Bloodlines (21 page)

The land had been cleared—and I remember row upon row of sterile little cement houses with corrugated roofs. There weren’t enough houses, and those that had been built weren’t ready for occupancy. But the architects of apartheid were ready to bulldoze Sophiatown, and the people had to be moved somewhere. Anyplace was good enough.

That day, my friends, the day the relocation began, for the first time in my adult life, I wept. Something inside me broke, and when it healed, it was a different substance, harder and stronger than before. The Sophiatown removal took away from me any faith in the future, and I found myself thinking often in the time after of the question Michaela had asked me—because I realized then that I could no longer be a teacher of children without hope. Before I could teach again, the future would have to be different. I didn’t think then that we would ever be able to change it, but I was ready to risk everything in the attempt.

It was several years before I met Michaela again, and by then, we were both changed. I went through combat training in preparation for the violence that was to come, and I traveled out of the country, to Mozambique, and Botswana, and even to China. When I returned I was a different person, competent in the world. I had learned the use of explosives; learned how to collapse a bridge or destroy a police station. I became a marksman with a rifle, and with a revolver. More importantly for me, I learned hand to hand fighting; I knew how to silently immobilize a man. They taught me to kill. Never again—never—would I lie silent on a floor and tense myself for a kick in the groin. I might die in the process—but I would not die alone. The fury that ate away at my insides when I felt helpless was transformed into a cold rage. I had learned that if any war was just, this one was—and I became a soldier on the front line.

But while I was away, I learned also about myself—that although it was important for me to know the techniques of combat and self defense, I discovered that violence should be my way only if everything else failed. I was no longer teaching children—but I was at heart a teacher, and my weapon of choice was words. I knew that we were getting closer to our goal, and I gave silent thanks to the proponents of apartheid who were forcing us up against the wall. The harder they pushed, the sooner we would find in ourselves the strength to push back. And I knew that when we were ready, they would not be able to mount enough force to stop us.

During that time I had to support myself, and I had to appear legitimate to the authorities. I worked for a time as a gardener at a large public park, where I could meet with people easily, to give and receive messages. Later, I was a chauffeur—I drove a car for a Johannesburg law firm, where one of the partners was active in the freedom movement. And I worked in a garage that we used as a transfer station to move banned people around; to get those in danger out of the country. And it was there, at that time, that Michaela entered my life again, only this time, Steven, she was carrying you in her belly. She was physically changed, and surer of herself. But despite the changes in both of us, nothing had changed between us. That was immediately clear.

The garage had two bays. On the day she arrived, there was a truck in one bay, concealing an injured man who had just escaped from the authorities; the other bay was empty, waiting for the transfer driver to arrive. I didn’t know that it would be Michaela—I had been told only that the driver was experienced, and that the car had a concealed compartment in the back. But when she arrived and the mechanic drove her father’s Volvo into the bay, I recognized it at once.

So I went out and looked through the window separating the garage floor from the waiting area, and there I saw her. Her pregnancy was obvious, her hair was shining and she glowed the way pregnant women sometimes do. I was so very happy to see her—but the police were still patrolling and I didn’t want to attract attention, so I turned to walk back into the garage. That was when Michaela looked up and saw me.

If we had been standing side by side, nothing could have stopped me from putting my arms around her. And from the look of great surprise and joy on her face, I knew that, had I embraced her, I would have felt her arms around me in response. But that moment was illicit, and our emotions forbidden; to act on them would have been foolish.

I turned to the garage and went in, and with help from a fellow worker, transferred the man to the hidden compartment in the back of her car while she waited outside. When it was all ready and the boxes had been repackaged in the back, I went out to tell her. She was sitting in the waiting area with three other people, reading a magazine, and all four of them looked up as I opened the door. I knew that once she drove away, I might never see her again.

“Madame,” I said to her, “your chariot is ready.” In that place, and at that moment, it was the closest I could come to a declaration of love.

.

thirteen

MANDLA

Johannesburg, 1959

M
ichaela and I did eventually have a love affair—but it didn’t start until you were three or four, Steven, when the resistance movement had gained maturity. We didn’t plan it, but we found ourselves thrown together at the same meetings and protests; involved in hiding or transporting the same people; participating in the same background work to spread the word.

At one point the government increased the bus fare charged on black-only buses that carried people from the townships to where they worked in Johannesburg. We were organizing a peaceful strike against the fare hike, because those who used the buses had no alternative transportation, and the increase, although small, created a real hardship.

Late one night, a few weeks after my reunion with Michaela at the garage, she and I found ourselves working together with four others printing pamphlets to protest the fare increase. We were using a mimeograph machine in a shed on the grounds of a home in a suburb west of Johannesburg. One person cranked the handle, another made sure that paper was feeding cleanly; a third collected the mimeographed sheets, and the remaining two packed and carried boxes.

The shed we were working in was a makeshift office, lit by a single bulb hanging from a rafter, and the mimeograph machine was set up on an old green metal desk directly beneath the light. All around were cartons of paper and supplies for the mimeograph machine. Each time we filled a box with pamphlets, one of us took it out of the side door and stacked it there. When we had filled two or three boxes, we made the trek to the back of the property, where an empty lot was covered with waist-high grasses and scattered trees. Michaela had driven her car through the grass and parked it beneath the overhang of a huge mulberry tree. It was a moonless night; the car was virtually invisible.

Of the six people there, I was the only black man, and it was foolish for me to be in a white suburb, working so late at night. The plan was for me to spend the night in one of the servant’s rooms, and in the morning it would have been easy to leave. But a neighbor reported our activity, and sometime after ten o’clock the police arrived.

Michaela and I were at the back of the property, loading a box into the concealed compartment in her father’s s car, so I didn’t witness their arrival. But we heard the squeal of tires as the police cars pulled up, and the sound of the shed door being forced open as half a dozen armed men stormed in. I heard a crash, which I knew must be the mimeograph machine being knocked to the floor.

Michaela was worried about the mimeograph machine—it had been expensive and difficult to obtain—but my first thought was for her safety. If they found the concealed compartment in the car, both she and her father would be arrested; and the police would know how we had been getting our people out of the country, right under their noses. The idea would become unusable, and we would have lost a valuable tool.

Sooner or later someone would realize that there was a side door to the shed, and they would follow the path to the back of the property. The car had to be moved—and we had to get away. She didn’t want to go without me, but I insisted, and she had just gotten into the driver’s seat and closed the door when we heard the sound of booted feet running along the path.

We were too late. Michaela hadn’t started the car, and I hadn’t taken a step to hide myself when something hit me in the back with tremendous force, lifting me into the air. I fell to the ground on my face and remained where I had fallen, taking count of my body. I was shocked and in pain—but I remember thinking that this was the second time Michaela had watched me being beaten by a member of the South African security force. The first time I had been a boy—this time I was a man, and I had been trained in the art of killing. More importantly, perhaps, I knew deep in my bones that this was one battle in a long war, and that they would have no mercy on me. This time, I thought, I may die, but I will not lie still and be beaten.

The footsteps edged closer, and a boot nudged my kidney. It was a firm nudge, cautious and curious, but there was authority behind it.

“What are you doing here, boy?”

I turned and looked up to see a policeman standing over me. It was too dark to see his face, but he was a big man, with a very deep, angry voice. He was alone—but not for long. I had very little time.

“I asked you a question,” he said. “What are you doing? Stealing the car?”

I slowly raised myself onto all fours until I was kneeling.

“Can I get up,
baas
?” I asked quietly. “I have my pass in my pocket.”

He put his foot on my back and pushed down hard until I was on the ground again, and then lifted his foot away. He kicked me twice, hard, and I heard myself grunting. Out of the side of my eye I saw the foot move back a third time and as he prepared to kick me again I rolled away, grabbing it under my arm as I went, and twisted hard as I rolled it under me, jamming the heel into my side. Under the combined force of my weight pulling and twisting him in one direction, and his own weight forcing him in another, his leg came with me, and I felt the crack of breaking bone and the jarring snap of cartilage in his knee. He grunted in pain as he went down. This was the first time I had used what I knew to purposely hurt someone, and I remember being shocked at how easy it was, and by the animal sound in his throat.

As soon as I felt him land, I released his leg and rolled onto all fours and then up onto my feet, only to look down into the muzzle of his revolver. He had snapped it from his holster as he stood over me, and the safety was off. My eyes went instinctively to his. I saw that he was frightened and hurting, and I felt rather than saw the tightening of his forefinger on the trigger. I dived toward him and knocked the revolver away, but not before there was a flash in the darkness, an explosion of pain in my left thigh. But I had no chance to see what the damage was because he grabbed me around the waist with one arm and punched me in the face with the other.

I drove my elbow down into his throat with all the power I had, and felt the cartilage give. He coughed, choking, but still kept pummeling my face. By now I was above him; he had his arm about my neck, and he was squeezing so hard that I couldn’t breathe. I knew that I wouldn’t be thinking clearly for many more seconds. Somehow I managed to wrap my arm under his head, grabbed hold of his chin, and twisted as hard as I could. From within his neck there was the cracking sound of breaking twigs, the arm about my neck released, and he was suddenly still.