Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

The silence is over.

That is what has been repeating in his head since the alarm clock woke him with its electronic peeps at five this morning. He phoned the airport before he got out of bed, and while hearing the stretched Glockenspiel tape they entertain you with when you’re waiting for Information to answer, that phrase was counterpointing again and again, himself speaking inside himself: ‘The silence is over’. Because the love affair is over. The silence in which the love affair was hidden, precious and thrilling, something she must not be allowed to touch with a word, now seems an agony endured. More than a year of confidences, feelings unexpressed, emotions, anecdotes lie painfully trapped, layer on layer, constricted within him. But she has given birth; he wonders how it will be to see her again, rid of her burden. Her body as it was before, when he used to see it: he saw her only clothed while her body was growing, filling, she stopped undressing in front of him because they could not speak.

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.