Bloodlines (37 page)

“What is it, Solomon?” I asked, stepping into the boots.

He shook his head in disapproval. “It is not good,
Nkosikazi
. Come, I will show you, and you will see the problem that has come to sit on our doorstep.”

Carrying a glass of water in his hand, he took me across the yard, past the rooms where he and the cook and the housemaid slept, through a clearing and into a grove of trees. A black man whom I assumed at first to be one of the farm workers sat slumped against a tree, a bloody bandage on the side of his head and his arm in a makeshift sling. There was blood on his clothes, and his face was drawn in exhaustion and pain. He tried to rise as we approached, but Solomon gently pushed him down and placed the glass of water in his hand. The man drank greedily.

“Here is Grace Michaels,” said Solomon. “Tell her your story.”

“Khabazela told me if I was in trouble, that I should come to this farm and ask for you,” he said, looking at me. “Trouble has come, this you can see. And so I ask your help.”

“When did you see him?” I asked.

“Less than ten days from today,” he said.

“Where?”

He lowered his eyes in thought, and then looked up at me, attempting to smile. “On a hilltop in Zululand, not far from the homestead of your mother, Lungile.”

I smiled back at him—it was the code we had agreed upon.

“This trouble that has come to you,” I asked, “will it be bringing others behind you who are also in trouble, or are you alone?”

“I am only one,
Nkosikazi
.”

“Can you tell us what has happened to you?”

He shrugged his shoulders and grimaced at the pain. “I have been wounded—shot through the arm—a week ago. I was making my way to my home, and I stopped where my sister works so that she could shelter me for the night. But the farmer she works for found out about me and he came to her room to beat her for taking me in. He was very surprised that I would stand up to him, but I could not allow her to be beaten, and so we fought, and I have cut his throat.”

“
Cha
,” said Solomon, clicking his teeth. “This is a very bad thing. How do you know that you are not followed? And what of your sister? You have not brought her with you, have you?”

He shook his head. “No, no, she is far from here, gone in the opposite direction. I am not followed—this thing happened three night’s walk from here. I have been hiding in daylight, so although they are looking, they have no reason to come here.”

“The danger is not here, yet,” said Solomon, turning to me. “But it will come if someone sees him or talks about a stranger. Then, word will spread and police will arrive. It will not be good for us. We should hide him until he is strong enough, and then he must go.”

“Get him to one of the servant’s rooms for the day, then,” I said. “He can rest, and tonight we can help him out to the field we were at yesterday—where the cowherds shelter in the rain.”

“No, no,” said Solomon, “there is a much better place. Go,
Nkosikazi
. If you are seen here it will raise questions. I will hide him today, and tonight I will take you to see him.”

I walked the fields alone that morning, wondering how this man came to be three days walk from the farm, and whether he was telling the truth about his injuries. I wondered where they had met, and tried to guess where Khabazela might be. He could be undergoing military training—or torture—in as distant a place as Tanzania or China, or he could be sleeping in the servants’ quarters behind the farm. Either way, I would know nothing until he chose to tell me. This may have been his way of protecting me—but while it probably afforded me a measure of physical safety, I felt isolated and lonely, high and dry, and fully exposed emotionally.

As I walked between two shoulder-high corn fields, sweating in the mid-summer sun, I realized that my feet hurt because I was kicking clods of dirt from the path carelessly, and in anger. The arrangement was not working, and, I thought, it would have to change when he returned. I couldn’t even say “when” with confidence. Until he came home, it would be safer to say “if.”

That night, long after dark, Solomon came to get me. I carried my first aid kit, which contained everything from antibiotics and cough syrup to needles and sutures. Solomon carried his stick in one hand and a bag of food over his shoulder, and he had a long flashlight protruding from his pocket. We walked silently through the deserted yard adjacent to the servants’ quarters. Slits of yellow light shone from beneath closed doors, and sounds of muted voices and laughter drifted through the darkness as we passed. Solomon led me along a path I didn’t know, around a grove of thorn trees and through a pasture. The moon was half full in a cloudless sky and it was easy to see our way, and I followed him easily for about fifteen minutes until we reached the base of a steep hill and the path seemed to disappear into the undergrowth. It didn’t—but the foliage was so thick that no moonlight penetrated, and the path simply wound its way up the incline, around the trunks of huge shade trees. Solomon turned on the flashlight and focused it on the ground ahead of us.

The hill was steep, and I was breathless when we reached the top. For a few moments at the summit we were in moonlight again, but I followed Solomon down the other side and into the darkness again. He took my hand and led me off the path through the undergrowth towards what appeared to be a wall of rock. Within seconds we were in absolute darkness.

“Wait,
Nkosikazi
,” he said, releasing my hand, “while I turn on the light. We are here.”

In the glow of the flashlight I saw that we were in a narrow crevice that opened in the rock wall, and I followed Solomon deeper into the crevice until it closed over and became a cave that widened and rose around us. It was about twenty feet across, and at the highest point I couldn’t touch the roof with my upraised arm. At one side of the cave, lying on a blanket and looking up at us, was the man I had seen that morning.

Solomon untied the sack and showed him the contents, enough food to last for several days. I knelt beside him and gently unwrapped the bandage around his head. He had a deep laceration along the side of his skull, but it was clean and healing well. I washed it, spread antiseptic on the wound, and redressed it. I did the same with the sling around his arm, and Solomon helped me roll him onto his unharmed side so that we could treat the wound on his shoulder.

The bullet had entered his upper arm just above the bicep and off to one side, so that it ripped right through the back of his deltoid muscle. He was unable to move his arm, and I had no way of telling whether there was any damage to the bone or shoulder joint. I could have drawn from memory the structure of the shoulder—but it didn’t help me ascertain how badly he had been hurt. And even if I had known, what would I have done? The nearest hospital was hours distant, and anyway, that wasn’t an option since I had yet to meet the local doctor and determine whether he was to be trusted. All I could do was clean and bandage the wounds, and make sure that he had a place to rest and enough to eat and drink. I felt helpless, and I knew that if this was to be a part of my life, I would need to either learn more about healing, or find someone to rely on who was more knowledgeable than I.

By the time I was through, my patient had fallen asleep again, and I repacked the first aid kit and rose to my feet. Solomon stood beside me, flashlight in hand.

“What is this place, Solomon?”

“It is just an old hole in the rock,” he said, “a cave, where I came to play as a child. Very few know of this place—but I have brought many to hide here. The cave does not know a good man from bad; it cannot tell a black man from white, or a Zulu from some other, and so it shelters all. Once it hid the little hunters, so that they could make their paintings on the rock. Look,” he said quietly, pointing his light at the wall.

I followed the light up to the top of the rock, where a series of painted figures leaped out at me—Bushman paintings of hunters, pursuing antelope and impala, and, lower down, and more recent, what were unmistakably the figures of two larger black men with rifles, battling against several Bushmen with bows and arrows.

I looked up at the rock paintings again, to see in them the only remnant of a vanished culture. The first people in the area, the Bushmen, were killed by fiercer, more sophisticated tribes who wanted to farm and hunt; they were unable—or unwilling—to find a way for their cultures to coexist. Then the Europeans came, and once they had helped annihilate the remaining Bushmen, they turned their superior firepower on the Zulu. And now, the players slightly different and the objectives slightly altered, we were still engaged in a continuation of the same struggle.

I went back to the farmhouse and spent the night tossing in my bed—it would never be a marriage bed, even if it played host to a man who was husband in all but name—kicking at the lonely, yet-to-be-consummated sheets, asking myself what I was doing with my life. But the next morning the phone rang, and my question was answered. We had a party line back then, and I knew that there could be any number of people listening—and a voice I didn’t know told me that the tractor starter motor I’d been waiting for had arrived, and would be delivered in a day or two.

Khabazela was the starter motor, and he was coming home.

We had barely seen each other since leaving Lungile’s homestead. Khabazela knew of my trip to Switzerland to access my father’s funds, but he had now been away for six weeks. I missed him with a physical longing that lived in my chest like a deep ache.

Like a lovesick Sheba in wait for her king, I mooned about the farm, alternately ecstatic and tearful, at one moment thinking about the welcome home sign I would hoist, and the next furious that he had not yet arrived, and that such a celebratory gesture was out of the realm of possibility. I wanted to have my hair done, wear my most revealing gown, make up my face and dab perfume lightly on my neck, between my breasts, on my thighs. I daydreamed of holding him, of being in his arms.

But while in my mind the husband of my heart was returning to my bed, to most people he would be just another shabby worker in soiled clothing returning to the farm, and it wasn’t conceivable that he and I could mean anything to each other. So I did nothing and went about my business, and I hid my longing and excitement beneath a veneer of impatience and the appearance of activity.

I first saw him the next afternoon, as I stood in the yard talking to Brian McWilliams. The end of summer was approaching; there were fields that needed to be prepared for planting, and crops ripe for harvest.

As McWilliams explained his harvesting plans to me, Solomon drove through the gate and into the yard in an ancient, mud-caked narrow-wheeled tractor, a man sitting on each of the rear mudguards. He stopped the tractor at the door to the shed, and one of the men jumped down and went inside. The other man moved slowly—he seemed to be waiting for Solomon, as the elder, to dismount first.

When they were both on the ground, Solomon, no higher than the other man’s shoulder, took his elbow and led him toward us, speaking softly as they approached. The stranger wore a black cap and brown farm overalls that were worn in the knees and too short for him, and he walked with rounded shoulders, his eyes on the ground.

My body knew that it was Khabazela before I recognized him, and I felt a tremor of excitement and then a flush of warmth in my face even before the stooped stranger raised his head cautiously and glanced at me from under his cap. I stopped breathing as I looked directly into his eyes. McWilliams, noticing that I had glanced away from him, followed my eyes.

“What is it, Solomon?” he asked brusquely. “Who is this?”

Solomon nodded politely to McWilliams, but when he spoke it was to me alone. McWilliams didn’t like it.

“
Nkosikazi
, this is the boy of whom I have told you, my sister’s son. He has been in Durban, cooking in the big houses, and if you wish, he will work for you in the kitchen, and he will be in my room here on the farm. His name is Mandla Mkhize, and it will be good for me to leave him here, to watch over you when I am away.”