Jump and Other Stories

by Nadine Gordimer

  The flight is expected in on time. He puts on linen trousers and sandals, the air-conditioner continues to stutter and shudder and soon, thank God, he won’t notice it any more because it won’t be the only noise in an empty house. He shaves but puts the cologne back on the shelf because—like an impulse of nausea the morning after a night out, this comes—it is what he used to smell of when he came home from the bed and scent of another woman, an unsuccessful disguise, he knows, because it was obvious he had showered after love-making, you don’t come from the Consulate offices with wet hair. The madness of it! Just as during that year he couldn’t think about his wife, didn’t see her even when she was sitting across the table from him, so now he is too preoccupied to visualize the woman he couldn’t keep away from even for a day. Driving on the airport road over fallen yellow flowers of cassia trees he feels memory like a hand alternately scalded and balmed—fear of the terrible experience of the wonderful love affair that belongs to this place, this posting, as the trees do, and gratitude to the endurance of these trees, this posting where he is about to be restored. There were tanks rolling along this road not long ago, and it’s unevenly patched with fresh tarmac where it was blown up. But the familiar trees full of yellow blossom are still here. So is he.

  He parks the car innocently, now, right out in the open; it has not brought him to any clandestine destination where he would arrive already with an erection. He walks slowly into the airport building because this passage between low hedges of Christ’s-thorn and hibiscus propped up like standard roses—nobody would believe what survives an attempted coup, while people are shot—is the way towards something that is both old and new—nobody would believe what a man and woman can survive, between themselves.

  This decaying airport he has been in and out of impatiently many times is going to be where it happens; how strange that is. How appropriately inappropriate definitive places are. He is early, at first the arrival hall is empty, bins overflowing with beer cans seem blown away against the walls, the worn red rubber flooring glittering under its spills and dirt stretches vast, he is alone in the perspective of a de Chirico painting…

  These wisps of philosophical generalizing, fragments of the culture and education which overlay the emotions that drive life, drift irrelevantly away from him. She is coming home with a live baby. That flesh, that fact is what has resulted of one night when he returned from a weekend trip with that woman and was so angry at his wife’s forlornness, her need of comfort he couldn’t give, for something he couldn’t say, that he made love to her. Fucked her. It was not even good fucking because he had been making love to the other woman, rapturously, tenderly, hardly sleeping for two nights. It was an act shameful to them both; his wife and himself. It did not serve as a way of speaking to one another. More like a murder than a conception. If it hadn’t been for that horrible night there would have been no baby and—a clutch of fear at the danger so narrowly escaped—he wouldn’t be waiting here now, the love affair might have ploughed on through his life leaving nothing standing.

  The gatherings of people who hang about these airports all day rather than arrive or depart are beginning to humanize and domesticate the surreal vacuum of the hall. The men come in talking, there seems always, day or night, something for black men to explain, argue, exclaim over to one another. They are surely never lonely. The turbaned women are clusters rather than individuals, children clinging to and climbing about the mothers’ robes, whose symbols of fish and fruit and the face of the President circled with a message of congratulation on his sixtieth birthday are their picture books. The blacks take their children everywhere, they sleep under their mothers’ market stalls, they nod, tied on their mothers’ backs, through the beer halls—these people never part from their children, at least while they are pre-adolescent. After that, in this country, the boys may be abducted by the rebel army or drafted beardless into the President’s youth labour corps; often not seen at home again, after all that closeness when they’re little, all that flesh-contact of warmth and skin-odours that is—love? He tried to keep the boy out of the silence, to speak to him. To show love. That is, to do things with him. But the fact is the boy is not manly, he’s not adventurous—he’s too beautiful. Too much like her, her delicate skin round the eyes, her nacreous ears, her lips the way they are when she wakes in the morning, needing no paint. Lovely in a woman—yes, loverly, what a man wants, desirable and welcoming (how could he ever have forgotten that, even for one year in fifteen?). But not in a boy. The boy can swim like a fish but he sulked when he was taken spear-fishing with adults, with his father; an expedition any other boy would have been proud to be included in. And those times when love suddenly, for a moment, didn’t mean the other woman, when it was a rush of longing for flesh-contact and the skin-odours of one’s own child, to have that child cling—he didn’t understand, he only submitted. As his mother did, that one night.

  He doesn’t allow himself to look at his watch. There is still at least a quarter of an hour to go. That night—that she should have conceived that night. When the boy was younger they had tried for another child. Nothing happened. All the time when it would have been conceived out of joy, when they still desired each other so much and so often! And of course that’s the main reason why the boy has been spoilt—as he thinks of it, he doesn’t mean only in the sense of over-indulged as an only child. And it is also his fault—part of that madness! No point in sorrowing over it now (a spasm of anguish) but when she conceived out of the willed lust of anger and shame he felt at the sight of his victim, he didn’t want to see what was happening to her, he didn’t want to see her belly growing and she didn’t want him to see her. She was alone days and nights on end with the boy, poor little devil. And even when the time came, only last month, for the baby to be born, he sent the boy with her to Europe for the birth. He sent her away with an immature thirteen-year-old as her only companion when his own place was with her (there is a hoarse twanging murmur over the public address system but he makes out it is the departure announcement for another plane) his own place was with her. the throbbing of the words starts up again immediately his attention is turned from the distraction.

  This onslaught of the past year rising from the places in himself where it was thrust away both denies his actual presence here in the airport hall where people beside him are eating cold cassava porridge and drinking Coke from the refreshment and curio shop that has just removed its shutters, and at the same time makes momentous every detail of this place, this scene. For the rest of his life, he knows, he will be able to feel the split in the seat beneath him where the stuffing spills like guts. He will be able to arrange the graduated line of ebony elephants from charm-bracelet to door-stop size, the malachite beads, copper bangles, and model space monsters imprisoned in plastic bubbles against card among the dead cockroaches in the shop’s window that he walks past and past again. These are his witnesses. The tawdry, humble and banal bear testimony to the truth; the splendid emotions of a love affair are the luxurious furnishings of the lie.

  A green star on the Arrivals and Departures indicator is flashing. He stands up from the broken seat. It doesn’t matter that the announcement comes as a burble, he catches the number of the flight, the green star keeps flashing. The unhappy night when he forced himself to make love to his wife and she conceived this baby he’s awaiting—that’s all over. He is her husband again, her lover. He has come back to her in a way she will realize the moment she steps off the plane and he embraces her. The end of a journey he took, away from her, and the end of her journey, now, will meet and they’ll be whole again. With the baby. The baby is the wholeness she is carrying off the plane to him and he’ll receive.

  The ordinary procedure of privilege is taking place: the Customs man recognizes him as usual, someone attached to a foreign consulate, someone who doesn’t have to abide by the rules for local people with their bundles and relatives. Right through, sir, thank you sir. He has passed a checkpoint this way countle
ss times; but this time replicates no time.

  There they are.

  Through a glass screen he sees them near the baggage conveyer belt. There they are. A little apart from the other passengers ringed round the belt. What’s the matter with the boy? Why doesn’t that boy stand by ready to lift off the baggage?

  They are apart from the rest of the people, she is sitting on that huge overnight bag, he sees the angle of her knees, sideways, under the fall of a wide blue skirt. And the boy is kneeling in front of her, actually kneeling. His head is bent and her head is bent, they are gazing at something. Someone. On her lap, in the encircling curve of her bare arm. The baby. The baby’s at her breast. The baby’s there; its reality flashes over him in a suffusion of blood. He pauses, to hold the moment. He doesn’t know how to deal with it. And in that moment the boy turns his face, his too beautiful face, and their gaze links.

  Standing there, he throws his head back and gasps or laughs, and then pauses again before he will rush towards them, his wife, the baby, claim them. His cry flings a noose towards the boy. Catch! Catch! But the boy is looking at him with the face of a man, and turns back to the woman as if she is his woman, and the baby his begetting.

  Spoils

  In the warmth of the bed your own fart brings to your nostrils the smell of rotting flesh: the lamb chops you devoured last night. Seasoned with rosemary and with an undertaker’s paper frill on the severed rib-bones. Another corpse digested.

  ‘Become a vegetarian, then.’ She’s heard it all too many times before; sick of it, sick of my being sick of it. Sick of the things I say, that surface now and then.

  ‘I want no part of it.’

  We are listening to the news.

  ‘What? What are you going on about. What?’

  What indeed. No: which. Which is it I choose to be no part of, the boy who threw a stone at the police, had both his arms broken by them, was sodomized by prisoners into whose cell he was thrown, the kidnapped diplomat and the group (men, as I am a man, women, as she is a woman) who sent his fourth finger by mail to his family, the girl doused with petrol and burned alive as a traitor, those starved by drought or those drowned by flood, far away, the nineteen-year-old son of Mr and Mrs killed by the tremendous elemental thrill of 220 volts while using an electric spray gun on his motorbike, near by. The planned, devised, executed by people like myself, or the haphazard, the indifferent, executed senselessly by elemental forces. Senselessly. Why is there more sense in the conscious acts that make corpses? Consciousness is self-deception. Intelligence is a liar.

  ‘You’re not having great thoughts. That’s life.’

  Her beauty-salon philosophy. Stale, animal, passive. Whether I choose or not; can’t choose, can’t want no part.

  The daily necrophilia.

  ‘Become a vegetarian, then!’

  Among other people no one would ever think there was anything wrong. He is aware of that; she is aware of his being aware, taking some kind of pride in appearing exactly as they have him in their minds, contributing to their gathering exactly what his place in it expects of him. The weekend party invited to a lodge on a private game reserve will include the practical, improvising man, the clown who burns his fingers at the camp fire and gets a laugh out of it, the woman who spends her time preparing to feed everyone, the pretty girl who perks up the company sexually, the good-timer who keeps everyone drinking until late, the quiet one who sits apart contemplating the bush, one or two newcomers, for ballast, who may or may not provide a measure of serious conversation. Why not accept? No? Well. What else has he in mind that will please him better? Just say.

  Nothing.

  There you are!

  He, in contrast to the clown, is the charmer, the wit. He knows almost everyone’s foibles, he sets the anecdotes flowing, he provides the gentle jibes that make people feel themselves to be characters.

  Whatever their temperaments, all are nature lovers. That is nothing to be ashamed of—surely, even for him. Their love of the wild brings them together—the wealthy couple who own the reserve and lodge rather than racehorses or a yacht, the pretty girl who models or works in public relations, the good-timer director of a mining house, the adventurous stockbroker, the young doctor who works for a clerk’s salary in a hospital for blacks, the clowning antique dealer… And he has no right to feel himself superior—in seriousness, morality (he knows that)—in this company, for it includes a young man who has been in political detention. That one is not censorious of the playground indulgences of his fellow whites, so long as the regime he has risked his freedom to destroy, will kill to destroy, lasts. That’s life.

  Behaving—undetectably—as what is expected of one is also a protection against fear of what one really is, now. Perhaps what is seen to be, is himself, the witty charmer. How can he know? He does it so well. His wife sees him barefoot, his arms round his knees on the viewing deck from which the company watches buffalo trampling the reeds down at the river, hears the amusing asides he makes while gazing through field-glasses, notices the way he has left his shirt unbuttoned in healthy confidence of the sun-flushed manliness of his breast—is the silence, the incomprehensible statements that come from it, alone with her, a way of tormenting her? Does he do it only to annoy, to punish? And what has she done to deserve what he doesn’t mete out to others? Let him keep it to himself. Take a Valium. Anything. Become a vegetarian. In the heat of the afternoon everyone goes to their rooms or their makeshift beds on the shaded part of the deck, to sleep off the lunch-time wine. Even in the room allotted to them, he keeps up, out of sight of the company (but they are only a wall away, he knows they are there), what is expected. It is so hot he and she have stripped to their briefs. He passes a hand over her damp breasts, gives a lazy sigh, and is asleep on his back. Would he have wanted to take her nipples in his mouth, commit himself to love-making, if he hadn’t fallen asleep, or was his a gesture from the wings just in case the audience might catch a glimpse of a slump to an off-stage presence?

  The house party is like the fire the servant makes at dusk within the reed stockade beside the lodge. One never knows when a fire outdoors will smoke or take flame cleanly and make a grand blaze, as this one does. One never knows when a small gathering will remain disparate, unresponsive, or when, as this time, men and women will ignite and make a bright company. The ceremony of the evening meal was a bit ridiculous, but perhaps intended as such, and fun. A parody of old colonial times: the stockade against the wild beasts, the black man beating a drum to announce the meal, the chairs placed carefully by him in a missionary prayer-meeting circle well away from the fire, the whisky and wine set out, the smell of charred flesh from the cooking grids. Look up: the first star in the haze is the mast-light of a ship moving out, slipping moorings, breaking with this world. Look down: the blue flames are nothing but burning fat, there are gnawed bones on the swept earth. He’s been drinking a lot—she noticed: so that he could stomach it all, no doubt he tells himself.

  The fire twitches under ash and the dinner orchestra of insects whose string instruments are their own bodies, legs scraping against legs, wings scraping against carapace, has been silenced by the rising of the moon. But laughter continues. In the huge night, not reduced to scale by buildings, tangled by no pylons and wires, hollowed out by no street- and window-lights into habitable enclosures, the laughter, the voices are vagrant sound that one moment flies right up boldly into space, the next makes a wave so faint it dies out almost as it leaves the lips. Everyone interrupts everyone else, argues, teases. There are moments of acerbity; the grapes they are eating pop into sharp juice as they are bitten. One of the quiet guests has become communicative as will the kind who never risk ideas or opinions of their own but can reproduce, when a subject brings the opportunity, information they have read and stored. Bats; the twirling rags darker against the dark—someone suggested, as a woman cowered, that fear of them comes from the fact that they can’t be heard approaching.

  ‘If your eyes are closed,
and a bird flies overhead, you’ll hear the resistance of air to its wings.’

  ‘And also, you can’t make out what a bat’s like, where its head is—just a thing, ugh!’

  The quiet guest was already explaining, no, bats will not bump into you, but not, as this is popularly believed, because they have an inbuilt radar system; their system is sonar, or echolocation—

  ‘—I wear a leopard skin coat!’

  The defiant soprano statement from a sub-conversation breaks through his monologue and loses him attention.

  It is the pretty girl; she has greased her face against the day’s exposure to the sun and her bone-structure elegantly reflects the frail light coming from the half moon, the occasional waver of flame roused in the fire, or the halo of a cigarette lighter. She is almost beautiful. ‘—D’you hear that!’ ‘Glynis, where did you find this girl?’ ‘Shall we put her out to be eaten by her prey, expose her on a rock?’

  ‘No leopards here, unfortunately.’

  ‘The coat would look much better on the leopard than on you.’ The wit did not live up to his reputation, merely repeated in sharper, more personal paraphrase what had been well said no one remembered by whom. He spoke directly to the girl, whereas the others were playfully half-indignant around her presence. But the inference, neither entirely conservationist nor aesthetic, seemed to excite the girl’s interest in this man. She was aware of him, in the real sense, for the first time.