July's People

Chapter 4

Why do they come here? Why to us?—

His wife had accepted his dictum, when he arrived that night in a white man’s bakkie with a visitation of five white faces floating in the dark. Given up the second bed, borrowed a Primus for them; watched him, in the morning, take the beautiful cups he had once brought her from the place of his other life. His mother had given up her hut — the trees for the walls and roof-poles felled and raised by him, the mud of the walls mixed and built up by his mother and herself, that was due to have a new roof next thatching season. Both women had moved about under his bidding without argument. But that was not the end of it. He knew that would not be the end of it.

— You don’t understand. Nowhere else to go. I’ve told you.—

His wife jerked her chin in exaggerated parody of accord. She hung her head to her hunched shoulder as she had done as a girl. — White people here! Didn’t you tell us many times how they live, there. A room to sleep in, another room to eat in, another room to sit in, a room with books (she had a Bible), I don’t know how many times you told me, a room with how many books … Hundreds I think. And hot water that is made like the lights we see in the street at Vosloosdorp. All these things I’ve never seen, my children have never seen — the room for bathing — and even you, there in the yard you had a room for yourself for bathing, and you didn’t even wash your clothes in there, there was a machine in some other room for that — Now you tell me nowhere. —

She had her audience. The young girls who were always in her hut with her tittered.

— They had to get out, they had to go. People are burning those houses. Those big houses! You can’t imagine those houses. The whites are being killed in their houses. I’ve seen it — the whole thing just blow up, walls, roof.—

His wife rubbed a forefinger up and down behind her ear. — He has a gun. The children saw there’s a gun, he keeps it in the roof.—

— When they come, one gun is no use. If he could chase them away one day they would come back the next. There’s trouble! Unless you’ve been there, you can’t understand how it is.—

His mother’s hands were never still. The four fingertips of each beat ceaselessly at the ball of the thumb — the throb of an old heart exposed there, like the still-beating heart in the slit chest of a creature already dead. — White people must have their own people somewhere. Aren’t they living everywhere in this world? Germiston, Cape Town — you’ve been to many places, my son. Don’t they go anywhere they want to go? They’ve got money.—

— Everywhere is the same. They are chasing the whites out. The whites are fighting them. All those towns are the same. Where could he run with his family? His friends are also running. If he tried to go to a friend in another town, the friend wouldn’t be there. It’s true he can go where he likes. But when he gets there, he may be killed.—

They listened; with them, no one could tell if they were convinced.

— You used to write and say how you were looking after the house by yourself — feeding their dog, their cat. That time when you were even sleeping inside the house, thieves came and broke the window where you were sleeping — I don’t know, one of those rooms they have … He went away, overseas, didn’t he.—

The English word broke the cadence of their language. Overseas. The concept was as unfamiliar to his wife as the shaping of the word by her tongue, but he had carried the bags of departure, received postcards of skyscrapers and snow-covered mountains, answered telephone calls from countries where the time of day was different.

— You know about the big airport where the planes fly overseas? It wasn’t working. And before that they shot down a plane with white people who were running away.—

— Who shot? Black people? Our people? How could they do that. — The old woman was impatient with him. — I’ve seen those planes, they pass over high in the sky, you even see them go behind clouds. You can hear them after you can’t see them any more.—

— Over in Moçambique, our people have got some special kind of guns or bombs. They travel very far and very high. They’ve even got those things in Daveyton and Kwa Thema and Soweto now — right near town. They hit the plane and it burst in the air. Everyone was burned to death.—

His mother made the stylized, gobbling exclamations that both ward off disaster and attribute it to fate. — What will the white people do to us now, God must save us.—

Her son, who had seen the white woman and the three children cowered on the floor of their vehicle, led the white face behind the wheel in his footsteps, his way the only one in a wilderness, was suddenly aware of something he had not known. — They can’t do anything. Nothing to us any more.—

— White people. They are very powerful, my son. They are very clever. You will never come to the end of the things they can do.—

When he was in the company of the women it was like being in the chief’s court, where the elders sitting in judgment wander in and out and the discussion of evidence is taken up, now where they drift outside to take a breath of air or relieve themselves among their tethered horses and bicycles hitched against trees, now back in the court-room at whatever point the proceedings have moved on to. His mother went out to pluck a chicken whose neck he’d just wrung. His wife asked the young girls whether they thought she was going to do without water all day? How much longer were they going to hang about with their mouths open? One of the girls was bold but respectful: —Tatani, I want to ask, is it true you also had a room for bathing, like the one they had?—

— Oh yes, bath, white china lavatory, everything.—

They could only laugh, how could they visualize his quarters, not so big as the double garage adjoining, with in his room the nice square of worn carpet that was once in the master bedroom.

— There are eggs in the belly — it would still have given us eggs! You should have taken the white one with the broken foot, I told you. — The old woman was shouting from beyond the doorway.

— What is it she wants?—

— You killed the wrong fowl … But I don’t know what it’s all about.—

He called back. — Exactly. Mhani, that one with the bad foot is a young one. It will lay well next year, even.—

The white woman’s hand, when she stood there and offered it — the first time, touching white skin. His wife went with her mother-in-law sometimes to the dorp to hawk green mealies or the brooms the old lady made, outside the Indian store; it had happened that a white from the police post had bought from her sack of cobs, and cents had dropped from the white hand to hers. But she had never actually touched that skin before.

She fell again into the mannerism of holding her head to one side that had been bashful and that he had found so attractive, inviting him and escaping him, when she was a young girl, and that had become, in the years he was away in the city, something different, a gesture repelling, withdrawing, evasive and self-absorbed. — The face — I don’t know … not a nice, pretty face. I always thought they had beautiful dresses. And the hair, it’s so funny and ugly. What do they do to make it like that, dark bits and light bits. Like the tail of a dirty sheep. No. I didn’t think she’d be like that, a rich white woman.—

— They looked different there — you should have seen the clothes in their cupboard. And the glasses — for visitors, when they drink wine. Here they haven’t got anything — just like us.—

She sharply reproached the baby who, staggering around on legs braced wide for balance, had picked up fowl droppings and successfully conveyed the mess to its mouth. Her forefinger hooked unthinkingly round the soft membranes, awareness of the small body was still as part of her own. The man was excluded. She flicked the chalky paste off her fingers. — There’ll be no more money coming every month.—

Without his white people back there, without the big house where he worked for them, she would not be getting those letters (yes, she had been to school, he would not have married a woman who could not read their own language) that came from his other life, his other self, and provided for those who could not follow him there. Not even in dreams; not even now, when she had seen his white people.