July's People

by Nadine Gordimer

  A pair of legs in Bam’s old grey pants stuck out from beneath it.

  There is always something to say: the formula for the roadside breakdown. —What’s the trouble?—

  July’s voice came between grunts. —No, is coming all right. That pipe, like always, it’s little bit loose—

  —Oh the exhaust. Well, it took a bashing getting here. Can’t expect anything else.—

  He worked himself out, along the earth, on his back, blinked and shook his head to get rid of the dirt that had fallen on his face. Smiling, made a deep clicking exclamation of comic exasperation: —That thing!—He questioned someone, in their language; Daniel was still under there.

  July got stiffly to his hunkers. His greasy hands hung by the wrists. —At home we had that strong wire.—

  She nodded. A roll—far too much, more than they could ever have put to use, taking up space in the double garage between the sack of charcoal for the braais, and the lawn mower.

  He laughed. —Man, I wish I can have some of that wire here!—

  —I wonder if there’s anything left.—

  —Ye-s-ss! Everything it’s there! When we go I’m putting that big (he mimed the padlock with first finger and thumb hooked across the knuckle of the other hand) I’m closing up nice!—He leaned his back against the wheel of the bakkie. Pride, comfort of possession was making him forget by whose losses possession had come about.

  —The fighting must be very bad.—

  —You heard something what they say?—

  —Not the radio we always hear. I think that’s finished. Maybe the building is blown up—I don’t know. The special radio, for the army.—

  For him, too, there had always been something to say: the servant’s formula, attuned to catch the echo of the master’s concern, to remove combat and conflict tactfully, fatalistically, in mission-classroom phrases, to the neutrality of divine will. —My, my, my. What can we do. Is terrible, everybody coming very bad, killing … burning … Only God can help us. We can only hope everything will come back all right.—

  —Back?—

  She saw he did not want to talk to her in any other way.

  —Back?—

  His closed lips widened downwards at each corner and his lids lowered as they did when she gave him, back there, an instruction he didn’t like but would not challenge. —I don’t want to hear about killing. This one is killing or that one. No killing.—

  —But you don’t mean the way it was, you don’t mean that. Do you? You don’t mean that.—

  Daniel, young and lithe, rolled easily from under the vehicle and stood by. She glanced to him for agreement, admittance to be extracted by the two of them. He too, had something to say to her: a greeting, ihlekanhi, missus. July spoke to him. A few half-attentive questions were followed by some sort of order given: in any case, the young man was propelled by it down into the valley, going off in the direction of the settlement, maybe to fetch something for the repairwork.

  But as soon as he was ten yards off they both knew it was a pretext to get him out of the way. Maureen felt it had been decided she had come to look for July; helpless before the circumstantial evidence that they were now alone, again, as they were when he came to the hut and she was aware he was looking behind her to see if anyone was inside.

  She might just have come into his presence that moment; he spoke as if opening a conversation out of silence, as if they had not already been talking. —I’m getting worried.—

  She knew his use of tenses. He meant ‘am worried’.

  —You are hungry. I think you are hungry.—

  She smiled with surprise; and suspicion. —Why d’you say that? We’re not hungry. We’re all right.—

  —No … No. You have to go look for spinach with the women.—

  The answer came back at him. —I go. I don’t have to go.—

  —If the children need eggs, I bring you more eggs. I can bring you spinach.—

  —I’ve got nothing to do. To pass the time.—But they could assume comprehension between them only if she kept away from even the most commonplace of abstractions; his was the English learned in kitchens, factories and mines. It was based on orders and responses, not the exchange of ideas and feelings. —I’ve got no work.—

  He smiled at the pretensions of a child, hindering in its helpfulness. —That’s not your work.—

  She had had various half-day occupations over the years; he used to shut the gate behind her—a wave of the hand, lingering to talk to his passing friends in the street—when she drove away to her typewriter, news paper files, meetings, every morning. Yet he knew she could work with her hands. When the shift boss’s daughter had dug and planted all Saturday in the garden he would (it seemed to her then) acknowledge her comradely: —Madam is doing big job today.—Now he chose what he wanted to know and not know. The present was his; he would arrange the past to suit it.

  —Anyway, I don’t want the other women to find food for my family. I must do it myself.—But here they both knew the illusion of that statement, even while they let it stand. July’s women, July’s family—she and her family were fed by them, succoured by them, hidden by them. She looked at her servant: they were their creatures, like their cattle and pigs.

  —The women have their work. They must do it. This is their place, we are always living here and they are doing all things, all things how it must be. You don’t need work for them in their place.—

  When she didn’t understand him it was her practice to give some noncommittal sign or sound, counting on avoiding the wrong response by waiting to read back his meaning from the context of what he said next. (Despite his praise of Bam—was it not given to wound her rather than exalt Bam?—Bam did not have this skill and often irritated him by a quick answer that made it clear, out of sheer misunderstanding, the black man’s English was too poor to speak his mind.) He might mean ‘place’ in the sense of role, or might be implying she must remember she had no claim to the earth—’place’ as territory—she scratched over for edible weeds to counter vitamin deficiency and constipation in her children. She didn’t wait to find out. She spoke with the sudden changed tone of one who has made a discovery of her own and is about to act on it. —I like to be with other women sometimes. And there are the children, too. We manage to talk a bit. I’ve found out Martha does understand—a little Afrikaans, not English. It’s just that she’s shy to try.—

  The pleasant smile of her old position; at the same time using his wife’s name with the familiarity of women for one another.

  He settled stockily on his legs. —It’s no good for you to go out there with the women.—

  She tackled him. —Why? But why?—

  —No good.—

  The words dodged and lunged around him. —Why? D’you think someone might see me? But the local people know we’re here, of course they know. Why? There’s much more risk when Bam goes out and shoots. When you drive around in that yellow thing … Are you afraid—Her gaze sprang with laughing tears as if her own venom had been spat at her; he and she were amazed at her, at this aspect of her, appearing again as the presumptuous stranger in their long acquaintance. —Are you afraid I’m going to tell her something?—

  Giddied, he gave up a moment’s purchase of ground. —What you can tell?—His anger struck him in the eyes. —That I’m work for you fifteen years. That you satisfy with me.—

  The cicadas sang between them. Before her, he brought his right fist down on his breast. She felt the thud as fear in her own.

  It echoed no other experience she had ever had. The shift boss with his thick, miner’s wrists and stump where the right third finger had caught in a kibble underground would never cross the will of his little dancer; her husband—what could ever have arisen, back there, that would make him a threat to her? And here; what was he here, an architect lying on a bed in a mud hut, a man without a vehicle. It was not that she thought of him with disgust—what right had she, occupying the same mud hut—but that she had g
one on a long trip and left him behind in the master bedroom: what was here, with her, was some botched imagining of his presence in circumstances outside those the marriage was contracted for.

  She had never been afraid of a man. Now comes fear, on top of everything else, the fleas, the menstruating in rags—and it comes from this one, from him. It spread from him; she was feeling no personal threat in him, not physical, anyway, but in herself. How was she to have known, until she came here, that the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself, the one thing there was to say between them that had any meaning.

  Fifteen years

  your boy

  you satisfy

  She walked away and sat on a mud ruin, sending her gaze far from them—from him, from her—over the grey and green bush, a layer of cumulus seen from a jet plane between two continents, where crossed date-lines eliminate time and there are no horizons.

  The clink and wrench of tools on metal was taken up against the single continuous note of the cicadas. Her broken nails—only the left thumbnail, always hornier and harder than the rest, retained semblance of the oval it was kept to back there—could not score the earth wall. When she lifted and looked at her palms they were stippled with the pressure of the grains but carried none with them; in the veld round the mine, she had stubbed her toes again and again on the same hard dark earth, bonded into anthills. She got up and went to where he had dragged the exhaust pipe from the bakkie and was tinkering with it between his spread legs.

  He had never been any good with mechanical things.

  Look at the pliers he was using. Even she could see they were too small to grip properly.

  And he was approaching the task from the wrong angle.

  The pipe should be the other way up. Bam remarked how, if July packed the car, the suitcases were placed upside down, standing on their lids. She wouldn’t have Bam say anything to him, offend his pride—he was so highly intelligent in other ways.

  He persisted with pliers and screwdriver; got no message from the awkward stress between metal and his fingers. He never had; what problems with the lawn mower, half-dismantled, and left in the yard until Bam came home.

  Oh not that way. Even a woman can tell that.

  Her presence conveyed all this to him, in their silence both heard, knew from what had been unspoken in their past.

  She said it. —You’ve never been able to fix machines. Get Bam to do it. Ask him.—

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t know ‘Bam’, a white man from whom he had taken the vehicle; like her, he knew someone left behind back there, the master who would put together the pieces of the lawn mower when he came home. But he silenced her: —Yesterday night someone’s come.—

  The whip cracked over her head. Deep breaths slowly pumped her chest; she was aware of the pulse showing in her small, flat, left breast under the T-shirt: fear, in there. —Police? Who came?—

  He left her to it a moment. —Someone there from the chief.—

  Relief made her impatient. —Well that’s all right, July, isn’t it—he knows you. I mean he must know you’ve got somebody here.—

  —He know who is it me … He send someone ask who I’m keep in my house. Someone say you must come there to the chief’s place, I must show him. Always when people is coming somewhere, they must go to the chief, ask him.—

  —Ask him what?—

  —Ask him nice, they can stay in his village.—

  —I thought you said this is your place, everybody knows it’s your place, you can do what you like. You’ve been saying that since we arrived. A hundred times.—

  —Yes, I’m say that. My place it’s here. But all people here, all villages, it’s the chief’s. If he’s sending someone ask me this or this, I must do. Isn’t it. If he’s saying I must come, I must come. That is our law.—

  —Why didn’t you tell us before, if the polite thing—if it’s nice to go and see the chief?—

  He looked up: her dirty feet, her thin face from which the hair was drawn back in a rubber band. The colour had worn off her jeans along her thighs and fly. —Now I’m tell you.—

  —When?—

  He gestured; in his own time. —Tomorrow.—

  —Bam can go with you.—

  He was carrying on with his repair. —You, master, your children. All is going.—

  She was unsteady with something that was not anger but a struggle: her inability to enter into a relation of subservience with him that she had never had with Bam. Leave it, she said of the vehicle, as she had said of her lawn mower. —Leave it. He’ll come and fix it.

  —She started off towards the settlement. On the descent she turned, against the sun a moment, as if she would call back. Then she came purposefully to where she had stood before. They were near each other. Her eyes hooded by her hand, his head under the vehicle, neither could see the other’s face. She said what nobody else should hear. —You don’t have to be afraid. He won’t steal it from you.—

  Chapter 14

  Bam rose from the bed like a man who has fallen asleep on the couch in his office when he was supposed to be working.

  —It’s question of courtesy, apparently. I don’t think there’s anything sinister. Paying respects to the chief.—

  He was surly at feeling ridiculous. The haversack that was his pillow had made a deep crease on one cheek. His unused voice snagged on phlegm. —Ours is hardly a state visit here.—

  —Anyway, we have to go. I don’t know why he didn’t say so before.—

  —Didn’t you ask?—

  —He wasn’t prepared to be forthcoming. In a bad mood.—

  —What’s the matter?—

  She had picked up their water-bottle as she came in and was gulping straight from the neck between speaking. Her mouth was wet, she grinned with the voluptuousness of thirst quenched. —He’s afraid I’ll tell about his town woman.—

  —He’s what?—

  —Because I’ve got friendly with Martha—the wife—you know. Well friendly, hardly—we exchange a few words in the fields, she can speak a bit of Afrikaans, I’ve found out.—

  —Oh, his Ellen. But what makes him think you would?—

  She looked at this half-asleep man who did not know. She spoke violently, if not to him. —It’s rubbish. Don’t let’s transpose our suburban adulteries. His wife knew nothing else about him, there, either.—

  Bam tore off a length from one of the toilet rolls she had not forgotten to provide, and went out into the bush. He left the smell of his sweaty sleep behind him; she had not known, back there, what his smell was (the sweat of love-making is different, and mutual). Showers and baths kept away, for both of them, the possibility of knowing in this kind of way. She had not known herself; the odours that could be secreted by her own body. There were no windows in the mud walls to open wide and let out the sour smell of this man. The flesh she had caressed with her tongue so many times in bed—all the time it had been a substance that produced this. She made a cooking-fire outside and the smoke was sweet, a thorny, perfumed wood cracking to release it. The others—Martha—were wise to keep the little hearth-fire alive always in the middle of the huts. Only those still thinking as if they were living with bathrooms en suite would have decided, civilizedly, the custom was unhygienic and too hot.

  In the morning they were ready to go. In clean, un-ironed clothes they were shabbier than July and Daniel; Maureen would not attempt to use one of the old flat-irons, heated in the fire, with which the women made a perfect line of fold down the legs of frayed and ragged trousers. She was talkative, joking affectionately with the children, smiling, over their remarks, complicity with him—Bam; like she used to be when they were off on a family outing, to the drive-in cinema or a picnic. They had been shut up in the vast bush that surrounded them for more than three weeks: any move into it was an occasion: He himself felt an urge to shave; he did so irregularly, now. Even the prisoner, when th
e day comes for him to face the dreaded charge in court, probably is excited by being piled into the Black Maria for the drive along city streets scented and glimpsed behind steel mesh; Bam had seen the fingers sticking through it, while passing prison vans in his car, back there.

  He had in his breast not dread—a lump of certainty. The chief wanted them to move on; the three children running in and out the hut with their childish sensationalism, their plaints, their brief ecstasies, his wife knocking a nail into her sandal with a stone, and he, shaving outside where there was light. Would tell them to go. What business of the chiefs to tell them where? He had not asked them to come here. A wide arc of the hand: plenty place to go. And this was not their custom, but the civilized one; when a white farmer sold up, or died, the next owner would simply say to the black labourers living and working on the land, born there: go.

  He said nothing of this certainty to her not because of any wish not to alarm her—the male chivalry of the suburbs had no right to keep her in ignorance of what she had to fear and it could not defend her against—but because he did not know to whom to speak these days, when he spoke to her. ‘Maureen’. ‘His wife’. The daughter of the nice old fellow who had worked underground all his life and talked of the stopes of Number 4 Shaft, the heat in Number 6, the ‘bad luck’ his boys felt (long before he lost his finger there, in that section of Number 4 where the kibble caught him), as a man talks fondly of the features of the town in which he grew up. The girl in leotards teaching modern dance to blacks at night-class, under the eyes of her architect boy-friend with his social conscience. The consort clients meant when they said: And we’d so much like you and your wife to come to dinner. The woman whose line of pelvis, shifting backside, laugh among other people sometimes suddenly became strongly attractive again after fifteen years; that same woman familiar as a cup on the kitchen shelf. The woman to whom he was ‘my husband’. The other half in collusion, one for purposes of income tax, one to provide an audience at school sports, one in those moments when, not looking at each other, without physical contact or words, they clasped together against whatever threatened, in the nature of menace there was back there—professional jealousy, political reactionism, race prejudice, the wine-tasting temptation of possessions.