No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  Thoughts arising in context that there’d never been place or attention for.

  What happened—what there undeniably had been—was—between himself and this woman whose blond veil dropped over his face and his penis—was simply a private ease, not known to those encountering them. A continuation. When they heard each other’s casual voice or the focus of eyes accidentally met. He learnt this from her.

  Farewells were hearty among some in the gorilla embrace of coat arms, email and telephone numbers exchanged, many cards handed out like men with something to sell. A number had special requests and went with her one after another to her office to give or note information for follow-up. He had no pretext. As the transport for the airport arrived, she made her usual efficient lift of the shining beacon of her head to summon attention —Professor Reed, I have photostats of those papers you wanted from the library— and went ahead of him into the office. As if remembering, in the haste, her manners, she stepped back for him to pass her, and as if again of itself in haste, the door swung closed behind him. The static of voices and shifting of feet outside was vacuumed into the bus. She signalled dropping her eyelids a moment and firming her lips: the transport wouldn’t leave without him. They went to each other and kissed as in embrace in the mill. Those were their cards exchanged. They left the office separately, she first. From among two other late-coming delegates, one of them Domanski, she beckoned him to mount the panting bus.

  As Domanski bounced down beside him entangled in briefcase, shopping bags, rolled newspapers, she was out there. Her waving arm was for everyone.

  The homecoming at the airport is a welcoming combined embrace.

  Gary Elias, Sindiswa, Jabu, in hugging chorus about him, Sindi and Jabu women sharing his cheeks, the boy hung somewhere around his body. It was Sunday so everyone was there, of which he could at once make it an outing by taking all to the children’s choice of one of the airport coffee and pizza dens instead of going straight home.

  The house in the Suburb claimed him, didn’t look any different. Why feel it should have. Jabu with the natural alertness that had developed into lawyerly analytical attention had questions on some of the subjects of the conference that had interested her when she had seen the scope outlined on his invitation. Water pollution, in both rural and urban areas, was becoming the cause of litigation in the human rights cases taken up by the Justice Centre. What was the name of the man who’s spoken with such knowledge about the sea, not only rivers—there’s still debate, here at the Cape, about the whales every now and then beached and dying—where could he be contacted? She knew one of her colleagues would want to, it’d be useful.

  She was taking his underwear and his shirts from him as he unpacked clothes and the papers doubled in bulk from those he’d set out with. But she abandoned what was intended for the washing machine, at the sight of the papers, and carried off a few at a glance, to ask —What’s this about monkeys and AIDS come up again?— So he made her laugh with a description over whether it was toxins in food which originated in the primate family the mysterious disease we call AIDS, when a trendy young professor (he did not name the Beard) proposed the theory. Someone then pressing to know more precisely the diet, what did they eat. And another professor in a way of dismissing the whole thesis as if remarking on something everyone must have experienced for himself —Omnivorous. From what I see when I take my children to the zoo.—

  Sindi and Gary went about their own preoccupations. Sindi to the secrecy that was her own small room from which there came always, regular as a muezzin’s cry from a mosque, the adolescent beat of whichever pop group in favour with her friends, Gary to clean his bicycle companionably in the garden where Wethu was entertaining some of hers. Not spring yet in the Southern Hemisphere, no one goes off to swim at the Dolphins’ pool. The Sunday papers whose pages he and Jabu exchange, as they always do, have nothing further of something he heard from her on the phone last Sunday. She gives him whatever facts have come up in the meantime about the white farmer who shot dead his servant’s son he says he thought was a baboon. It’s an odd connection, grim, with the story of the omnivorous monkeys. The father says he was only protecting himself against a marauding primate come to eat his maize.

  Wethu didn’t sit as a family collateral at the family supper table—although she isn’t a servant she takes Sundays off as servants in white people’s houses do. But however she conceives her relationship in the home of a child of the Elder in her village church, her kinsman, it includes coming by to say goodnight although it’s Sunday and she’s spent the day apart, attending church (not the one that the people in this place, shame on them—God will punish—make into a swimming bath) and inviting friends to be with her in the garden she shares with the family of the Elder’s daughter. A clan daughter is a daughter to her as the daughter’s man and children therefore are family. She has no inhibition about going to Sindi, who is back in her room immediately after supper, Wethu is an exception in being welcome—nosey Gary Elias has to be kept out. There is a high happy duo of voices from in there, above the music, and Wethu emerges hugging her arms with delight—That Sindi!— She turns the light of it on Jabu and Steve. —And how were you in England, my, my that must be a wonderful time, London, and I’ll never see—did you take some pictures?—

  —Eish! I forgot my camera!— But she closes one eye, at him, she knows he’s fibbing, joking because he’s let her down.

  And Jabu joins her kin, both in chorus —Next time. He was working with many important people, Sisi, I’m sure they were on TV . . . not our TV.—

  Didn’t send Wethu a promised postcard, should have thought of it. Buckingham Palace not that spring countryside.

  Jabu sees jet-lag weariness she herself felt on return from the first, their trip, to London. It goes without saying it’s early to bed. Her palm between his shoulderblades after Gary has been hugged and sent off and Sindi called to be kissed. Fresh short-pant pyjamas laid out on the wide bed. She’s gone to take her bath, she’ll run the tub after, right mixture of hot and cold for him, the way he likes it. He goes in to brush his teeth while she lies there; all the time since Swaziland, the sheen of water on her soft brown shapes.

  The nipples are dark berries.

  They kissed as this bed returned to recognised, but neither of them would distinguish which of them would not proceed to lovemaking: just her bent arm doubled against his chest, his arm enlaced across her.

  He knows—knew—he is attractive to women—that either comes at adolescence or doesn’t, and not always implying conventional good looks (although they seem to find he’s not short of some). While a student he had a few—could hardly call ‘affairs’ the fancy term of the white middle class—and the brief interludes in time of the Struggle, snatched, smuggled for relief and about pleasure out of the many different deprivations commitment to the Struggle implied. That faith made even the man or woman’s children come second. Freedom demands everything. The price, none of these hasty asides had anything beyond the moments, at best a gift—occasionally not without tenderness—the quick fuck, as it’s known. But all before. Once he had ‘slept with’—another of the polite euphemisms for the indescribable act, from the exaltation of ecstasy to the desecration of rape—once he had made love in Swaziland with the newly recruited comrade just out of teacher’s training class, it was unlikely there were any beckons of passing attraction followed. She taking him in, to her, he entering her, body and being, out of reach of all differences perceived in them by others’ categories, both wanting answers to the same questions in the circumstances decreed of their existence—even got themselves married as their particular symbol of the meaning of this state—he had not made love to any other woman.

  What brought us together, the Struggle.

  That was the attraction?

  Looking for reasons for the mill.

  And she, Jabu, ‘his Jabu’—that’s seeing her as an attachment, never mind her independent effectiveness in the world, the time and
place they live in. There come random—never thought of, the lunches with a lawyer in successful private practice, very different from her new kind of comrades at the Justice Centre. Has there been one time. Once. Something that wasn’t lunch. A passing ‘in-house’ affair. An unmarked hour that has nothing to do with her constant life.

  So. Looking for justifications?

  There is some other way. Come out with it. He must tell her what happened at the conference, not the findings of discussions that she was eager to have him relate. Quash. Erase this convenient speculation under the heel of frankness, tell her, Jabu, about the mill. Rehearsing how to say it.

  Ah that the final indulgence! She’s oblivious, make her hurt and unhappy, who can take the sounding in her of what she would make of it—a reflection on herself, what she might fail to be for him?

  The moment came; and went—in what would have been the moment for it Jabu is voluble with—Then a row broke out just in front of the doors, some shopkeeper and the men coming from the church, he was shouting they’d left their blankets and dirt outside his place, spoiling the business, it was awful . . . I was right there . . . you’ve got to see what it’s like, when are you free this week . . .—

  She is speaking where, in what, they are together, the present. The compassion of a Protestant church (denomination of her Baba) not evidenced by the Catholics, the Jews, the Muslims in their religious establishments, had sheltered refugee immigrants from countries in conflict around this one’s borders since the influx started, Christianity appropriate to the circumstances of the times. But now it was becoming a disruption of the city, intrusion, invasion of rightful tax-paying citizens, a threat to business and health. The church turned dormitory flowed over to the pavement where people slept like corpses under any old shroud on scavenged cardboard.

  Into this form of reality she drove him. The street they reached didn’t look like the familiar fast-paced city, the displacement of functions was the home stage-set struck.

  There were the magistrates’ courts, fine contemporary architectural expressions of the dignity of the law, human rights. There was the red-brick dignity of the old Methodist Church. The entrance façade of the Magistrates’ Courts ignored, obscured by a clutter of occupant people, their makeshift shelters dismantled by the police, piled up like bedclothes to be used again, not trash to be removed. Some men and women, tripped over where they squatted on flagstone surrounded by children wanting a share of takeaway food adults held—these men and women were the fortunate who found small change, washing a car somewhere or begging (the nature of Jabu’s work keeps her up to date with how the destitute exist). Others came by carrying their tin plates of food doled out in the church. They pass him without seeing him seeing them: he doesn’t exist. Jabu greets them in her language, for her and for him Sanibonani bafowethu nondade! When this is acknowledged in the tongue of a neighbouring country she understands, she speaks again, using their language. He is the Stranger.

  What are we doing gawping like tourists at these people from Congo, Zimbabwe, their share of Africa. Even though she has some legitimacy and he associated with her through her words, her black skin.

  They ought to go into the church, greet the pastor, she’s the daughter of an Elder in the same House of God even if not observant. They’ve seen the pastor many times in the newspapers—a white man, once he was in a scandal of some sort the press won’t forget, true or false. Who can put on the moral scale the weights of right and wrong, lies and truth when these people are left without shelter by himself, the Umkhonto cadre, and this pastor keeps them alive for conceivable time when there will be peace for them to go home to whichever country it was where they had to leave their lives behind. But the uncountable numbers of this church’s different kind of congregation mean that it has to have some of the formalities of a business institution, now. There are a couple of the church’s representatives (marshals? Or plain-clothes police taken over) who question, first addressing the white intruder. He has an appointment with the pastor? What organisation does he come from? Is he from a newspaper? There must be a list of people seen as of ill intent, he might be one of the street’s shopkeepers.

  He cannot enter the church.

  She, a woman and black like themselves, is ignored; their manner is flirtatiously dismissive when she surprisingly speaks up for herself, in the way of asserting a right of common law, there is also the law of God’s house: you can’t refuse to let a Christian into her church. They are sceptical, appreciative of what they take in the tone of sexual banter, but won’t let her in, either.

  It’s not in the nature of comrades’ experience to give way to discouragement of what they believe they ought to do. —What is the pastor’s mobile number. Please give it. He’ll see us.— She is speaking in English now. Pulling rank, an educated Sister, she thinks she knows the high-up people to get her in anywhere she wants. The man grins and twists his shoulders before her, doesn’t need to say it; no.

  What is unexpected is that there is—impossible—an atmosphere of some sort of home in the organised squalor of this place. A suckling at a mother’s bare breast where she sits cross-legged on a bit of blanket and looks so young—how’s a man to judge—it might have been born while she took shelter in the pastor’s church. There’s an old man rolling cigarettes out of torn bits of newspaper filled with tobacco he’s taking from a small pile of stubs, there are fag-ends drifted like leaves to the gutters. Step round the woman who has seen the opportunity to count on women’s desire to look good in the current city style although they are not of the city, and set herself up in business: a client sits on a box having a pattern woven more elaborate than the one Jabu used to wear, composed of the hair on the head with devices, from a spread of combs, clasps, and what look like rat-tails. There’s refusal to accept the denial of ordinary small pursuits.

  He and she are the foreigners here. Even she. Black skin isn’t enough. She turns down an exit from this scene of someone else’s claimed territory which opens suddenly on a street where a wide passageway, sign declares ‘Boulevard’, of closed elegant shops has become the homeless’s version of a walkway supermarket. Takeover. Two young men dance bangles of cell-phone batteries for sale before him. Second-third-hand frayed jeans with the natural injuries of hardship which some white students in his classes reproduce on their jeans as the sign that they’re not squares, are splay-legged in paving display with crumpled dashikis and dresses reminiscing on the shapes of their previous wearers, baby clothes that have survived generations.

  Everybody’s trying to sell something. The importuning cheerful refugees turned traders know only too well this man and woman wouldn’t ever need. There’s a special kind of animation when you’ve got nothing left to lose?

  Back in the territory of the Suburb, he describes this before Jake, Isa, Marc, Peter Mkize who’s come to pick up his son from an afternoon of tackle technique practice with Gary Elias. Isa clucks her tongue, stops herself, then —You’ve read how people in concentration camps made instruments out of rubbish, played music, there were even stand-up comics, with the gas ovens there waiting.—

  —It’s not the same.— Jabu will never let pass examples of brutality committed by Europeans as some part of the human condition blacks must inevitably share in their attitudes between themselves, Africans, just as they’ve taken to computers, Internet, Facebook, Twitter. What the whites did to one another—even if it produced among the inmates of the Holocaust, as she’s just seen in the people outcast by conditions in their own African countries and in this one of refugees—a dire spirit. Nothing to lose.

  —Of course it’s not the same! In the Holocaust you died in gas ovens. Finished and klaar. You died because you were Jews. People here come from Zimbabwe where you can die slowly, because your brothers take everything from you, that’s the Mugabe way, for themselves.—

  —And their other brothers here in Africa?—

  —Cousins, not same-mother-same-father—

  —All r-right
! The same blood of Africa . . .—

  Here it comes again—the charge that can’t be ducked, held off.

  —Eish! Of course, what’s it with you from Umkhonto, why don’t you veterans do something for these brothers who let us operate from their countries in the Struggle?—

  —So no good just talking. What do you suggest we can do, my brother. Go to the church and invite them home with us? You ready to share this room?—

  The Dolphin Marc has become a comrade, beyond the pool gatherings where the Suburb bond is simply neighbourly, since he is the one among the local inhabitants who moved in to take care of Isa and the family when Jake was in hospital after the hijack attack. It is he who this week leads them to what he’s come across when hopefully visiting a backer for one of his plays, living in a townhouse complex (upmarket he classed it), walled and with guards at electronic gates.

  Purple bougainvillea luxuriating over a wall and a uniformed man sat in a summerhouse version of guardhouse chattering to himself on a mobile. The street a wide well-maintained one.

  On its opposite side there was a confusion of coiled razor wire rising and sagging along a stretch of open land whose limit couldn’t be made out, where haphazardly some sort of organised shelter had dumped itself, a small brick outhouse left over from whatever had been built there, overcome by makeshift of board, plastic sheets, planks, old rugs, like something organic, a wild creeper grown out of the dust.