Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

The fire twitches under ash and the dinner orchestra of insects whose string instruments are their own bodies, legs scraping against legs, wings scraping against carapace, has been silenced by the rising of the moon. But laughter continues. In the huge night, not reduced to scale by buildings, tangled by no pylons and wires, hollowed out by no street- and window-lights into habitable enclosures, the laughter, the voices are vagrant sound that one moment flies right up boldly into space, the next makes a wave so faint it dies out almost as it leaves the lips. Everyone interrupts everyone else, argues, teases. There are moments of acerbity; the grapes they are eating pop into sharp juice as they are bitten. One of the quiet guests has become communicative as will the kind who never risk ideas or opinions of their own but can reproduce, when a subject brings the opportunity, information they have read and stored. Bats; the twirling rags darker against the dark — someone suggested, as a woman cowered, that fear of them comes from the fact that they can’t be heard approaching.

‘If your eyes are closed, and a bird flies overhead, you’ll hear the resistance of air to its wings.’

‘And also, you can’t make out what a bat’s like, where its head is — just a thing, ugh!’

The quiet guest was already explaining, no, bats will not bump into you, but not, as this is popularly believed, because they have an inbuilt radar system; their system is sonar, or echolocation—

‘—I wear a leopard skin coat!’

The defiant soprano statement from a sub-conversation breaks through his monologue and loses him attention.

It is the pretty girl; she has greased her face against the day’s exposure to the sun and her bone-structure elegantly reflects the frail light coming from the half moon, the occasional waver of flame roused in the fire, or the halo of a cigarette lighter. She is almost beautiful. ‘—D’you hear that!’ ‘Glynis, where did you find this girl?’ ‘Shall we put her out to be eaten by her prey, expose her on a rock?’

‘No leopards here, unfortunately.’

‘The coat would look much better on the leopard than on you.’ The wit did not live up to his reputation, merely repeated in sharper, more personal paraphrase what had been well said no one remembered by whom. He spoke directly to the girl, whereas the others were playfully half-indignant around her presence. But the inference, neither entirely conservationist nor aesthetic, seemed to excite the girl’s interest in this man. She was aware of him, in the real sense, for the first time.

‘Wait till you see me in it.’ Just the right touch of independence, hostility.

‘That could be arranged.’

This was a sub-exchange, now, under the talk of the others; he was doing the right thing, responding with the innuendo by which men and women acknowledge chemical correspondences stirring between them. And then she said it, was guided to it like a bat, by echolocation or whatever-it-is, something vibrating from the disgusts in him. ‘Would you prefer me to wear a sheepskin one? You eat lamb, I suppose?’

It is easy to lose her in the crisscross of talk and laughter, to enter it at some other level and let fall the one on which she took him up. He is drawn elsewhere — there is refuge, maybe, rock to touch in the ex-political prisoner. The prisoner holds the hand of his pale girl with her big nervously-exposed teeth; no beauty, all love. The last place to look for love is in beauty, beauty is only a skin, the creature’s own or that of another animal, over what decays. Love is found in prison, this no-beauty has loved him while his body was not present; and he has loved his brothers — he’s talking about them, not using the word, but the sense is there so strongly — although they live shut in with their own pails of dirt, he loves even the murderers whose night-long death songs he heard before they were taken to be hanged in the morning.

‘Common criminals? In this country? Under laws like ours?’

‘Oh yes, we politicals were kept apart, but with time (I was there ten months) we managed to communicate. (There are so many ways you don’t think of, outside, when you don’t need to.) One of them — young, my age — he was already declared a habitual criminal, inside for an indeterminate sentence. Detention’s also an indeterminate sentence, in a way, so I could have some idea…’

‘You hadn’t killed, robbed — he must have done that over and over.’

‘Oh he had. But I hadn’t been born the bastard of a kitchen maid who had no home but her room in a white woman’s back yard, I hadn’t been sent to a “homeland” where the woman who was supposed to take care of me was starving and followed her man to a squatter camp in Cape Town to look for work. I hadn’t begged in the streets, stolen what I needed to eat, sniffed glue for comfort. He had his first new clothes, his first real bed when he joined a gang of car thieves. Common lot; common criminal.’

Common sob story.

‘If he had met you outside prison he would have knifed you for your watch.’

‘Possibly! Can you say “That’s mine” to people whose land was taken from them by conquest, a gigantic hold-up at the point of imperial guns?’

And the bombs in the streets, in the cars, in the supermarkets, that kill with a moral, necessary end, not criminal intent (yes, to be criminal is to kill for self-gain) — these don’t confuse him, make carrion of brotherhood. He’s brave enough to swallow it. No gagging.

Voices and laughter are cut off. You don’t come to the bush to talk politics. It is one of the alert silences called for now and then by someone who’s heard, beyond human voices, a cry. Shhhhh … Once it was the mean complaining of jackals, and — nearer — a nasal howl from a hyena, that creature of big nostrils made to scent spilt blood. Then a squeal no one could identify: a hare pounced on by a wheeling owl? A warthog attacked by — whom? What’s going on, among them, that other order, of the beasts, in their night? ‘They live twenty-four hours, we waste the dark.’ ‘Norbert — you used to be such a nightclub bird!’ And the young doctor offers: ‘They hunt for their living in shifts, just like us. Some sleep during the day.’ ‘Oh but they’re designed as different species, in order to use actively all twenty-four hours. We are one species, designed for daylight only. It’s not so many generations since — pre-industrial times, that’s all — we went to bed at nightfall. If the world’s energy supplies should run out, we’d be back to that. No electricity. No night shifts. There isn’t a variety in our species that has night vision.’ The bat expert takes up this new cue. ‘There are experiments with devices that may provide night vision, they’re based on—’

‘ Shhhhh …’

Laughter like the small explosion of a glass dropped.

‘Shut up, Claire!’

All listen, with a glisten of eye movements alone, dead still.

It is difficult for them to decide on what it is they are eavesdropping. A straining that barely becomes a grunt. A belching stir; scuffling, scuffling — but it could be a breeze in dead leaves, it is not the straw crepitation of the reeds at the river, it comes from the other direction, behind the lodge. There is a gathering, another gathering somewhere there. There is communication their ears are not tuned to, their comprehension cannot decode; some event outside theirs. Even the ex — political prisoner does not know what he hears; he who has heard through prison walls, he who has comprehended and decoded so much the others have not. His is only human knowledge, after all; he is not a twenty-four-hour creature, either.

Into this subdued hush breaks the black man jangling a tray of glasses he has washed. The host signals: be quiet, go away, stop fussing among dirty plates. He comes over with the smile of one who knows he has something to offer. ‘Lions. They kill one, two maybe. Zebras.’