— And citizens of other European nations. I remember distinctly. A man called Robson, it was his report to Congress. No, not Robson, Copson — that’s it.—
It was not necessary for her to remind him they and their children were not Americans, or Europeans of other European nations. It was not necessary for him to remind her that they could have been Europeans of Canadian citizenship. If all whites became the same enemies, to blacks, all whites might become ‘Europeans’ for the Americans?
She felt his eyes upon her hands picking at her toes. She stretched her legs and tucked the hands out of the way under her armpits. — What about the business of the gun?—
He came and squatted. His mouth worked half-smilingly before he spoke. — You know what I thought. I thought it was going to be something else. He was going to tell us to push off. — Anything a relief so long as it was not going to be that.
Her head turned away.
She spoke from there. — What about the gun?—
— Can you see me as a mercenary.—
Her inner gaze was directed by him, at himself. She had been asked to note someone who had just arrived, but she saw the man who had been left behind.
— Throwing South African army hand-grenades to protect some reactionary poor devil of a petty chief against the liberation of his own people.—
She took her hands from under her arms and they clapped listlessly together: oh all that. The phrases they had used back there.
— Wha’d’you think I am. — Anger began to turn in him a wheel that would not engage.
— What’ll you do if he does come. If he walks over for his lesson in marksmanship.—
— What rubbish. One shot-gun. A toy — this is bush warfare.—
— He thinks of it only as a sample, a demonstration model. There’ll be other weapons — as you said, South African hand-grenades. The last handout from the government to their homeland chiefs. So if he comes… —
Pragmatism, that’s all, she had said when they first arrived in this dump and she had reproached herself for learning ballet dancing instead of — at least — the despised Fanagalo. And he had said, of back there, if it’s been lies, it’s been lies. He struggled hopelessly for words that were not phrases from back there, words that would make the truth that must be forming here, out of the blacks, out of themselves. He sensed for a moment the great drama hidden in the monotonous days, as she was aware, always, of the yellow bakkie hidden in the sameness of bush. But the words would not come. They were blocked by an old vocabulary, ‘rural backwardness’, ‘counter-revolutionary pockets’, ‘failure to bring about peaceful change inevitably leading to civil war’—she knew all that, she had heard all that before it happened. And now it had happened, it was an experience that couldn’t be forethought. Not with the means they had satisfied themselves with. The words were not there; his mind, his anger, had no grip. — You saw he ‘let me’ drive, going there? … A treat for me. July’s pretty sure of himself these days. He doesn’t seem to think much of his chief, anyway. You heard the way he talked.—
She blinked slowly two or three times. — I think July was talking about himself.—
— Himself? How? — Now she was actually saying something, not provoking him to give himself away in some manner he didn’t understand; he didn’t want either to slip the frail noose or tighten it on himself by the wrong reaction.
— He always did what whites told him. The pass office. The police. Us. How will he not do what blacks tell him, even if he has to kill his cows to feed the freedom fighters.—
— But it will come better from them. — (Some of the old phrases were real.) — For his own people. Even if they do need the help of the Cubans and Russians to bring it about.—
— So July won’t fight any Holy Wars for that old man. He didn’t murder us in our beds and he won’t be a warrior for his tribe, either.—
— Oh murder us in our beds! — Moving after her along this track and that, losing her. — You don’t think (he stopped) you’re not thinking he was a sell-out to bring us here — are you? Not that?—
— What do the blacks think? What will the freedom fighters think? Did he join the people from Soweto? He took his whites and ran. You make me laugh. You talk as if we weren’t hiding, we weren’t scared to go farther than the river?—
— Of course we’re hiding. From (his neck stiffened, his head shuddered frustration rather than shook denial) — from … temporary rage and senseless death. He’s hiding us.—
— He’s been mixed up with us for fifteen years. No one will ever be able to disentangle that, so long as he’s alive; is that it? A fine answer to give the blacks who are getting killed to set him free.—
— Good god! He runs the risk of getting killed himself, for having us here! Although I don’t think he realizes, luckily …—
— Then we’d better go.—
She was looking at him as he had never seen her before, with dead eyes, triumphantly, as if he had killed her himself, expecting nothing of him. — So we’d better go, then. You can’t be a mercenary. He didn’t join his own people in town.—
The two of them were regarding — he himself was conscious of — a heavy blond man, his reddened skull wrinkled with anguish above angry eyes. — Where? Where?—
At the same instant both heard (again, strangely, the couple in the master bedroom about to be burst in upon while making love on Sunday morning) the approaching voices of their children.
But she would not let him avoid the logical conclusion of his question. She was telling him as Royce raced up, prancing, tripping and shadow-boxing one of his own heroic fantasies of adult life: —How. And how?—
Chapter 17
The white woman did not understand they were going to cut grass, not gather leaves for boiling. She followed, and pointed at the old woman’s sickle, silver-black, slick as a snake’s tongue, with cowhide thongs woven round the hand-piece. It had been taken down from the dark of the special hut where the wooden yoke and chains for the plough-oxen were kept. Martha had her one-year-old hump of baby on her back and on her head an enamel basin with a small machete, cold pap tied in a cloth, and an old orange-squash bottle filled with a pale mixture of water, powdered milk and tea. She shaped for the white woman the few Afrikaans words she could find; these included a slang catch-all brought back from the mines and cities by men of the village who were the gang labourers of poorly-educated white foremen: Dingus, thing, whatsis-name. — Vir die huis. Daardie dingus. — Her hands were free, her head steady under its heavy crown, she lifted elbows and sketched the pitch of a roof. The old woman half-closed her faded eyes and growled low and friendly affirmation. While her daughter-in-law tried to satisfy the questions of this white woman who had had to be taught the difference between a plant that even a cow knew better than to chew, and the leaves that would make her children strong, the old woman had the chance to look at her closely in the satisfying, analytical way she didn’t often get without the woman disguising herself by trying, with her smiles and gestures, to convey respect etc. as she thought this was done by black people. July had told his mother again and again, the white woman was different at home. He meant that place that had a white china room to do your business in, even he had one in the yard. She had never worked for whites — only in weeding parties on their farms, and there in the lands they didn’t tell her where to go and do it. She wouldn’t be told that by whites!