Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

In bed, she would not (of course) take a sleeping pill but they had each other. He made love to her while her tears smeared them both, and that put her blessedly to sleep. Now and then she gave the hiccuping sigh of a comforted child, and he woke at once and lifted his head, watching over her. There was a smell of clean dog-fur in the bed that third night.

Teresa.

He woke to find she was already bathed and dressed. She turned her head to him from the bedroom doorway when he spoke her name; her hair was drawn away tightly from her cheekbones and ears, held by combs. Again something had happened to her in his absence; this time while she was beside him, but they were parted in sleep. She was ready to leave the house long before it was time to go to work: going first to see an Indian woman lawyer whom they’d heard speak at protest meetings against detention without trial. He agreed it was a good idea. That was what must have come to her overnight, among these other things: if she was right about her mother’s high tension (or whatever it was) Jimmy must contact the doctor who treated her and get a statement from him confirming a poor state of health — that might get her released or at least ensure special diet and treatment, inside. And something must be done about that house — it would be rifled in a week, in that neighbourhood. Somebody responsible must be found to go there and see that it was properly locked up — and tidy up, yes, the police would have turned everything upside down; if they arrest, they also search the scene of arrest.

— Shall I come with you?—

No, she had already phoned Fatima, she was waiting at her office. Teresa paused a moment, ready to go, rehearsing, he could see, what she had to say to the lawyer; blew him a kiss.

There were no more tears, no more tremblings. She came to the Institute straight from the lawyer’s office, reported to him on the advice she had been given, put on her white coat and did her work. She found it hard to concentrate those first few days and had a dazed look about her, from the effort, when they met for lunch. They would seek a place to sit apart from others, in the canteen, like clandestine lovers. But it was not sweet intimacies their lowered voices exchanged. They were discussing what to do, what should be done, what could be done — and every now and then one or the other would look up to return the wave or greeting of a colleague, look up into the humid, cheerful room with the day’s specials chalked on a board, people gathered round the coffee and tea and Coke dispensers, look out, through the expanse of glass the sea breathed on, to the red collage of flamboyants and jazzy poinsettias in the Institute’s park — and her mother, brother and sister were in cells, somewhere. All the time. While they ate, while they worked, while they took the dog for his walk. For that progression of repetitions known as daily life went on; with only a realization of how strange it is, in its dogged persistence: what will stop it covering up what is really happening? In the cells; and here?

While he took care of that daily life (she had too much on her mind to be expected to shop and take clothes to the dry cleaner’s) she spent all their spare time seeing lawyers, collecting and filling in applications to magistrates, chiefs of police, government officials, and consulting organizations concerned with the condition of detainees. She was no longer dazed; hair out of the way, her attention never deflected, determination hardened her gestures and emboldened her gentleness, sloughed it away. She importuned anyone she could use — that was how she put it — Maybe we can use So-and-so. He’s supposed to be a good liberal, let’s see what he’ll do. Fatima says he’s an old Stellenbosch buddy of the Commissioner of Police. — To ask for help apparently was too weak a demand, people would reply ‘I’d help you if I could but…’;—We must pick people over whom there’s public leverage of some sort.—

He marvelled at how she had come to this knowledge; she, who had always been so endearingly primly principled, even went to see a Nationalist ex-member of parliament who was said still to be close to the Minister of Justice. She, who had always been so sincere, revived acquaintance with people he and she had avoided as materialistic, incompatible, pushy, because now their connections might be of use. Her entire consciousness was a strategy. When she had managed — through Fatima’s consultation with lawyers in the city where the mother, brother and sister were held — to get a parcel of blankets and clothing to them, she turned pressure on her mother’s doctor, telephoning him at his home late at night to urge that the prison medical officer attend her mother; when that succeeded, she contacted the friend-of-a-friend, who lived in the city, to take food to the prison (dried fruit, yoghurt, these were the things, she ascertained from those who had been political prisoners, one most needed) and try and get the Chief Warder to accept it for her mother, Robbie and Francie. She was always on the telephone; he brought her plate to her from their interrupted meals, where she sat, elbows on knees, on a stool — it was her corner, now, just as Dudu had his particular place under the table. That terrible ivy, daily life. How to pull it away and see — what?

She was constantly on the telephone because what was happening in the cells was far away, in Johannesburg. She became stern with impatience — sympathy irritated her and he had to realize that, for all their closeness, apartness together, he couldn’t really claim to be feeling what she was feeling. Every enquiry or instruction from her had to be referred through a third person. Jimmy’s timidity made him even less intelligent, she said, than he had ever been. He wasn’t to be relied on and he was the only member of the family there. Where she should be; every time some proxy bungled, it came up: she should be there. And then it was he who became distraught, couldn’t concentrate on anything but the cold anxiety that she would go there, walk into the waiting car of the Security Police, he saw them ready for her, counting on her coming to that house, to that prison where her mother, brother and sister were held. Hadn’t he said to her, of Jimmy’s fears, that it was a fact that anyone in the family…? And she was the one who had connections with Robbie beyond blood ties!

— Exactly! They might turn up here any time and take you and me. Both of us. How do we know what’s come out, in there… what he might have told my mother or poor frightened Francie — my sister’s only nineteen, you know … Those two women’ll never stand up under interrogation from those beasts, they couldn’t even judge what’s compromising and what isn’t.—

His physical size seemed to hamper him when opposing the will that tempered her slender body. He spoke, and it was as if he made some clumsy, inappropriate move towards her. — But they haven’t. I mean, thank god they haven’t. Maybe they don’t know about you.—

She gave a disparaging half-grunt, half-laugh.

— Maybe no one’s said anything about us… you. But if you go there, at once they’ll decide they might as well see what you know. And there is something to be got out of you, isn’t there.—

She gestured away the times her brother had appeared for refuge; the packets of papers that had been hidden under research documents about the habits of fish, in the desk of the Institute’s Swedish expert.

— Teresa, I won’t let you go! — He had never before spoken to her in that voice, probably it was the ugly voice of her father — he felt he had struck her a blow; but it was on his own sternum that his fist had fallen. He was shouting. —I will not have it! I’ll go, if someone must, I’ll go, I’m not one of the family!—