Jump and Other Stories (2 page)

The first time he ever used the phone on the floor was when he phoned her, his mother, to tell her he was alive and here.
Where?
How could she ever have supposed it—back, back in this country! The sun, the mangoes (that day there was fruit supplied on the table where the egg congeals, now), the prison a young boy had been thrown into like any black. She wept because she and his father had thought he was dead. He had disappeared two months previously. Without a word; that was one of the conditions he adhered to on his side, he couldn't tell his parents this was not a business trip from which he would return: he was giving up the house, the maid, the first-class air tickets, the important visitors, the book-lined room with the telecommunications system by which was planned the blowing up of trains, the mining of roads, and the massacre of sleeping villagers back there where he was born.

It is the day to phone her. It's more and more difficult to keep up the obligation. There's nothing left to tell her, either. From weeping gratitude that he was alive, as time has gone by she has come to ask why
she
should be punished in this way, why he should have got mixed up in something that ended so badly.

Over the phone she says, Are you all right?

He asks after his father's health. Does it look like being a mild winter?

Already the wind from the mountains has brought a touch of rheumatism.

Do you need anything? (Money is provided for him to send to his parents, deprived of their pension; that's part of the deal.)

Then there's nothing to say. She doesn't ask if he's suffering from the heat back there, although the sun banks up its fire in the closed curtains, although she knows well enough what the climate's like in summer, and he was gone seven years and cannot reacclimatize. She doesn't want to mention the heat because that is to admit he is back there, she and his father will never understand what it was all about, his life; why he got himself into the fine house, the telecommunications system, the international connections, or why he gave it all up. She says little, in a listless voice, over the phone. But she writes. They deliver her letters, pushed under the door.
Why does God punish me? What have your father and I done? It all started long ago. We were too soft with you. With that parachute nonsense. We should never have allowed it. Giving in, letting you run wild with those boys. It started to go wrong then, we should have seen you were going to make a mess of our lives, I don't know why. You had to go jumping from up there. Do you know what I felt, seeing you fall like that, enjoying yourself frightening us to death while you fooled around with killing yourself? We should have known it. Where it would end. Why did you have to be like that? Why? Why?

First in the weeks of debriefing and then in the press conferences, he had to say.

They demanded again and again. It was their right.

How could you associate yourself with the murderous horde that burns down hospitals, cuts off the ears of villagers, blows up trains full of innocent workers going home to their huts, rapes children and forces women at gunpoint to kill their husbands and eat their flesh?

He sat there before them sane, and was confronted by the madness. As he sits in the red gloom in front of the wide-screen television set, the fuse of a cigarette between the fingers of his fine white hand and his pale blue eyes clear under puppy-like brows. Shuddering; they couldn't see it but he shuddered within every time to hear listed by them what he knew had happened. How could they come out with it, just like that?

Because horror comes slowly. It takes weeks and months, trickling, growing, mounting, rolling, swelling from the faxed codes of operation, the triumph of arms deals secretly concluded with countries who publicly condemn such transactions; from the word ‘destabilization' with its image of some faulty piece of mechanism to be rocked from its base so that a sound structure may be put in its place. He sent the fax, he took the flights to campaign for support from multinational companies interested in access to the oil and minerals the blacks were giving to their rivals, he canvassed Foreign Offices interested in that other term, spheres of influence.

In the fine house where an antique clock played an air over the sudden stutterings of communications installations, the war was intelligence, the miracle of receiving the voice of a general thousands of kilometres away, on the other continent, down there in the bush. When he travelled on his European missions he himself was that fighting man: the beard, the fatigues, the beret. The people he visited saw
him as straight from the universal battlefield of Right and Left; the accoutrements transformed him for himself, so it seemed he was emerged from that generic destiny known as the field of operations.

You mean to say you didn't know?

But nobody talked. A push was achieved or it wasn't. A miniature flag moved on the map. Men lost, and losses imposed on the government forces were recorded. There were some reverses. A huge airlift of supplies and matériel by the neighbouring African state allied in the cause of destabilization was successful; the rebel force would fight on for years, village by village, bridge by bridge, power stations and strategic roads gained on the map. There would be victory on the righteous side.

Nobody said how it was being done. The black government spread reports of massacres because it was losing, and of course the leftist and liberal press took up the tales. Intelligence, tuned to the clock with its gilded cupids, filed these: under disinformation about destabilization.

Here, always, they waited for him to go on. He swallowed continually between phrases, and while he was telling they would watch him swallow. The cold egg won't go down. There is a thin streamer of minute ants who come up six floors through the empty foyer and the closed reception rooms and find their way along the leg of the table to food left there; he knows. And telling, telling—telling over and over to himself, now that no one comes to ask any more, he swallows, while the ants come steadily. Go on, go on.

It wasn't until I went to the neighbouring State—it is a white state and very advanced—that provided the matériel, planes, intelligence supplied by its agents to the communications centre it set up for us in the house in Europe. There was also a base.

Go on.

A training base for our people. It was secret, no one knew it was there. Hidden in a game reserve. I was very confident—pleased—to find myself sent not only around Europe, but chosen to go to that State. To liaise. To meet the Commander of National Security and Special Services there. See for myself the important extent of co-operation in our mutual dedication to the cause. Report back on the morale of our men being trained there in the use of advanced weapons and strategy.

Yes?

A crescendo comes in great waves from the speaker provided with the tape player: to win the war, stabilize by de-stabilization, set up a regime of peace and justice!

During press conferences, at this point an ooze of heat would rise under his skin. Their eyes on him drew it up from his tissues like a blister. And then?

There's no one in the room, the curtains are closed against everyone. Swallow. I saw the male refugees captured at the border brought in starving. I saw how to deal with them. They were made to join our forces or were put back over the border to die. I could see that they would die. Their villages burned, their families hacked to death—you saw in their faces and bodies how it really happened … the disinformation. It wasn't talked about at that base, either. Our allies, at the dinners they gave—game dishes and wine, everything of the best provided, treated like a VIP—they didn't talk about these things. Well… I was shown around… everything. The secret radio station that broadcast the Voice of our organization. The latest weapons made available to us. The boots and uniforms made in their factories. (That outfit of mine must have come from there.) The planes taking off at night to fly our men, armed and
equipped to do what they were trained to do. I knew, now, what that was.

Yes?

Of course, it was war…

So?

… War isn't pretty. There is brutality on both sides. I had to understand. Tried to. But planes also came back from over the border at night. Not empty. They carried what I thought were refugee children to be saved from the fighting; girls of twelve or thirteen, terrified, they had to be pulled apart from each other to get them to walk. They were brought in for the men who were receiving their military training. Men who had been without women; to satisfy them. After dinner, the Commander offered me one. He had one led in for himself. He took off her clothes to show me.

So, yes, I knew what happened to those girl children. I knew that our army had become—maybe always was—yes, what you say, a murderous horde that burned hospitals, cut off the ears of villagers, raped, blew up trains full of workers. Brought to devastation this country where I was born. It's there, only the glowing curtains keep it out. At night, when the curtains are drawn back it is still there in the dark with the blind bulk of buildings, the traces of broken boulevards and decayed squares marked in feeble lights. Familiar to me, can't say I don't know it, can't say it doesn't recognize me. It is there, with the sun pressing against the window, a population become beggars living in the streets, camping out in what used to be our—white people's—apartments, no electricity, no water in the tiled bathrooms, no glass in the windows, and on the fine balconies facing the sea where we used to take our aperitifs, those little open fires where they cook their scraps of food.

And that's the end.

But it's gone over again and again. No end. It's only the tape that ends. Can't be explained how someone begins really to know. Instead of having intelligence by fax and satellite.

Back in the room in Europe with its telecommunications there was on record the whereabouts of this black regime's representatives abroad. One day he went there. In the rebel army's outfit, with the beard, so that they could shoot him if they wanted; so that they would realize who he was and what he knew. Not the atrocities. Something else; all that he could offer to efface his knowledge of the atrocities: complete information about the rebel army, its leaders, its internal feuds, its allies, its sources of supply, the exact position and function of its secret bases. Everything. Everything he was and had been, right back to the jump with the parachute and the photograph of the tower. They didn't shoot. They kept him under guard so that the people from the telecommunications headquarters in the room with the antique clock would not kill him before he could tell. They handled him carefully; himself a strange and rare species, kept captured for study. They were aware of its worth, to them.

Debriefing is like destabilization, the term doesn't describe the method and experience. Day by day, divested of the boots, fatigues, the beret and the beard, first-class flights, the house in Europe, the dinners of honour, the prestige of intelligence—his life. He has been discovered there beneath it, sitting quite still on a chair in a dark room, only a naked full neck pulsating. In the silence after the
tape ends it is possible to think there is the distinct sound of ants moving in an unwavering path.

They knew they couldn't have it for nothing—his life. They haven't provided the house with a garden that was part of the deal. Or the car. Of course, he can go out. Go where he likes, it was only for the first six months that he was restricted. Once they know they can trust him, he's not of interest to them any longer. Nothing more, now, to lead them to. Once he's told everything, once he's been displayed, what use is he to them?

They are right. Perhaps they will never come to him again.

The girl emerges from the bedroom, she sleeps late.

There is a girl. They didn't supply her. But they might have; she was there in the waiting room when he went under surveillance to a doctor. He politely let her take her turn with the doctor first, and when she came out they got talking. I don't see how I'm ever supposed to follow this diet, she said, what can you buy if you haven't got foreign currency—you know how it is, living here.

Yes—for the first time he saw it was so: he lives here. Perhaps it was possible for him to get what she needed? She didn't ask questions; access to foreign currency is not a subject to be discussed.

The girl's been in the bedroom all morning, just as if there was no one there. Now the dim room prolongs her lassitude, no break between night and day. Pink feet with hammer toes drag over the floor; she makes tasting sounds with her tongue against her palate. She takes a deep breath, holds then expels it; because he doesn't speak.

So you don't want to eat?

She has lifted the covering plate and touches the yellow mound of the yolk with her forefinger; the congealed surface dents shinily. She wipes her finger on the T-shirt that is her nightgown. A sprig of houseplant she brought and put in a glass, one day, is on the table where she set it down then; in the cloudy water, the darkened room, it has sent out one frail, floating thread of root. Ants are wavering at the rim of the glass. The thin buttermilk smell of her fluids and his semen comes to him as she bends to follow the ants' trail from the floor. After he had finished with her, last night, she said: You don't love me.

He was assailed by the sight of the twelve-year-old child and the Commander.

Then she heard something she couldn't believe. The man weeping. She drew away in fear and repugnance to the side of the bed.

She hangs about the room behind him, this morning, knowing he's not going to speak.

Why don't we go to the beach. Let's have a swim. I'd love to go and eat some prawns. We can take a bus. There's a good place … it's cheap. And don't you feel like a swim, I'm dying to get into the water… come on.

She waits patiently.

Has he shaken his head—there was some slight movement. There is nothing in the room she can turn to as a pretext to keep her there, waiting to see if he accepts her forgiveness, her humble understanding of her function. After a few minutes she goes back into the bedroom and comes out dressed.