Nadine Gordimer: Jump and Other Stories

I stay, and listen. He forgets I’m there when he’s talking and arguing about something I can see is important, more important than anything we could ever have to say to each other when we’re alone. But now and then, when one of the other comrades is speaking I see him look at me for a moment the way I will look up at one of my favourite children in school to encourage the child to understand. The men don’t speak to me and I don’t speak. One of the things they talk about is organizing the people on the farms — the workers, like my father and brother, and like his parents used to be. I learn what all these things are: minimum wage, limitation of working hours, the right to strike, annual leave, accident compensation, pensions, sick and even maternity leave. I am pregnant, at last I have another child inside me, but that’s women’s business. When they talk about the Big Man, the Old Men, I know who these are: our leaders are also back from prison. I told him about the child coming; he said, And this one belongs to a new country, he’ll build the freedom we’ve fought for! I know he wants to get married but there’s no time for that at present. There was hardly time for him to make the child. He comes to me just like he comes here to eat a meal or put on clean clothes. Then he picks up the little girl and swings her round and there! — it’s done, he’s getting into the combi, he’s already turning to his comrade that face of his that knows only what’s inside his head, those eyes that move quickly as if he’s chasing something you can’t see. The little girl hasn’t had time to get used to this man. But I know she’ll be proud of him, one day!

How can you tell that to a child six years old. But I tell her about the Big Man and the Old Men, our leaders, so she’ll know that her father was with them on the Island, this man is a great man, too.

On Saturday, no school and I plant and weed with my mother, she sings but I don’t; I think. On Sunday there’s no work, only prayer meetings out of the farmer’s way under the trees, and beer drinks at the mud and tin huts where the farmers allow us to squat on their land. I go off on my own as I used to do when I was a child, making up games and talking to myself where no one would hear me or look for me. I sit on a warm stone in the late afternoon, high up, and the whole valley is a path between the hills, leading away from my feet. It’s the Boer’s farm but that’s not true, it belongs to nobody. The cattle don’t know that anyone says he owns it, the sheep — they are grey stones, and then they become a thick grey snake moving — don’t know. Our huts and the old mulberry tree and the little brown mat of earth that my mother dug over yesterday, way down there, and way over there the clump of trees round the chimneys and the shiny thing that is the TV mast of the farmhouse — they are nothing, on the back of this earth. It could twitch them away like a dog does a fly.

I am up with the clouds. The sun behind me is changing the colours of the sky and the clouds are changing themselves, slowly, slowly. Some are pink, some are white, swelling like bubbles. Underneath is a bar of grey, not enough to make rain. It gets longer and darker, it grows a thin snout and long body and then the end of it is a tail. There’s a huge grey rat moving across the sky, eating the sky.

The child remembered the photo; she said That’s not him. I’m sitting here where I came often when he was on the Island. I came to get away from the others, to wait by myself.

I’m watching the rat, it’s losing itself, its shape, eating the sky, and I’m waiting. Waiting for him to come back.

Waiting.

I’m waiting to come back home.

Nadine Gordimer’s many novels include The Lying Days (her first novel), The Conservationist, joint winner of the Booker Prize, Burger’s Daughter, July’s Children, A Guest of Honour, A World of Strangers, My Son’s Story, None to Accompany Me, The House Gun and, most recently, The Pickup. Her collections of short stories include Something Out There, Jump and her most recent work, Loot. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lives in South Africa.