Nadine Gordimer - July's People

— You c’n tell the police, dad.—

Bam looked behind, around him; sat down on the bed. He nodded a long time.

She saw that he wouldn’t answer the child; but he was back there: if he couldn’t pick up the phone and call the police whom he and she had despised for their brutality and thuggery in the life lived back there, he did not know what else to do.

He heaved himself up. Some surge of adrenalin summoned, sending him striding out, ducking his big head under the doorway. But he walked immediately into their gaze again. He lay down on his back, on that bed, the way he habitually did; and at once suddenly rolled over onto his face, as the father had never done before his sons.

They looked to their mother but her expression was closed to them. Even her body — so familiar in the jeans as worn as the covering of a shabby stuffed toy, the T-shirt stretched over the flat small breasts that were soft to lie against — they knew, as they had learnt when a dog or cat was going to repulse them, that to touch was forbidden them.

She looked down on this man who had nothing, now.

There was before these children something much worse than the sight of the women’s broad backsides, squatting.

The moon in the sky was a circle of gauze pasted up on the afternoon blue. Maureen Smales — the name, the authority that signed his pass every month — came back to the gumba-gumba gathering to look for July. For Mwawate. He was not there; they were used to her, they took no more notice of her than of the dogs and children who hung around the drinkers’ mysterious animation, quarrelsome happiness and resentful sadness.

She went to his hut — not his private quarters, but the home of his women. Martha was bathing the baby boy in a basin set on a box. Flashing tears of pure anger he appealed to the one — anyone — who had arrived to rescue him from soap and water. These black women were tranquil through their children’s tantrums; Martha did not seem to hear the screams and considering a moment, looking no higher than at the white woman’s feet, in servility, as if they had not walked and worked in the fields together, indicated she didn’t know where July was. Somewhere about. His mother sat under her skirts beside the hearth ashes. When she was not actively working she was very old and still; she leaned with a twig in her hand and blew a faint glow in the grey as if it were her own life she was keeping just alight.

There was a moment when Maureen could have got on her hunkers beside Martha and helped hold the baby’s head while its hair was washed.

Martha asked her nothing; July had to do what he was told by this woman when he worked in town, she claimed the right to know where he was, even here at his home.

She couldn’t tell Martha why she wanted July; it was not a matter of language, they had communicated before. She couldn’t tell Martha what she herself felt herself to be, what had happened to her. She saw Martha securely petrified, madonna drawing snuff into one nostril above a baby’s head, pietà with a machine-gunned son across her lap. Martha had laughed at veined white legs. At one time (the longings of Maureen Smales from back there) it seemed a beginning. Something might have come of it. But not much.

She left the women and their hearth and jogged down into the grass below the village. The habit of the pace came from spare-time attention given to many things, back there: your health, your sense of injustice done, your realization of living a life that was already over — these were the dutiful half-hour recognitions that did not affect normal daily abuse. When the Smales couple ran round the suburban blocks under the jacarandas they didn’t know what they were running from. She was following in reverse, as if with a finger on a map, the way the gumba-gumba man had come towards her. The grass shushed past her knees, her passage scything it folded back on either side. Orange-polka-dotted blackbeetles that weighed the stalks were transferred from their feeding-ground to her bare calves and her clothes. Rough seeds burred together the rolled-up legs of her jeans. The vegetation fingered and touched; there were minute ticks that waited a whole season for the passing of an animal or human host. That was the intimate nature of the inert bush dissolving distance.

She did not expect to find him at the river but it was where the invisible route traced by the red box was taking her. She had not gone often to the river except on very private errands, and then not to the place where the children swam, where it was forded. Even here, when there was nobody, there was little sign that there was ever anybody. The people had nothing superfluous with which to litter; the shallows sank into the depressions made in mud by their feet and mingled them with the kneading of cattle hooves. Muslin scraps of butterflies settled on turds. She could name the variety of thorn-tree— Dichrostachys cinserea, sekelbos — with its yellow tassels dangling from downy pink and mauve pompoms, both colours appearing on the same branch. Roberts’ bird book and standard works on indigenous trees and shrubs were the Smales’ accommodation of the wilderness to themselves when they used to visit places like this, camping out. At the end of the holiday you packed up and went back to town.

There was the stillness of unregarded trees and ceaseless water. On the huge pale trunks wild figs bristled like bunches of hat-pins. The earth was sour with fallen fruit; between the giant trees a tan fly-catcher swooped, landing to hover on the invisible branches of a great tree of air. Again, she had the feeling of not being there, that she had had while the man with the red box was climbing into her vision. The slight rise and fall of her breathing produced no ripple of her counter-existence in the heavy peace. The systole and diastole needed only to cease, and she would be ingested, disappeared in this state of being that needed no witnesses. She was unrecorded in any taxonomy but that of Maureen Hetherington on her points to applause in the Mine Recreation Hall.

She withdraw, every twig a trap sprung by her weight. She took the old way to him, joining the single-file path he and Daniel had made, tending the vehicle, from the village. Their club, their retreat, meeting-place … She and Bam had talked of converting the garage into a room where July could sit with his friends, putting an old sofa there, but both knew that since he would be the only servant in the suburb with such a privilege, there would be too many friends in and out the backyard, too much noise.

She found him there sitting on one of their homemade stools at the left side of the vehicle — probably because of the shade it had cast; the sun was low enough now for that to be unnecessary. Neither cleaning nor repairing the vehicle; but the gumba-gumba and the beer were not for him despite his show of participation. He was writing with an old short lead pencil in a note-book, calculating something as he used to keep his gambling accounts. The note-book was one of the desk-top promotions sent by building-supply firms to architects each Christmas. It was stained with red earth and the corners had curled with handling. He saw she recognized it. It seemed they were about to exchange some reminiscence.

— You’ve got to get that gun back.—

He screwed up his face irritably, jerked his chest: what was this?

— The gun’s gone. It was kept in the roof.—

She saw that he had not known. But he was not surprised. He sucked at his cheeks and closed the note-book with the pencil between the pages. — When someone’s take it?—

— I don’t know when. It wasn’t there any more when we came back from going to see them put up that thing for the music.—

He accused her. — How someone’s can take it?—