Bloodlines (50 page)

“If I were alone right now I’d tear the house apart,” I said eventually.

“I’d be tempted to do the same in your place.”

“You might be,” I said. “On the other hand, you’ve come here as another man’s proxy, to deliver the message that I’m not enough for him. He’s marrying another woman, and she’s already carrying his child. And in a minute you’re going to start trying to convince me that I shouldn’t chuck him out, sell the farm, pack up and leave. That makes me furious with you, as well as with him.”

Andrew smiled.

“There’s nothing funny in this,” I said sharply.

“Plenty of irony, though,” he replied. He relaxed into the armchair, his thick forearms crossed over his chest. “Look at me, for example. I couldn’t have begun to imagine being here, another man’s proxy, as you put it, yet here I am. And the reason why I might want you to accept what he’s done and stay here has very little to do with my responsibility to any person or political movement.” He paused, looking at me with eyes wide and unconcealed. “That’s why I’m not going to try and convince you of anything. You know your own mind, and you’ll make your own decisions.”

“Before I make any decisions I need to know precisely what message you’re here to deliver,” I said.

“I don’t have a message from him, Grace; he didn’t ask me to come talk to you. Doesn’t even know I’m here.”

“So you think he’s just dropped me out of his life? That he was going to let this happen and have me find out after the fact?”

“No, no. He’ll tell you in his own time. But I thought it would be easier—that it would work out better for all concerned—if you already knew about it when he came to speak to you.”

“Why?”

“Because I think it’s important for you to be reminded of how he views this.”

“It’s pretty clear that he views his relationship with me as over. Does he even plan to acknowledge that he’s the father of my child?”

“Acknowledge?” he said harshly. “To whom? The apartheid government? Don’t be ridiculous, Grace. You forget we’re in South Africa? This is why I came to you—because you can’t count on anyone else to be honest with you. No one else knows enough about you, or about all the circumstances, to tell you what you need to hear. He certainly can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for starters, what makes you think that he views his relationship with you as over? That he would even consider dropping you from his life?”

“Are you insane, Andrew?” I asked, glaring at him. “He’s going to marry a woman in the village. How could you possibly think I would share him with another woman?”

“What I think is not the issue here. It’s what you and he think that matters. But you’re not thinking straight, Grace. You might not be interested in sharing him—but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be quite happy to share himself. You’ve forgotten that the man you’re in love with is a Zulu, and the times we live in make it impossible for him to discard traditional values. You ask whether he’ll even acknowledge fathering your child—I think he’d be dumbfounded by the question because it would never enter his mind to deny that your child was his. But he might be asking himself different questions: what good would it do the child to know that a Zulu man named Mandla Mkhize fathered him? What can a black father offer to his colored child in the South Africa we live in? And they’re reasonable questions. He can’t offer much, and his fatherhood would need to be kept secret until the child is old enough to be trusted—probably as a teenager. And then there’s the question, Grace, of whether a boy or girl of fifteen or sixteen, having been raised in a white or colored community, will even want to acknowledge a black father. Have you considered that?”

He stopped to sip at his tea, by now long cold. And again, in the silence between us, I wondered whether I was doing my child a grave disservice by bringing him into a white world.

“There’s more,” continued Andrew. “You forget that he comes from a polygamous culture. Where he grew up, most of the men have more than one wife. Did he ever lead you to believe he intended to be faithful to you? I don’t think so, because that could never have been his intention. You entered into this knowing that you could never marry—that the time you spent together would be short and infrequent. Did he ever tell you that the limited possibilities open to the two of you were sufficient for him to forego the comforts of home and children? He probably believes this is a non-issue—that there’s no reason why the life you have together, and the work you do, should change.” He stopped and looked at me. “If he were standing here now, he would say that he’s not what stands in the way of making the relationship between you work. You are.”

In the forty years I’ve had to wonder why I stayed, I’ve come up with many answers. None of them are good enough to explain or justify what ultimately happened.

I stayed because I loved my farm, and the people who worked on it, and the land. I stayed because of the corkscrew-horned kudu on my property, and the steenbok and the impala; because of the sun setting over the Drakensberg Mountains, and the long, pale winter grasses dancing with the wind. Because of Solomon and Lungile and the
sangoma’s
predictions, and because South Africa was my child’s birthright, and because I didn’t want to deprive my baby of the opportunity to live in the new South Africa, the one I firmly believed was coming. I stayed because I had developed a small community of friends, and because if I went anywhere else, I would have to start from square one.

And where would I go? In the 1960s there was no place in the world—at least no place I knew of—that would welcome a single white mother with a black child. Even in Boston, New York and other enlightened places in the northeast United States, the civil rights struggle was just getting underway. I thought I was devoting my life to destroying a corrupt and evil system, and the realization, from my spot at the tip of the African continent, that the world seemed to offer no better place to go, was both frightening and humbling.

Despite this, I thought of going to Boston and starting over. Lenny didn’t want me, so I would be alone—but at least I would be close to you, Steven. Then I imagined Lenny’s anger and outrage were I to arrive with my colored child, and your resentment at having to put up with a halfsibling. Today, I realize that going to Boston might have been the wisest thing I could have done. It would have been difficult, but nothing as difficult as staying has been. Lenny is basically a good man, and he would probably have overcome his anger; you were still a child, and would probably have followed your father’s example. But I was still young, then, and going to Boston felt like defeat and humiliation.

As a younger woman, I would have argued that all cultures were equally valid; that the responsibility for our problems rested with our political and economic systems—apartheid, and communism, and unregulated capitalism. Time has cured me of that belief; time, and loss, and the Taliban, and Sharia law, and our awareness of the treatment of women in most of the world. But when I was pregnant, I recognized that Andrew was right. I might be angry and feel betrayed, but I could not fault the tribal value system that made it possible for Khabazela to marry another woman and still expect to have me.

I don’t know what I would do today—but back then, I stayed because I loved him, and because I knew that I would continue to love him, though I would never again invite him to my bed. And because, to tell the truth, the greatest horror I could imagine was having to start over again. So I stayed, and I planned. I waited for Anna McWilliams to make her demands, and for my child to be born. And I waited with anticipation and dread for Khabazela’s return.

.

twenty-three

MICHAELA

Journey to Swaziland, 1968

F
or weeks I waited, watched for messages he might have left. When the wind blew at night and the windows rattled in their frames; when floorboards in the hallway creaked in the early morning hours; when the dogs barked at the scent of a stranger or the sound of birdsong suddenly stopped, all my senses came alive to the possibility that Khabazela was approaching. But his arrival, when it did happen, was not what I had expected, and it was for reasons far different from anything I could have imagined. Once more in our lives, the personal and the political collided, and as usual, politics took precedence.

That day, the radio reports were full of news about a raid outside Johannesburg, on the secret headquarters of Spear of the Nation. Among the documents discovered in an open safe was a detailed military plan to bring down the government. All those present were arrested, and eight leaders of the organization were taken into custody. It was, said the news reports, another major victory for the Special Branch, and a major defeat for the resistance.

I was concerned—but Khabazela had never discussed his rank in the paramilitary wing—in fact, he had never admitted to having any official rank, and I had no way of knowing whether he was senior enough to have been at the meeting. When the footsteps came that night, I was not surprised—but they were not his.

Solomon was never comfortable coming into the farmhouse—he had never been further than the kitchen. I was already wide awake when the floorboards creaked, and when the sound was followed by his whispered voice, I was out of bed and at the door in an instant.

“What’s happened, Solomon?”

“
Nkosikazi
, Khabazela waits for you at the cave of the little hunters. He is with other men. Important men, I think. Will you come?”

“Of course,” I said. “Are any of them injured?”

“No
Nkosikazi
, but they came tonight from Johannesburg. All day yesterday and tonight they have been running from the police. There are guards, also. They are hungry and thirsty. I have water for them, and food. I will wait while you make yourself ready.”

I changed quickly, put on my boots, and followed Solomon through the chilly darkness to the mouth of the cave. In a cloudless, pitch-black sky the brilliance of the stars seemed to cast their own light, and the sliver of moon just above the horizon seemed dull by comparison. There was just enough light so that I could see each of the four men we passed on the path, each one in battle fatigues. Three carried high-powered rifles; one carried a sub-machine gun. In all my encounters with this secret and unlawful paramilitary, I had never seen such an open show of force, and I wondered who they were protecting, and against what opposition. Solomon greeted each man with a murmured word, and I thought, not for the first time, that there was more to this simple man than first met the eye.

Khabazela was standing at the entrance to the cave, dressed in worn khaki fatigues and holding a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other. He was tense and alert, tall and muscular, and I loved him. I wanted to throw my arms around him; grind my fists into his face. I did neither, but he briefly placed his arm about my shoulder, looked at my belly and gave me a quick, unsure grin. Then he turned and I followed him to the back of the cave.

In the beam of the flashlight, three men sat on upturned logs. All wore creased suit pants and dirty white shirts that looked as if they’d been slept in, and each had been given an old khaki jacket to guard against the cold. There was a tall Englishman with a graying mustache, swept back hair and blue eyes, and a stocky, powerful black man with an afro, a wide smile, and an American accent. They both looked weary, and greeted me without rising. The third man, by contrast, sat erect on his log, and he rose and bowed to me when I entered. When I looked at him and realized that he was Chinese, I must have shown my surprise, because amusement registered at the corners of his mouth. I had never seen a Chinese man in Zululand, but I was not responding to his presence alone.

We were only one day beyond a devastating raid; the government had publicly accused Spear of the Nation of receiving financial and military backing from China, from the international communist party, and from other left-wing organizations in the UK and the United States. And here, in a darkened cave decorated by long-gone Bushmen hunters, an Englishman, an American and a Chinese man happened to show up a day later—one day’s drive from where the raid occurred. Their appearance was no coincidence, nor was the fact that they were protected by a grim contingent of guerilla fighters from Spear of the Nation.

Solomon knelt on one knee, opened the knapsack, and drew out a bag of apples, a loaf of bread, a block of cheese and several canteens of water. He lay it all out on a blanket on the floor of the cave, and as the men drank greedily and helped themselves to the food, they listened.

“I apologize for the accommodations,” said Khabazela. “This is not usually how we entertain our guests. But you are at least safe and dry, until we leave here after dark tomorrow. This is Grace Michaels, your hostess, and she will also be your driver. We will do all we can to get you all out of the country and home in one piece. In the meantime, Solomon will take care of your needs; as you’ve already seen, the guards outside are well trained, and they will keep you safe. It’s been a long day—you should rest while you can.”

He ushered me outside, beyond the entrance to the cave, where we sat together on a fallen tree trunk. We were in a darkened clearing surrounded by a dense tangle of overhanging trees, vines and brush. There was nothing silent about the night—it was filled with the murmur of windswept foliage, the sounds of cicadas, wood frogs, and night birds, and by the troop of silver vervet monkeys on the alert, indignant about our invasion of their territory. He took my wrist in his hand and ran his thumb along the underside of my forearm. It was an intimate gesture, gently done, and it was all I wanted from him.

“Are you well?” he asked in a low voice.

“I’m fine,” I said, carefully withdrawing my wrist from his hand. “Who are these men?” I asked.

“Better if you don’t know,” he said. “As far as the world knows, these men are not here now, and as soon as we’ve returned them to their own countries, they will never have been here.”

“We’ve hidden plenty of people up here, but never with armed guards. Who’s after them? Were you at the meeting with them?”

“Yes,” he said. “We were all there. I was watching out for them, and I was able to get them out. The Branch knows that several of us escaped—but they have no idea who, or what powers these men represent. Every one of our leaders is in custody as a result of the raid. It’s been a terrible loss—but if those three are captured, it will be far worse. Foreign governments will have to deny their support for the resistance, and they’ll be pressured to withdraw funding. Even worse, it would make the regime even more paranoid. They’d close the country down. That would mean more isolation, more restrictive laws. It would set us back twenty years. Whatever it takes, I have to get them out of the country.”

He looked at me in the darkness; I could see the whites of his eyes not six inches from my face, and the smell of his sweat and exertion was strong, and very familiar.