Jump and Other Stories

by Nadine Gordimer

  So she thought.

  He was in the kitchen when she went, wiping the slime from her panting mouth, to drink water. He always addressed her as ‘miss’—Good afternoon, miss.—He was himself filling a glass.

  She stopped where she was; sourness was in her mouth and nose, oozing towards the foreign stranger, she mustn’t go a step nearer. Shame tingled over nausea and tears. Shame heaved in her stomach, her throat opened, and she just reached the sink in time to disgorge the final remains of a pizza minced by her teeth and digestive juices, floating in beer.—Go away. Go away!—her hand flung in rejection behind her. She opened both taps to blast her shame down the drain.—Get out!—

  He was there beside her, in the disgusting stink of her, and he had wetted a dish-towel and was wiping her face, her dirty mouth, her tears. He was steadying her by the arm and sitting her down at the kitchen table. And she knew that his kind didn’t even drink, he probably never had smelled alcohol before. If it had been one of her own crowd it would have been different.

  She began to cry again. Very quietly, slowly, he put his hand on hers, taking charge of the wrist like a doctor preparing to follow the measure of a heart in a pulse-beat. Slowly—the pace was his—she quietened; she looked down, without moving her head, at the hand. Slowly, she drew her own hand from underneath, in parting.

  As she left the kitchen a few meaningless echoes of what had happened to her went back and forth—are you all right yes I’m all right are you sure yes I’m all right.

  She slept through her parents’ return and next morning said she’d had flu.

  He could no longer be an unnoticed presence in the house, outside her occupation with her work and the friends she made among the other junior employees, and her preoccupation, in her leisure, with the discothèque and cinema where the hand-holding and sex-tussles with local boys took place. He said, Good afternoon, as they saw each other approaching in the passage between the family’s quarters and his room, or couldn’t avoid coinciding at the gate of the tiny area garden where her mother’s geraniums bloomed and the empty milk bottles were set out. He didn’t say ‘miss’; it was as if the omission were assuring, Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone, although I know all about what you do, everything, I won’t talk about you among my friends—did he even have any friends? Her mother told her he worked in the kitchens of a smart restaurant—her mother had to be sure a lodger had steady pay before he could be let into the house. Vera saw other foreigners like him about, gathered loosely as if they didn’t know where to go; of course, they didn’t come to the disco and they were not part of the crowd of familiars at the cinema. They were together but looked alone. It was something noticed the way she might notice, without expecting to fathom, the strange expression of a caged animal, far from wherever it belonged.

  She owed him a signal in return for his trustworthiness. Next time they happened to meet in the house she said—I’m Vera.—

  As if he didn’t know, hadn’t heard her mother and father call her. Again he did the right thing, merely nodded politely.

  —I’ve never really caught your name.—

  —Our names are hard for you, here. Just call me Rad.— His English was stiff, pronounced syllable by syllable in a soft voice.

  —So it’s short for something?—

  —What is that?—

  —A nickname. Bob for Robert.—

  —Something like that.—

  She ended this first meeting on a new footing the only way she knew how:—Well, see you later, then—the vague dismissal used casually among her friends when no such commitment existed. But on a Sunday when she was leaving the house to wander down to see who was gathered at the pub she went up the basement steps and saw that he was in the area garden. He was reading newspapers—three or four of them stacked on the mud-plastered grass at his side. She picked up his name and used it for the first time, easily as a key turning in a greased lock.—Hullo, Rad.—

  He rose from the chair he had brought out from his room.—I hope your mother won’t mind? I wanted to ask, but she’s not at home.—

  —Oh no, not Ma, we’ve had that old chair for ages, a bit of fresh air won’t crack it up more than it is already.—

  She stood on the short path, he stood beside the old rattan chair; then sat down again so that she could walk off without giving offence—she left to her friends, he left to his reading.

  She said—I won’t tell.—

  And so it was out, what was between them alone, in the family house. And they laughed, smiled, both of them. She walked over to where he sat.—Got the day off? You work in some restaurant, don’t you, what’s it like?—

  —I’m on the evening shift today.—He stayed himself a moment, head on one side, with aloof boredom.—It’s something. Just a job. What you can get.—

  —I know. But I suppose working in a restaurant at least the food’s thrown in, as well.—

  He looked out over the railings a moment, away from her.—I don’t eat that food.—

  She began to be overcome by a strong reluctance to go through the gate, round the corner, down the road to The Mitre and the whistles and appreciative pinches which would greet her in her new flowered Bermudas, his black eyes following her all the way, although he’d be reading his papers with her forgotten. To gain time she looked at the papers. The one in his hand was English. On the others, lying there, she was confronted with a flowing script of tails and gliding flourishes, the secret of somebody else’s language. She could not go to the pub; she could not let him know that was where she was going. The deceptions that did for parents were not for him. But the fact was there was no deception: she wasn’t going to the pub, she suddenly wasn’t going.

  She sat down on the motoring section of the English newspaper he’d discarded and crossed her legs in an X from the bare round knees.—Good news from home?—

  He gestured with his foot towards the papers in his secret language; his naked foot was an intimate object, another secret.

  —From my home, no good news.—

  She understood this must be some business about politics, over there—she was in awe and ignorance of politics, nothing to do with her.—So that’s why you went away.—

  He didn’t need to answer.

  —You know, I can’t imagine going away.—

  —You don’t want to leave your friends.—

  She caught the allusion, pulled a childish face, dismissing them.—Mum and Dad… everything.—

  He nodded, as if in sympathy for her imagined loss, but made no admission of what must be his own.

  —Though I’m mad keen to travel. I mean, that’s my idea, taking this job. Seeing other places—just visiting, you know. If I make myself capable and that, I might get the chance. There’s one secretary in our offices who goes everywhere with her boss, she brings us all back souvenirs, she’s very generous.—

  —You want to see the world. But now your friends are waiting for you—

  She shook off the insistence with a laugh.—And you want to go home!—

  —No.—He looked at her with the distant expression of an adult before the innocence of a child.—Not yet.—

  The authority of his mood over hers, that had been established in the kitchen that time, was there. She was hesitant and humble rather than flirtatious when she changed the subject.—Shall we have—will you have some tea if I make it? Is it all right?—He’d never eaten in the house; perhaps the family’s food and drink were taboo for him in his religion, like the stuff he could have eaten free in the restaurant.

  He smiled.—Yes it’s all right.—And he got up and padded along behind her on his slim feet to the kitchen. As with a wipe over the clean surfaces of her mother’s sink and table, the other time in the kitchen was cleared by ordinary business about brewing tea, putting out cups. She set him to cut the gingerbread:—Go on, try it, it’s my mother’s homemade.—She watched with an anxious smile, curiosity, while his beautiful teeth broke into its crumbling softness. He nodded, gran
ting grave approval with a full mouth. She mimicked him, nodding and smiling; and, like a doe approaching a leaf, she took from his hand the fragrant slice with the semicircle marked by his teeth, and took a bite out of it.

  Vera didn’t go to the pub any more. At first they came to look for her—her chums, her mates—and nobody believed her excuses when she wouldn’t come along with them. She hung about the house on Sundays, helping her mother.—Have you had a tiff or something?—

  As she always told her bosom friends, she was lucky with her kind of mother, not strict and suspicious like some.—No, Ma. They’re okay, but it’s always the same thing, same things to say, every weekend.—

  —Well… shows you’re growing up, moving on—it’s natural. You’ll find new friends, more interesting, more your type.—

  Vera listened to hear if he was in his room or had had to go to work—his shifts at the restaurant, she had learnt from timing his presence and absences, were irregular. He was very quiet, didn’t play a radio or cassettes but she always could feel if he was there, in his room. That summer was a real summer for once; if he was off shift he would bring the old rattan chair into the garden and read, or stretch out his legs and lie back with his face lifted to the humid sun. He must be thinking of where he came from; very hot, she imagined it, desert and thickly-white cubes of houses with palm trees. She went out with a rug—nothing unusual about wanting to sunbathe in your own area garden—and chatted to him as if just because he happened to be there. She watched his eyes travelling from right to left along the scrolling print of his newspapers, and when he paused, yawned, rested his head and closed his lids against the light, could ask him about home—his home. He described streets and cities and cafés and bazaars—it wasn’t at all like her idea of desert and oases.—But there are palm trees?—

  —Yes, nightclubs, rich people’s palaces to show tourists, but there are also factories and prison camps and poor people living on a handful of beans a day.—

  She picked at the grass: I see.—Were you—were your family—do you like beans?—

  He was not to be drawn; he was never to be drawn.

  —If you know how to make them, they are good.—

  —If we get some, will you tell us how they’re cooked?—

  —I’ll make them for you.—

  So one Sunday Vera told her mother Rad, the lodger, wanted to prepare a meal for the family. Her parents were rather touched; nice, here was a delicate mark of gratitude, such a glum character, he’d never shown any sign before. Her father was prepared to put up with something that probably wouldn’t agree with him.—Different people, different ways. Maybe it’s a custom with them, when they’re taken in, like bringing a bunch of flowers.—The meal went off well. The dish was delicious and not too spicy; after all, gingerbread was spiced, too. When her father opened a bottle of beer and put it down at Rad’s place, Vera quickly lifted it away.—He doesn’t drink, Dad.—

  Graciousness called forth graciousness; Vera’s mother issued a reciprocal invitation.—You must come and have our Sunday dinner one day—my chicken with apple pie to follow.—

  But the invitation was in the same code as ‘See you later’. It was not mentioned again. One Sunday Vera shook the grass from her rug.—I’m going for a walk.—And the lodger slowly got up from his chair, put his newspaper aside, and they went through the gate. The neighbours must have seen her with him. The pair went where she led, although they were side by side, loosely, the way she’d seen young men of his kind together. They went on walking a long way, down streets and then into a park. She loved to watch people flying kites; now he was the one who watched her as she watched. It seemed to be his way of getting to know her; to know anything. It wasn’t the way of other boys—her kind—but then he was a foreigner here, there must be so much he needed to find out. Another weekend she had the idea to take a picnic. That meant an outing for the whole day. She packed apples and bread and cheese—remembering no ham—under the eyes of her mother. There was a silence between them. In it was her mother’s recognition of the accusation she, Vera, knew she ought to bring against herself: Vera was ‘chasing’ a man; this man. All her mother said was—Are you joining other friends?—She didn’t he.—No. He’s never been up the river. I thought we’d take a boat trip.—

  In time she began to miss the cinema. Without guile she asked him if he had seen this film or that; she presumed that when he was heard going out for the evening the cinema would be where he went, with friends of his—his kind—she never saw. What did they do if they didn’t go to a movie? It wouldn’t be bars, and she knew instinctively he wouldn’t be found in a disco, she couldn’t see him shaking and stomping under twitching coloured lights.

  He hadn’t seen any film she mentioned.—Won’t you come?—It happened like the first walk. He looked at her again as he had then.—D’you think so?—

  —Why ever not. Everybody goes to movies.—

  But she knew why not. She sat beside him in the theatre with solemnity. It was unlike any other time, in that familiar place of pleasure. He did not hold her hand; only that time, that time in the kitchen. They went together to the cinema regularly. The silence between her and her parents grew; her mother was like a cheerful bird whose cage had been covered. Whatever her mother and father thought, whatever they feared—nothing had happened, nothing happened until one public holiday when Vera and the lodger were both off work and they went on one of their long walks into the country (that was all they could do, he didn’t play sport, there wasn’t any activity with other young people he knew how to enjoy). On that day celebrated for a royal birthday or religious anniversary that couldn’t mean anything to him, in deep grass under profound trees he made love to Vera for the first time. He had never so much as kissed her, before, not on any evening walking home from the cinema, not when they were alone in the house and the opportunity was obvious as the discretion of the kitchen clock sounding through the empty passage, and the blind eye of the television set in the sitting-room. All that he had never done with her was begun and accomplished with unstoppable passion, summoned up as if at a mere command to himself; between this and the placing of his hand on hers in the kitchen, months before, there was nothing. Now she had the lips from which, like a doe, she had taken a morsel touched with his saliva, she had the naked body promised by the first glimpse of the naked feet. She had lost her virginity, like all her sister schoolgirls, at fourteen or fifteen, she had been fucked, half-struggling, by some awkward local in a car or a back room, once or twice. But now she was overcome, amazed, engulfed by a sensuality she had no idea was inside her, a bounty of talent unexpected and unknown as a burst of song would have been welling from one who knew she had no voice. She wept with love for this man who might never, never have come to her, never have found her from so far away. She wept because she was so afraid it might so nearly never have happened. He wiped her tears, he dressed her with the comforting resignation to her emotion a mother shows with an over-excited child.

  She didn’t hope to conceal from her mother what they were doing; she knew her mother knew. Her mother felt her gliding silently from her room down the passage to the lodger’s room, the room that still smelt of her brother, late at night, and returning very early in the morning. In the dark Vera knew every floorboard that creaked, how to avoid the swish of her pyjamas touching past a wall; at dawn saw the squinting beam of the rising sun sloped through a window that she had never known was so placed it could let in any phase of the sun’s passage across the sky. Everything was changed.

  What could her mother have said? Maybe he had different words in his language; the only ones she and her mother had wouldn’t do, weren’t meant for a situation not provided for in their lives. Do you know what you’re doing? Do you know what he is? We don’t have any objection to them, but all the same. What about your life? What about the good firm your father’s got you into? What’ll it look like, there?

  The innocent release of sensuality in the girl gave her an auth
ority that prevailed in the house. She brought him to the table for meals, now; he ate what he could. Her parents knew this presence, in the code of their kind, only as the signal by which an ‘engaged’ daughter would bring home her intended. But outwardly between Vera and her father and mother the form was kept up that his position was still that of a lodger, a lodger who had somehow become part of the household in that capacity. There was no need for him to pretend or assume any role; he never showed any kind of presumption towards their daughter, spoke to her with the same reserve that he, a stranger, showed to them. When he and the girl rose from the table to go out together it was always as if he accompanied her, without interest, at her volition.

  Because her father was a man, even if an old one and her father, he recognized the power of sensuality in a female and was defeated, intimidated by its obstinacy. He couldn’t take the whole business up with her; her mother must do that. He quarrelled with his wife over it. So she confronted their daughter. Where will it end? Both she and the girl understood: he’ll go back where he comes from, and where’ll you be? He’ll drop you when he’s had enough of what he wanted from you.

  Where would it end? Rad occasionally acknowledged her among his friends, now—it turned out he did have some friends, yes, young men like him, from his home. He and she encountered them on the street and instead of excusing himself and leaving her waiting obediently like one of those pet dogs tied up outside the supermarket, as he usually had done when he went over to speak to his friends, he took her with him and, as if remembering her presence after a minute or two of talk, interrupted himself: She’s Vera. Their greetings, the way they looked at her, made her feel that he had told them about her, after all, and she was happy. They made remarks in their own language she was sure referred to her. If she had moved on, from the pub, the disco, the parents, she was accepted, belonged somewhere else.