July's People by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online Page A

alarmed at being jolted about. Just then a stick-figure danced up to the doorway and stopped dead, uncertain whether to enter. The white child threatened: —There’s Nyiko! There’s Nyiko!—
    The black child slipped into the hut and at once the two little girls were giggling behind their hands. The black one undid the towel, threw it over her back, lifted the baby and, thrusting out her own hard bottom like a camel on its knees, saddled herself with him.
    The boys saw their mother, magnanimously peace-making, was going to offer the black child one of their sausages as she left.
    Maureen held it out on the point of the penknife. Before she took the food the child brought her hands together as ifto pray, then opened them and cupped the palms in an attitude of receiving grace.
    Maureen gave her husband back his knife without wiping it. —If only ours’d pick up the good manners along with the habits of blowing their noses in their fingers and relieving themselves where they feel like it.—
    He pocketed the remark along with the knife as a sign that hostility was suspended.
    The three children were locked in an endless game of tormenting one another. Because Gina lay down on the car-seat bed they shared, the boys left their contest of floating chicken feathers on currents of air and came to edge her off onto the dirt floor. The man and woman were unable to attend to the noise and appeals to their authority from both sides—there was no distraction, even in the slum propinquity of the hut they were crowded into, from their preoccupation. It grew and battened on the racket. He lay on the bed. She sat on the stool in the doorway. Now and then she came and stood beside the bed. They looked at each other.
    —Want to lie down?—
    But that was a
non sequitur
, like the tea she made from their precious store, pumping the Primus they’d been lent.
    There was no reason why July should be expected back within any limit of time that could be fixed. She went out and gazed away over at the particular roofless hut hidden by invading trees as at the lair of some animal that has disappeared. The place looked just as it had when the vehicle had still been in there. On the bed the man kept glancing at his watch but she knew hers was a useless thing, here; yet with the deep and livid light that came flowing upon the bush from a setting sun under an inky storm-ceiling, she could not stifle a feeling of agonizing alertness. The day ending. She watched the bush; her scale pathetic, a cat at a mouse-hole, before that immensity.
    When he closed his eyes he saw the hut door-opening asthe white-heat shape from a blow-torch. He could have opened his eyes on snow, snow and the safe clumsiness of figures well-insulated in bright clothing: Canada. After five years, they would have been established there by now. Muscle by muscle, his whole big body and limbs tightened upon him in a strangle-hold. If it had not been for her; he couldn’t remember what he really felt he had wanted to do, stay or go, but she had a will that had twisted itself around him, he was split and at the same time held together by it as the wild fig-trees out there in the bush crack and bind rocks. He snatched up the radio and turned the knob through hellish furies of crackling, jungles of roaring, the high-pitched keening of monsters in the sizzling depths of an ocean. —For Christ sake!— She was back standing over him.
    He reduced the volume and continued to play up and down the length of the band.
    —There’s
nothing.
You’re only wasting the battery.—
    He swirled suddenly to a crescendo, by mistake or in malice—her head flew up—before he put the thing aside.
    —Why is it the whites who speak their languages are never people like us, they’re always the ones who have no doubt that whites are superior? If we could talk— She had the slow, tight murmur of Gina when resentful.
    —There’s nothing significant there—don’t go fishing. Not at this stage—please.