Nadine Gordimer - July's People

His mother made the stylized, gobbling exclamations that both ward off disaster and attribute it to fate. — What will the white people do to us now, God must save us.—

Her son, who had seen the white woman and the three children cowered on the floor of their vehicle, led the white face behind the wheel in his footsteps, his way the only one in a wilderness, was suddenly aware of something he had not known. — They can’t do anything. Nothing to us any more.—

— White people. They are very powerful, my son. They are very clever. You will never come to the end of the things they can do.—

When he was in the company of the women it was like being in the chief’s court, where the elders sitting in judgment wander in and out and the discussion of evidence is taken up, now where they drift outside to take a breath of air or relieve themselves among their tethered horses and bicycles hitched against trees, now back in the court-room at whatever point the proceedings have moved on to. His mother went out to pluck a chicken whose neck he’d just wrung. His wife asked the young girls whether they thought she was going to do without water all day? How much longer were they going to hang about with their mouths open? One of the girls was bold but respectful: — Tatani , I want to ask, is it true you also had a room for bathing, like the one they had?—

— Oh yes, bath, white china lavatory, everything.—

They could only laugh, how could they visualize his quarters, not so big as the double garage adjoining, with in his room the nice square of worn carpet that was once in the master bedroom.

— There are eggs in the belly — it would still have given us eggs! You should have taken the white one with the broken foot, I told you. — The old woman was shouting from beyond the doorway.

— What is it she wants?—

— You killed the wrong fowl … But I don’t know what it’s all about.—

He called back. — Exactly. Mhani , that one with the bad foot is a young one. It will lay well next year, even.—

The white woman’s hand, when she stood there and offered it — the first time, touching white skin. His wife went with her mother-in-law sometimes to the dorp to hawk green mealies or the brooms the old lady made, outside the Indian store; it had happened that a white from the police post had bought from her sack of cobs, and cents had dropped from the white hand to hers. But she had never actually touched that skin before.

She fell again into the mannerism of holding her head to one side that had been bashful and that he had found so attractive, inviting him and escaping him, when she was a young girl, and that had become, in the years he was away in the city, something different, a gesture repelling, withdrawing, evasive and self-absorbed. — The face — I don’t know … not a nice, pretty face. I always thought they had beautiful dresses. And the hair, it’s so funny and ugly. What do they do to make it like that, dark bits and light bits. Like the tail of a dirty sheep. No. I didn’t think she’d be like that, a rich white woman.—

— They looked different there — you should have seen the clothes in their cupboard. And the glasses — for visitors, when they drink wine. Here they haven’t got anything — just like us.—

She sharply reproached the baby who, staggering around on legs braced wide for balance, had picked up fowl droppings and successfully conveyed the mess to its mouth. Her forefinger hooked unthinkingly round the soft membranes, awareness of the small body was still as part of her own. The man was excluded. She flicked the chalky paste off her fingers. — There’ll be no more money coming every month.—

Without his white people back there, without the big house where he worked for them, she would not be getting those letters (yes, she had been to school, he would not have married a woman who could not read their own language) that came from his other life, his other self, and provided for those who could not follow him there. Not even in dreams; not even now, when she had seen his white people.

Bam could help july mend such farming tools — scarcely to be called equipment — as he and his villagers owned. The span of yokes and traces they shared, taking turns to plough, was kept in a special hut where no one lived. The heavy chains trailed across the floor. Hoes hung from the roof. There was the musty, nutty smell of stored grain in baskets. Someone had been there, picking over beans on one of the mats used as table-tops or bowls: Maureen saw the arrangement as broken beads set aside from good ones, choices made by someone momentarily absent — the dioramas of primitive civilizations in a natural history museum contrive to produce tableaux like that.

Bam was determined to rig up a water-tank, the round, corrugated tin kind, that had somehow been lugged that far into the bush but never installed. July laughed, and gave it a kick (as Victor had the bath).

— No, I mean it. If we can get hold of a bag of cement, we can make a foundation. I saw some old piping lying somewhere …? You could have quite a decent rain-water supply all through the rainy months. It’s a waste. The women won’t need to go to the river. It’ll be much better to drink than river water.—

There was no bag of cement; but they worked together more or less as they did when Bam expected July to help him with the occasional building or repair jobs that had to be done to maintain a seven-roomed house and swimming-pool. Bam made do with stones for a foundation. He kept the radio near and at the hours when news bulletins were read she would appear from wherever she might be. They stood and listened together. There were other radios in the community, bellowing, chattering, twanging pop music, the sprightly patter of commercials in a black language; the news reader’s gardening-talk voice spoke English only to the white pair, only for them. They didn’t comment and each watched the other’s face. But whatever each hoped to find there, of a sudden new decision made, or dreaded to find, of new grounds for fear, did not appear. There was fierce fighting round Jan Smuts Airport; the city centre, under martial law, had been quiet last night, but mortar fire was heard and confused reports had been received of heavy fighting in the eastern and northern suburbs. The Red Cross appealed for blood. The gasworks had been attacked and the explosion had started a fire that spread to suburban houses; Bam’s eyebrows flew up and exposed his gaze — only across the valley, the freeway, from the house they had chosen to build in a quiet suburb. U.S. Congress was debating the organization of a United States government airlift for American nationals. It was not known from where it would operate; Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth airports were closed, and their ports bombed and blockaded. Maureen looked away where a young boy was emptying a basket head-load of stones as July directed; she had been for trying to get to the coast.

Lucky to be alive. Neither could expect the other to say what would come next; what to do next; not yet. He arranged the stones brought from some other attempt to build something that had fallen into ruin. That was how people lived, here, rearranging their meagre resources around the bases of nature, letting the walls of mud sink back to mud and then using that mud for new walls, in another clearing, among other convenient rocks. No one remembered where the water-tank came from. July said he would ask the old woman but never did, although she sat outside the women’s hut most of the day, on the ground, making brooms out of some special grasses the women collected. The water-tank was from back there, like the Smales and their children; the white man was the one to make a place for it here.