Bloodlines (42 page)

“At first she was hot all the time,” said Andrew, “and we laughed behind our hands as she stood before the open window waving a handkerchief before her face, flushed and sweating in the winter wind that blew down from the mountains. Then she began to lose weight, as if there were malevolent fury in her body boiling her from within, rendering her flesh the way fat is rendered in the fire. She simply melted away, and her skin hung loosely from the framework of her bones like pigskin, softened by use. Her cheeks, once glutted and oily, became dried and shriveled as they caved in, and they slopped down beneath her jawbones like desiccated udders that swayed back and forth as she moved her head.

One day she appeared at school leaning on a cane, and she walked painfully, struggling for breath. We watched her dying, fascinated and appalled, and we were relieved when she stopped coming to school. She died within the year.

“At the funeral,
mama
was serene and solemn, but her eyes gleamed with silent knowing. Sbusiso and I looked at each other, remembering what had happened, and we knew with a terrible certainty that
mama
was responsible. We never discussed it, but it remained a shared secret between us that she had visited a diviner or a sorcerer and invoked the help of the Shades. I was her child, and she had harnessed their anger in my defense.”

Andrew said that it was both comforting and terrifying to think that
mama
had such power at her disposal. He would have done anything for her, but the fact that she had been willing to go to such lengths to protect him cemented his identity as a Zulu. From that point on, there was never any doubt in his mind that he would do anything to protect either her or Sbusiso, and by extension to stand up for whoever—or whatever—was important to them.

“It was a defining moment for me,” he said, “the moment I knew that the Shades of our ancestors live among us and influence our lives; that beneath my white skin is an African heart; that I have Zulu blood and a Zulu spirit. I knew that I belonged as much to the Zulu people—the People of the Sky—as I do to my father’s people. It was years before I recognized that this knowing was as deep as bone, but
mama
had fed me from her body, and she knew long before I did that I was a white Zulu.”

By the end of the evening, I understood that the work Andrew referred to doing with Khabazela was wrapped up with the ANC, and that he was as committed as we were. He was not on the Governing Committee, although he could have been had he wanted to. I think even the most diehard separatist blacks would have welcomed him. But he preferred to make his contribution surreptitiously, as the eyes and ears of the organization.

In his role as a physician to both English and Afrikaans-speaking whites, and to the Zulu community, Andrew was privy to much that would otherwise never have been revealed. He knew who was affiliated with which political movement; he knew who could be called on for help, and who should be avoided. He knew every child born, every incident of family violence that required medical care, every altercation between young men of different villages; he knew who was raped and when, and he knew who was behind many of the acts of violence that were never reported. If the legal system failed to punish the perpetrators of random violence or gratuitous theft, others often did, and Andrew was frequently the force behind the thief who repaid his victim, or the young tough who came to the door of the man he had beaten, offering to help with the farming until his injuries healed.

These roles Andrew would have filled no matter what the political circumstances, but in addition, because he traveled around the community, he had an excuse to be anywhere at any time. He was above suspicion, and he was a huge asset to the movement. He also turned out to be a very good friend.

My initial response to the revelation that Andrew was one of us had been anger at Khabazela, who had given me no indication of what to expect. I walked into a living room expecting to be welcomed as Grace Michaels, only to find myself exposed. Andrew hadn’t simply seen through my disguise—it had been totally invisible to him because he already knew precisely who I was.

He knew that I had never lived on a farm near the Rhodesian border—but did he also know that my farmer husband was a fiction? I couldn’t follow the trail any further in my mind without knowing how deeply involved Andrew was in the ANC, but I wondered for how long he had been a hidden factor in my life. He might have had a hand in planning the event that resulted in our arrest; and he may have been instrumental in the decision to break me out of prison along with Khabazela. I wondered whether he knew that we had been in hiding for a year in Zululand, and whether he had perhaps followed our activities while we were there. Did he know that we were lovers?

I knew very little about Andrew, at least at the start, but he was privy to some—perhaps many—of my secrets. Khabazela had given me no preparation at all; allowed me to enter a situation completely unprepared for what I might find. It put me at a distinct disadvantage, and I left Glen Acres Farm at the end of the evening furious with him.

But by the time I drove down my dirt road into the farmyard and climbed out of the Jeep, my fury had evaporated. Khabazela had played me by sending me into unfamiliar territory and seeing how I would handle being unmasked. Both he and Andrew had kept from me the fact that it was a safe situation, and when it happened I felt far more vulnerable than I actually was. I handled the situation as well as anyone could have, and I was willing to let them conduct their test at my expense. But I was also relieved, because for the first time since arriving on the farm, I felt that we were not alone. There was someone else who knew me for what I was; someone else before whom I didn’t need to be on constant alert.

Brian McWilliams’ wife, Anna, never did come to pay her respects. When I occasionally saw her in town, I was struck by the fact that she was almost pretty, but circumstance and her own temperament had failed her. She had discontent written all over her pale, narrow face, and I never saw her smile. Her mouth would have been beautiful, but her lips had been sculpted with a knife blade, and most often she held her mouth pursed in an expression of determination or distaste. Like most farm women, she cut her hair herself, and it hung in an uneven fringe over her forehead. Beneath large, pale blue eyes she had dark rings that spoke of depression or lack of sleep, and by all accounts, she had reason to suffer from both.

The McWilliams lived at the edge of the property where the farm road met the tarmac, and I passed it every time I left the farm. Sometimes I saw Anna over the waist-high stone wall that surrounded the foreman’s cottage, wheeling a pram in the back yard, or sitting on the porch with the maid, shelling peas or husking
mielies
as the children played on the small enclosed lawn. One day I saw her hanging laundry, her arms raised to the washing line, and she was so thin that I was sure she must be ill. Today we would conclude that she was either anorexic or that she had AIDS. But back then we didn’t know about anorexia and there was no AIDS, and Anna McWilliams was just another bony, flat-chested, over-worked farm wife who bore too many children too soon.

Brian McWilliams was apparently not a bad husband or father, but he was not to be trifled with, especially when he was drinking. It seems he loved his scotch, and it didn’t take much to turn him into a loud and vindictive drunk. In his defense—a thin defense, I thought—it was said that he seldom beat her, but she was afraid of him, and the story was that she hid his liquor. He accepted it, perhaps relieved that she was protecting him from his worst self. But that didn’t stop him from trying to locate her hiding places, which she changed often. I shuddered to think what her life must have been like as he searched for his drink, as she waited for him to find it, and then watched as he changed into the person she was trying so hard to keep him from becoming.

The McWilliams had four children under the age of six, and Anna always had one of them on her back, on her hip, on her lap. Sometimes Brian relieved her by bringing the oldest boy, Michael, with him to the farmhouse, where I gave him a cup of tea and a biscuit as his father and I discussed the day’s work. He was a serious child with a thick mop of wheat-colored hair, and he would sit with his tea on the verandah in his short pants, his chapped, little-boy knees clasped together, watching us silently out of big brown eyes. I became fond of him, and he enjoyed coming to the relative peace of my home, so different from his own.

Several months passed without incident. Khabazela came and went, and while I loved it when he was home, I was determined not to miss him when he was gone. I spent several evenings with Letty and Jane, and sometimes Andrew joined us; on a couple of occasions Andrew and I went for a long tramp through the
veld
along the low berg, where the winter grass rustled in the silence.

There were still families of baboons wandering the
veld
then, and small herds of impala. The sky, always clear in winter after the sun evaporated the morning mist, was filled with heron, and multiple species of water birds landed on the small ponds that dotted the flatland. The air was filled with dragonflies and buzzing with insects and flying beetles. Whenever we came across an herb or a plant used by the Zulus, Andrew would point to it with his walking stick. We would kneel down beside each other and he would show me how to identify it, and describe how it was used. He pointed out plants whose roots or flowers were used to cause vomiting or to relieve constipation, to heal sores and cure blindness or ringworm or pimples.

While some of the botanical knowledge he had was practical, some was simply superstition, and I found it fascinating to see how the two coexisted. The herb
Icishamlilo
, for example—the extinguisher of fire—had dark purple flowers, and traditional healers used its roots in a concoction to relieve pain. But some healers also sprinkled it around the homestead as protection against evil, and on hut roofs as protection against arson. He showed me
Umabophe
, a shrub whose leaves and roots were used in court proceedings to prevent a plaintiff from making a clear argument. It either made the recipient mute, or made him say things that were not relevant to the case. I laughed.

“You may mock,” he said, “but I’ve seen it happen. When someone knows that he’s taken the medicine, we can say that it works only because he thinks it will. But I’ve seen it work when it was given to a witness without his knowledge.”

“You can’t believe that, Andrew,” I said. “How do you reconcile it with your medical training?”

“I’m trained in western medicine,” he said, “but many of my patients are Zulus. I’ve seen these medicinal concoctions work in ways that confound western scientific thinking.” He shrugged, squatting on his heels and supporting himself on his stick. “I don’t try any more to reconcile what I don’t understand—I just accept that there are some things our science doesn’t yet know.”

I looked at him skeptically. “Like your first grade teacher being bewitched and melting away?”

I was kneeling beside him, and for a long moment he returned my glance without speaking. Then he pointed with his stick at the plant between us. It was an herb with narrow leaves and a richly scented white flower.