July's People (6 page)

He swirled suddenly to a crescendo, by mistake or in malice—her head flew up—before he put the thing aside.

—Why is it the whites who speak their languages are never people like us, they’re always the ones who have no doubt that whites are superior? If we could talk— She had the slow, tight murmur of Gina when resentful.

—There’s nothing significant there—don’t go fishing. Not at this stage—please. I couldn’t take it now. Whites in the pass offices and labour bureaux who used to have to deal with blacks all the time across the counter—speaking an African language was simply a qualification, so far as they were concerned, that’s all. Something you had to have to get the job.—

—What are you lecturing about?— But he hadn’t noticed he had spoken of back there in the past tense.

—I just don’t want to go into a whole spiel, whether we’ve been deluding ourselves… If it’s been lies, it’s been lies.—

—Pragmatism not ‘significance’: that’s what I’m talking about.
Fanagalo
would have made more sense than ballet.—

The shift boss Jim spoke the bastard black
lingua franca
of the mines, whose vocabulary was limited to orders given by whites and responses made by blacks. An old story that she had been ashamed—when she married her liberal young husband—of a father who had talked to his ‘boys’ in a dialect educated blacks who’d never been down a shaft in their lives regarded as an insult to their culture; now he, the husband, was to be submitted to her being ashamed of
that
shame. —If we’d gone five years ago, you’d have told me we’d run away. We’ve stayed and lived the best we could. We stuck it out— He was slowly rotating his head on his neck, as if stiffness were a noose: god knows, look at us now…

—No—
caught out.
— She would not let go; the rope might have been in her hand. —It’s like when you would tell a story showing your importance or erudition and get caught out. Mmmh? Everybody listening: ‘I was on the judging committee’—the architects’ international award that time, when you went to Buenos Aires. Mentioning the famous names you were included among—just to claim your status without doing it in so many words. ‘Most of us couldn’t speak Spanish so the discussions were carried on in French’—showing that you must be able to speak French, as this was no problem for you. ‘We each nominated our candidates, then we presented the laudatory argument for our choice’… I listened to you, every time. I heard you. And when someone asked who your candidates were, you couldn’t answer. Couldn’t remember! Had to fluff. Because what really happened was you simply enjoyed the importance of being there, being a judge, you just supported the candidates somebody else chose. And so you gave that away, too. You were caught out.
Come on.
I saw it and so did everybody.
Come on
…—

—I never believed it. But it’s true, you’re jealous. My god.
D’you know what this reminds me of? The time I was living with Masha, we were in the middle of having dinner at her parents’ flat and she said to me when her mother got up a moment to fetch bread from the kitchen, I must tell you I’m in love with Jan (I don’t remember his other name, a Pole); I slept with him this afternoon.
At the table.
Her father sitting there, but he was deaf.— He glanced at the wrangling, oblivious children. Giggled shockingly a moment; the corner of her mouth cringed at the spectacle. He held his voice rigid and violent. —You women are such bloody cowards—oh yes, physical courage, sticking it out in the bottom of the bakkie, that’s something else. But you choose your moments. By Christ you do. When it comes to ‘frankness’.—

—It all looks ridiculous. That’s all.— Her voice came from where she had her back to him now, sitting with arms around her knees on the mud floor in the doorway, seeing the forest smudge away in darkness that stepped closer in every interval of her attention.

—What d’you bloody want to do? Conjure up Superman (he tossed open his hand at the children, who watched the serial at home) to bear them away? 1 know I gave him the fucking keys.—

—Why don’t you admit we were mad to run.
Why can’t you.
— He felt her saliva on his face. It seemed for a moment her nails would follow; he and she would fall to the ground, striking at each other in an awful embrace they had never tried. She bleated venomously: —‘You wanted to go’. Why do you do what I want so that you’ll be absolved.—

—What’re you talking about? You wanted to get to the coast.—

—Only until he offered this. I can’t stand your fucking rearrangement of facts.—

—Don’t pose, Maureen. You don’t have to invent yourself. That’s what you accuse me of doing. You don’t have to stage
yourself in some ‘situation’ to sell to the papers when it’s over. It’s all minute to minute, ever since we got into that bakkie. So for Christ sake, leave it, leave it, leave us alone.—

The children had fallen asleep where they lay. He gently, ostentatiously disentangled them from the positions of conflict within which they had been overcome—Gina’s cruel little hand open on the reddened ear of Royce she had been crumpling, Victor’s dirt- and tear-striped cheek resting on the amulet, a large safety-pin with some beads and a fragment of hide strung on it, he had wrested from her. The fatherliness stood in for the listlessness towards the children that tension produced in their mother. Light from the paraffin lamp fell on her litter. She left them and went out; heat was darkness and darkness was heat, the moon and stars had been stifled. The bush that hid everything was itself hidden. The ringing of insects enfeebled the single, long undifferentiated cry, made up of singing, thudding, human to-and-fro that came from the convivial place where it had not ceased, did not cease. One of the strangest things about being here was that darkness, as soon as it fell every night, ended all human activity. On this night alone—Saturday—were the people awake among their sleeping companions, their animals; in the darkness (drawing away, up from it, in the mind, like an eagle putting distance between his talons and the earth) the firelight of their party was a pocket torch held under the blanket of the universe.

Heat and dark began to dissolve and she had to go in. There were no gutters; the soft rain was soundless on the thatch. Bam had balanced the stool end-up beside the iron bed and put the paraffin lamp on it. He was reading her
The Betrothed.
It was the first time there had been rain since they came; the worn thatch darkened and began helplessly to conduct water down its smooth stalks; it dripped and dribbled. Insects crawled and flew in. They were activated by the moisture,
broke from the chrysalis of dryness that had kept them in the walls, in the roof. She knew that the lamp attracted them but he kept it on. The flying cockroaches that hit her face were creatures she was familiar with. There were others like outsize locusts, but shiny, with fat bodies made up of an encasement of articulated rings, that refused to die although they were beaten again and again with a shoe and a yellow paste spurted from them. These lay all over among the puddles of the floor, saw-toothed legs twitching.

He and she carried the children to the bed to keep them above the wet floor.

They sat on the car seats with the lamp hissing out time in the hot smell of paraffin. He did not read but did not put out the light: people in a hospital waiting-room in the small hours, not looking at one another. At last, deathly tiredness drained him of all apprehension; so might a man fall asleep half-an-hour before he was to be woken by a firing squad. He lay somehow on the car seat. His feet dangled. He did not know she had doused the light, the hissing, or that the rain intensified, then slackened. She went out. Night was close to her face. Rain sifted from the dark. She knew only where the doorway was, to get back. She took off her shirt and got out of panties and jeans in one go, supporting herself against the streaming mud wall. Holding her clothing out of the mud, she let the rain pit her lightly, face, breasts and back, then stream over her. She turned as if she were under a shower faucet. Soon her body was the same temperature as the water. She became aware of being able to see; and what she saw was like the reflection of a candle-flame behind a window-pane flowing with rain, far off. The reflection moved or the glassy ripples moved over it. But it existed—the proof was that there was a dimension between her and some element in the rain-hung darkness. Where it was, the rain must have thinned: and now she saw twin faint, needled beams, travelling. They
progressed slowly, and because there was no other feature to be made out between her and them, seemed half-way up the sky. Then a sense of direction came to her, from the luminous trace: she stuck a pin where there was no map—there, in the dark and rain, was where the ruined huts were. The vehicle was creeping back. The point placed in her mind went back to darkness. The headlights were out, the engine off, in the roofless hut.

If it were not for the rain his voice would be carrying to her across the valley, he was a talkative man, liking to run through small events again, to savour his activity, burning accumulated garden rubbish or reorganizing storage in kitchen cupboards. No hand-held light moved; he knew his way in the dark although even the embers of the cooking-fires had been quenched by the rain.

She went in—she had kept her sopping canvas shoes on because of the dead insects—and felt her way to the dirty clothing Bam had taken off the children. She dried herself with it, put on a cardigan discovered by feel, and slept, like a drowning case in the coarse warmth of the rescuers’ blanket wrapped round her, on her car seat.

H
er husband was pumping the Primus. Barefoot, in his wet raincoat; must have been out to pee. The morning sounds were muffled. The children had begun to cough in their sleep for the last hour or so—the same cough that one always hears from black children. The sack was lifted and she could see the silvery hatchings of rain. He poured boiling water on tea-leaves from yesterday afternoon and while waiting for the second-hand brew to strengthen took up the radio with (secretly watching him) the baffled obstinacy of a sad, intelligent primate fingering the lock on his bars…the voice sprang out bland and clear and she was at once sitting with a straight spine.

His head was bent to the black box and his eyes caught and held hers as an admonition not to speak, ‘…several Sam missiles fell on the city in a rocket attack late on Friday night…Prudential Assurance Company building was the
worst hit and a fly-over on the east-west freeway suffered heavy damage that has cut road communication…men of the army engineering corps working throughout the night…an attempt to take over the SABC-TV studios in Auckland Park was repulsed by the crack commando led by Colonel Mike Hoare, veteran of counter-insurgency against urban guerrillas in Zaïre and other African states…radio transmission was also interrupted but the Director of the SABC has as yet issued no statement…’

She slid down into her blanket again. She lay there and said nothing of the vehicle that was once more where she was aware of it. Her arm thrust out and he brought her the stale hot brew in one of the pink glass cups. The distillation of tannin drew the mouth; unconsciously she made the grimace that appreciates the first swallow of a good whisky.

–Must have been a near thing.—

—What were you expecting to hear?—

He was drinking his tea with both hands round the small cup. He shrugged; the strong smell of wet straw and the damp, chilly fug of the hut was sluggishly insulating.

—‘This is Radio Azania’.— She tried it out softly.

—Did you think that?—

—I don’t know.— A steeple of her hands over her mouth, the third fingers butting at her nose that was blunt and greasy with sleep, blurred her voice. —But all the same, wouldn’t it be extraordinary… actually to hear…—

He was waiting for her to say: would we go back? They had fled the fighting in the streets, the danger for their children, the necessity to defend their lives in the name of ideals they didn’t share in a destroyed white society they didn’t believe in. Go back, at once? How to be received? Things would quieten down—in a new way. That must be counted on. In the Congo, Belgians went back; some of Smith’s Rhodesians stayed on in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe; some Portuguese friends
returned to Maputo when Lourenço Marques no longer existed, they were prepared to live in a new way. But she didn’t want to ask the question because the hypothesis presumed, apart from anything else, the presence of the vehicle. She kept her knowledge of the vehicle as a possession to which she was curiously entitled, had no incumbency to reveal. Each one for himself. She felt no meanness in not releasing him instantly from the anxiety they had been held in since early afternoon the day before, and that would return to him but not her the moment the distracting relief of bad news, over the radio, passed. There would come a point at which she would choose to tell him. And she would not have him asking how, why she had come to know what she knew—silently falsifying her taking her clothes off in the middle of the night in the rain as some piece of psychodrama. Already he had given a ‘for god’s sake?’ glance of enquiry when she got up and he noticed her thin white belly and brown pubic hair naked below the cardigan, like some caricature of a titillating photograph in a porn magazine, or—yes, more like—a woman in the Toulouse-Lautrec brothel drawings they had seen together in Europe. Before she reached that point—of telling him (she put on her other pair of jeans, the ones from last night were still wet, buttoned the cardigan over her breasts and was dressed)—July’s voice called at the doorway. Bam’s look was a pair of hands flung apart in the air; her own eyes did not meet it, and perhaps he saw, in that instant, that she had known July was back… caught out, she this time.

—You say I can come inside?— He used to have the habit of knocking at a door, asking, The master he say I can come in?, and they had tried to train him to drop the ‘master’ for the ubiquitously respectful ‘sir’. He had an armful of wood under a torn fertilizer bag; of course (and he was right) it would not have occurred to them to bring some wood into shelter when the rain began. —You make small fire inside today, s’coming little bit cold.— Royce was coughing himself
awake. —Yes, you see— The child’s gaze came to consciousness on him, restfully, confident. He had dropped his city plastic raincoat and was the familiar figure bending about some task, khaki-trousered backside higher than felted black head—he began at once to lay a hearth-fire.