Bloodlines (16 page)

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seven

S
TEVEN

Boston, 2001

A
s Dariya and I read my father’s retelling of Miss Coetzee’s story, I began to recall my second-grade classroom. At first, I didn’t know whether the images formed out of the mist of imagination, or whether they came from memory.

“I do remember her,” I said. “She kept a bright blue bag full of marbles tied to her belt, and at recess she used to walk around the playground. Sometimes she would play marbles with us. She sat down next to me and opened her little bag, and she asked me what I was aiming for. I showed her the reddest brick in the wall, and we took turns throwing marbles at it.”

“So your father wasn’t making this all up?”

“Not the parts I remember.”

“What about your little speech? Do you remember that?”

I shook my head. “No—but if I did make the speech, I can’t believe I would have forgotten it.”

“You were under tremendous stress, Steven—there’s a lot you might have forgotten.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “So when did my mother die? And how? It must have happened much later.”

Dariya just looked at me. “Let’s keep reading,” she said.

“I can’t right now. I need your help in the studio. We need to select the paintings for my show at the Danforth Museum next week, and then I have to deliver them.”

Dariya came with me to the studio, where I had selected what I thought were the five best and lined them up against the wall. She was seeing them for the first time.

“They’re masterful, Steve. Great color. They jump from the canvas, but somehow you’ve kept the subtlety. I love them.” She stood before them, swaying her hips as she glanced from one to the next.

“Is there a ‘but’ in there?”

She crossed her arms, rubbing the knuckles of one hand against her chin.

“No buts—just a question. What do they say? And when did you start with all the abstract shapes?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Since the summer, every time I start a landscape or a seascape, I find myself painting a tower in the water, or a huge monument in a valley—anything to fill up the emptiness. I want to use space differently, you know? But what you call abstract shapes, really aren’t abstract at all. Look closer.”

I showed her that every shape in every painting was organic—that I had just changed the scale of things, viewed rock walls and umbrellas, bottles and windmills and towers and seashells, from different and unusual angles, shaded and tinted them in unexpected ways.

“What happened?” she asked. My paintings were arrayed against the wall and I glanced from one to another, seeing suddenly that they were an attempt to get below the skin of the landscape, to stick my arm deep into the painting and pull out what was hiding there. And underlying that was a belief, or at least a hope, that my search would reveal something worth seeing.

Dariya had moved out of my line of sight, and was standing behind me. She put her arms about me, leaned over so that our cheeks were touching.

“Steven,” she said. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“What?”

“Do you think your father was hiding something else?” asked Dariya.

“You mean something besides the fact that my mother was unfaithful to him?”

“Yes.”

“And besides the fact that he never told me I made up the story of how she died?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you ask?”

“Don’t you think there’s something strange about the way he’s written his story?”

“He was a very private person,” I said. “I’ve thought as we read through the manuscript that writing this history must have been like having his teeth pulled.”

“No,” she said, “it’s more than that. It’s not just strange—there’s something calculated about the way he’s revealing the story. As you read it, don’t you feel in the slightest way that you’re being manipulated?”

I put my hands on her shoulders and looked at her skeptically.

“Don’t make fun,” she said. “You know, if you’re any good as a journalist, you quickly develop a sense of whether people are withholding information. You know I’m good. And I’m telling you he’s holding something back.” She paused. “Something else.”

“Perhaps he is,” I said. “Maybe he was just trying to postpone writing about what happened to my mother for as long as possible. Remember, he was never able to talk to me about her.”

“He was dying as he wrote this—he didn’t know how much time he had, or whether he’d be able to finish. Wouldn’t it have made sense for him to write about the most important things first?”

“Who knows what he thought was important? Dariya, I’m not a writer—I have no idea what was on his mind.”

She agreed, reluctantly, that I was probably right.

“We don’t have to wait, you know,” I said, grinning at her.

“What do you mean?”

“If you’re so sure that he’s waiting to reveal something else, we could skip to the end of the manuscript. That way we might find out what it is in our own time, instead of on his schedule. Would that make you feel less manipulated?”

She shook her head. “I already thought of that,” she said, “but it would feel too much like cheating. I suppose we just have to go along with his plan and keep reading.”

It struck me that there were several advantages to writing a history and leaving it for me. First, he avoided having to face me, and second, as long as I read it in the sequence he gave me, I had no choice but to discover each piece of the story in precisely the order in which he decided to reveal it. Despite himself, he had managed to remain in control. What Dariya didn’t—couldn’t—tell me was that she had already figured out what else he was hiding. She was trying to prepare me for what was to come, and it wasn’t far off.

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eight

L
ENNY

Boston, 2001

W
e come now, my children, to the almost end of my part in this story. I say almost because there are still two things to be addressed. None too soon.

You were just here, Steven, sitting at my bedside, watching over me as I write feverishly, looking on as I die. I want so much to face you and tell you the truth, but I lack the courage, even now. Instead, I spread my arms wide, intending it, I suppose, as an invitation to hug you. I wanted so much to hold you close to me, to feel your love and to have you feel mine, before everything changed. But you looked at me with alarm—if you think back, you will remember it—and the moment passed. You looked with pity and dismay at my narrow, shrunken chest, and I raised my shoulders in a long, painful shrug. You watched my wrists sticking out from my pajama sleeves, bony and thin. I felt—and you must have seen—a man not so much cold-blooded, as bloodless, drained of all fluids. Then, like a skeletal, avian thing coming to rest, I lowered my arms like wings, bent them into a fold at my sides, and closed my eyes. When I awoke you were gone, and Dariya had taken your place.

I’ve known since we left South Africa that we would eventually have this conversation. I didn’t know how long we’d have to wait for it, or what the tenor of the discussion would be. And I hoped it would be in the form of an interchange, where you could ask the questions I’ve successfully avoided answering all these years, and I would have the opportunity to explain. This is far more difficult—like giving an interview, but without an interviewer. I have to provide all the answers, without benefit of questions or accusations.

You say you have no memory of finding out that your mother was killed fighting apartheid—it’s always been a fact of life for you. There’s a reason why you have no memory of the event: no one ever told you that she was dead. I just failed to find the right time to tell you what did happen. Why didn’t I tell you before? There were many reasons—I leave it to you to decide when the first possible moment was to tell you the truth.

Was it when we first arrived in Boston? South Africa was still dealing with sabotage and violence then, and the atmosphere was as repressive as ever. Your mother had disappeared, and the police were unwilling to suspend their search. They wanted her alive, or they wanted proof that she was dead.

The growing community of South Africans in Boston knew who I was and what had happened to us, and many of them were still in touch with people who hadn’t left. One word about your mother and it would have been all over the country, and the police would have intensified their search. I imagined how angry you would have been to discover as an adult that your mother had been captured because I told you the truth, and you shared it with a school friend. So in the early years, I said nothing.

Perhaps I should have told you when you were old enough to keep it secret—when you were twelve, or fourteen, or seventeen. Or should it have been my birthday gift to you when you turned twenty-one? I don’t know. And the longer I waited, the more difficult it became.

There was also the matter of what your mother wanted. She did manage to get a message to me before we left the country, and we spoke briefly on the phone. I was in a garage outside the city—I don’t have the faintest idea where she was, and she was afraid to tell me.

“You’ve destroyed my life as well as yours,” I told her angrily. “Why didn’t you just light a bomb under us? At least it would have been quicker.”

“I didn’t mean any of this to happen,” she said, “I’m sorry, Lenny, but it happened and I can’t undo it. I don’t have much time. Tell me—how’s Stevie?”

“Oh, his life is one big party,” I answered. “The Special Branch follows him wherever he goes, he’s bullied at school by children who repeat the profanities they hear at home about you, and he misses you terribly. Other than that, he’s doing fine.” She didn’t answer. “Did you expect that he would accept all this madness in his life without missing a beat? For Christ’s sake, it’s turned my life upside down, and he’s only seven years old. What the hell were you thinking?”

I didn’t hear her voice again for almost forty years. All that time, she’s been an absent presence in our lives, and she has weighed heavily on us both. She did write occasionally. In her letters she made it clear that she thought you were better off without her; left me to decide when to tell you the truth. She left me responsible for ensuring her safety; left me to carry the lie; left me to live with the consequences of your reaction when you found out the truth; left up to me the decision of when to break our silence.