July's People

by Nadine Gordimer

  —Don’t tell me what Daniel he tell me. Me, I know if he’s say or he’s not say nothing. Is not my business, isn’t it?—

  She sat down on the mud wall that was warmed to life all through the heat of the day and whose colour had risen, amber, blood-purple out of terra-cotta in the thick layer of last light suspended at a man’s height across the earth.

  —You’ve got to get it back.—She knew those widened nostrils. Go, he willed, go up the hill to the hut; as he would to his wife.

  He could smell her cold cat-smell she had when she sweated. The only way to get away from her was to walk off and leave her, give up to her this place that was his own, the place he had found to hide the yellow bakkie and keep it safe.

  He stuffed the note-book into his shirt-pocket torn and neatly sewn back with unmatched thread by Ellen. —How I must get that gun? Where I’m going find it? You know where is it? You know? Then if you know why you yourself, your husband, you don’t fetch it?—

  —The gun’s gone, Daniel’s gone. He handled it, he was allowed to fire a shot with it … Bam’s nonsense. He was at the chief’s listening to all that talk about guns. He fancied it for himself. Didn’t he? Thinks he’ll kill some meat. Or he’s got a customer for it.—Her lids blinked sharply at him. —Perhaps the chief. You must know where to look for him, he’s with you (a gesture towards the bakkie) every day.—

  He was feeling up round his neck and over his chest under the shirt while she talked at him. The hand came out swiftly and stiff fingers tapped at the centre of his being, there on the plate with its little shining black cups of hollow where the breast-muscles joined the bone. —Me? I must know who is stealing your things? Same like always. You make too much trouble for me. Here in my home too. Daniel, the chief, my-mother-my-wife with the house. Trouble, trouble from you. I don’t want it any more. You see?—His hands flung out away from himself.

  —You’ve got to get it back.—

  —No no. No no.—Hysterically smiling, repeating. —I don’t know Daniel he’s stealing your gun. How I’m know? You, you say you know, but me I’m not see any gun, I’m not see Daniel, Daniel he’s go—well what I can do—

  She was stampeded by a wild rush of need to destroy everything between them, she wanted to erase it beneath her heels as snails broke and slithered like the shell and slime of rotten eggs under her foot in the suburban garden. —You stole small things. Why? I wouldn’t tell you then but I tell you now. My scissors like a bird, my old mother’s knife-grinder.—

  —Always you give me those thing!—

  —Oh no, I gave you … but not those.—

  —I don’t want your rubbish.—

  —Why did you take rubbish? … I said nothing because I was ashamed to think you would do it.—

  —You—He spread his knees and put an open hand on each. Suddenly he began to talk at her in his own language, his face flickering powerfully. The heavy cadences surrounded her; the earth was fading and a thin, far radiance from the moon was faintly pinkening parachute-silk hazes stretched over the sky. She understood although she knew no word. Understood everything: what he had had to be, how she had covered up to herself for him, in order for him to be her idea of him. But for himself—to be intelligent, honest, dignified for her was nothing; his measure as a man was taken elsewhere and by others. She was not his mother, his wife, his sister, his friend, his people. He spoke in English what belonged in English: —Daniel he’s go with those ones like in town. He’s join.—The verb, unqualified, did for every kind of commitment: to a burial society, a hire purchase agreement, their thumbprints put to a labour contract for the mines or sugar plantations —I don’t know—maybe he’s need the gun for that.—He leaned back, done with her.

  —I know.—Daniel’s raised first in greeting had seemed a matter of being fashionable, for the young milkman returned to his backward village from town, just as dropping to the knees before the chief was surely no more than a rural convention for him and July. —I know.—‘Cubas’: it was he who had supplied the identification when the chief could not name the foreigners he feared. —So he’s gone to fight. Little bastard. He only took what he had a right to.—

  July might not have understood the claim granted, or was not going to be obliged to speak. His familiar head, newly shaved by a villager who barbered under a tree, his broad soft mouth under the moustache, his eyes white against the dark of the face blurred by the dimness, now, of all things at the earth’s level under the high light of the sky, faced her. Together in this place of ruin that was the habitation of no living being, only a piece of machinery, their words sank into the broken clay walls like spilt blood. Would be buried here. The skin of her body was creeping with an ecstatic fever of relief, splendid and despicable to her. She told him the truth, which is always disloyal. —You’ll profit by the others’ fighting. Steal a bakkie. You want that, now. You don’t know what might have happened to Ellen. She washed your clothes and slept with you. You want the bakkie, to drive around in like a gangster, imagining yourself a big man, important, until you don’t have any money for petrol, there isn’t any petrol to buy, and it’ll lie there, July, under the trees, in this place among the old huts, and it’ll fall to pieces while the children play in it. Useless. Another wreck like all the others. Another bit of rubbish.—

  The incredible tenderness of the evening surrounded them as if mistaking them for lovers. She lurched over and posed herself, a grotesque, against the vehicle’s hood, her shrunken jeans poked at the knees, sweat-coarsened forehead touched by the moonlight, neglected hair standing out wispy and rough. The death’s harpy image she made of herself meant nothing to him, who had never been to a motor show complete with provocative girls. She laughed and slapped the mudguard vulgarly, as he had done to frighten a beast out of the way. The sharp sound flew back to them from the settlement. A little homely fire, the first of those for the evening meal, began to show over there as a match flame grows cupped in a palm.

  Bam was giving the children food. He dug off lumps of mealie-meal he had cooked and they took it with their fingers. They were chattering and said nothing to her when she appeared, as if they thought she had been there all the time. He did not ask her where she had been; he ate with the children, using the tin spoon to which tatters of pap clung. She ate nothing and went into the dark hut, finding the water-bottle by feel. In there she drank the whole bottle in a series of sucking gulps broken by long pauses, like an alcoholic who hides away to indulge secret addiction. And like the family of the addict that does not know how to deal with her, they pretended not to know, or did not know.

  The gumba-gumba had started up again with one of the same four or five records. Baby, baby come duze—duze—duze in close harmony, broken by the jet of a high-voiced refrain playing above it, went out into the bush over the huts and under the haze. There were no stars. Baby, baby, du-ze, du-ze … If there were a roving band of freedom fighters out there, they would be able to hear it, far away, the old music of Soweto, Daveyton, Tembisa, Marabastad, the town places they had burst and spread from.

  When he saw her getting into what was her bed, he made the approach of remarking that her feet were awfully dirty. She got up and from July’s oil-drum kept full of river water washed them with soap supplied by July. She spoke from beyond the light of the paraffin lamp. —Was it like this for him?—It was never necessary to say ‘July’; he was there in their minds, there was no one else.

  She was understood: but that would be too easy an equation. A hand scratched the back fringe of blond hair, felt carefully where there was none.

  She matched the remembered total dependency with this one. —Used to come to ask for everything. An aspirin. Can I use the telephone. Nothing in that house was his.—

  —Well … he wasn’t kept short of anything. Anything we had to give.—

  —I wonder what would have become of him.—

  The paraffin lamp was still burning but the blue eyes were closed. —Would have got old with us and been
pensioned off.—

  Daniel has the gun. Taken it for himself.

  Her lips moved with the words formed but not spoken. She looked a long time at the closed eyelids.

  Chapter 20

  The mists of the night left a vivid freshness that dispels the sickly ammoniacal odour of fowl droppings, the fetid cloying of old thatch, the stinks of rotting garbage—rags, the jaw-bone of a calf, scaly with big glistening flies—that collect wherever the rains have hollowed the ground between huts. Women put out the lengths of cotton they wrap themselves and their babies in. A clear strong sun sweetens the fusty cloth. It glosses the grass roofs and the mud walls change under it to golden ochre; the stuff of which these houses were made is alive. At this moment in its span, its seasons, the village coincides with the generic moment of the photographer’s village, seen from afar, its circles encircled by the landscape, held in the pantheistic hand, the single community of man-and-nature-in-Africa reproduced by skilled photogravure processes in Holland or Switzerland.

  Nyiko has appeared early in the doorway. Her tender curls sift sunlight, one pink-soled foot hooks round a tiny black ankle as she waits for her friend Gina. The little girls smile and don’t speak before the others; their friendship is too deep and secret for that.

  The two boys squeeze the scrapings of the mealie-meal pot into dirty balls and bait the hooks they make out of ends of wire scavenged or stolen from the broken diamond-mesh, itself scavenged, that wraps someone’s fowl-cage. They murmur in the harmony of their absorption. They jump up to ask July, who is re-stacking the sheaves of thatching grass their father threw aside, if he has (ah please man July) some string? He goes away and brings a length of real plastic fishing-line bobbing a spiral from his hand. Over there, where the three stand together, Royce does (still) his little boy’s dance of excitement; and Victor—

  Victor is seen to clap his hands, sticky with mealie-pap, softly, gravely together and bob obeisance, receiving the gift with cupped palms.

  At once the boys race back. You can count the beads of spinal vertebrae bent over their handiwork. Later, they pull their father from the hut and make him go fishing with their following troupe of children and babies. Red and yellow weaver-birds they disturb mass in shrill joy and flower briefly at the tips of tall grasses too slender for support.

  On such a morning, lucky to be alive.

  At about midday (from the height of the sun and the quiet of the bush—her watch was broken) Maureen Smales, who is alone at the hut although not alone in the settlement, no one was ever alone there—feels some change in the fabric of subconsciously identified sounds and movements that make the silence. There is a distant chuddering as of air being packed in waves of resistance against its own density. Up in the sky, yes. She is sewing the burst seam on one of her sons’ shorts, good, hard-wearing stuff from Woolworths, they were never got up in smart American-style leisure clothes bought for the sons of wealthy whites, or the bourgeois outfits of miniature gentlemen the poor blacks wasted money on.

  The sound is not the fairly familiar one of a troop-carrier or reconnaissance plane passing. She sticks the needle like a brooch through the pants and stands to gaze. The usual cloud, lying early in wait in the west to bring rain in the afternoon, has drawn a blind over the morning, fuming with suffused sun. The chuddering grows behind it, her eyes try to follow her ears. A racket of blows that shakes the sky circles and comes down at her head—the whole village is out, now, poised in its occupations or its idleness, cringing beneath the hoverer, there is even some sort of cheer, probably from children. A high ringing is produced in her ears, her body in its rib-cage is thudded with deafening vibration, invaded by a force pumping, jigging in its monstrous orgasm—the helicopter has sprung through the hot brilliant cloud just above them all, its landing gear like spread legs, battling the air with whirling scythes.

  They shriek, all of them; a woman races past Maureen laughing in terror, the baby on her back rocked amok. The whoop of their voices curves; the thrilling and terrifying thing has at once ducked up out of sight again, raising itself into the cloud. Under its belly, under the beating wings of its noise, she must have screwed up her eyes: she could not have said what colour it was, what markings it had, whether it holds saviours or murderers; and—even if she were to have identified the markings—for whom.

  July’s people run all around her. The dropsical one, shuffled from his stool, balanced on the two pillars of his useless legs, is holding his knob-kerrie against the sky in a warrior’s homage or defiance. Martha’s stance, one hand challenging dourly on her hip, is recognizable in the crowd. They are exhilarated rather than frightened; they have seen aircraft before, but never so close—the fright was more stirringly entertaining than the voice of the amplifier.

  Above yells, exclamations, discussions and laughter, she follows the scudding of the engine up there behind cloud. She is following now with a sense made up of all senses. She sees the helicopter once again, a tiny dervish dangling out of cover towards the bush. It lifts once more into cloud, makes another circle of sound-waves out of sight. And then its rutting racket changes level; slows; putters.

  She did not see it land, but she knows where it is. Nothing is different in the look of the bush, it is as always when her gaze flows with it, retreating before its own horizon. But she knows what it has taken in; in what direction and area the shuddering of the air has died away.

  She has folded the half-sewn shorts carefully, the habit of respecting the tidiness of cupboards, and hesitating when she enters the hut, places them on the bed. Apparently not satisfied with the shorts’ appearance, her palm smooths them in a forgotten caress. Then she stands for a moment while fear climbs her hand-over-hand to throttle, hold her.

  She walks out of the hut. The pace quickens, stalks past the stack of thatch and the wattle fowl-cage, jolts down the incline, leaps stones, breaks into another rhythm. She is running through the elephant grass, dodging the slaps of branches, stooping through thickets of thorn. She is running to the river and she hears them, the man’s voice and the voices of children speaking English somewhere to the left. But she makes straight for the ford, and pulling off her shoes balances and jumps from boulder to boulder, and when there are no more boulders does as she has seen done, moves out into the water like some member of a baptismal sect to be born again, and when the water rises to her waist, holds her arms (the shoes in one hand) high for balance while her thighs push swags of water before them. The water is tepid and brown and smells strongly of earth. It seems tilted; the sense of gravity has wavered. She is righted, suddenly come through onto the shallows of the other side and has clambered the cage of roots let down into the mud by the huge fig-tree, landmark of the bank she has never crossed to before. Her wet feet work into the shoes and she runs. A humpbacked scrub cow blunders away from the path she made for herself as she blundered upon it. She runs. She can hear the laboured muttering putter very clearly in the attentive silence of the bush around and ahead: the engine not switched off but idling, there. The real fantasies of the bush delude more inventively than the romantic forests of Grimm and Disney. The smell of boiled potatoes (from a vine indistinguishable to her from others) promises a kitchen, a house just the other side of the next tree. There are patches where airy knob-thorn trees stand free of under-growth and the grass and orderly clumps of Barberton daisies and drifts of nemesia belong to the artful nature of a public park. She runs: trusting herself with all the suppressed trust of a lifetime, alert, like a solitary animal at the season when animals neither seek a mate nor take care of young, existing only for their lone survival, the enemy of all that would make claims of responsibility. She can still hear the beat, beyond those trees and those, and she runs towards it. She runs.

  A Note on the Author

  Nadine Gordimer’s many novels include The Lying Days

  (her first novel), The Conservationist, joint winner of the

  Booker Prize, Burger’s Daughter, My Son’s Story,

 
None to Accompany Me, The House Gun, The Pickup and

  Get a Life. Her collections of short stories include

  Something Out There, Jump, Loot and was most recently

  the editor of the short story collection, Telling Tales.

  In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  She lives in South Africa.

  By the Same Author

  NOVELS

  The Lying Days / A World of Strangers / Occasion for Loving

  The Late Bourgeois World / A Guest of Honour

  The Conservationist / Burger’s Daughter / July’s People

  A Sport of Nature / My Son’s Story / None to Accompany Me

  The House Gun / The Pickup / Get a Life / No Time Like the Present

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Soft Voice of the Serpent / Six Feet of the Country

  Friday’s Footprint / Not for Publication

  Livingstone’s Companions

  A Soldier’s Embrace / Something Out There

  Jump / Loot / Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black / Life Times

  ESSAYS

  The Black Interpreters / On the Mines (with David Goldblatt)

  Lifetimes under Apartheid (with David Goldblatt)

  The Essential Gesture — Writing, Politics and Places (edited by Stephen Clingman)

  Writing and Being

  Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

  Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954–2008

  EDITOR, CONTRIBUTOR

  Telling Tales

  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1981

  Copyright © 1981 by Nadine Gordimer

  This electronic edition published 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.