July's People (3 page)

It was early morning but in their hut the women were dreamy, as at the end of the day; a furzy plank of sunlight rested from a single pane-sized aperture in the walls across the profile of a young girl, the twitching, hump-knuckles of the old lady, the fat spread legs of the sated child. On an iron bedstead tidily made up with fringed plaid blankets one of the half-grown girls was plaiting the hair on the bent head of another. Perhaps they had been out since first light gathering wood or working in their fields—Maureen was aware, among them in the hut, of not knowing where she was, in time, in the order of a day as she had always known it.

W
hy do they come here? Why to us?—

His wife had accepted his dictum, when he arrived that night in a white man’s bakkie with a visitation of five white faces floating in the dark. Given up the second bed, borrowed a Primus for them; watched him, in the morning, take the beautiful cups he had once brought her from the place of his other life. His mother had given up her hut—the trees for the walls and roof-poles felled and raised by him, the mud of the walls mixed and built up by his mother and herself, that was due to have a new roof next thatching season. Both women had moved about under his bidding without argument. But that was not the end of it. He knew that would not be the end of it.

—You don’t understand. Nowhere else to go. I’ve told you.—

His wife jerked her chin in exaggerated parody of accord.
She hung her head to her hunched shoulder as she had done as a girl. —White people here! Didn’t you tell us many times how they live, there. A room to sleep in, another room to eat in, another room to sit in, a room with books (she had a Bible), I don’t know how many times you told me, a room with how many books… Hundreds I think. And hot water that is made like the lights we see in the street at Vosloos-dorp. All these things I’ve never seen, my children have never seen—the room for bathing—and even you, there in the yard you had a room for yourself for bathing, and you didn’t even wash your clothes in there, there was a machine in some other room for that— Now you tell me
nowhere.
—

She had her audience. The young girls who were always in her hut with her tittered.

—They had to get out, they had to go. People are burning those houses. Those big houses! You can’t imagine those houses. The whites are being killed in their houses. I’ve seen it—the whole thing just blow up, walls, roof.—

His wife rubbed a forefinger up and down behind her ear. —He has a gun. The children saw there’s a gun, he keeps it in the roof.—

—When they come, one gun is no use. If he could chase them away one day they would come back the next. There’s trouble! Unless you’ve been there, you can’t understand how it is.—

His mother’s hands were never still. The four finger-tips of each beat ceaselessly at the ball of the thumb—the throb of an old heart exposed there, like the still-beating heart in the slit chest of a creature already dead. —White people must have their own people somewhere. Aren’t they living everywhere in this world? Germiston, Cape Town—you’ve been to many places, my son. Don’t they go anywhere they want to go? They’ve got money.—

—Everywhere is the same. They are chasing the whites out.
The whites are fighting them. All those towns are the same. Where could he run with his family? His friends are also running. If he tried to go to a friend in another town, the friend wouldn’t be there. It’s true he can go where he likes. But when he gets there, he may be killed.—

They listened; with them, no one could tell if they were convinced.

—You used to write and say how you were looking after the house by yourself—feeding their dog, their cat. That time when you were even sleeping inside the house, thieves came and broke the window where you were sleeping—I don’t know, one of those rooms they have… He went away,
overseas
, didn’t he.—

The English word broke the cadence of their language.
Overseas.
The concept was as unfamiliar to his wife as the shaping of the word by her tongue, but he had carried the bags of departure, received postcards of skyscrapers and snow-covered mountains, answered telephone calls from countries where the time of day was different.

—You know about the big airport where the planes fly
overseas
? It wasn’t working. And before that they shot down a plane with white people who were running away.—

—Who shot? Black people? Our people? How could they do that.— The old woman was impatient with him. —I’ve seen those planes, they pass over high in the sky, you even see them go behind clouds. You can hear them after you can’t see them any more.—

—Over in Moçambique, our people have got some special kind of guns or bombs. They travel very far and very high. They’ve even got those things in Daveyton and KwaThema and Soweto now—right near town. They hit the plane and it burst in the air. Everyone was burned to death.—

His mother made the stylized, gobbling exclamations that both ward off disaster and attribute it to fate. —What will the white people do to us now, God must save us.—

Her son, who had seen the white woman and the three children cowered on the floor of their vehicle, led the white face behind the wheel in his footsteps, his way the only one in a wilderness, was suddenly aware of something he had not known. —They can’t do anything. Nothing to us any more.—

—White people. They are very powerful, my son. They are very clever. You will never come to the end of the things they can do.—

When he was in the company of the women it was like being in the chief’s court, where the elders sitting in judgment wander in and out and the discussion of evidence is taken up, now where they drift outside to take a breath of air or relieve themselves among their tethered horses and bicycles hitched against trees, now back in the court-room at whatever point the proceedings have moved on to. His mother went out to pluck a chicken whose neck he’d just wrung. His wife asked the young girls whether they thought she was going to do without water all day? How much longer were they going to hang about with their mouths open? One of the girls was bold but respectful: —
Tatani
, I want to ask, is it true you also had a room for bathing, like the one they had?—

—Oh yes, bath, white china lavatory, everything.—

They could only laugh, how could they visualize his quarters, not so big as the double garage adjoining, with in his room the nice square of worn carpet that was once in the master bedroom.

—There are eggs in the belly—it would still have given us eggs! You should have taken the white one with the broken foot, I told you.— The old woman was shouting from beyond the doorway.

—What is it she wants?—

—You killed the wrong fowl… But I don’t know what it’s all about.—

He called back. —Exactly.
Mhani
, that one with the bad
foot is a young one. It will lay well next year, even.—

The white woman’s hand, when she stood there and offered it—the first time, touching white skin. His wife went with her mother-in-law sometimes to the dorp to hawk green mealies or the brooms the old lady made, outside the Indian store; it had happened that a white from the police post had bought from her sack of cobs, and cents had dropped from the white hand to hers. But she had never actually touched that skin before.

She fell again into the mannerism of holding her head to one side that had been bashful and that he had found so attractive, inviting him and escaping him, when she was a young girl, and that had become, in the years he was away in the city, something different, a gesture repelling, withdrawing, evasive and self-absorbed. —The face—I don’t know… not a nice, pretty face. I always thought they had beautiful dresses. And the hair, it’s so funny and ugly. What do they do to make it like that, dark bits and light bits. Like the tail of a dirty sheep. No. I didn’t think she’d be like that, a rich white woman.—

—They looked different there—you should have seen the clothes in their cupboard. And the glasses—for visitors, when they drink wine. Here they haven’t got anything—just like us.—

She sharply reproached the baby who, staggering around on legs braced wide for balance, had picked up fowl droppings and successfully conveyed the mess to its mouth. Her forefinger hooked unthinkingly round the soft membranes, awareness of the small body was still as part of her own. The man was excluded. She flicked the chalky paste off her fingers. —There’ll be no more money coming every month.—

Without his white people back there, without the big house where he worked for them, she would not be getting those
letters (yes, she had been to school, he would not have married a woman who could not read their own language) that came from his other life, his other self, and provided for those who could not follow him there. Not even in dreams; not even now, when she had seen his white people.

B
am could help July mend such farming tools—scarcely to be called equipment—as he and his villagers owned. The span of yokes and traces they shared, taking turns to plough, was kept in a special hut where no one lived. The heavy chains trailed across the floor. Hoes hung from the roof. There was the musty, nutty smell of stored grain in baskets. Someone had been there, picking over beans on one of the mats used as table-tops or bowls: Maureen saw the arrangement as broken beads set aside from good ones, choices made by someone momentarily absent—the dioramas of primitive civilizations in a natural history museum contrive to produce tableaux like that.

Bam was determined to rig up a water-tank, the round, corrugated tin kind, that had somehow been lugged that far into the bush but never installed. July laughed, and gave it a kick (as Victor had the bath).

—No, I mean it. If we can get hold of a bag of cement, we can make a foundation. I saw some old piping lying somewhere…? You could have quite a decent rain-water supply all through the rainy months. It’s a waste. The women won’t need to go to the river. It’ll be much better to drink than river water.—

There was no bag of cement; but they worked together more or less as they did when Bam expected July to help him with the occasional building or repair jobs that had to be done to maintain a seven-roomed house and swimming-pool. Bam made do with stones for a foundation. He kept the radio near and at the hours when news bulletins were read she would appear from wherever she might be. They stood and listened together. There were other radios in the community, bellowing, chattering, twanging pop music, the sprightly patter of commercials in a black language; the news reader’s gardening-talk voice spoke English only to the white pair, only for them. They didn’t comment and each watched the other’s face. But whatever each hoped to find there, of a sudden new decision made, or dreaded to find, of new grounds for fear, did not appear. There was fierce fighting round Jan Smuts Airport; the city centre, under martial law, had been quiet last night, but mortar fire was heard and confused reports had been received of heavy fighting in the eastern and northern suburbs. The Red Cross appealed for blood. The gasworks had been attacked and the explosion had started a fire that spread to suburban houses; Bam’s eyebrows flew up and exposed his gaze—only across the valley, the freeway, from the house they had chosen to build in a quiet suburb. U.S. Congress was debating the organization of a United States government airlift for American nationals. It was not known from where it would operate; Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth airports were closed, and their ports bombed and blockaded. Maureen looked away where a young boy was
emptying a basket head-load of stones as July directed; she had been for trying to get to the coast.

Lucky to be alive. Neither could expect the other to say what would come next; what to do next; not yet. He arranged the stones brought from some other attempt to build something that had fallen into ruin. That was how people lived, here, rearranging their meagre resources around the bases of nature, letting the walls of mud sink back to mud and then using that mud for new walls, in another clearing, among other convenient rocks. No one remembered where the water-tank came from. July said he would ask the old woman but never did, although she sat outside the women’s hut most of the day, on the ground, making brooms out of some special grasses the women collected. The water-tank was from back there, like the Smales and their children; the white man was the one to make a place for it here.

Beyond the clearing—the settlement of huts, livestock kraals, and the stumped and burned-off patches which were the lands—the buttock-fold in the trees indicated the river and that was the end of measured distance. Like clouds, the savannah bush formed and re-formed under the changes of light, moved or gave the impression of being moved past by the travelling eye; silent and ashy green as mould spread and always spreading, rolling out under the sky before her. There were hundreds of tracks used since ancient migrations (never ended; her family’s was the latest), not seen. There were people, wavering circles of habitation marked by euphorbia and brush hedges, like this one, fungoid fairy rings on grass—not seen. There were cattle cracking through the undergrowth, and the stillness of wild animals—all not to be seen. Space; so confining in its immensity her children did not know it was there. Royce headed a delegation: —Can’t we go to a film today? Or tomorrow?— (The postponement an inkling, the confusion of time with that other dimension, proper to
this place.) Even though Gina and Victor were old enough to know cinemas had been left behind, they did not stop him asking, and sulked and quarrelled afterwards on the car-seat beds in the hut, scratching flea-bites. Maureen could not walk out into the boundlessness. Not so far as to take the dog around the block or to the box to post a letter. She could go to the river but no farther, and not often. When she did go she did so believing it better not to go at all than risk being seen, now.

July came to fetch her family’s clothes for the women to wash down there.

—I can do it myself.— They had so few, they wore so little; the children had abandoned shoes, there was no question of a fresh pair of shorts and socks every day.