Bloodlines (31 page)

We spent three days in the treetops of the Nkandla. When the police search party had given up and left, one of the boys came to tell us that it was safe for us to return, but Khabazela was too weak to climb down the tree or to make his way out of the forest alone. Sthembiso sent a rescue party, and I watched with relief as they built a stretcher while we explained to them what had happened. They carried him out into the light and back to the homestead, where he fell into an exhausted sleep.

There was rejoicing that we had returned, that Khabazela had survived the snake bite, and that I had done what was necessary to care for him. Sthembiso prepared to slaughter a cow for a ritual celebration. There would be meat, and as much beer as could be drunk.

When I first arrived in Zululand I knew nothing of Zulu ritual or belief. The only way I could process what I saw was to relate it to my own background, and all I knew of such things I had received at the hands of my grandmother Rachael, who was raised on the Jewish traditions in the ghettos of eastern Europe before the war. Without her faith, life would have been formless and she a lump of clay, and she took it into her body like a sacrament. The rituals she practiced shaped her belief, wove the fabric of her life, offered purpose and beauty.

When the celebration began, I watched it through the lens my grandmother had given me. What I saw was primitive and crude—but much of it was so familiar to me that at moments, I felt I had come home.

On the morning of the celebration, women swept the huts and cleaned the grounds. Around midday the guests began to arrive. Lungile and the other wives had brewed huge pots of traditional sweet millet beer, and they brought it out and passed it around in clay vessels. Cattle were herded into the enclosure and the gate shut, and the guests watched, talking and laughing.

The noise of celebration ceased when Sthembiso emerged from one of the huts and walked gravely towards us. He wore a skin around his shoulders, on his head a dressing of feathers, in his hand the long, ancient homestead spear, passed down through the generations, and used only for ritual slaughter. Behind him came Khabazela. My breath caught in my throat when I saw him, looking down at the ground, sporting several long feathers in his hair. He wore only a narrow leather thong that hung from his waist, hardly covering him.

Together they came into the enclosure, where Khabazela was seated on an upturned log beside an old man. Sthembiso wandered among his herd of thirty-two cows; he could identify them by the shape of their ears, the feel of their udders, their sounds and the smell of their breath. With a familiarity borne of long practice, he touched them as he walked through the enclosure, passing his hand across their backs, mumbling under his breath. Eventually he stopped, took a dramatic step backwards, and raised his spear into the air. Behind us, a musician began drumming a rhythmic beat.

Sthembiso danced, chanting under his breath in time to the drum, an elderly man rocking back and forth, stamping his feet on the ground and twirling his arms in the air. He could easily have been a bearded Hassid in a black frock coat and hat, dancing with face upraised in ecstatic acknowledgement of the spirit world; and my imagined Hassid could have matched each Zulu chant with a Yiddish song that expressed his own adoration of the Almighty.

He danced over to a big reddish animal with symmetrical horns, the sacred cow that never worked because it belonged to the Shades, the ancestors. He stood beside the animal, one arm across its neck, and he spoke softly into its ear. As he spoke, a white cow with black markings along her flanks separated herself from the herd and ambled across the byre, coming to a standstill on Sthembiso’s other side, and there she stood, chewing her cud. Sthembiso turned and placed his hand on the neck of the white cow.

“We have excited the Shades,” he said in a breathless shout, “woken them with the stamping of our feet. They have chosen this cow for their meat. Is she not beautiful and fat?” He stopped and reached out his hand, and one of the men handed him a clay bowl filled with beer. He poured it onto the animal’s back, spread it with his hand over her neck and shoulders, and back over her flanks. “We anoint this animal with beer, which is the drink of the Shades.” He turned on one foot and pointed dramatically. “Look! It is as we have said—there sits our son, Mandla Mkhize, full of health; today he will eat among us, and give thanks with us to the Shades who live among us and with us, and who have acted in these days to bring us health, and meat, and drink.”

He turned, leading the chosen cow with him to stand before Khabazela. He beckoned to the old man, who rose, and Sthembiso gravely gave him the spear. The old man walked around the cow, passed the spear between the animal’s rear legs, being careful not to touch them. He passed his hands over her udder, muttering, and walked to her side, where he passed the spear between her front legs to ensure the cattle’s fertility. Then he placed the tip of the spear on the cow’s neck where the main artery comes close to the surface, and without apparent effort, he thrust it deeply into the animal’s flesh. Blood pumped from the wound and sprayed across the enclosure, the cow bellowed loudly, her forelegs buckled and she fell to her knees.

The slaughterer held the spear in place, and when he was assured that the cow’s bellowing had been sufficient to call the Shades, he inserted the tip of the spear between two vertebrae, twisted deftly and severed the spinal column. As the white cow’s rear legs buckled and she came down, the spectators shouted approval, and several men came into the enclosure and maneuvered her so that she fell onto her right side. The other animals milled around uncomfortably at the smell of blood, and Sthembiso called for the boys to come and take the herd out to graze.

The slaughterer opened the cow’s belly, carefully cut out the gall bladder and poured its contents over Khabazela’s shoulders and onto his hair. Muttering, he gestured that Khabazela should open his mouth, which he did, and the old man sprinkled a few drops of gall onto his tongue. Like a trusting child; a paschal lamb.

Unbidden and unexpected, unsure of their origin or why they appeared, the words of broken psalms formed in my mouth. You prepare a table before mine enemies; my head you anoint with oil. It’s all of a oneness, I thought; the same things, seen through different lenses. Grandma Rachael, were she still alive, would have been horrified by the mere idea.

On a shard of clay from a broken pot, Sthembiso placed pieces of organ meat, beckoned to Khabazela, and together they returned to the hut. They put the potshard on the fire so that the Shades might be called by the burning meat to partake of the feast with us. The guests remained silent while the two men remained in the hut, waiting for the meat on the hearth to begin sizzling. It was like the Passover Seder, the cup of wine, filled to the brim each year so the children might run to open the door for the Prophet Elijah, if he were to arrive and announce the coming of the Messiah. I remember the excitement of waiting, breathlessly watching the cup to see whether Elijah would enter the house and take a sip of wine.

Smoke wafted from the doorway of the hut, and the odor, familiar and vaguely unpleasant, was the smell of the symbolic shank bone baking unseasoned in my grandmother’s oven before the Passover feast. The Shades would smell the smoke, recognize it as theirs, and come lick their meat and beer. Then the living could resume their celebration.

The horns and part of the skull of the slaughtered cow were mounted above the door of our hut. The empty gall bladder was tied around Khabazela’s right wrist, and Sthembiso tied a strip cut from the cowhide around his left. He insisted that I, too, have a piece of wet hide tied around my wrist. It was a great honor, I was told, to be given a hide bracelet from a ritually slaughtered animal, and I accepted as graciously as I could. For days I went about with the smell of rotting meat in my nostrils. Khabazela joked that I could not refuse to sleep with him because of his bad smell, since I smelled just as bad. But eventually the smell dissipated, or else I became used to it, as I became used to much else, and our lives returned to what had come to feel normal.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand the significance of what took place when we emerged from the Nkandla Forest. It forced me to see Khabazela in a new light, as a far more complex person than I had initially thought, and I didn’t know what to do with his particular complexity. This man, whom I loved, who on the surface was as Western as I was, had depths that I could not imagine. No matter what promises we might make to each other, he had age-old ties and loyalties far deeper than any commitment he might make to me. I knew deep in my blood—and I accepted—that if I chose to spend my life with him, it would be with the understanding that I might be called upon at any moment to give him up to the tribal demands that preceded mine.

He would have laughed at me had I raised the issue of his potentially divided loyalties. But I had seen in him the presence of the traditional Zulu who shared a body with the humorous, gentle, and determined idealist I knew, and it filled me with an intense sense of loss. I was aware of the duality he lived with, and I had to accept that I was irrevocably shut out from a part of his life.

Lungile waited until the winter had passed before she took me to the silent hilltop to see Cetshwayo’s grave. She waited until she knew me better; until I had learned Zulu, and we could speak to each other. There were words that needed saying, she told me, and she thought it appropriate that they be said at the grave of a Zulu King.

The grave itself was nothing to look at—a small, grassy plot on which lay the remains of the oxcart, surrounded by a makeshift fence to keep the cows out. It was well cared for, but I remember being puzzled by the contrast between this primitive and desolate site, and the pride with which Khabazela and Lungile had spoken of the man whose life it marked. A hush enveloped the site like a thick fog, and I imagined shouted slivers of distant voice cutting through the silence. With my new eye, I paid my respects, kneeling beside all that was left to mark the site—a rusted wheel rim, a moldering axle, and miscellaneous bits of wood and metal.

Lungile sat me down at a distance from the grave, in the shade cast by a huge sausage tree, its elongated seed pods hanging from vine-like stems. It was early morning, and the long, mottled shade we sat in was distant enough from the tree itself that we were far from the spot where, should they fall, the heavy seed pods would land. She leaned back on her arms, legs stretched out before her.

“Michaela, my daughter,” she began, “I have troubling dreams, and they push me to speak difficult words, to explain things of the Zulu to you.” She looked down at the ground, rubbing her bare feet against each other. There was thoughtfulness in her voice, and she said each word slowly, so that I would understand. “You have lived two seasons with us, and we have learned, you and I, that what binds us together is greater than that which makes us different.” She laughed loudly. “Did I think I would live to have a white daughter? Never! And did you come to us thinking that you would find a Zulu mother? No! But so it is.” She paused, picked up a twig, and began drawing in the sand at her side. “Among us it is the work of mothers to explain to young girls the things of women and men.”

“It is the same with us, Lungile,” I said.

“Good. You are no longer a young girl, but in the ways of women you are still a child. It has been given to me to teach you these things.” She paused. “The Shades are the molders of children. Do you know of this?”

“No,” I answered, “nor do I understand what it means. It’s strange to my ears.”

“I will explain,” she said. She shifted herself into a more comfortable position, and raised her hands above her head to illustrate her words. “When the sky brings clouds to us, the rain comes, and it makes all living things grow. This you know, because you have seen it. We say of this, that the sky is working with water. And as we talk of what is between man and woman, we say that the man is working with water. In this way there comes into the womb of the woman the water of the man, to mix with her blood. This makes a child grow.”