Bloodlines (59 page)

We carried my sons back through the trees to the main building, and there I washed the blood from their bodies and sewed together their torn flesh, thinking to hide the degree of their damage from their mothers. Andrew tried to dissuade me, but he too was heartbroken, and he stood and watched me as I clumsily did my mending. I was not thinking clearly, and perhaps a part of me thought that by sewing up their wounds I might bring them back. But their lives were gone. And mine.

There I sat on the forest floor, my legs spread out before me in the mud, holding my sons one against each shoulder. I wept in a way I never thought possible; heard bellows of animal grief so painful that I looked around me for the source until I realized that the sounds came from my own throat. The only thing worse than the experience of my own grieving was our dark and silent journey back to the farm, where I stood frozen and numb, a weeping rock, and I watched Miriam and Michaela fall on the boys, kiss their dead eyes, keening and wailing. And then they stood together, holding each other upright even though all they wanted was to end the pain of their own grief, fall to the earth and burrow deep beneath it.

This is the first time I have ever told anyone the details of what happened that night, Steven. But it is your right, as Simon’s brother. You thought that you were the only son, but now you are the only one living. I hope you will remember that when you meet your mother.

We buried Simon and Thulani on the farm one moonlit night in a grove of ancient trees. They lie side by side, and Michaela has put a picket fence around the graves. I’m sure she will take you there, to show you the little fenced plot where she tends roses and where she grows herbs and grasses. She will not tell you this, but she visits our boys each day, as she has done since the night they were killed.

I don’t remember how we managed to get through the days after Ongoye. I was still convinced that the only way to achieve political change was to make the act of governing impossible by the use of sabotage—but the personal cost of doing so had finally become too high.

After that night, I could not find it in myself to even think about taking life. I ceased all my military activity, terminated my connection with Spear of the Nation, and became a full-time negotiator. And it didn’t take long to realize that for me, being on the farm or in the village was like a living death. Whether I was in Miriam’s room, in the farmhouse itself, or anywhere on the grounds, I heard the sounds of the boys’ laughter and their horseplay, and I found myself over and over turning around to look for them—only to be reminded yet again that they were gone.

And for Miriam, it was too difficult to remain in the village where she had raised Thulani. When I suggested that we go elsewhere, Miriam was relieved, and so we began to make plans to move. I was not sure where we would go, and we talked to Michaela as well, because if she had wanted to leave, too, we would have gone somewhere together. It might have been easier for us to move as a unit—she could have sold the farm and bought a property elsewhere, and it would have been quite normal for us to follow as her domestic servants. But she was living with Andrew by then, and he would not have been willing to move far from his medical practice. And they were as happy together as they could have been under the circumstances.

Besides, it would not have worked well for Michaela and Miriam to be too close. Although they would not willingly admit it, they found it difficult to be together. Each woman’s grief only intensified the grief of the other, and they were a constant reminder to each other of what they had lost.

Something else happened in the weeks following the burial that made it impossible for Michaela to leave. Hlengiwe appeared at the farm late one afternoon, and when I arrived that evening looking for Miriam, I found her with Michaela and Hlengiwe waiting for me inside. They were not in the kitchen, where I would have expected them to be, but in the main room, in front of the fire. When I came into the room Hlengiwe rose from her chair and turned to me. There was something very serene about her as she came slowly towards me.

“Until tonight, Khabazela, I thought that of all of us, my loss was the greatest. I should have been able to see it, but I did not know until now that Simon and Thulani had the same father,” she said. “So your loss is greater than I could have imagined. I am so sorry.”

She put her arms about my neck and hugged me gently, and kissed my cheek. It was not what I expected. There was something intimate and unseemly about her embrace, and I didn’t understand what had happened or what I was supposed to do. It struck me that this must be a thing among women, and that I couldn’t be expected to know how to deal with it. But even as I thought it, I knew the idea was ludicrous.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why have you taken it upon yourselves to share with this girl something so private? This was not yours alone to give away.”

“This is not just any girl,” said Miriam quietly. Both she and Michaela shook their heads and gestured to Hlengiwe as if they were deferring to the younger woman.

“I have something to tell you,” she said as she returned to her chair. “Please sit down.”

We sat down across the coffee table, and Hlengiwe leaned forward towards me. Her eyes were intensely dark and liquid, and there was a fierce intelligence in them that I hadn’t expected.

“Thulani was like my brother,” she said. “You know that we played together from the time we were little. And Miriam knows that when she brought both boys to the village, we all three played together. But with Simon, it was always different. There was a distance between us, even as children, and I thought for a long time that it was just because he was a white boy. But as we became older I saw that when we all played together, Simon would play with the other children, but with me he was distant. It made me very angry because I thought he disliked me. So I ignored him.

“Thulani knew better than we did what was going on, and he told Simon that I was in love with him. So Simon overcame his shyness, and last year, when I turned sixteen, he took me into the woods and asked if he could kiss me. I told him that all my kisses were his, and that he did not need to ask for them.” She smiled shyly, a sad little smile. “He took many, and I do not regret what I gave, because I received more in return.”

“I thought that my loss was the greatest of all, because in Thulani I lost a brother; and in Simon I have lost my best friend, and the man who would have been my husband. But I came here today to tell you—all of you—that even in the terrible weight of this grief, we must leave room for living.” She looked into the fire, and then turned back to me. “My father, I had to know that Simon was your son, because I am pregnant with Simon’s child.”

When you visit South Africa, Steven, you will come to Michaela’s farmhouse, and you will meet our grandson, Penya. He has his grandmother’s eyes, and his father’s chin, and I would not be surprised to find that he seems familiar to you. There are good reasons for that. Penya is your nephew; your brother’s son.

.

twenty-seven

S
TEVEN

Boston, 2001

D
ariya sat on the couch looking at me as I dialed the number, standing with my back to the wall as I waited for the call to go through. The ring was unfamiliar, almost archaic. It was late afternoon when we finished reading; it would be about 9:00 pm in South Africa.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Is this Michaela Green?”

“Yes, this is Michaela. What is it?”

The connection was clear, the voice energetic, cultured, with a stronger South African accent than my father had. It was the voice of a competent woman who didn’t like being disturbed in the evening, but who was used to being called at inconvenient hours. I felt ridiculous—this was an absurd conversation to have on the telephone, but I knew that the only way to have it was to dive in. I cleared my throat.

“This is Steven.” I paused, gripped the phone tightly. “Your son.”

There was a pause at the other end of the line, long enough that I wondered whether she had severed the connection. During the pause, I wondered, what does one call the mother one hasn’t seen for four decades? Mom? I didn’t think so.