July's People Read online

  The vehicle was driven right within the encirclement of a roofless hut. Red as an anthill, thick clay walls had washed down to rejoin the earth here and there, and scrubby trees pushed through them like limbs of plumbing exposed in a half-demolished building. The vehicle flattened the tall weeds of the floor and a roof of foliage, thorn and parasitic creepers hid the yellow paint.

  From the doorway of the hut they had been given she could make out the vehicle. Or thought she could; knew it was there. There was still a plastic demijohn of tap-water taken from the last dorp, hidden in it. She went secretly, observed from afar by whispering black children, to fetch rations for her children to drink. Within the hot metal that boomed hollowly where her weight buckled it, the vehicle was a deserted house re-entered. Trapped flies lay droning into unconsciousness on their backs. It was as if she had walked into that other abandoned house.

  —You won’t see it from the air.—They had watched two planes flying over, although at a great height. Bam was satisfied the vehicle would not draw a stray bomb shat by some aircraft from the black army’s bases in Moçambique that might reconnoitre the bush and find a suspicious sign of white para-military presence in an area where even a broken-down car was a rarity.

  July’s home was not a village but a habitation of mud houses occupied only by members of his extended family. There was the risk that if, as he seemed to assume, he could reconcile them to the strange presence of whites in their midst and keep their mouths shut, he could not prevent other people, living scattered round about, who knew the look of every thorn-bush, from discovering there were thorn-bushes that overgrew a white man’s car, and passing on that information to any black army patrol. If not acting upon it themselves?

  July broke into snickering embarrassment at her ignorance of a kind of authority not understood—his; and anyway, he had told them—everybody—about the vehicle.

  —Told them what?—She was confident of his wily good sense; he had worked for her for years. Often Bam couldn’t follow his broken English, but he and she understood each other well.

  —I tell them you give it to me.—

  Bam blew laughter. —Who’ll believe that.—

  —They know, they know what it is happening, the trouble in town. The white people are chased away from their houses and we take. Everybody is like that, isn’t it?—

  —But you can’t drive.—She was anxious, for their safety, he should be believed.

  —How they know I’m not driving? Everybody is know I’m living fifteen years in town, I’m knowing plenty things.—

  It was some days before the vehicle ceased to be the point of reference for their existence. What was left of the tinned food was still there; the box containing Victor’s electric racing-car track that it was discovered he must have put in under cover of adult confusion. There was nowhere, in this hut, to put anything: —It’s not worthwhile dragging everything out.—But Victor nagged for his racing-car track. —It only means you’ll have to dismantle it and pack it up again.—

  He had the habit of standing in front of her with his demands; she walked round him.

  He planted himself again. —When are we going?—

  —Vic, where’s there to set it up? And there’s no electricity, you can’t run it.—

  —I want to show it.—

  —To whom?—

  The black children who watched the hut from afar and scuttled, as if her glance were a stone thrown among them, re-formed a little way off.

  —But tell them they mustn’t touch it. I don’t want my things messed up and broken. You must tell them.—

  She laughed as adults did, in the power they refuse to use. —I tell them? They don’t understand our language.—

  The boy said nothing but kicked steadily at the dented, rusted bath used for their ablutions.

  —Don’t. D’you hear me? That’s July’s.—

  The demijohn of water was empty. Royce, the littlest, kept asking for Coca-Cola: —Then buy some. Go to the shop-man and buy some.—She put paraffin tins of river water on the fire. She would cool the boiled water overnight; —It’s madness to let them drink that stuff straight from the river. They’ll get ill.—

  Bam got the blaze going. —I assure you, they’ve been drinking water wherever they find it, already … it’s impossible to stop them.—

  —What’re we going to do if they get ill?—

  But he didn’t answer and she didn’t expect him to. There lay between them and all such questions the unanswerable: they were lucky to be alive.

  The seats from the vehicle no longer belonged to it; they had become the furniture of the hut. Outside in an afternoon cooled by a rippled covering of grey luminous clouds, she sat on the ground as others did. Over the valley beyond the kraal of euphorbia and dead thorn where the goats were kept: she knew the vehicle was there. A ship that had docked in a far country. Anchored in the khakiweed, it would rust and be stripped to hulk, unless it made the journey back, soon.

  Chapter 3

  A dresser made of box-wood in imitation of the kind whose prototype might have been seen in a farmer’s kitchen had shelf-edgings of fancy-cut newspaper and held the remainder of the set of pink glass cups and saucers.

  July presented her to his wife. A small, black-black, closed face, and huge hams on which the woman rested on the earth floor as among cushions, turning this way and that as she took a tin kettle from the wisp of hearth ashes to pour tea, silently, over the mug an old lady held, and adjusted the feeding-bottle in the hands of a child past the age of weaning whose eyes were turning up in sleep on her own lap. She frowned appealingly under July’s chivvying voice, swayed, murmured greeting sounds.

  —She say, she can be very pleased you are in her house. She can be very glad to see you, long time now, July’s people—

  But she had said nothing. Maureen took her hand and then that of the old lady, who was somebody’s mother—July’s or his wife’s. The old lady wore gilt drop ear-rings and a tin brooch with red glass stones pinned her black snail-shell turban. Thin bare feet soled with ash stuck out from the layers of skirt in which she squatted. She demanded something of July, growling a clearing of the throat before each question and looking, her head cocked up, at the white woman who smiled and inclined herself in repeated greeting. There were several others, young women and half-grown girls, in the hut. His sister, wife’s sister-in-law, one of his daughters; he introduced them with a collective sweep in terms of kinship and not by name. The small child was his last-born, conceived, as all his children were, on one of his home-leaves and born in his absence. Maureen provided presents for him to send home on her behalf, at the news of each birth. And to this woman, July’s wife, never seen, never imagined, had sent toys for the children and whatever it seemed surely any woman, no matter where or how she lived, could use: a night-gown, a handbag. When July returned from leave he would bring back with him in return a woven basket as a gift from his unknown wife, his home—in one of these baskets she had carried the money from the bank. His town woman was a respectable office cleaner who wore crimplene two-piece dresses on her days off. She ironed his clothes with Maureen’s iron and chatted to Maureen when they met in the yard. The subject was usually a son being put through high school in Soweto on his mother’s earnings; it was understood July’s responsibility was to his own family, far away. The town woman had no children fathered by her lover; once had put a hand under her breasts with the gesture with which women declare themselves in conscious control of their female destiny: —It’s all finished—I’m sterilized at the clinic.—In confidence: her black, city English sophisticated in the vocabulary relevant to the kind of life led there.

  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 o
ne 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.

  Chapter 4

  Why 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 Vosloosdorp. 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 fingertips 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 Kwa Thema 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.

  Chapter 5

  Bam 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).