Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

The race of pursued and pursuers broke suddenly from one side of the road to the other, he was thrust to the edge of the wild press and saw his chance.

Out.

The fence was down. The squatter shacks: he was on the wrong side. The road was no longer the sure boundary between that place and his suburb. It was the barrier that prevented him from getting away from the wrong side. In the empty road ( would no one come, would no one stop it ) the man went down under chants and the blows of a club with a gnarled knob as big as a child’s head, the butcher’s knife plunged, the pointed wires dug, the body writhed away like a chopped worm. On the oil stains of the tarmac blood was superimposing another spill.

He fled down among the shacks. Two bare-arsed children squatting to pee jumped up and bounded from him like rats. A man lifted the sack over an aperture in tin and quickly let it fall. There were cooking pots and ashes and a tethered donkey, the scabby body of a car like the eviscerated shell of a giant beetle, lamed supermarket trolleys, mud walls, beer cans; silence. Desertion; or the vacuum created by people left behind by the passage of violence, keeping out of it, holding breath. The haphazard strips of muddy passage between whatever passed for walls were so narrow he seemed to have entered a single habitation where, unseen, people all around followed him — his breathing, his panting breath — from room to room. A white man! He felt himself only to be a white man, no other identity, no other way to be known: to pull aside a sack and say, I’m in brokerage, give his name, his bona fide address — that was nothing, these qualifications of his existence meant nothing. And then a woman appeared out of a shack that had a door. — Get inside. It’s dangerous. — A firm grip, a big butterscotch-coloured upper arm in a tight-filled short sleeve, yellow- and pink-flowered. He ducked into her doorway with a push from her in his back.

— They terrible, those people, they’ll kill anybody. They will. — She had the strict face formed by respectability, a black woman churchgoer’s face, her eyes distant and narrowed behind butterfly-shaped spectacle frames with gilt scrolls. Other people in dimness were staring. A piece of canvas hung over what must be a square of window. Light came only from the gaps between tin walls and the roof low on his head. — You see, I run… I was just on the other side of the road, out for a run …—

A young man who was turned away from this apparition, paring his nails, children, a stooping man in pyjama trousers and a pullover, a girl with a blanket wrapped round her body below naked shoulders, doek awry from sleep.

He had a momentary loss of control, wanting to collapse against the woman, clutch her used big body under her apron and take the shield of her warmth against his trembling. — What’s happening — who was it — he’s dead there, in the road.—

She spoke for everyone. — From the hostel. They come from the hostel, they come in here and kill us.—

— I read about it. — His head wagged like a puppet’s, down, down to his chest.

— You read about it! — She gave a short slap of a laugh. — Every night, we don’t know. They come or they don’t come—

— Who are they?—

— The police send them.—

He could not say to this woman, That’s not what I read.

— Tomorrow it can be him. — The woman uncrossed her fine arms and presented the profile of the young man.

— Him?—

— Yes, my son. Come and knock on the wall shouting it’s all right, call him comrade so he’ll believe, and if he doesn’t go out, break in and beat my husband, there, you see him, he’s an old man already — take my son and kill him.—

Nothing moves a man on behalf of others so surely as danger to himself. — It was wonderful of you to open your door like that. I mean, for me. I don’t know what to say. Why him? What would make them come for your son?—

The young man shifted abruptly, turning still more pointedly away from the apparition his mother had brought in among them.

— My son’s in the Youth — the street committee.—

The kind who burned government appointees’ houses, stoned buses, boycotted schools. And lived here — slowly he was making out of the dimness and his own shock what this habitation was. Its intimacy pressed around him, a mould in which his own dimensions were redefined. He took up space where the space allowed each resident must be scrupulously confined and observed. The space itself was divided in two by curtains which stretched across it, not quite drawn closed, so that he could see the double bed with a flounced green satin cover which filled one half. A table with pots and a spirit stove, a dresser with crockery, a sagging armchair into which the old man sank, a chromium-shiny radio cassette player, a girlie calendar, Good Shepherd Jesus, framed, with a gold tinsel halo, the droop of clothes hanging from nails, vague darkness of folded blankets — that was the second half. He saw now there were three children as well as the grown daughter and son; seven people lived here.

The woman had lit the spirit stove and she gave an order, in their language, to the girl. Holding the blanket in one hand and shuffling with her knees together in modesty, the girl fetched a cup and saucer from the dresser, wiped them with a rag, put a spoon of powdered milk in the cup and, chivvied again by her mother, a spoon of tea in a jug. Like a sleep-walker. No one spoke except the woman. But he felt their awareness of him: the old man bewildered as at a visitor he hadn’t been told to expect, the children in unblinking curiosity, the young man hostile, the girl — the girl wanting to sink through the earth that was the shack’s floor; as if he were the threat, and not the marauders whose gales of anger blew about from the road, rising and fading as a wind would gust against the tin walls. The old man suddenly got up and signalled him to take the armchair.

— Please — stay where you are, I don’t need—

The woman brought him the cup of tea, carrying a small tin of sugar. — No, no, sit, sit. You see what this place is like, the rain pours in, you see how we have to try and stuff around the tin with plastic, but we can still greet with a chair.—

While he drank the paraffin-tasting tea she stood above him admonishingly. — You must keep away from here.—

— I don’t usually come so far, it was just only this morning, and I was right on the other side of the main road, there was no one… it happened, I got in the way.—

She pinched her lips between her teeth and shook her head at foolishness. — What do you want to come near this place for.—

Don’t take any chances keep away from the main road— his wife, when he ran sometimes before going to bed at night, possessive, not wanting him to do anything that excluded her.

— I can rather go to my home there in Lebowa, but how can we go, he’s got a job in town, he’s the attendant at underground parking, you’ll see him there by the chain where the cars come in to go down under the building. He’s too old to stay here now alone.—

The baying from the road swerved away out of hearing. Morning sounds, of coughing, wailing babies, and the drumming of water on tin containers, were released. He stood up and put the cup down carefully on the table.

— Wait. — She turned and said something to the young man. He answered with the smouldering obstinacy of adolescence. She spoke once more, and he put his head out of the door. All held the exact position in which the narrow stream of morning sunlight found them; the boy slipped out and closed them into dimness behind him. The woman did not speak while he was away. Darkness danced with the after-vision of the boy’s profile against glare; the waiting was the first atmosphere shared with the one to whom refuge had been given. He could hear them breathing as he breathed.