July's People Read online

—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.

  But he stood in the manner of one who will not go away without what he has come for. —Then I must carry water for you, make it hot, everything.—

  She saw she could not expect to be indulged, here, in any ideas he knew nothing about.

  —Will your wife do it? I must pay.—

  It was women’s business, in his home. His short laugh tugged tight with his fingers at the ends of the loose bundle she had made. —I don’t know who or who. But you can pay.—

  —And soap?—She was cherishing a big cake of toilet soap, carefully drying it after each use and keeping it on top of the hut wall, out of reach of the children.

  —I bring soap.—

  Soap he had remembered to take from her store-cupboard? His clean clothes smelled of Lifebuoy she bought for them—the servants. He didn’t say; perhaps merely not to boast his foresight. She was going to ask—and quite saw she could not.

  —I’ll pay for it.—Bundles of notes were bits of paper, in this place; did not represent, to her, the refrigerator full of frozen meat and ice-cubes, the newspapers, water-borne sewage, bedside lamps money could not provide here. But its meaning was not dissociated, for July’s villagers. She saw how when she or Bam, who were completely dependent on these people, had nothing but bits of paper to give them, not even clothes—so prized by the poor—to spare, they secreted the paper money in tied rags and strange crumpled pouches about their persons. They were able to make the connection between the abstract and the concrete. July—and others like him, all the able men went away to work—had been sending these bits of paper for so long and had been bringing, over fifteen years (that meant seven home-leaves), many things that bits of paper could be transformed into, from the bicycle Bam had got for him at a discount to the supermarket pink glass teacups.

  July’s wife’s hut, his own hut, the huts of three or four other families within the family, their goat-kraal, the chicken-coops made of twiggy dead branches staved into the earth in a rough criss-cross of hoops, the pig-pen enclosed by the fusion of organic and inorganic barriers—thorny aloes, battered hub-caps salvaged from wrecked cars, plates of crumbling tin, mud bricks; the hut where the farming implements were kept—these were the objectives and daily landmarks available. She moved between them neither working as others did nor able to do nothing as others did. She did have one book—a thick paperback snatched up in passing, until that moment something bought years ago and never read, perhaps it was meant for this kind of situation: Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, in translation as The Betrothed. She did not want to begin it because what would happen when she had read it? There was no other. Then she overcame the taboo (if she did not read, they would find a solution soon; if she did read the book, they would still be here when it was finished). She dragged the lame stool July had supplied ‘for the children’ out where she had a view of the bush and began. But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She was in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone’s breath fills a balloon’s shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.

  They had nothing.

  In their houses, there was nothing. At first. You had to stay in the dark of the hut a long while to make out what was on the walls. In the wife’s hut a wavy pattern of broad white and ochre bands. In others—she did not know whether or not she was welcome where they dipped in and out all day from dark to light like swallows—she caught a glimpse of a single painted circle, an eye or target, as she saw it. In one dwelling where she was invited to enter there was the tail of an animal
and a rodent skull, dried gut, dangling from the thatch. Commonly there were very small mirrors snapping at the stray beams of light like hungry fish rising. They reflected nothing. An impression—sensation—of seeing something intricately banal, manufactured, replicated, made her turn as if someone had spoken to her from back there. It was in the hut where the yokes and traces for the plough-oxen were. She went inside again and discovered insignia, like war medals, nailed just to the left of the dark doorway. The enamel emblem’s red cross was foxed and pitted with damp, bonded with dirt to the mud and dung plaster that was slowly incorporating it. The engraved lettering on the brass arm-plaque had filled with rust. The one was a medallion of the kind presented to black miners who pass a First Aid exam on how to treat injuries likely to occur underground, the other was a black miner’s badge of rank, the highest open to him. Someone from the mines; someone had gone to the gold mines and come home with these trophies. Or they had been sent home; and where was the owner? No one lived in this hut. But someone had; had had possessions, his treasures displayed. Had gone away, or died—was forgotten or was commemorated by the evidence of these objects left, or placed, in the hut. Mine workers had been coming from out of these places for a long, long time, almost as long as the mines had existed. She read the brass arm-plaque: BOSS BOY.

  The shift boss’s gang earn recognition and advancement. He is proud of his BOSS BOY; some among the succession of incumbents have been recruited again and again from the kraals, the huts, repeating the migrant worker’s nine-or eighteen-month contract for the whole period of My Jim’s own working life; on Western Areas, while his girls are growing up ambitious to be ballet dancers.

  A white schoolgirl is coming across the intersection where the shops are, chewing gum and moving to the tune of summer-afternoon humming. In step beside her is a woman of the age blacks retain between youth and the time when their sturdy and comfortable breasts and backsides become leaden weight, their good thick legs slow to a stop—old age. The black woman chews gum, too; her woollen cap is over one ear and she carries on her head a school case amateurishly stencilled in blue, MAUREEN HETHERINGTON. When the black woman makes to move against the traffic light suddenly gone red, the white girl grabs her hand to stop her, and they continue to hold hands, loosely and easily, while waiting for the light to change. Then they caper across together. Lydia scarcely needs to put up the other hand to steady the heavy case; she does so as one jaunties the set of a hat.

  The pair are to be seen going like this, over the intersection at the local shops and the short-cut through the open veld (later there was an industrial area established there, the metal box factory and the potato crisps plant) to the mine married quarters. The shift bosses’ houses are behind the recreation centre where ballet classes are held. Lydia has the back-door key of the house—shift boss My Jim’s wife works in an estate agent’s office and is out all day. Our Jim cleans the shoes and digs in the garden. Lydia has her time to herself, her housework is varied by frequent saunters to the shops where she goes to pick up a loaf, starch for the washing, or simply to meet and talk to other black people on similar errands. Maureen often bumps into her there, on her way home from school. Lydia expects her; maybe she sets out to do some shopping at the time she knows Maureen will be coming off the school bus. Once met, they are in no hurry; it is a hot time of day. Lydia sits on Maureen’s case, continuing the long conversations she was engaged in before the girl was sighted, and Maureen goes into the Greek shop to get a Coke, which they share, mouth-about, and—if she has the cash—some gum or chocolate. Lydia swings the case—it contains a blazer, gym shoes as well as a load of books—onto her head. Sometimes they giggle and are in cahoots —Don’t tell you saw, hey Lydia—(When she has come from school on the back of a boy’s bicycle instead of safely by bus.)—Darling, how can I tell? You are my true friend, isn’t it?—At other times Lydia is in a chastising, critical mood. It is directed first at ‘those people’: anyone with whom she has been wrangling over Fah-Fee bets or the complicated ethics of the ‘club’ to which she belongs, into whose funds each member pays part of her wages every month so that each in turn may have a bonus month when she is the recipient of the sum of all the others’ contributions. —That woman! The sister-in-law of Gladys, she’s holding the money, but I’m telling her, why if you holding you not paying in like everybody? Why you must get your month, but I’m short—Then the mood is turned on the girl, brooding over buried misdemeanours. —Maureen, you know your father he’s getting cross if you going lose that thing again like last time—(The battery lantern, from the camping kit in his garage workshop; she promised it as a spotlight for the school nativity play.)—Maureen, why you take the pillows from your bed, let your friends make them dirty on the grass? Then your mother she’s going shout me when she sees those marks in the washing, the dog with his feet and everything—

  —Lovey, don’t worry. I’ll tell ma the dog came in and jumped on my bed. I’ll put everything back, I promise you—Hanging wheedlingly round her neck, that was lighter than the rest of her (but how was she, naked; she was very prudish about the body and the functions of the body, had never revealed herself in a stage of undress further than her nylon bloomers and bare, lifted underarms, dingy purplish). The neck smelled of clean ironing, fish-frying, and the whiffs that came up from her feet that walked and sweated in plastic-soled slippers. The plump neck had three ‘strings of pearls’, the graceful lines of a young woman; she must have been only in her late twenties or early thirties.

  One afternoon a photographer took a picture of Maureen and Lydia. They saw him dancing about on bent legs to get them in focus, just there at the shops while they crossed the road. When he had taken his photographs he came up and asked them if they minded. Lydia was in command; she put her hands on her hips, without disturbing the balance of the burden on her head. —But you must send us a picture. We like to have the picture.—He promised, and aimed at them again as they went on their way. He had not written down the address, Number 20, Married Quarters, Western Areas Gold Mines, so how could they get the photograph? Years later someone showed it to Maureen Smales in a Life coffee-table book about the country and its policies. White herrenvolk attitudes and life-styles; the marvellous photograph of the white schoolgirl and the black woman with the girl’s school case on her head.

  Why had Lydia carried her case?

  Did the photographer know what he saw, when they crossed the road like that, together? Did the book, placing the pair in its context, give the reason she and Lydia, in their affection and ignorance, didn’t know?

  Chapter 6

  At least for bam the days were roughly divided into categories of work and rest. The third category, that organized suburban invention called leisure, did not exist, except as the talking and beer-drinking that began on Saturday morning and died down into sleep and revived again, until late in the course of Sunday night. There was some sort of hymn-singing that rose out of the beery kind, some kind of circling with little flags like the green-and-white flags carried by the Zionist Church zealots to their services on vacant lots in the city—maybe a Sunday church gathering mixed up with the spontaneity of drink that sent men and women slowly dancing, each on his own turntable of dust. Maureen could recognize July’s quick voice and baritone laughter, holding the floor among country people. On their second Saturday Bam was offered and took beer with them; July intervened with a mug for him, while others drank from a clay pot, swilling over, passed round. Bam stayed as long as was polite—the men pressed drink upon him and approved, kindly teasing with leering, pretended admiration, when he seemed to relish their liquor. July strode about declaiming proprietarily an anecdote that obviously referred to this man who had been his employer, the guest and stranger.

  Bam came back to the hut with something of the appropriate, slightly foolish expression of good-natured participation on his face; he hadn’t understood a word. The maize brew was soporific; there was the constant subliminal feeling between him and her
that they must discuss, talk. How to get out of here? Where to? But he was either putting up the water-tank, or the children—the children were generally around, as the blacks’ children were always about their adults. And now he was sleepy, although for the moment the children were out of the way, fascinated by two oil-drums covered with cowhide that were being banged by dedicated young men who did not tire, only went into a lull now and then, a sleeper’s breathing changing with his level of consciousness—the soft, lazy thud from a single drumstick keeping the rhythm unbroken until it was quickened and orchestrated again.

  —I caught Royce wiping his behind with a stone, this morning.—

  Bam lay spread on the iron bed neither had room to turn on, shared at night. He didn’t open his eyes but his naked diaphragm sucked in with amusement, and creaked the bed. —Well, a good thing he’s acquired the technique. How long d’you think your toilet rolls will last?—

  It was true that it was difficult to get the children to remember to bury the paper along with the turd; it was disgusting to find shit-smeared scraps blowing about—and being relished by the pigs, as she saw. She would have thought toilet rolls were some of the few essentials she had thought to bring. The things that had got in, bundled along (let alone the racing-car track Victor had smuggled)! She came upon a gadget for taking the dry cleaner’s tags off clothes without breaking your nails. There were other gadgets, noticed in use about the settlement, she privately recognized as belonging to her: a small knife-grinder that had been in the mine house kitchen before her own, a pair of scissors in the form of a stork with blades for beak that she actually saw in July’s hand when he reproached the old woman for trimming his baby’s toenails with a razor blade. These things were once hers, back there; he must have filched them long ago. What else, over the years? Yet he was perfectly honest. When he was cleaning the floor, and found a cent rolled there, he would put it on Bam’s bedside table. They had never locked anything, not even their liquor cupboard. If she had not happened—by what chance in a million, by what slow certain grind between the past and its retribution—to be here now, she would never have missed these things: so honesty is how much you know about anybody, that’s all.