Free July's People by Nadine Gordimer Page B

Victor had helped dig up: —See if you can find July.—
    Her child came back with his troop. They lay belly-down on their elbows on the damp ground and crowded heads blissfully over their cracking of tiny fibrous shells. —Did you find July?—
    —Mmm. There at his house.—
    —Is he coming?—
    —He says it’s all right, he’s there, you can come.—
    She sat on in the sun that crisped the skin, a hot iron passing over damp cloth. She was menstruating—since the day before, although by the calculation of the calendar left behind above the telephone it would have been a week too soon. There was another essential she had forgotten. Under her jeans she wore between her legs the wadding of rags that all the women here had to when their days came. Already she had been, with the modesty and sense of privacy that finds the appropriate expression in every community, secretly down to the river to wash a set of bloody rags. She had no thought for the risk of bilharzia as she scrubbed against a stone and watched the flow of her time, measuring off another month, curl like red smoke borne away in the passing of the river.
    —Want some?— Her youngest child still needed to share his pleasures with her.
    Red earth and bunches of raw peanuts clung to the roots of the plants.
    —If you don’t cat them all, I’ll roast the rest. With salt. Then they have some taste.—
    —Same as in the packets? In the shops?—
    —That’s right.—
    —I didn’t know those grew!—
    The little boy’s toes drummed at the earth and while he ate he hummed, as he would soon cease to do, becoming too old to find content between his lips, as he had at her nipple. He seemed to understand what the black children said; and at least had picked up the ceremonial or ritual jargon of their games, shouting out what must be equivalent of ‘Beaten you!’ ‘My turn!’ ‘Cheat!’
    —Go and say I want to see him.—
    The whole formation of children took off. She put out a hand and a black head with the feel of freshly-washed sheep-skin brushed under it. Sometimes she could coax a small child, new on its legs, to come to her, but mostly she was too unfamiliar-looking, to them, to be trusted.
    The children did not return. She thought she heard him singing, way up in the bones of his skull, the hymns he breathed while he worked at something that required repetitive, rhythmical effort, polishing or scrubbing. But when he appeared he was merely coming over to her, unhurried, on a sunny day. Nothing sullen or resentful about him; her little triumph in getting him to come turned over inside her with a throb and showed the meanness of something hidden under a stone. These sudden movements within her often changed her from persecutor to victim, with her husband, her children, anyone.
    She spoke as she did back there when domestic detail impinged upon the real concerns of her life, which could not be understood by him. But she had got to her feet. —Here are your keys.—
    For an instant his hands sketched the gesture of receivingand then were recalled to themselves and the thumb and fingers of his right hand simply hooked the bunch, with a jingle, from her fingers.
    His chin was raised, trying to sense rather than see if Bam was in the hut behind. Her silence was the answer: not back; they both knew the third one had gone off, early, to shoot some meat—a family of wart-hogs had been rashly coming to an old wallow within sight of the settlement. He stood there, his stolidity an acceptance that he could not escape her, since she was alone, they were one-to-one; hers an insinuated understanding that she had not refused to come to him but wanted them to meet where no one else would judge them. The subtlety of it was nothing new. People in the relation they had been in are used to having to interpret what is never said, between them.
    —You don’t like I must keep the keys. Isn’t it. I can see all the time, you don’t like that.—
    She began to shake her