July's People by Nadine Gordimer Page A

face, breasts and back, then stream over her. She turned as if she were under a shower faucet. Soon her body was the same temperature as the water. She became aware of being able to see; and what she saw was like the reflection of a candle-flame behind a window-pane flowing with rain, far off. The reflection moved or the glassy ripples moved over it. But it existed—the proof was that there was a dimension between her and some element in the rain-hung darkness. Where it was, the rain must have thinned: and now she saw twin faint, needled beams, travelling. They progressed slowly, and because there was no other feature to be made out between her and them, seemed half-way up the sky. Then a sense of direction came to her, from the luminous trace: she stuck a pin where there was no map—there, in the dark and rain, was where the ruined huts were. The vehicle was creeping back. The point placed in her mind went back to darkness. The headlights were out, the engine off, in the roofless hut.
    If it were not for the rain his voice would be carrying to her across the valley, he was a talkative man, liking to run through small events again, to savour his activity, burning accumulated garden rubbish or reorganizing storage in kitchen cupboards. No hand-held light moved; he knew his way in the dark although even the embers of the cooking-fires had been quenched by the rain.
    She went in—she had kept her sopping canvas shoes on because of the dead insects—and felt her way to the dirty clothing Bam had taken off the children. She dried herself with it, put on a cardigan discovered by feel, and slept, like a drowning case in the coarse warmth of the rescuers’ blanket wrapped round her, on her car seat.

Chapter 7
     
    Her husband was pumping the Primus. Barefoot, in his wet raincoat; must have been out to pee. The morning sounds were muffled. The children had begun to cough in their sleep for the last hour or so—the same cough that one always hears from black children. The sack was lifted and she could see the silvery hatchings of rain. He poured boiling water on tea-leaves from yesterday afternoon and while waiting for the secondhand brew to strengthen took up the radio with (secretly watching him) the baffled obstinacy of a sad, intelligent primate fingering the lock on his bars … the voice sprang out bland and clear and she was at once sitting with a straight spine.
    His head was bent to the black box and his eyes caught and held hers as an admonition not to speak.… … several Sam missiles fell on the city in a rocket attack late on Friday night … Prudential Assurance Company building was the worst hit and a fly-over on the east-west freeway suffered heavy damage that has cut road communication … men of the army engineering corps working throughout the night … an attempt to take over the SABC-TV studios in Auckland Park was repulsed by the crack commando led by Colonel Mike Hoare, veteran of counter-insurgency against urban guerrillas in Zaïre and other African states … radio transmission was also interrupted but the Director of the SABC has as yet issued no statement …’
    She slid down into her blanket again. She lay there and said nothing of the vehicle that was once more where she was aware of it. Her arm thrust out and he brought her the stale hot brew in one of the pink glass cups. The distillation of tannin drew the mouth; unconsciously she made the grimace that appreciates the first swallow of a good whisky.
    —Must have been a near thing.—
    —What were you expecting to hear?—
    He was drinking his tea with both hands round the small cup. He shrugged; the strong smell of wet straw and the damp, chilly fug of the hut was sluggishly insulating.
    —‘This is Radio Azania’.—She tried it out softly.
    —Did you think that?—
    —I don’t know.—A steeple of her hands over her mouth, the third fingers butting at her nose that was blunt and greasy with sleep, blurred her voice. —But all the