Chapter 3
A dresser made of box-wood in imitation of the kind whose prototype might have been seen in a farmer’s kitchen had shelf-edgings of fancy-cut newspaper and held the remainder of the set of pink glass cups and saucers.
July presented her to his wife. A small, black-black, closed face, and huge hams on which the woman rested on the earth floor as among cushions, turning this way and that as she took a tin kettle from the wisp of hearth ashes to pour tea, silently, over the mug an old lady held, and adjusted the feeding-bottle in the hands of a child past the age of weaning whose eyes were turning up in sleep on her own lap. She frowned appealingly under July’s chivvying voice, swayed, murmured greeting sounds.
— She say, she can be very pleased you are in her house. She can be very glad to see you, long time now, July’s people—
But she had said nothing. Maureen took her hand and then that of the old lady, who was somebody’s mother — July’s or his wife’s. The old lady wore gilt drop ear-rings and a tin brooch with red glass stones pinned her black snail-shell turban. Thin bare feet soled with ash stuck out from the layers of skirt in which she squatted. She demanded something of July, growling a clearing of the throat before each question and looking, her head cocked up, at the white woman who smiled and inclined herself in repeated greeting. There were several others, young women and half-grown girls, in the hut. His sister, wife’s sister-in-law, one of his daughters; he introduced them with a collective sweep in terms of kinship and not by name. The small child was his last-born, conceived, as all his children were, on one of his home-leaves and born in his absence. Maureen provided presents for him to send home on her behalf, at the news of each birth. And to this woman, July’s wife, never seen, never imagined, had sent toys for the children and whatever it seemed surely any woman, no matter where or how she lived, could use: a night-gown, a handbag. When July returned from leave he would bring back with him in return a woven basket as a gift from his unknown wife, his home — in one of these baskets she had carried the money from the bank. His town woman was a respectable office cleaner who wore crimplene two-piece dresses on her days off. She ironed his clothes with Maureen’s iron and chatted to Maureen when they met in the yard. The subject was usually a son being put through high school in Soweto on his mother’s earnings; it was understood July’s responsibility was to his own family, far away. The town woman had no children fathered by her lover; once had put a hand under her breasts with the gesture with which women declare themselves in conscious control of their female destiny: —It’s all finished — I’m sterilized at the clinic. — In confidence: her black, city English sophisticated in the vocabulary relevant to the kind of life led there.
It was early morning but in their hut the women were dreamy, as at the end of the day; a furzy plank of sunlight rested from a single pane-sized aperture in the walls across the profile of a young girl, the twitching, hump-knuckles of the old lady, the fat spread legs of the sated child. On an iron bedstead tidily made up with fringed plaid blankets one of the half-grown girls was plaiting the hair on the bent head of another. Perhaps they had been out since first light gathering wood or working in their fields — Maureen was aware, among them in the hut, of not knowing where she was, in time, in the order of a day as she had always known it.
Chapter 4
Why do they come here? Why to us?—
His wife had accepted his dictum, when he arrived that night in a white man’s bakkie with a visitation of five white faces floating in the dark. Given up the second bed, borrowed a Primus for them; watched him, in the morning, take the beautiful cups he had once brought her from the place of his other life. His mother had given up her hut — the trees for the walls and roof-poles felled and raised by him, the mud of the walls mixed and built up by his mother and herself, that was due to have a new roof next thatching season. Both women had moved about under his bidding without argument. But that was not the end of it. He knew that would not be the end of it.
— You don’t understand. Nowhere else to go. I’ve told you.—
His wife jerked her chin in exaggerated parody of accord. She hung her head to her hunched shoulder as she had done as a girl. — White people here! Didn’t you tell us many times how they live, there. A room to sleep in, another room to eat in, another room to sit in, a room with books (she had a Bible), I don’t know how many times you told me, a room with how many books … Hundreds I think. And hot water that is made like the lights we see in the street at Vosloosdorp. All these things I’ve never seen, my children have never seen — the room for bathing — and even you, there in the yard you had a room for yourself for bathing, and you didn’t even wash your clothes in there, there was a machine in some other room for that — Now you tell me nowhere. —
She had her audience. The young girls who were always in her hut with her tittered.
— They had to get out, they had to go. People are burning those houses. Those big houses! You can’t imagine those houses. The whites are being killed in their houses. I’ve seen it — the whole thing just blow up, walls, roof.—
His wife rubbed a forefinger up and down behind her ear. — He has a gun. The children saw there’s a gun, he keeps it in the roof.—
— When they come, one gun is no use. If he could chase them away one day they would come back the next. There’s trouble! Unless you’ve been there, you can’t understand how it is.—
His mother’s hands were never still. The four fingertips of each beat ceaselessly at the ball of the thumb — the throb of an old heart exposed there, like the still-beating heart in the slit chest of a creature already dead. — White people must have their own people somewhere. Aren’t they living everywhere in this world? Germiston, Cape Town — you’ve been to many places, my son. Don’t they go anywhere they want to go? They’ve got money.—
— Everywhere is the same. They are chasing the whites out. The whites are fighting them. All those towns are the same. Where could he run with his family? His friends are also running. If he tried to go to a friend in another town, the friend wouldn’t be there. It’s true he can go where he likes. But when he gets there, he may be killed.—
They listened; with them, no one could tell if they were convinced.
— You used to write and say how you were looking after the house by yourself — feeding their dog, their cat. That time when you were even sleeping inside the house, thieves came and broke the window where you were sleeping — I don’t know, one of those rooms they have … He went away, overseas, didn’t he.—
The English word broke the cadence of their language. Overseas. The concept was as unfamiliar to his wife as the shaping of the word by her tongue, but he had carried the bags of departure, received postcards of skyscrapers and snow-covered mountains, answered telephone calls from countries where the time of day was different.
— You know about the big airport where the planes fly overseas? It wasn’t working. And before that they shot down a plane with white people who were running away.—
— Who shot? Black people? Our people? How could they do that. — The old woman was impatient with him. — I’ve seen those planes, they pass over high in the sky, you even see them go behind clouds. You can hear them after you can’t see them any more.—
— Over in Moçambique, our people have got some special kind of guns or bombs. They travel very far and very high. They’ve even got those things in Daveyton and Kwa Thema and Soweto now — right near town. They hit the plane and it burst in the air. Everyone was burned to death.—