Jump and Other Stories

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Lighted windows: cutouts of home in the night. When he came from his meeting he turned the key but the door was quickly opened from the inside — she was there, Teresa, a terribly vivid face. Her thin bare feet clutched the floorboards, she was in her cotton nightgown that in bed he would draw away tenderly, the curtain of her body.

— They’ve taken my mother. Robbie and Francie and my mother.—

He must have said something — No! Good God! — but was at once in awe of her, of what had happened to her while he was not there. The questions were a tumble of rock upon them: When? Where? Who told her?

— Jimmy just phoned from a call box. He didn’t have enough change, we were cut off, I nearly went crazy, I didn’t know what number to call back. Then he phoned again. They came to the house and took my mother and Francie as well as Robbie.—

— Your mother! I can’t believe it! How could they take that old woman? She doesn’t even know what politics is — what could they possibly detain her for?—

His wife stood there in the entrance, barring his and her way into their home. — I don’t know… she’s the mother. Robbie and Francie were with her in the house.—

— Well, Francie still lives with her, doesn’t she. But why was Robert there?—

— Who knows. Maybe he just went home.—

In the night, in trouble, the kitchen seems the room to go to; the bedroom is too happy and intimate a place and the living-room with its books and big shared desk and pictures and the flowers he buys for her every week from the same Indian street vendor is too evident of the life the couple have made for themselves, apart.

He puts on the kettle for herb tea. She can’t sit, although he does, to encourage her. She keeps pulling at the lobes of her ears in travesty of the endearing gesture with which she will feel for the safety of the ear-rings he has given her. — They came at four o’clock yesterday morning.—

— And you only get told tonight?—

— Nils, how was Jimmy to know? It was only when the neighbours found someone who knew where he works that he got a message. He’s been running around all day trying to find where they’re being held. And every time he goes near a police station he’s afraid they’ll take him in, as well. That brother of mine isn’t exactly the bravest man you could meet…—

— Poor devil. D’you blame him. If they can take your mother — then anybody in the family—

Her nose and those earlobes go red as if with anger, but it is her way of fiercely weeping. She strokes harder and harder the narrow-brained head of the Afghan hound, her Dudu. She had never been allowed a dog in her mother’s house; her mother said they were unclean. — It’s so cold in that town in winter. What will my mother have to sleep on tonight in a cell.—

He gets up to take her to his arms; the kettle screams and screams, as if for her.

In bed in the dark, Teresa talked, cried, secure in the Afghan’s warmth along one side of her, and her lover-husband’s on the other. She did not have to tell him she cried because she was warm and her mother cold. She could not sleep — they could not sleep — because her mother, who had stifled her with thick clothing, suffocating servility, smothering religion, was cold. One of the reasons why she loved him — not the reason why she married him — was to rid herself of her mother. To love him, someone from the other side of the world, a world unknown to her mother, was to embrace snow and ice, unknown to her mother. He freed her of the family, fetid sun.

For him, she was the being who melted the hard cold edges of existence, the long black nights that blotted out half the days of childhood, the sheer of ice whose austerity was repeated, by some mimesis of environment, in the cut of his jaw. She came to him out of the houseful, streetful, of people as crowded together as the blood of different races mixed in their arteries. He came to her out of the silent rooms of an only child, with an engraving of Linnaeus, his countryman, in lamplight; and out of the scientist’s solitary journeys in a glass bell among fish on the sea-bed — he himself had grown up to be an ichthyologist not a botanist. They had the desire for each other of a couple who would always be strangers. They had the special closeness of a couple who belonged to nobody else.

And that night she relived, relating to him, the meekness of her mother, the subservience to an unfeeling, angry man (the father, now dead), the acceptance of the ghetto place the law allotted to the mother and her children, the attempts even to genteel it with lace curtains and sprayed room-fresheners — all that had disgusted Teresa and now filled her with anguish because — How will a woman like my mother stand up to prison? What will they be able to do to her?—

He knew she was struggling with the awful discovery that she loved her mother, who was despicable; being imprisoned surely didn’t alter the fact that her mother was so, proven over many omissions and years? He knew his Teresa well enough not to tell her the discovery was not shameful — that would bring it out into the open and she would accuse herself of sentimentality. Her mother was sentimental: those bronzed baby shoes of the men and women who had not grown up to be careful not to get into trouble, who had married a blond foreigner with a strange accent or taken to drink and bankruptcy, or got mixed up in politics, secret police files, arrests in the small hours of the morning. He listened and stroked her hair, sheltered her folded hand between his neck and shoulder as she cried and raged, pitying, blaming; and cursing — she who kept of her mother’s genteelism at least her pure mouth — those fucking bastards of government and police for what they had done, done not only at four in the morning in that house with its smell of cooking oil and mothballs, but for generations, tearing up lives with their decrees on bits of paper, breaking down doors in power of arrest, shutting people off from life, in cells.

Later in the night when he thought she might at last have fallen asleep, she sat up straight — What will she say? What does she know?—

She meant, about Robbie. Teresa and the brother, Robbie, were the ones who had got mixed up in politics. Teresa and her Swedish husband, living in this backwater coastal town in the company of marine biologists who were content to believe all species are interesting, and enquire no further into questions of equality, belonged to progressive organizations which walked the limit of but did not transgress legality, going no further than protest meetings. This was a respectable cover for the occasional clandestine support they gave Robbie, who really was mixed up, not just in avowals, but in the deeds of revolution. Sometimes it was money; sometimes it was an unannounced arrival in the middle of the night, with the need to go Underground for a day or two.

— Robbie won’t have told her anything. You know how, even if he ever wanted to, she’d stop her ears.—

— It’s not what she knows. She’s never known anything about us. But they won’t believe that! They’ll go on interrogating her—

— Don’t you think they’ll soon discover it — that she’s never known anything that would matter to them?—

His slow voice was the anchor from which she bobbed frantically. Suddenly her anger spilled in another direction. — What the hell got into him? What did Robbie go there for? How could he dare go to that house? How could he possibly not know that there, of all places, would be where they’d pick him up! The idiocy! The self-indulgence! What did he want, a home-cooked meal? I don’t know what’s gone wrong with the Movement, how they can let people behave so undisciplinedly, so childishly… How can we ever hope to see the end, if that’s how they behave… The idiot! Handed over—yes do come in and meet my mother and sister—quite a social occasion in the family, all ready to be carted off to prison together. I hope he realizes what he’s done. Some revolution, left to people like him… how could he go near that house—

They did not call each other by the endearments used commercially by every patronizing saleswoman and every affected actress—‘love’ and ‘darling’—but had their own, in his language. — Min lille loppa, we don’t know what his reasons might have been—

His ‘little flea’ beat the pillows with her fist, frightening her dog off the bed. — There can’t be any reason. Except she ruined them all, for everything, for the revolution too — he’s no different from the other brothers, in the end. He goes crawling back under mummy’s skirt — You don’t know those people, that family—

He went to the kitchen and brought her a glass of hot milk at four in the morning. While the milk was heating on the stove he stood at the kitchen window and put his palm on the pane, feeling the dark out there, the hour of the end of night into which, forty-eight hours before, mother, brother and sister had come, led to police cars.

In the morning, she didn’t go to work. She was soiled and blurred by helplessness. He had been in that family house only a few awkward times over their seven years together, but he saw for the first time that she would resemble her mother if she were ever to grow old and afraid. With her lips drawn back in pain, her teeth looked long — the face of a victim. Distraught, her beauty dragged out of shape, there was the reversion to physical type that comes with age; some day he would become the listing old Scandinavian hulk who was his father or his uncle. He begged her to take one of his tranquillizers but she wouldn’t — she had a horror of drugs, of drink, anything she had seen give others power over the individual personality; he had always privately thought this came subconsciously from her background, where people of one colour were submitted to the will of those of another.

He went to the Institute for an hour to set his team the tasks of the day and explain why both would be absent — she was employed there, too, in a humbler capacity, having had the opportunity, through their marriage and his encouragement, to satisfy her longing for some form of scientific education. When his colleagues asked what he was going to do he realized he didn’t know. If it turned out that Teresa’s family were detained under Section 29 they would have no access to lawyers or relatives. Between his colleagues’ expressions of sympathy and support were (he saw) the regarding silences shared by them: they could have predicted this sort of disaster, inconceivable in their own lives, as a consequence of his kind of marriage.

He found her talking on the telephone. She was clutching the receiver in both hands, her feet were bare and wet, and the dog — the dog had undergone a change, too, shrunk to a bony frame plastered with fringes of wet fur.

She had bathed the dog? On this day?

She saw his face but was hysterically concentrated on what she was hearing; signalled, don’t interrupt, be quiet! He put his arm round her and her one hand left the earpiece and groped up for his and held it tightly. She was cutting into the gabble on the other end — But I must be able to reach you! Isn’t there anywhere I can phone? If I don’t hear from you, who will tell me what’s happening? … Listen Jimmy, Jimmy, listen, I’m not blaming you… But if I can’t phone you at work, then… No! No! That isn’t good enough, d’you hear me, Jimmy—

There was a moment when he tried to hold steady the shifting gaze of her eyes. She put down the phone. — Call box. And I’ve forgotten the number he just gave me. I’ve been waiting the whole morning for him to call back, and now… I didn’t know how to get myself away from sitting here looking at that phone… do anything, anything… He phoned just after you left and said he had a lawyer friend-of-a-friend, someone I’ve never heard of, he was going to find out details, something about approaching a magistrate—

The phone sprang alive again and she stared at it; he picked it up: there was the voice of her brother, hesitant, stumbling — Ma and them, they in under Section 29.—

She sat at the phone while he tried to activate the house as if it were a stopped clock. To keep them going there would have to be lunch (he cooked it), later the lights switched on, the time for news on television. But she couldn’t eat not knowing if her mother was able to eat what there would be in a plate pushed through a cell door, she couldn’t read by lamplight because there was darkness in a cell, and the news — there was no news when people were detained under Section 29. She telephoned friends and could not remember what they had said. She telephoned a doctor because she suddenly had the idea her mother had low blood pressure or high blood pressure — not sure which — and she wanted to know whether her mother could have a stroke and die, from the one, or collapse, from the other, in a prison? She did not want to go to bed. She brought out a small cracked photograph of her mother holding a baby (Robbie, she identified) with a cross-looking tiny girl standing by (herself). A piece of a man’s coatsleeve showed where the rest of the photograph had been roughly cut off. The missing figure was her father. Exhausted, the two of them were up again until after midnight while she talked to him about her mother, was filled with curiosity and flashes of understanding about her mother, the monotony and smallness of her mother’s life. — And it has to be this: the only big thing that’s ever happened to her has to be this. — Her whole face trembled. He suffered with her. He was aware that it is a common occurrence that people talk with love about one they have despised and resented, once that person is dead. And to be in prison under Section 29, no one knows where, was to be dead to the world where one did not deserve to be loved.

In bed, she would not (of course) take a sleeping pill but they had each other. He made love to her while her tears smeared them both, and that put her blessedly to sleep. Now and then she gave the hiccuping sigh of a comforted child, and he woke at once and lifted his head, watching over her. There was a smell of clean dog-fur in the bed that third night.

Teresa.

He woke to find she was already bathed and dressed. She turned her head to him from the bedroom doorway when he spoke her name; her hair was drawn away tightly from her cheekbones and ears, held by combs. Again something had happened to her in his absence; this time while she was beside him, but they were parted in sleep. She was ready to leave the house long before it was time to go to work: going first to see an Indian woman lawyer whom they’d heard speak at protest meetings against detention without trial. He agreed it was a good idea. That was what must have come to her overnight, among these other things: if she was right about her mother’s high tension (or whatever it was) Jimmy must contact the doctor who treated her and get a statement from him confirming a poor state of health — that might get her released or at least ensure special diet and treatment, inside. And something must be done about that house — it would be rifled in a week, in that neighbourhood. Somebody responsible must be found to go there and see that it was properly locked up — and tidy up, yes, the police would have turned everything upside down; if they arrest, they also search the scene of arrest.

— Shall I come with you?—

No, she had already phoned Fatima, she was waiting at her office. Teresa paused a moment, ready to go, rehearsing, he could see, what she had to say to the lawyer; blew him a kiss.

There were no more tears, no more tremblings. She came to the Institute straight from the lawyer’s office, reported to him on the advice she had been given, put on her white coat and did her work. She found it hard to concentrate those first few days and had a dazed look about her, from the effort, when they met for lunch. They would seek a place to sit apart from others, in the canteen, like clandestine lovers. But it was not sweet intimacies their lowered voices exchanged. They were discussing what to do, what should be done, what could be done — and every now and then one or the other would look up to return the wave or greeting of a colleague, look up into the humid, cheerful room with the day’s specials chalked on a board, people gathered round the coffee and tea and Coke dispensers, look out, through the expanse of glass the sea breathed on, to the red collage of flamboyants and jazzy poinsettias in the Institute’s park — and her mother, brother and sister were in cells, somewhere. All the time. While they ate, while they worked, while they took the dog for his walk. For that progression of repetitions known as daily life went on; with only a realization of how strange it is, in its dogged persistence: what will stop it covering up what is really happening? In the cells; and here?

While he took care of that daily life (she had too much on her mind to be expected to shop and take clothes to the dry cleaner’s) she spent all their spare time seeing lawyers, collecting and filling in applications to magistrates, chiefs of police, government officials, and consulting organizations concerned with the condition of detainees. She was no longer dazed; hair out of the way, her attention never deflected, determination hardened her gestures and emboldened her gentleness, sloughed it away. She importuned anyone she could use — that was how she put it — Maybe we can use So-and-so. He’s supposed to be a good liberal, let’s see what he’ll do. Fatima says he’s an old Stellenbosch buddy of the Commissioner of Police. — To ask for help apparently was too weak a demand, people would reply ‘I’d help you if I could but…’;—We must pick people over whom there’s public leverage of some sort.—

He marvelled at how she had come to this knowledge; she, who had always been so endearingly primly principled, even went to see a Nationalist ex-member of parliament who was said still to be close to the Minister of Justice. She, who had always been so sincere, revived acquaintance with people he and she had avoided as materialistic, incompatible, pushy, because now their connections might be of use. Her entire consciousness was a strategy. When she had managed — through Fatima’s consultation with lawyers in the city where the mother, brother and sister were held — to get a parcel of blankets and clothing to them, she turned pressure on her mother’s doctor, telephoning him at his home late at night to urge that the prison medical officer attend her mother; when that succeeded, she contacted the friend-of-a-friend, who lived in the city, to take food to the prison (dried fruit, yoghurt, these were the things, she ascertained from those who had been political prisoners, one most needed) and try and get the Chief Warder to accept it for her mother, Robbie and Francie. She was always on the telephone; he brought her plate to her from their interrupted meals, where she sat, elbows on knees, on a stool — it was her corner, now, just as Dudu had his particular place under the table. That terrible ivy, daily life. How to pull it away and see — what?

She was constantly on the telephone because what was happening in the cells was far away, in Johannesburg. She became stern with impatience — sympathy irritated her and he had to realize that, for all their closeness, apartness together, he couldn’t really claim to be feeling what she was feeling. Every enquiry or instruction from her had to be referred through a third person. Jimmy’s timidity made him even less intelligent, she said, than he had ever been. He wasn’t to be relied on and he was the only member of the family there. Where she should be; every time some proxy bungled, it came up: she should be there. And then it was he who became distraught, couldn’t concentrate on anything but the cold anxiety that she would go there, walk into the waiting car of the Security Police, he saw them ready for her, counting on her coming to that house, to that prison where her mother, brother and sister were held. Hadn’t he said to her, of Jimmy’s fears, that it was a fact that anyone in the family…? And she was the one who had connections with Robbie beyond blood ties!

— Exactly! They might turn up here any time and take you and me. Both of us. How do we know what’s come out, in there… what he might have told my mother or poor frightened Francie — my sister’s only nineteen, you know … Those two women’ll never stand up under interrogation from those beasts, they couldn’t even judge what’s compromising and what isn’t.—

His physical size seemed to hamper him when opposing the will that tempered her slender body. He spoke, and it was as if he made some clumsy, inappropriate move towards her. — But they haven’t. I mean, thank god they haven’t. Maybe they don’t know about you.—

She gave a disparaging half-grunt, half-laugh.

— Maybe no one’s said anything about us… you. But if you go there, at once they’ll decide they might as well see what you know. And there is something to be got out of you, isn’t there.—

She gestured away the times her brother had appeared for refuge; the packets of papers that had been hidden under research documents about the habits of fish, in the desk of the Institute’s Swedish expert.

— Teresa, I won’t let you go! — He had never before spoken to her in that voice, probably it was the ugly voice of her father — he felt he had struck her a blow; but it was on his own sternum that his fist had fallen. He was shouting. —I will not have it! I’ll go, if someone must, I’ll go, I’m not one of the family!—

The dissension was like a sheet of newspaper that catches alight, swells and writhes with flame, and quickly dies to a handful of black membrane.

She dropped the idea. He thirsted with relief; she watched him go to the cupboard and pour himself a whisky, but she didn’t need anything like that. Every few days, something would happen that would precipitate the ordeal all over again. By now she had made connections that had ways of smuggling news out of the prison: Robbie was on a hunger strike, her mother and Francie had been moved to another prison. Why? She ought to be there to find out. The lawyer’s application to the Minister for her mother’s and Francie’s release was awaiting decision. She ought to be there to see if something couldn’t be done to hasten it. Her husband brought in friends to back him up; he, they, wouldn’t hear of her going.

She took leave of absence from the Institute. He didn’t know whether that was a good idea or not. At least work was a distraction, thinking about other matters, talking to people who had other concerns. This one had been cleaned out — a burglary, lost everything—things? He saw the question in her face, flung back. That one had a dying wife—death? Of course, death’s natural; he reflected that if her sixty-something-year-old mother had become ill and died, in that house, it would have been an event to accept.

So the practical preoccupations of her mother’s and siblings’ detention became her work, as well. Even her few pleasures — no, wrong word — her few small satisfactions were part of the disaster: there was the news that a banner calling for the release of her mother, brother and sister had been displayed at a meeting of a liberation movement broken up by police and dogs. There were messages from the movement in exile for which Robbie was active: they preferred this lawyer rather than that to be engaged on his behalf. And the fact that they knew to contact her drew her into another kind of cell, of new associates for whom detention was a hazard like a traffic fine, and clandestinity with all its cunning a code for survival in or out of prison.

It was on their advice that she started sleeping away from home. Well, it was a disinterested confirmation of the fears he had had for her; and, at the same time, of her conviction that she could just as well be picked up there as in the region of her mother’s house or place of imprisonment. She went to this good friend or that. — I may be at Addie’s tonight, if not with Stephen and Joanna. — She held him tightly a moment, buried Dudu’s slim snout against her before she slipped out, and she would be back early in the morning for breakfast. But he lay in their bed full of deserted desire for her, although they had not made love for weeks, not since the second night after the news came. He sensed she was ashamed of their joy happening while the others — that family — were out of human touch in prison. Once, he gave in to the temptation to hear her voice and phoned her where she said she would sleep, but she wasn’t there; and of course it would defeat the whole purpose of her absence if the friend who answered the call were to have told him where she had moved to; it was more than likely that the phone he was using at his bedside was tapped. He was too ashamed, next day, to confess to her his childish impulse.

She never wore her hair loose, now. No doubt it was because she didn’t have the heart to spend time putting it up in rollers and brushing it out, innocently enjoying the sight of it in the mirror, as she used to. Yet she looked differently beautiful; a woman becomes another woman when she changes the way she wears her hair. The combs scragged it away from her cheekbones and eye-hollows. She looked like a dusky Greta Garbo (he was just old enough to remember Greta Garbo). When the front door banged and she came in to breakfast in the mornings he felt — and it was like a fear — that he was falling in love with her. But how unpleasant and ridiculous, he had loved her for seven years, Teresa, Teresa — there was no need for abandoning that, starting something new.

And then there came to him the mad thought — mad! — that it was not he who was falling in love with her; someone else was. There was the mark of it on her, in the different beauty. She was the way someone else saw her. That was what he confronted himself with when she arrived in the mornings.

There was a day when the hair was wet, twisted up and the combs pushed in any-old-how.

— The sea looked so cool, I couldn’t resist a dip on the way.—

— I’m glad, min lille loppa, was it lovely?—

At the time he was tenderly pleased, as at the sign of recovery to a normal interest in life by an invalid. But walking through the Institute’s aquarium, while the fish mouthed at him he was overcome by what could not be said: who was it who swam with her, and she must have been naked, or only in her panties, because surely she didn’t take a swimsuit with her when she went away to elude the Security Police at night.

An hour or two later he could not believe he could have thought so cheaply about her, Teresa, Teresa. There was a little beach where he and she had often swum in the nude, sheltered by rocks; it was their beach she would have been to, alone, without him.

Because he had these moments of thinking badly of her, he became shy of her. They had always shared the discomfort of one another’s small indispositions — her period pains, his bouts of indigestion if he sat too long crouched over a microscope. Now he suffered, all to himself, an embarrassing ailment, a crawling sensation round the anus. It seemed to him it must be one of the signs of middle age, the beginning of the deterioration of the nervous system. What would such a distasteful detail mean to her, at this time? Getting older, decaying, was natural. And she was young: why should she want to be bothered with his backside while her mother and brother and sister were still in prison — it was nine weeks now. And she had a young lover.

Oh why did these thoughts come!

Why should she not have found a lover, young like herself, brought up in comradely poverty, someone who had already been in prison, whose métier, outwitting those bastards of policemen, warders, government officials, was newly her own?

And now, every sign could be interpreted that way. She, who had always been so love-hungry, passionate, had not come to him in weeks and had created an atmosphere round herself that made it indelicate for him to come to her. When she had slept out and arrived home early in the morning, she could have slipped into their bed, where he still lay; she didn’t. The night he had phoned Stella’s flat — she wasn’t there; and how had Stella sounded? Hadn’t the voice been constrained? Lying? Covering up? Teresa, Teresa. He was thinking about all this in Swedish. What did that mean? He was retreating, going back to what he was before they made their life apart from the past, together… she was thrusting him back there, leaving him, she had a lover. He began to try to find out who it was. When she talked about fellow members of the Detainees’ Support Committee he listened for the recurrence of certain names; and there was new dismay for him — it might even be that she was having an affair with someone else’s husband. Teresa! At the occasional parties they had gone to, over seven years, she had not even danced with any man because he did not dance; she would hold his hand and watch.

And then one night — no it was morning already, behind the curtains — the dog jumped off the bed and whined and he heard the front door latch click. He waited but she did not come into the bedroom; he must have fallen asleep again, waiting, and when he woke he felt the silence of an empty house. In the kitchen was a note: ‘I’ll be gone for a few days. Don’t worry. Lille loppa.’ It was the kind of note left, these days, by people like Robbie, people like the ones she mixed with. If they had to disappear; if they didn’t want anyone who might be questioned about their whereabouts to get into trouble with the police: the less you know, the better for you. But he knew. He was sure, now. Perhaps it was even her way of letting him know. If the police came, he could tell them: She has gone away with a lover.

He could not imagine her without himself — just as she, when it all began, could not imagine whether her mother would be able to eat or sleep in prison. Teresa across the table from someone who would put dead flesh on her plate (theirs was a vegetarian home) and she would eat it. Teresa in one of the cotton nightgowns; if she could take a swimsuit in her handbag for a secret early morning rendezvous she would not hesitate to take the nightgown. Unlike Teresa, he drank whisky and swallowed sleeping pills so that he might not think any further. But he dreamt horribly, from the mixture. In the dream they had a child who was playing at the water’s edge on their beach, where he was making love to Teresa, and he fiercely pursued his climax while he knew a high surf was washing the child out to sea. He woke like a schoolboy, wet with the dream.

Standing at his tanks in the Institute he followed the movements, currents and streamers, rose, violet, yellow and blue, of the tropical fish from these southern waters that would have devoured the drowned body of the child, and he thought of the scrubbed satiny floors, the white muslin curtains and the white-trunked birch trees of the house with the silent rooms he had inherited outside Stockholm. He had not thought he would ever have to live there again.

After three days, she telephoned the Institute just before noon.

— Where are you?—

— Here. Dudu’s head’s in my lap! — She was laughing.

He left at once, and again, as he put his key in the door it was opened from the inside. She held out her hands, palm up; he had to take them, and did so slowly. They went into the kitchen where he saw she had been eating bread and avocado, hungrily spreading crumbs, in her way. The dog was sniffing her over to sense where she had been and what she had done, and he, too, wanted and feared to get the scent of her betrayal.

She sat back in a kitchen chair and faced him.

— I’ve seen her. And I’ve got notes from Francie and Robbie, smuggled out. She’s all right. I knew you’d stop me if I told you I was going.—

She lifted her shoulders, shook her head, smiling, closing the subject.

Perhaps there was no lover? He saw it was true that she had left him, but it was for them, that house, the dark family of which he was not a member, her country to which he did not belong.