The Thief: A Story

A story.

By Dan Jacobson

Ablack-browed angry-looking man he was, and the games he played with his children were
always angry games: he was chasing them, he was growling at them, he was snapping his
teeth at them, while they shrieked with delight and fear, going pale and tense with fear, but
coming back for more, and hanging on to his hands when he declared that they had had
enough. There was a boy and a girl, both dark-haired and thin, the boy a little older than his
sister and protective towards her with servants and strangers, with everyone but his father:
he did not dare to protect her when his father sprang at her from behind a bush, and carried
her shrieking, upside down, to his lair that was, he told them, littered with the bones of
other children that he had already eaten.

The mother sat aside from these games—she sat at the tea table at the head of the small
sweep of lawn towards the swimming bath, beyond which were the trees where her
husband and children played, or she lay in the sun on the side of the swimming bath, with a
towel about her head, and it was only rarely that she called to them or warned them of their
father’s stealthy, mock approaches. She sun-bathed or she read in the sun; they were all
sun-tanned in that family, from spending so much time at their swimming bath, and from
their annual six-weeks’ holiday at the Cape, where they lived the life simple in a seaside
cottage with only one servant. The big house in Johannesburg seemed to have innumerable
servants, all black men in gleaming white jackets and aprons and little white caps like
those of an Indian political movement, but in fact only another sign of their servitude, and
these black men kept the house like a house on show: the house shone, unmarked by the
pressures, the stains and splashes, the disorder of living. Not that the children were the
least bit tidy—they dropped things about them as they went, and left the toys and the sticks
and the items of clothing lying where they had been dropped, but the servants followed,
picking up things and putting them in drawers, as though that was all that they had been
born for, this dance of attendance on the two nervous, dark-haired children. And the
mother, who had been poorly brought up, loved it in the children that they had, so without
question or wonder, the insolence of wealth. Once when he had hardly been more than a
baby she had asked the boy: “Would you like to be a little black boy?”

The child had been puzzled that hi” mother should have asked this. “No,” he said, frowning,
bringing his fine dark eyebrows together, and looking up in puzzled distaste.
Why not?

The puzzlement had left the boy’s face, and there had been only distaste as he replied,
“They have nasty clothes.” And for this he had been given a kiss, which he accepted
demurely. The children accepted their mother’s affection as a matter of course; it was for
their father’s mock-anger that they lived. The mother knew this and did not resent it: she
believed that the insolence she loved in them had come from their father, and for her her
husband’s violence was profoundly confused with his wealth.

But sometimes, watching the children at their perilous play with their father, even the
mother would be afraid. She would lift her eyes from her book, or unwrap the towel which
had been muffling the sun’s rays to a yellow blur on her eyes, and her heart would sink with
fear to see them run and stand breathing behind some tree while their father prowled on
tiptoe towards them. So frail they seemed, with their bony elbows poking out from their
short-sleeved blouses, and their knees large and round below the dress or khaki shorts that
each wore. And he seemed so determined, so muscular in the casual clothing he wore in
the evenings, after he had come from work, so large above the children, with so much black
hair on his arms. But she accepted his violence and his strength, and she never protested
against the games. She would sometimes watch them play, but her eyes would go back to
the book, or she would again carefully wrap the towel about her eyes and her ears, and sink
back into her drowse. She seemed sunken under her husband, under his wealth, under his
strength; they had come down upon her as the sun did where she lay at the side of the
swimming bath, and she questioned them no more than she could have questioned the
sun. She had submitted to them.

The father laughed, showing his wh”te teeth, when the children ran yelling from him. In the
shadows of the trees they waited for him to come again. He moved slowly towards them,
and a lift of his arm made them scamper. He was king of his castle—and castle enough the
house was too, in its several acres of ground, and its trees that cut it off from sight of the
road.
Then one night the burglar came to their house. It was not for nothing that their house, like
every other house in Johannesburg, had every window barred with steel burglar-proofing,
that every door had a double lock, that two large dogs were let loose in the grounds at night.
It was not for nothing that the father had a revolver in his wardrobe, always loaded and on a
high shelf out of reach from the children, for the burglars in Johannesburg can be an ugly
lot—gangsters, marauders, hard black men who seem to have nothing to lose, who carry
with them knives and knuckledusters and guns.

But this one was not one of these. This one was a boy, a fool, a beginner, come by himself
to the wrong house, barked at by the dogs where he stood in the darkness of a corner of the
garage between the large painted fender of a car and a workbench behind him. He did not-
even reach for one of the chisels on the bench behind him, but stood squeezing the fingers
of one hand in the grasp of the other, as though by that alone he might be able to stop the
shivering which shook his shoulders in quick, awful spasms.

But the house did not know what he was and what he might do. The whole house was wild
with lights and shouts and the banging of doors. Men, women, they had tumbled out pell-
mell from the rooms in which they slept: one of the servants had been roused by the
barking of dogs and had seen the burglar slipping into the garage. The house had all been in
darkness, and still, so still that not even the trees had moved under the brilliance of the
stars in the early morning sky, when the shouts of the servant had first come calamitously
upon it. Wild, hoarse, archaic, the shouts had sounded, like the shouts a dreamer might
dream he is making, in his deep terror of the darkness around him. Then there had been the
other shouts, the house in uproar.

And the father in his pajamas and dressing gown, with the revolver thrust unsteadily before
him, advancing across the back yard. The servants fell in behind him, even the one who had
been guarding the window of the garage. “Get to the window, you fool!” the father shouted.
“Guard the window!” Unwillingly, one or two went to the window, while the father came
closer to the garage door.

He did not know what might be behind the door; he found that he could not push the garage
door open, for fear the burglar might spring at him. He was a stranger to himself, roused out
of bed by hoarse shouts, hurried downstairs by danger, chilled by the early morning air: to
him it seemed that he had never before seen the place he was in; never before felt the lock
under his hand, never felt the painted smooth wood under his hand; and when he looked
back, the house, with the light falling on the paved yard from the open kitchen door, was the
house of a stranger, not his at all. The servants were simply people, a throng, some carrying
improvised clubs in their hands, all half-dressed, none of them known, all of them
strangers.

He could not push the door open. T”e dread of opening himself to whatever might be there
was too great. The servants pushed a little closer; and he felt his fear growing tighter and
closer within him. They pressed so closely upon him his fear had no room to move, and
when he did at last lift up the revolver it was in desperation, to drive away the people who
constricted his fear and pressed it suffocatingly upon him. He lifted the revolver and
shouted, “Leave me!” He tilted it towards the stars and fired. The clamor of the shot was
more loud and gross in his ears than he could have imagined, and with it there sprang from
the muzzle a gout of flame, vivid in the darkness, like a wild eager tongue. When the
servants shrank back he felt a momentary sense of release and relaxation, as though he
had done the thing for which he had been dragged out of bed, and could be left now to go in
peace. Then he felt the door behind him budge.

He leaped away from the door so vi”lent’y that he stumbled and fell, and he was on his
knees with the revolver scratching uselessly against the paving when the burglar came out
of the garage. The servants too had staggered back when their master had leaped towards
them, so the burglar stood alone in the doorway, with his hands still squeezed together, but
lifted now to his chest, like some one beseeching mercy. From where he sprawled on the
ground the master could only gasp: “Catch him. Get round him.” And one or two of the
men-servants came forward. They hesitated, and then they saw the spasms shaking the
burglar, so they came to him and took him roughly, pinioning him. Their master was
struggling to his feet.

Bring him into the kitchen, he said. There was a sigh from the group of servants, and a
babble, then eagerly they began jostling the burglar towards the kitchen, and he went
unresistingly.
To the father the kitchen too looked harsh and strange, a place of urgency, and there
seemed to be so many people in it: all the servants, and his wife, and the two children, and
the burglar, and the servants’ friends, those who had been sleeping illegally but without
harmful intent in the rooms in the back yard. These shrank back now, as if only now
realizing that the events of the night might have consequences for themselves too, and not
only for the burglar they had helped to catch.

You’ve phoned the police? The father asked.

Yes, the mother said. “The flying-squad’s coming.”

The father sat down at the kitchen table, blowing his cheeks out with exhaustion, feeling
the tension beginning to ebb from the pit of his stomach. He could not look at the burglar.
The mother too, for different reasons, avoided looking at the burglar, but the two children,
in their neat white pajama suits, had eyes for nothing else. They knew all about burglars:
they had grown up in Johannesburg, and they knew why the steel bars lay across their
bedroom windows, and why they were not allowed outside the house after nightfall, and
why the dogs roamed loose at night. But this was the first burglar they had seen. Even the
revolver loose in their father’s hand could not draw their eyes from the burglar.

He stood in the middle of the kitchen, and his dark eyes were dazed, unseeing. He was a
young African—he looked no more than seventeen—an undersized, town-bred seventeen
years of age. He was wearing a soiled gray sports coat and a pair of ragged trousers that
reached only about halfway down his shins, and when the spasms came he shook from his
shoes upwards, even his strained brown ankles shaking, his knees, concealed by cloth,
shaking, his loins, his shoulders, his head, all shaking. Then the fit would pass and he
would simply stand, supported on each side by the household servants.

He seemed to see nothing, to look at nothing, to hear nothing: there seemed to be within
him a secret war between his will and the spasms of shaking that came upon him, like a fit.
The color of his face was terrible: he was gray, an ash-gray, a gray like that of the first
thinning of the darkness after a rain-sodden night. Sometimes when every other part of his
body was free of the spasm, his mouth would still be shaking; his lips were closed, but they
shook, as if there were a turbulence in his mouth that he had to void. Then that too would
pass.

The little boy at last looked away from the burglar to his father, and saw him sitting weakly
in the chair, exhausted. The hand that held the revolver lay laxly on the kitchen table, and
from it there rose a faint acrid scent, but the gun looked in his hand like a toy. The father
could not move and he could not speak, he sat collapsed, until even the servants looked
curiously at him, as the little boy had done, from the burglar to him, and then back to the
burglar again. They murmured a little, uncertainly; the two who were holding the burglar
loosened their grip on him and shuffled their feet. They waited for direction from their
master, but no direction came. The little boy waited for action from his father, but no action
came. The boy’s fine-featured face was turned to his father, and when the father met his
son’s gaze he looked away. The son was the first to see that his father could make no
action, could give no word.

So he gave the word himself. In a voice that was barely recognizable as his own, his face
with its little point of a nose contorted, he screamed in rage and disappointment: “Hit the
burglar! Hit the burglar!” He danced on his bare feet, waving his small fists in the air. “Why
don’t you hit the burglar? You must hit the burglar.” His voice was high and strident, and he
danced like a little demon in his light pajamas. “Hit!” he screamed. “Hit!” His little sister
joined in because she heard her brother shouting, and she added her high yell to his: “Hit
the burglar!”

Get the children out of here! The father shouted. The children had raised their voices for a
moment only, but it had seemed endless, their little voices shrilling for blood. “What are
they doing here?” the father shouted in a fury at the mother, pulling himself up at last. “Get
them out of here!” But he made no move to help the mother, though he saw that she could
not manage both dancing, capering children. And the little boy saw that his father did not
move towards him, so again he screamed, “Hit the burglar!”

Jerry, the mother said to one of the servants, “help me. Don’t stand there!” She was
grappling at arm’s length with the flailing hands of the little girl.
The dark body of the servant bent over the boy. Then he sprang back, waving his hand. The
boy had bitten him. So he too being near distraught with excitement and this last
unexpected little assault, reached out and hit the little boy across the back of the head. The
boy staggered; he fell down and lay on the sparkling kitchen floor. But it was only for a
moment. He came up growling, with hands lifted, curled inwards, and fell upon the burglar.
It took two servants to prise him off, and when he was finally carried away over the black
powerful shoulder of the one, he had left two deep scratches on the face of the burglar,
both from the forehead down, broken by the shelf of bone over the eyes, and continued
down the cheeks. The burglar had made no effort to defend himself, knowing what would
hap pen to him if he did anything to hurt the child.

Then the police came and took the burglar away. By that time the children were safe and
quiet in the nursery; and later the mother too fell asleep after taking a sedative.

But the servant who had hit the boy was dismissed the very next day, by the mother, who
could not bear it that a servant should have struck a child of hers. Least of all the son to
whom she now submitted, the son who after the night the burglar had come to the house
was not afraid to protect his sister, when her father fell upon her in their games in the
garden, and who fought, when he himself was picked up and carried away, as an adult
might fight, with his fists and his feet and his knees, to hurt. His will was stronger than his
father’s, and soon they were facing each other like two men, and the wild games and the
shrieking among the trees grew rarer. For the father was afraid of the games he sometimes
still had to play with his son, and there was none among them who did not know it, neither
the son, nor the daughter, nor the mother, nor the father from whose hands in one night the
violence in the family had passed.

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