Jump and Other Stories (10 page)

She isn't giving him a chance to eat his apple. He swallows a large bite, shaking his head on its thin, little-boy neck.—I was inside. Detained from this June for six months.—

She looks round the others.—And you?—

Shadrack seems to nod slightly. The other two look at her. She should know, she should have known, it's a common
enough answer from youths like them, their colour. They're not going to be saying they've been selected for the 1st Eleven at cricket or that they're off on a student tour to Europe in the school holidays.

The spokesman, Dumile, tells her he wants to study by correspondence, ‘get his matric' that he was preparing for two years ago; two years ago when he was still a child, when he didn't have the hair that is now appearing on his face, making him a man, taking away the childhood. In the hesitations, the silences of the table, where there is nervously spilt coffee among plates of banana skins, there grows the certainty that he will never get the papers filled in for the correspondence college, he will never get the two years back. She looks at them all and cannot believe what she knows: that they, suddenly here in her house, will carry the AK-47s they only sing about, now, miming death as they sing. They will have a career of wiring explosives to the undersides of vehicles, they will go away and come back through the bush to dig holes not to plant trees to shade home, but to plant land-mines. She can see they have been terribly harmed but cannot believe they could harm. They are wiping their fruit-sticky hands furtively palm against palm.

She breaks the silence; says something, anything.

—How d'you like my lion? Isn't he beautiful? He's made by a Zimbabwean artist, I think the name's Dube.—

But the foolish interruption becomes revelation. Dumile, in his gaze—distant, lingering, speechless this time—reveals what has overwhelmed them. In this room, the space, the expensive antique chandelier, the consciously simple choice of reed blinds, the carved lion: all are on the same level of impact, phenomena undifferentiated, undecipherable. Only the food that fed their hunger was real.

A place for goats—we all must leave.

Othello called here.

That's all it was fit for, our island. The goats. After how long we don't know; because we don't know how or when we got there: a shipwreck must have started us, we have one family name only—Teraloyna. But Othello stopped here; they came over in small boats, black men with spears. They did not harm us. We had always fished with nets woven of bark; they taught us to spear the great fish who broke our nets. They never went back wherever it was they came from. And so when we left we had among us only a child here and there who was raw-faced and blue-eyed; we were coloured neither very dark nor very light.

We don't know how the goats came. Perhaps there was a pair of goats on board, for the milk, and they swam ashore from the wreck. Ours were strong, large goats, they had a great many young. They had many more young than we had; in the end they ate up the island—the grass, the trees, at night in our houses we could hear those long front teeth of theirs, paring it away. When the rains came our soil had nothing to hold it, although we made terraces of stones. It washed away and disappeared into the shining sea. We killed and ate a lot of goats but they occupied some parts of the island where we couldn't get at them with our ropes and knives, and every year there were more of them. Someone remembered us—a sailor's tale of people who had never seen the mainland of the world?—and we were recruited. We took our grandmothers and the survivors of our matings of father and daughter, brother and sister (we never allowed matings of mother and son, we were Christians in our way, in custom brought down to us from the shipwreck) and we emigrated to these great open lands—America, Australia, Africa. We cleaned the streets and dug the dams and begged and stole; became like anybody else. The children forgot the last few words of the shipwreck dialect we once had spoken. Our girls married and no longer bore our name. In time we went into the armies, we manned the street stands selling ice-cream and hot dogs, all over the mainland that is the world.

The goats died of famine. They were able to swim to survival from a ship, but not across an ocean. Vegetation and wildlife, altered forever by erosion, crept back: blade by blade, footprint by footprint. Sea-birds screamed instead
of human infants. The island was nevertheless a possession; handed out among the leftovers in the disposition of territories made by victors in one or other of the great wars waged on the mainland. But neither the United States nor Britain, nor the Soviet Union, was interested in it; useless, from the point of view of its position, for defence of any sea-route. Then meteorologists of the country to which it had been given found that position ideal for a weather station. It has been successfully manned for many years by teams of meteorologists who, at first, made the long journey by ship, and more recently and conveniently by plane.

A team's tour of duty on the island is a year, during which the shine of the sea blinds them to the mainland as it did those who once inhabited the island. A long year. A plane brings supplies every month, and there is communication by radio, but—with the exception of the goats, the islanders must have kept goats, there are the bones of goats everywhere—the team has neither more nor less company than the islanders had. Of course, these are educated people, scientists, and there is a reasonable library and taped music; even whole plays recorded, someone in one of the teams left behind cassettes of Gielgud's Lear and Olivier's Othello—there is a legend that Othello was blown in to anchor at the island. The personnel are subject to the same pests the original inhabitants suffered—ticks, mosquitoes, recurrent plagues of small mice. Supposedly to eat the mice, but maybe (by default of the softness of a woman?) to have something warm to stroke while the winter gales try to drown the weather station in the sea that cuts it adrift from humankind, a member of a team brought two kittens with him from the mainland on his tour of duty. They slept in his bed for a year. They were fed tit-bits by everyone at that
table so far from any other at which people gather for an evening meal.

The island is not near anywhere. But as it is nearest to Africa, when the islanders left towards the end of the last century, some went there. Already there were mines down in the south of the continent and the communities of strangers diamonds and gold attract; not only miners, but boardinghouse- bar- and brothel-keepers, shopkeepers and tradesmen. So most of the islanders who went to Africa were shipped to the south and, without skills other than fishnet-making and herding goats—which were redundant, since commercially-produced nets were available to the fishing fleets manned by people of mixed white, Malay, Indian and Khoikhoi blood, and only the blacks, who minded their own flocks, kept goats—they found humble work among these communities. Exogamous marriage made their descendants' hair frizzier or straighter, their skin darker or lighter, depending on whether they attached themselves in this way to black people, white people, or those already singled out and named as partly both. The raw-faced, blue-eyed ones, of course, disappeared among the whites; and sometimes shaded back, in the next generation, to a darker colour and category—already there were categories, laws that decreed what colour and degree of colour could live where. The islanders who were absorbed into the darker-skinned communities became the Khans and Abramses and Kuzwayos, those who threaded away among the generations of whites became the Bezuidenhouts, Cloetes, Labuschagnes and even the Churches, Taylors and Smiths.

The Teraloynas are an obscure curiosity in the footnotes of ethnologists. The surname survives here and there; the people who bear it are commonly thought, without any evidence but a vague matching of vowel sounds, to be of Spanish or Portuguese origin. Linguists interested in the distortion of proper names in multilingual, colonized countries have suggested the name probably derives from a pidgin contraction of two words the shipwrecked, presumably French-speaking, used to describe where they found themselves. ‘Terre'—earth, ‘loin'—far: the far earth.

The Teraloynas occupy no twig on the family trees of white people. Whites in that country have not yet acquired the far-sighted circumspection of claiming a trace of black in their genes, and blacks who, in pride of origin and search for unity among their different shades of black, claim an admixture of the blood of non-negroid indigenes, the Khoikhoi and San, never bother to assert kinship with such scarcely-identifiable bastard groups as the St. Helenans (Napoleon had a forced stay on their island) or the Teraloynas. Those of Teraloyna descent whose blood is so diluted that no one—least of all themselves—could learn from the shape of their mouths and noses, the lie of their hair, from their names or habits of speech that they have such ancestry, sometimes fly in Business Class over their island: down there, all wrinkled and pleated in erosion, all folds (the ravines where the goats held out so long) and dark inlets edged at the mouth by the spittle of the sea—it is not marked on the coloured route map in the flight magazine provided in each seat-pocket. Their island; and they emigrated from that unrecognized piece of earth, poked up out of the sea, to the great open lands—America, Australia, Africa. They doze in their seats.

When a certain black carpenter draws a splinter from under his nail, the bubble of blood that comes after it is Teraloyna. And when a certain young white man, drafted into military service straight from school, throws a canister of tear-gas into a schoolyard full of black children and is hit on the cheek by a cast stone, the broken capillaries ooze Teraloyna lifeblood.

It is a mere graze, he is lucky, he might have lost a blue eye.

This year there are six hundred cats on the island. An estimate: there may be many more, they breed in the ravines. Their mating howls sound terrifyingly over the night sea. Othello would turn about in horror from an island of demons. Survivors from a wreck would rather go under than make for that other death.

But they are really only cats—the demons. Descendants of two kittens, a pretty black queen with a beauty patch of white on her cheek and a ginger tabby torn, who kneaded the pillows of a member of one of the meteorological teams in his lonely nights and were fed tit-bits at the only dining table for thousands of sea-miles around.

The meteorologists have tried poisoned meat, and being scientifically-minded, infection with cat flu, so deadly to pets on any mainland. But these feral creatures know no mainland. The soft beds and tit-bits have disappeared in ancestral memory. They have forgotten the comforts and dependence on humans natural to them; to succumb to the forms of eradication devised by humans would be a form of atavism. Their howls are the only cries heard on the island; they have eaten all the eggs of the sea-birds. They
have caused the giant turtles to disobey, in amphibian wisdom, the imperative of their slow drag up the beaches to lay their eggs; the turtles have learnt something they did not need to know before in thousands of years in the chain of their existence: that cats, the claws of cats will dig up their eggs no matter how much breath—and how agonizing it is to breathe, out of water!—is expended in burying them in the sand. The hares are fast being eaten out; and even the butterflies—caterpillars are milky-bodied and nutritious.

The meteorologists have no trouble with mice, of course. But two kittens, so soft and small, have almost destroyed the ecology of the island, and this (apart from the infernal wails of feline rut) is an embarrassment to the team. When the SPCA protests against the cruelty of inflicting on animals a painful death by germ warfare, the meteorologists cite the near-extinction, by those non-indigenous animals, of wildlife. But this only emphasizes the careless disregard for ecological balance shown in the first place; why were the kittens not spayed, in the case of the female, and castrated, in the case of the male (a precaution against his mating with some kind of wild feline that might have existed on the island)? Well, they were pets, and nobody thought of it, nobody could have dreamt of the consequences: of such fierce fecundity in that place where there were no women. It was simply out of mind; out of the mainland.

A new solution is to be tried.

The fact is, there is an emergency on the island.

As the solution involves an element of sportsmanship—who could be persuaded to carry it out, otherwise?—it was never intended to get into the papers, but due to another
indiscretion on somebody's part, it has. Only a line or two: the cats are to be shot. If the hunters are good marksmen the death will be far quicker and less painful than death by arsenic or cat flu. The meteorologists are not the sort of men who shoot for sport, of course, they don't handle firearms, so others must be found to do it. The army would be the obvious choice, but another sort of State of Emergency exists in the mainland country and all troops are required to man the borders, take part in pre-emptive raids across them, and install themselves with tear-gas, dogs, and guns in the vast areas where blacks live. Every young recruit is needed: there are boycotts, strikes, stay-at-homes, refusals to pay rent, all of which bring blacks into the streets with stones and home-product petrol bombs and sometimes grenades and AK-47s that have somehow been smuggled past the troops on the borders.

But there are thousands of young white men outside the army who are proficient in handling firearms. Only temporarily out of the army: all these healthy males have done their initial period of military service, but they are called up for short periods wherever an emergency within the Emergency arises. No one has had time enough in civilian life to lose his touch, handling an automatic rifle, or needs practice to get his eye in on target. Under command, and sometimes out of panic, they have shot chanting black schoolchildren, black mourners dispersing from those children's funerals, black rioters fleeing, black men and women who happened to go out for a pint of milk or a packet of cigarettes and crossed the path of an army patrol in the streets. Pick them off. They're all black. There is no time—it is no time—to distinguish the bystanders from the revolutionaries.