July's People (4 page)
July’s wife’s hut, his own hut, the huts of three or four other families within the family, their goat-kraal, the chicken-coops made of twiggy dead branches staved into the earth in a rough criss-cross of hoops, the pig-pen enclosed by the fusion of organic and inorganic barriers—thorny aloes, battered hub-caps salvaged from wrecked cars, plates of crumbling tin, mud bricks; the hut where the farming implements were kept—these were the objectives and daily landmarks available. She moved between them neither working as others did nor able to do nothing as others did. She did have one book—a thick paperback snatched up in passing, until that moment something bought years ago and never read, perhaps it was meant for this kind of situation: Manzoni’s
I Promessi Sposi
, in translation as
The Betrothed.
She did not want to begin it because what would happen when she had read it? There was no other. Then she overcame the taboo (if she did not read, they would find a solution soon; if she did read the book, they would still be here when it was finished). She dragged the lame stool July had supplied ‘for the children’ out where she had a view of the bush and began. But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time, place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She
was
in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone’s breath fills a balloon’s shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.
They had nothing.
In their houses, there was nothing. At first. You had to stay in the dark of the hut a long while to make out what was on the walls. In the wife’s hut a wavy pattern of broad white and ochre bands. In others—she did not know whether or not she was welcome where they dipped in and out all day from dark to light like swallows—she caught a glimpse of a single painted circle, an eye or target, as she saw it. In one dwelling where she was invited to enter there was the tail of an animal and a rodent skull, dried gut, dangling from the thatch. Commonly there were very small mirrors snapping at the stray beams of light like hungry fish rising. They reflected nothing. An impression—sensation—of seeing something intricately banal, manufactured, replicated, made her turn as if someone had spoken to her from back there. It was in the hut where the yokes and traces for the plough-oxen were. She went inside again and discovered insignia, like war medals, nailed just to the left of the dark doorway. The enamel emblem’s red cross was foxed and pitted with damp, bonded with dirt to the mud and dung plaster that was slowly incorporating it. The engraved lettering on the brass arm-plaque had filled with rust. The one was a medallion of the kind presented to black miners who pass a First Aid exam on how to treat injuries likely to occur underground, the other was a black miner’s badge of rank, the highest open to him. Someone from the mines; someone had gone to the gold mines and come home with these trophies. Or they had been sent home; and where was the owner? No one lived in this hut. But someone had; had had possessions, his treasures displayed. Had gone away, or died—was forgotten or was commemorated by the evidence of these objects left, or placed, in the hut. Mine workers had been coming from out of these places for a long, long time, almost as long as the mines had existed. She read the brass arm-plaque:
BOSS BOY
.
The shift boss’s gang earn recognition and advancement. He is proud of his
BOSS BOY
; some among the succession of incumbents have been recruited again and again from the kraals, the huts, repeating the migrant worker’s nine-or eighteen-month contract for the whole period of My Jim’s own working life; on Western Areas, while his girls are growing up ambitious to be ballet dancers.
A white schoolgirl is coming across the intersection where the shops are, chewing gum and moving to the tune of summer-afternoon humming. In step beside her is a woman of the age blacks retain between youth and the time when their sturdy and comfortable breasts and backsides become leaden weight, their good thick legs slow to a stop—old age. The black woman chews gum, too; her woollen cap is over one ear and she carries on her head a school case amateurishly stencilled in blue,
MAUREEN HETHERINGTON
. When the black woman makes to move against the traffic light suddenly gone red, the white girl grabs her hand to stop her, and they continue to hold hands, loosely and easily, while waiting for the light to change. Then they caper across together. Lydia scarcely needs to put up the other hand to steady the heavy case; she does so as one jaunties the set of a hat.
The pair are to be seen going like this, over the intersection at the local shops and the short-cut through the open veld (later there was an industrial area established there, the metal box factory and the potato crisps plant) to the mine married quarters. The shift bosses’ houses are behind the recreation centre where ballet classes are held. Lydia has the back-door key of the house—shift boss My Jim’s wife works in an estate agent’s office and is out all day. Our Jim cleans the shoes and digs in the garden. Lydia has her time to herself, her housework is varied by frequent saunters to the shops where she goes to pick up a loaf, starch for the washing, or simply to meet and talk to other black people on similar errands. Maureen often bumps into her there, on her way home from school. Lydia expects her; maybe she sets out to do some shopping at the time she knows Maureen will be coming off the school bus. Once met, they are in no hurry; it is a hot time of day. Lydia sits on Maureen’s case, continuing the long conversations she was engaged in before the girl was sighted, and Maureen goes into the Greek shop to get a Coke, which they share, mouth-about, and—if she has the cash—some gum or chocolate. Lydia swings the case—it contains a blazer, gym shoes as well as a load of books—onto her head. Sometimes they giggle and are in cahoots —Don’t tell you saw, hey Lydia—(When she has come from school on the back of a boy’s bicycle instead of safely by bus.)—Darling, how can I tell? You are my true friend, isn’t it?—At other times Lydia is in a chastising, critical mood. It is directed first at ‘those people’: anyone with whom she has been wrangling over Fah-Fee bets or the complicated ethics of the ‘club’ to which she belongs, into whose funds each member pays part of her wages every month so that each in turn may have a bonus month when she is the recipient of the sum of all the others’ contributions. —That woman! The sister-in-law of Gladys, she’s holding the money, but I’m telling her, why if you holding you not paying in like everybody? Why you must get your month, but I’m short—Then the mood is turned on the girl, brooding over buried misdemeanours. —Maureen, you know your father he’s getting cross if you going lose that thing again like last time—(The battery lantern, from the camping kit in his garage workshop; she promised it as a spotlight for the school nativity play.)—Maureen, why you take the pillows from your bed, let your friends make them dirty on the grass? Then your mother she’s going shout me when she sees those marks in the washing, the dog with his feet and everything—
—Lovey, don’t worry. I’ll tell ma the dog came in and jumped on my bed. I’ll put everything back, I promise you—Hanging wheedlingly round her neck, that was lighter than the rest of her (but how was she, naked; she was very prudish about the body and the functions of the body, had never revealed herself in a stage of undress further than her nylon bloomers and bare, lifted underarms, dingy purplish). The neck smelled of clean ironing, fish-frying, and the whiffs that came up from her feet that walked and sweated in plastic-soled slippers. The plump neck had three ‘strings of pearls’, the graceful lines of a young woman; she must have been only in her late twenties or early thirties.
One afternoon a photographer took a picture of Maureen and Lydia. They saw him dancing about on bent legs to get them in focus, just there at the shops while they crossed the road. When he had taken his photographs he came up and asked them if they minded. Lydia was in command; she put her hands on her hips, without disturbing the balance of the burden on her head. —But you must send us a picture. We like to have the picture.—He promised, and aimed at them again as they went on their way. He had not written down the address, Number 20, Married Quarters, Western Areas Gold Mines, so how could they get the photograph? Years later someone showed it to Maureen Smales in a
Life
coffee-table book about the country and its policies. White
herrenvolk
attitudes and life-styles; the marvellous photograph of the white schoolgirl and the black woman with the girl’s school case on her head.
Why had Lydia carried her case?
Did the photographer know what he saw, when they crossed the road like that, together? Did the book, placing the pair in its context, give the reason she and Lydia, in their affection and ignorance, didn’t know?
At least for bam the days were roughly divided into categories of work and rest. The third category, that organized suburban invention called leisure, did not exist, except as the talking and beer-drinking that began on Saturday morning and died down into sleep and revived again, until late in the course of Sunday night. There was some sort of hymn-singing that rose out of the beery kind, some kind of circling with little flags like the green-and-white flags carried by the Zionist Church zealots to their services on vacant lots in the city—maybe a Sunday church gathering mixed up with the spontaneity of drink that sent men and women slowly dancing, each on his own turntable of dust. Maureen could recognize July’s quick voice and baritone laughter, holding the floor among country people. On their second Saturday Bam was offered and took beer with them; July intervened with a mug for him, while others drank from a clay pot, swilling over, passed round. Bam stayed as long as was polite—the men pressed drink upon him and approved, kindly teasing with leering, pretended admiration, when he seemed to relish their liquor. July strode about declaiming proprietarily an anecdote that obviously referred to this man who had been his employer, the guest and stranger.
Bam came back to the hut with something of the appropriate, slightly foolish expression of good-natured participation on his face; he hadn’t understood a word. The maize brew was soporific; there was the constant subliminal feeling between him and her that they must discuss,
talk.
How to get out of here? Where to? But he was either putting up the water-tank, or the children—the children were generally around, as the blacks’ children were always about their adults. And now he was sleepy, although for the moment the children were out of the way, fascinated by two oil-drums covered with cowhide that were being banged by dedicated young men who did not tire, only went into a lull now and then, a sleeper’s breathing changing with his level of consciousness—the soft, lazy thud from a single drumstick keeping the rhythm unbroken until it was quickened and orchestrated again.
—I caught Royce wiping his behind with a stone, this morning.—
Bam lay spread on the iron bed neither had room to turn on, shared at night. He didn’t open his eyes but his naked diaphragm sucked in with amusement, and creaked the bed. —Well, a good thing he’s acquired the technique. How long d’you think your toilet rolls will last?—
It was true that it was difficult to get the children to remember to bury the paper along with the turd; it was disgusting to find shit-smeared scraps blowing about—and being relished by the pigs, as she saw. She would have thought toilet rolls were some of the few essentials she had thought to bring. The things that had got in, bundled along (let alone the racing-car track Victor had smuggled)! She came upon a gadget for taking the dry cleaner’s tags off clothes without breaking your nails. There were other gadgets, noticed in use about the settlement, she privately recognized as belonging to her: a small knife-grinder that had been in the mine house kitchen before her own, a pair of scissors in the form of a stork with blades for beak that she actually saw in July’s hand when he reproached the old woman for trimming his baby’s toenails with a razor blade. These things were once hers, back there; he must have filched them long ago. What else, over the years? Yet he was perfectly honest. When he was cleaning the floor, and found a cent rolled there, he would put it on Bam’s bedside table. They had never locked anything, not even their liquor cupboard. If she had not happened—by what chance in a million, by what slow certain grind between the past and its retribution—to be here now, she would never have missed these things: so honesty is how much you know about anybody, that’s all.
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.