Bloodlines (29 page)

For my part, I watched him, too. When he was with others, and when he was with me. And I watched myself when we were together. I thought I loved him, but in truth my knowledge of him was superficial. I knew his body, and the texture of his skin, and his hair; and I knew the feel of his lips on my mouth, and on my flesh; I knew what passion looked like in his eyes, and gentleness; knew that he was a patient teacher, that he was angry and brave; that he had wept in my arms after killing his first man, the police officer who would otherwise have killed him.

Lungile took care of me. It was a two and a half hour walk over the hills to the nearest road, and young boys watching the cows were also watching for strangers, so it was unlikely that anyone from the outside world might see me. But with a pair of binoculars on a distant hill, it might have been possible for someone to notice my white skin. So at the beginning, each morning she intercepted me as I left our hut, and took me into her own, where she darkened my skin, rubbing my arms, legs, neck and face with a thin solution dyed with tree bark and roots. Over my clothes, I wore a torn old work shirt of her husband’s and over that, a stained apron, and a woolen hat to cover my hair. Only then would she stand aside, hands on her hips, look at me, smiling so that I could see her pink gums.

“
Hau
,” she would exclaim, satisfied with her work. “
Yebo
.” Yes. And she would wave me out of the hut.

The homestead was on a hillside, with the huts in a rough circle, and what I had not seen on my first, exhausted night was that in the center was a
kraal,
a pen bounded by wooden stakes, in which the cattle were kept; the lower part of the circle was open, and contained a patch of tilled soil in which, at various times during our stay, Lungile grew
mielies
, beans and sweet potatoes. Gentle, rounded hills rolled off in all directions to the horizon, and although at first I had thought that we were alone, it became clear in the light of day that other homesteads were scattered among the hills, and that they were joined by a network of paths.

In the western distance, the silhouette of a massive range of mountains was visible, sometimes clearly, and at others indistinguishable from high cloud cover. These were the Drakensberg, which to the whites looked like a dragon’s back—but the Zulus called their mountains the
uKhahlamba
—the Barrier of Spears.

Winter is the dry season in Zululand, and although the temperature drops precipitously at night, it is crisp and clear during the day when the sun shines. The winter grasses were tall and wheat-colored, with an occasional hint of pale green, and standing outside my hut in the bright sunshine I recall feeling an overwhelming impulse to extend my arms and rise into the air as I watched the gently rolling hillsides waving and thrashing in the wind that billowed across the landscape. It would have been so easy to give myself to the wind, to become weightless and be carried upward and away.

Early in the day the silence was broken by the sound of the cattle, and by the barefoot young boys whose job was to care for them. In the mornings the boys encouraged their cows along the paths, herding them in single file, to the hillsides where they would spend the day grazing. These were Nguni cattle, which had accompanied the migrating fore-bears of the Zulus as they traveled down from the northernmost reaches of the African continent. The journey took place around the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and no one knows how many hundred years it took for them to reach the land where they finally settled. Perhaps as a result of the journey, the cows were hardy and resistant to disease, and many had a distinctive, mottled coloration. They were also the measure of wealth among the Zulus; herding them was a privilege, and the boys watched over their charges with pride. At night, before the sun went down and as the temperature began to fall, they would return along the same paths, singing to each other and calling to the cows by name, voices echoing among the hills.

It was a peaceful place of never-ending skies, silent hillsides, and streams that ran clear and pure. Its people were imbued with the dignity and wildness of this astoundingly graceful land, and it all seemed far distant from the turmoil of unjust laws, and the poverty, sadness and disease they spawned. Johannesburg and Soweto were like the memory of a distant, festering wound—but even then in Zululand, the signs of disharmony were present.

Most of the able-bodied men were gone for months at a time, some to work in the sugar cane fields; many to labor in the mines, living in barracks under almost penal conditions. Women from the cities were brought in to service the miners—women who themselves had few other choices. That was bad enough—but it was nothing compared to the current situation. When the AIDS virus arrived, the men returned from the mines to their multiple wives in the hills of Zululand, bearing lethal gifts.

One evening about a month after we arrived, as the cows were being returned to the
kraal
, one of the young boys ran into the homestead at full speed, his bare feet making no sound. Lungile was in the gardens when he arrived, and I watched as they spoke quietly together, his bare chest heaving as he gave his message. He had run a long distance, and began to shiver as he spoke. She placed a blanket around his shoulders, and then he sank down beside the fire.

Ignoring me, Lungile ran to our hut, calling out as she ran, and when Khabazela emerged they stood together and talked. I watched, knowing that the herd boys were on the lookout, that they signaled each other silently from hilltop to hilltop, and that they had been alerted to watch out for people who might be after us.

“The boys have seen a group of men in uniform,” he said, lowering his head as he entered our hut, and beckoning for me to follow him. “There are five white men on horseback, with bearers and pack animals.”

“Do we know who they are?” I asked, following his example as he rolled his blanket.

“No,” he said, and stepped back to look around the hut. There was nothing that might identify either of us. “Could be the Special Branch searching for us; but even if it’s the regional police doing a routine patrol, they’ve been asked to be on the lookout for us. If they stop for the night, they’ll be here by mid-morning—but it’s a full moon, and if they keep going, they might be here in a couple of hours. We have to go.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Where they’ll never find us,” he said in a low voice. “But we’ll be in good company—it’s the forest where King Cetshwayo took refuge in 1883, when the Zulu leadership was destroyed.”

I didn’t know of Cetshwayo, and I had only heard mention of the nearby forest as a dark place of spirits and ghosts. I was full of fear as Lungile took two yams still in their skins from the fire, stuffed them into the blanket I was carrying so that I wouldn’t burn myself, and waved us off. The boy had risen from the fire and led the way, and I followed them to the top of the hill where Khabazela took my hand in the evening chill as we made our way silently through the waist-high grass.

We had been walking together every evening, and I was no longer as easily winded as I had been when we first arrived. I was used to his pace; I had learned to hear his breathing over the sound of my own exertion, and to breathe in tandem with him. Walking together calmed me and gave me a sense of purpose.

We followed the boy along a cow path across a lengthy crest, further than I had yet ventured from the homestead, and eventually broke off to forge our way through the grass up the side of a steep hill. When we reached the top, the boy lowered himself to sit on the ground; Khabazela followed suit, and pulled me down beside him.

“Look,” he said, and pointed into the horizon.

The Zululand sky is vast, and although the sun was no more than a blinding sliver about to vanish behind the distant peaks, a pastel glow colored the underside of the cloud cover just above and rays of light shone down onto the forest that spread out before us. The tops of the trees—the forest ceiling—extended out almost horizontally from where we were, but from our vantage point, I could see that the hillside continued on a downward slope beyond where it became the forest floor. It ran along the valleys and up the hillsides, bounded at the higher points by steep, grassy fields. It was an isolated mist-belt forest, found only in high mountains. The density of the growth, and the almost immediate height of the trees, made it dark and virtually impenetrable.

“Nkandla,” he said. “Many of its trees are hundreds of years old.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, “at least, it looks beautiful from here.”

“Yes, in the light. From within, it is less lovely. And the forest floor is treacherous.”

He turned to the boy and they spoke together, and the boy gestured down the hill, pointing with a closed fist to a narrow trail that ran along the forest border and seemed to come to a sudden stop. Then he arched his body, rolled his thin shoulders, seemed to be pulling himself along by outstretched arms that gripped a series of invisible branches and roots. I shuddered involuntarily at the sinuous movement. I knew that he was showing us how we would have to crawl along the darkened, moist floor, threading ourselves among the roots, through the trees and the vines that locked them together until we had inserted ourselves so deep into the body of the forest that we became invisible from the outside; so deep that we ourselves were unaware of which direction was out, and which would take us further into the darkness.

We rose, and Khabazela placed his hands on the boy’s shoulders, thanking him in a grave voice for showing us the way. The boy’s eyes widened with pride, and he held his lean, smooth cheeks tight so that he wouldn’t show how pleased he was—but he couldn’t maintain it, and as he smiled, his teeth gleamed in the last reflected light of the day. Then he turned and ran back up, disappearing over the crest of the hill.

The Nkandla forest was full of more than trees and vines. There were several species of deer, and leopard, some of the older people remembered seeing elephant, and there were many cautionary tales of rocky cobras, puff adders and black mambas. The path we followed was actually the route the wild pigs took to their lair, and rather than stopping abruptly, as it seemed to do from a distance, when we reached its apparent end-point we were at the forest verge, and we followed it on into the trees.

Within seconds we were in darkness, the temperature dropped immediately, and we were enveloped in the thick smell of the place—the smell of moist soil, wet bark covered with lichens, rotting vegetation, and a musty animal odor that could have come from wild pigs and baboons. At first I found the smell insufferable, but within a short time it became just one more part of the forest background. The trail was inaccessible to us—it disappeared into a tunnel of roots and vines so low to the ground that we would have had to crawl on our bellies to enter it. We stopped to see where we were, our hands entwined.

“That way,” he said, pointing at a wall of vines and trees, “but you’d better put your blanket over your neck—you’re going to need both hands.”

“How do you know this place?” I asked, stopping to do as he suggested.

“I was here often as a boy,” he said, taking the woven reeds hanging from my blanket roll and looping them over my head and one shoulder. “We used to play here, and we sometimes slept in the place I’m taking you to. After all these years, I hope I can still find it.”

I followed as he clambered through the living barrier. It closed in on me so that I felt bound and constricted, and I couldn’t seem to expand my lungs to get sufficient air. The growth was thicker and more dense than I could have imagined, and I found myself having to arch my body as the boy had, sliding one shoulder up over the roughened surface of a horizontal vine, in order to pass through a narrow opening between vine and branch, even before I had extricated my legs from the dense tangle of roots behind me.

Unlike the hillside homestead, which was warmed by the sun even in the midst of winter, this place never saw the sun. The ground never dried, and our clothes were drenched from contact with dripping ferns, wet elephant-ear leaves, and the rotten and moist deadwood underfoot. It was strenuous work, and when we stopped ten or fifteen minutes later—an interminable period—we were hot and sweating, despite the chill. We were in a circle of ferns and hanging vines at the base of an immense tree trunk that rose leafless and branchless into the darkness.

“How far do we have to go before we’re safe?” I asked.

“I think we’re here,” he said, “if this is the right tree. There should be a rope ladder hanging down—there’s a sleeping platform high up, and we can pull the rope up after us.”

Khabazela pulled a flashlight from his pack, and directed the light first before us to show the way, and then up at the tree in search of the ladder. The forest was so thick around us that the light was completely insulated from outside view.

We were not alone. Several times the light reflected off a pair of yellow eyes in the undergrowth, and we heard the unsettling sounds of scurrying paws—or claws. It took us a few moments to make our way around the complex root system, which reared up out of the ground like an exoskeleton—narrow struts and buttresses attached at ground level, or arches that extended up to join the trunk far above our heads. We had somehow circled around and approached so that instead of the ladder being directly in front of us, it was on the other side of the tree. But we found it, a thick hanging vine with a sturdy branch bound to it crossways by rawhide or reeds at two-foot intervals.