Bloodlines (54 page)

I knew that all she had to do was to meet Miriam, and the deal would be done. Miriam had just turned twenty. She was slender and energetic, with smooth brown cheeks and fiery eyes, and a smile that would have melted glass. She did not have much education—it would have been difficult in the village to find a girl who had completed high school. But when I met Miriam, I knew that she was a good match for me. She was highly intelligent; she had a very strong sense of herself. She was one of those people—I have seen this quality mostly among women—who understands how the world works, and who manages to function within the system while somehow rising above it. I knew that she would be able to work in Michaela’s house without becoming a servant. In her own way she was as determined as Michaela, but she could be obstinate with a sweetness that brushed most obstacles out of her way. I had been completely honest with her, and by the time I suggested that they meet, I knew she had an instinctive understanding of how difficult it all was for Michaela.

I thought it best that I not be there when Miriam first went to the farmhouse, and Michaela arranged it at a time when they could be alone in the kitchen. Afterwards neither woman spoke much about their meeting, other than to say that it had gone well. But over the years, both of them have dropped little pieces of information, and I’ve been able to piece together a picture of what happened.

I know that at first it was awkward for both of them. This was not the normal interview of a prospective nursemaid by a farm wife. They sat down together in the kitchen, and Michaela made tea. They were nervous; both mistress and servant pregnant, and aware that the children they carried had the same father; and aware also that if their secret became public, none of our lives would be exempt from the ensuing disaster.

They talked at first about what the job would entail, and what were Michaela’s expectations. At the start, Miriam was in awe of this tall, beautiful white woman who ran the farm alone, who had had the courage to follow her heart and love me despite the risks, and who, she knew by then, had the strength of character to end our relationship when I married. But it didn’t take her long to see that Michaela was also heartbroken by the course events had taken, and that beneath it all, she was just another woman in the world, about to have a child, and, like so many other women she knew, about to have a child alone.

At one point, pouring from the teapot, Michaela knocked a cup off the table. The hot tea splattered and the cup shattered on the wood floor. As they stood together at the sink, Michaela trying to remove the stains on Miriam’s light blue blouse with a wet cloth, Miriam noticed that there were tears in her eyes, and she instinctively put one comforting arm around your mother’s waist.

“It will be good for our children to have each other,” she said quietly. “And so that we will not be each of us a mother alone with a child on this big farm, it will be good for us, Madame, to be sisters. When Khabazela comes, he can see both the children.” She looked at your mother and her eyes were dark, and shining, and the white part was pure and innocent. “And he can see you, too.”

Michaela was taller than Miriam, and she looked down at her, slowly wiping her eyes. “If we’re going to be sisters, Miriam,” she said, “you can’t go around calling me Madame. I think you’d better find me another name.”

I remember every word the old
sangoma
spoke, and over the years, as the events she predicted have come to pass, I have found myself repeating her words and remembering the sound of her strange, tortured voice as she channeled the Shades.

The
sangoma
said that Michaela and I would have a child, and she said that together with another mother, Michaela would raise two children. It happened just as she predicted, and I found myself in the enviable position of having the two women I loved bringing up my two sons in the same house. It would have been unconventional anywhere, but in that poisonous world, it was beyond anything I could have imagined or hoped for.

They were born two months apart, Simon first, and then Thulani. Our good friend Andrew, the local doctor, attended both births. On any other farm, one of the boys would have lived in the farmhouse and the other in the servants’ quarters. On this farm, Simon and Thulani slept in the same crib, and whether it was in Miriam’s room behind the house or in the baby’s room Michaela had prepared for Simon, all the two boys cared about was that they were together.

Andrew—whom we all called the White Zulu—was smitten with your mother, and they became very close after Miriam and I married. By the time the boys were two years old she was ready to move on with her life, and Andrew moved into the farmhouse. They were a good match. He was a powerful personality, his integrity was absolute, and they shared a commitment to our cause. More than that, they shared a strange need, which I never understood, to become what they could never be. I believe they found happiness in each other, and they lived together for almost twenty-five years, until his death a few years ago.

I was relieved to know that there was a man in the house, because in those years the degree and frequency of political violence increased beyond anything we could have previously imagined. In addition to my other work, I was frequently called on to mediate, and my deepest regret is that I was absent for much of those years.

My greatest concern about having a child with Michaela was that the authorities would come sniffing around, and that they would make an arbitrary decision regarding the race of our child. They might decide based on some bizarre measure that the child was black, or colored, and he would have been taken from Michaela to live with another family in a different racial district. We are only a few years from that Kafkaesque world, where we lived in fear of arbitrary decisions based on inhuman distinctions among people, but even to me it seems hard to believe that for so long it was the norm we lived with.

Both boys were healthy, and both were beautiful. Thulani had his mother’s full cheeks and big dark eyes; he had my mouth and my smile. There was no question about his parentage. That was not the case with Simon, who had warm brown eyes, curly hair, and a complexion that could have been Mediterranean or Indian. His ancestry might have been Corsican or North African. His full mouth, much like your mother’s, would have suited an infant in a fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But there was no place for possibilities or uncertainty under the race laws. In that benighted environment, it was better not to stand out. So Michaela kept his hair cut short and made sure that he stayed out of the sun, which would only have darkened his skin further. When he did go outside he soon became used to wearing a cap with a brim that protected his face.

Luckily, it was far easier to make him invisible on the farm than it would have been in town, just as it was easier on the farm to have the two boys essentially living together. When Miriam took Thulani home with her, she sometimes took Simon, too. I don’t think Simon knew there was a difference between them.

My mother was still alive then, and living in the village; she made a great fuss of both her grandsons. And they had the run of the farm. They moved easily from the farmhouse to the servants’ quarters, and when they were old enough to explore further afield, there was always someone looking out for them. They were inseparable, deeply loved, and the irony was that despite all our fears, they lived charmed lives, in absolute safety.

If ever two little boys might have thought that they owned the world, these were they. As they grew and became more independent, the radius of safety around the farmhouse expanded, and along with it, Michaela’s—and my—fear that Simon would be exposed. We agreed that the only way to ensure that they were not separated, and that they were safe, was to keep them close to home for as long as possible.

It was not a long-term plan; we knew that we had to take each day as it came. But what really gnawed at me and kept me up at night was the fact that I could not give my two sons the same education. The only schools in the area were for white children, and there were no black schools anywhere. But this was not, as Sophiatown had been, an area of dense population that was highly visible and under constant police scrutiny. I wondered how we could capitalize on the fact that we were instead a rural community covering a vast area, and we had sparse police coverage. And I came up with an idea that turned out to offer multiple benefits.

In Sophiatown, it was impossible to hide our forbidden schools, so we camouflaged them as social clubs. But Michaela’s farm in the Midlands was in many ways a self-contained community, separated from other farms and other people by vast expanses of growing fields and grassland, and by hillsides, scrub and forest. It was the perfect place to start educating the children of the farm—not just my two boys, but the children of farm employees as well, both black and white. And when I returned from a lengthy stay out of the country and suggested it to Michaela, she laughed loudly and asked me to come by the old barn the following day.

The next afternoon I made my way to the farm. The barn was a good ten minute walk from the farmhouse, but anyone approaching it had to go past the farmhouse first. It was secluded behind a grove of close-growing trees and vines, and the only way to access it was via an overgrown tractor path. The barn was used to warehouse outdated farm machinery, and when I had last seen it the barn door was hanging from one hinge. As I approached I saw that the door had been repaired, and when I pushed it open, the barn was empty of machinery. There were old benches stacked in the center, and a wood stove at one end.

At the far end of the barn Miriam was whitewashing the walls while Michaela swept the floor. In one corner there was an old table surrounded by several chairs, and a third woman sat with her back to the door, cutting and pasting sheets of paper, and writing letters of the alphabet with a big marker on each page. Simon and Thulani were laughing and running around at one end of the empty barn, playing a game with a little girl of about six. I walked across the barn towards them and when the boys saw me they shouted and ran to me, and the little girl followed. The boys jumped at me and I lifted them both, one in each arm, and continued walking towards the women.

“Good morning, Mandla,” said Michaela. She spoke in her public voice, presumably because of the third woman in the room, but her eyes were smiling. “This is the room I was talking about, where we will have classes for the children. I’m pleased to see you—we can use your help arranging the benches around the walls.” She spoke to the third woman, who had turned her head to look at us. “Anna,” she said, “I think you know Mandla. Mandla, you remember Mrs. McWilliams. She’s going to be helping us. And this is her daughter, Helen.”

I had not seen Anna McWilliams since shortly after the boys were born, and I almost didn’t recognize her. She had been a thin, unhappy woman with stringy blond hair; she looked always as if she had been beaten, or was afraid that she would be. There had been something unhealthy about her; something almost unclean. In any event, she was almost unrecognizable. Her hair and clothes alone made her look like different person. She had gained weight, her cheeks were round, and she was smiling. She looked at me over her shoulder with a curious expression.