Bloodlines (32 page)

Lungile fell silent. Finally, she reached out her hand and touched my wrist. “It is these things, the water and the blood, that the Shades use in the molding of children. Do you see how it is, my daughter?” she murmured.

“Yes, mother,” I said. “I see how it is.” But she continued to stare at me, shaking her head, and I realized that I had not seen what she wanted me to. She clapped her hands, once, startling me.

“No!” she said loudly. “I have not told you well what I mean. I must use other words, or you will not hear what I have been given to tell you. It is like this.” She licked her lips and turned to face me. “When Khabazela is with you together in the hut where you sleep, he works with water with you. Is it not so?”

“Sometimes it is so, Mother,” I said, and felt the heat rising in my face. “But there will be no babies, so how can there be a problem with the Shades?”

She reached over and slapped my face. I don’t know even today how forceful the blow was, but it stung, and I was shocked.

“Why do you humiliate me, Mother?” I asked, keeping my anger under control. I had seen her slap other young women, who took the treatment in stride, but this was the first time she had raised a hand to me. “How have I offended you?”

“You have not offended me,” she said loudly, “but you offend the Shades! Do you want to bring on yourself the worst of the sicknesses of women, which is the curse of childlessness?” She clicked her tongue, shaking her head from side to side in irritation. “There will be babies! But you are like a small child—you speak in ignorance, and so you force me to swat your words away to protect you from yourself.”

It was a foregone conclusion that we would never have a child. One of the ironies of making sex between races illegal was that an interracial child became evidence of a law broken, and although parents might be punished, the child bore the consequences. There were multiple cases in those years of children being taken from their parents because they bore physical characteristics closer to those of a different racial group. They were torn from their families, relocated to live in a different racial area, with a family whose color, facial features and hair were deemed closer to their own. It was horrendous while it happened, and difficult to believe today—but back then we had already felt the long arm of racial laws. We had no desire to complicate our lives—or the lives of children—by bringing them into so unjust a world. As a result, either he used a condom or I used a diaphragm, but we didn’t discuss it until much later. Talking about why we could never have a child would have been far too painful, and we both avoided the subject.

I was taken aback by Lungile’s words, but I still didn’t understand what her real concern was until she tried again to make it clear.

“Your people do not live with their Shades in the same way that we do,” she said, “in their homesteads and in their houses. Is it not true?”

“It is true, mother.”

“Then where do the Shades of your ancestors go to live after they leave this life?” she asked.

I tried to explain to her that there was no one way of thinking of ancestors; that they did not feature as prominently in most religious beliefs as the presence of Shades in Zulu life.

“But if this is true,” she said, “who does the molding of children in the womb?”

“We believe,” I said, “that—
Inkosi AmaKhosi
, the Lord of Lords—takes care of the making of children, and that He does it by uniting the egg of the woman, which lives in her womb, with the seed of the man, which is in his water.”

“
Hau
,” she scoffed, “this is not correct. You are confused. You speak of eggs and seeds working together. You mix animal and plant, as if the big seeds on the sausage tree—” she pointed at the seed pods hanging above us, and then down at a small bird pecking at the base of the tree “—could do the working of water with that little female guinea fowl there, to mold a living thing.” She laughed loudly, incredulous at the impossibility of what I was suggesting, and waved her hand vigorously back and forth. “No, my daughter, this cannot be the correct teaching of your people.”

She stopped, sat in silence for a moment, rolled several strands of long green grass between the palms of her hands until they formed one strand, and then looked critically at what she had made.

“I know how it is between Zulu and Zulu,” she said thoughtfully, “but I cannot tell you how it is among others. Between you and Khabazela, I do not know how a child will be molded; nor do I know if the Shades will find each other in your womb. Among us it is not told what happens when the Shade of a Zulu meets with the Shade of another people.”

She knelt, rose to her feet, and stretched. “I have unburdened myself, and I have no more to say. More answers must come from others, who see deeper than I. Sthembiso has decided that together you and Khabazela will go to see a great
sangoma
, a very old woman, who will perhaps know of these things. The place where she lives is far—come, my daughter. We have preparations to make.”

We did see the
sangoma
, although it didn’t happen for several weeks. Khabazela was secreted away somewhere negotiating the next step of our lives with the leaders of the ANC, and it would not be until after we visited the
sangoma
that he explained to me what they had agreed to, and what choices I had.

In the meantime, I found myself longing for you, Steven. I wanted to look into my child’s face and hold him in my arms, to know that he was well and that he didn’t hate me. But traveling to Johannesburg to see you would have placed us both in danger, and bringing you to Zululand was out of the question. When Khabazela said quietly that the best we could do was arrange a phone conversation with Lenny and Steven, I jumped at the suggestion.

It took a week to arrange. A news reporter visited Lenny, saying that he wanted to talk about me. During the interview he slipped Lenny a note telling him to be at Sal’s Garage on the outskirts of Johannesburg at noon on the day of the call. There was no guarantee that the call would actually take place. We were at least a day’s journey from the nearest phone that was not on a party line—one that would allow us to have a private conversation.

Sthembiso and I started out after midnight on the long trek out to the main road, which we reached at sun-up, to find our contact waiting for me in an old Ford pickup. We drove south until we reached a town large enough to have a post office with a public phone, and we arrived several hours before the call was scheduled. My driver went off to have breakfast, but he dropped me at a second hand clothing store where I bought a skirt and jersey, new underwear and a pair of comfortable shoes. Then I went next door to the town hotel and rented a small, inexpensive room with its own bath. I had my first hot bath since my escape from prison months earlier. If I hadn’t been anxious about the phone call I would have luxuriated in the bathtub, but as it was I washed my hair three times, scrubbed my skin until it was red, then dressed and waited until it was time to go.

We had decided not to drive all the way together in the truck. The post office was for Whites Only, and my guide would have been arrested had he set foot inside. I walked two blocks to the post office. Anything could have gone wrong. The phone might have been out of order; there might have been a long waiting line; Lenny might have been delayed. But the post office was empty; the phone not in use, and Lenny arrived at the garage on time. I would have been better off had the conversation never taken place, but the arrangements for the call couldn’t have gone more smoothly. I followed instructions to the letter—I called the number of the garage and then hung up; someone called me back and hung up to let me know that Lenny was ready; and then I called again. The phone was picked up and I heard a muffled voice. “I think this is for you.”

Then Lenny came on the line.

“Where the hell are you, Michaela?” he asked. He sounded weary and strained.

“I can’t tell you where I am, Lenny.”

“Great,” he said. “Can you tell me what your plans are?”

“I have no plans. And if I had plans, I couldn’t share them with you over the phone. It wouldn’t be safe.”

“That’s par for the course. Whatever your plans are,” he said bitterly, “they haven’t included me for some time now, have they?”

Much of what we said, I don’t remember. But some of Lenny’s words that day are carved in bone on the inside of my skull.

The fallout from what I had done, he said, made it impossible for him to remain in the country. Most of our friends had supported him when I was on trial, and some had continued even after I was convicted. The police didn’t publicize our escape, and the media never printed a word—but because the investigation continued, and everyone associated with us was questioned, it soon became known among our circle that even after a guilty verdict, I had been involved in a brazen escape. Apparently, few people wanted to be associated with a man whose wife was unwilling to take her medicine and fade away into obscurity. Lenny quickly discovered who his true friends were; the others simply disappeared. His mentor and the senior partner in his engineering firm accused him of jeopardizing projects for which the firm was bidding—told him bluntly that he should have had the balls to put me in my place while the marriage was still salvageable. The management team was almost universally contemptuous of him.

“I didn’t mean any of this to happen,” I said.

“That’s rich,” he said. “Perhaps you can explain to me how you fuck a man without meaning to. Dear God, Michaela, what the hell were you thinking?” Anger and despair were so clear in his voice that I had to distance the phone from my ear. “You’ve destroyed my life as well as yours, to say nothing about what you’ve done to Stevie.”

“I’m so sorry, Lenny.” My voice was a whisper, trying not to be heard, instinctively shying away from what I didn’t want to know. “How is he?”

“He’s traumatized. The Special Branch has us both under constant surveillance. They follow me to work and him to school, hoping that you’ll try and make contact. At school the children are merciless. They taunt him every day with words they don’t even understand—it just shows what they must hear at home. They call you a traitor.” He spoke the words slowly, enunciating carefully. “Whore. Adulteress.
Kaffir
lover.”

I listened to the recitation in silence, wondering whether, at some level, Lenny was using the words to make his own accusations.

“I have to get Stevie out of the country,” he said eventually. “I’ve been offered a teaching job in the States, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We’re leaving next month.”

“Of course,” I said, unable to raise my voice beyond a whisper. “I understand why you have to go. But will you tell Stevie that I love him? That I never meant to hurt him?”

“He’s not ready. He’s got enough to cope with.” Lenny hesitated briefly and then continued, remorseless. “I wasn’t going to tell you this, but he’s convinced himself that you’re dead. He’s told his entire class that you were killed fighting apartheid, and that he’s proud of you.”

My breath caught in my throat. “Where did he get that from?”

“Not from me. He made it up—it’s the only way he can deal with what’s on his plate.”

“When you get settled you’ll tell him the truth, won’t you?”

“Of course I’ll tell him the truth,” he snapped. “I’m not about to live with the lie that you’re dead. When he’s ready, we’ll have a talk and I’ll tell him the truth.”

I was silent, wondering, what truth will you tell him? And how will you know when he’s ready to hear it?

“That’s it, then,” I said. “I’ll write you at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and let you know where I am.”

“Fine. I’ll give him your letters, and if you ask me about him I’ll write back and let you know how he’s doing.” He paused. “I can’t speak for Steven, but I’m done with South Africa. I will never return.” He breathed a jagged breath, and in the silence that followed I recognized the sounds as Lenny choking back his tears. When he was able to speak, he cleared his throat. “I’ll probably love you for as long as I live, Michaela, but I never want to see you again. You’ve done enough damage for one lifetime.”

In response I wept silently, shook my head into the phone as if he could see me disagreeing with him. But whatever pain I might have felt at his words, I could not dispute the damage he accused me of. He waited, listened to me breathing, but I couldn’t speak. Eventually the phone went dead.

“Goodbye, Lenny,” I whispered.

I remained in the kiosk long after we ended the call, the receiver hard against my ear, listening to the dense silence that comes through a disconnected phone. It wasn’t until a man knocked impatiently on the glass that I forced myself to cradle the receiver, push open the sliding door, and place one foot in front of the other until I was standing outside the post office, blinded by the brilliant sunshine. It was a warm summer afternoon, but I was shivering, chilled to the bone.

I thought then that in your mind, the mind of my seven year old son, I was dead, killed in the fight for freedom. Alive, I was a disgrace and an embarrassment; it was much easier to live with the memory of a dead hero. I tried to imagine the macabre conversation in which I came to life. Would you be disappointed or relieved? Or just furious that I had sabotaged your attempt to create an acceptable mother?