Bloodlines (25 page)

Mandla was right—I needed my mother’s story to round out whatever picture of the past was being painted. Impatient, almost resentful, I waited for the package to arrive. Dariya reminded me that I had waited all my life to hear my mother’s story, and that a few days more or less wouldn’t make a difference.

“Perhaps you were right that my father was manipulative in his writing,” I said to her. “But I feel manipulated from all directions—as if the three of them were in collusion, arranging to tell their story so that events are sequenced to make them look good.”

“There’s no collusion between your father and your mother,” said Dariya. “Your father wanted to confess, and at the same time present himself in the best possible light to you. I imagine that your mother will want something similar for herself. Mandla may be helping her to make her case, and perhaps that’s manipulation—but he’s doing it openly.”

Greg noticed that I had been impatient and preoccupied, and raised the issue in his own way at supper one night, as he laboriously cut his spaghetti into pieces so that he could eat it tidily.

“How come you’re so sad, Dad?” he asked.

“What makes you think I’m sad, Greg?”

“You’re not smiling these days,” he said. “And you don’t seem very interested in me.”

“I’m not sad,” I said. “And of course I’m interested in you. I’m always interested in everything you do. But right now, I have a lot on my mind.”

“You don’t seem sad to me,” said Sally. I watched her as she carefully twirled spaghetti around the fork in one hand, while the tines were supported by a spoon held in the other. “You just seem impatient, as if you’re waiting for something to happen.” She looked up at me and stopped twirling. “Are you?” Then she maneuvered the fork into her mouth, chewing and watching me as she waited for a response.

I cleared my throat. “As a matter of fact,” I said, looking at Dariya for direction, “I am waiting for something.”

“What?”

“Remember the book Grandpa Lenny wrote,” I asked, “the one he left me to read?”

They both nodded.

“Well, the grandmother you’ve never met, Grandma Michaela, is sending me the book she’s written, so that I can learn all about what’s happened to her before we meet again.”

“I don’t understand all this writing stuff,” said Sally. “Why didn’t they just tell you the stuff instead of writing it all down?”

“Is our grandma writing it all down now because she knows she’s going to die,” asked Greg, “just like Grandpa Lenny did?”

“No, I don’t think that’s why she’s writing,” said Dariya. “But sometimes people find things difficult to say, and perhaps it’s easier to write them down.”

“When you’re writing something to someone, you’re not really looking at them, are you, Mom?” asked Greg.

“That’s right, honey,” said Dariya. “Why?”

“Well, it’s hard to say some things to a person when you’re looking in their eyes,” he replied. “You know, like when I do something bad and have to say I’m sorry? It’s easier to say sorry if you’re not looking in the person’s eyes.”

In response, I got up from the table and walked around to my son, knelt at his side and wrapped my arms about him.

“Let’s not talk about Grandma Michaela any more tonight,” I said into his ear. “I’m not sad, and I want to know something. What have you been doing that you think I’m not interested in?”

“Lemme go,” he said laughing as he squirmed in my arms.

“Never,” I said, and I kissed his warm, salty neck, breathing him in. Letting him go was the last thing in the world I ever intended to do. And I promised myself that there would never be a need in our lives for written apologies to my children.

Again, Mandla was as good as his word, and the package arrived ten days later. Had I been expecting the same carefully bound, leather-covered manuscript from my mother that I received from him, I would have been disappointed. But what I found when I opened the package was a far more likely presentation from the woman my mother turned out to be. What I withdrew from the package was covered in thick plastic, and within it was a thick sheaf of paper, sandwiched between two sturdy pieces of cardboard cut from a packing carton. Three huge, red rubber bands surrounded the cardboard. When I removed them and laid the cardboard aside, I found the manuscript.

Each chapter was held by an oversized brass paperclip at the top left, the whole thing clipped together by a galvanized binder clasp with the handles folded down. As I flipped through the pages, I could see that she had written and edited it on a computer, and I imagined her—someone—printing each chapter as she completed it. When I noticed that there were two different fonts, I slowed down enough to realize that Mandla had interspersed his sections among hers, and the font he used was the same one he had used on his own manuscript.

Again, I put it away unread. The package was delivered on a Thursday, but Dariya and I didn’t get a chance to look at it together until early Saturday morning. We opened it again as the children slept, and we drank coffee in bed.

.

fifteen

MICHAELA

KwaZulu Natal, 2001

My Dear Steven,

I write this to you, my son, now in your forties, with children of your own. You’ve been in my thoughts each day since I last saw you when you were seven, but you’d be within your rights if you refused to think of me as your mother. I understand that your father wrote a memoir of sorts, which I’m sure has left you with an unflattering opinion of me. Mandla Mkhize—he has by now probably invited you to call him Khabazela, and that is how I will refer to him—Khabazela and I have a lifelong connection, and our lives are interwoven with a complexity that’s difficult to explain. I don’t know precisely what, but he’s apparently added parts of his own story to the mix in an effort to rehabilitate me in your eyes.

You know very little of me, despite the writings of these two men, who lived with me in very different times, and under dissimilar circumstances. Knowing your father as I did, I doubt whether he ever told you much about my background or my family; I know from my last conversation with him that up until a few months ago, you were still convinced that I died before you were seven. That came as something of a shock to me. He and I had agreed that when you were old enough, and when he thought the time right, he would tell you the truth so that you could decide for yourself whether to make contact with me. For whatever reason, the time was never right, and I’ve lived for over ten years—since Nelson Mandela came to power and I was safe from prosecution—with the fiction that he had told you the truth about me, but that you’d made a conscious decision not to know me. I don’t know much about you, but I can be sure of at least one thing: you have no idea why I made the decisions I did, and you have no concept of the circumstances in which those decisions were made.

This is not my life story, and it’s not a fairy tale written in the hope of love and forgiveness. I can’t ask for either—it’s not my way, and I don’t want your forgiveness for the life I’ve chosen. What I do want is your understanding, if it can be had.

I didn’t know it then, but with the distance of age, I can see that I started out as a driven, uncompromising young woman who wanted to make a difference in the world; fought hard against my father, whose idealism I inherited, but not his fearfulness and timidity, nor his reluctance to stand up to authority. I was loved by a young man molded in my father’s image, a good man who was not as exciting or as radical in his politics as I felt the time required. And with no thought of the consequences to him or to me or to you, our young son, perhaps just to show him how weak he was, I found another man who was far more radical than I was. I thought, then, that I was willing to put everything at risk for a moral cause and a political movement more important than any of us individually, and the bonus was that he and I loved each other. But perhaps I had it backwards. It may have been that we loved each other—and the bonus was that we had a cause important enough that it allowed us to justify putting everything at risk. Whichever truth it was, my story will tell that we risked everything. And though we made huge strides for the cause, much of what we risked personally, we lost.

Johannesburg, 1962

The night we were arrested was my first venture into violence against what we called—it sounds so contrived today—the infrastructure of apartheid.

Khabazela and I planted a bomb and destroyed an electric-generation plant, plunging the southwestern neighborhoods of Johannesburg into darkness. By the time the bomb went off we were a half mile away, riding bicycles through the deserted pre-dawn roads towards the small foreman’s house on a farm outside the city, a safe house used by the ANC.

Whether an informer gave us up or whether members of the Special Branch of the South African police had been following our movements, we still don’t know. For a moment when they broke into the house, it crossed my mind that Lenny might have betrayed us—but your father was not capable, then or now, of such an act.

I remember still, with numbness and shock, the expressions of disgust and outrage on the faces of young, uniformed men when they broke into the bedroom to find us naked on the bed. It happened in an instant—they ripped him from my body, pinned him to the floor, stamped their boots on his naked feet and kicked his exposed genitals. Others grabbed at the sheet I had drawn up to cover myself, forcing it from my clenched fists so that they could look with lustful ownership at the body they thought I had defiled. And I did not know which was worse—that they treated him as a mongrel or me as their own personal thoroughbred.