Authors: Nadine Gordimer
Fifteen years
your boy
you satisfy
She walked away and sat on a mud ruin, sending her gaze far from them—from him, from her—over the grey and green bush, a layer of cumulus seen from a jet plane between two continents, where crossed date-lines eliminate time and there are no horizons.
The clink and wrench of tools on metal was taken up against the single continuous note of the cicadas. Her broken nails—only the left thumbnail, always hornier and harder than the rest, retained semblance of the oval it was kept to back there—could not score the earth wall. When she lifted and looked at her palms they were stippled with the pressure of the grains but carried none with them; in the veld round the mine, she had stubbed her toes again and again on the same hard dark earth, bonded into anthills. She got up and went to where he had dragged the exhaust pipe from the bakkie and was tinkering with it between his spread legs.
He had never been any good with mechanical things.
Look at the pliers he was using. Even she could see they were too small to grip properly.
And he was approaching the task from the wrong angle.
The pipe should be the other way up. Bam remarked how, if July packed the car, the suitcases were placed upside down, standing on their lids. She wouldn’t have Bam say anything to him, offend his pride—he was so highly intelligent in other ways.
He persisted with pliers and screwdriver; got no message from the awkward stress between metal and his fingers. He never had; what problems with the lawn mower, half- dismantled, and left in the yard until Bam came home.
Oh not that way. Even a woman can tell that.
Her presence conveyed all this to him, in their silence both heard, knew from what had been unspoken in their past.
She said it. —You’ve never been able to fix machines. Get Bam to do it. Ask him.—
He didn’t answer. He didn’t know ‘Bam’, a white man from whom he had taken the vehicle; like her, he knew someone left behind back there, the master who would put together the pieces of the lawn mower when he came home. But he silenced her: — Yesterday night someone’s come.—
The whip cracked over her head. Deep breaths slowly pumped her chest; she was aware of the pulse showing in her small, flat, left breast under the T-shirt: fear, in there. —Police? Who came?—
He left her to it a moment. —Someone there from the chief.—
Relief made her impatient. —Well that’s all right, July, isn’t it—he knows you. I mean he must know you’ve got somebody here.—
—He know who is it me… He send someone ask who I’m keep in my house. Someone say you must come there to the chief’s place, I must show him. Always when people is coming somewhere, they must go to the chief, ask him.—
—Ask him what?—
—Ask him nice, they can stay in his village.—
—I thought you said this is your place, everybody knows it’s your place, you can do what you like. You’ve been saying that since we arrived. A hundred times.—
—Yes, I’m say that.
My
place it’s here. But all people here, all villages, it’s the chief’s. If he’s sending someone ask me this or this, I must do. Isn’t it. If he’s saying I must come, I must come. That is our law.—
—Why didn’t you tell us before, if the polite thing—if it’s nice to go and see the chief?—
He looked up: her dirty feet, her thin face from which the hair was drawn back in a rubber band. The colour had worn off her jeans along her thighs and fly. —Now I’m tell you.—
—When?—
He gestured; in his own time. —Tomorrow.—
—Bam can go with you.—
He was carrying on with his repair. —You, master, your children. All is going.—
She was unsteady with something that was not anger but a struggle: her inability to enter into a relation of subservience with him that she had never had with Bam. Leave it, she said of the vehicle, as she had said of her lawn mower. —Leave it. He’ll come and fix it.—
She started off towards the settlement. On the descent she turned, against the sun a moment, as if she would call back. Then she came purposefully to where she had stood before. They were near each other. Her eyes hooded by her hand, his head under the vehicle, neither could see the other’s face. She said what nobody else should hear. —You don’t have to be afraid. He won’t steal it from you.—
B
am rose from the bed like a man who has fallen asleep on the couch in his office when he was supposed to be working.
—It’s a question of courtesy, apparently. I don’t think there’s anything sinister. Paying respects to the chief.—
He was surly at feeling ridiculous. The haversack that was his pillow had made a deep crease on one cheek. His unused voice snagged on phlegm. —Ours is hardly a state visit here.—
—Anyway, we have to go. I don’t know why he didn’t say so before.—
—Didn’t you ask?—
—He wasn’t prepared to be forthcoming. In a bad mood.—
—What’s the matter?—
She had picked up their water-bottle as she came in and
was gulping straight from the neck between speaking. Her mouth was wet, she grinned with the voluptuousness of thirst quenched. —He’s afraid I’ll tell about his town woman.—
—He’s what?—
—Because I’ve got friendly with Martha—the wife—you know. Well
friendly
, hardly—we exchange a few words in the fields, she can speak a bit of Afrikaans, I’ve found out.—
—Oh, his Ellen. But what makes him think you would?—
She looked at this half-asleep man who did not know. She spoke violently, if not to him. —It’s rubbish. Don’t let’s transpose our suburban adulteries. His wife knew nothing else about him, there, either.—
Bam tore off a length from one of the toilet rolls she had not forgotten to provide, and went out into the bush. He left the smell of his sweaty sleep behind him; she had not known, back there, what his smell was (the sweat of love-making is different, and mutual). Showers and baths kept away, for both of them, the possibility of knowing in this kind of way. She had not known herself; the odours that could be secreted by her own body. There were no windows in the mud walls to open wide and let out the sour smell of this man. The flesh she had caressed with her tongue so many times in bed—all the time it had been a substance that produced this. She made a cooking-fire outside and the smoke was sweet, a thorny, perfumed wood cracking to release it. The others—Martha—were wise to keep the little hearth-fire alive always in the middle of the huts. Only those still thinking as if they were living with bathrooms
en suite
would have decided, civilizedly, the custom was unhygienic and too hot.
In the morning they were ready to go. In clean, un-ironed clothes they were shabbier than July and Daniel; Maureen would not attempt to use one of the old flat-irons, heated in
the fire, with which the women made a perfect line of fold down the legs of frayed and ragged trousers. She was talkative, joking affectionately with the children, smiling, over their remarks, complicity with him—Bam; like she used to be when they were off on a family outing, to the drive-in cinema or a picnic. They had been shut up in the vast bush that surrounded them for more than three weeks: any move into it was an occasion. He himself felt an urge to shave; he did so irregularly, now. Even the prisoner, when the day comes for him to face the dreaded charge in court, probably is excited by being piled into the Black Maria for the drive along city streets scented and glimpsed behind steel mesh; Bam had seen the fingers sticking through it, while passing prison vans in his car, back there.
He had in his breast not dread—a lump of certainty. The chief wanted them to move on; the three children running in and out the hut with their childish sensationalism, their plaints, their brief ecstasies, his wife knocking a nail into her sandal with a stone, and he, shaving outside where there was light. Would tell them to go. What business of the chief’s to tell them where? He had not asked them to come here. A wide arc of the hand: plenty place to go. And this was not
their
custom, but the civilized one; when a white farmer sold up, or died, the next owner would simply say to the black labourers living and working on the land, born there: go.
He said nothing of this certainty to her not because of any wish not to alarm her—the male chivalry of the suburbs had no right to keep her in ignorance of what she had to fear and it could not defend her against—but because he did not know to whom to speak these days, when he spoke to her. ‘Maureen’. ‘His wife’. The daughter of the nice old fellow who had worked underground all his life and talked of the stopes of Number 4 Shaft, the heat in Number 6, the ‘bad luck’ his boys felt (long before he lost his finger there, in that section
of Number 4 where the kibble caught him), as a man talks fondly of the features of the town in which he grew up. The girl in leotards teaching modern dance to blacks at night-class, under the eyes of her architect boy-friend with his social conscience. The consort clients meant when they said: And we’d so much like you and your wife to come to dinner. The woman whose line of pelvis, shifting backside, laugh among other people sometimes suddenly became strongly attractive again after fifteen years; that same woman familiar as a cup on the kitchen shelf. The woman to whom he was ‘my husband’. The other half in collusion, one for purposes of income tax, one to provide an audience at school sports, one in those moments when, not looking at each other, without physical contact or words, they clasped together against whatever threatened, in the nature of menace there was back there—professional jealousy, political reactionism, race prejudice, the wine-tasting temptation of possessions.
Her. Not ‘Maureen’. Not ‘his wife’. The presence in the mud hut, mute with an activity of being, of sense of self he could not follow because here there were no familiar areas in which it could be visualized moving, no familiar entities that could be shaping it. With ‘her’ there was no undersurface of recognition; only moments of finding each other out. For the children she chose to appear as ‘their mother’, ‘his wife’, this morning. But she was no one to whom he could say that the chief was going to tell them to go. He had no idea how she would deal with his certainty. There was no precedent to go on, with her. And he himself. How to deal with it. How to accept, explain—to anyone: after all these days when his purpose (his male dignity put to the test by ‘Maureen’, ‘his wife’, Victor, Gina, Royce, who were living on mealie-meal) had been how to get away—now it was how to stay.
Daniel was surely unnecessary but he was of the party; neither he nor she suggested the young man should be left behind.
The placing of the children in the bakkie had to be rearranged several times before everyone was satisfied. July did it, as he used to do the suitcases. The children obeyed him, anyway, although he made none of the parents’ attempts at fairness, he openly favoured Royce. Daniel got into the back with them and at once was claimed in rivalry as a playmate. Gina had wanted to bring Nyiko along; she took him of right, as a substitute, yelled in his own language, which she was learning in the form of ‘private talk’ between Nyiko and herself, He’s
my
friend, mine!
Maureen opted out of the children’s wrangle and settled herself in the middle of the front seat, where she would travel between driver and second passenger.
The door was open on the driver’s side. He went round to the other but July was there before him and got in. There was a moment’s pause but July was not looking his way. He went under their eyes—Maureen, July—past the hood of the vehicle and climbed in behind the steering-wheel. The rim had been adorned with a plastic clip-on cover printed with a leopard-skin pattern. That couldn’t have come from the Indian store. More likely a garage ‘boutique’ somewhere. (He slid a glance, half-smile, to her; she stared round abruptly at his profile: what did he want?)
Maybe July, like Maureen, had taken to looting.
July signalled, his arm raised, fingers of the hand folded together in a goose’s head, jabbing: straight on, straight on. The vehicle followed cattle tracks. Thorns screeched across the windows. Cows with long, deformed horns drew together to watch the yellow object approach and July wound down the window and put out his arm to bang a warning with the flat of his hand on the body-work. The vehicle passed huts where people were doing what they did where the passengers had come from. The same endless dragging of wood, chopping of wood, for the same fires; the same backsides bent at
washing, squatting picking over maize; the same babies staggering towards mastery of their legs among the old slowly losing it. An acceptance that produced restless fear in anyone unused to living so close to the life cycle, accustomed to the powerful distractions of the intermediary or transcendent—the ‘new life’ of each personal achievement, of political change.
People looked up at the load in the bakkie with faces of those seeing for themselves something they had heard about. Once or twice July called out a greeting.
—No main roads, eh, I hope.—
—Never!— July laughed. —We are coming now-now.—
The vehicle slowed over the bare grazed ground that marked each settlement; they were again among a few huts, fences made of rubbish, green scrolls of pumpkin patches. Half-turns to right and left were ordered; right-angles belong back there, with street-signs and numbers. Even the bakkie had some difficulty negotiating the gullies in the public way.
—Slow slow.—
—This is it?—
July spoke with a dreamy reassuring tolerance of others’ nerves. —We just going stop that place under the tree. Just wait little bit there by that building there. Over there.—
T
hey sat in the vehicle.
He read in her silence an old expectation—didn’t apply any more—that he would ask the man to give account of his actions: July had jumped down and shut the door on anyone who thought to follow. He would scarcely be needing to ask the way; was this perhaps the chief’s house?
To them, a church or schoolhouse—the kind of utility structure, a ‘building’ rather than a large hut by virtue of its brick construction and rectangular shape, about which Bam had once presented a paper (
Needs and Means in Rural African Architecture
). Not every community could afford the tin steeple or peak-roofed porch entrance early missionaries had decreed—apparently God couldn’t live in a black man’s round house. The place had a tin roof and two pairs of windows with cardboard patching broken panes. There was a length of angle-iron hanging from a tree—the usual substitute
for a church- or school-bell, struck when it was time for children or congregation to assemble. But no cross anywhere, and instead of the dust patch with rough-dressed goal posts that was every school’s sports facilities, there was this grassy open space, with hitching posts under two trees of ceremonial size and dignity that had been spared any loppings for firewood. Three horses tied up; a man lay on his back splattered by the shade of the tree his shoulders rose against. Daniel must have brought a radio with him; the heavy beat and plea of pop music swarmed out from the back of the vehicle.