July's People

by Nadine Gordimer

  Oh, she didn’t deny that. She was setting out the facts before herself, a currency whose value had been revised. It was not only the bits of paper money that could not supply what was missing, here.

  —I’d give him the keys any time. I could teach him to drive, myself—he hasn’t asked me. All right—someone has to get supplies for us …—

  —As long as the money lasts.—

  —The money! We’ll be out of here, with plenty of money.—Habit assumed the male role of initiative and reassurance—something he always had on him, a credit card or cheque-book. She would not look at him, where it had passed from him, and remark his divestiture.

  July’s wave had been innocent. He came with their supply of wood—all still so damp, the whole settlement was hazed bluish from everyone’s cooking-fires, once more established outdoors. Bam spoke up with independent pleasantness. —You shouldn’t bother. I’ve told you. I can chop my own wood. You mustn’t do it.—

  —The women bring the wood. You see all the time, the women are doing it.—It was an issue not worth mentioning; he was enthusiastic about his prowess with the vehicle. —You know I’m turning round already? I’m know how to go back, everything. My friend he’s teaching me very nice.—

  —I saw. You didn’t say you were going to learn to drive. You never said you wanted to learn.—

  —In town?—He was affable, deprecating his own ability, or reminding that they knew he had known the limits of his place.

  —Here. Here.—

  He leaned forward confidentially, using his hands. —Is no good someone else is driving the car, isn’t it? Is much better I myself I’m driving.—

  —If they catch you, without a licence …—

  He laughed. —Who’s going to catch me? The white policeman is run away when the black soldiers come that time. Sometime they take him, I don’t know … No one there can ask me, where is my licence. Even my pass, no one can ask any more. It’s finished.—

  —I’m still worried that someone will come to look for us here because of the bakkie.—

  —The bakkie? You know I’m tell them. I get it from you in town. The bakkie it’s mine. Well, what can they say?—

  Only a colourless texturing like combings from raw wool across the top of his head from ear to ear remained to Bam—he had begun to go bald in his twenties. The high dome reddened under the transparent nap. His eyes were blue as Gina’s shining out of dirt. —Is it yours, July?—

  All three laughed in agitation.

  —They hear me. They must know, if I tell them I take it from you.—

  A wave of red feeling—it seemed to flash from Bam’s fine pate to her—sent her backing them all away at a warning. Again, she gained foothold, spoke from there. —Martha’s given me something for the children’s coughs. She makes it out of herbs—at least, she showed me some plants she was boiling—

  July’s eyes at once screwed up. —What? She’s give you what? That stuff is no good. No good.—

  —But she gave it to the baby. Your baby. That’s how I could show her I wanted something for Gina and Royce—Royce never stops, all night, although he doesn’t wake up.—

  His face was flickering with something suppressed: annoyance with his wife, irritation at responsibility—he was not a simple man, they could not read him. They had had experience of that, back there, for fifteen years; but then they had put it down to the inevitable, distorting nature of dependency—his dependency on them. —That medicine is no good for Royce. You don’t give that for Royce. You give it already?—

  —No, I thought tonight. I thought maybe it’s something that makes you sleepy—

  —It’s—you know … It’s not for white people.

  —She was smiling as if he knew better. —Ju-ly … your baby is given it. Don’t tell me it can do any harm.—

  —What do they know, these farm women? They believe anything. When I’m sick, you send me to the hospital in town. When you see me take this African medicine?—

  —Well, all right. But even in town plants are used for some cough medicines. It might have helped. I haven’t anything to give him.—

  —Me, I’m try next time I’m go to the India shop.

  —Bam put an end to an academic argument. —There won’t be medicines. Grandpa Headache Powders, maybe.—

  —No, he’s right, they’ll quite likely have some sort of cough syrup, think of all the chest troubles rural people get, living like this. It’s possible.—

  —Royce he’s coming warm enough in the night? I think I bring blanket I got there in my house.—

  She shook her head, smiling thanks. Swiftly, she placed—not a request, an assumption. —I’m going to put the rubber floor-mat from the bakkie under where he sleeps.—Her hand was out.

  —I wanted to fetch it this morning, but you’ve kept the keys.—Bam did not raise his voice; had never shouted for him, back there. The white man (Bam saw himself as they would see him) would walk out into the yard, reasonably, when there was a reproach to lay at the door of his room, where his friends, so well-dressed on their days-off, sat gossiping.

  —Who will go to the shop to get things for you? Who can bring your matches, your paraffin. Who can get the food for your children? Tell me?—

  She always took on the responsibility of assuming herself addressed; she was the one who understood him, the way he expressed himself.

  —Of course. I’ll bring them back to you.—

  —Tell me?—

  —Of course, yes of course.—

  He looked at her, looked away. —Tomorrow I’m go get medicine for Royce. That child he’s sick.—

  He turned around in the hut a moment as a man does when he forgets what he is there for. Falling in step with some pattern chanced upon he began to push about the small, crowded, darkened space, dragging and shaking things into a private order.

  They stood there while his obsession swirled about them. They looked neither at him nor at each other; at least they did not allow themselves to be driven out along with the fowls, the nuisance of whose droppings was equalized by the benefits of an assiduous scavenging for the insects who shared the hut.

  There was in his dark profile, the thrust of the whites of his eyes suddenly faced and away again, the painful set of his broad mouth under the broad moustache, a contempt and humiliation that came from their blood and his. The wonder and unease of an archetypal sensation between them, like the swelling resistance of a vein into which a hollow needle is surging a substance in counterflow to the life-blood coursing there; a feeling brutally shared, one alone cannot experience it, be punished by it, without the other. It did not exist before Pizarro deluded Atahualpa; it was there in Dingane and Piet Retief.

  A sudden leaping, punching broke the air outside.

  Victor and his gang of boys raced chattering upon the doorway.

  —Everybody’s taking water! They’ve found it comes out the tap! Everybody’s taking it! I told them they’re going to get hell, but they don’t understand. Come quick, dad!—

  The black faces of his companions were alight with the relish of excitement coming, the thrill of chastisement promised for others.

  —But it’s their water, Victor. It’s for everybody. That’s what I put the tank up for.—

  The child scratched his head, turned out his muddy bare feet and tottered round on the heels, clowning. —Ow, dad, it’s ours, it’s ours!—His friends were enchanted by the performance and began their own variations on it.

  —Who owns the rain?—The preachy reasonableness of his mother goaded him.

  —It’s ours, it’s ours.—

  July was instantly affectionate, playful, light and boastful with the boy. —You lucky, you know your father he’s very, very clever man. Is coming plenty rain, now everybody can be happy with that tank, is nice easy, isn’t it? You see, your father he make everyone-everyone to be pleased.—

  Chapter 9

  Always a moody bastard.

  The term was not a strong one
, in her observations to herself; there were times when she remarked her small daughter behaved to Victor and Royce ‘like a real little bitch’.

  She had indulged him, back there. She had been afraid—to lose him, the comforts he provided; to be inconsiderate of private sorrows he might have she might know nothing of, and that she could guess at only in the shape of circumstances into which he didn’t fit. Did he love the town woman? She thought of that, here. And did that mean he would have liked to bring the town woman here and live with her permanently?

  The humane creed (Maureen, like anyone else, regarded her own as definitive) depended on validities staked on a belief in the absolute nature of intimate relationships between human beings. If people don’t all experience emotional satisfaction and deprivation in the same way, what claim can there be for equality of need? There was fear and danger in considering this emotional absolute as open in any way; the brain-weighers, the claimants of divine authority to distinguish powers of moral discernment from the degree of frizz in hair and conceptual ability from the relative thickness of lips—they were vigilant to pounce upon anything that could be twisted to give them credence. Yet how was that absolute nature of intimate relationships arrived at? Who decided? ‘We’ (Maureen sometimes harked back) understand the sacred power and rights of sexual love as formulated in master bedrooms, and motels with false names in the register. Here, the sacred power and rights of sexual love are as formulated in a wife’s hut, and a backyard room in a city. The balance between desire and duty is—has to be—maintained quite differently in accordance with the differences in the lovers’ place in the economy. These alter the way of dealing with the experience; and so the experience itself. The absolute nature she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody was no more than the price of the master bedroom and the clandestine hotel tariff.

  She had in her hand one of the clay oxen Gina was learning to make, that had been set to dry in the sun. Abstractions hardened into the concrete: even death is a purchase. One of Barn’s senior partners could afford his at the cost of a private plane—in which he crashed. July’s old mother (was she not perhaps his grandmother?) would crawl, as Maureen was watching her now, coming home with wood, and grass for her brooms on her head, bent lower and lower towards the earth until finally she sank to it—the only death she could afford.

  Maureen had the keys, kept overnight after she had fetched the rubber mat from the vehicle. She heard his voice, his energetic laugh, and saw him cross from hut to goat-kraal and back. To be seen is not necessarily to be acknowledged, where people’s movements are centred about the same kind of activity in every household, every day. Everyone was everyone else’s witness, and this bred its own discretion. Only the children hung together and moved like the comet’s tail of bees she had seen roll out of the sky the other day and bear down on tree after tree before attaching itself to one. She had never been inside his hut; Bam had. —He has some things from home. It’s smartened-up. He can’t live like the others.—Bam meant the home he and she had provided; he meant the wife and female relatives.

  She rehearsed her arrival at the door of his domain. It was only a hundred feet away. His quarters had been only across the yard, she had waved at his friends, his brothers who were eternally visiting, seen through the open door in summer, or heard them in there, round the electric heater she provided, in winter—she came right by his quarters every time she went to the double garage to drive off in her car. But she had never entered unless—rare occasion—he was sick. Then she knocked, and the attendant friends stood up respectfully (accommodated somehow on up-ended boxes, an old table—she provided one decent chair for her servant’s comfort but could not be expected to allow for the reception of half-a-dozen friends), and she would put down on the spotless bed the tray of light food she had prepared for him herself. His hut, here, was apparently something he kept to himself, apart from women. But she was a white woman, someone who had employed him, theirs was a working relationship; surely that was her claim.

  She had lived for more than two weeks within steps of that hut and could have lived there for ever without going inside it. She no more wanted to have to see her cast-off trappings here, where they separated him from the way other people lived around him, than she did back there, where they separated him from the way she lived. The old green bedspread with dolphins, mermaids and tritons printed round a fake facsimile of an early map of the world, the framed poster of Málaga—these things themselves (in his room back there) might not be displayed, but others of the same origin. He must have known, when she handed some new object on to him it was because it was shoddy or ugly, to her, and if it were some old object, it was because she no longer valued it. She stopped Royce (his favourite) who kept running past to help himself and the other children to the peanuts that were Victor’s share of the harvest Victor had helped dig up: —See if you can find July.—

  Her child came back with his troop. They lay bellydown on their elbows on the damp ground and crowded heads blissfully over their cracking of tiny fibrous shells. —Did you find July?—

  —Mmm. There at his house.—

  —Is he coming?—

  —He says it’s all right, he’s there, you can come.

  —She sat on in the sun that crisped the skin, a hot iron passing over damp cloth. She was menstruating—since the day before, although by the calculation of the calendar left behind above the telephone it would have been a week too soon. There was another essential she had forgotten. Under her jeans she wore between her legs the wadding of rags that all the women here had to when their days came. Already she had been, with the modesty and sense of privacy that finds the appropriate expression in every community, secretly down to the river to wash a set of bloody rags. She had no thought for the risk of bilharzia as she scrubbed against a stone and watched the flow of her time, measuring off another month, curl like red smoke borne away in the passing of the river.

  —Want some?—Her youngest child still needed to share his pleasures with her.

  Red earth and bunches of raw peanuts clung to the roots of the plants.

  —If you don’t eat them all, I’ll roast the rest. With salt. Then they have some taste.—

  —Same as in the packets? In the shops?—

  —That’s right.—

  —I didn’t know those grew!—

  The little boy’s toes drummed at the earth and while he ate he hummed, as he would soon cease to do, becoming too old to find content between his lips, as he had at her nipple. He seemed to understand what the black children said; and at least had picked up the ceremonial or ritual jargon of their games, shouting out what must be equivalent of ‘Beaten you!’ ‘My turn!’ ‘Cheat!’

  —Go and say I want to see him.—

  The whole formation of children took off. She put out a hand and a black head with the feel of freshly-washed sheep-skin brushed under it. Sometimes she could coax a small child, new on its legs, to come to her, but mostly she was too unfamiliar-looking, to them, to be trusted.

  The children did not return. She thought she heard him singing, way up in the bones of his skull, the hymns he breathed while he worked at something that required repetitive, rhythmical effort, polishing or scrubbing. But when he appeared he was merely coming over to her, unhurried, on a sunny day. Nothing sullen or resentful about him; her little triumph in getting him to come turned over inside her with a throb and showed the meanness of something hidden under a stone. These sudden movements within her often changed her from persecutor to victim, with her husband, her children, anyone.

  She spoke as she did back there when domestic detail impinged upon the real concerns of her life, which could not be understood by him. But she had got to her feet. —Here are your keys.—

  For an instant his hands sketched the gesture of receiving and then were recalled to themselves and the thumb and fingers of his right hand simply hooked the bunch, with a jingle, from her fingers.

  His chin was raised, tryi
ng to sense rather than see if Bam was in the hut behind. Her silence was the answer: not back; they both knew the third one had gone off, early, to shoot some meat—a family of wart-hogs had been rashly coming to an old wallow within sight of the settlement. He stood there, his stolidity an acceptance that he could not escape her, since she was alone, they were one-to-one; hers an insinuated understanding that she had not refused to come to him but wanted them to meet where no one else would judge them. The subtlety of it was nothing new. People in the relation they had been in are used to having to interpret what is never said, between them.

  —You don’t like I must keep the keys. Isn’t it. I can see all the time, you don’t like that.—

  She began to shake her head, arms crossed under her breasts, almost laughing; lying, protesting for time to explain—

  —No, I can see. But I’m work for you. Me, I’m your boy, always I’m have the keys of your house. Every night I take that keys with me in my room, when you go away on holiday, I’m lock up everything … it’s me I’ve got the key for all your things, isn’t it—

  —July, I want to tell you—

  The ten fingers of his hands, held up, barred what she thought, she wanted. —In your house, if something it’s getting lost it’s me who must know. Isn’t it? A-l-l your things is there, it’s me I’ve got the key, always it’s me—

  —July, you don’t ask me—

  —Your boy who work for you. There in town you are trusting your boy for fifteen years.—His nostrils were stiff dark holes. The absurd ‘boy’ fell upon her in strokes neither appropriate nor to be dodged. Where had he picked up the weapon? The shift boss had used it; the word was never used in her house; she priggishly shamed and exposed others who spoke it in her presence. She had challenged it in the mouths of white shopkeepers and even policemen. —Trust you! Of course we trusted you—

  They had moved closer together. She put a fist, hard claim, upon his arm.

  —No. No. You don’t like I must have these keys.—