No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  This is the subject of gleeful uproar in the Suburb round the church pool. The Dolphins rejoice in this other example of double moral standards, for both arms and sex deals. A man who had held the second highest position of power in the land, Deputy President, apparently committed to fight HIV and AIDS, tells the male population a good soap-and-shower on the penis, after, is all you need, no antiretrovirals necessary.

  Jake can’t resist. —And if you do find you’ve caught the incurable clap, you just put yourself on a diet of beetroot, garlic and wild spinach—if you can find that traditional veg at the supermarket.—

  Everyone laughing again at what’s become colloquially the priceless synonym of absurdity, the nature cure advised by the Minister of Health in her rejection of antiretrovirals. That other trial, the arms deal corruption, has been indeed referred again (it will go away) in legal complications of irregularities. Jabu is best able to explain, passing on the enlightenment from the access of her own intelligence to expert legal minds.

  Marc dives into the pool and comes up exploding water and laughing, shaking a shower from his fashionably shaven head. —What a fantastic plot! What a cast! If only I could— The playwright seizing on a new twist to a marvellous plot.

  She sits in the court with the onlooker crowd on the day when Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma is cross-examined about how intercourse came about if it was not intentioned by him and he answered that in view of the affectionate goodnight exchanges between Uncle and a friend’s daughter (her provocative scanty attire already described to the court) it was traditionally incumbent in Zulu culture for a Zulu man to satisfy a woman who showed she was sexually aroused. ‘You cannot just leave a woman if she is in that state.’

  It is illegal to make public the name of a woman who has laid a rape charge. To protect her anonymity this woman is known in court and to the media as Kwezi, ‘Morning Star’.

  Outside the court Jabu, a woman among black women, made her way past those shouting their message. —Burn the bitch!— The image, photographs of Morning Star, are in flames.

  The ex-Deputy President is found not guilty in his rape trial.

  Marriage. A common identity. Is that what it is. What it stands for, leave the takens, the sexual implication out of it, the biological, even the legal, the mutual health insurance, tax benefits et al. These are Sunday church swimming pool subjects aired, argued over, kindly jested about to the comrade Dolphins by the Straight in the company. —So you want the right to get divorced?—

  Whether by words avowed in church, mosque, synagogue, temple, in a magistrates’ court or in love vows privately coupling two of the same sex—marriage: it’s a term for a common identity encircling all the individual difference between two human beings. But mustn’t assume the differences are not there, the other identities: mustn’t presume they are like elements in a laboratory that combine to produce one substance to create decorative endurance or an explosion, according to the imperative at the time. He and she share political dismay at the Zuma ‘affair’—in both senses of the word, in this instance—the arms deal corruption charge that may never come to court is the other. She’s a lawyer identified within a resource for justice. He has an identity as a teacher, for him the designation ‘academic’ is a social class distinction; both lower and upper levels of learning alike are served by teachers. If a hero comrade turns out to have sexual morals as feet of clay, at least the university is showing signs of transforming into what he believes such an institution should be in the need of the present. He was an industrial chemist in a paint factory clandestinely producing formulae for making bombs, he was a cadre (these terms seem too Stalinist post 1994?) in a liberation army, he has now yet another identity in the synthesis of self. What’s called in psychological jargon job satisfaction’s a distraction from political disillusion. He’s able to come home to tell how some of the students who attend band-aid coaching are turning out to have the determination, the unbeatable guts comrades had to summon in Umkhonto situations—discover in themselves what uninspiring schooling had stifled. An ability to concentrate, question, an urge to use that over-aweing tomb, the library, as well as quick-fix Internet, educate yourself in innate fascination of discovering the apparently limitless reach of that mystery concealed from your own mind. Some are opening to a vocabulary of ideas as well as words beyond so how’s it, cool. This he could exploit for them by persuading scientists from nuclear research, virology, particle physics, to condescend to brief seminars where the ‘underprivileged’ were bold enough to ask questions that showed they had some perceptions of the ecosphere not confined to the romantic monsters of space-busters. They are given the revelation of Grid, learning a scientist named Wilczek’s concept of stuff that exists in what is regarded as space, emptiness. So it’s not a void? There atoms and nuclei are held together by forces acting between all the pairs of particles that they contain. It’s a highly structured, powerful medium whose activity moulds the world where their eyes see nothing. Wonder . . .

  She was glad for them, for him, in the way of someone who has always had such expectations of someone like him. The idea that she might sit in on one of these sessions somehow didn’t come off. Peter and Jake were elated at the participation of the band-aid students when invited to an exchange between them and a visiting luminary.

  Jabu had asked—would he manage care of the children, meals and all that, if she went to KwaZulu for the weekend, taking Wethu with her, Wethu hadn’t been home lately, a visit was due.

  Could he manage! He laughed, butting her cheek with his. —The kids’ll have a ball, undisciplined, and I can get takeout I’m sure from the Dolphins’ jambalaya.— He knew what she did not say: she needed to be with her father in what must be to him the betrayal of the amaZulu, the people, disgraced by the behaviour of one who had been MEC for Economic Affairs and Tourism in their provincial government; one with whom the church Elder and headmaster had grown to be inducted to manhood by the killing of a bull by bare hands.

  All the way with her attention an automatic pilot performing the functions of driving she was rehearsing what she would say. What she would say, best. What would invoke naturally with respect, the particular relation between them, the only way to speak. Wethu beside her was not so much uncommunicative as in the same state—there and not there—but with a different absence, already taking the paths from clay-smeared house to house, seeing from behind door to door the brothers, sisters, the old and new born of the collaterals from which she came. So neither felt any awkwardness in their silence.

  —We’re nearly home.— And Wethu’s composure half-woke to her habitually tired smile along with some low sound of assent, as if every huddle of trees, wave of sugar cane under the wind was landmark of a personal map. Only when there was a roadside store or an old church surviving in childhood memory the experiences by which she had left behind the images, Jabu saw that there was no longer time to prepare herself for sharing her Baba’s troubled self as somehow nobody else could.

  As she took the turn to the village: a big poster of Jacob Zuma grinning lopsidedly as it had lurched loose from a fence pole.

  Must be relic of a meeting of some sort: before.

  The dirt road to the house passed the headmaster’s school, there were boys leaping, crouching about in a football game where Gary Elias had played. It was as if walking not driving, step by step, the final road that was drawing her to his presence, Baba.

  She has told her mother on landline, she’s coming; he never answers that phone, it’s for the convenience of the women, he has his mobile. That way it wasn’t needed she would have to guard herself against giving away her purpose, demeaning it by the conventional means of overcoming distance. Her mother quite naturally assumed it was the daughterly duty to all women of the extended family that obliged her daughter to consider it time Wethu had a visit to take up liens from home. So a group gathered round Wethu in cheerful welcome, some then furtively drawing back to eye the changes in dress that on each return marked
their sister a city woman, and the mother’s arms claimed her own daughter. Baba was there apart, as always in his contrasting calm, the stance special for her, ready for her. The hands of each went out to clasp and hold the hands of the other, he drew her to him without her breasts and his body meeting.

  They exchanged the usual: how was the road, not too busy, yes, the children are fine, Steve in charge. —We were expecting you next month, with Gary Elias.— The handover for the school holidays. —Oh of course we’re coming then, everyone.— Baba must need all the support he can get, grief comes not only from death, but the debilitating anger of shock. She felt anger in him, the tightened grasp on her hands, and the impatient lower of his eyes as they sat through the serving of tea and cake, even a bowl of potato chips from the store (her mother thinking Gary Elias might have been along). Wethu was another being, here; but it wasn’t the time or purpose to observe and feel troubled at having isolated the woman from belonging. Her father put down his cup and stood up, his signal everyone accepts every time she comes home. Father and daughter left the veranda gathering unremarked.

  The passage to his cubby-hole study where at her beginning so long ago he had told her she was going to school before her brother Bongani—she had gulped a yell and laughed tears. She felt something now, a strength of him, Baba—she didn’t have for (her others) Steven, Sindiswa, Gary Elias.

  On the door to his privacy there is the same poster that was hanging on the fence pole.

  Amazed disbelief. Collisions of fast-rapping heart—her father such a man, so distinct from anyone else in his dealing with ambiguities self-contradictions which are yes or no to others. The remarkable headmaster; the Elder.

  Some Christian faith that this man grinning on his front teeth gap must be saved, in the way of the church. Something they term a lost soul. An image set up for redemption? An Elder could believe that. It has been her—what—shame, regret, guilt that although she has been part of the Elder’s congregation since she was old enough to be in church on her mother’s back and she still believes in the first revolutionary, the Lord Jesus and the ultimate Father, God, she never depended on Him when she was in detention, in a bush camp, there was that other faith, the only one, Freedom. She can’t understand: but is Zuma set up, to be saved.

  She comes in and performs the action, pulling out one of the two hard chairs for herself as is expected. He’s walked round the side of his desk and is seated in the chair with pressure-sagged leather arms that belonged, she knows, to his father the minister of the Methodist Church.

  It is usual when they are at last alone together that she waits for him to begin their time to talk.

  He sits straight-backed, opens and then closes his lips, once, and looks to her. As if he can’t find the words.

  They come bursting from her. —I’ve been thinking of you, all the time, Baba, I couldn’t talk on the phone, I was in the court and I heard him, I heard it all. He said it himself. And when I left, the women outside shouted terrible things. She must be burned. The women shouting that—

  He hears something different. —The papers attack him like wild animals. They are out to tear him to pieces, that’s all. It doesn’t matter the court, the judges found him not guilty, the lies of that woman—

  —Baba—

  —I’m saying what we can see, what we know.—

  —What we know. Baba what is it we know.—

  —Mbeki and his people he gives the important posts, they’ll do everything, anything to stop Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma from being president next time.—

  —Zuma.— She says it to make it real.

  He pronounces across this as confirmation of everything he is expounding, feeling, and that she must be experiencing with him. They are speaking in the language, Zuma’s tongue they possess with Zuma: their own. Father and daughter have always shared perceptions, hers from maturity instinctively received, his from the time-step ahead of the young, received by him. His daughter. Zuma. When she says Zuma. It’s the affirmation of all he has said, is saying for them both. It would not be necessary to speak of it at all between them, what they feel, the vice of appalment clamped inside them, the spoken cadence is only to put it out to the air like the blast-wail of the raging women outside the court.

  She is saying again, again, what she heard in the court before the judge, the lawyers, the people she sat among, anyone will tell this was what they heard, she’s heard, the young woman was his comrade’s daughter, he had been ten years on the Island in prison with the woman’s father, he knew she was sick—

  Baba listens to her patiently; almost recognisably. The Bible Constitution, its laws that command human behaviour in which (yes) he is satisfied she has had the opportunity to become learned, cannot deal with this matter of spiritual morality. Of course she doesn’t know the stricken souls of men, she can’t believe what indeed she does know now, that power ravages the soul and a brother, Mbeki (she’d call Umkhonto comrade) takes it in fist to strike brother out of its way.

  She cannot speak to her father about the other proud statement to the court—a Zulu man ‘cannot just leave a woman if she is in that state’. That it is traditional in Zulu culture for a Zulu man to satisfy a woman who shows she is sexually aroused.

  Share politics, yes, even passionate disagreement, disruption in the confidence between them neither shares with anyone else quite the same way. But the matter of sexuality. No.

  The evening passes somehow in the company of her mother among the lively women. As customary, it was their turn to have a share of her time back with them; she becomes more and more desperately aware of the need to take herself and her mobile into a corner somewhere in that family home where there is no privacy except Baba’s, or the lavatory; call Steve. To say—what. The landline is continually occupied; the children taking a holiday at least from one parent’s surveillance to chatter with friends without using up cell-phone batteries, and Steve’s mobile responded with the message (recorded on his request in her voice because he likes it so much) that he was not available but would call back. Later she slipped out into the dark and against the live voices and contests of radios between rap, gospel and kwaito coming from earth-wall houses, the running, brushing past of children’s games, found Steve’s voice.

  —I’ll be coming home tomorrow not Sunday.—

  —Poor darling, is it hard going, he’s in a state of shock to put it mildly, I can imagine.—

  She isn’t in tears but her voice has the heightened register of that level. —Yes but it’s not that—what we—he’s up in anger, it is all a plot to keep Zuma out of becoming president. He’s—he’s like stone, furious on behalf of Zuma.—

  —Not at Zuma? Disgusted?—

  —No no, the papers, the woman. It’s lies, all a plot.—

  —But you’ve told him. You were there—

  —I told him— and she silences herself— I want to come home—

  —I wish I could fetch you right now.—

  These are better than love words.

  Wethu is not to be deprived of half her visit as someone will be going back to work in the city on Sunday night and would transport her.

  Alone in the car rehearses not as she had on the drive to her other, KwaZulu home what she was going to say to her Baba sharing with him the disgrace, the betrayal of the amaZulu by Jacob Zuma: but the recall of the small private place, the hour between her father and her while he turned betrayal around. Completely: to represent people named and unnamed who were not that giant body naked power, but power fully garbed with lies and scurrilous scenarios—woman paid to cry rape—disgrace and destroy the great man who is president elect.

  Burn the bitch. Hadn’t spoken of it to her although he said he had read all accounts of the trial and events around it. Does the devout Christian, son of the pastor and himself an Elder in his community church allow a call that a woman be burned as some sort of heretic to the faith of power, as heretics of the Christian faith were burned in the Crusades.

&nb
sp; Something else she hadn’t wanted to come to surface with the threading of the road back beneath her. Just as respectfully she couldn’t speak before her father of sexuality, out of his respect for her, his daughter, in her choice of a man—white—as husband and father of her children, he couldn’t say what else he had read: there are whites who own the newspapers, behind tactics to smear Zuma, along with his black political rivals for power. Is it possible that her father who gained for her as a child the rightful chances wrested from within white race privilege, could somehow, facing her yesterday see her, his private revolutionary creation, as part of the whites who fear and want to destroy Zuma.

  And she will never be able to tell Steve this that has come to her on the road home to the Suburb where she belongs, has chosen.

  Parallels in life reduce the obsessive impact of one when they suddenly meet. While she was driving back to the Suburb Jake was leaving it early in the morning to pick up an old comrade visiting downtown. At a traffic light as he fumbled for small change to give a beggar at his window two men thrust this accomplice aside and one held the hard cold snout of a gun at his head. His car is an automatic, a foot free, he accelerated to throw them off and as the gunman lost his balance the gun slid from ear to neck, the man’s reaction was to fire. The bullet broke a vertebra, the men snatched the keys from the ignition, pushed the slumped driver to the passenger seat and drove to a deserted building site where they dumped him among the rubble, disappeared with the car.