Nadine Gordimer - July's People

The clink and wrench of tools on metal was taken up against the single continuous note of the cicadas. Her broken nails — only the left thumbnail, always hornier and harder than the rest, retained semblance of the oval it was kept to back there — could not score the earth wall. When she lifted and looked at her palms they were stippled with the pressure of the grains but carried none with them; in the veld round the mine, she had stubbed her toes again and again on the same hard dark earth, bonded into anthills. She got up and went to where he had dragged the exhaust pipe from the bakkie and was tinkering with it between his spread legs.

He had never been any good with mechanical things.

Look at the pliers he was using. Even she could see they were too small to grip properly.

And he was approaching the task from the wrong angle.

The pipe should be the other way up. Bam remarked how, if July packed the car, the suitcases were placed upside down, standing on their lids. She wouldn’t have Bam say anything to him, offend his pride — he was so highly intelligent in other ways.

He persisted with pliers and screwdriver; got no message from the awkward stress between metal and his fingers. He never had; what problems with the lawn mower, half-dismantled, and left in the yard until Bam came home.

Oh not that way. Even a woman can tell that.

Her presence conveyed all this to him, in their silence both heard, knew from what had been unspoken in their past.

She said it. — You’ve never been able to fix machines. Get Bam to do it. Ask him.—

He didn’t answer. He didn’t know ‘Bam’, a white man from whom he had taken the vehicle; like her, he knew someone left behind back there, the master who would put together the pieces of the lawn mower when he came home. But he silenced her: —Yesterday night someone’s come.—

The whip cracked over her head. Deep breaths slowly pumped her chest; she was aware of the pulse showing in her small, flat, left breast under the T-shirt: fear, in there. — Police? Who came?—

He left her to it a moment. — Someone there from the chief.—

Relief made her impatient. — Well that’s all right, July, isn’t it — he knows you. I mean he must know you’ve got somebody here.—

— He know who is it me … He send someone ask who I’m keep in my house. Someone say you must come there to the chief’s place, I must show him. Always when people is coming somewhere, they must go to the chief, ask him.—

— Ask him what?—

— Ask him nice, they can stay in his village.—

— I thought you said this is your place, everybody knows it’s your place, you can do what you like. You’ve been saying that since we arrived. A hundred times.—

— Yes, I’m say that. My place it’s here. But all people here, all villages, it’s the chief’s. If he’s sending someone ask me this or this, I must do. Isn’t it. If he’s saying I must come, I must come. That is our law.—

— Why didn’t you tell us before, if the polite thing — if it’s nice to go and see the chief?—

He looked up: her dirty feet, her thin face from which the hair was drawn back in a rubber band. The colour had worn off her jeans along her thighs and fly. — Now I’m tell you.—

— When?—

He gestured; in his own time. — Tomorrow.—

— Bam can go with you.—

He was carrying on with his repair. — You, master, your children. All is going.—

She was unsteady with something that was not anger but a struggle: her inability to enter into a relation of subservience with him that she had never had with Bam. Leave it, she said of the vehicle, as she had said of her lawn mower. — Leave it. He’ll come and fix it.

— She started off towards the settlement. On the descent she turned, against the sun a moment, as if she would call back. Then she came purposefully to where she had stood before. They were near each other. Her eyes hooded by her hand, his head under the vehicle, neither could see the other’s face. She said what nobody else should hear. — You don’t have to be afraid. He won’t steal it from you.—

Bam rose from the bed like a man who has fallen asleep on the couch in his office when he was supposed to be working.

— It’s question of courtesy, apparently. I don’t think there’s anything sinister. Paying respects to the chief.—

He was surly at feeling ridiculous. The haversack that was his pillow had made a deep crease on one cheek. His unused voice snagged on phlegm. — Ours is hardly a state visit here.—

— Anyway, we have to go. I don’t know why he didn’t say so before.—

— Didn’t you ask?—

— He wasn’t prepared to be forthcoming. In a bad mood.—

— What’s the matter?—

She had picked up their water-bottle as she came in and was gulping straight from the neck between speaking. Her mouth was wet, she grinned with the voluptuousness of thirst quenched. — He’s afraid I’ll tell about his town woman.—

— He’s what?—

— Because I’ve got friendly with Martha — the wife — you know. Well friendly , hardly — we exchange a few words in the fields, she can speak a bit of Afrikaans, I’ve found out.—

— Oh, his Ellen. But what makes him think you would?—

She looked at this half-asleep man who did not know. She spoke violently, if not to him. — It’s rubbish. Don’t let’s transpose our suburban adulteries. His wife knew nothing else about him, there, either.—

Bam tore off a length from one of the toilet rolls she had not forgotten to provide, and went out into the bush. He left the smell of his sweaty sleep behind him; she had not known, back there, what his smell was (the sweat of love-making is different, and mutual). Showers and baths kept away, for both of them, the possibility of knowing in this kind of way. She had not known herself; the odours that could be secreted by her own body. There were no windows in the mud walls to open wide and let out the sour smell of this man. The flesh she had caressed with her tongue so many times in bed — all the time it had been a substance that produced this. She made a cooking-fire outside and the smoke was sweet, a thorny, perfumed wood cracking to release it. The others — Martha — were wise to keep the little hearth-fire alive always in the middle of the huts. Only those still thinking as if they were living with bathrooms en suite would have decided, civilizedly, the custom was unhygienic and too hot.

In the morning they were ready to go. In clean, un-ironed clothes they were shabbier than July and Daniel; Maureen would not attempt to use one of the old flat-irons, heated in the fire, with which the women made a perfect line of fold down the legs of frayed and ragged trousers. She was talkative, joking affectionately with the children, smiling, over their remarks, complicity with him — Bam; like she used to be when they were off on a family outing, to the drive-in cinema or a picnic. They had been shut up in the vast bush that surrounded them for more than three weeks: any move into it was an occasion: He himself felt an urge to shave; he did so irregularly, now. Even the prisoner, when the day comes for him to face the dreaded charge in court, probably is excited by being piled into the Black Maria for the drive along city streets scented and glimpsed behind steel mesh; Bam had seen the fingers sticking through it, while passing prison vans in his car, back there.

He had in his breast not dread — a lump of certainty. The chief wanted them to move on; the three children running in and out the hut with their childish sensationalism, their plaints, their brief ecstasies, his wife knocking a nail into her sandal with a stone, and he, shaving outside where there was light. Would tell them to go. What business of the chiefs to tell them where? He had not asked them to come here. A wide arc of the hand: plenty place to go. And this was not their custom, but the civilized one; when a white farmer sold up, or died, the next owner would simply say to the black labourers living and working on the land, born there: go.