Nadine Gordimer - July's People

It was the first time the Smales had had to come home to: the iron bed, the Primus, the pink glass cups and saucers in the enamel basin with its sores of rust, the tin of milk powder and the general-store packet of sugar covered with a newspaper. Living within the hut they had lost sense of it. But now it was waiting for them. Coming from the stare of the sun into the dim enclosure smelled rather than seen — old, smoky grass and earth damp with what spilled from vessels and human bodies instead of dew and rain — they scarcely made each other out. In a tin-bright angle of sunlight drawn by the slide-rule of the doorway a fowl with a bald neck was sitting on the suitcase of their possessions. Maureen read the labels to herself as if she had never seen them before. Statler-Hilton Buenos Aires Albergo San Lorenzo

Mantua Heerengracht Hotel Cape Town. Bam chased the fowl.

— Don’t lie on the bed.—

They could see each other now, blotched by dazzle. He turned only to give her a look: who says I was going to. She lit the Primus; it was the oily smell of home. They had had a friend, once detained on suspicion of working with blacks for this revolution, who burned the sweaters she had worn in prison because she couldn’t dissociate from the wool the smell of the cell in which they’d warmed her.

He turned the tuning knob of the radio and tried the aerial at every angle its swivel allowed. His fingers moved in hesitant concentration, someone feeling out, listening for the combination that would spring a lock. The aerial wavered the single antenna of an injured crayfish he had once caught at Gansbaai. She attracted his attention with a new battery held up, end to end, between thumb and forefinger. He shook his head. There is no music of the spheres, science killed that along with all other myths; there are only the sounds of chaos, roaring, rending, crackling out of which the order that is the world has been won. No peace beyond this world — not there, either. When the racket was lost a moment, only a cosmic sigh; they heard the sough of time and space, the wave poised over everything.

— Let me have a go.—

— Magic touch … — Their black box was ceded to her; but this one would not contain the record of their disaster, their crash from the suburb to the wilderness. It would only bring to them the last news, before silence, from Military Area Radio Network. Perhaps that had come already. She tried everything he had tried, and then twirled wildly. — Bloody thing. — Handed it back; he hung it on the nail where the previous occupant of the hut had hung her hoe.

In place of chaos, the sounds of July’s — the chiefs — form of order came to them. Someone droning song in rhythm with movement. The hiccuping wail of a baby being joggled on someone’s back, old voices and young shouts in the concourse that was to these people newspaper, library, archives and theatre. And from over there, always to be heard, near and far, beyond where she could still see the yellow of the bakkie under black twigs, the sound of water gouting slowly from the narrow neck of a jar — the cuckoo falcon that called, beckoned and never showed itself in the bush that had no other side.

— If only I could have heard better. Even in Portuguese I might have been able to make out if—

Her expectant face, put on to dismiss rather than express any confidence: his mouth open to speak drew in air instead, he stroked roughly from under his chin down his throat as if he couldn’t breathe.

— What was the wave-length? Did you remember? You’re sure?—

— You tried every wave-length yourself.—

— Perhaps it’s the set. We can borrow Daniel’s when they come back. The bakkie’s there; I don’t know where they’ve got to, I don’t see them. — She no longer had to worry about her children; she fed them; they knew how to look after themselves, like the black children.

He lingered about in the small space of the hut behind her, she could hear him hitting his fist into his palm as he did back there when he was talking about some building project he was hoping to be commissioned to design. Impossible to imagine what was happening in those suburban malls now, where white families ate ice-cream together on Saturday morning shopping trips, bought T-shirts stamped with their names (‘Victor’ ‘Gina’ ‘Royce’), and looked, learning about foreign parts, at photographic exhibitions whose favoured subject was black township life.

— There was that report last year — I don’t know any more, probably several years ago — United States Congress was told by their Research Service it was possible U.S. aircraft would be sent in to rescue American citizens if they were in danger. And it was mentioned — don’t you remember? — in the news the first week after we got here, I was putting up the tank… It just could be that what we heard—

— You heard, I didn’t.—

— … it just could be what that was. Pretoria, Johannesburg, United States Congress …—

She was pressing back the cuticles grown like dry cobwebs up her earth-rimmed toenails. Squatted in the doorway; Maureen who had been so at ease in her body, a dancer’s repose even if she wasn’t much as a dancer, examined herself with the obsessive attention of the confined, left to nothing but themselves. — Aircraft to rescue Americans. —

— And citizens of other European nations. I remember distinctly. A man called Robson, it was his report to Congress. No, not Robson, Copson — that’s it.—

It was not necessary for her to remind him they and their children were not Americans, or Europeans of other European nations. It was not necessary for him to remind her that they could have been Europeans of Canadian citizenship. If all whites became the same enemies, to blacks, all whites might become ‘Europeans’ for the Americans?

She felt his eyes upon her hands picking at her toes. She stretched her legs and tucked the hands out of the way under her armpits. — What about the business of the gun?—

He came and squatted. His mouth worked half-smilingly before he spoke. — You know what I thought. I thought it was going to be something else. He was going to tell us to push off. — Anything a relief so long as it was not going to be that.

Her head turned away.

She spoke from there. — What about the gun?—

— Can you see me as a mercenary.—

Her inner gaze was directed by him, at himself. She had been asked to note someone who had just arrived, but she saw the man who had been left behind.

— Throwing South African army hand-grenades to protect some reactionary poor devil of a petty chief against the liberation of his own people.—

She took her hands from under her arms and they clapped listlessly together: oh all that. The phrases they had used back there.

— Wha’d’you think I am. — Anger began to turn in him a wheel that would not engage.

— What’ll you do if he does come. If he walks over for his lesson in marksmanship.—

— What rubbish. One shot-gun. A toy — this is bush warfare.—

— He thinks of it only as a sample, a demonstration model. There’ll be other weapons — as you said, South African hand-grenades. The last handout from the government to their homeland chiefs. So if he comes… —

Pragmatism, that’s all, she had said when they first arrived in this dump and she had reproached herself for learning ballet dancing instead of — at least — the despised Fanagalo. And he had said, of back there, if it’s been lies, it’s been lies. He struggled hopelessly for words that were not phrases from back there, words that would make the truth that must be forming here, out of the blacks, out of themselves. He sensed for a moment the great drama hidden in the monotonous days, as she was aware, always, of the yellow bakkie hidden in the sameness of bush. But the words would not come. They were blocked by an old vocabulary, ‘rural backwardness’, ‘counter-revolutionary pockets’, ‘failure to bring about peaceful change inevitably leading to civil war’—she knew all that, she had heard all that before it happened. And now it had happened, it was an experience that couldn’t be forethought. Not with the means they had satisfied themselves with. The words were not there; his mind, his anger, had no grip. — You saw he ‘let me’ drive, going there? … A treat for me. July’s pretty sure of himself these days. He doesn’t seem to think much of his chief, anyway. You heard the way he talked.—