Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

He could not imagine her without himself — just as she, when it all began, could not imagine whether her mother would be able to eat or sleep in prison. Teresa across the table from someone who would put dead flesh on her plate (theirs was a vegetarian home) and she would eat it. Teresa in one of the cotton nightgowns; if she could take a swimsuit in her handbag for a secret early morning rendezvous she would not hesitate to take the nightgown. Unlike Teresa, he drank whisky and swallowed sleeping pills so that he might not think any further. But he dreamt horribly, from the mixture. In the dream they had a child who was playing at the water’s edge on their beach, where he was making love to Teresa, and he fiercely pursued his climax while he knew a high surf was washing the child out to sea. He woke like a schoolboy, wet with the dream.

Standing at his tanks in the Institute he followed the movements, currents and streamers, rose, violet, yellow and blue, of the tropical fish from these southern waters that would have devoured the drowned body of the child, and he thought of the scrubbed satiny floors, the white muslin curtains and the white-trunked birch trees of the house with the silent rooms he had inherited outside Stockholm. He had not thought he would ever have to live there again.

After three days, she telephoned the Institute just before noon.

— Where are you?—

— Here. Dudu’s head’s in my lap! — She was laughing.

He left at once, and again, as he put his key in the door it was opened from the inside. She held out her hands, palm up; he had to take them, and did so slowly. They went into the kitchen where he saw she had been eating bread and avocado, hungrily spreading crumbs, in her way. The dog was sniffing her over to sense where she had been and what she had done, and he, too, wanted and feared to get the scent of her betrayal.

She sat back in a kitchen chair and faced him.

— I’ve seen her. And I’ve got notes from Francie and Robbie, smuggled out. She’s all right. I knew you’d stop me if I told you I was going.—

She lifted her shoulders, shook her head, smiling, closing the subject.

Perhaps there was no lover? He saw it was true that she had left him, but it was for them, that house, the dark family of which he was not a member, her country to which he did not belong.

On my way back home from Europe I saw a beautiful woman with a very small baby and a son of about thirteen. They were sitting across the aisle from me in the aircraft. The baby could not have been more than ten days old. It had abundant black fine hair standing up from its head the way hair lifts from a scalp under water; as if the hair had been combed, floating, by the waters of the womb. The pathetic little bent legs had never been used. The eyelids were thick and lifted slowly, a muscular impulse still being tested, revealing an old and wondering gaze: eyes very dark, but no colour that could be described as black or blue. Perhaps colour has something to do with focus and it was focusing only now and then — that was the wondering — on the face of the mother. Or rather the gaze of the mother. She would look into its face, and its eyes would open like buds. The strange concentration between them was joined, frequently, by that of the boy.

The boy was beautiful as his mother. In words beauty can be suggested only by its immediate signal. Theirs was of clarity. Their identical round brows were clear horizons, their nostrils and earlobes appeared translucent, their skin, lips and eyes had the colouring of portraits in stained glass. The baby was unlike either of them. It was the presence of someone absent; and yet it was so intensely theirs. She parted her clothes (fashionable, expensively, discreetly dressed, she was) and although I couldn’t see her breast I could tell from the angle of the baby’s head in the crook of her arm and the slight bobbing movement of its hairy head that it was sucking. The boy and the mother leant over it — this process — reverently. Once I saw her put her well-used but beautiful hand round the curve of the boy’s head and hold it there a moment. A trinity.

From time to time the boy suddenly became the child he was; he was working at a puzzle or game supplied for youngsters along with the usual handout of head-sets and slippers. He was turned away, then; but kept being drawn back to that contemplation in which he served. Literally: he was up and down during the night, taking the baby’s dirty napkins to be disposed of in the toilet, bringing plastic cups of water which his lips and his mother’s touched indiscriminately. Then the baby slept in its portable cot on the floor and the two of them, the dividing arm between their seats removed, slept as a single form disposed under aircraft blankets. They had even covered the separate identity of their faces — no doubt against the cabin lights.

They left the plane when it landed to refuel in the middle of Africa. That airport recently had been closed for the period when there was an attempted coup in the country; distorted in the convex window of the plane I could see burned-out military vehicles, two of the letters that spelled as the airport’s name across the façade of the terminal the name of the country’s President were missing, and dogs were foraging at the margin of the runway.

She had the baby in her arms. The boy carried their bulky hand-luggage, hovering protectively close as she stepped through the door onto the gangway that had been rolled into place. My window was a lens with a more restricted range of vision than the human eye: mine could not follow them across the tarmac to the terminal building, I don’t know if they hurried anticipatedly, excitedly to what was awaiting them there, I don’t know where they had been, why they had gone, or what they were coming back to. I know only that the baby was so young it must have been born elsewhere, they were bringing it to this place for the first time, this was its first journey. I continued mine; they had disappeared. They exist only in the alternate lives I invent, the unknown of what happened to them preceding the journey, and the unknown of what was going to happen at its end.

I’m thirteen. I’d had my birthday when I went away with my mother to have the baby in Europe. There isn’t a good hospital in the country where my father is posted — he’s Economic Attaché—so we went back where my parents come from, the country he represents wherever we live. I know it only from holidays with my grandma because I was born when they were on another posting.

I’d been my parents’ child — the only one — so long. I always wanted brothers and sisters but never had any. And then, round about my twelfth birthday I noticed it, something went wrong in our house — I mean the house we are living in on this posting. My mother and father were almost silent at meals. The private language we used to speak together — cat-language — we didn’t use any more. You see, I’m allowed to have cats as pets but not dogs, because cats can almost fend for themselves when we get another posting and they have to be left behind; we have a different kind of voice for each of the three cats I have here, and we used to pretend the cats were making remarks about us. For instance, if I was eating with my elbows on the table, my father would use a cat voice to tell me I had bad manners, and if my father forgot to fill up my mother’s wineglass my mother would use her special cat voice to complain she’d been left out. But the cats stopped speaking; they became just cats. I couldn’t be the only one to use their voices. A child can’t use even a cat voice to ask: what’s the matter? You can’t ask grown-ups that.

The three of us stopped going swimming together. We love swimming and before we used to go often to the Consul-General’s pool. But my father made me learn to play squash with him and he took me on spear-fishing trips with men. The sea is very rough here, it’s horrible being thrown about by breakers full of bits of plastic and rotten fruit from the harbour before the boat gets to the place where you dive. These were things my mother didn’t do: play squash, spear-fish. I told her about the sea, but she didn’t say anything to my father, she didn’t take my part. It was a bit like what happened to me: as if she couldn’t use a cat voice to tell him.