Jump and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online

clothes in the clinic yard. Our grandmother has another card to get punched, and then we can choose something: I have two dresses, two pants and a jersey, so I can go to school.
    The people in the village have let us join their school. I was surprised to find they speak our language; our grandmother told me, That’s why they allow us to stay on their land. Long ago, in the time of our fathers, there was no fence that kills you, there was no Kruger Park between them and us, we were the same people under our own king, right from our village we left to this place we’ve come to.
    Now that we’ve been in the tent so long—I have turned eleven and my little brother is nearly three although he is so small, only his head is big, he’s not come right in it yet—some people have dug up the bare ground around the tent and planted beans and mealies and cabbage. The old men weave branches to put up fences round their gardens. No one is allowed to look for work in the towns but some ofthe women have found work in the village and can buy things. Our grandmother, because she’s still strong, finds work where people are building houses—in this village the people build nice houses with bricks and cement, not mud like we used to have at our home. Our grandmother carries bricks for these people and fetches baskets of stones on her head. And so she has money to buy sugar and tea and milk and soap. The store gave her a calendar she has hung up on our flap of the tent. I am clever at school and she collected advertising paper people throw away outside the store and covered my schoolbooks with it. She makes my firstborn brother and me do our homework every afternoon before it gets dark because there is no room except to lie down, close together, just as we did in the Kruger Park, in our place in the tent, and candles are expensive. Our grandmother hasn’t been able to buy herself a pair of shoes for church yet, but she has bought black school shoes and polish to clean them with for my first-born brother and me. Every morning, when people are getting up in the tent, the babies are crying, people are pushing each other at the taps outside and some children are already pulling the crusts of porridge off the pots we ate from last night, my first-born brother and I clean our shoes. Our grandmother makes us sit on our mats with our legs straight out so she can look carefully at our shoes to make sure we have done it properly. No other children in the tent have real school shoes. When we three look at them it’s as if we are in a real house again, with no war, no away.
    Some white people came to take photographs of our people living in the tent—they said they were making a film, I’ve never seen what that is though I know about it. A white woman squeezed into our space and asked our grandmotherquestions which were told to us in our language by someone who understands the white woman’s.
    How long have you been living like this?
    She means here? our grandmother said. In this tent, two years and one month.
    And what do you hope for the future?
    Nothing. I’m here.
    But for your children?
    I want them to learn so that they can get good jobs and money.
    Do you hope to go back to Mozambique—to your own country?
    I will not go back.
    But when the war is over—you won’t be allowed to stay here? Don’t you want to go home?
    I didn’t think our grandmother wanted to speak again. I didn’t think she was going to answer the white woman. The white woman put her head on one side and smiled at us.
    Our grandmother looked away from her and spoke—There is nothing. No home.
    Why does our grandmother say that? Why? I’ll go back. I’ll go back through that Kruger Park. After the war, if there are no bandits any more, our mother may be waiting for us. And maybe when we left our grandfather, he was only left behind, he found his way somehow, slowly, through the Kruger Park, and