Jump and Other Stories (17 page)

They are dirtied with blood and to human eyes de-sexed, their kind of femaleness without femininity, their kind of threat and strength out of place, associated with the male. They have no beauty except in the almighty purpose of their stance. There is nothing else in their gaunt faces: nothing but the fact, behind them, of half-grown and younger cubs in the rib-cage of a zebra, pulling and sucking at bloody scraps.

The legs and head are intact in dandyish dress of black and white. The beast has been, is being eaten out. Its innards are missing; the half-digested grasses that were in its stomach have been emptied on the ground, they can be seen—someone points this out in a whisper. But even the undertone is a transgression. The lionesses don't give forth the roar that would make their menace recognizable, something to deal with. Utterances are not the medium for this confrontation. Watching. That is all. The breathing mass, the beating hearts in the vehicle—watching the cubs jostling for places within the cadaver; the breathing mass, the beating hearts in the vehicle—being watched by the lionesses. The beasts have no time, it will be measured by their fill. For the others, time suddenly begins again when the young doctor's girl-friend begins to cry soundlessly and the black children look away from the scene and see the tears shining on her cheeks, and stare at her fear. The young doctor asks
to be taken back to the lodge; the compact is broken, people protest, why, oh no, they want to stay and see what happens, one of the lionesses has broken ranks and turns on a greedy cub, cuffing it out of the gouged prey. Quite safe; the car is perfectly safe, don't open a window to photograph. But the doctor is insistent: ‘This old truck's chassis is cracked right through, we're overloaded, we could be stuck here all night.'

‘Unreal.' Back in the room, the wife comes out with one of the catch-alls that have been emptied of dictionary meaning so that they may fit any experience the speaker won't take the trouble to define. When he doesn't respond she stands a moment, in the doorway, her bedclothes in her arms, smiling, gives her head a little shake to show how overwhelming her impression has been.

Oh well. What can she expect. Why come, anyway? Should have stayed at home. So he doesn't want to sleep in the open, on the deck. Under the stars. All right. No stars, then.

He lies alone and the mosquitoes are waiting for his blood, upside-down on the white board ceiling.

No. Real.
Real.
Alone, he can keep it intact, exactly that: the stasis, the existence without time and without time there is no connection, the state in which he really need have, has no part, could have no part, there in the eyes of the lionesses. Between the beasts and the human load, the void. It is more desired and awful than could ever be conceived; he does not know whether he is sleeping, or dead.

There is still Sunday. The entertainment is not over. Someone has heard lions round the lodge in the middle of
the night. The scepticism with which this claim is greeted is quickly disproved when distinct pugs are found in the dust that surrounds the small swimming-pool which, like amniotic fluid, steeps the guests at their own body temperature. The host is not surprised; it has happened before: the lionesses must have come down to quench the thirst their feasting had given them. And the scent of humans, sleeping so near, up on the deck, the sweat of humans in the humid night, their sighs and sleep-noises? Their pleasure- and anxiety-emanating dreams?

‘As far as the lions are concerned, we didn't exist.' From the pretty girl, the remark is a half-question that trails off.

‘When your stomach is full you don't smell blood.'

The ex-prisoner is perhaps extrapolating into the class war?—the wit puts in, and the ex-prisoner himself is the one who is most appreciatively amused.

After the mosquitoes had had their fill sleep came as indifferently as those other bodily states, hunger and thirst. A good appetite for fresh pawpaw and bacon, boerewors and eggs. Hungry, like everybody else. His wife offers him a second helping, perhaps he needs feeding up, there is a theory that all morbid symptoms are in fact of physical origin. Obsession with injustice—what's wrong with the world is a disease you, an individual, can't cure, that's life. The one who went to prison may be suffering from a lack of something—amino acids, vitamins; or an excess of something, overfeeding when a child or hyperactive thyroid gland. Research is being done.

Siza confirms that the lionesses came to drink. They passed his house; he heard them. He tells this with the dry, knowing smile of one who is aware of a secret to-and-fro between bedrooms. After breakfast he is going to take the
party to see in daylight where the kill took place last night.

‘But is there anything to see?'

Siza is patient. ‘They not eat all. Is too much. So they leave some, tonight they come back for eat finish.'

‘No thanks! I don't think we should disturb them again.' But nobody wants the young doctor and his girl-friend to come, anyway, and spoil the outing.

‘The lions they sleeping now. They gone away. Come back tonight. Is not there now.'

The wife is watching to see if she and her husband are going along. Yes, he's climbing, limber, into the old vehicle with the cracked chassis, he's giving a hand up to the hostess, he's said something that makes her laugh and purse her mouth.

The black women are thumping washing at an outdoor tub. Neither they nor their children come on this expedition. There is room to breathe without contact, this time. Everything is different in daylight. It is true that the lionesses are absent; the state that he achieved last night is absent in the same way, like them, drugged down by daylight.

Not a lion to be seen. Siza has stopped the vehicle, got out, but waved the passengers to stay put. The scrub forest is quiet, fragile pods that burst and sow their seed by wind-dispersion spiral slowly. Everybody chatters. The stockbroker leaves the vehicle and everybody shouts at him. All right. All right. Taking his time, to show his lack of fear, he climbs aboard. ‘Lions are not bulls and bears, Fred.' They laugh at this mild jeer which is the kind expected to sustain the wit's image—all are amused except the stockbroker himself, who knows the remark, in turn, refers to his image of himself as one whom no one would guess to be a stockbroker.

Siza comes back and beckons. The vehicle is quickly quit. And now the emptiness of the scrub forest is untrustworthy, all around, you can't see what's behind dead brush, fallen logs and the screens of layered branches that confine vision to ten feet. They talk only softly, in the sense of being stalked. The black man is leading them along what looks almost like a swept path; but it has been swept by a large body being dragged through dust and dead leaves: there is the carcass of the zebra, half-hidden in a thicket.

‘No tyre-tracks, we didn't drive right into here! This can't be the place.'

‘They pull him here for when they come back tonight.'

‘What! To keep the meat fresh?'

‘For the birds mustn't see.' Siza gives a name in his language.

‘He means vultures. Vultures, eh, Siza.' A mime of the vultures' hunched posture.

‘Yes, those big birds. Come look here—' The tour continues, he takes them a few paces from the carcass and stands beside a mound over which earth has been scratched or kicked. Flies whose backs spark tinny green and gold are settled on it. The black man has his audience: taking up a stick, he prods the mound and it stirs under dust like flour-coated meat moved by a fork.

‘Christ, the intestines! Look at the size of that liver or spleen!'

‘You mean lions can do that? Store things covered? How do they do it, just with their paws?'

‘It's exactly the way my cat covers its business in the garden, scratches up earth. They're cats, too.'

The young jailbird and his girl and the antique dealer have made a discovery for themselves, having, in the confidence
of excitement, retraced for a short distance the way along which the kill was approached. They have found the very pile of the contents of the zebra's stomach that someone noticed last night.

It is another mound. He has come over from the mound of guts they are marvelling at. There is nothing to watch in dead flesh, it is prodded and it falls back and is still. But this mound of steaming grass that smells sweetly of cud (it has been heated by the sun as it was once heated by the body that contained it) is not dead to human perception. What's going on here is a visible transformation of an inert mass. It is literally being carried away by distinctly different species of beetles who know how to live by decay, the waste of the digestive tract. The scarabs with their armoured heads burrow right into the base of the mound, and come out backwards, rolling their ball of dung between their strong, tined legs. The tunnels they have mined collapse and spread the mound more thinly on its periphery; smaller beetles are flying in steadily to settle there, where their lighter equipment can function. They fly away carrying their appropriate load in a sac—or between their front legs, he can't quite make out. A third species, middle-sized but with a noisy buzz, function like helicopters, hovering and scooping off the top of the mound. They are flattening it perfectly evenly, who can say how or why they bother with form? That's life. If every beetle has its place, how is refusal possible. And if refusal is possible, what place is there. No question mark. These are statements. That is why there is no point in making them to anyone. There is no possible response.

The mound is slowly going to disappear; maybe the vehicle is about to take the party back to the lodge, the weekend is going to be over. He is walking back to the rest of
the party, still gathered round the carcass and the black man. For the space of a few yards he is alone, for a few seconds he is equidistant between those at the dung mound and those up ahead, part of neither one nor the other. A sensation that can't be held long; now he is with the group at the kill, again. There is some special stir of attentiveness in them, they crowd round and then herd back a step, where Siza, the black man, is crouched on his hunkers. He is business-like, concentrated, not taking any notice of them. He has given them all he could; now he has the air of being for himself. He has a knife in his hand and the white man who has just joined the group recognizes it, it is the knife that is everywhere, nowhere without the knife, on the news, at the dark street-corners, under the light that the warders never turn out. The black man has thrust, made his incision, sliced back the black-and-white smooth pelt on the dead beast's uppermost hind leg and now is cutting a piece of the plump rump. It is not a chunk or hunk, but neatly butchered, prime—a portion.

They laugh, wondering at the skill, curious. As if they can't guess, as if they've never sunk their teeth into a steak in their lives. ‘What're you going to do with that, Siza?' Ah yes, put it in a doggy bag, take it home when you've already stuffed your own guts, taken the land (as the jailbird would say).

The black man is trimming it. Along with the knife, he has brought a sheet of newspaper. ‘For me. Eat it at my house. For my house.'

‘Is it good meat?'

‘Yes, it's good.'

One of the men chides, man to man. ‘But why not take the whole haunch—the whole leg, Siza. Why such a small piece?'

The black man is wrapping the portion in newspaper, he knows he mustn't let it drip blood on the white people.

He does it to his satisfaction in his own time and looks up at them. ‘The lions, they know I must take a piece for me because I find where their meat is. They know it. It's all right. But if I take too much, they know it also. Then they will take one of my children.'

He's one of those dark-haired men whose beards grow out rusty-red. He could have dyed his hair to match—more or less—but a beard is the first thing they'd expect to find you behind. He's lived like this several times before; the only difference is that this time he came back into the country legally, came home—so much for the indemnity promised to exiles, so much for the changed era there, now bans on his kind of politics were supposed to be a thing of the past, he was supposed to be—free? He knows how their minds work—not much imagination, reliance on an Identikit compilation of how political subversives look and behave Underground. Underground: this time, as at other times, he's aware of how unsuitably abstract a term that is. To hide away, you have to be out in the open of life; too soon and easily run to ground, holed up somewhere. Best safety lies in crowds. Selective crowds; he goes to football matches with beer in a knapsack, and a cap with a plastic
eyeshade over his sunglasses, but not to pop concerts, where the police keep an eye on young leftists whose democratic recreation this is. He goes to the movies but not to concerts although he longs for the company of strings and brass; someone among his intellectual buddies from long ago would be bound to gaze at him, reaching back for recognition. Small gatherings where everyone can be trusted are traps; glowing with the distinction of the secret encounter with a real revolutionary, someone will not be able to resist boasting to another, in strictest confidence, and that other will pass on the luminous dusting of danger.

The good friends who provide a bed sometimes offer the use of a car as well, but driving alone is another sure way to be traced and picked up. He walks, and takes buses among ordinary workers and students. He's a little too forty-five-ish, thickened around the jowl and diaphragm, to pass as a student but with his cravat of tangled black hair showing in the neck of a sweat shirt and his observance of the uniform jogging shoes with soles cushioned like tyres, he could be anyone among the passengers—the white artisans, railway and post office employees, even policemen. Reading a newspaper with its daily account of the proceedings at the group trial where he is a missing accused, worrying about these comrades in arms, he tries not to feel self-congratulatory at his escape of arrest, a form of complacency dangerous to one in his position, sitting there in a bus among people he knows would be glad to hand him over to the law; but he can't suppress a little thrill, a sort of inner giggle. Perhaps
this
is freedom? Something secret, internal, after all? But philosophizing is another danger, in his situation, undermining the concept of freedom for which he has risked discovery and imprisonment yet again.