— Aw no … not yet … Going home?—
Yes, home. Gina was at home among the chickens, hearth ashes and communal mealie-meal pots of July’s place. Bamford Smales and his wife and the chief were together a few minutes longer, standing about now, smiling, exchanging remarks about the need for rain again; thanks, and protestations of pleasure at meeting. The chief implied that he was open to complaints about July. — Everything it’s all right there. He’s doing nice, you getting food, what you want?—
It was she who smiled at July, said what had to be said. — We owe him everything.—
The two white people stepped forward, one by one, to shake the chief’s hand and those of his elders. He parted from the white man as if acknowledging an invitation. — I come to see that gun. You teach me.—
Chapter 16
In the vehicle they did not speak in front of July. It was July himself who challenged criticism, or merely explained (Maureen might be able to interpret his attitude, Bam not). — The African people is funny people. They don’t want know this nation or this nation. The country people. Only his own nation we know, each one.—
Maureen seemed to follow. — Your chief wants to be left alone. But it’s not possible.—
— He’s talking talking. Talking too much.
— Their cautious lack of response roused a kind of obstinacy in July. — You can tell me, what he can do? You tell me?—
— He told you. He’ll fight.—
— How he can fight? Did you see him fight when the government is coming, telling him he must pay tax? When they saying he must kill some his cattle? He must do this or this. He is our chief, but he doesn’t fight when the white people tell him he must do what they want—they want. Now how can he fight when the black soldiers come, they say do this or this. How can he fight? He is poor man. He is chief but poor man, he hasn’t got money. If they come over here, those what-you-call-it, the people from Soweto they bring them, they eat his mealies, they hungry, kill a cow — what he’s going do? Can’t do nothing. Talking, talking.—
The heat of their three bodies welded them together on the seat. July was driving; he took them right up almost to the door of the hut, his mother’s house that he had given them, they drew apart from one another as the wet flesh of a ripe fruit gives. Then he drove away to put the yellow bakkie in its hiding-place taking Victor, Gina and Royce along for the ride, picking up other children who ran after him as he went, part of the same gang. Daniel sat up front, he and July were side by side again. When they walked to the settlement July would have the keys of the vehicle back in his pocket.
It was the first time the Smales had had to come home to: the iron bed, the Primus, the pink glass cups and saucers in the enamel basin with its sores of rust, the tin of milk powder and the general-store packet of sugar covered with a newspaper. Living within the hut they had lost sense of it. But now it was waiting for them. Coming from the stare of the sun into the dim enclosure smelled rather than seen — old, smoky grass and earth damp with what spilled from vessels and human bodies instead of dew and rain — they scarcely made each other out. In a tin-bright angle of sunlight drawn by the slide-rule of the doorway a fowl with a bald neck was sitting on the suitcase of their possessions. Maureen read the labels to herself as if she had never seen them before. Statler-Hilton Buenos Aires Albergo San Lorenzo
Mantua Heerengracht Hotel Cape Town. Bam chased the fowl.
— Don’t lie on the bed.—
They could see each other now, blotched by dazzle. He turned only to give her a look: who says I was going to. She lit the Primus; it was the oily smell of home. They had had a friend, once detained on suspicion of working with blacks for this revolution, who burned the sweaters she had worn in prison because she couldn’t dissociate from the wool the smell of the cell in which they’d warmed her.
He turned the tuning knob of the radio and tried the aerial at every angle its swivel allowed. His fingers moved in hesitant concentration, someone feeling out, listening for the combination that would spring a lock. The aerial wavered the single antenna of an injured crayfish he had once caught at Gansbaai. She attracted his attention with a new battery held up, end to end, between thumb and forefinger. He shook his head. There is no music of the spheres, science killed that along with all other myths; there are only the sounds of chaos, roaring, rending, crackling out of which the order that is the world has been won. No peace beyond this world — not there, either. When the racket was lost a moment, only a cosmic sigh; they heard the sough of time and space, the wave poised over everything.
— Let me have a go.—
— Magic touch … — Their black box was ceded to her; but this one would not contain the record of their disaster, their crash from the suburb to the wilderness. It would only bring to them the last news, before silence, from Military Area Radio Network. Perhaps that had come already. She tried everything he had tried, and then twirled wildly. — Bloody thing. — Handed it back; he hung it on the nail where the previous occupant of the hut had hung her hoe.
In place of chaos, the sounds of July’s — the chiefs — form of order came to them. Someone droning song in rhythm with movement. The hiccuping wail of a baby being joggled on someone’s back, old voices and young shouts in the concourse that was to these people newspaper, library, archives and theatre. And from over there, always to be heard, near and far, beyond where she could still see the yellow of the bakkie under black twigs, the sound of water gouting slowly from the narrow neck of a jar — the cuckoo falcon that called, beckoned and never showed itself in the bush that had no other side.
— If only I could have heard better. Even in Portuguese I might have been able to make out if—
Her expectant face, put on to dismiss rather than express any confidence: his mouth open to speak drew in air instead, he stroked roughly from under his chin down his throat as if he couldn’t breathe.
— What was the wave-length? Did you remember? You’re sure?—
— You tried every wave-length yourself.—
— Perhaps it’s the set. We can borrow Daniel’s when they come back. The bakkie’s there; I don’t know where they’ve got to, I don’t see them. — She no longer had to worry about her children; she fed them; they knew how to look after themselves, like the black children.
He lingered about in the small space of the hut behind her, she could hear him hitting his fist into his palm as he did back there when he was talking about some building project he was hoping to be commissioned to design. Impossible to imagine what was happening in those suburban malls now, where white families ate ice-cream together on Saturday morning shopping trips, bought T-shirts stamped with their names (‘Victor’ ‘Gina’ ‘Royce’), and looked, learning about foreign parts, at photographic exhibitions whose favoured subject was black township life.
— There was that report last year — I don’t know any more, probably several years ago — United States Congress was told by their Research Service it was possible U.S. aircraft would be sent in to rescue American citizens if they were in danger. And it was mentioned — don’t you remember? — in the news the first week after we got here, I was putting up the tank… It just could be that what we heard—
— You heard, I didn’t.—
— … it just could be what that was. Pretoria, Johannesburg, United States Congress …—
She was pressing back the cuticles grown like dry cobwebs up her earth-rimmed toenails. Squatted in the doorway; Maureen who had been so at ease in her body, a dancer’s repose even if she wasn’t much as a dancer, examined herself with the obsessive attention of the confined, left to nothing but themselves. — Aircraft to rescue Americans. —