Nadine Gordimer - July's People

— The fighting must be very bad.—

— You heard something what they say?—

— Not the radio we always hear. I think that’s finished. Maybe the building is blown up — I don’t know. The special radio, for the army.—

For him, too, there had always been something to say: the servant’s formula, attuned to catch the echo of the master’s concern, to remove combat and conflict tactfully, fatalistically, in mission-classroom phrases, to the neutrality of divine will. — My, my, my. What can we do. Is terrible, everybody coming very bad, killing … burning … Only God can help us. We can only hope everything will come back all right.—

— Back?—

She saw he did not want to talk to her in any other way.

— Back?—

His closed lips widened downwards at each corner and his lids lowered as they did when she gave him, back there, an instruction he didn’t like but would not challenge. — I don’t want to hear about killing. This one is killing or that one. No killing.—

— But you don’t mean the way it was, you don’t mean that. Do you? You don’t mean that.—

Daniel, young and lithe, rolled easily from under the vehicle and stood by. She glanced to him for agreement, admittance to be extracted by the two of them. He too, had something to say to her: a greeting, ihlekanhi, missus. July spoke to him. A few half-attentive questions were followed by some sort of order given: in any case, the young man was propelled by it down into the valley, going off in the direction of the settlement, maybe to fetch something for the repairwork.

But as soon as he was ten yards off they both knew it was a pretext to get him out of the way. Maureen felt it had been decided she had come to look for July; helpless before the circumstantial evidence that they were now alone, again, as they were when he came to the hut and she was aware he was looking behind her to see if anyone was inside.

She might just have come into his presence that moment; he spoke as if opening a conversation out of silence, as if they had not already been talking. — I’m getting worried.—

She knew his use of tenses. He meant ‘am worried’.

— You are hungry. I think you are hungry.—

She smiled with surprise; and suspicion. — Why d’you say that? We’re not hungry. We’re all right.—

— No … No. You have to go look for spinach with the women.—

The answer came back at him. — I go. I don’t have to go.—

— If the children need eggs, I bring you more eggs. I can bring you spinach.—

— I’ve got nothing to do. To pass the time. — But they could assume comprehension between them only if she kept away from even the most commonplace of abstractions; his was the English learned in kitchens, factories and mines. It was based on orders and responses, not the exchange of ideas and feelings. — I’ve got no work.—

He smiled at the pretensions of a child, hindering in its helpfulness. — That’s not your work.—

She had had various half-day occupations over the years; he used to shut the gate behind her — a wave of the hand, lingering to talk to his passing friends in the street — when she drove away to her typewriter, news paper files, meetings, every morning. Yet he knew she could work with her hands. When the shift boss’s daughter had dug and planted all Saturday in the garden he would (it seemed to her then) acknowledge her comradely: —Madam is doing big job today. — Now he chose what he wanted to know and not know. The present was his; he would arrange the past to suit it.

— Anyway, I don’t want the other women to find food for my family. I must do it myself. — But here they both knew the illusion of that statement, even while they let it stand. July’s women, July’s family — she and her family were fed by them, succoured by them, hidden by them. She looked at her servant: they were their creatures, like their cattle and pigs.

— The women have their work. They must do it. This is their place, we are always living here and they are doing all things, all things how it must be. You don’t need work for them in their place.—

When she didn’t understand him it was her practice to give some noncommittal sign or sound, counting on avoiding the wrong response by waiting to read back his meaning from the context of what he said next. (Despite his praise of Bam — was it not given to wound her rather than exalt Bam? — Bam did not have this skill and often irritated him by a quick answer that made it clear, out of sheer misunderstanding, the black man’s English was too poor to speak his mind.) He might mean ‘place’ in the sense of role, or might be implying she must remember she had no claim to the earth—’place’ as territory — she scratched over for edible weeds to counter vitamin deficiency and constipation in her children. She didn’t wait to find out. She spoke with the sudden changed tone of one who has made a discovery of her own and is about to act on it. — I like to be with other women sometimes. And there are the children, too. We manage to talk a bit. I’ve found out Martha does understand — a little Afrikaans, not English. It’s just that she’s shy to try.—

The pleasant smile of her old position; at the same time using his wife’s name with the familiarity of women for one another.

He settled stockily on his legs. — It’s no good for you to go out there with the women.—

She tackled him. — Why? But why?—

— No good.—

The words dodged and lunged around him. — Why? D’you think someone might see me? But the local people know we’re here, of course they know. Why? There’s much more risk when Bam goes out and shoots. When you drive around in that yellow thing … Are you afraid — Her gaze sprang with laughing tears as if her own venom had been spat at her; he and she were amazed at her, at this aspect of her, appearing again as the presumptuous stranger in their long acquaintance. — Are you afraid I’m going to tell her something?—

Giddied, he gave up a moment’s purchase of ground. — What you can tell? — His anger struck him in the eyes. — That I’m work for you fifteen years. That you satisfy with me.—

The cicadas sang between them. Before her, he brought his right fist down on his breast. She felt the thud as fear in her own.

It echoed no other experience she had ever had. The shift boss with his thick, miner’s wrists and stump where the right third finger had caught in a kibble underground would never cross the will of his little dancer; her husband — what could ever have arisen, back there, that would make him a threat to her? And here; what was he here, an architect lying on a bed in a mud hut, a man without a vehicle. It was not that she thought of him with disgust — what right had she , occupying the same mud hut — but that she had gone on a long trip and left him behind in the master bedroom: what was here, with her, was some botched imagining of his presence in circumstances outside those the marriage was contracted for.

She had never been afraid of a man. Now comes fear, on top of everything else, the fleas, the menstruating in rags — and it comes from this one, from him. It spread from him; she was feeling no personal threat in him, not physical, anyway, but in herself. How was she to have known, until she came here, that the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself, the one thing there was to say between them that had any meaning.

Fifteen years

your boy

you satisfy

She walked away and sat on a mud ruin, sending her gaze far from them — from him, from her — over the grey and green bush, a layer of cumulus seen from a jet plane between two continents, where crossed date-lines eliminate time and there are no horizons.