Bam rigged up a spit. Lacking herbs, onion or pepper — only the salt Maureen massaged over the firm skin — the meat was a feast never tasted before. They and their children had not eaten wart-hog, and they had never before gone two weeks without meat. The incense of roasting flesh — there was not much fat, only the domestic swine runs to that — rose from every cooking-fire. There were dog-fights roused by the mere smell of it. The half-wild, half-craven cats clamoured incessantly on the periphery of Maureen’s preparations. She squatted, carefully basting the carcass with the juices it gave off into an old powdered-milk tin she held, a stick’s length away from her, among the flames. Sweat and smoke swam across her vision and now and then she staggered up for a respite, laughing at herself, while Bam took over.
They had not known that meat can be intoxicating. Eating animated them in the way they attributed to wine, among friends, around a table. Bam sang a comic song in Afrikaans for Royce. — Again! Again! — Gina wavered through a lullaby she had learnt from her companions, in their language. Victor became a raconteur, past, present and distance resolved in the best tradition of anecdote: —You know what we do at school? On Friday when the big boys go to cadets, and they’re not there to boss us around in the playground—
There were drunken, giggling accusations of boasting, lying; and swaggering denials. The children made the grown-ups laugh. Royce hummed and sucked on the pipe-stem of a rib-bone; was almost asleep. Carried off in a state of unprotesting confusion to be bedded-down, he mumbled with content. — There’s no school tomorrow, is there? — It was what he would ask, sometimes, on a Friday evening, when he was allowed to stay up late.
They had not made love since the vehicle had taken them away. Unthinkable, living and sleeping with the three children there in the hut. A place with a piece of sacking for a door. Lack of privacy killed desire; if there had been any to feel — but the preoccupation with daily survival, so strange to them, probably had crowded that out anyway. Tension between them took the form of the expectation of hearing a burst of martial music when they turned on the radio. It subdued into the awkward sense of disbelief, foreboding, and immediate salvation (lucky to be alive; even here) that came from the announcement of the battle for the city that was continuing, back there.
They were conscious of the smell of grease and meat clinging to their fingers. It was difficult to balance, in the space each kept to of the car seats they shared, without folding elbows and resting hands near one’s face. They made love, wrestling together with deep resonance coming to each through the other’s body, in the presence of their children breathing close round them and the nightly intimacy of cockroaches, crickets and mice feeling-out the darkness of the hut; of the sleeping settlement; of the bush.
In the morning he had a moment of hallucinatory horror when he saw the blood of the pig on his penis — then understood it was hers.
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.—