July's People

Chapter 11

Good meat, mhani? —

The old woman was at an age when people pretend not to enjoy anything, any more, as a constant reproach to those who are going to live on after them.

— When was the last time you had such good meat?—

She twitched away from a subject not worth her attention. — Meat is quickly gone. You eat it, there’s nothing again tomorrow. My house has to have a new roof, the rain comes in. And in the winter it’ll be cold. I was going to put on new grass …—

— You’ll put on your new grass.—

She made a face of calculatedly reasonable questioning, to her son.

— You’ll have your house, your new grass.—

— With them living in it. — His wife Martha was scouring with ashes an enamel pot that came packed in his luggage the leave-before-the-last. — Heyi, mhani! —

— I’ll build you a new house. You see? You worry about this business — but I’ll build you a new one.—

— They will bring trouble. I don’t mind those people — what do they matter to me? But white people bring trouble. — The woman drew a husky song from the pot, rubbing away at it, not looking at him so that she would not attract his annoyance.

He drummed out what he was always having to repeat. — What trouble? From where?—

She knew she could not say to him as she had said before: trouble with the police, the government.

He half-laughed, half-grunted; made as if to leave the two women to their goading ignorance, then turned, glancing thoughts off them like stones skimming water. — If I say go, they must go. If I say they can stay … so they stay.—

His wife persisted, as her fingers did with the daily tasks — hesitating, picking over dried beans, working the paste of ash over the pot — putting together the past from the broken pieces brought before her by the yellow bakkie. Her voice took the tone of simple curiosity. — There in town, the white woman — did she say to you you must cook this or clean that—

— Nobody else can tell me. If I say—

She was shaking her head, down, to herself; it was as if he were not there. It was habitual to address him when he was not there, he had been gone so long, her conversations with him provided question and response out of her own broodings. Sometimes he disappeared completely; she was not aware of his existence, anywhere. It was then she dictated letters to him through someone who could write better than she could (although she could read his, written in their own language, she had not had much other need to write since her three years at school and the ball-point she kept for this purpose formed words that staggered across the ruled pad): My dear husband, I think all the time of the days you were here and when you will come again. Most of the women of child-bearing age had husbands who spent their lives in those cities the women had never seen. There was a set of conventions for talking about this. The man had written or had not written, the money had arrived or was late this month, he had changed his job, he was working in ‘another place’. Was there anyone, some other woman whose man had perhaps worked there, someone to whom the name of yet another town none of the women had ever seen, was familiar? It did not so much as occur to her that it could have been possible to talk to other women about what was asked in the conversations with her husband that never took place. Not even to her man’s mother, who was old and had that in her face which showed she would know the answers; she had had a man thirty years on the mines.

Across the seasons was laid the diuturnal one of being without a man; it overlaid sowing and harvesting, rainy summers and dry winters, and at different times, although at roughly the same intervals for all, changed for each for the short season when her man came home. For that season, although she worked and lived among the others as usual, the woman was not within the same stage of the cycle maintained for all by imperatives that outdid the authority of nature. The sun rises, the moon sets; the money must come, the man must go.

His wife had the power of a whingeing obstinacy, shying away and insisting. — No, there in town. Was it the man who told you what you—

It was hardly worth answering. — You know I didn’t make the food. There was the Xhosa woman, the cook.—

— How must I know, I didn’t see her—

— Nomvula. The one they called Nora. You saw her on the photo. One Christmas. You got the photo they took of us. With the children, Gina and the boys. A coloured picture. You’ve got it. Albert brought it with the shoes I sent.—

The old woman completed the description. — The fat woman with a pink cap like this — (She cocked a hand over one eye.) — Looks as if she likes to drink.—

— Was she married?—

— I think her husband died.—

— So she didn’t have a man?—

She watched him for an answer. She saw he was thinking of something else, back there. The backyard photograph, the white man and woman and their children here and now — the concrete knowledge of these was hers but provided too scanty a trail for her to follow him by.

— There’s Bongani. The Zulu, he works as an inspector for the Cleansing Department. Dressed up in a uniform on his bicycle. He stays with Nomvula in her room.—

— They didn’t mind him living in the yard … Mnnn. And what happened to Nomvula? Where did she go now?—

He sat down on the small low bench placed inside the hut against the wall, where male strangers sat when they came to visit. The single source of light, from the doorway, axed the interior diagonally; on the one side, women, the planes of the bay of mud plaster behind them lifted into ginger-gold, richly-moted relief like the texture of their faces, on the other, the man in darkness. His hands were on his knees. They could see his fingernails and his eyes. Perhaps he had shrugged to show he didn’t know. When his wife had assumed he wasn’t going to bother to answer — and she didn’t need an answer, anyway; the Zulu was the answer that satisfied her, her further question was a distraction of others’ attention from that satisfaction — he spoke from his corner. — I don’t know where she is. What happened to her. If she reached her family in … — His voice trailed off, confused, as if he had forgotten a place-name; or could not speak it.