Jump and Other Stories

by Nadine Gordimer

  There will be an inquiry; there had better be, to stop the assumption of yet another case of brutality against farm workers, although there’s nothing in doubt—an accident, and all the facts fully admitted by Van der Vyver. He made a statement when he arrived at the police station with the dead man in his bakkie. Captain Beetge knows him well, of course; he gave him brandy. He was shaking, this big, calm, clever son of Willem Van der Vyver, who inherited the old man’s best farm. The black was stone dead, nothing to be done for him. Beetge will not tell anyone that after the brandy Van der Vyver wept. He sobbed, snot running onto his hands, like a dirty kid. The Captain was ashamed, for him, and walked out to give him a chance to recover himself.

  Marais Van der Vyver left his house at three in the afternoon to cull a buck from the family of kudu he protects in the bush areas of his farm. He is interested in wildlife and sees it as the farmers’ sacred duty to raise game as well as cattle. As usual, he called at his shed workshop to pick up Lucas, a twenty-year-old farmhand who had shown mechanical aptitude and whom Van der Vyver himself had taught to maintain tractors and other farm machinery. He hooted, and Lucas followed the familiar routine, jumping onto the back of the truck. He liked to travel standing up there, spotting game before his employer did. He would lean forward, braced against the cab below him.

  Van der Vyver had a rifle and 300 ammunition beside him in the cab. The rifle was one of his father’s, because his own was at the gunsmith’s in town. Since his father died (Beetge’s sergeant wrote ‘passed on’) no one had used the rifle and so when he took it from a cupboard he was sure it was not loaded. His father had never allowed a loaded gun in the house; he himself had been taught since childhood never to ride with a loaded weapon in a vehicle. But this gun was loaded. On a dirt track, Lucas thumped his fist on the cab roof three times to signal: look left. Having seen the white-ripple-marked flank of a kudu, and its fine horns raking through disguising bush, Van der Vyver drove rather fast over a pot-hole. The jolt fired the rifle. Upright, it was pointing straight through the cab roof at the head of Lucas. The bullet pierced the roof and entered Lucas’s brain by way of his throat.

  That is the statement of what happened. Although a man of such standing in the district, Van der Vyver had to go through the ritual of swearing that it was the truth. It has gone on record, and will be there in the archive of the local police station as long as Van der Vyver lives, and beyond that, through the lives of his children, Magnus, Helena and Karel—unless things in the country get worse, the example of black mobs in the towns spreads to the rural areas and the place is burned down as many urban police stations have been. Because nothing the government can do will appease the agitators and the whites who encourage them. Nothing satisfies them, in the cities: blacks can sit and drink in white hotels, now, the Immorality Act has gone, blacks can sleep with whites… It’s not even a crime any more.

  Van der Vyver has a high barbed security fence round his farmhouse and garden which his wife, Alida, thinks spoils completely the effect of her artificial stream with its tree-ferns beneath the jacarandas. There is an aerial soaring like a flag-pole in the back yard. All his vehicles, including the truck in which the black man died, have aerials that swing their whips when the driver hits a pot-hole: they are part of the security system the farmers in the district maintain, each farm in touch with every other by radio, twenty-four hours out of twenty-four. It has already happened that infiltrators from over the border have mined remote farm roads, killing white farmers and their families out on their own property for a Sunday picnic. The pot-hole could have set off a land-mine, and Van der Vyver might have died with his farm boy. When neighbours use the communications system to call up and say they are sorry about ‘that business’ with one of Van der Vyver’s boys, there goes unsaid: it could have been worse.

  It is obvious from the quality and fittings of the coffin that the farmer has provided money for the funeral. And an elaborate funeral means a great deal to blacks; look how they will deprive themselves of the little they have, in their lifetime, keeping up payments to a burial society so they won’t go in boxwood to an unmarked grave. The young wife is pregnant (of course) and another little one, wearing red shoes several sizes too large, leans under her jutting belly. He is too young to understand what has happened, what he is witnessing that day, but neither whines nor plays about; he is solemn without knowing why. Blacks expose small children to everything, they don’t protect them from the sight of fear and pain the way whites do theirs. It is the young wife who rolls her head and cries like a child, sobbing on the breast of this relative and that.

  All present work for Van der Vyver or are the families of those who work; and in the weeding and harvest seasons, the women and children work for him, too, carried—wrapped in their blankets, on a truck, singing—at sunrise to the fields. The dead man’s mother is a woman who can’t be more than in her late thirties (they start bearing children at puberty) but she is heavily mature in a black dress between her own parents, who were already working for old Van der Vyver when Marais, like their daughter, was a child. The parents hold her as if she were a prisoner or a crazy woman to be restrained. But she says nothing, does nothing. She does not look up; she does not look at Van der Vyver, whose gun went off in the truck, she stares at the grave. Nothing will make her look up; there need be no fear that she will look up; at him. His wife, Alida, is beside him. To show the proper respect, as for any white funeral, she is wearing the navy-blue-and-cream hat she wears to church this summer. She is always supportive, although he doesn’t seem to notice it; this coldness and reserve—his mother says he didn’t mix well as a child—she accepts for herself but regrets that it has prevented him from being nominated, as he should be, to stand as the Party’s parliamentary candidate for the district. He does not let her clothing, or that of anyone else gathered closely, make contact with him. He, too, stares at the grave. The dead man’s mother and he stare at the grave in communication like that between the black man outside and the white man inside the cab the moment before the gun went off.

  The moment before the gun went off was a moment of high excitement shared through the roof of the cab, as the bullet was to pass, between the young black man outside and the white farmer inside the vehicle. There were such moments, without explanation, between them, although often around the farm the farmer would pass the young man without returning a greeting, as if he did not recognize him. When the bullet went off what Van der Vyver saw was the kudu stumble in fright at the report and gallop away. Then he heard the thud behind him, and past the window saw the young man fall out of the vehicle. He was sure he had leapt up and toppled—in fright, like the buck. The farmer was almost laughing with relief, ready to tease, as he opened his door, it did not seem possible that a bullet passing through the roof could have done harm.

  The young man did not laugh with him at his own fright. The farmer carried him in his arms, to the truck. He was sure, sure he could not be dead. But the young black man’s blood was all over the farmer’s clothes, soaking against his flesh as he drove.

  How will they ever know, when they file newspaper clippings, evidence, proof, when they look at the photographs and see his face—guilty! guilty! they are right!—how will they know, when the police stations burn with all the evidence of what has happened now, and what the law made a crime in the past. How could they know that they do not know. Anything. The young black callously shot through the negligence of the white man was not the farmer’s boy; he was his son.

  Home

  Lighted windows: cutouts of home in the night. When he came from his meeting he turned the key but the door was quickly opened from the inside—she was there, Teresa, a terribly vivid face. Her thin bare feet clutched the floorboards, she was in her cotton nightgown that in bed he would draw away tenderly, the curtain of her body.

  —They’ve taken my mother. Robbie and Francie and my mother.—

  He must have said something—No! Good God!—but was at once in awe
of her, of what had happened to her while he was not there. The questions were a tumble of rock upon them: When? Where? Who told her?

  —Jimmy just phoned from a call box. He didn’t have enough change, we were cut off, I nearly went crazy, I didn’t know what number to call back. Then he phoned again. They came to the house and took my mother and Francie as well as Robbie.—

  —Your mother! I can’t believe it! How could they take that old woman? She doesn’t even know what politics is—what could they possibly detain her for?—

  His wife stood there in the entrance, barring his and her way into their home.—I don’t know… she’s the mother. Robbie and Francie were with her in the house.—

  —Well, Francie still lives with her, doesn’t she. But why was Robert there?—

  —Who knows. Maybe he just went home.—

  In the night, in trouble, the kitchen seems the room to go to; the bedroom is too happy and intimate a place and the living-room with its books and big shared desk and pictures and the flowers he buys for her every week from the same Indian street vendor is too evident of the life the couple have made for themselves, apart.

  He puts on the kettle for herb tea. She can’t sit, although he does, to encourage her. She keeps pulling at the lobes of her ears in travesty of the endearing gesture with which she will feel for the safety of the ear-rings he has given her.—They came at four o’clock yesterday morning.—

  —And you only get told tonight?—

  —Nils, how was Jimmy to know? It was only when the neighbours found someone who knew where he works that he got a message. He’s been running around all day trying to find where they’re being held. And every time he goes near a police station he’s afraid they’ll take him in, as well. That brother of mine isn’t exactly the bravest man you could meet…—

  —Poor devil. D’you blame him. If they can take your mother—then anybody in the family—

  Her nose and those earlobes go red as if with anger, but it is her way of fiercely weeping. She strokes harder and harder the narrow-brained head of the Afghan hound, her Dudu. She had never been allowed a dog in her mother’s house; her mother said they were unclean.—It’s so cold in that town in winter. What will my mother have to sleep on tonight in a cell.—

  He gets up to take her to his arms; the kettle screams and screams, as if for her.

  In bed in the dark, Teresa talked, cried, secure in the Afghan’s warmth along one side of her, and her lover-husband’s on the other. She did not have to tell him she cried because she was warm and her mother cold. She could not sleep—they could not sleep—because her mother, who had stifled her with thick clothing, suffocating servility, smothering religion, was cold. One of the reasons why she loved him—not the reason why she married him—was to rid herself of her mother. To love him, someone from the other side of the world, a world unknown to her mother, was to embrace snow and ice, unknown to her mother. He freed her of the family, fetid sun.

  For him, she was the being who melted the hard cold edges of existence, the long black nights that blotted out half the days of childhood, the sheer of ice whose austerity was repeated, by some mimesis of environment, in the cut of his jaw. She came to him out of the houseful, streetful, of people as crowded together as the blood of different races mixed in their arteries. He came to her out of the silent rooms of an only child, with an engraving of Linnaeus, his countryman, in lamplight; and out of the scientist’s solitary journeys in a glass bell among fish on the sea-bed—he himself had grown up to be an ichthyologist not a botanist. They had the desire for each other of a couple who would always be strangers. They had the special closeness of a couple who belonged to nobody else.

  And that night she relived, relating to him, the meekness of her mother, the subservience to an unfeeling, angry man (the father, now dead), the acceptance of the ghetto place the law allotted to the mother and her children, the attempts even to genteel it with lace curtains and sprayed room-fresheners—all that had disgusted Teresa and now filled her with anguish because—How will a woman like my mother stand up to prison? What will they be able to do to her?—

  He knew she was struggling with the awful discovery that she loved her mother, who was despicable; being imprisoned surely didn’t alter the fact that her mother was so, proven over many omissions and years? He knew his Teresa well enough not to tell her the discovery was not shameful—that would bring it out into the open and she would accuse herself of sentimentality. Her mother was sentimental: those bronzed baby shoes of the men and women who had not grown up to be careful not to get into trouble, who had married a blond foreigner with a strange accent or taken to drink and bankruptcy, or got mixed up in politics, secret police files, arrests in the small hours of the morning. He listened and stroked her hair, sheltered her folded hand between his neck and shoulder as she cried and raged, pitying, blaming; and cursing—she who kept of her mother’s genteelism at least her pure mouth—those fucking bastards of government and police for what they had done, done not only at four in the morning in that house with its smell of cooking oil and mothballs, but for generations, tearing up lives with their decrees on bits of paper, breaking down doors in power of arrest, shutting people off from life, in cells.

  Later in the night when he thought she might at last have fallen asleep, she sat up straight:—What will she say? What does she know?—

  She meant, about Robbie. Teresa and the brother, Robbie, were the ones who had got mixed up in politics. Teresa and her Swedish husband, living in this backwater coastal town in the company of marine biologists who were content to believe all species are interesting, and enquire no further into questions of equality, belonged to progressive organizations which walked the limit of but did not transgress legality, going no further than protest meetings. This was a respectable cover for the occasional clandestine support they gave Robbie, who really was mixed up, not just in avowals, but in the deeds of revolution. Sometimes it was money; sometimes it was an unannounced arrival in the middle of the night, with the need to go Underground for a day or two.

  —Robbie won’t have told her anything. You know how, even if he ever wanted to, she’d stop her ears.—

  —It’s not what she knows. She’s never known anything about us. But they won’t believe that! They’ll go on interrogating her—

  —Don’t you think they’ll soon discover it—that she’s never known anything that would matter to them?—

  His slow voice was the anchor from which she bobbed frantically. Suddenly her anger spilled in another direction.—What the hell got into him? What did Robbie go there for? How could he dare go to that house? How could he possibly not know that there, of all places, would be where they’d pick him up! The idiocy! The self-indulgence! What did he want, a home-cooked meal? I don’t know what’s gone wrong with the Movement, how they can let people behave so undisciplinedly, so childishly… How can we ever hope to see the end, if that’s how they behave… The idiot! Handed over—yes do come in and meet my mother and sister—quite a social occasion in the family, all ready to be carted off to prison together. I hope he realizes what he’s done. Some revolution, left to people like him… how could he go near that house—

  They did not call each other by the endearments used commercially by every patronizing saleswoman and every affected actress—‘love’ and ‘darling’—but had their own, in his language.—Min lille loppa, we don’t know what his reasons might have been—

  His ‘little flea’ beat the pillows with her fist, frightening her dog off the bed.—There can’t be any reason. Except she ruined them all, for everything, for the revolution too—he’s no different from the other brothers, in the end. He goes crawling back under mummy’s skirt—You don’t know those people, that family—

  He went to the kitchen and brought her a glass of hot milk at four in the morning. While the milk was heating on the stove he stood at the kitchen window and put his palm on the pane, feeling the dark out there, the hour of the end of night into wh
ich, forty-eight hours before, mother, brother and sister had come, led to police cars.

  In the morning, she didn’t go to work. She was soiled and blurred by helplessness. He had been in that family house only a few awkward times over their seven years together, but he saw for the first time that she would resemble her mother if she were ever to grow old and afraid. With her lips drawn back in pain, her teeth looked long—the face of a victim. Distraught, her beauty dragged out of shape, there was the reversion to physical type that comes with age; some day he would become the listing old Scandinavian hulk who was his father or his uncle. He begged her to take one of his tranquillizers but she wouldn’t—she had a horror of drugs, of drink, anything she had seen give others power over the individual personality; he had always privately thought this came subconsciously from her background, where people of one colour were submitted to the will of those of another.