July's People

by Nadine Gordimer

  —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? I 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 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.

  Chapter 7

  Her 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 secondhand 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.

  Bam had not greeted him. Maureen was unbelieving to see on the white man’s face the old, sardonic, controlled challenge of the patron. —And where were you yesterday? What’s the story?—

  July went on doing what he was expert at. The snap of twigs, the shuffle of a single paper fist uncrumpling itself (no cupboard full of old newspapers, here, everything that was worth nothing must be used sparingly), a word or two to keep Royce in bed —Little while, it’s coming nice and warm, you coming nice by the fire.—

  —We were very worried.—Her implication was the flattery, ‘about you’.

  —Where did you go?—Bam giving the man every chance to give a satisfactory account of himself.

  —To the shops.—

  He straightened up and wiped his palms down his trousers.

  The shops! As if he had been sent round the corner for a pint of milk when the household ran short. The shops. The distance to the nearest general store must be forty kilometers. There was a police post there; certainly the Indian store would have a petrol pump.

  Bam stepped through a minefield of words before he chose what to say. —Who drove the bakkie?—

  —I got someone he’s drive for me. One time he’s working there in Bethal, for the dairy, he’s driving truck. He knows very well to drive for me. I’m bring paraffin, salt, tea, jam, matches, everything—when it’s stopping to rain you come with me, we fetch from down there.—And he patted the car keys in his pocket.

  —Did you have money?—She knew it was impossible that he could have made free of the still-thick swatch of notes, lying swollen as the leaves of a book that has got wet and dried again, in the suitcase on which Gina, cross and unaware of anyone, as she always was in the early mornings, was sitting.

  —Is fifteen rand thirty-five.—So it was he would announce the cents owed him when he had paid, out of his own pocket, the surcharge on a letter delivered by the postman while the lady of the house was out.

  —Bam, we must pay July.—She shooed Gina off the suitcase.

  —We’ll pay. We’ll pay. Did anyone see you—I mean, say anything? Ask any questions? What’s happening there?—

  He smiled and gave his customary high-pitched grunt of amusement when asked something obvious, to him. —Plenty people is know me. I’m from here since I’m born, isn’t it? Everyone is greet me.—

  —Is it quiet there? No fighting?—

  He laughed. —But they tell me at the mine there’s plenty trouble. People are coming home from there, they don’t want to stay, they say there’s burning, the houses, everything. Like in town. And the India’s coming too expenses. This it’s short, that it’s short. Sugar … Even box matches, you must fight for get it.—

  —The mine?—

  Bam answered her. —There’s an asbestos mine about sixty kilometres in the other direction—west. I suppose a lot of the men sign up to work there.—

  —Some soldiers was coming by the shop. They tell me, last week. The India he’s run away when he see them.—

  —So who keeps the shop open?—

  —No—(he was amused)—when the soldiers they went, the India’s come back. He’s there, there, in the shop.—

  The little boy Royce made a dash from the bed and gained the pillar of July’s thigh. Holding on, leaning, in confused regression to babyhood, he stopped his mouth with his thumb and confronted his parents with the lowered gaze of some forgotten defiance. The black man lifted and carried the child back to bed. The parents were amiably given an order. —Just now when the rain is coming slow, I call you. I send someone, you come.—He put on the raincoat and was digging in the pockets. —Here, I bring for you—He tossed up in his palm and presented to her two small radio batteries.

  —Oh how marvellous. How clever to remember.—He had heard her say it all when friends brought her flowers or chocolates.

  He grinned and swayed a little, as they did. —Now you listen nice again.—It was the small flourish of his exit.

  She considered the batteries in her hand; smiled at the well-meaning—not even a new battery would bring the voices from back there if the radio station should be hit.

  —Put them where it’s dry.—

  There was only the suitcase, and even that was stained with damp moving up from where it rested on the floor. —If we could find a couple of bricks to raise it on.—But bricks were a cherished commodity; in every hut, they were used to raise beds. Where was Bam to find bricks for her? She found her own solution. —Ask July.—

  She was quite competent at making porridge, now. It was the little community’s own meal, grown by them and stamped by the women in big wooden jars. It looked more like bits of coarse broken yellow china than the sugar-fine grains commercially milled. It tasted better, too, than the packaged stuff, rough as it was. Everyone knew that; it was sold in health shops and eaten by white food-faddists with honey and butter … Salt! He had brought salt, at least. That was what had been missing, now she would be able to put salt in the water in which she boiled the meal.

  People—black people—would certainly have seen him at the store, in possession of the yellow bakkie.

  —So he turns up there as if the millennium has already arrived.—

  She was stirring the meal thickening on the Primus. Spoon dripping in her hand, she looked at Bam, considering what could be done for him rather than what he had said. —But jam will be good—a dollop of jam with this …—She stirred as if to shift their energies. —He did bring things.—

  Chapter 8

  There was the moment to ask him for the keys. But it was let pass.

  They stood in the midday sun and watched, over at the deserted dwelling-place, the yello
w bakkie being reversed, bucking forward, leaping suddenly backwards again; kicking to a stop. July was at the wheel. His friend was teaching him to drive.

  After days of rain hot breath rose from everything, the vegetation, the thatch, the damp blankets of all patterns and colours hung out over every bush or post that would spread them. Submission to the elements was something forgotten, back there. You shivered, you had no dry clothes to replace wet ones. The hearth-fire that filled the hut with smoke was the centre of being; children, fowls, dogs, kittens came as near to it as the hierarchy of their existence allowed. The warmth that food brought—blood chafing into life—came from it, where the clinkers of wood, transparent with heat, made the porridge bubble vigour. Bam and Maureen had longed for cigarettes, for a drink of wine or spirits, their children had craved for sweet things; but in the days of rain, the small fire they never let die satisfied all wants.

  A shimmer of heat like a flock of fast-flying birds passed continually across the movements of the vehicle. He was getting the hang of it.

  When the lesson petered out he and his friend sat about on their hunkers—too far away to make out what they were doing; just talking, no doubt, July stimulated and eager to communicate, as everyone is when acquiring a new skill, the stages at which mastery eluded or came to him. Walking back through the valley, he waved jubilantly when he was near enough to recognize and be recognized.

  —I would never have thought he would do something like that. He’s always been so correct.—Bam paused to be sure she accepted the absolute rightness, the accuracy of the word. —Never gave any quarter, never took any, either. A balance. In spite of all the inequalities. The things we couldn’t put right. Oh, and those we could have, I suppose.—

  Gratitude stuffed her crop to choking point. —We owe him everything.—

  Her husband smiled; it didn’t weigh against the keys of the vehicle, for them.