Bloodlines (13 page)

“This is a news clipping from early 1962,” she said quietly. “It’s the only reference to your mother I could find.”

It was from page five of the Johannesburg
Star
, and the date was March, 1962, when I was seven years old. I have no memory of the events surrounding it. The clipping fitted snugly onto a piece of white photocopy paper, and at the top, side by side, were two photographs, one of a young black man, and one of a young white woman. Neither photograph was clear, but the woman was identifiable as my mother, and beneath her picture was her name, Michaela Green. I knew before I saw it that the name beneath the picture of the young black man would be familiar, and it was. Mandla Mkhize.

I felt a sense of relief when I first glanced at the clipping because I assumed that the typescript below the pictures was a report of my mother’s death, and that, finally, I would discover evidence of how she was killed. Then I read the news report. The article was titled “TRIED AND CONVICTED”. Clearly, it was not a report on their deaths. They had both been charged with miscegenation and with sabotage.

According to the story, they blew up an electrical plant, and then made their way under cover of darkness to a farm known to be one of the ANC’s safe sites. Several hours after the explosion, members of the Special Branch observed them having sexual relations in the bedroom of a small house on the farm grounds. They were arrested and taken into custody. Mandla, a known member of terrorist organizations, had orchestrated the act of sabotage, and as the leader, he was given a life sentence. My mother had associations to banned organizations, but she was not known to be a member herself. She was identified as an accomplice, and they were more lenient on her. She was sentenced to ten years in prison.

If she served her full sentence, she would have been released in 1972, and I found myself calculating how old I would have been, had she survived. Seventeen. I was a junior in high school, about to lose—or having just lost—my virginity on the royal blue carpet in my bedroom.

“Stevie?” Dariya stood behind me, waiting, and placed a hand gently on the back of my neck.

“So she didn’t just cheat on my father with this man,” I said. “They blew up an electrical plant together. And they went to jail.”

Dariya didn’t say anything.

“My father never said a word about any of this. He must have been trying to protect me. She must have died later, maybe in prison.”

“I’ve looked,” she said, “gone through the paper page by page, and found no other mention of your mother. She seems to have just disappeared. I did name searches during the ten years she would have been in prison, and after, and found nothing there, either.” She paused. “I did find a mention of Mandla, though,” she said. “He won a teaching award—I think it was from the Natal Regional Ministry of Education—sometime in the early 1990s.”

“I’ve spoken to him—so we know somehow he survived.” I paused for a moment, and Dariya also remained silent. “But what happened to my mother? Did she die in prison, or did something happen to her once she got out? I can’t let this rest here just because the newspaper doesn’t give us an answer,” I said. My voice was hoarse. “She can’t just have disappeared.”

“I’ll keep looking, if you want me to.”

“Where would you look? You’ve already gone through the newspaper page by page.”

“There are other sources,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Mandla. You can phone him. He should know. And there may be retired news reporters who worked for these newspapers. And there are other databases that I could get access to.” She paused. “If you want to follow this further.”

“I don’t have much choice,” I said. “I can’t let this rest here. But let’s finish my father’s manuscript first. Perhaps it will answer some questions. And if it doesn’t, maybe it will give us a better idea of where to look, and what to look for.”

.

six

L
ENNY

Johannesburg, 1960

A
fter Sharpeville our lives fell apart with bewildering speed. At times I wanted to punish your mother—but even when I knew she was away from my bed and from our child, it was beyond my imagining that she would be willing to risk her family, her life and her freedom to meet with that man in forbidden places. All I could do was pace up and down the hallway of our house in a murderous rage—but even then I didn’t consider doing anything that would have separated her from you.

What I felt went beyond confusion and betrayal—I was incredulous. In our world what she was doing was not just scandalous, it was inconceivable. Marriage between them would have been illegal; sex between them was a criminal act; if they had lived together openly they would have been arrested and convicted. What was left to them? Short of settling in another part of the world, their only alternative was to continue hiding their affair, and that was hardly a long term solution. In fact, there was no long term solution—unless they believed that they were about to change the world, and that love between them would shortly be sanctioned. But that would have been delusional. It was clear to me and to everyone else, that for a white woman and a black man to have an affair was to destroy both lives—but somehow, she was unable to see it.

I still loved your mother, and she hadn’t disavowed her love for me. I didn’t want to divorce her—all I wanted was to understand what she was doing, but there was no one I could confide in, and nowhere to go for help. I went to the library, read books on psychology; searched through medical books on the sociology of sex. I wondered whether she had been brainwashed; considered that perhaps she had fallen in love with him because she saw him as a heroic figure fighting for his people’s freedom.

The only conclusion I could live with was that your mother and Mandla shared a commitment to freedom and were strongly opposed to the government and its policies—and that, being thrown together in stressful situations, she had mistaken those feelings for attraction, or love. All I could hope for was that she would come to her senses before it was too late.

But she didn’t. By the time I discovered the truth about their activities, and the sordid details of their relationship, it was already too late. She had carried her activism and her contempt for the law past the point where either compassion or anger would make any difference.

Your mother was out of the house that night—the night they blew up the electric plant. When she didn’t come home, I assumed they were together, and I went to bed. Just after dawn, two cars full of Special Branch officers pulled up at the door, barged in, and began to tear the house apart. They forced open closets, broke through walls, pulled up linoleum flooring. They smashed photographs and paintings in search of hidden messages written on the back, and they ripped open the seams of my suits to see if we’d sewn notes in the lining. They wanted to know where she was; searched for evidence and documents that showed proof of her membership in banned organizations. They probed for any indication that we were involved in the systematic campaign of sabotage being waged by Spear of the Nation, and took away with them boxes of books and journals on socialism and Marxism, the politics of protest, and liberal philosophy.

I was a terrified young father, alone with my son, and the men going through my home were rabid to find evidence. They became more and more frantic and angry as time passed and they found nothing. Eventually the man in charge sat me down, took off his hat and threw it on the dining room table and stood above me, glaring, his arms crossed over his chest. I was so disoriented that at first I didn’t recognize him.

“Mr. Green,” he said, “We met at Kliptown a few years ago—you were there demonstrating at the Congress of the People with your lovely wife. Your father-in-law is my dentist.”

He must have thought me a pitiful creature, because he showed more compassion than I expected.

“My name is Viljoen, Anders Viljoen. Remember me?”

“Yes,” I said. I could barely look at him.

“We have proof that your wife is involved in a plot to bring down the government,” he said. “Were you aware that she took part earlier tonight in an act of sabotage?”

I shook my head.

“You don’t know where she was this evening?”

Again I shook my head.

“And I assume you don’t know where she is right now. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” I said.

He pulled out a chair and sat down beside me.

“Mr. Green,” he said softly, “you have my deepest sorrow for what you’re going through. You have no idea what’s going on here, or what your wife’s been up to. Do you know why I’m so sure of that?”

Again, I shook my head.

“Because your wife couldn’t tell you anything about what she’s been engaged in. No wife could. You know what I mean, Mr. Green?”

“Are you suggesting this is more than politics—that my wife is sleeping with another man?” I said. “What evidence do you have?”

“I think we can safely say it’s both,” he said. “Sex and politics. And as for evidence, we’re collecting it. You’re not in the kind of trouble she is—but if you withhold evidence, then you’re no better than she is, and you will be prosecuted, too. Then what will happen to your son? The boy deserves one good parent. So, what can you tell me about where she might be?”

They interrogated me for what seemed like hours, but I told them nothing. It was dawn before the police left, and I was exhausted, and scared.

The truth is that I had an idea where they might be—I’d been to the farm to deliver documents and to attend meetings myself. But the only way to warn them was to go there myself—and if I was followed, or caught, I’d go to prison along with her. And I had a third life to consider, Steven—yours. Neither your mother nor I had any siblings, and the only family we had was my father, Papa Mischa. He was already ill, and there would have been no one else to take care of you. If we’d both gone to prison, what would have happened to you?

I chose to take no action; made no attempt to find or contact your mother. Even after all these years, I don’t know that what I did was right—it’s possible that I might have saved her from being arrested. But I did nothing. I’ve lived my life wondering whether I should have acted differently. But when I examine the options that were open to me, and at what I knew—or thought I knew—at the time, I’m still unsure. For years afterwards, it was one of the things that kept me awake, staring into the dark as if I could find an answer in the blackness.

I knew that if she didn’t return soon, she was either in jail or dead. Whatever happened, it was possible that the police would return later to arrest me. It felt as if the end of the world had come, and there was no way I could pull myself together enough to function at the office. You were a deep sleeper as a child, and somehow you managed to sleep through the chaos. But when you woke you were shocked to see the state of the house, and you wanted to know where Mommy was. Your nanny was as shocked as you were, but she got you off to school, and once you were out of the house I managed to shower and change. It was the longest day of my life, and in some ways it never ended.

Around noon, the Special Branch returned, and Viljoen sat me down again.

“I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you, Mr. Green, but your wife was arrested earlier this morning. She was with a man named Mandla Mkhize. You know him?”

“I know who he is,” I said.

“They had just blown up an electric plant,” he said, “and apparently couldn’t wait to get into bed together.”

That’s how I found out that our life together was over. I sat for a long time with my head buried in my hands, not knowing what to do or say.

“I can imagine how unpleasant this is for you,” said Viljoen. “Perhaps you can get some of your own back on this terrorist Mandla Mkhize by telling us what you know of their plans, and where they meet. Anything your wife might have told you that might be of consequence.”

I had nothing to say; nothing to give. It felt as if I had been robbed. Your mother took everything from me—wife, family, self-respect, good name, even the cause we had fought for together I could no longer claim as my own. I said nothing, and Viljoen made clear that he had nothing but contempt for my weakness.