July's People (16 page)

The vehicle that had brought his white people had never been mentioned between the two of them. She had not remarked upon or praised his prowess while he was learning to drive it. He had said nothing; it was natural for him to assume she saw him serving his white people in this way just as he took them wood and had given them his mother’s house and the pink glass cups and saucers.

There was complicity growing in the silence. He broke it. —After the fighting… If you could have seen how it was in town. I was there. You die just like that.— There were thoughts that had to be tried out on someone. —I left my money. I couldn’t fetch it, anyway. Everything was closed up. Finished.—

In the shoulder-bag
AEROLINEAS ARGENTINAS
his white man had passed on after the return from the architects’ congress in Buenos Aires he kept the simulated-calf wallet they had given him one Christmas. It was flattened and softened to its contents by the years he had carried it always against the contours of the body in hip or breast pocket; his passbook that his employers had to sign every month, his post office savings book, the building society savings book with its initial deposit entry of one hundred rands they had given him in recognition of ten years’ service, five years ago. The figures in his post office book rose and fell, from three figures sometimes to one. He put in five rands of Fah-Fee winnings when he was very, very lucky, he took out sums to
send home when there was a crisis in his family, far from his intervention—the only authority left to him, at that distance, was money. He withdrew the savings of two years’ work, his entire capital, all he was worth to the city he was spending his life in, all that there ever was between him and a slump, unemployment, sudden disaster, old age and destitution, each time he went home on leave. He never had withdrawn anything from the United Building Society account with the hundred rands, and it had grown by itself, a rand or two a year: they explained interest to him, how money could be earned without working for it, the system whites had invented for themselves. He had never seen the money they gave him, or touched it, but it was there. They had saved him, when first he came to them, from his country ignorance, keeping his money in a cigarette tin under his mattress.

—How much?— She knew what his monthly wage was, and didn’t tell anyone else because people always ask to borrow. But she didn’t understand the source of other odd sums that came his way and sometimes were passed on to her and his mother—not always, she saw that when he used to come home on the railway bus in new clothes; this last time, two years ago, in blue jeans and matching zip-up jacket. She did not know what other money there was to be gained, or how, and on whom he spent it. The gambling game was not one that was played here at his home. A backyard, back-lanes game where the money rolled from white houses.

They had told him his money was safe, written down in those books. But now that they had run away, those books were just bits of paper. Like the other things he and his wife and his mother and all the people here kept in the dark of huts because there was so little left over from the needs of each day: the safety medal someone brought back from the mines, the Mickey Mouse watch Victor had ruined in the
bath, the receipt for the bicycle paid for six hundred kilometres away.

He made a rough equivalent for her. —More than a hundred pounds.— The people here at home had never changed their calculation to the currency of rands and cents, the Indian store still marked in the old British currency the price of Primus stoves and zinc finials which, for those who could afford them, had replaced the cone of mud packed on the apex of roofs to secure the highest layer of thatch.

He thought of the pass-book itself as finished. Rid of it, he drove the yellow bakkie with nothing in his pockets. But he had not actually destroyed it. He needed someone—he didn’t yet know who—to tell him: burn it, let it swell in the river, their signatures washing away.

A
man in short trousers came along the valley carrying a red box on his head. She was watching him all the way; she could no longer stay in the hut while the blond man fiddled with the radio. The children had stood obstinately before her, squinting into the sun through wild hair, when she forbade them to go swimming in the river, and she could hear their squeals as they jumped like frogs from boulder to boulder in the brown water with children who belonged here, whose bodies were immune to water-borne diseases whose names no one here knew. Maybe the three had become immune, too. They had survived in their own ability to ignore the precautions it was impossible for her to maintain for them. Victor was forgetting how to read, but did not miss his Superman and Asterix; she sat outside the hut and could not understand
I Promessi Sposi
. It was translated from the Italian but would not translate from the page to the kind
of comprehension she was able to provide now. Only the account of bread riots in Milan in 1628 produced in her, in reflex, an olfactory impression of bread, and even that was not a craving for bread (there was none here, mealie-meal
pap
was bread), for the supply from the supermarket that was always ready, wrapped in plastic bags, in the freezer back there—was not a real connection made between her normal sense of self and her present circumstances, but simply the statement of the bread Lydia baked once a week. In the kitchen of the Married Quarters house on the mine, along the passage—as you opened the door, the house bloomed with the slightly fermented scent. And it was Lydia’s heavy brown bread in brick-shaped loaves. Rather tasteless; it had given all in what it breathed through the house.

She was not in possession of any part of her life. One or another could only be turned up, by hazard. The background had fallen away; since that first morning she had become conscious in the hut, she had regained no established point of a continuing present from which to recognize her own sequence. The suburb did not come before or after the mine. 20, Married Quarters, Western Areas, and the architect-designed master bedroom were in the same rubble. A brick picked up might be Lydia’s loaf.

The red box on the man’s head showed first under the bold black-green of the wild fig-trees at the river. A bit of red leaped out at her; no one knew from which direction anyone might have come, in the homogeneity of the bush out there, she watched it all day and saw nothing, it absorbed, concealed what it held. If people came from the other side of the river they appeared for the first time, broken up by foliage and flashes off the water they disturbed as they crossed the river; and as they rearranged their bundles and their clothes after wading through with these on their heads. But this was some sort of trunk or box, bright red. It appeared now as red
splinters between the elephant grass on the near side of the river. The man climbed the gradient towards her—not seeing her, there were bushes, there was a great pile of thatch someone had dumped, she felt she was not there—with bowed black shins staggering. The trousers were not shorts but had worn through and been torn off at the knees. The red box was heavy and there were wires looped from it that bothered him. He hailed once, towards the huts. Having announced himself, plodded on. A fix on him, she had felt the bunching of muscles in his neck as he braced himself against rising ground under the red box, the cold tingling in the arm from which the blood receded where it was raised to steady the box; the sweat of his effort melting in the heat of the day was the sweat of her hands’ imprint wetting the pages of the book. He was lost to her behind Martha’s chicken-house on stilts and the water-tank when he reached the village.

In the afternoon there was a deafening, fading and lurching bellow through the air; it was the
gumba-gumba
being tried out, the children reported.

Here was something for which Victor, Gina and Royce knew the name in the village people’s language but not in their own. The red box was the area’s equivalent of a travelling entertainment; someone had brought back from the mines a battery-operated amplifier and apparently he would come and set it up in this village or that, attached to a record player, for an occasion. It was not clear what this occasion was. Mother and father were tugged along by the Smales children to see the
gumba-gumba
, which the children couldn’t believe was not something unknown to them. —How can you say what it’s like?—For Gina, what hadn’t before been seen in this village was new to the world.

The parents were brought together to witness the contraption as divorced people might meet on their regular day to keep up a semblance of family life. They exchanged a few
words with July, another parent, his second youngest sitting yoked on his shoulders. He had the city man’s good-natured amusement at country people’s diversions. Bam asked whether there was a wedding? And added, or a meeting? But July was not apart from the leisurely, straggling group coming and going about the focus of the man who had commandeered a couple of youths to help him rig up his wires and speaker horn on one of the wattle poles of the hut that was also some kind of church or meeting-house—often women’s voices singing hymns came from there. —Is not a wedding. —And at the idea of a meeting, he merely laughed. —Sometime we having a party. Just because someone he’s…I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.— He called up to the man on the roof in the way his people did, teasing and encouraging, the first part of what he said gabbled and rapid, the syllables of the last word strongly divided and drawn out, the word itself repeated.
Mi ta twa ku nandziha ngopfu, swi famba a moyeni. Ncino wa maguva lawa, hey—i…hey—i!

Laughter and comment flew from people come out of their huts and flocked up around the man and July. The
gumba-gumba
was itself the occasion; the dropsical man (whose legs lately were bandaged in rags of a filthy towel), sometimes the presence of a beggar, today—because of the voice of the oracle yelling and retching from its battered red box and dented horn—sat on his stool as an old god carried out among them, the grotesque ceremonial presence without which carnival forgets its origin is in fear of death. Music began swirling unsteadily from the amplifier. Already they were passing round the thin beer that was the same colour when drunk and when vomited. Their fun had its place in their poverty. It ignored that they were in the middle of a war, as if poverty itself were a country whose dispossession nothing reaches.

July’s white people wandered away. The father did not want to have to drink that stuff and did not want to offend.
The mother thought there were pleasanter sights for the children than—in particular—some of the women (not July’s, ever) getting drunk with their babies on their backs, and going to pee only as far away as their staggering would carry them.

When the white family got back to the hut the gun was gone.

I
f he hadn’t been with them watching the installation of the
gumba-gumba
they would have thought it was Victor. Quite possible he would boast that he was allowed to handle his father’s gun; would have somehow climbed up and taken it from its place in the roof.

The boxes of cartridges had gone, too.

Bam was just as he was when the car keys were lost back there. But his hands shook, actually shook—she saw it as she had often pretended not to know when someone was crying. There were so few places to search, in a hut, and where could the gun be, if it were not in its place and had not been moved by him? Who would move it?

He seemed suddenly unsure he might not have moved it himself. After coming back from the chief. She had always been asked to check whether her passport was really in her
travel wallet, when they travelled together. She had done this with exaggerated precision, holding it up to him in her way between thumb and first finger, putting it back where it had been and she had been sure it had been, all the time.

She looked under the coverings they used as bed-clothes and pitched their few crumpled clothes out of the suitcase.

He even took the knob-kerrie he had been given by an old man in exchange for fish and poked in the thatch that was piled up outside, lifted the bundles one by one and flung them aside. Victor and Royce rummaged, talking too much. —What if someone’s buried it? C’mon, let’s dig, Vic? Shall we dig?— When checked in one activity, they dashed to another. They forgot what they were supposed to be searching for; turning over ashes became a contest of kicking the grey powder at one another. Gina had run off to skip with Nyiko, who had an old dressing-gown cord for a rope.

— You’re quite sure you didn’t play with it? At
any
time?—

—No, daddy—man! I promise.— Victor was offended at being suspected of what he knew he might very well have done.

The younger one indemnified, innocent of everything, for all time: —We never. Cross my heart.—

—Because no one else knew it was there.— Their father’s look held. He breathed as if he had been running; even as they did when they were about to cry.

The boys stood waiting for whatever it was grown-ups might decide to do. Neither would dare risk telling their father everybody knew it was there, every chicken that scratched, every child whose eyes went round the interior of the hut,
mhani
Tsatsawani’s hut, where the white people stayed. —
Gina
knows.— Royce told tales, but the father didn’t understand the implication. And Victor, his hand out of sight where he stood close up beside his young brother, took the flap of the little boy’s skinny thigh and pinched it
with steadily maintained pressure for a few seconds, enforcing a code of loyalty that extended even to their sister in time of real trouble.

—You c’n tell the police, dad.—

Bam looked behind, around him; sat down on the bed. He nodded a long time.

She saw that he wouldn’t answer the child; but he was back there: if he couldn’t pick up the phone and call the police whom he and she had despised for their brutality and thuggery in the life lived back there, he did not know what else to do.

He heaved himself up. Some surge of adrenalin summoned, sending him striding out, ducking his big head under the doorway. But he walked immediately into their gaze again. He lay down on his back, on that bed, the way he habitually did; and at once suddenly rolled over onto his face, as the father had never done before his sons.