Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

Six leaves from my father’s country.

When I began to know him, in his shop, as someone distinct from a lap I sat on, he shouted at the black man on the other side of the counter who swept the floor and ran errands, and he threw the man’s weekly pay grudgingly at him. I saw there was someone my father had made afraid of him. A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.

I gathered the leaves for their pretty autumn stains, not out of any sentiment. This village where we’ve rented the State hunting lodge is not my father’s village. I don’t know where, in his country, it was, only the name of the port at which he left it behind. I didn’t ask him about his village. He never told me; or I didn’t listen. I have the leaves in my hand. I did not know that I would find, here in the wood, the beaters advancing, advancing across the world.

They took him in. Since their son had got himself signed up at sea for eighteen months on an oil rig, the boy’s cubbyhole of a room was vacant; and the rent money was a help. There had rubbed off on the braid of the commissionaire father’s uniform, through the contact of club members’ coats and briefcases he relieved them of, loyal consciousness of the danger of bombs affixed under the cars of members of parliament and financiers. The father said ‘I’ve no quarrel with that’ when the owners of the house whose basement flat the family occupied stipulated ‘No Irish’. But to discriminate against any other foreigners from the old Empire was against the principles of the house owners, who were also the mother’s employers — cleaning three times a week and baby-sitting through the childhood of three boys she thought of as her own. So it was a way of pleasing Upstairs to let the room to this young man, a foreigner who likely had been turned away from other vacancies posted on a board at the supermarket. He was clean and tidy enough; and he didn’t hang around the kitchen, hoping to be asked to eat with the family, the way one of their own kind would. He didn’t eye Vera.

Vera was seventeen, and a filing clerk with prospects of advancement; her father had got her started in an important firm through the kindness of one of his gentlemen at the club. A word in the right place; and now it was up to her to become a secretary, maybe one day even a private secretary to someone like the members of the club, and travel to the Continent, America — anywhere.

— You have to dress decently for a firm like that. Let others show their backsides.—

— Dad! — The flat was small, the walls thin — suppose the lodger heard him. Her pupils dilated with a blush, half shyness, half annoyance. On Friday and Saturday nights she wore T-shirts with spangled graffiti across her breasts and went with girl-friends to the discothèque, although she’d had to let the pink side of her hair grow out. On Sundays they sat on wooden benches outside the pub with teasing local boys, drinking beer shandies. Once it was straight beer laced with something and they made her drunk, but her father had been engaged as doorman for a private party and her mother had taken the Upstairs children to the zoo, so nobody heard her vomiting in the bathroom.

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.—