Nadine Gordimer - July's People

The terse habits engendered by the tension of the journey stayed with the couple. They communicated mainly about decisions neither wanted to take responsibility for without the other. Bam did not regard the malaria prophylactics she had not forgotten as he did her pack of blue toilet rolls. — Should we be saving them for the children?—

She doled out his pill and took hers, dry, swallowing repeatedly to get the galling bitterness down. — If we died of malaria, what would happen to them.—

There were many silences between them, when each waited for the other to say what might have to be said.

He was wearily, boredly trusting. — They would look after them. He’d look after them. Until someone came.—

— Who comes?—

—’The Cubans’.—

They began to banter and laugh. They had always — from a distance — admired Castro, the bourgeois white who succeeded in turning revolutionary.

— The Russians …—

— How many packets have we got left?—

— Six, I think.—

— Good god. Such a lot of pills! — His voice became low, murmuring, elliptical. This was the form of intimacy that had taken the place of love-talk between them. — Mmh? … did you expect we’d be staying a long time?—

— Well, will we?—

The radio station they depended on had been off the air for twenty-four hours; must have been a battle going on for control of the station. Broadcasts had been resumed again without comment. If the blacks had succeeded, there would have been the burst of martial music, the triumphant announcement, a new name for the country. But there were only reports of an RPG7 rocket-propelled grenade attack on the Carlton Centre, followed by occupation of the five-star hotel there by black forces.

She went down on her hunkers, resting her backside on one of the car seats. There was no nail-file; often she sat examining her broken nails, taking the rind of dirt from under them, as she did now, with a piece of fine wire, a thorn, whatever presented itself in the dust around her. — I used to think, one day I’d like to see where he lived, to make the trip home with him. I knew it would never come off.—

— No … the sort of thing that sounds fun … it was pretty impossible, then.—

— In that way. — In her pause, he said nothing. — You know. Combining it with a shooting trip for you. In the children’s holidays. Bringing all the camping stuff. The portable fridge. What’d I imagine?—

He wriggled to show he was composing himself for a nap.

— Walking in here with presents for them, all lined up clapping their hands together in greeting. Telling the kids, this is his home, this is how he lives, see how cleverly July builds houses for himself. Telling everybody at home we actually drove him all the way to the bundu, visited him as a friend.—

Bam suddenly remembered, touching the rill of sleep, how they had run in haste and confusion. The malaria pills: —Where’d you get such a supply? Surely we didn’t have them in the bathroom cupboard?—

— I looted. From the pharmacy. After they attacked the shops.—

The last thing he saw before he fell asleep was her face closed to him in the unconscious, matriarchal frown of necessity performed without question, without reasoning; the same frown she had had turned up to her by July’s wife, in the women’s hut — if he had been there to see it. He woke to hear the engine of the vehicle revving. — Maureen, what do you think you’re doing! — He swayed in shock, sitting upright on the bed.

But she was in the hut with him. He shouted at her. — Who’s playing around? That bloody little Victor! You gave him the keys?—

— I? I haven’t any key. — On a precarious ledge of existence; no room to attack one another. Like the bed. They trembled, tottered, the dimness of the hut broke back and forth against, between them. She ran out.

She ran to where she knew the vehicle was, always, even when she wasn’t looking. It was being driven off, jerkily but with growing confidence and speed as it cleared the deserted ruin and rocked onto a cattle path. She saw the backs of two black heads, driver and passenger. As she came back into the hut, he remembered, told her, told himself: —July’s got the keys. He wanted to lock up something in there. Parts for his bicycle. His wife lets other people walk off with them.—

— Someone else’s driving.—

— But it’s him.—

— I couldn’t see. Just the heads.—

Bam got up and had the menacing aspect of maleness a man has before the superego has gained control of his body, come out of sleep. His penis was swollen under his rumpled trousers. He went off round the huts, from one to another. A few men were sleeping in preparation for going back to the beer-drink. None of the women he encountered could speak his languages. The drums were in his head insistently. His sons had tired of watching the tireless drummers and were playing with skeletal carts, home-made of twisted wire by the black children, they had exchanged for the model cars from Victor’s racing track. The cars had been broken up, the segments kept as objects in themselves by those who had so few that useless possession itself was the treasure. His daughter was eating mealie-meal with her fingers, from a pot shared with two or three other small girls. She called to claim him boastfully before them. — Hey, daddy! — In the group of drinkers he made himself understood; they asked one another questions, argued, and one who could speak a few words not of English but of Afrikaans said July ‘had gone’. Somewhere. With someone. Another added, in English — He did not tell me. We do not know.—

Thought he made himself understood; couldn’t ask them what he was thinking, what he really needed to have denied by them because it was so extraordinary, couldn’t ever happen — like the fact of Bam and Maureen Smales and those three white children, here in this place. One can draw supposition and dread only from what one comes to know, over the years. In Rhodesia, during the war, it was said guerrillas had forced people at torture-point to co-operate with them. The white Selous Scouts had done the same. He couldn’t get an answer out of anyone: had July perhaps been picked up by a passing patrol, or informed on and taken away to be questioned, forced with a gun at his ear to give up the white man’s vehicle?

The facts that contradicted this did not bring the reassurance they should have. If this was what had happened, why hadn’t there been a search of the settlement? Why did people go on drinking beer and joking — that was what all the shouts seemed to be about, just laughter and the quarrelsome, obsessive stories of people getting drunk.

There was nowhere to run to. Nothing to get away in. All he could say to Maureen was that it was July. July.

— He’s not around.—

— When did he get the keys?—

— Oh, the other day.—

There was nothing to be remarked or reproached, in that, between them. He had been in charge on the journey, they were on his ground, here. He knew what was best. — It wasn’t only his stuff. He says we ought to keep the vehicle locked because of the tools, too. — July apparently knew his relatives; when the vehicle’s tools had been used to mend the old harrow, there were people who expected to borrow them but July didn’t trust that they would be returned.

She knew only where to place her feet, precariously on the solid ground of footholds. She had steadied from the position where she almost had been knocked off balance. She sat on a car seat picking burrs from a child’s jersey and making them into a careful pile so no bare foot would be hurt, accidentally treading on one.

When July was not about — only the two of them. He felt humbled, towards Maureen, but saw she did not share this — she was frightened into sulks?