Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

He does it to his satisfaction in his own time and looks up at them. ‘The lions, they know I must take a piece for me because I find where their meat is. They know it. It’s all right. But if I take too much, they know it also. Then they will take one of my children.’

He’s one of those dark-haired men whose beards grow out rusty-red. He could have dyed his hair to match — more or less — but a beard is the first thing they’d expect to find you behind. He’s lived like this several times before; the only difference is that this time he came back into the country legally, came home — so much for the indemnity promised to exiles, so much for the changed era there, now bans on his kind of politics were supposed to be a thing of the past, he was supposed to be — free? He knows how their minds work — not much imagination, reliance on an Identikit compilation of how political subversives look and behave Underground. Underground: this time, as at other times, he’s aware of how unsuitably abstract a term that is. To hide away, you have to be out in the open of life; too soon and easily run to ground, holed up somewhere. Best safety lies in crowds. Selective crowds; he goes to football matches with beer in a knapsack, and a cap with a plastic eyeshade over his sunglasses, but not to pop concerts, where the police keep an eye on young leftists whose democratic recreation this is. He goes to the movies but not to concerts although he longs for the company of strings and brass; someone among his intellectual buddies from long ago would be bound to gaze at him, reaching back for recognition. Small gatherings where everyone can be trusted are traps; glowing with the distinction of the secret encounter with a real revolutionary, someone will not be able to resist boasting to another, in strictest confidence, and that other will pass on the luminous dusting of danger.

The good friends who provide a bed sometimes offer the use of a car as well, but driving alone is another sure way to be traced and picked up. He walks, and takes buses among ordinary workers and students. He’s a little too forty-five-ish, thickened around the jowl and diaphragm, to pass as a student but with his cravat of tangled black hair showing in the neck of a sweat shirt and his observance of the uniform jogging shoes with soles cushioned like tyres, he could be anyone among the passengers — the white artisans, railway and post office employees, even policemen. Reading a newspaper with its daily account of the proceedings at the group trial where he is a missing accused, worrying about these comrades in arms, he tries not to feel self-congratulatory at his escape of arrest, a form of complacency dangerous to one in his position, sitting there in a bus among people he knows would be glad to hand him over to the law; but he can’t suppress a little thrill, a sort of inner giggle. Perhaps this is freedom? Something secret, internal, after all? But philosophizing is another danger, in his situation, undermining the concept of freedom for which he has risked discovery and imprisonment yet again.

One afternoon in the city he was gazing inattentively out of the window waiting for the bus to set off when he became aware of the presence just seating itself beside him. Aware like an animal: scenting something different in the bus’s familiar sun-fug of sweat and deodorants, fruit-skins and feet. Perfume. Real perfume, at the price of a month’s wages of the other passengers. And a sound, a sound of silk as a leg crossed the knee of another leg. He straightened away from the window, looked ahead for a decent interval and then slowly turned, as if merely fidgeting because the bus was taking too long to leave.

A woman, of course — he’d scented that. Grey silk pants or some sort of fashionable skirt divided like pants, with an arched instep showing in a pastel sandal. Below the neckline of a loose blouse, silk slopes shining — breasts rising and falling. Out of breath. Or exasperated. He moved a little to give her more room. She nodded in acknowledgement without looking at him; she didn’t see him, she was going through some sort of dialogue or more likely monologue in her head, annoyance, exasperation twitched her lips.

Schoolgirls tramped onto the bus with their adolescent female odours and the pop of gum blown between their lips like the text balloons in comics. An old woman opened a bag of vinegary chips. The bus filled but the driver was absent.

This misplaced person, this woman, this pampered almost-beauty (he saw as she turned, throwing back her long, tiger-streaked hair cut in a parrot-poll over the forehead, and smiling on perfectly conformed teeth) had now accepted where she found herself. She indicated the driver’s seat. — What d’you think’s happened to him?—

Taking a leak. — Having a cup of coffee, I suppose. — They shared the polite moment of tolerance.

— I thought they had a strict timetable. Oh well. D’you know if this takes us along Sylvia Pass?—

— Pretty near the top of the Pass.—

She pulled a face and blinked her thick-lashed eyes in resigned dismay. Secretive, glossy eyes, knowing how to please, and folding at the outer corners an attractive, experienced fan of faint lines.

— Where do you want to get off?—

— That’s the problem — at the bottom of the Pass. I suppose I should have taken some other bus… I don’t know why taxis don’t cruise in this town as they do in any other civilized place! I’ve been looking for one for half an hour, traipsing…—

— There should have been taxis for tourists at any hotel.—

— No, no, I live here, but this just isn’t my day… my car’s stuck in a parking garage. Underground. Infuriating. Battery dead or something. I couldn’t find a telephone booth where the receiver hadn’t been torn out… this town! I had to ask a shopkeeper to let me phone for a mechanic… anyway, I couldn’t wait any longer, I’ve left the keys with the attendant.—

She felt better now that she had told someone, anyone. He was anyone.

When the driver appeared and fares were to be paid of course she had neither season card nor change for a ticket. While she scrabbled in her bag, gold chains on her wrists sliding, he gave the conductor two tickets.

— Oh you are kind… — She was suddenly embarrassed by her privileged life, by her inability to cope with what for all the people surrounding her on the bus was daily routine. In their ignoring of her she felt a reproach that she had never travelled on the bus before, perhaps not this bus or any bus, at least since she was a schoolchild. He was no longer anyone; somehow an ally, although from his appearance he probably could ill afford to waste a bus ticket on a stranger. Yet there was something in his self-assurance, the amusement in his regard, that suggested he was not merely one of the other passengers. Unsure of this, in a habit of patronage — she was the kind who would treat her servants generously but send her children to segregated schools — she chattered to him to show she considered him an equal. — You make the journey every day? Isn’t it always bliss to get home, out of this town?—

— Every day, no. But what’s wrong with the city? — Too full of blacks for you, now, lady, blacks selling fruit and cheap jewellery and knitted caps, dirtying the streets, too full of men without work for whom you see your bracelets and that swish Italian suède bag as something to be taken from you.

She shifted to safe generalization. — Oh I’m no city girl. Not anywhere.—

— But you live in one?—

— Well, you’d hardly know it was there, from my house. Luckily. It’s an old suburb … the trees — that’s one thing about Johannesburg, isn’t it, you can hide yourself in trees, just the highways humming, well out of sight!—