July's People

by Nadine Gordimer

  She was not in possession of any part of her life. One or another could only be turned up, by hazard. The background had fallen away; since that first morning she had become conscious in the hut, she had regained no established point of a continuing present from which to recognize her own sequence. The suburb did not come before or after the mine. 20, Married Quarters, Western Areas, and the architect-designed master bedroom were in the same rubble. A brick picked up might be Lydia’s loaf.

  The red box on the man’s head showed first under the bold black-green of the wild fig-trees at the river. A bit of red leaped out at her; no one knew from which direction anyone might have come, in the homogeneity of the bush out there, she watched it all day and saw nothing, it absorbed, concealed what it held. If people came from the other side of the river they appeared for the first time, broken up by foliage and flashes off the water they disturbed as they crossed the river; and as they rearranged their bundles and their clothes after wading through with these on their heads. But this was some sort of trunk or box, bright red. It appeared now as red splinters between the elephant grass on the near side of the river. The man climbed the gradient towards her—not seeing her, there were bushes, there was a great pile of thatch someone had dumped, she felt she was not there—with bowed black shins staggering. The trousers were not shorts but had worn through and been torn off at the knees. The red box was heavy and there were wires looped from it that bothered him. He hailed once, towards the huts. Having announced himself, plodded on. A fix on him, she had felt the bunching of muscles in his neck as he braced himself against rising ground under the red box, the cold tingling in the arm from which the blood receded where it was raised to steady the box; the sweat of his effort melting in the heat of the day was the sweat of her hands’ imprint wetting the pages of the book. He was lost to her behind Martha’s chicken-house on stilts and the water-tank when he reached the village.

  In the afternoon there was a deafening, fading and lurching bellow through the air; it was the gumba-gumba being tried out, the children reported.

  Here was something for which Victor, Gina and Royce knew the name in the village people’s language but not in their own. The red box was the area’s equivalent of a travelling entertainment; someone had brought back from the mines a battery-operated amplifier and apparently he would come and set it up in this village or that, attached to a record player, for an occasion. It was not clear what this occasion was. Mother and father were tugged along by the Smales children to see the gumba-gumba, which the children couldn’t believe was not something unknown to them. —How can you say what it’s like?—For Gina, what hadn’t before been seen in this village was new to the world.

  The parents were brought together to witness the contraption as divorced people might meet on their regular day to keep up a semblance of family life. They exchanged a few words with July, another parent, his second youngest sitting yoked on his shoulders. He had the city man’s good-natured amusement at country people’s diversions. Bam asked whether there was a wedding? And added, or a meeting? But July was not apart from the leisurely, straggling group coming and going about the focus of the man who had commandeered a couple of youths to help him rig up his wires and speaker horn on one of the wattle poles of the hut that was also some kind of church or meeting-house—often women’s voices singing hymns came from there. —Is not a wedding.—And at the idea of a meeting, he merely laughed. —Sometime we having a party. Just because someone he’s … I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.—He called up to the man on the roof in the way his people did, teasing and encouraging, the first part of what he said gabbled and rapid, the syllables of the last word strongly divided and drawn out, the word itself repeated. Mi ta twa ku nandziha ngopfu, swiJamba a moyeni. Nano wa maguva lawa, hey—i … hey—i!

  Laughter and comment flew from people come out of their huts and flocked up around the man and July. The gumba-gumba was itself the occasion; the dropsical man (whose legs lately were bandaged in rags of a filthy towel), sometimes the presence of a beggar, today—because of the voice of the oracle yelling and retching from its battered red box and dented horn—sat on his stool as an old god carried out among them, the grotesque ceremonial presence without which carnival forgets its origin is in fear of death. Music began swirling unsteadily from the amplifier. Already they were passing round the thin beer that was the same colour when drunk and when vomited. Their fun had its place in their poverty. It ignored that they were in the middle of a war, as if poverty itself were a country whose dispossession nothing reaches.

  July’s white people wandered away. The father did not want to have to drink that stuff and did not want to offend. The mother thought there were pleasanter sights for the children than—in particular—some of the women (not July’s, ever) getting drunk with their babies on their backs, and going to pee only as far away as their staggering would carry them.

  When the white family got back to the hut the gun was gone.

  Chapter 19

  If he hadn’t been with them watching the installation of the gumba-gumba they would have thought it was Victor. Quite possible he would boast that he was allowed to handle his father’s gun; would have somehow climbed up and taken it from its place in the roof.

  The boxes of cartridges had gone, too.

  Bam was just as he was when the car keys were lost back there. But his hands shook, actually shook—she saw it as she had often pretended not to know when someone was crying. There were so few places to search, in a hut, and where could the gun be, if it were not in its place and had not been moved by him? Who would move it?

  He seemed suddenly unsure he might not have moved it himself. After coming back from the chief. She had always been asked to check whether her passport was really in her travel wallet, when they travelled together. She had done this with exaggerated precision, holding it up to him in her way between thumb and first finger, putting it back where it had been and she had been sure it had been, all the time.

  She looked under the coverings they used as bedclothes and pitched their few crumpled clothes out of the suitcase.

  He even took the knob-kerrie he had been given by an old man in exchange for fish and poked in the thatch that was piled up outside, lifted the bundles one by one and flung them aside. Victor and Royce rummaged, talking too much. —What if someone’s buried it? C’mon, let’s dig, Vic? Shall we dig?—When checked in one activity, they dashed to another. They forgot what they were supposed to be searching for; turning over ashes became a contest of kicking the grey powder at one another. Gina had run off to skip with Nyiko, who had an old dressing-gown cord for a rope.

  —You’re quite sure you didn’t play with it? At any time?—

  —No, daddy—man! I promise.—Victor was offended at being suspected of what he knew he might very well have done.

  The younger one indemnified, innocent of everything, for all time: —We never. Cross my heart.—

  —Because no one else knew it was there.—Their father’s look held. He breathed as if he had been running; even as they did when they were about to cry.

  The boys stood waiting for whatever it was grownups might decide to do. Neither would dare risk telling their father everybody knew it was there, every chicken that scratched, every child whose eyes went round the interior of the hut, mhani Tsatsawani’s hut, where the white people stayed. —Gina knows.—Royce told tales, but the father didn’t understand the implication. And Victor, his hand out of sight where he stood close up beside his young brother, took the flap of the little boy’s skinny thigh and pinched it with steadily maintained pressure for a few seconds, enforcing a code of loyalty that extended even to their sister in time of real trouble.

  —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?—

  She flung back at him his uprightness, his moralizing—whatever the rigmarole of form he had always insisted on establishing between them. —Why not, July? Why not? Just walk into the hut when we’re not there and take it. Steal it.—

  —Now-now?—

  —Bam discovered it now. But it might not have been this afternoon. It could have been any time.—

  —When he’s see it last time?—

  —Doesn’t seem to know himself. But it was still there when we came back from the chief’s. We talked about it. I saw it.—

  —You sure the gun it’s there before this afternoon? Because everybody he’s there at the music. You see everybody was there, hey? Nobody can come to the house that time.—

  —How do I know if it was still there then? I told you. I know everyone was at the music.—

  —Night-time.—He let the two of them visualize it. —Night-time, you all sleeping, you
all in the house. Who can come.—

  —It’s not Victor.—July knew that possibility as well as anyone. —You can forget about Victor.—

  —No, no, Victor he’s so nice. Naughty boy sometime but so nice. And if he’s take, he’s show his friend, he’s put back, isn’t it. Not Victor. Well, everybody here so nice at the music today, everybody know that gun it’s your gun—

  —Where’s Daniel?—

  She was distracted by something misplaced. What would appear for her from beneath the vehicle, from the ruined huts, so often a silent presence while not yet noticed: now he surely would come forward to July’s call with his young man’s easy stroll.

  —Daniel wasn’t there—Her voice alight; at the same time, some kind of fear and amazement came like a sack thrown dark over her head. —Where’s Daniel?—

  —Daniel he’s not come any more.—A hand lifted, at large a moment, slid under the neck of the shirt. The gauze round of moon had become opaque and polished with the light of the vanished sun; it began gently to reflect, a mirror being adjusted. The shadow of the vehicle fell upon them and reached out in its blown-up detail, roof-rack and spare tyre, over the bright, watery lacings of sunset in grass and bushes. —One, two day now he’s going.—

  —But you know where he is. He told you where he was going?—

  He spoke of these young ones. —They not asking anyone, anyone. Not even the father.—

  —But he told you, he discussed it with you, he must have talked to you. You and he are together all the time. You were like his father, weren’t you. You can’t say to me he didn’t tell you?—Two gnats she had swatted against her face stuck drowned in sweat on her cheek.