Nadine Gordimer - July's People

— Then why don’t we go in?—

— How should I know?—

After the silence he spoke again. — Let him handle it. He’s always been a shrewdy.—

There was some reaction of hostility in her, an emanation. But they had been in it together, ‘Maureen’, ‘his wife’; she knew that. They had been amused together at July’s calculation, on strips torn from the margins of their newspapers, of his ten-cent bets and one-rand gains in the Fah-Fee game he acted as agent for, from their backyard. When gently teased, he had a way of rubbing first finger and thumb together. Grinning: Everybody he’s like money. Of course — Shylock’s gesture from a man so poor he had nothing to offer in the city but his own pound of flesh, and nothing else to gain there beyond money; money in the beggarly denominations a servant knows.

The music had given way to a voice with the same urgent, triumphant, cheerful cadence used by disc-jockeys everywhere, reading the news in Portuguese. The transmission must have been coming from Moçambique, but there were recurrent mentions of ‘Azania Freedom Fighters’ in English, a repetition of place-names, Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Bam could make out several references to the American Embassy. He stuck his head through the window to hear better, then jumped out of the vehicle again. He took the radio from the child but the newscast ended, he had missed the last of it in the noise the children were making. The man from under the tree had wandered over to gaze at them all and talk to Daniel. He was bare-foot, with a fighter’s furrowed thick face and a wall eye that seemed constantly to be trying to get away from what it saw. Daniel and the local were talking about him, the white man, as he stood there holding the radio and trying to get some other station; talking over him as people talk over the supine man in his hospital bed. The little girl jigged a passion of possession for the transistor; music vibrated again. As he turned back to the cab of the vehicle, July was approaching with a man whose advance was formal and belly-first. He wore a collar and tie and a suit made up of odd-matched jacket and trousers. He suddenly paused, leaving July to go on unnoticingly a few steps ahead, and drew back a round shaved head on a thick smooth neck, screwing up one side of his face at the sight of the bakkie and those inside it. Then he came heavily on, as if through crowds in a path cleared for him by July.

A good thing there had not been time to get back into the vehicle; it would be disrespectful not to be standing for this meeting. But July seemed to be fumbling his part, attempting no introduction — well, perhaps — what could he say? Chief, this is the Master. (How many times, back there, had Maureen and Bam tried to get him to drop the Simon Legree term, but he wouldn’t, couldn’t, as if there were no term to replace it, none that would express exactly what the relationship between Bam and him was, for him. Yet when some friend of the house occupied the guest room or was invited to Sunday drinks and supper, the servant who was also a familiar would exchange with the white man or woman easy greetings and superficial family news.) The big black man murmured deeply and hastily over a formula of greeting (they wouldn’t understand, anyway) whose tone contradicted, authoritatively, any welcome or acceptance.

— Bamford Smales. My wife … our children. — He put out a hand and the other took it. The process of weighing up a presence — the yellow bakkie, the white man outside the vehicle and the woman and children inside — was like a form of digestion, audible in the sounds the man made without words. The clearing of his throat was a rap for attention. — You coming from where? — July must have told him, he must, like everyone else around, have known of their presence and their story; this was the magisterial ritual of cross-examination.

— Johannesburg, with July.—

— I see, I see … — The jaw lifted consideringly and strongly from its bed of fat and the eyes sized the contents of the vehicle once more, acknowledging a greeting from the woman by a tremor of flesh-swags under the chin. Daniel, once driver of a milk truck in town, got out giving the raised fist greeting of the black townships, and stood ignored, roughly aligned with July.

— And you are coming here. For what are you coming?—

A smile — unconscious attempt to be ingratiating; if one knew what would please …? — a hand run over the pate where there were only fine, short blond hairs left, the skin was not pleasant to touch, scaly from exposure to the sun. — Well, you know the trouble there. It’s like a war. It is a war. We could have been killed. The houses where we stayed … they’ve been burned, bombed — some of them. People had to leave, our children might have been hurt. July brought us.—

July interrupted. — He tell me the chiefs in his house. We go there to the chief’s house now.—

The big man’s gait was suddenly recognizable as that of a city doorman or (to her, certainly) an induna who would sit on guard on his fruit-crate outside the compound where the shift boss’s labourers lived. That must have been why she hadn’t got out of the bakkie as ‘his wife’, to stand beside ‘her husband’. Anyway, he shook hands with the man again before they drove on.

— What was he? I mean, what does he do?

— It seemed always to amuse July to be the mentor, as if he didn’t take too seriously a white’s wish to comprehend or faculty of comprehension for what he had never needed to know as a black had the necessity to understand, take on, the white people’s laws and ways. — Headman. He’s headman for the chief.—

— Really headman, or are there more than one?

— Laughter again. — Sometime is plenty, is plenty villages.—

— A headman for each village?—

— Ev-’ry village. But this one is headman for the chief. Same village like where the chief he’s live.—

She took up her old role as interpreter. — Don’t you see? The headman of all the headmen. A personal assistant, adviser — I don’t know — to the chief.—

He steered the yellow bakkie in the spaces between mud huts, people and animals. The rag flags of religious sects and those that were the professional plates put up by sangomas , men and women who foretold the future and interpreted the past by throwing bones, stood out in bright, store colours on wattle poles outside some huts. There was a collapsing wattle stall with an advertisement for Teaspoon Tips Tea nailed to it, but nothing displayed for sale. He spoke to her alone. — We should have brought something.—

— A case of gin and the promise of a gun-boat?—

— A bottle of whisky. — The kind of goodwill gesture it was permissible to make towards a good client, or the gift he would take to a farmer in return for the hospitality of a shooting weekend. It could hardly be expected to change the mind of the black man who had the right and authority, here, to tell them to go. But if he had thought of it, if July could have found a bottle somewhere (the Indian store-keeper wouldn’t sell drink), he would have told him to buy one.

— There was something about the American Embassy.—

— But in Portuguese. Might have had to do with another part of the world.—

— No, I could make out … there were references to Pretoria and Johannesburg. — He had brought the vehicle to a stop where July indicated: a group of the usual huts, one that had a crude porch — wattle poles with a sheet of corrugated tin. A girl of about twelve swung a baby boy out of the way, by his arm, little moles of breasts nosing up from her dark flesh. Johannesburg, Pretoria; as much another part of the world as anywhere else that might have been mentioned.