Jump and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer

it up. She is distressed at the inadequacy of the meal and then notices thefruit bowl, her big copper fruit bowl, filled with apples and bananas and perhaps there is a peach or two under the grape leaves with which she likes to complete an edible still life.—Have some fruit. Help yourselves.—
    They are stacking their plates and cups, not knowing what they are expected to do with them in this room which is a room where apparently people only eat, do not cook, do not sleep. While they finish the bananas and apples (Shadrack Nsutsha had seen the single peach and quickly got there first) she talks to the spokesman, whose name she has asked for: Dumile.—Are you still at school, Dumile?—Of course he is not at school—
they
are not at school; youngsters their age have not been at school for several years, they are the children growing into young men and women for whom school is a battleground, a place of boycotts and demonstrations, the literacy of political rhetoric, the education of revolt against having to live the life their parents live. They have pompous titles of responsibility beyond childhood: he is chairman of his branch of the Youth Congress, he was expelled two years ago—for leading a boycott? Throwing stones at the police? Maybe burning the school down? He calls it all—quietly, abstractly, doesn’t know many ordinary, concrete words but knows these euphemisms—‘political activity’. No school for two years? No.—So what have you been able to do with yourself, all that time?—
    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 commonenough 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.
    â€”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