Bloodlines (60 page)

“Everything else came true, and now this, too,” she whispered. “We had to wait until I was an old woman for you to return from that far distant place.”

“What did you say?” I asked, not realizing until after I had spoken that she was referring to the
sangoma
’s prediction.

“It’s nothing,” she said, pulling herself together. “You’re in a far distant place, and your call took me by surprise.” She paused. “Stevie? Steven, I mean. Thank God you called. I suppose I shouldn’t call you Stevie. How do you like to be called?”

I wanted badly to remember the hushed voice; wanted it to catapult me back into my childhood. It didn’t.

“Steven is fine,” I said, and stopped. I didn’t know where to begin.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve been hoping you would call, ever since Khabazela told me you had spoken. I know your father left something for you to read after his death, and I know from Khabazela that he’s written to you himself, and that he sent you my—attempt.” She hesitated. “I don’t know what either of them wrote, but since you’re calling me, I assume you’ve read it all. It feels a little strange, but at this point you know far more about me than I know about you.”

“That would be true,” I said.

“I was sorry to hear about your father,” she said. “I would have liked to see Lenny again.”

“Yes.”

“Time got away from us. I suppose life got in the way.”

I thought for a moment before I responded, not wanting to sound as angry as the child in me felt.

“What got in the way was your youth and your politics, and everything else that stands as an excuse for what you did. Your life might have gotten in the way—mine didn’t. It was just upended.” Then I asked the question that had kept me up at night throughout my childhood. “Why? How could you have let this happen?”

In the silence that followed I could hear her breathing, swallowing, pulling herself together.

“Every day I ask myself that question,” she said hoarsely, “and I’ll continue asking it for as long as I live. I can give you many reasons, but even to my ears they sound like attempts at justification. Perhaps we can find an answer together, because so far I haven’t found one.” She stopped talking and I could hear her taking deep breaths. “Can we meet? I long to see you, and to meet Dariya.” She paused. “And Sally and Greg, my grandchildren.”

I ignored her request to meet, but took note of the fact that she knew all her grandchildren’s names.

“Forty years,” I said quietly. “That’s two generations. If Lenny hadn’t called you, would you ever have made the effort to contact me?”

“When all this started,” she said, “our reality was vastly different from anything you can imagine, Steven. We were in the middle of a war; people were dying all around us. I thought of myself as a freedom fighter in the forefront of battle, and I couldn’t run away. I felt like an adult, but in retrospect, I was so young—half the age you are now. And what I did wasn’t in your best interest; it was selfish. I’m desperately sorry that I decided not to join you in Boston—sorry for the pain it caused you, and the grief; for the burden it placed on your father; for not being there while you grew up and became a man. But the years passed, and by the time you were old enough to be trusted with the truth, I had become a coward. I began to wonder whether you weren’t better off without me; whether you’d even be interested in seeing me. After all, I didn’t turn out to be much of a mother.” She paused. “Did I?”

I was reminded that this woman, who owned the unfamiliar voice at the other end of the telephone, and whose face I would not recognize, was the same one I had loved with every fiber of my being; whatever doubts I might have about her love were newly acquired. They pierced the protective skin that had grown over when I lost her, emerged rough and splintered from my body, a raw, painful presence that had to be acknowledged and dealt with. This was the woman whose bed I had crawled into and into whose arms I had cuddled; the woman whose smell I could still conjure in my mind, and whose lips I could still imagine kissing my cheeks and my forehead. To say she hadn’t been much of a mother would be to say that losing her wasn’t much of a loss.

“I knew even as a little boy that you loved me,” I said, looking across the room into Dariya’s eyes. “I couldn’t have said it, but even then I understood what unconditional love was. I loved you so much, and then you—you just disappeared. I didn’t understand how someone who loved me so much could have gone away. It was like losing a part of my body.”

Dariya smiled an encouraging smile at me from across the room.

“Remember that I was deceived, too, Steven,” said my mother mildly. “I really thought you knew, and had decided you wanted no contact with me. I thought I was respecting your wishes. Don’t I deserve some credit for making contact as soon as I found out the truth?”

I didn’t answer.

“I have no answer for you,” she continued. “All I can offer—and all I can ask, if I have the right to ask for anything—is the chance for us to rediscover each other.” She paused. “I would love it if you would all visit me here.”

“We’ll have to think about that,” I said.

“And Steven?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know what your father told you before he died, but don’t be too hard on him. For years he carried the consequences of what I did on his shoulders. I had no right to burden him with that.”

“Considering the circumstances,” I said, “he didn’t do a bad job of raising me.”

“I’m sure he didn’t,” she said.

We agreed to talk again in a few days, and ended the conversation. Dariya rose from the couch and she saw me watching her. She smiled at me again, and I took her in my arms. There was a strange thing trembling at the corners of my mouth, and I didn’t know whether it was a smile trying to happen, or an effort not to cry. Perhaps both.

“We’re about to have a family reunion,” I said.

It took months of planning and negotiation, but in July of 2002, Dariya, Sally, Greg and I boarded a South African Airways airbus at JFK Airport in New York and made the seventeen hour flight to Johannesburg.

As we planned the trip, I shared with Dariya my regret that my father was not coming with us; that he had managed to die before going back. He said he never wanted to see my mother again for as long as he lived, and he made it happen.

“Why would you have wanted him to go back with you?” she asked.

“I would have liked to get them in the same room,” I said, “face to face.”

“So you want vengeance,” she said one weekend in June as we walked on the beach in Dennis. “You’re the painter—what would vengeance look like?”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Dariya,” I said. “This isn’t about vengeance—it’s about resolution. I would have liked to confront them with what they’ve done, and see how they react.”

“So what would this confrontation look like?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you can’t see it, I’ll paint the picture for you,” she said. “You get both your parents, in their seventies, in a room. Each of them tells a different story—but both stories are equally true. You decide whose sins are worse, and you extract your pound of flesh.

“The way you’re thinking now, maybe it would have been eleven ounces from your mother; five ounces from your father. A few months ago, it would have been reversed. Anyway, you cut it off their bodies accordingly, and you stand there holding this messy pound of parental flesh in both hands, and their blood drips between your fingers onto the carpet, onto your shoes.

“Where are Sally and Greg while this butchery is taking place? Outside playing with the neighbors? Or are they watching? You wanted no more secrets—you want our children free, unharmed by the past. Well, this is the past you’re dealing with, and if you take a pound of flesh, either you’ll have to show it to them, or conceal it from them. And there is no place on earth deep enough or far away enough to hide it.”

I grabbed her on the beach, kissed her mouth in the June breeze, and tasted the sun on her skin. My touchstone. There were oiled teenage girls in bikinis on the beach watching us, close enough so that I could smell their suntan lotion. Their still winter-pale boyfriends grinned in disdain at our middle-aged show. You should be so lucky, I thought.

.

twenty-eight

S
TEVEN

Johannesburg, 2002

I
was close to fifty, and had been absent from South Africa for forty-one years. The country had changed dramatically, that I knew—and I could only wonder how much of it I would recognize. Once we arrived, however, it became clear that at the age of seven, in crisis and mourning, I had squeezed the essential juice from memory and placed it in airtight storage, to be retrieved at the right time.

We planned to deplane in Johannesburg, transfer the luggage to a rental car, and make the six or seven hour drive southeast to the Drakensberg. My mother, however, had other ideas. She suggested that we spend a few days with Khabazela in Johannesburg first, and this gave us an opportunity to get over jet lag before we saw her. Khabazela said he would come to our hotel—he wanted to show us something of Johannesburg before we went to his home in Soweto.

On our second day in the country, we came down from our room to find several men sitting and waiting in the hotel lobby. Only one could have been Khabazela. He was tall and spare, a straight-backed, vigorous man in his seventies. He was wearing a tailored gray jacket over a yellow tieless shirt, and a dark pair of pants. He sat relaxed and comfortable in a maroon lobby armchair, arms resting on the lustrous upholstery. The contours of his cheeks were a series of concave arcs so that his face was long and thin, and other than the deep wrinkles around his eyes, his skin was smooth.

He had a white goatee and a carefully shaped mustache, and when he saw us emerge from the elevator he bounced to his feet. When he smiled his elegant, somber face lit up like an unexpected sunrise.

“Steven,” he said, putting a hand on each of my shoulders. I recognized the deep sonorous voice from our telephone conversations. “I’d know you anywhere—you’re the image of your father.” He put his arms about me and hugged me hard, and spoke softly into my ear. “It’s been a long time, Steven. You have come home. I welcome you.”

Then he turned to greet Dariya, Sally and Greg, but I didn’t hear what they were saying. It was the first time I had thought of this trip as a homecoming. Not by any stretch of the imagination could I think of this place as home—yet. I was surprised both by his words and by how deeply they touched me.

We had breakfast in the hotel, and I watched how Khabazela won over Sally and Greg, who had initially been shy and a little in awe of this dignified and courtly man. At first he was serious with them, asking questions with real interest. As they grew more comfortable he began to joke with them, and they responded.

“Greg,” he said at one point, as the cereal and sausage and eggs were being cleared away and the coffee being poured, “is looking at me with very serious eyes—and I know those eyes.” He smiled. “They have a question in them. Right?”

Greg nodded.

“Well, out with it. What’s the question?”