Read Online Jump and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer - Free Book Online Page A

the man in the train: from the tone, the expression on the faces, the curiosity, meaning is clear.
    Who are you?
    Where do you come from?
    A map of Africa drawn with a stick in the mud.
    Africa! The children punch each other and jig in recognition. They close in. One of them tugs at the gilt ring glinting in the ear of a little girl dark and hairy-curly as a poodle. They point: gold.
    Those others knew about gold, long ago; for the poor and despised there is always the idea of gold somewhere else. That’s why they packed him off when he was thirteen and according to their beliefs, a man.
    At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky. In the wood a thick plumage of fallen oak leaves is laid reverentially as the feathers of the dead pheasants swinging from the beaters’ belts. The beaters are coming across the great fields of maize in the first light of the moon. The guns probe its halo. Where I wait, apart, out of the way, hidden, I hear the rustle of fear among creatures. Their feathers swish against stalks and leaves. The clucking to gather in the young; the spurting squawks of terror asthe men with their thrashing sticks drive the prey racing on, rushing this way and that, no way where there are not men and sticks, men and guns. They have wings but dare not fly and reveal themselves, there was nowhere to run to from the village to the fields as they came on and on, the kick of a cossack’s mount ready to strike creeping heads, the thrust of a bayonet lifting a man by the heart like a piece of meat on a fork. Death advancing and nowhere to go. Blindness coming by fire or shot and no way out to see, shelling peas by feel. Cracks of detonation and wild agony of flutter all around me, I crouch away from the sound and sight, only a spectator, only a spectator, please, but the cossacks’ hooves rode those pleading wretches down. A bird thuds dead, striking my shoulder before it hits the soft bed of leaves beside me.
    Six leaves from my father’s country.
    When I began to know him, in his shop, as someone distinct from a lap I sat on, he shouted at the black man on the other side of the counter who swept the floor and ran errands, and he threw the man’s weekly pay grudgingly at him. I saw there was someone my father had made afraid of him. A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
    I gathered the leaves for their pretty autumn stains, not out of any sentiment. This village where we’ve rented the State hunting lodge is not my father’s village. I don’t know where, in his country, it was, only the name of the port at which he left it behind. I didn’t ask him about his village. He never told me; or I didn’t listen. I have the leaves in my hand. I did not know that I would find, here in the wood, the beaters advancing, advancing across the world.

Some Are Born
to Sweet Delight
    Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night
    WILLIAM BLAKE—
‘Auguries of Innocence’

They took him in. Since their son had got himself signed up at sea for eighteen months on an oil rig, the boy’s cubbyhole of a room was vacant; and the rent money was a help. There had rubbed off on the braid of the commissionaire father’s uniform, through the contact of club members’ coats and briefcases he relieved them of, loyal consciousness of the danger of bombs affixed under the cars of members of parliament and financiers. The father said ‘I’ve no quarrel with that’ when the owners of the house whose basement flat the family occupied stipulated ‘No Irish’. But to discriminate against any other foreigners from the old Empire was against the principles of the house owners, who were also the mother’s employers—cleaning three times a week and baby-sitting through the childhood of three boys she thought of as her own. So it was a way of pleasing Upstairs to let the room to this young man, a foreigner