Bloodlines (28 page)

There was a fire burning at the center of the cluster, and as we arrived two people rose from the fireside—an elderly woman with a traditional raised, flat headdress on her head, and a slender young man. I moved toward the fire and opened my blanket to let the heat warm me. Before he led the donkey off, the old man and the woman spoke together in low voices, and although I knew a few words in Zulu and was familiar with the sounds of the language, I understood nothing of their dialect. But it didn’t matter—for the first time in hours I felt warm, and would have been happy to curl up beside the fire and fall asleep on the ground. When they were done, the woman approached me and beckoned for me to follow her. From the fireside she picked up a bowl covered with a cloth, and led the way to one of the huts. The young man followed us at a distance.

The hut was high enough so that once inside, I could stand straight. In the center there was a circle of stones in which burned a small fire, and most of the smoke seeped out through the grass walls. What was left warmed the air and gave off a thick smoky odor that was familiar to me—the black people I met often smelled this way, and I realized for the first time, with some shame, even in my exhausted state, that it was because they carried the smoky smell in their clothes.

I learned later that smoke prolonged the life of the hut, kept termites out, and discouraged insects from eating the grass walls. The hut had a mud floor and was furnished with a low, roughly-made table, and two upended logs that served as chairs. To one side was a grass sleeping mat on the floor. The woman pointed to the table on which there was a galvanized tin pitcher filled with water, and she placed the bowl beside it. Then she called to the young man who was standing at the entrance and he came in, respectful of both the woman and of me.

In the firelight I saw that he was not yet a young man, but a tall boy just past puberty, thirteen or fourteen. He stood uncomfortably, waiting, with the old man’s humorous mouth and piercing eyes, but his eyelashes were long, and his cheeks smooth. He wore short pants that ended above his bony knees, and a stained long-sleeved white shirt that hung on him; the shirtsleeves were thickly rolled up and were still long enough to protect his wrists from the cold. He walked into the hut with awkward, long-legged grace.

“Do you speak English?” I asked.

“I speak,” he said, his high voice not yet changed.

The woman addressed him, several long sentences, waving toward me, pausing to change or amend what she wanted him to tell me.

“
Gogo
—my grandmother—she says you must eat—” he pointed to the bowl on the table “—and then you must sleep.”

“Thank you,” I said. “But why—” I remember trying to formulate my questions—who were they? Why were they helping me? Who had arranged my escape? What was to happen to me? But I was chilled to the bone, hungry and in shock, too weary to find the words.

In response the woman led me to one of the upended logs and sat me down, and as she uncovered the bowl, she spoke to the boy. I thought I heard her say my name, and as she spoke, she placed the steaming bowl in my hands and motioned with her thumb and the first two fingers of her hand that I should eat.

“She says for me to tell you,” said the boy, “a man comes. Tomorrow. Now you eat, and then—” he pointed to the bed “—you sleep.”

He backed out and left. The woman waited until I had eaten, picking up mouthfuls of the thick warm porridge with my fingers. It was
mielie
porridge, pap, and I had seen black servants eating it almost every day of my life, either hot or fermented, mixed with vegetables or meat, always with their fingers, or sopped up with bread—but I had never eaten it. Now the warmth and texture of this whitish, heavy, bland, slightly salty dish seemed to infuse my body with strength and calm. When I was through, the woman led me outside and showed me where to relieve myself, and pointed to a bucket filled with cold water so that I could wash my face and hands. Then she took me back to the hut, watched me curl up on the mat, covered me with a blanket, and left.

My life was at a dead end, and falling asleep felt like a death from which I might not wake. I could not even imagine my parents’ grief, had they been alive to see where I was. And then there was my Grandmother Rachael. She would have been overwhelmed by disapproval and sadness—but I don’t think she would have been surprised.

She was a seamstress, a woman with no schooling, but she was an important person in my life, and she had a tremendous influence on me. Her world centered on the plain, rundown brick building that housed the synagogue. In her life she took nothing on faith but faith itself, and she had a ferocious belief in
tikkun olam
—the obligation to be involved in the work of healing the world. She took food and companionship to the sick and elderly, and people in need were all the same to her. It was irrelevant to her whether those she helped were members of her synagogue, Jews or gentiles, black or white.

She knew things about me that I have only discovered—or been able to admit to myself—as an old woman. I was comforted by the thought that her devotion to me was as fierce as her disapproval, and that her love would have been no less because of where my life had taken me. As I lay on the mat in circumstances that she could never have imagined, unable to sleep, I remembered sitting on the couch in her small living room when I was in high school.

“Why is it not enough for you to be content with what you are?” she asked.

“I am content,” I answered. “I’m just curious, that’s all. What’s wrong with learning what other people believe and how they live?”

“Hear me carefully, Michaela,” she said. “You do well at school, but you struggle against being a student. You write for the school newspaper, beautifully, but you don’t feel like one of the group, so you stop writing and you become curious about playing piano. You join the orchestra, you don’t feel like one of the musicians, you look for something else. You go to Tuesday afternoon classes at the synagogue, but you feel different from the girls and boys there, so—what is next for you? Where do you go?”

She thrust the spread fingers of both hands through her hair in frustration. “Michaela, you’re already where you are supposed to be.” She took the skin on my forearm and rolled it firmly between her thumb and forefinger. “You are here, where you belong, inside your skin. That’s what you’re really trying to change.” She pointed a finger at me and spoke very slowly. “There is no place else to go,” she said. “Underneath your skin is where you need to be happy first, before anything else. You will have no peace, Michaela, until you stop fighting to become something other than what you are.”

Grandma Rachael was deeply grounded by the certainty that she had a purpose in the world. She knew instinctively who she was, where she came from, and where she belonged. She gave me many gifts, and she offered that one, too. But even her considerable energy and determination were not enough to make me comfortable in my own skin.

As I tossed and turned, the grass-filled mat beneath me rustled each time I moved. I finally fell asleep with her face before me, remembering the camphor-filled smell of the one-bedroom flat she and my grandfather lived in.

I slept without moving, the deep, dreamless sleep of exhaustion, and when I woke, stiff and hungry, the hut was filled with warm, mid-afternoon light. There was a figure sitting on one of the logs, watching me. When he saw that I was awake, he smiled, rose, and came to kneel on the mat beside me.

I looked into his face, and thought at first that I was dreaming—the man who owned this face was on his way to serve a life sentence in prison—he couldn’t possibly be here with me in this hut.

“Khabazela?” I whispered.

“I am here, Michaela,” he said.

For a long time we said nothing. We looked into each other’s eyes; he held my hand; I stroked his cheek. The silence between us was an expression of relief that we were together—but it was also reluctance to discuss the impossibility of our situation.

I was a fugitive, estranged from my husband. The grief and terror—and the awful sense of loss I felt as I anticipated the start of a ten year jail sentence—were now gone, replaced by uncertainty, and fear of what the future held. I even allowed myself to wonder how long it would be before I saw you, Steven, and to imagine the circumstances of our reunion. But no matter how hard I thought about you, I could not find a way around the facts.

In the months that followed, I spent much of every day lying on my mat in the hut Khabazela and I shared, my eyes closed, tortured by images of you and of your life without me. Sometimes I imagined you tearful and sad, missing me; at others, I thought of you living with your father and some other woman, happy enough with whoever had replaced me. I couldn’t tell which image was more painful, but eventually, sleep came and gave me release.

All I had left was Khabazela, and I would not willingly leave him—but it was clear that if we wanted to remain together, we would have to create our own reality, and that it could only exist outside the boundaries of what was legal. I could not then have imagined what survival would demand of us, but I was to learn firsthand how vulnerable I was to corruption and cruelty.

.

sixteen

MICHAELA

Zululand, 1962

T
he old woman who had greeted me the previous night turned out to be not so old. Her name was Lungile—The Good One—most of her teeth were gone, and she was in her fifties, although she didn’t know her exact age. She was the senior wife of my guide of the previous night, Sthembiso, who, when he worked in the gold mines, was called Promise.

Both he and Lungile were wonderful to us. When we first arrived, all I saw was an uneducated and impoverished couple, with nothing to offer me but their meager hospitality. I was grateful—but it would have been impossible to imagine at the beginning that by the time we left, I would come to see them as energetic and gracious, and to love and respect them. I’m not sure that they ever truly understood what we had done, or why it was necessary for us to hide from the authorities. But Khabazela’s father and Sthembiso were related—they belonged to the same lineage—and we were accepted as family. We stayed with them in their homestead among the hills of Zululand for almost nine months, and in that time I was reborn.

At first, I knew nothing of their language or customs. Khabazela could do little to help, but he watched me, and that was perhaps more important. After all, we had never spent more than a few hours at a time together. He might have seen my strength and determination as a volunteer in Sophiatown, or as an upper-middle class white woman enraged by a corrupt power structure. And he might have felt that he loved me. But what he had in mind for us was not time-limited—it was a commitment to a lifestyle, far more dangerous and challenging than anything I had known in my previous life. It would take place in isolated and rural locations, in the absence of any community of support, and in an environment where we would be in harm’s way much of the time. Before he put his proposition to me, he needed to see if I had the commitment, the willingness and the strength to manage the difficulties he knew were in store.