Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

A green star on the Arrivals and Departures indicator is flashing. He stands up from the broken seat. It doesn’t matter that the announcement comes as a burble, he catches the number of the flight, the green star keeps flashing. The unhappy night when he forced himself to make love to his wife and she conceived this baby he’s awaiting — that’s all over. He is her husband again, her lover. He has come back to her in a way she will realize the moment she steps off the plane and he embraces her. The end of a journey he took, away from her, and the end of her journey, now, will meet and they’ll be whole again. With the baby. The baby is the wholeness she is carrying off the plane to him and he’ll receive.

The ordinary procedure of privilege is taking place: the Customs man recognizes him as usual, someone attached to a foreign consulate, someone who doesn’t have to abide by the rules for local people with their bundles and relatives. Right through, sir, thank you sir. He has passed a checkpoint this way countless times; but this time replicates no time.

There they are.

Through a glass screen he sees them near the baggage conveyer belt. There they are. A little apart from the other passengers ringed round the belt. What’s the matter with the boy? Why doesn’t that boy stand by ready to lift off the baggage?

They are apart from the rest of the people, she is sitting on that huge overnight bag, he sees the angle of her knees, sideways, under the fall of a wide blue skirt. And the boy is kneeling in front of her, actually kneeling. His head is bent and her head is bent, they are gazing at something. Someone. On her lap, in the encircling curve of her bare arm. The baby. The baby’s at her breast. The baby’s there; its reality flashes over him in a suffusion of blood. He pauses, to hold the moment. He doesn’t know how to deal with it. And in that moment the boy turns his face, his too beautiful face, and their gaze links.

Standing there, he throws his head back and gasps or laughs, and then pauses again before he will rush towards them, his wife, the baby, claim them. His cry flings a noose towards the boy. Catch! Catch! But the boy is looking at him with the face of a man, and turns back to the woman as if she is his woman, and the baby his begetting.

In the warmth of the bed your own fart brings to your nostrils the smell of rotting flesh: the lamb chops you devoured last night. Seasoned with rosemary and with an undertaker’s paper frill on the severed rib-bones. Another corpse digested.

‘Become a vegetarian, then.’ She’s heard it all too many times before; sick of it, sick of my being sick of it. Sick of the things I say, that surface now and then.

‘I want no part of it.’

We are listening to the news.

‘What? What are you going on about. What?’

What indeed. No: which. Which is it I choose to be no part of, the boy who threw a stone at the police, had both his arms broken by them, was sodomized by prisoners into whose cell he was thrown, the kidnapped diplomat and the group (men, as I am a man, women, as she is a woman) who sent his fourth finger by mail to his family, the girl doused with petrol and burned alive as a traitor, those starved by drought or those drowned by flood, far away, the nineteen-year-old son of Mr and Mrs killed by the tremendous elemental thrill of 220 volts while using an electric spray gun on his motorbike, near by. The planned, devised, executed by people like myself, or the haphazard, the indifferent, executed senselessly by elemental forces. Senselessly. Why is there more sense in the conscious acts that make corpses? Consciousness is self-deception. Intelligence is a liar.

‘You’re not having great thoughts. That’s life.’

Her beauty-salon philosophy. Stale, animal, passive. Whether I choose or not; can’t choose, can’t want no part.

The daily necrophilia.

‘Become a vegetarian, then!’

Among other people no one would ever think there was anything wrong. He is aware of that; she is aware of his being aware, taking some kind of pride in appearing exactly as they have him in their minds, contributing to their gathering exactly what his place in it expects of him. The weekend party invited to a lodge on a private game reserve will include the practical, improvising man, the clown who burns his fingers at the camp fire and gets a laugh out of it, the woman who spends her time preparing to feed everyone, the pretty girl who perks up the company sexually, the good-timer who keeps everyone drinking until late, the quiet one who sits apart contemplating the bush, one or two newcomers, for ballast, who may or may not provide a measure of serious conversation. Why not accept? No? Well. What else has he in mind that will please him better? Just say.

Nothing.

There you are!

He, in contrast to the clown, is the charmer, the wit. He knows almost everyone’s foibles, he sets the anecdotes flowing, he provides the gentle jibes that make people feel themselves to be characters.

Whatever their temperaments, all are nature lovers. That is nothing to be ashamed of — surely, even for him. Their love of the wild brings them together — the wealthy couple who own the reserve and lodge rather than racehorses or a yacht, the pretty girl who models or works in public relations, the good-timer director of a mining house, the adventurous stockbroker, the young doctor who works for a clerk’s salary in a hospital for blacks, the clowning antique dealer… And he has no right to feel himself superior — in seriousness, morality (he knows that) — in this company, for it includes a young man who has been in political detention. That one is not censorious of the playground indulgences of his fellow whites, so long as the regime he has risked his freedom to destroy, will kill to destroy, lasts. That’s life.

Behaving — undetectably — as what is expected of one is also a protection against fear of what one really is, now. Perhaps what is seen to be, is himself, the witty charmer. How can he know? He does it so well. His wife sees him barefoot, his arms round his knees on the viewing deck from which the company watches buffalo trampling the reeds down at the river, hears the amusing asides he makes while gazing through field-glasses, notices the way he has left his shirt unbuttoned in healthy confidence of the sun-flushed manliness of his breast — is the silence, the incomprehensible statements that come from it, alone with her, a way of tormenting her? Does he do it only to annoy, to punish? And what has she done to deserve what he doesn’t mete out to others? Let him keep it to himself. Take a Valium. Anything. Become a vegetarian. In the heat of the afternoon everyone goes to their rooms or their makeshift beds on the shaded part of the deck, to sleep off the lunch-time wine. Even in the room allotted to them, he keeps up, out of sight of the company (but they are only a wall away, he knows they are there), what is expected. It is so hot he and she have stripped to their briefs. He passes a hand over her damp breasts, gives a lazy sigh, and is asleep on his back. Would he have wanted to take her nipples in his mouth, commit himself to love-making, if he hadn’t fallen asleep, or was his a gesture from the wings just in case the audience might catch a glimpse of a slump to an off-stage presence?

The house party is like the fire the servant makes at dusk within the reed stockade beside the lodge. One never knows when a fire outdoors will smoke or take flame cleanly and make a grand blaze, as this one does. One never knows when a small gathering will remain disparate, unresponsive, or when, as this time, men and women will ignite and make a bright company. The ceremony of the evening meal was a bit ridiculous, but perhaps intended as such, and fun. A parody of old colonial times: the stockade against the wild beasts, the black man beating a drum to announce the meal, the chairs placed carefully by him in a missionary prayer-meeting circle well away from the fire, the whisky and wine set out, the smell of charred flesh from the cooking grids. Look up: the first star in the haze is the mast-light of a ship moving out, slipping moorings, breaking with this world. Look down: the blue flames are nothing but burning fat, there are gnawed bones on the swept earth. He’s been drinking a lot — she noticed: so that he could stomach it all, no doubt he tells himself.