It had become impossible to talk about what was happening, back there. He and his wife listened in silence and he noted subconsciously something trivial that he could remark on when the radio was switched off. — Did you find someone to take the kittens? — They were no longer in the hut.
She got up sluggishly from the bed; she certainly had been taking a nap.
— I drowned them in a bucket of water.—
She used sometimes to answer him outlandishly, out of sarcasm, when he suggested she might do something it was beyond question — by nature and intelligence — for her to have done. Now don’t let slip to Parkinson I don’t intend to go to the meeting because I’ve no intention of voting, mmh. — Oh I’ve already had a good chat with Sandra about it, just to be sure he’ll get to hear.
This kind of repartee belonged to the deviousness natural to suburban life. In the master bedroom, sometimes it ended in brief coldness and irritation, sometimes in teasing, kisses, and love-making of a variety suggested by the opportunities of the room and its rituals — a hand between her legs while she was cleaning her teeth, the butting of his penis, seeking her from behind while she bent over the bath to swish a mixture of hot and cold water.
She was lean, rough-looking — the hair on her calves, that had always been kept shaved smooth, was growing back in an uneven nap after so many years of depilation. That she had said ‘in a bucket’: he understood that as it was meant, a piece of concrete evidence of an action duly performed.
— Oh my god. — His lips turned out in disgust, distaste, on her behalf.
She scratched efficiently at her ribs, working the shrunken T-shirt against the bones just below her shallow breasts.
— Oh my poor thing.—
She pulled the shirt over her head and shook it. To lie down was to become a trampoline for fleas. — What’re you making a fuss about. — The baring of breasts was not an intimacy but a castration of his sexuality and hers; she stood like a man stripped in a factory shower or a woman in the ablution block of an institution. — I used to take them to be spayed.—
— Well of course you took them to be spayed.—
— Obsessed with the reduction of suffering. It was all right, I suppose…. Not how to accept it, the way people do here.—
— I should damn well hope not.—
Her neck was weathered red and over-printed with dark freckles down to a half-circle bisected by a V, the limits of the T-shirt and cotton blouse which were her wardrobe. He would never have believed that pale hot neck under long hair when she was young could become her father’s neck that he remembered in a Sunday morning bowling shirt.
The tight T-shirt dragged back down her features, distorting eyes, nose and mouth. It was as if she grimaced at him, ugly; and yet she was his ‘poor thing’, dishevelled by living like this, obliged to turn her hand to all sorts of unpleasant things. — Why didn’t you get one of them to do it?—
Chapter 13
At first the women in the fields ignored her, or greeted her with the squinting unfocused smile of those who have their attention fixed on the ground. One or two — the younger ones — perhaps remarked on her to each other as they would of someone come to remark upon them — a photographer, an overseer (at certain seasons they had used to hire themselves out as weeders on white farms, being fetched by the truckload from many miles distant). She followed along, watching what it was they selected, picked and dug up — July’s mother, in particular, seemed to have a nose for where her pointed digging-stick would discover certain roots. She herself could not expect to acquire that degree of discernment but could recognize wild spinach and one or two other kinds of leaves she saw the women bend for and put in their baskets. When her hands were full, she dropped what she had garnered into one of these. Then she found herself an old plastic bag that had once contained fertilizer — people brought home whatever could be scavenged when they went to the dorp or worked on the farms — and tied it with a bit of string to hang from her shoulder, as those who did not have baskets did.
The sun brought the steamy smell of urine-wet cloth from the bundles of baby on the mothers’ backs. The women hitched up their skirts in vleis and their feet spread, ooze coming up between the toes, like the claws of marsh-birds; walking on firm ground, the coating of mud dried matt in the sun and shod them to mid-calf. She rolled her jeans high, yellow bruises and fine, purple-red ruptured blood-vessels of her thighs, blue varicose ropes behind her knees, coarse hair of her calves against the white skin showed as if she had somehow forgotten her thirty-nine years and scars of childbearing and got into the brief shorts worn by the adolescent dancer on mine property. July’s unsmiling wife was laughing; looking straight at those white legs: she did not turn away when Maureen caught her at it. Laughing: why shouldn’t she? July’s wife with those great hams outbalancing the rest of her — Maureen laughed back at her, at her small pretty tight-drawn face whose blackness was a closed quality acting upon it from within rather than a matter of pigment. Why should the white woman be ashamed to be seen in her weaknesses, blemishes, as she saw the other woman’s? For a while they worked along a donga like a team, unspokenly together, now side by side, now passing and repassing each other, closely; then July’s wife was hailed by somebody a little way off, and moved on about her business, as every woman did, individually, yet keeping the pattern of a flock of egrets, that rises and settles now here, now there, where the pickings are best.
The family ate their share of the greens with mealie meal. If he — Bam — knew she had gathered them herself, he said nothing. But when Victor demanded more greens, he answered him swiftly. — You’ve had your share. It takes a lot of effort to get them. — Turning the dry pap in her mouth she had a single throb of impulse, quickly inert again, to go over to the man and sink against, embrace him, touch someone recollected, not the one who persisted in his name, occasionally supplying meat, catching fish for people.
The news: that day the station was impossible to tune into under the hooting racket of jamming and for the first time they found themselves listening to what could only be MARNET, the Military Area Radio Network, that had been developed originally to supplement vulnerable telephone communications on the border in the Namibian war, and lately extended to the whole country. The voices were employing a code, but there were direct references to Diepkloof, the military base between Soweto and Johannesburg. The abrupt urgency of Afrikaans voices was suddenly lost; like the impulse. She watched him fiddling with the knob and trying to find the transmission again. He kept his back to her as if he were doing something private and shameful. He had switched off; and took possession of the bed.
She walked out into the vacuum of the hot afternoon without any objective, bothered by a veil of flies. Thatch, old tins, cock’s plumage glittered drably: she made for the place where the yellow bakkie was hidden, only because it was somewhere else — there was nothing belonging to her, in the vehicle, any more. Ants had raised a crust of red earth on the dead branches that once had formed a cattle-pen. With a brittle black twig she broke off the crust, grains of earth crisply welded by ants’ spit, and exposed the wood beneath bark that had been destroyed; bone-white, the wood was being eaten away, too, was smoothly scored in shallow running grooves as if by a fine chisel. She scraped crust with the aimless satisfaction of childhood, when there is nothing to do but what presents itself; wandered on; there the vehicle was, still there.