Bloodlines (27 page)

When the blanket was roughly pulled off me I thought I was discovered, but I sat up to see that we were in a darkened garage, parked beside a grayish delivery truck with the words “L. Feldman, Ltd., Importers” printed on the side.

“Quick, lady.” The driver spoke quietly without turning around, but I looked up to see his dark, tense eyes in the rear view mirror. “Out the car and into the back of the truck. Lock the truck door from the inside and climb under the blankets. Someone will come this afternoon to give you food.”

Before I had closed the door behind me the car pulled out of the parking space, and for a moment, as I made the four foot dash to the rear door of the truck, I was completely exposed. What, I thought, if the truck door is locked? I was an escaped prisoner—the police would arrive, see me, and shoot to kill. But the door had been left ajar, and I closed and locked it behind me. The truck was empty but for a pile of padded wrapping blankets on the floor, the kind used to protect furniture, and I lay down among them, covered myself, and waited.

I didn’t know it then, but I was in an indoor garage on the ground floor of an apartment building in upscale Killarney, a community just outside the city, and it was a perfect place to wait for nightfall. In the hours I spent there only a half-dozen cars came and went. At mid-afternoon the driver’s door was unlocked from the outside and a woman in a blue uniform with a white apron and cap—a servant in one of the apartments upstairs—put her fingers to her lips, and beckoned for me to follow her.

We saw no one, and she took me up in the service elevator to the roof of the building where the servants’ quarters were, and where few of their white employers ever ventured. I used the bathroom and washed my face, and she returned me to the truck, leaving me with a thermos of tea, a chicken sandwich, and a smile. I ate and drank and fell into an exhausted sleep. The uncertainty was more than I could bear, and sleep was the only way to make the time pass.

When I woke, the truck was moving. It was dark, but there was a sliding door between the driver’s compartment and the cargo area, and it was half open. I peered through the gap to see that we were driving at high speed along the highway, and that there was only darkness on either side of us. The driver was a young white man with long, pale face and a thin beard, in a gray delivery uniform and a khaki driver’s cap.

“So,” he said. “She wakes, finally.” He turned to gaze at me, and beckoned to the passenger seat. “Come sit up front. We’re well out of Jo’burg, but we’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”

“I don’t know who you are or why you’re doing this,” I said as I maneuvered myself forward, “but thank you.”

“You’re welcome. But better you don’t know who I am.” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “We’re on the Durban road headed southeast. I’m to take you as far as Mooi River. You know where that is?”

I’d seen signs for Mooi River when we drove overnight to Durban on school holidays, but I’d never been there. All I knew was that it was an isolated farming village off the main road.

“I know where it is,” I answered. “Where do we go from there?”

“That’s where we part company,” he said. “I go on to Durban to pick up a truckload of sweets and biscuits at the dock. It was conveniently left off the big truck that picked up our delivery yesterday, so if we’re stopped I can explain where I’m going.”

“And me? Where do I go?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “And for now it’s probably better that way.”

His instructions—from whom, he couldn’t or wouldn’t say—were that when we arrived after a five hour drive through farmland and open
veld
, he would be handing me off to someone else. It was less information than I needed, but it was all he would give me.

It was still dark when we reached the turnoff to Mooi River and left the main road. After several miles on a pitch-black deserted mud lane, he pulled the truck off the road and cut the lights and engine. For what seemed like an eternity we waited in silence, listening to the rhythmic clicking of cooling metal, and to the sound of the cicadas through the open window. Then, from behind us, came the sound of an engine, approaching slowly.

“Here they are,” he said, relief in his voice.

“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” he said. “But you’re about to find out.”

The vehicle crept by, a face peered curiously into the driver’s window, and then an ancient truck pulled up and parked in front of us.

“This is it, Mrs. Green,” he said.

“You know who I am,” I said, feeling stupid. How could I have imagined for a moment that I was unknown to him?

“The whole country knows who you are,” he said grimly. “And they’ll know a hell of a lot more about Michaela Green when tomorrow’s paper is delivered.” He reached across me and opened the door. “You’re in for a difficult time, Miss. I wish you the best of luck.”

“Thank you,” I said, stepping down into the dark unknown of a new life. It was only a few steps, and I could have refused to take them. In fact, at any point I could have turned off the path I was on. I could have made my way to Swaziland and flown out of the country; I could eventually have gone to the United States, which is where Lenny finally decided to go and start a new life, unable to handle the pressure of being the husband of the disappeared Michaela Green.

But I don’t remember at any point even considering a path other than the one directly in front of me. Perhaps what my father called my incredible bull-headedness was really not that at all, but was instead a lack of imagination. I could never see a way to do other than tackle what was directly ahead of me. There was no going around obstacles; I had to force my way straight through them. This has been a life-long pattern. Perhaps it was a genetic predisposition; maybe it was simply called into being by the brutality of the system I was born into. In retrospect I could have lived my life no other way, but it has exacted a heavy price.

When this journey began I was the white, privileged daughter of educated, upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants, living in the suburbs of Johannesburg, completely insulated from the realities of South Africa’s gross inequities. For the white middle-class, these horrors—the arbitrariness of life and law, the uncertainty and constant fear, lack of safety and hope, the poverty and violence and disease—did not exist, but they soon became commonplace to me, and I learned to go among them as easily as walking from sunlight to shadow and back again.

I climbed up into the passenger seat of the ancient truck and closed the door. The seat sloped uncomfortably towards the gearshift; the backrest was ripped, and I could feel the compressed stuffing hard against my spine. We took off slowly, the sound of the engine a deep-throated rumble interrupted by the frequent misfiring of badly gapped spark plugs. I was sure that the noise would attract attention, but the driver was unconcerned. In the darkness I was able to identify him only as a burly white man of indeterminate age. He would have been content, it seemed, to drive me to wherever we were going without exchanging a word. But eventually, the silence between us, punctuated by the sound of the truck engine and the whine of downshifted gears, became deafening. He spoke first.

“So,” he said, his voice deep and unexpressive. “This is pretty dangerous stuff you’re involved in, hey?”

I was surprised to hear from his accent that he was an Afrikaner—much more likely to be violently opposed to change, and at far more risk from his community if he were seen with me.

“Seems you’d know as much about putting yourself in danger as I do,” I said. “Why are you doing this?”

He turned to me in response, and for the first time I saw that he was in his forties, sandy-haired and unshaven, and that his mouth was firm, serious, even angry.

“I don’t like your methods,” he said, glancing at me through clear blue eyes, “and I don’t agree with all the changes you want in this country. But that doesn’t mean I think you ought to be serving ten years of hard time with real criminals.” He shook his head. “Pretty woman like you—I don’t understand it. But it’s your business. Not mine.”

“Yes,” I said. “But thank you, anyway.” I was surprised—and touched—that he was willing to put himself in danger and to help me despite political differences.

“You’re going to have a hard enough time as it is,” he said. “I’m just driving a few hours, dropping you off, and then going straight back to my farm.”

“Where are you supposed to drop me?”

“You don’t know where you’re going?”

“I’ve no idea,” I said. “Nobody told me. I’ve been taken from one place to another by a series of people I don’t know. It hasn’t been pleasant, but I suppose it’s better than being where I was.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t feel too thankful. Not just yet—not until you get to where you’re going. I don’t know your final destination, but it’s probably the only place in the country that’s safe—the middle of nowhere.” He grinned at me. “Right in the heart of Zululand.”

It seemed we traveled forever, first on the highway, then on narrow dirt roads that traversed hillsides and curved through mountain passes. I saw nothing but what the truck headlights illuminated. We drove up steep inclines and along cliff edges, and although I was sure that we were climbing, there were times when the overall direction seemed downward, towards the sea. We made our way along mile after mile of rough country track, and for the last few hours I was in a daze as we rocked and bumped over paths that were first gravel, and then sand and mud.

It was still dark when we pulled over, into darkness and silence so thick that I could have stretched out a hand and touched it. There had been no lights or dwellings for miles, and it had been an hour since we passed another car. I was about to ask where we were when there was a gentle tapping at my window, the door handle clicked, and as the door was slowly drawn open, the indoor light came on. Into the narrow shaft of illumination at my side stepped an elderly black man wrapped in an orange blanket. He wore a dark woolen hat, and his cheeks were covered by tight grey twirls of sparse beard. In his mouth there was an ancient straight-stemmed pipe, the top of its bowl burned and uneven, and as he puffed on it he drew in his cheeks while he stared at me. His eyes were deep-set, pouched and reddened, surrounded by coarse folds within which was set a network of fine wrinkles. They were thoughtful eyes; there was no judgment in them, and for that I felt grateful. Eventually he nodded solemnly.

“
Sawubona
,” he said. I see you. And he gestured with his head that I should come with him.

My driver nodded to me, and as I thanked him and dropped down to the ground he slowly pulled away, turned around, and headed back the way we had come. It was freezing on the mountaintop, the silence absolute, and I was alone with a dignified old Zulu who spoke no English. He wasn’t simply tall—he towered over me. Bending to my level so that I could see him gesture in the darkness, he beckoned for me to follow, and he led the way down a path that paralleled the road for a few hundred feet and then turned into the brush, through a narrow ravine. We came to a stream and he strode nimbly over the peeled log that spanned it, and again I felt grateful—this time that he didn’t look back to see me struggling to keep my balance.

Eventually he stopped at a fork in the path, where a small donkey was tethered to a tree-stump. Attached to the blanket saddle was a canvas bag which he opened and from which he pulled a heavy woolen blanket. He unfolded the blanket and draped it about my shoulders, bent to untether the donkey, and gestured for me to mount the animal. I shook my head, preferring to walk, and he frowned, at first puzzled by my refusal. Then he shook his head emphatically, and it was clear that he was unwilling to continue unless I rode.

“All right,” I muttered eventually as I stepped over to the donkey. “I’ll play by your rules.”

I put my foot into his clasped hands, with which he hefted me up to the animal’s back. Then he smiled at me through his pipe-stem, took hold of the donkey’s tether, and led the way down the path. He was right, of course—the warmth of the animal’s belly between my legs was comforting in the cold, and I soon realized that I could not have matched the old man’s pace. In the darkness his orange blanket seemed to float in slow-motion around his elongated figure as he took smooth, long-legged strides that ate up the distance, his bare feet shushing rhythmically on the path.

Only a man used to making long journeys on foot could move with such speed and constancy. From the sound of the donkey’s hooves I knew that there were stones and twigs on the path, but the old man’s pace remained unaffected by what he stepped on, and I remember imagining the protection afforded him by the thick, yellowed calluses that had formed on his heels, and beneath his forefeet and toes. I couldn’t have imagined that in a matter of months I would be able to match both his speed and the toughness of his feet.

Dawn was just breaking when we came across a cluster of huts on a hillside. They were traditional Zulu huts, a framework of sticks wired together into a frame and covered with woven grasses down to the ground. There were seven in all, one in the center larger than the others. I had seen these structures from the road, passed similar smallholdings on the way to volunteer at the church in Sophiatown, learned about them in school. I knew that the larger one belonged to the father; the smaller ones to each of his wives with her small children, and that perhaps there was one for older boys and another for older girls.