Bloodlines (3 page)

My father refused to discuss what happened on the last day I saw my mother, and so I have no knowledge of what he experienced or remembered.

As for me, I remember that my mother dropped me off at kindergarten that morning, and I have tried without success to recall whether she kissed me goodbye. Of course, neither she nor I knew that it was her last day, but over the years the question of whether I received and returned her kiss became more and more important to me. Perhaps it was a childish attempt to cement my connection to her. Eventually I came to accept the absence of that final kiss as a part of her legacy.

What I do remember of her are a little boy’s sensations of the caress of her skin, and the feel of her hair; and her breath, which had about it the warmth and sweetness of our garden in mid-summer. When I think of the way her lips opened when she smiled, and of her breathy laughter, it gives me a catch in the chest even today. I remember her physical intimacy. Ironic, because what I craved from her as I was growing up was to know her mind—to talk to her, to hear how she might have advised me to live my life.

The few appeals I made to my father on the subject of my mother’s death revealed little of consequence, and eventually it became a concrete fact in my life that he would never reveal what happened. So what does a seven, or a ten, or a fourteen year old boy do when he has no information about the death of his mother? He lies awake at night, trying to recreate her last hours. Which I did, night after night, into my teens.

They say memory is not fixed—that it can be changed, or even created. I created my own private internal story of my mother’s death out of scraps of what I overheard; from the earliest cowboy movies I watched, where I ignored John Wayne coming to the rescue, but only saw the massacre of Indians; from the newscasts in movie theatres—of international events, police brutality, African genocides, foreign wars. Later, I incorporated what I learned about torture and intrigue from spy movies, thrillers and television news. It was all equally valid grist to my mill, and I chewed it all up and turned it into a series of memories that changed and became increasingly sophisticated as I grew older. These memories became my nightmares.

Despite my father’s attempts to avoid talking about South Africa, I couldn’t help but come to a vague understanding of its politics, and as I did so, my nightmares became more factual, and more violent. My mother, driving through the darkness, stopped by a car full of uniformed white men. Terrified, but always brave, she refuses to open the trunk. They break it open, discover a man cowering beneath a hidden floor. Sometimes they shoot her right there and leave, and I have to bury her; sometimes they cart her off to prison, where she is brutally interrogated, has cold water dripped on her forehead, and goes mad before they finally drown her, leaving me to dispose of her body.

In the fifth grade, my class was assigned to prepare an oral report entitled
My Family History.

The report was supposed to be a personal interpretation of family history using interviews with parents and other family members, as well as research gathered from other sources. I was at a distinct disadvantage—I had no other relatives to interview, and getting family information from my father was like pulling teeth. But motherless and with my strange foreign accent, I already stood out in class, and I refused to be branded in addition as the one with no family history, so I worked with a tenacity that surprised even me, spending every afternoon in the school library.

Mrs. Tolliver was the school librarian, a stern, angular woman with iron-gray hair. She understood instinctively that this project was more than simply a school assignment, and she became my accomplice. She found books for me, showed me how to use them, and took me one afternoon to the Cambridge Public Library. She must have sensed that I was a visual child who best expressed himself through drawings, and that I was in search of a past.

She laid before me books of photography and drawings of South Africa, and I saw the city I came from, Johannesburg, surrounded by huge mine dumps, the crushed rock that remains after the extraction of gold. I saw the gorgeous coastal cities and beautiful beaches of Cape Town and Durban; wild stretches of rolling farmland of the Free State and the profusion of wild game in a book on the Kruger National Park. I took it all into myself and it became autobiography, filling what had been empty. But I was most taken by the Drakensberg Mountains southeast of Johannesburg, in KwaZulu-Natal, near the area once known as Zululand. I was spellbound by the majestic wilderness of towering, jagged peaks and rolling
veld.
I didn’t understand it, but as an adult I recognize that something in its massive and permanent isolation struck a chord in me.

No one, not even Mrs. Tolliver, knew what I was preparing for my report, and I wanted it to be a surprise to everyone.

When my father said that he had a meeting on my scheduled presentation date and would be unavailable, I was heartbroken and furious. And despite my outraged beseeching, he was adamant that his meeting could not be changed. The next afternoon, Mrs. Tolliver noticed my lack of concentration as I sat in the library over a book of South African history.

“You seem so distracted, Steven,” she said. “If your presentation isn’t finished, you’d best pull yourself together. It’s only a few days away.”

“I don’t want to do it,” I said.

She sat down beside me. “What is it, Steven?” she asked. “You’ve worked so hard on this project. What happened?”

“My father can’t come,” I blurted out. “I know it’s not for him, it’s for me, but if he can’t be there to listen, I don’t want to do it at all.”

“You know,” she said quietly, “perhaps we can reschedule your presentation to a time when your father can be there. What do you say?”

Years later my father regaled me with a story about the telephone call from Mrs. Tolliver. He told the story as if it was a joke, impervious to what it revealed about him.

“I knew the minute I heard her voice,” he said, “that she was a tough cookie. She explained the problem, and there was no way she would let me off the hook. ‘Steven’s teacher has set aside six presentation days in all,’ she said. ‘On which ones will you be available?’ She gave me the dates, but I told her that I had classes to teach, and graduate students to meet with. ‘Mr. Green, I’ve been watching your son work on this project, alone, for over a month,’ she said. ‘I don’t know all that your family’s been through, but this is Steven’s attempt to find his past. He needs you to witness this presentation, and I will do whatever I can to ensure that he gets your audience, even if it means that he has to do a second presentation one evening in the library. So, Mr. Green, which is it going to be?’”

My father finally agreed to a time. I had no idea what happened behind the scenes—how my teacher managed to arrange the switch with another child—but eventually it was my turn to present
My Family History
.

I rose in my jacket, white shirt and pressed khaki pants, a nervous little boy, hair slicked back, walking proudly to the front of the class. Mrs. Tolliver caught my eye and winked at me. My teacher stood to the side, ready to remove the white sheet that had been placed over my presentation before class began.

I don’t remember exactly what I said; the notes I made are long gone. But I do recall that I spoke about the injustice of apartheid. I spoke of the Pass Laws, requiring all black people to carry a document specifying when and where they might live and work. I talked about the fact that white and black people could not live in the same house; about separate public toilets, and park benches labeled for black or white use, and the fact that black people were only allowed to do menial, low-paying jobs. And in a small voice, in my father’s presence and in the presence of others, I spoke about my mother. That, I remember.

“My mother was a brave woman who believed in equal rights, and in the freedom of all people, of all skin colors. She was willing to fight for what she believed in, and to break laws that she thought were unjust. She helped people in trouble to escape from the authorities, and she worked hard to bring knowledge of what was happening in South Africa to the rest of the world. She taught me that it is important to try and make a difference, and she showed me that if the difference is worth making, then it’s also worth dying for.

“But South Africa is not just a cruel government of unfair laws. It is also a beautiful country of wonderful people.”

I beckoned to my teacher, who came to the front of the class and removed the sheet covering my brown paper roll. There were several small pictures taped to the roll—a picture of Johannesburg, which I described as the city I had been born in, two pictures of African tribesmen in traditional dress, the beaches, a pride of lions. But the three pictures I was most proud of, the ones that stood out most prominently, were my paintings of the Drakensberg Mountains—Champagne Castle, Giant’s Castle, and the cloud-covered Sani Pass, from which mountains, rolling hills and rivers are visible into the far distance. I had painted them in brilliant colors, the greens deep and dense; the grasses in the foreground typical of the dry gray-green and tan colors of Africa.

“The country I come from,” I said in conclusion, “is filled with many different people and racial groups. Lots of good people have been hurt or killed doing what they feel is right. But one day they will succeed in their struggle.” I looked at the back of the classroom, directly into my father’s eyes. “And then,” I said, “then we will be able to go home again.”

After a brief moment of surprised silence, one of the parents began to clap, and the whole room joined in. No other presentation had been applauded, and I was filled with pride.

In the back of the classroom, Mrs. Tolliver dabbed at her eyes with a tissue—but my father was pale, trembling visibly, and, as the tears ran down his cheeks, he wiped them away with his shirtsleeve. It took me a long time—over forty years—before I understood precisely what he was crying about.

I took a very different professional direction from my father. Having always been interested in art, and having painted and sketched since I was a small boy, it was only natural that I become a painter. But my father, ever the practical man, insisted that I equip myself to be a teacher of painting in case my own talent turned out to be less than adequate.

As a result, I concentrated on fine arts in college, eventually did a Master’s degree in modern American painters, and my first job was teaching undergraduates at the Boston University School of Fine Arts. In that sense, my father and I are similar—we both earned a living as academics, even if our subjects were very different.

Luckily, whatever talent I might have had, combined with a need to paint that has been one of the few constants in my life, has proven sufficient. My paintings of Cape Cod sell as well in Chatham as they do among the desert paintings that fill the galleries in Santa Fe, and their sale provides an additional source of income that adds a nice cushion to my academic salary.

To see me, you wouldn’t think I had lived through anything out of the ordinary. I look like what I am—forty-eight, white, male; a boyish face, pleasant expression. My wife Dariya tells me that my age shows around the eyes, which are a little baggy and crease when I smile. I like my face, but it’s nothing special. Fair complexion, receding light brown hair, a little gray at the temples. A bit under six feet tall, broad in the shoulder, skinny hips and thighs, beginning to run to fat.