Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

The dissension was like a sheet of newspaper that catches alight, swells and writhes with flame, and quickly dies to a handful of black membrane.

She dropped the idea. He thirsted with relief; she watched him go to the cupboard and pour himself a whisky, but she didn’t need anything like that. Every few days, something would happen that would precipitate the ordeal all over again. By now she had made connections that had ways of smuggling news out of the prison: Robbie was on a hunger strike, her mother and Francie had been moved to another prison. Why? She ought to be there to find out. The lawyer’s application to the Minister for her mother’s and Francie’s release was awaiting decision. She ought to be there to see if something couldn’t be done to hasten it. Her husband brought in friends to back him up; he, they, wouldn’t hear of her going.

She took leave of absence from the Institute. He didn’t know whether that was a good idea or not. At least work was a distraction, thinking about other matters, talking to people who had other concerns. This one had been cleaned out — a burglary, lost everything— things? He saw the question in her face, flung back. That one had a dying wife— death? Of course, death’s natural; he reflected that if her sixty-something-year-old mother had become ill and died, in that house, it would have been an event to accept.

So the practical preoccupations of her mother’s and siblings’ detention became her work, as well. Even her few pleasures — no, wrong word — her few small satisfactions were part of the disaster: there was the news that a banner calling for the release of her mother, brother and sister had been displayed at a meeting of a liberation movement broken up by police and dogs. There were messages from the movement in exile for which Robbie was active: they preferred this lawyer rather than that to be engaged on his behalf. And the fact that they knew to contact her drew her into another kind of cell, of new associates for whom detention was a hazard like a traffic fine, and clandestinity with all its cunning a code for survival in or out of prison.

It was on their advice that she started sleeping away from home. Well, it was a disinterested confirmation of the fears he had had for her; and, at the same time, of her conviction that she could just as well be picked up there as in the region of her mother’s house or place of imprisonment. She went to this good friend or that. — I may be at Addie’s tonight, if not with Stephen and Joanna. — She held him tightly a moment, buried Dudu’s slim snout against her before she slipped out, and she would be back early in the morning for breakfast. But he lay in their bed full of deserted desire for her, although they had not made love for weeks, not since the second night after the news came. He sensed she was ashamed of their joy happening while the others — that family — were out of human touch in prison. Once, he gave in to the temptation to hear her voice and phoned her where she said she would sleep, but she wasn’t there; and of course it would defeat the whole purpose of her absence if the friend who answered the call were to have told him where she had moved to; it was more than likely that the phone he was using at his bedside was tapped. He was too ashamed, next day, to confess to her his childish impulse.

She never wore her hair loose, now. No doubt it was because she didn’t have the heart to spend time putting it up in rollers and brushing it out, innocently enjoying the sight of it in the mirror, as she used to. Yet she looked differently beautiful; a woman becomes another woman when she changes the way she wears her hair. The combs scragged it away from her cheekbones and eye-hollows. She looked like a dusky Greta Garbo (he was just old enough to remember Greta Garbo). When the front door banged and she came in to breakfast in the mornings he felt — and it was like a fear — that he was falling in love with her. But how unpleasant and ridiculous, he had loved her for seven years, Teresa, Teresa — there was no need for abandoning that, starting something new.

And then there came to him the mad thought — mad! — that it was not he who was falling in love with her; someone else was. There was the mark of it on her, in the different beauty. She was the way someone else saw her. That was what he confronted himself with when she arrived in the mornings.

There was a day when the hair was wet, twisted up and the combs pushed in any-old-how.

— The sea looked so cool, I couldn’t resist a dip on the way.—

— I’m glad, min lille loppa, was it lovely?—

At the time he was tenderly pleased, as at the sign of recovery to a normal interest in life by an invalid. But walking through the Institute’s aquarium, while the fish mouthed at him he was overcome by what could not be said: who was it who swam with her, and she must have been naked, or only in her panties, because surely she didn’t take a swimsuit with her when she went away to elude the Security Police at night.

An hour or two later he could not believe he could have thought so cheaply about her, Teresa, Teresa. There was a little beach where he and she had often swum in the nude, sheltered by rocks; it was their beach she would have been to, alone, without him.

Because he had these moments of thinking badly of her, he became shy of her. They had always shared the discomfort of one another’s small indispositions — her period pains, his bouts of indigestion if he sat too long crouched over a microscope. Now he suffered, all to himself, an embarrassing ailment, a crawling sensation round the anus. It seemed to him it must be one of the signs of middle age, the beginning of the deterioration of the nervous system. What would such a distasteful detail mean to her, at this time? Getting older, decaying, was natural. And she was young: why should she want to be bothered with his backside while her mother and brother and sister were still in prison — it was nine weeks now. And she had a young lover.

Oh why did these thoughts come!

Why should she not have found a lover, young like herself, brought up in comradely poverty, someone who had already been in prison, whose métier, outwitting those bastards of policemen, warders, government officials, was newly her own?

And now, every sign could be interpreted that way. She, who had always been so love-hungry, passionate, had not come to him in weeks and had created an atmosphere round herself that made it indelicate for him to come to her. When she had slept out and arrived home early in the morning, she could have slipped into their bed, where he still lay; she didn’t. The night he had phoned Stella’s flat — she wasn’t there; and how had Stella sounded? Hadn’t the voice been constrained? Lying? Covering up? Teresa, Teresa. He was thinking about all this in Swedish. What did that mean? He was retreating, going back to what he was before they made their life apart from the past, together… she was thrusting him back there, leaving him, she had a lover. He began to try to find out who it was. When she talked about fellow members of the Detainees’ Support Committee he listened for the recurrence of certain names; and there was new dismay for him — it might even be that she was having an affair with someone else’s husband. Teresa! At the occasional parties they had gone to, over seven years, she had not even danced with any man because he did not dance; she would hold his hand and watch.

And then one night — no it was morning already, behind the curtains — the dog jumped off the bed and whined and he heard the front door latch click. He waited but she did not come into the bedroom; he must have fallen asleep again, waiting, and when he woke he felt the silence of an empty house. In the kitchen was a note: ‘I’ll be gone for a few days. Don’t worry. Lille loppa.’ It was the kind of note left, these days, by people like Robbie, people like the ones she mixed with. If they had to disappear; if they didn’t want anyone who might be questioned about their whereabouts to get into trouble with the police: the less you know, the better for you. But he knew. He was sure, now. Perhaps it was even her way of letting him know. If the police came, he could tell them: She has gone away with a lover.