Jump and Other Stories (13 page)

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.