Bloodlines (2 page)

Michaela stands at his side, gives him a glass of whiskey for the pain; Dennis takes a position behind him, holds him down as Dr. Davidson removes the bullet from his thigh with a long forceps. When they’re done they stitch and bandage the wound. Dennis finds a pair of the doctor’s pants for Mandla, who calls the number he has been given for such emergencies, and is told that if he can get to the Rhodesian border, he will be met and taken care of. It is at least an eight hour journey, but Michaela insists on driving him.

“I’ve done it before,” she whispers, not wanting her father or Dennis to know where they are headed. “Besides, there’s nowhere for you to hide here. The police will be all over the neighborhood any minute.”

Out in the garage, Dennis helps Michaela open the back of the Volvo. They remove the boxes of pamphlets and take out the cover, beneath which is a false plywood floor with a hinge running from back to front at the midline of the car. Michaela folds back the false floor, revealing a narrow, shallow opening just large enough to hide a man. It contains a small pillow, and several blankets to cushion the ride. Mandla is given a bottle of water to drink, which he will refill with urine if he needs to, the false floor is closed and the carpet replaced. Michaela takes rapid leave of her father, who hugs her close.

On the steering wheel is attached a hand-sized, black leather-covered rotating steering ball. Michaela grips it tightly, and through it she feels the grit of the wiry, graying hair on the back of her father’s hand, the strength and comfort of his presence. She has stopped only once to refuel and to give Mandla a chance to stretch, and out in the country she stops again to fold back the cover and half open the false floor.

Hours pass, and as she drives on in the harsh pre-dawn light, undulant fields lie still as a photograph; the tan of winter grasses takes on a colorless and lifeless hue. She can see to the far horizon, which gives mass to the sky. The landscape is a frozen scaffold that arches upward to bear the weight of the heavens, and the crescent moon is like a bright light beamed through the perfect arc cut into a backlit fabric. Only the stars move—they pulse and flicker, living pinpricks in such profusion that they have form and density.

The fields begin to alternate with bushes, silvered in the moonlight, and scattered groves of small trees, their shadows dark against the ground. Finally, after the second grouping of large trees between two higher hills, she spots the turning and slows, following the narrow, curving trail around the hills and into a low wooded area hidden from the road.

Up ahead a flashlight blinks, and she breathes a jagged sigh of relief. She’s been gripping the wheel so tightly that her knuckles are white, and she is suddenly aware of the cramping in her fingers. They’ve made good time; more importantly, they encountered no police cars or military roadblocks.

When she stops the car, two men approach. Both wear high laced military boots and khaki fatigues. One of them opens her door and she gets out slowly, stiff and awkward after the long drive. She is quivering with the need to urinate.

Thank God I only have to live with this for another few months, she thinks.

The man at the car door is short, stocky and powerful; he is prematurely balding, and has a boxer’s nose.

“Hello,” he says, looking at the moonlight on her long brown hair. He watches her body as she opens the door, struggles to turn sideways, and climbs stiffly out of the car. She hates her shapelessness, how awkward she feels, and the ugliness of her maternity clothes.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s get him out of the hole.”

He grins widely, and in the moonlight his teeth shine against his dark skin. “We’re glad to see you. Thank you for bringing him. You show great courage to do this.” He gestures with his chin at her belly. “Especially now.” His voice is deep and steady, his English heavily accented.

“It was a long trip,” she says, “but we weren’t followed. I’m just happy we got here safely.”

She walks around to the rear of the car and opens the tailgate. The interior light goes on, illuminating the half open floor.

“I need a moment alone,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”

She turns and walks quickly into the forest and steps behind a tree, where she lifts her dress above her waist, lowers her panties and squats, too uncomfortable to be embarrassed. The sound of her water splashing against the forest floor carries through the stillness, and she sighs with relief. When she is through, she stands, lowers her dress, and walks back to the car.

Mandla has climbed out of the hole and sits on the back of the car, his legs stretched out before him. As she approaches the car, the smell hits her—fetid and heavy, of blood, urine, and sweat. She feels her throat closing. I will not vomit, she thinks. Not here, not before him, and all he’s gone through.

“Raymond, are you a sight for sore eyes,” he says. His voice is hoarse.

The man laughs, a deep, throaty sound. “Khabazela,” he says, addressing Mandla by his clan name, “it’s good to see you, too. But what the hell have you been doing in there? It smells like a zoo.”

The night air is fresh and moist; Mandla breathes deeply, then attempts to move his legs. He groans loudly. “Feels like I’ve been lying in that position for a week,” he says. “Michaela, I’m so sorry I messed in the car. I had to go, and with the floor closed over me, I couldn’t get the bottle in place.”

“I’m just glad we got here in one piece,” she says.

“You better get along,” says Raymond. “You’re not safe here.”

The second man has not introduced himself. He is tall and lithe compared to his companion, and slightly younger. Under his military cap his shadowed face is smooth, but his voice is educated, and has the ring of command. “The border’s only over the hill. We’ll get him some help. Thank you for what you’re doing.”

Michaela reaches into the car, takes the soiled blanket gingerly by a corner, drags it out of the hole, and drops it on the ground. Then she closes the false bottom and rolls the carpet back. It will reduce the smell on the long journey home—and besides, it needs to be closed in case she encounters a roadblock. She stumbles quickly to his side.

“Heal quickly,” she says. “Come back as soon as you can. We need you.”

“I will,” he says. “Be safe, Michaela. And thank you.”

Then, without a word, Raymond helps Mandla up, supporting him on one shoulder; the other man hefts both rifles and they disappear into the woods. She runs to the car, her heart racing, and has the presence of mind to leave the lights off as she drives back along the trail towards the road.

.

one

S
TEVEN

Boston, 2001

T
hese events occurred in Johannesburg and along the Rhodesian border in 1956, three months before I was born. My name is Steven Green; the young woman, Michaela Green, was my mother. It was not until I reached middle age that I discovered the wounded man was a political activist who later became her lover.

You might wonder how I know the details of our little trip to the border when I was still
in utero
. It’s a long tale, and it has to do with the legacy my mother failed to leave me.

In an impassioned struggle against apartheid, it was inevitable that my mother’s clandestine activities would catch up with her. Eventually she was arrested, and with a wrenching suddenness, she disappeared from my life. Much of my childhood was spent mourning her, and I guarded what little recollection I had of her as if it were a pearl of memory embedded in me, the physical embodiment of a courageous and outspoken mother killed in the long struggle for freedom.

When I was seven, in 1962, my father, Lenny, moved us from South Africa to Boston to start a new life. He taught engineering at MIT, we seldom spoke about the past, and we lived alone and womanless. For over forty years, I thought I was the son of a dead mother. Then everything started to unravel. At first slowly, and then very fast.

I remember little about our first few months in Boston. My father rented a smallish two-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, and although I was unaware of it, we lived frugally.

By the time I was twelve, he had saved enough to make a down payment on a little cottage with a garden just off the beach in Dennis on Cape Cod. We spent almost every weekend there during the school year, and as much of the summers as he could afford.

In my memory, winters were pretty much shades of gray until we bought the cottage. Then I began to see the possibilities of color, even in the bleak, early-dark winter skies that hovered over the Atlantic. Perhaps it was the beauty and isolation of the Cape, which was still an undiscovered gem in the 1960s; perhaps something in my father came to life once he felt himself attached to a piece of land. Or, perhaps it was that he and I began to spend more time together when we went to the cottage, mostly in silent communion while he worked and I drew or painted, or in lockstep as we walked the beaches and the streets that were deserted and silent for much of the year.

In any case, we never discussed our relationship. My father was intensely private, a guarded personality, and as I matured, I took his example and respected his space as he respected mine. Now that I have children and know what it means to be involved in their lives, I recognize that he raised me with a distant kind of love best described as benign neglect.

When he and I were together, I often felt that something was missing. But in time, the missing ingredient took on a character of its own. Instead of being an absence that bound us together, it became a presence with its own specific gravity. Eventually we formed a molecule with my father on one end and me on the other, and the force that kept us apart was so palpable that it might have been a magnetic field in which we were drawn together with no option but to repel each other.

For years I thought—assumed—that the thing between us was the absence of my mother; that because we both missed her and mourned her death, that the loss bound us together. But it was a different kind of loss for each of us, and the real barrier between us was not her absence. It was that we lived two vastly different versions of reality, which, because they were irreconcilable at the time, we were unable to broach until much later.