I had affairs with women who were single, and I had affairs with married women, too, a few of them the mothers of young children. As an artist I’ve painted nude women for over thirty years, and have seduced—and been seduced by—some of them. If asked, Dariya would confirm that I am no prude. I thought I was well enough entrenched in my time, and my sense of propriety broad enough, that nothing could shock me. I was wrong.

What’s the appropriate response to Mandla’s revelation that the mother who abandoned me as a child seduced him while I was still suckling at her breast? Did the milk intended for me drip from her full breasts as they lay together in the little cottage bedroom? Whatever they did could hardly have been leisurely, since she had to hurry back and feed me. When she came back to me, I wondered, did she smell of him? As I took her swollen nipple in my infant mouth, did I sense anything different about her? And did it make a difference that the man she had been with wasn’t my father?

These questions came to me unbidden, and as they rolled over me the images they conjured were tortuous. As I watched myself writhe with them, I recognized in myself the symptoms of the spurned lover, and knew I was being ridiculous. Here I was in my fifth decade, having spent my youth and adolescence pining for my dead mother, wondering whether I knew as I sucked at her breast that she had just been intimate with another man.

Dariya was unsympathetic; worse, she was amused. She let me mope around for two days, but her patience ran out as we sat in the kitchen after breakfast on the second day, drinking coffee and reading the
Boston Globe
.

“Come on, Steven,” she said. She looked at me tenderly, but the smile on her mouth told me that she thought I was being infantile. “It happened almost half a century ago. Michaela was a young woman who fell in love with another man. Mandla said they were living with a siege mentality—it happens in dangerous times. Yes, the woman we’re talking about was your mother, and you happened to be an infant, and yes, you were suckling. But it wasn’t all about you then, and it’s not all about you now. Time to move on.”

For a moment I glared at her. She may have been right, but a little compassion would have been nice. She rose from her chair, sat on my lap.

“For the record,” she said, “I think it’s cute that you’re jealous of your mother’s young lover, who by now must be close to eighty.” She kissed me, and I put my arms around her.

“Much better,” I said. “I think you’ve cured me.”

“That was the idea.” She rose. “So what’s next? Didn’t Mandla ask you to call him when you were through reading what he sent you?”

“He did.”

She looked at her wristwatch and handed me the phone. “It’s midafternoon there.”

My conversation with Mandla was not long. I told him that I had finished reading. I offered no reaction to his writing, and he had the grace to ask no questions.

“I look at your website occasionally, Steven,” he said. “Michaela does, too, with great pride, I might add. As a painter of seascapes, you’ll appreciate it if I tell you that we’re trying to paint a picture of the past from many angles. You’ve seen it from Lenny’s viewpoint, and from mine. But you’ve not yet heard from the most important player.”

“In my father’s last conversation with Michaela,” I said, “she threatened that she would send me her own accounting. He said he decided to write his story so that I’d have his version, too. I guess I have her to thank for that.” I paused. “Somehow I don’t think my father expected that there would be three versions of the story.”

“There is only one story, seen through three sets of eyes. I don’t think one telling contradicts another—but I hope that each adds its own richness to your understanding.”

“So what happens next,” I asked, “in this carefully choreographed revelation?”

He laughed, a chuckle deep in his chest. “I like your sense of humor, Steven,” he said. “I’m sitting at my desk looking at what Michaela’s written, which I picked up from her last week. I’m taking the liberty of interspersing a few of my own notes—chapters, I suppose—explaining events that she’s not aware of or found too difficult to write about. I think you’ll understand what I mean. I’ll be done in a day or so, and will send the package air express. With the exception of what I’ve added, the package is exactly as she gave it to me. You should have it next week. Once you’ve read it, Steven, I will have done all I can. The next steps will be up to you.”