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JULY’S PEOPLE NADINE GORDIMER

The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there a rises a great diversity of morbid symptoms. —Antonio Gramsci Prison Notebooks

Contents Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9

Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 A Note on the Author 5/327

By the Same Author 6/327

Chapter 1 You like to have some cup of tea?— July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind. The knock on the door. Seven o’clock. In governors’ residences, commercial hotel rooms, shift bosses’ company bungalows, master bedrooms en suite —the tea-tray in black hands smelling of Lifebuoy soap. The knock on the door no door, an aperture in thick mud walls, and the sack that hung over it looped back for air, sometime during the short night. Bam, I’m stifling; her voice raising him from the dead, he staggering up from his ex- hausted sleep.

No knock; but July, their servant, their host, bringing two pink glass cups of tea and a small tin of condensed milk, jaggedly- opened, specially for them, with a spoon in it. —No milk for me.— —Or me, thanks.— The black man looked over to the three sleeping children bedded-down on seats taken from the vehicle. He smiled confirma- tion: —They all right.— —Yes, all right.—As he dipped out under the doorway: —Thank you, July, thank you very much.— She had slept in round mud huts roofed in thatch like this before. In the Kruger Park, a child of the shift boss and his family on leave, an enamel basin and ewer among their supplies of orange squash and biscuits on the table coming clear as this morning light came. Rondavels adapted by Bam’s ancestors on his Boer side from the huts of the blacks. 8/327

They were a rusticism true to the continent; before air-conditioning, everyone praised the natural insulation of thatch against heat. Rondavels had concrete floors, thickly shined with red polish, veined with trails of coarse ants; in Botswana with Bam and his guns and hunter’s supply of red wine. This one was the prototype from which all the others had come and to which all returned: below her, beneath the iron bed on whose rusty springs they had spread the vehicle’s tarpaulin, a stamped mud and dung floor, above her, cobwebs stringy with dirt dangling from the rough wattle steeple that supported the frayed grey thatch. Stalks of light poked through. A rim of shady light where the mud walls did not meet the eaves; nests glued there, of a brighter-coloured mud—wasps, or bats. A thick lip of light round the doorway; a bald fowl entered with chicks cheeping, the faintest sound in the world. Its gentleness, ordinariness produced 9/327

sudden, total disbelief. Maureen and Bam Smales. Bamford Smales, Smales, Caprano & Partners, Architects. Maureen Hetherington from Western Areas Gold Mines. Under 10s Silver Cup for Classical and Mime at the Jo- hannesburg Eisteddfod. She closed her eyes again and the lurching motion of the vehicle swung in her head as the swell of the sea makes the land heave underfoot when the passenger steps ashore after a voyage. She fell asleep as, first sensorily dislocated by the assault of the vehicle’s motion, then broken in and contained by its a-rhythm, she had slept from time to time in the three days and nights hidden on the floor of the vehicle. People in delirium rise and sink, rise and sink, in and out of lucidity. The swaying, shuddering, thudding, flinging stops, and the furniture of life falls into place. The vehicle was the fever. Chattering metal and raving dance of loose bolts in the smell of the chil- dren’s car-sick. She rose from it for gradually 10/327

longer and longer intervals. At first what fell into place was what was vanished, the past. In the dimness and traced brightness of a tri- bal hut the equilibrium she regained was that of the room in the shift boss’s house on mine property she had had to herself once her elder sister went to boarding-school. Picking them up one by one, she went over the objects of her collection on the bookshelf, the miniature brass coffeepot and tray, the four bone elephants, one with a broken trunk, the khaki pottery bulldog with the Union Jack painted on his back. A lavender- bag trimmed with velvet forget-me-nots hung from the upright hinge of the ad- justable mirror of the dressing-table, cut out against the window whose light was meshed by minute squares of the wire flyscreen, clogged with mine dust and dead gnats. The dented silver stopper of a cut-glass scent bottle was cemented to the glass neck by lay- ers and years of dried Silvo polish. Her 11/327

school shoes, cleaned by Our Jim (the shift boss’s name was Jim, too, and so her mother talked of her husband as ‘My Jim’ and the house servant as ‘Our Jim’), were outside the door. A rabbit with a brown patch like a birthmark over one eye and ear was waiting in his garden hutch to be fed … As if the vehicle had made a journey so far beyond the norm of a present it divided its passengers from that the master bedroom en suite had been lost, jolted out of chronology as the room where her returning consciousness properly belonged: the room that she had left four days ago. The shapes of pigs passed the doorway and there were calls in one of the languages she had never understood. Once, she knew—she always knew—her husband was awake although still breathing stertorously as a drunk. She heard herself speak. —Where is it?—She was seeing, feeling herself contained by the vehicle. 12/327

—He said hide it in the bush.— Another time she heard something between a rustling and a gnawing. —What? What’s that?— He didn’t answer. He had driven most of the time, for three days and three nights. If no longer asleep, stunned by the need of sleep. She slowly began to inhabit the hut around her, empty except for the iron bed, the children asleep on the vehicle seats—the other objects of the place belonged to anoth- er category: nothing but a stiff rolled-up cowhide, a hoe on a nail, a small pile of rags and part of a broken Primus stove, left against the wall. The hen and chickens were moving there; but the slight sound she heard did not come from them. There would be mice and rats. Flies wandered the air and found the eyes and mouths of her children, probably still smelling of vomit, dirty, sleep- ing, safe. 13/327

Chapter 2 The vehicle was a bakkie, a small truck with a three-litre engine, fourteen-inch wheels with heavy-duty ten-ply tyres, and a sturdy standard chassis on which the buyer fits a fibreglass canopy with windows, air- vents and foam-padded benches running along either side, behind the cab. It makes a cheap car-cum-caravan for white families, generally Afrikaners, and their half-brother coloureds who can’t afford both. For more affluent white South Africans, it is a second, sporting vehicle for purposes to which a town car is not suited. It was yellow. Bam Smales treated him- self to it on his fortieth birthday, to use as a shooting-brake. He went trapshooting to

keep his eye in, out of season, and when winter came spent his weekends in the bush, within a radius of two hundred kilometres of his offices and home in the city, shooting guinea-fowl, red-legged partridge, wild duck and spur-wing geese. Before the children were born, he had taken his wife on hunting trips farther afield—to Botswana, and once, before the Portuguese régime was over- thrown, to Moçambique. He would no soon- er shoot a buck than a man; and he did not keep any revolver under his pillow to defend his wife, his children or his property in their suburban house. The vehicle was bought for pleasure, as some women are said to be made for pleas- ure. His wife pulled the face of tasting something that set her teeth on edge, when he brought it home. But he defended the dyed-blonde jauntiness; yellow was cheerful, it repelled heat. 15/327

They stood round it indulgently, wife and family, the children excited, as it seemed nothing else could excite them, by a new pos- session. Nothing made them so happy as buying things; they had no interest in feed- ing rabbits. She had smiled at him the way she did when he spurted ahead of her and did what he wanted; a glimpse of the self that does not survive coupling. —Anything will spot you a mile off, in the bush.— In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in ad- vance of events. How was one to know? Civil Emergency Planning Services will not provide. (In ‘76, after the Soweto Riots, phar- maceutical firms brought out a government- approved line in First Aid boxes.) The cir- cumstances are incalculable in the manner in which they come about, even if apocalyptic- ally or politically foreseen, and the identity of16/327

the vital individuals and objects is hidden by their humble or frivolous role in an habitual set of circumstances. It began prosaically weirdly. The strikes of 1980 had dragged on, one inspired or brought about by solidarity with another un- til the walkout and the shut-down were lived with as contiguous and continuous phenom- ena rather than industrial chaos. While the government continued to compose conces- sions to the black trade unions exquisitely worded to conceal exactly concomitant re- strictions, the black workers concerned went hungry, angry, and workless anyway, and the shop-floor was often all that was left of burned-out factories. For a long time, no one had really known what was happening out- side the area to which his own eyes were wit- ness. Riots, arson, occupation of the headquarters of international corporations, bombs in public buildings—the censorship of newspapers, radio and television left rumour 17/327

and word-of-mouth as the only sources of in- formation about this chronic state of upris- ing all over the country. At home, after weeks of rioting out of sight in Soweto, a march on Johannesburg of (variously estimated) fif- teen thousand blacks had been stopped at the edge of the business centre at the cost of a (variously estimated) number of lives, black and white. The bank accountant for whom Bam had designed a house tipped off that if the situation in the city showed no signs of being contained (his phrase) the banks would have to declare a moratorium. So Bam, in a state of detached disbelief at his action, taking along a moulded plastic-foam box that had once held a Japanese hi-fi sys- tem, withdrew five thousand rands in notes and Maureen gave the requisite twenty-four hours’ notice for withdrawal from her sav- ings account and cleared it, one thousand seven hundred and fifty-six rands in notes which, secured by rubber bands, she carried 18/327

home without incident in a woven grass shopping bag with Bam’s suit from the dry cleaner folded ostentatiously on top. And then the banks did not close. The blacks were held back (they were temporarily short of ammunition and they had long since given up the heroism of meeting bullets with sticks and stones) by the citizen force strengthened by white Rhodesian immig- rants, some former Selous Scouts, accus- tomed to this sort of fighting, and the arrival of a plane-load of white mercenaries flown in from Bangui, Zaïre, Uganda—wherever it was they had been propping up the current Amins, Bokassas and Mobutus. The children stayed home from school but played wildly at street-fighting in the peaceful garden. The li- quor store suddenly delivered wine and beer ordered weeks before, two black men in overalls embroidered with the legend of a brand of cane spirit carrying the cases into the kitchen and exchanging time-of-day 19/327

jokingly with the servants. For the twentieth, the hundredth time, since the pass-burnings of the Fifties, since Sharpeville, since Soweto ‘76, since Elsie’s River 1980, it seemed that all was quietening down again. First the Smales had given the time left as ten years, then another five years, then as perhaps projected, shifted away into their children’s time. They yearned for there to be no time left at all, while there still was. They sickened at the appalling thought that they might find they had lived out their whole lives as they were, born white pariah dogs in a black continent. They joined political parties and ‘contact’ groups in willingness to slough privilege it was supposed to be their white dog nature to guard with Mirages and tanks; they were not believed. They had thought of leaving, then, while they were young enough to cast off the blacks’ rejection as well as white privilege, to make a life in another country. They had stayed; and told 20/327

each other and everyone else that this and nowhere else was home, while knowing, as time left went by, the reason had become they couldn’t get their money out—Bam’s growing saving and investments, Maureen’s little legacy of De Beers shares her maternal grandfather had left her, the house there was less and less opportunity of selling as city ri- ots became a part of life. Once again, for the hundred-and-first time, thousands of blacks were imprisoned, broken glass was swept up, cut telephone lines were reconnected, radio and television assured that control was re-es- tablished. The husband and wife felt it was idiotic to have that money hidden in the house; they were about to put it back in the bankagain … When it all happened, there were the transformations of myth or religious parable. The bank accountant had been the legendary warning hornbill of African folktales, its flit- ting cries ignored at peril. The yellow bakkie 21/327

that was bought for fun turned out to be the vehicle: that which bore them away from the gunned shopping malls and the blazing, un- sold houses of a depressed market, from the burst mains washing round bodies in their Saturday-morning garb of safari suits, and the heat-guided missiles that struck Boeings carrying those trying to take off from Jan Smuts Airport. The cook-nanny, Nora, ran away. The decently-paid and contented male servant, living in their yard since they had married, clothed by them in two sets of uni- forms, khaki pants for rough housework, white drill for waiting at table, given Wed- nesdays and alternate Sundays free, allowed to have his friends visit him and his town woman sleep with him in his room—he turned out to be the chosen one in whose hands their lives were to be held; frog prince, saviour, July. He brought a zinc bath big enough for the children to sit in, one by one, and on his 22/327

head, paraffin tins of water heated on one of the cooking-fires. She washed the children, then herself in their dirty water; for the first time in her life she found that she smelled bad between her legs, and—sending the chil- dren out and dropping the sack over the doorway—disgustedly scrubbed at the smooth lining of her vagina and the unseen knot of her anus in the scum and suds. Her husband took a chance and washed in the river—all these East-flowing rivers carried the risk of bilharzia infection. July came back and forth with porridge, boiled wild spinach, and even a pawpaw, hard and green—the family’s custom of fin- ishing a meal with fruit ritualistically ob- served, somehow, by one so long habituated to them. No uniform here (he wore an il- legibly faded T-shirt and dusty trousers, clothes he left to come back to on his two- yearly leave), but he went in and out the hut with the bearing he had had for fifteen years 23/327

in their home; of service, not servile, under- standing their needs and likings, allying him- self discreetly with their standards and even the disciplining and indulgence of the children. —We’ll cook for ourselves, July. We must make our own fire.—The guest protest- ing at giving trouble; he and she caught the echo of those visitors who came to stay in her house and tipped him when they left. He had brought wood for Bam, but was back again at dusk. He didn’t trust them to look after themselves. —You want I make small fire now?—He was carrying a Golden Syrup tin full of milk. There was a little boy with him; earlier in the day he had chased curious black children away. —This my third-born, nearly same time like Victor. Victor he’s twenty-one January, isn’t it? This one he’s Christmas Day.— The white children had seen the ser- vant’s photograph of his children, in his 24/327

wallet along with his pass-book, back there. They looked at the black child as at an impostor. —Is from the goat, this milk we drink, I don’t know if Gina she’s going like it. Always Gina little bit fussy. Madam, you can boil it—He screwed up one eye and his mouth drew down the sides of his moustache, ad- vising caution, most delicately acknow- ledging some lack of hygiene, if he were to compare the goat, the syrup tin, with the sterilized bottles from which he would take milk out of the refrigerator, back there. The vehicle was moved from the bush, at night, to a group of abandoned huts within sight of but removed from those of July’s family. Bam did not use the headlights and was guided by July moving along in the dark ahead of him, as he had been for certain stretches of the journey. That way they had avoided both patrols and roving bands. July’s knowledge or instinct that in country 25/327

dorps the black petrol attendants often live in sheds behind the garage-and-general- store complex—on that they had kept going, on and on, although they had left with only enough fuel to take them less than half-way. He asked for notes from the plastic-foam box and, every time, came back with petrol, wa- ter, food. It was a miracle; it was all a mir- acle: and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror. How that load of human beings with the haphazard few possessions there was time to take along (the bag of oranges Maureen had run back to fetch from the kitchen, the radio Bam remembered so that they could hear what was happening behind them as they fled) could hope to arrive at the destination placed before them—that was an impossibil- ity from minute to minute. —We can go to my home.—July said it, standing in the living-room where he had never sat down, as he would say ‘We can buy little bit paraffin’ 26/327

when there was a stain to be removed from the floor. That he should have been the one to decide what they should do, that their helplessness, in their own house, should have made it clear to him that he must do this—the sheer unlikeliness was the logic of their position. There was nothing else to do but the impossible, now they had stayed too long. They put their children into the vehicle, covered them with a tarpaulin under which Maureen crawled, and drove. How the vehicle hadn’t broken down, urged across the veld and mealie-fields, ground-nut fields, in- to dongas and through sluices whose stones were deep under the table of summer rains; how they had found their way, not daring to use the roads, taking three days and nights for a journey that could be done in a day’s hard driving under normal conditions—but that was July, July knew the whole six hun- dred kilometres, had walked it, making a fire to keep the lions away at night where his 27/327

path bordered and even passed through the Kruger Park, the first time he came to the city to look for work. The vehicle was driven right within the encirclement of a roofless hut. Red as an ant- hill, thick clay walls had washed down to re- join 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-wa- ter taken from the last dorp, hidden in it. She went secretly, observed from afar by whis- pering 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- 28/327

entered. Trapped flies lay droning into un- consciousness 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 hab- itation 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 dis- covering there were thorn-bushes that 29/327

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 embarrass- ment 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 hap- pening, 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. 30/327

—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 dis- covered 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.— 31/327

—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 wa- ter on the fire. She would cool the boiled wa- ter overnight; —It’s madness to let them 32/327

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 ex- pect 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 be- longed 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 33/327

khakiweed, it would rust and be stripped to hulk, unless it made the journey back, soon. 34/327

Chapter 3 A dresser made of box-wood in imita- tion 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 daugh- ters; he introduced them with a collective sweep in terms of kinship and not by name. 36/327

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 un- known wife, his home—in one of these bas- kets she had carried the money from the bank. His town woman was a respectable of- fice 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 earn- ings; it was understood July’s responsibility 37/327

was to his own family, far away. The town woman had no children fathered by her lov- er; once had put a hand under her breasts with the gesture with which women declare themselves in conscious control of their fe- male destiny: —It’s all finished—I’m steril- ized 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 one 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 38/327

knowing where she was, in time, in the order of a day as she had always known it. 39/327

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 ma- chine 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. 41/327

—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 under- stand 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 in42/327

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 fight- ing 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 your- self—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.— 43/327

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 sky- scrapers 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 44/327

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 wo- men it was like being in the chief’s court, where the elders sitting in judgment wander in and out and the discussion of evidence is45/327

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. 46/327

—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. 47/327

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 dif- ferent, 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 cup- board. And the glasses—for visitors, when they drink wine. Here they haven’t got any- thing—just like us.— She sharply reproached the baby who, staggering around on legs braced wide for 48/327

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. 49/327

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 bas- kets. 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 ab- sent—the dioramas of primitive civilizations in a natural history museum contrive to pro- duce tableaux like that.

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