Jump and Other Stories

by Nadine Gordimer

  He fled down among the shacks. Two bare-arsed children squatting to pee jumped up and bounded from him like rats. A man lifted the sack over an aperture in tin and quickly let it fall. There were cooking pots and ashes and a tethered donkey, the scabby body of a car like the eviscerated shell of a giant beetle, lamed supermarket trolleys, mud walls, beer cans; silence. Desertion; or the vacuum created by people left behind by the passage of violence, keeping out of it, holding breath. The haphazard strips of muddy passage between whatever passed for walls were so narrow he seemed to have entered a single habitation where, unseen, people all around followed him—his breathing, his panting breath—from room to room. A white man! He felt himself only to be a white man, no other identity, no other way to be known: to pull aside a sack and say, I’m in brokerage, give his name, his bona fide address—that was nothing, these qualifications of his existence meant nothing. And then a woman appeared out of a shack that had a door.—Get inside. It’s dangerous.—A firm grip, a big butterscotch-coloured upper arm in a tight-filled short sleeve, yellow- and pink-flowered. He ducked into her doorway with a push from her in his back.

  —They terrible, those people, they’ll kill anybody. They will.—She had the strict face formed by respectability, a black woman churchgoer’s face, her eyes distant and narrowed behind butterfly-shaped spectacle frames with gilt scrolls. Other people in dimness were staring. A piece of canvas hung over what must be a square of window. Light came only from the gaps between tin walls and the roof low on his head.—You see, I run… I was just on the other side of the road, out for a run …—

  A young man who was turned away from this apparition, paring his nails, children, a stooping man in pyjama trousers and a pullover, a girl with a blanket wrapped round her body below naked shoulders, doek awry from sleep.

  He had a momentary loss of control, wanting to collapse against the woman, clutch her used big body under her apron and take the shield of her warmth against his trembling.—What’s happening—who was it—he’s dead there, in the road.—

  She spoke for everyone.—From the hostel. They come from the hostel, they come in here and kill us.—

  —I read about it.—His head wagged like a puppet’s, down, down to his chest.

  —You read about it!—She gave a short slap of a laugh.—Every night, we don’t know. They come or they don’t come—

  —Who are they?—

  —The police send them.—

  He could not say to this woman, That’s not what I read.

  —Tomorrow it can be him.—The woman uncrossed her fine arms and presented the profile of the young man.

  —Him?—

  —Yes, my son. Come and knock on the wall shouting it’s all right, call him comrade so he’ll believe, and if he doesn’t go out, break in and beat my husband, there, you see him, he’s an old man already—take my son and kill him.—

  Nothing moves a man on behalf of others so surely as danger to himself.—It was wonderful of you to open your door like that. I mean, for me. I don’t know what to say. Why him? What would make them come for your son?—

  The young man shifted abruptly, turning still more pointedly away from the apparition his mother had brought in among them.

  —My son’s in the Youth—the street committee.—

  The kind who burned government appointees’ houses, stoned buses, boycotted schools. And lived here—slowly he was making out of the dimness and his own shock what this habitation was. Its intimacy pressed around him, a mould in which his own dimensions were redefined. He took up space where the space allowed each resident must be scrupulously confined and observed. The space itself was divided in two by curtains which stretched across it, not quite drawn closed, so that he could see the double bed with a flounced green satin cover which filled one half. A table with pots and a spirit stove, a dresser with crockery, a sagging armchair into which the old man sank, a chromium-shiny radio cassette player, a girlie calendar, Good Shepherd Jesus, framed, with a gold tinsel halo, the droop of clothes hanging from nails, vague darkness of folded blankets—that was the second half. He saw now there were three children as well as the grown daughter and son; seven people lived here.

  The woman had lit the spirit stove and she gave an order, in their language, to the girl. Holding the blanket in one hand and shuffling with her knees together in modesty, the girl fetched a cup and saucer from the dresser, wiped them with a rag, put a spoon of powdered milk in the cup and, chivvied again by her mother, a spoon of tea in a jug. Like a sleep-walker. No one spoke except the woman. But he felt their awareness of him: the old man bewildered as at a visitor he hadn’t been told to expect, the children in unblinking curiosity, the young man hostile, the girl—the girl wanting to sink through the earth that was the shack’s floor; as if he were the threat, and not the marauders whose gales of anger blew about from the road, rising and fading as a wind would gust against the tin walls. The old man suddenly got up and signalled him to take the armchair.

  —Please—stay where you are, I don’t need—

  The woman brought him the cup of tea, carrying a small tin of sugar.—No, no, sit, sit. You see what this place is like, the rain pours in, you see how we have to try and stuff around the tin with plastic, but we can still greet with a chair.—

  While he drank the paraffin-tasting tea she stood above him admonishingly.—You must keep away from here.—

  —I don’t usually come so far, it was just only this morning, and I was right on the other side of the main road, there was no one… it happened, I got in the way.—

  She pinched her lips between her teeth and shook her head at foolishness.—What do you want to come near this place for.—

  Don’t take any chances keep away from the main road— his wife, when he ran sometimes before going to bed at night, possessive, not wanting him to do anything that excluded her.

  —I can rather go to my home there in Lebowa, but how can we go, he’s got a job in town, he’s the attendant at underground parking, you’ll see him there by the chain where the cars come in to go down under the building. He’s too old to stay here now alone.—

  The baying from the road swerved away out of hearing. Morning sounds, of coughing, wailing babies, and the drumming of water on tin containers, were released. He stood up and put the cup down carefully on the table.

  —Wait.—She turned and said something to the young man. He answered with the smouldering obstinacy of adolescence. She spoke once more, and he put his head out of the door. All held the exact position in which the narrow stream of morning sunlight found them; the boy slipped out and closed them into dimness behind him. The woman did not speak while he was away. Darkness danced with the after-vision of the boy’s profile against glare; the waiting was the first atmosphere shared with the one to whom refuge had been given. He could hear them breathing as he breathed.

  The son came back surly and said nothing. His mother went up to challenge him face to face. And he answered in monosyllables she drew from him.

  —It’s all right now. But you like to run, so run.—He felt she was teasing him, in the relief of tension. But she would not presume to laugh with a white man, her matronly dignity was remote as ever.

  He shook hands with the old man, thanking him, thanking them all, awkwardly, effusively—no response, as he included the children, the son and daughter—hearing his own voice as if he were talking to himself.

  He opened the door. With crossed arms, she contemplated him.—God bless you.—

  The telling of it welled up in his mouth like saliva; he was on the right side, running home to tell what had happened to him. He swallowed and swallowed in urgency, unable to get there fast enough. Now and then his head tossed as he ran; in disbelief. All so quick. A good pace, quiet and even on the soft tarmac, not a soul in sight, and before you have the time to take breath—to prepare, to decide what to do—it happens. Suddenly, this was sensational. That’s how it will happen, always happens everywhere! Keep away. They came over,
at him, not after him, no, but making him join them. At first he didn’t know it, but he was racing with them after blood, after the one who was to lie dying in the road. That’s what it really means to be caught up, not to know what you are doing, not to be able to stop, say no!—that awful unimagined state that has been with you all the time. And he had nothing to give the woman, the old man; when he ran, he kept on him only a few silver coins along with his house key in the minute pocket which, like the cushioned pump action of their soles, was a feature of his shoes. Could hardly tip her coins. But if he went back, another time, with say, a hundred rands, fifty rands, would he ever find the shack among so many? Should have asked her where she worked, obviously she must be a domestic or something like that, so that he could have rewarded her properly, found her at her place of employment. Where was it the husband held one of those chains you see before the ramp of a firm’s underground car park? Had she named the street? How shit-scared he must have been (he jeered) not to take in properly what the woman said! She probably saved his life; he felt the euphoria of survival. It lasted through the pacing of half a block. A car with men in golf caps, going to tee off early, passed him, and several joggers, just up, approached and went by with a comradely lift of the hand; he felt that his experience must blaze in his face if only they had known how to look, if only they had learnt.

  But don’t exaggerate.

  Had his life really been in danger? He could have been killed by a blow to get him out of the way, yes, that sledgehammer—it might have struck a glancing blow. The butcher’s knife, cleaver, whatever the horrible thing was with its sword-point and that woven bracelet like the pretty mats they make and sell on the streets, it could scalp you, open your throat with one swing. But they didn’t even seem to see him. They saw only the one they were after, and it wasn’t him. Under the rise and fall of his feet on the grassy suburban pavement blood drew its pattern on tarmac.

  Who knew whether she was telling the truth when she said it was the police who sent them to make trouble?

  He read the papers, for all he knew it could have been Inkatha murdering someone from the ANC, it could have been people from the street committees she said the boy belonged to, out to get a local councillor regarded as a government stooge, it could have been ANC people avenging themselves on a police informer. He didn’t know how to read the signs of their particular cause as someone like her would from the rags they had tied round their heads or the kind of weapons they’d improvised for themselves, the cries they chanted. He had to believe her, whatever she’d chosen to tell him. Whatever side she was on—god knows, did she know herself, shut in that hovel, trying to stay alive—she had opened her door and taken him in.

  Why?

  Why should she have?

  God bless you.

  Out of Christian caritas? Love—that variety? But he was not welcome in the hovel, she had kept the distaste, the resentment, the unease at his invasion at bay, but herself had little time for his foolish blundering. What do you want to come near this place for. He heard something else: Is there nowhere you think you can’t go, does even this rubbish dump belong to you if you need to come hiding here, saving your skin. And he had shamefully wanted to fling himself upon her, safe, safe, reassured, hidden from the sound and sight of blows and blood as he could be only by one who belonged to the people who produced the murderers and was not a murderer.

  As he came level with the security cage of the electricity sub-station, the take-away, and then the garage and the houses prefiguring his own, the need to tell began to subside inside him with the slowing of his heartbeat. He heard himself describing his amazement, his shock, even (disarmingly honest confession) his shit-scaredness, enjoying the tears (dread of loss) in the eyes of his wife, recounting the humble goodness of the unknown woman who had put out her round butterscotch-coloured arm and pulled him from danger, heard himself describing the crowded deprivation of the shack where too few possessions were too many for it to hold, the bed curtained for some attempt at the altar of privacy; the piously sentimental conclusion of the blessing, as he was restored to come home for breakfast. The urge to tell buried itself where no one could get it out of him because he would never understand how to tell; how to get it all straight.

  —A bit excessive, isn’t it? Exhausting yourself—His wife was half-reproachful, half-amused at the sight of shining runnels on his face and his mouth parted the better to breathe. But she was trailing her dressing-gown, barefoot, only just out of bed and she certainly had no idea how early he had left or how long he had been absent while the house slept. Over her cereal his daughter was murmuring to a paper doll in one of the imaginary exchanges of childhood, he could hear the boys racing about in the garden; each day without fingerprints, for them.

  He drank a glass of juice, and another, of water.—I’ll eat later.—

  —I should think so! Go and lie down for a while. Are you trying to give yourself a heart attack? What kind of marathon is this. How far have you been today, anyway?—

  —I don’t keep track.—

  —Yes, that’s evident, my darling! You don’t.—

  In the bedroom the exercise bicycle, going nowhere.

  In brokerage, her darling, resident at this address. He took off his running shoes and threw his shirt on the carpet. He stank of the same sweat as those he was caught up among within a pursuit he did not understand.

  The unmade bed was blissful. Her lilac-patterned blue silk curtains were still drawn shut but the windows were open and the cloth undulated with a breeze that touched his moist breast-hair with a light hand. He closed his eyes. Some extremely faint, high-pitched, minute sound made timid entry at the edge of darkness; he rubbed his ear, but it did not cease. Longing to sleep, he tried to let the sound sink away into the tide of his blood, his breath. If he opened his eyes and was distracted by the impressions of the room—the dressing-table with the painted porcelain hand where her necklaces and ear-rings hung, the open wardrobe with his ties dangling thick on a rack, a red rose tripled in the angle of mirrors, his briefcase abandoned for the weekend on the chaise-longue, the exercise bicycle—he heard the sound only by straining to. But the moment he was in darkness it was there again: plaintive, feeble, finger-nail scratch of sound. He staggered up and went slowly about the room in search of the source like a blind man relying on one sense alone. It was behind a wall somewhere, penetrating the closed space of his head from some other closed space. A bird. A trapped bird. He narrowed the source; the cheeping came from a drain-pipe outside the window.

  His bare feet slapping flat-footed with fatigue, he slumped back to the breakfast table.—There’s a bird trapped in the drain-pipe outside the bedroom.—

  —So the kids told me.—

  —Well let them take the ladder and get it out.—

  —It must be a chick from the nest those mynahs built under the eaves. Fell into the gutter and then down the pipe, so it’s stuck—what can the boys do?—

  —So what’s to be done about it?—

  —Can’t exactly call the fire brigade. Poor little thing. Just wait for it to die.—

  Back in the room, on the bed, he listened. Eyes closed. Every time the sound paused he had to wait for it to begin again. Die. It would not die. In another darkness the most insignificant of fragments of life cried out, kept crying out. He jumped from the bed and burst through the house, going after her, bellowing, his hands palsied with rage.—Get the bloody thing out, can’t you! Push up a pole, take the ladder, pull down the drain-pipe, for Christ’ sake!—

  She stared at him, distancing herself from this exhibition.

  —What do you expect of little boys? I won’t have them break their necks. Do it then! You do it. Do it if you can. You’re so athletic.—

  Amnesty

  When we heard he was released I ran all over the farm and through the fence to our people on the next farm to tell everybody. I only saw afterwards I’d torn my dress on the barbed wire, and there was a scratch, with blood, on
my shoulder.

  He went away from this place nine years ago, signed up to work in town with what they call a construction company—building glass walls up to the sky. For the first two years he came home for the weekend once a month and two weeks at Christmas; that was when he asked my father for me. And he began to pay. He and I thought that in three years he would have paid enough for us to get married. But then he started wearing that T-shirt, he told us he’d joined the union, he told us about the strike, how he was one of the men who went to talk to the bosses because some others had been laid off after the strike. He’s always been good at talking, even in English—he was the best at the farm school, he used to read the newspapers the Indian wraps soap and sugar in when you buy at the store.

  There was trouble at the hostel where he had a bed, and riots over paying rent in the townships and he told me—just me, not the old ones—that wherever people were fighting against the way we are treated they were doing it for all of us, on the farms as well as the towns, and the unions were with them, he was with them, making speeches, marching. The third year, we heard he was in prison. Instead of getting married. We didn’t know where to find him, until he went on trial. The case was heard in a town far away. I couldn’t go often to the court because by that time I had passed my Standard 8 and I was working in the farm school. Also my parents were short of money. Two of my brothers who had gone away to work in town didn’t send home; I suppose they lived with girl-friends and had to buy things for them. My father and other brother work here for the Boer and the pay is very small, we have two goats, a few cows we’re allowed to graze, and a patch of land where my mother can grow vegetables. No cash from that.

  When I saw him in the court he looked beautiful in a blue suit with a striped shirt and brown tie. All the accused—his comrades, he said—were well-dressed. The union bought the clothes so that the judge and the prosecutor would know they weren’t dealing with stupid yes-baas black men who didn’t know their rights. These things and everything else about the court and trial he explained to me when I was allowed to visit him in jail. Our little girl was born while the trial went on and when I brought the baby to court the first time to show him, his comrades hugged him and then hugged me across the barrier of the prisoners’ dock and they had clubbed together to give me some money as a present for the baby. He chose the name for her, Inkululeko.