Nadine Gordimer: Jump and Other Stories

‘No, anywhere. Here it’s all right. Fine. Just there by the corner. I must go look for someone who’ll praps give me a rand for the taxi, because I can’t walk so far, I haven’t eaten nothing since yesterday… just here, the master can please stop just here—’

The traffic light is red, anyway, and the car is in the lane nearest the kerb. Her thin, speckled white arm with a skilled flexible hand, but no muscle with which to carry a load of washing or lift a hoe, feels back to release the lock he is fumbling at. ‘Up, up, pull it up.’ She has done it for him. ‘Can’t you take a bus?’

‘There’s no buses Sunday, madam, this place is ve-ery bad for us for transport, I must tell you, we can’t get nowhere Sundays, only work-days.’ He is out, the plastic bag with the radio under his arm, his feet in their stained, multi-striped jogging sneakers drawn neatly together like those of a child awaiting dismissal. ‘Thank you madam, thank you master, God bless you for what you done.’

The confident dextrous hand is moving quickly down in the straw bag bought from a local market somewhere along the route. She brings up a pale blue note (the Englishman recognizes the two-rand denomination of this currency that he has memorized by colour) and turns to pass it, a surreptitious message, through the open door behind her. Goodbye master madam. The note disappears delicately as a tit-bit finger-fed. He closes the door, he’s keeping up the patter, goodbye master, goodbye madam, and she instructs—‘No, bang it. Harder. That’s it.’ Goodbye master, goodbye madam —but they don’t look back at him now, they don’t have to see him thinking he must keep waving, keep smiling, in case they should look back.

She is the guide and mentor; she’s the one who knows the country. She’s the one — she knows that too — who is accountable. She must be the first to speak again. ‘At least if he’s hungry he’ll be able to buy a bun or something. And the bars are closed on Sunday.’

Breathe.

Breath. A baby, a chicken hatching — the first imperative is to breathe.

Breathless.

Breathe! Out of this concentration, in which he forgets even the rhythm of his feet, is a bellows pumped by the command, the admonition, the slap on the bottom that shocks the baby into inhalation — comes his second wind. Unless you go out like this, morning and evening, you never know what no one can remember, that first discovery of independent life: I can breathe.

It came after twenty minutes or so, when he had left behind houses he had never entered but knew because they were occupied by people like himself, passed the aggressive monitoring of dogs who were at their customary gateposts, the shuttered take-away, prego rolls & jumbo burgers, and the bristling security cage of the electricity sub-station. These were his pedometer: three kilometres. Here where the grid of his familiar streets came up short against the main road was the point of no return. Sometimes he took a circuitous route back but this was the outward limit. Not quite a highway, the road divided the territory of Alicewood, named for the daughter of a real estate developer, from Enterprise Park, the landscaped industrial buffer between the suburb and the black township whose identity was long overwhelmed by a squatter camp which had spread to the boundary of the industries and, where there was vacant ground, dragged through these interstices its detritus of tin and sacking, abutting on the highway. Someone — the municipality — had put up a high corrugated metal fence to shield passing traffic from the sight.

At six o’clock on a Sunday morning the four-lane road is deserted. A wavering of smoke from last night’s cooking fires hangs peacefully, away on the other side, the sign of existence there. In the house he has left, a woman, three children, sleep on unaware that he has risen from her bed, passed their doors, as if he has left his body in its shape impressed beside her and moved out of himself on silent running shoes. The exhausted tarmac gives off a bitumen scent that is lost in carbon monoxide fumes during the week; he is quietly attracted, at his turning point, to mark time a few paces out on the road, having the pounded surface all to himself. It is pleasant as a worn rubber mat underfoot.

He began to run steadily along it. Now no landmarks of distance; instead, memory in a twin stream started to flow in its own progression, the pumping of his heart sending blood to open up where in his brain cells flashes of feeling and images from boyhood were stored at one with the play of fragments from the past week. Tadpoles wriggling in his pocket on his way home from school and the expression of irritation round his accountant’s mouth when he disputed some calculation, the change in the curve of a girl’s buttocks as she shifted her weight from one leg to another standing in front of him in a bank queue on Friday and the sudden surfacing of his father’s figure bending about in a vegetable garden, looming, seen at the height of a child who has done wrong (run away, was it?); the same figure and not the same, with an arthritic leg laid out like a wooden one and the abstracted glance of someone able now only to move towards death, the scent of the girl in the bank as her sharp exhalation of impatience sent the message of her body to his — all this smoothly breathed, in and out. In the flowing together of contexts the crow of a cock in the city does not come incongruously but is more of a heraldic announcement: day, today, time for ghosts to fade, time to return. The cock-crow sounds from over there behind the fence, a place which itself has come about defying context, plan, definition, confusing the peasant’s farmyard awakening with the labourer’s clock-in at the industries close by.

Of course, they kept chickens among whatever dirt and degradation was behind that fence. He must have done another couple of kilometres; there were no more factory buildings but the shanties occupied the land all along the other side of the road. Here in places the metal fence had collapsed under the pressure of shelters that leant against it and sections had been filched to roof other shacks, yet the life in there was not exposed to the road because the jumbled crowding of makeshift board and planks, bits of wrecked vehicles, cardboard and plastic sheeting closed off from view how far back the swarm of habitation extended. But as he turned to go home — it burst open, revealing itself.

Men came flying at him. The assault exaggerated their faces like close-ups in film; for a vivid second he saw rather than felt through the rictus of his mouth and cheek muscles the instant gaping fear that must have opened his mouth and stretched his cheeks like a rubber mask. They rushed over him colliding with him, swerving against him, battering him. But in their passage: they were carrying him along with them. They were not after him. Fuses were blowing in the panic impulses along the paths of his brain, he received incoherently the realization that he was something in their path — a box they tripped over, an abandoned tyre-tube bowling as they kicked past it — swept into their pursuit. What had seemed to be one of them was the man they were after, and that man’s terror and their rage were a single fury in which he hadn’t distinguished one from the other. The man’s shirt was ripped down the back, another hobbled wildly with one shoe lost, some wore red rags tied pirate-style round their heads, knobbed clubs swung above them, long pieces of wire strong and sharp enough to skewer a man armed them, one loped with a sledge-hammer over his shoulder, there were cleavers, and a butcher’s knife ground to sword-point and dangling from a bracelet of plaited red plastic. They were bellowing in a language he didn’t need to understand in order to understand, the stink of adrenaline sweat was coming from the furnace within them. The victim’s knees pumped up almost to his chin, he zigzagged about the road, the road that was never to be crossed, and the tight mob raced with him, hampered and terrible with their weaponry, and he who had blundered into the chase was whirled along as if caught up by some carnival crowd in which, this time, the presence of death was not fancy dress.