Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

After the mosquitoes had had their fill sleep came as indifferently as those other bodily states, hunger and thirst. A good appetite for fresh pawpaw and bacon, boerewors and eggs. Hungry, like everybody else. His wife offers him a second helping, perhaps he needs feeding up, there is a theory that all morbid symptoms are in fact of physical origin. Obsession with injustice — what’s wrong with the world is a disease you, an individual, can’t cure, that’s life. The one who went to prison may be suffering from a lack of something — amino acids, vitamins; or an excess of something, overfeeding when a child or hyperactive thyroid gland. Research is being done.

Siza confirms that the lionesses came to drink. They passed his house; he heard them. He tells this with the dry, knowing smile of one who is aware of a secret to-and-fro between bedrooms. After breakfast he is going to take the party to see in daylight where the kill took place last night.

‘But is there anything to see?’

Siza is patient. ‘They not eat all. Is too much. So they leave some, tonight they come back for eat finish.’

‘No thanks! I don’t think we should disturb them again.’ But nobody wants the young doctor and his girl-friend to come, anyway, and spoil the outing.

‘The lions they sleeping now. They gone away. Come back tonight. Is not there now.’

The wife is watching to see if she and her husband are going along. Yes, he’s climbing, limber, into the old vehicle with the cracked chassis, he’s giving a hand up to the hostess, he’s said something that makes her laugh and purse her mouth.

The black women are thumping washing at an outdoor tub. Neither they nor their children come on this expedition. There is room to breathe without contact, this time. Everything is different in daylight. It is true that the lionesses are absent; the state that he achieved last night is absent in the same way, like them, drugged down by daylight.

Not a lion to be seen. Siza has stopped the vehicle, got out, but waved the passengers to stay put. The scrub forest is quiet, fragile pods that burst and sow their seed by wind-dispersion spiral slowly. Everybody chatters. The stockbroker leaves the vehicle and everybody shouts at him. All right. All right. Taking his time, to show his lack of fear, he climbs aboard. ‘Lions are not bulls and bears, Fred.’ They laugh at this mild jeer which is the kind expected to sustain the wit’s image — all are amused except the stockbroker himself, who knows the remark, in turn, refers to his image of himself as one whom no one would guess to be a stockbroker.

Siza comes back and beckons. The vehicle is quickly quit. And now the emptiness of the scrub forest is untrustworthy, all around, you can’t see what’s behind dead brush, fallen logs and the screens of layered branches that confine vision to ten feet. They talk only softly, in the sense of being stalked. The black man is leading them along what looks almost like a swept path; but it has been swept by a large body being dragged through dust and dead leaves: there is the carcass of the zebra, half-hidden in a thicket.

‘No tyre-tracks, we didn’t drive right into here! This can’t be the place.’

‘They pull him here for when they come back tonight.’

‘What! To keep the meat fresh?’

‘For the birds mustn’t see.’ Siza gives a name in his language.

‘He means vultures. Vultures, eh, Siza.’ A mime of the vultures’ hunched posture.

‘Yes, those big birds. Come look here—’ The tour continues, he takes them a few paces from the carcass and stands beside a mound over which earth has been scratched or kicked. Flies whose backs spark tinny green and gold are settled on it. The black man has his audience: taking up a stick, he prods the mound and it stirs under dust like flour-coated meat moved by a fork.

‘Christ, the intestines! Look at the size of that liver or spleen!’

‘You mean lions can do that? Store things covered? How do they do it, just with their paws?’

‘It’s exactly the way my cat covers its business in the garden, scratches up earth. They’re cats, too.’

The young jailbird and his girl and the antique dealer have made a discovery for themselves, having, in the confidence of excitement, retraced for a short distance the way along which the kill was approached. They have found the very pile of the contents of the zebra’s stomach that someone noticed last night.

It is another mound. He has come over from the mound of guts they are marvelling at. There is nothing to watch in dead flesh, it is prodded and it falls back and is still. But this mound of steaming grass that smells sweetly of cud (it has been heated by the sun as it was once heated by the body that contained it) is not dead to human perception. What’s going on here is a visible transformation of an inert mass. It is literally being carried away by distinctly different species of beetles who know how to live by decay, the waste of the digestive tract. The scarabs with their armoured heads burrow right into the base of the mound, and come out backwards, rolling their ball of dung between their strong, tined legs. The tunnels they have mined collapse and spread the mound more thinly on its periphery; smaller beetles are flying in steadily to settle there, where their lighter equipment can function. They fly away carrying their appropriate load in a sac — or between their front legs, he can’t quite make out. A third species, middle-sized but with a noisy buzz, function like helicopters, hovering and scooping off the top of the mound. They are flattening it perfectly evenly, who can say how or why they bother with form? That’s life. If every beetle has its place, how is refusal possible. And if refusal is possible, what place is there. No question mark. These are statements. That is why there is no point in making them to anyone. There is no possible response.

The mound is slowly going to disappear; maybe the vehicle is about to take the party back to the lodge, the weekend is going to be over. He is walking back to the rest of the party, still gathered round the carcass and the black man. For the space of a few yards he is alone, for a few seconds he is equidistant between those at the dung mound and those up ahead, part of neither one nor the other. A sensation that can’t be held long; now he is with the group at the kill, again. There is some special stir of attentiveness in them, they crowd round and then herd back a step, where Siza, the black man, is crouched on his hunkers. He is business-like, concentrated, not taking any notice of them. He has given them all he could; now he has the air of being for himself. He has a knife in his hand and the white man who has just joined the group recognizes it, it is the knife that is everywhere, nowhere without the knife, on the news, at the dark street-corners, under the light that the warders never turn out. The black man has thrust, made his incision, sliced back the black-and-white smooth pelt on the dead beast’s uppermost hind leg and now is cutting a piece of the plump rump. It is not a chunk or hunk, but neatly butchered, prime — a portion.

They laugh, wondering at the skill, curious. As if they can’t guess, as if they’ve never sunk their teeth into a steak in their lives. ‘What’re you going to do with that, Siza?’ Ah yes, put it in a doggy bag, take it home when you’ve already stuffed your own guts, taken the land (as the jailbird would say).

The black man is trimming it. Along with the knife, he has brought a sheet of newspaper. ‘For me. Eat it at my house. For my house.’

‘Is it good meat?’

‘Yes, it’s good.’

One of the men chides, man to man. ‘But why not take the whole haunch — the whole leg, Siza. Why such a small piece?’

The black man is wrapping the portion in newspaper, he knows he mustn’t let it drip blood on the white people.