Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

‘Half his family sick… it must be pretty unhealthy, where they’ve been made to go.’

She smiles. ‘Well, I’m not too sure about that. I had the feeling, some of what he said… they’re theatrical by nature. You must take it with a pinch of salt.’

‘You mean about the mother and sisters and so on?’

She’s still smiling, she doesn’t answer.

‘But he couldn’t have made up about taking a job so far from home — and the business of sending his wages to his mother? That too?’

He glances at her.

Beside him, she’s withdrawn as the other one, sleeping behind him. While he turns his attention back to the road, she is looking at him secretly, as if somewhere in his blue eyes registering the approaching road but fixed on the black faces he is trying to read, somewhere in the lie of his inflamed hand and arm that on their travels have been plunged in the sun as if in boiling water, there is the place through which the worm he needs to be infected with can find a way into him, so that he may host it and become its survivor, himself surviving through being fed on. Become like her. Complicity is the only understanding.

‘Oh it’s true, it’s all true… not in the way he’s told about it. Truer than the way he told it. All these things happen to them. And other things. Worse. But why burden us? Why try to explain to us? Things so far from what we know, how will they ever explain? How will we react? Stop our ears? Or cover our faces? Open the door and throw him out? They don’t know. But sick mothers and brothers gone to the bad — these are the staples of misery, mmh? Think of the function of charity in the class struggles in your own country in the nineteenth century; it’s all there in your literature. The lord-of-the-manor’s compassionate daughter carrying hot soup to the dying cottager on her father’s estate. The ‘advanced’ upper-class woman comforting her cook when the honest drudge’s daughter takes to whoring for a living. Shame, we say here. Shame. You must’ve heard it? We think it means, what a pity; we think we are expressing sympathy — for them. Shame. I don’t know what we’re saying about ourselves.’ She laughs.

‘So you think it would at least be true that his family were kicked out of their home, sent away?’

‘Why would anyone of them need to make that up? It’s an everyday affair.’

‘What kind of place would they get, where they were moved?’

‘Depends. A tent, to begin with. And maybe basic materials to build themselves a shack. Perhaps a one-room prefab. Always a tin toilet set down in the veld, if nothing else. Some industrialist must be making a fortune out of government contracts for those toilets. You build your new life round that toilet. His people are Coloured, so it could be they were sent where there were houses of some sort already built for them; Coloureds usually get something a bit better than blacks are given.’

‘And the house would be more or less as good as the one they had? People as poor as that — and they’d spent what must seem a fortune to them, fixing it up.’

‘I don’t know what kind of house they had. We’re not talking about slum clearance, my dear; we’re talking about destroying communities because they’re black, and white people want to build houses or factories for whites where blacks live. I told you. We’re talking about loading up trucks and carting black people out of sight of whites.’

‘And even where he’s come to work — Pietersburg, what-ever-it’s-called — he doesn’t live in the town.’

‘Out of sight.’ She has lost the thought for a moment, watching to make sure the car takes the correct turning. ‘Out of sight. Like those mothers and grannies and brothers and sisters far away on the Cape Flats.’

‘I don’t think it’s possible he actually sends all his pay. I mean how would one eat?’

‘Maybe what’s left doesn’t buy anything he really wants.’

Not a sound, not a sigh in sleep behind them. They can go on talking about him as he always has been discussed, there and yet not there.

Her companion is alert to the risk of gullibility. He verifies the facts, smiling, just as he converts, mentally, into pounds and pence any sum spent in foreign coinage. ‘He didn’t sell the radio. When he said he’d sold all his things on the road, he forgot about that.’

‘When did he say he’d last eaten?’

‘Yesterday. He said.’

She repeats what she has just been told: ‘Yesterday.’ She is looking through the glass that takes the shine of heat off the landscape passing as yesterday passed, time measured by the ticking second hand of moving trees, rows of crops, country-store stoeps, filling stations, spiny crook’d fingers of giant euphorbia. Only the figures by the roadside waiting, standing still.

Personal remarks can’t offend someone dead-beat in the back. ‘How d’you think such a young man comes to be without front teeth?’

She giggles whisperingly and keeps her voice low, anyway. ‘Well, you may not believe me if I tell you…’

‘Seems odd… I suppose he can’t afford to have them replaced.’

‘It’s — how shall I say — a sexual preference. Most usually you see it in their young girls, though. They have their front teeth pulled when they’re about seventeen.’

She feels his uncertainty, his not wanting to let comprehension lead him to a conclusion embarrassing to an older woman. For her part, she is wondering whether he won’t find it distasteful if — at her de-sexed age — she should come out with it: for cock-sucking. ‘No one thinks the gap spoils a girl’s looks, apparently. It’s simply a sign she knows how to please. Same significance between men, I suppose… A form of beauty. So everyone says. We’ve always been given to understand that’s the reason.’

‘Maybe it’s just another sexual myth. There are so many.’

She’s in agreement. ‘Black girls. Chinese girls. Jewish girls.’

‘And black men?’

‘Oh my goodness, you bet. But we white ladies don’t talk about that, we only dream, you know! Or have nightmares.’

They’re laughing. When they are quiet, she flexes her shoulders against the seat-back and settles again. The streets of a town are flickering their text across her eyes. ‘He might have had a car accident. They might have been knocked out in a fight.’

They have to wake him because they don’t know where he wants to be set down. He is staring at her lined white face (turned to him, calling him gently), stunned for a moment at this evidence that he cannot be anywhere he ought to be; and now he blinks and smiles his empty smile caught on either side by a canine tooth, and gulps and gives himself a shake like someone coming out of water. ‘Sorry! Sorry! Sorry madam!’

What about, she says, and the young man glances quickly, his blue eyes coming round over his shoulder: ‘Had a good snooze?’

‘Ooh I was finished, master, finished, God bless you for the rest you give me. And with an empty stummick, you know, you dreaming so real. I was dreaming, dreaming, I didn’t know nothing about I’m in the car!’

It comes from the driver’s seat with the voice (a real Englishman’s, from overseas) of one who is hoping to hear something that will explain everything. ‘What were you dreaming?’

But there is only hissing, spluttery laughter between the two white pointed teeth. The words gambol. ‘Ag, nothing, master, nothing, all non -sunce—’

The sense is that if pressed, he will produce for them a dream he didn’t dream, a dream put together from bloated images on billboards, discarded calendars picked up, scraps of newspapers blown about — but they interrupt, they’re asking where he’d like to get off.