July's People (15 page)

—There was that report last year—I don’t know any more, probably several years ago—United States Congress was told by their Research Service it was possible U.S. aircraft would be sent in to rescue American citizens if they were in danger.
And it was mentioned—don’t you remember?—in the news the first week after we got here, I was putting up the tank… It just could be that what we heard—

—You heard, I didn’t.—

—…it just could be what that was. Pretoria, Johannesburg, United States Congress…—

She was pressing back the cuticles grown like dry cobwebs up her earth-rimmed toenails. Squatted in the doorway; Maureen who had been so at ease in her body, a dancer’s repose even if she wasn’t much as a dancer, examined herself with the obsessive attention of the confined, left to nothing but themselves. —Aircraft to rescue
Americans.
—

—And citizens of other European nations. I remember distinctly. A man called Robson, it was his report to Congress. No, not Robson, Copson—that’s it.—

It was not necessary for her to remind him they and their children were not Americans, or Europeans of other European nations. It was not necessary for him to remind her that they
could have been
Europeans of Canadian citizenship. If all whites became the same enemies, to blacks, all whites might become ‘Europeans’ for the Americans?

She felt his eyes upon her hands picking at her toes. She stretched her legs and tucked the hands out of the way under her armpits. —What about the business of the gun?—

He came and squatted. His mouth worked half-smilingly before he spoke. —You know what I thought. I thought it was going to be something else. He was going to tell us to push off.— Anything a relief so long as it was not going to be that.

Her head turned away.

She spoke from there. —What about the gun?—

—Can you see me as a mercenary.—

Her inner gaze was directed by him, at himself. She had been asked to note someone who had just arrived, but she saw the man who had been left behind.

—Throwing South African army hand-grenades to protect some reactionary poor devil of a petty chief against the liberation of his own people.—

She took her hands from under her arms and they clapped listlessly together: oh all that. The phrases they had used back there.

—Wha’d’you think I am.— Anger began to turn in him a wheel that would not engage.

—What’ll you do if he does come. If he walks over for his lesson in marksmanship.—

—What rubbish. One shot-gun. A toy—this is bush warfare.—

—He thinks of it only as a sample, a demonstration model. There’ll be other weapons—as you said, South African hand-grenades. The last handout from the government to their homeland chiefs. So if he comes…—

Pragmatism, that’s all, she had said when they first arrived in this dump and she had reproached herself for learning ballet dancing instead of—at least—the despised
Fanagalo.
And he had said, of back there, if it’s been lies, it’s been lies. He struggled hopelessly for words that were not phrases from back there, words that would make the truth that must be forming here, out of the blacks, out of themselves. He sensed for a moment the great drama hidden in the monotonous days, as she was aware, always, of the yellow bakkie hidden in the sameness of bush. But the words would not come. They were blocked by an old vocabulary, ‘rural backwardness’, ‘counter-revolutionary pockets’, ‘failure to bring about peaceful change inevitably leading to civil war’—she knew all that, she had heard all that before it happened. And now it had happened, it was an experience that couldn’t be fore-thought. Not with the means they had satisfied themselves with. The words were not there; his mind, his anger, had no grip. —You saw he ‘let me’ drive, going there?… A treat for me. July’s pretty sure of himself these days. He doesn’t seem
to think much of his chief, anyway. You heard the way he talked.—

She blinked slowly two or three times. —I think July was talking about himself.—

—Himself? How?— Now she was actually saying something, not provoking him to give himself away in some manner he didn’t understand; he didn’t want either to slip the frail noose or tighten it on himself by the wrong reaction.

—
He
always did what whites told him. The pass office. The police. Us. How will he not do what blacks tell him, even if he has to kill his cows to feed the freedom fighters.—

—But it will come better from them.— (Some of the old phrases were real.) —For his own people. Even if they do need the help of the Cubans and Russians to bring it about.—

—So July won’t fight any Holy Wars for that old man. He didn’t murder us in our beds and he won’t be a warrior for his tribe, either.—

—Oh murder us in our beds!— Moving after her along this track and that, losing her. —You don’t think (he stopped) you’re not thinking he was a sell-out to bring us here—are you? Not that?—

—What do the blacks think? What will the freedom fighters think? Did he join the people from Soweto? He took his whites and ran. You make me laugh. You talk as if we weren’t hiding, we weren’t scared to go farther than the river?—

—Of course we’re hiding. From (his neck stiffened, his head shuddered frustration rather than shook denial)— from…temporary rage and senseless death.
He’s
hiding us.—

—He’s been mixed up with us for fifteen years. No one will ever be able to disentangle that, so long as he’s alive; is that it? A fine answer to give the blacks who are getting killed to set him free.—

—Good god! He runs the risk of getting killed himself,
for having us here! Although I don’t think he realizes, luckily…—

—Then we’d better go.—

She was looking at him as he had never seen her before, with dead eyes, triumphantly, as if he had killed her himself, expecting nothing of him. —So we’d better go, then.
You
can’t be a mercenary.
He
didn’t join his own people in town.—

The two of them were regarding—he himself was conscious of—a heavy blond man, his reddened skull wrinkled with anguish above angry eyes. —Where? Where?—

At the same instant both heard (again, strangely, the couple in the master bedroom about to be burst in upon while making love on Sunday morning) the approaching voices of their children.

But she would not let him avoid the logical conclusion of his question. She was telling him as Royce raced up, prancing, tripping and shadow-boxing one of his own heroic fantasies of adult life: —How. And how?—

T
he white woman did not understand they were going to cut grass, not gather leaves for boiling. She followed, and pointed at the old woman’s sickle, silver-black, slick as a snake’s tongue, with cowhide thongs woven round the handpiece. It had been taken down from the dark of the special hut where the wooden yoke and chains for the plough-oxen were kept. Martha had her one-year-old hump of baby on her back and on her head an enamel basin with a small machete, cold
pap
tied in a cloth, and an old orange-squash bottle filled with a pale mixture of water, powdered milk and tea. She shaped for the white woman the few Afrikaans words she could find; these included a slang catch-all brought back from the mines and cities by men of the village who were the gang labourers of poorly-educated white foremen:
Dingus
, thing, whatsisname. —
Vir die huts. Daardie dingus.
— Her hands were free, her head steady under its heavy crown, she
lifted elbows and sketched the pitch of a roof. The old woman half-closed her faded eyes and growled low and friendly affirmation. While her daughter-in-law tried to satisfy the questions of this white woman who had had to be taught the difference between a plant that even a cow knew better than to chew, and the leaves that would make her children strong, the old woman had the chance to look at her closely in the satisfying, analytical way she didn’t often get without the woman disguising herself by trying, with her smiles and gestures, to convey respect etc. as she thought this was done by black people. July had told his mother again and again, the white woman was different at home. He meant that place that had a white china room to do your business in, even he had one in the yard. She had never worked for whites—only in weeding parties on their farms, and there in the lands they didn’t tell her where to go and do it. She wouldn’t be told that by whites!

The grass was the correct height, the weather neither too damp nor too hot and dry—exactly right for cutting thatching grass, and she, who knew the best sources for all the materials she used for her brooms and her roofs, was on her way to a stretch up-river she had been watching for weeks. Since before her son brought his white people. She grinned with top lip pursed rubbery down over her empty gums and pointed a first finger as if to prod the white woman in the chest: You, yes you.

But the white woman didn’t understand she meant the grass was to thatch the house the white woman had taken from her. Martha reproached her mother-in-law in their language; yet it was true; and she could say what she liked, anyway, the woman understood nothing. The poor thing, the
nhwanyana
(July’s mother used the term,
my lady
, that had come down to her attached to any white female face, from the conquests of the past), the white woman was grinning
back to show she had taken up the joke, whatever she imagined it was…
They have money, let them go to their relatives, to other white people, if they’re in trouble
: the old woman talked as the little party went through the bush. If her daughter-in-law didn’t or wouldn’t listen, the words became simply a refrain.

—Now they have been there. He’s greeted them.—

Several days after he had taken the white people to visit the chief, July’s wife spoke to July of what she was thinking. She was not used to having him present to communicate with directly; there was always the long wait for his answering letter, a time during which she said to herself in different ways what it was she had wanted and tried to tell him in her letters. Once she sent a telegram. There had been trouble with her younger brother; fighting, and a hut burned. But the man who knew how to go to the white farm store that was also a post office said never mind, he knew what you said in telegrams, and wrote
MOTHER VERY SICK COME HOME
.

Now her man was in her hut, she was giving him his food, he was there to look at her when she said something. —The chief can give them a place in his village, then.—

When July didn’t answer at once she couldn’t wait. —Perhaps he’s going to.—

Trying to hem him in with her reasoning; she thought she was chasing a chicken? — Why should the chief do that? Who told you that?—

—Nobody told me.— After a moment: — You took them there.—

—So you yourself are the one who thinks the chief will give them a house.—

—Did you ask him?—

He scooped and balled the
pap
vigorously between his fingers
and ate a mouthful; lifted a graceful smeared hand to show he would have something to say in a moment, in a moment.

She could wait; perhaps he was trying to think of an answer to all the questions she might have for him, who had learned so much she did not know.

—You are the one who is asking him. Aren’t you? Not me. I saw, you’ve put the bundles of thatching grass outside their house—all right,
mhani
’s house, I know. But why did you do that?— He added what both knew was not the reason for his objection. —Their children are playing with it. It will all be broken and spoiled. You’ll waste your work.—

—
She
said it was time. The grass was right. She wanted to cut before the other women took the best. I can’t tell your mother she mustn’t do what she wants. I am her daughter, I must help her. Perhaps you have also forgotten some things.—

—What do you mean?—

Her head on one side again, to ward off anger, but not afraid, her wheedling cringing force. —You have to learn all their things, such a long time. When you go.—

—More than fifteen years. Yes… The first time was in 1965. But I didn’t work for them, then. I worked in that hotel, washing up in the kitchen. I had no papers, that time. All of us in the kitchen had no papers, the owner let us sleep in the store-room, he locked us in so nobody could steal and take food out.— An old story, his story; her head nodded to check each point. —That was the place that burned down, afterwards, in the winter their paraffin stove started a fire there, they couldn’t get out. God was good to me.—

He had not burned to death in the white man’s city, he had brought home from that job the money to pay her father (he had already paid the cattle). She had had her first child by then, and she became his wife. That was what happened to
her, her story; he came home every two years and each time, after he had gone, she gave birth to another child. Next year would have been the time again, but now he had brought his white people, he had come to her after less than two years and already she had not bled this month.

He looked at her, painfully, pityingly, as if by so doing to block out seeing something or someone else. He spoke with the rush of an enthusiasm there was not time to examine. —When the fighting’s over I’ll take you with me, I’ll take you back and show you, you’ll stay there with me. And the children too.—

Her chin thrust forward, mouth jaunty, eyes sliding to the corners of her lids, she seemed to be discovering herself in the eyes of other people. —Me, there! What would I do in those places.— Gasping and making scornful, tender clicks in her throat. —Can you see me in their yard! How would I know my road, who would tell me where to go?— She laughed and shivered bashfully. She made to take the food away but he put out his hand to show he was not finished, although he didn’t eat, again seeing something she could not know about; those Ndebele women who came in from the veld north of the city and crossed the streets bewilderedly under backward glances and giggles, their tall vase-shaped headdresses of clay-and-hair covered by striped hand-towels, old canvas football boots on their feet below cylinders of brass-wire anklets.

Laughter, the bashfulness sank slowly from the settling muscles of her face, and the baby boy, loosed from the pouch on her back, pulled at the objects that were her nose, her lips, her small black ears and the tight string of dirt-etched blue beads, prescribed by a tribal doctor, she was always armed with against misfortune. —After the fighting is over, perhaps you can stay here. You said the job was finished. If we get more lands and we grow more mealies…a tractor to plough…
Daniel says we’re going to get these things. We won’t have to pay tax to the government. Daniel says. You wouldn’t have to pay the whites for a licence, you could have a shop here, sell soap and matches, sugar—you know how to do it, you’ve seen the shops in town. You understand as well as the India how to buy things and bring them from town. And now you can drive. For yourself. I see those men of our people who drive big lorries for white men. But you drive for yourself.—