No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  There’s an Australian exclamation picked up from the books in the process of being read: Good on him!

  What is the difference between not doing anything, and having arrived, while desperately opposing yourself, at recognition that what had been believed, fought for hasn’t begun to be followed—granted, couldn’t be realised—in fifteen years—and right now, every day degenerates. Oh that fucking litany, Better Life, how often to face the dead with it, the comrades who died for the latest executive model Mercedes, the mansions for winter or summer residence, the millionaire kickbacks from arms deals and tenders for housing whose brand-new walls crack like an old face. Who would have had a prescient nightmare of ending up sickened, unmanned of anything there is for you to take on, a luta continua.

  She has been ‘lent’ to a firm of lawyers in a case of rape. Although any violation of the human body would seem under rights in the Constitution a case for defence by the Justice Centre it would first have to be heard in a civil court before, lost or dismissed, going on appeal to the Constitutional Court. She’s been chosen because it’s remembered she has done so much in her early time as a recruit to the Centre preparing disorientated people to bear witness; her natural empathy would be an advantage in a case of this nature. And someone may have noticed her presence in the crowd at the President’s rape trial.

  —Have you ever known a woman who’d been raped?— Surely no one among the women they knew, but the country is said to have one of if not the highest incidence in the world. Maybe if it had happened, a woman wouldn’t want to talk about it. Not even an Isa, much.

  —How would we know. Among the girls at the university. Did we know that one in four men in the country is willing to admit committing a rape? Statistic: I’m so amazed, can’t believe . . . you . . . can you believe it.— She is asking him not as her husband but as a male, whether this is an instinct all males share but all don’t follow. Calling her up not as a lawyer but his lover is his certainty that the instinct or whatever else it may be has nothing to do with his making love to her impulsively perhaps demandingly sometimes not in their marriage bed but as they had to on the run against the law. Might as well have asked if he could understand murdering someone, yes? What is turned up under these stones. If you kill in a revolution for freedom that’s not murder. Too late to question.

  —Senior Counsel says these one-in-four men, they’re boasting . . . to him that’s perhaps the ugliest manifestation of the—she pauses for precision—the ‘commingling in South Africa of culture of impunity with one of masculine sexual entitlement’. That’s how it’s put. Conviction rate of those men who do go to trial is only around seven per cent.—

  —What are the police doing about this masculine entitlement.—

  —Police don’t have any real ability to prevent rape, do they—not the way they can catch thieves escaping with cash. Unless they come across flagrante delicto in cars, bushes . . . most rapes take place in private places. Homes: the men are friends of members of the family.—

  —State of the nation.— His voice is as if speaking to someone else. —State of the nation address after he became President, Jacob Zuma, himself accused of rape, saying the most serious attention would now be given to crimes against women and children.—

  She is the one, not he, who faces the victim in whose defence she is present at Chambers of the firm to which she is on loan. The victim isn’t a woman but half-woman-half-child. Fifteen years old. There has to be unlimited patience to draw her to tell. To be called upon at all is like being brought to the headmistress’s room and you wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t done something wrong.

  It’s not drawing blood from a stone, it’s looking at the blood and semen that ran down the thighs; there is the medical report from the doctor on night duty at the hospital where a taxi driver, evidently the lover of one of the women in the house, took the girl ‘because the auntie (there was no mother) didn’t know what to do with her’.

  The looks and manners of the lawyer woman who was asking the girl to speak about It—nothing like a headmistress, this beautiful lady out of TV, what an African woman’s supposed to look like, wearing the cloth wound high round the head and the smart jacket-and-pants suit you see in shop windows, white women wear. She’s what you would like to be; and she must have been a black kid, too, some time.

  Yes I know the man, he comes to the house and brings things, a bottle for auntie, she likes brandy, and takeaway, chicken and stuff. That Friday the others were out, even the little brother her sister’s kid, she washed her school shirt for Monday and the man came up behind when she was ironing it, he said shame, they’s left you all alone, shame, I just laughed, and then he said come talk to me a little while I take you to get us curry rolls from the Indian’s then he took the iron away, his hands were big, he turned me around and he was . . . kissing, I began to hit him, kick, and then he pulled up my dashiki I had on for the weekend how can I say—I screamed but he didn’t care he knew there was nobody in the house lots of noise in our street—He got the zip and opened my jeans, I fought I tried to bite, he pushed me on the floor there’s a rubber mat there by the sink and then with the other hand he was doing something at his clothes—

  Of course she began to weep a jumble of words and snot.

  So she must have been intact—what’s known, with biblical reference, as a virgin. Or maybe did have a boyfriend who entered her secretly as it was long ago in Swaziland. But it was the brutality of this man that brought her blood and his semen running out of her.

  To go to her, take her in your arms within a bonding of the common language—the girl is Ndebele but the language is through old tribal conquest close to isiZulu—that’s not in lawyer’s protocol of objectivity essential for extracting truth from clients’ emotions, but she takes the girl’s wet hands firmly in her own. Although the girl comes from what’s emerged as a background of poverty, a household of women managing an existence—where have the men disappeared to after insemination?—she’s not a bedraggled frail slum child. Something in the highways and byways of African DNA, a strain of strength and grace has sustained her. She doesn’t go to school in a dirty shirt on Monday. She is tall, for fifteen, with good long legs from what can be seen of the calves below the rolled-up jeans, a narrow waist above our jutting buttocks, and our African lips. Her story, evidence. She didn’t thank the unexpected kind of questioner but the dazed relief in her glance was an expression of this.

  Fifteen.

  She could be Sindiswa. Shades of brown deepening where the light catches the flesh. As Sindi would be. If Sindi had more share of me than share of her father.

  Professional detachment by which you live now as you could not in the Struggle—misplaced as if it’s a document put down somewhere, can’t be found.

  This is Sindi with the one man in four in our country.

  The advocate on the same case met them cheerfully at reception and forbore to murmur aside to his attorney and expect an answer, how did it go. She left him with her tidy pad of notes. Many thanks, I’ll call you at the Centre, he patted the notes as he spoke, an assurance between the code of colleagues that he was confident in her special qualification for this case. These are worthy, not reprehensible situations when race does count.

  She’s fifteen.

  —The girl is fifteen years old. Same age as Sindiswa.—

  He turns his head swiftly away and back again; does she have to be reminded this is not one of her cases to be told about with Sindiswa in the room, lately interested in her mother’s, a lawyer’s work; she and her schoolmates are being engaged seriously, at that school where there is a curriculum assumed responsibility with what pupils are going to do in life, for others, within the career they choose for themselves. What you going to be, as the schoolmates put it. Butcher-baker-candlestick-maker, oh no no no it’s nothing like the old jingle—television film-maker, advertising copywriter, sports coach, actress, five-star hotelier—teacher, doctor, lawyer, architect, engineer—these last ar
e what the school hopefully advises while not encroaching on individual freedom of ambition.

  He and she never had had the idea that you don’t bring your work preoccupation home with you, enough is enough as the phrase goes, one of those that have come into the country’s English from the colloquial of a long-mixed population, pre-colonial indigenous and immigrant usage. The university is about to send students and academics—himself—out on the winter vacation, with the poor mid-year exam results, solidarity with protest against inadequate bursaries, poor living conditions at hostels—the endemic of tertiary education—until these reassemble for the new term.

  The month is ending with doctors again on strike. In a province that has the name Mpumalanga, ‘Rising Sun’, a town which still bears the name of a Boer War leader against the British, Piet Retief, two are killed as a mob round pyres of burning tyres, brandishing ‘traditional weapons’ clubs and pangas not out of date, protest against what’s dubbed ‘service delivery’, a non-existence for them, their needs, water, electricity, refuse removal ignored with promises for fifteen years. In frustration they rage indiscriminately destroying what they do have, what’s passed for a clinic, a library.

  She speaks about the rape once more.

  Gary Elias was at the Mkizes where Njabulo is allowed to call up Facebook on his father’s new computer and they enter themselves to be received by others they’re unlikely ever to meet within touch. Sindi has Mandoza playing so batteringly that the walls of her den and the walls of the living room seem to act as drums resounding. He got up and made to go to her. —Don’t—no, leave her.—

  It was imperative; he smiled, the objection in court; but his legal representative counts on the volume to ensure privacy, the daughter won’t overhear. —She could be Sindi. Could have been her, I had to stop thinking.—

  He must concentrate on what he can’t know, what it was like drawing a woman—a girl, to tell what rape is while it is happening; to have the body, the opening that can’t resist forced entry down passage to female being. —She’s not Sindi, I mean it’s not what we’d want to admit, but look, that one comes from the shacks, there for any man to grab—that’s the fact.—

  —She’d remind you of Sindiswa.—

  She is black. Living as the fag-end of racism. Can’t say it. She’s not the product of a Baba who sent his daughter away to Swaziland for the evolution of education, and of the white Reed breed whose offspring evolved into a revolutionary comrade, she isn’t the product of an Aristotle school where the origins of democracy are taught relevant to Here and Now. Can’t say this.

  But they are too long through many circumstances for her not to follow. —Girls are forced into cars when they’re taking a walk to a shopping mall in their suburb, a gang gets over the security fence and breaks into a house, one rapes the woman while the others collect the TV and computer. You’ve read about it. An eight-month-old baby was raped, at the Centre we’re looking into a commission of psychiatrists to explain this.—

  —Male entitlement.— He supplies.

  She doesn’t bring home the rape case again until the week when she’s going back to her work at the Centre, the rapist has been found guilty and sentenced, his lawyer is applying for an appeal, but her bit-part is over.

  —Nothing to be done?—

  Her voice closes a file. —Nothing.—

  Apparently she is not seeing the girl; probably handed to the care of one of the organisations for abused women which Blessing Mkize is supporting with leftover food from the weddings and corporate dinners, as she does for old-age homes.

  It’s noticeable—the interest of his documentation on Australia; lately come, as if only now she sees on the calendar that November is four months near. It’s not on the practical settlement arrangements, the school decided for Sindi and Gary Elias, that she is turning pages. It’s the legal profession in a country which is not a republic under a president but still some residue of a British Empire, in the Commonwealth, a federation where the Queen is the highest authority as represented by a governor-general. What conditions are going to be the immigrants’ in relation to the statistics of crime, the nature of crimes. She has struck up quite a lively Internet exchange with a group of women lawyers Over There. Of course—not strange—logical if we look at the map, that what Australians call their dialogue partner is South-East Asia, those nations, people nearest to them. They signed a ‘Comprehensive Partnership’ (she’s reading it out) two years ago, political, economic, socio-cultural and on security, transnational issues including terrorism.

  He and she each walking over in projection their own future field. Sometimes afford the other a glance there, afterthought. —There are women on the judges’ bench . . . city hold-ups in certain quarters . . . low incidence of rape.—

  He had had his self-accusing doubts, was he forcing her to leave because they belong together as proven in every circumstance and solution. Now she has made her decision for Australia, down under in herself, to pry into it would be to admit some macho misuse of intimate freedom.

  South Africa inhabited by humans for almost two million years.

  Australia inhabited by humans for less than sixty thousand years.

  He’s called up online. ‘Australia at the time of European settlement in the seventeenth century the Indigenous population with its highly developed traditions reflected in a deep connection with the land was estimated at least 315,000. The Indigenous population declined significantly as a result of increased mortality and by 1930 was only 20 per cent of its original size.’

  Colonisers solved any future problem of liberation movement by killing off the natives, one way or another.

  ‘There was no population referendum until 1967, after 250 years of colonisation. The Australian constitution was then altered to allow Commonwealth Parliament to make laws to include aborigines in the national census.’

  Before that they didn’t exist.

  ‘The 2006 census. The Indigenous percentage of the total Australian population 23 per cent. But with an average annual growth of 2 per cent compared with 1.18 per cent for the total population.’

  Poor always breed like flies.

  ‘Just over half Australia’s Indigenous population live in or close to major cities but as a proportion of the total population Indigenous people are far more likely than non-Indigenous people to live in remote areas. Nationally, Indigenous people make up 24 per cent of Australians living in remote or very remote areas and just 1 per cent of those living in major cities. The expression “native title” is used in Australian law to describe communal, group or individual rights of aboriginals. In a decision of the High Court of Australia in 1992, Eddie Mabo was the first Indigenous person to have native title rights recognised on behalf of Indigenous people. The court rejected the idea that Australia had been terra nullius—land belonging to no one—at the time of British settlement. The Mabo decision led to the establishment of the Native Title Act which recognises and protects native title throughout Australia.’

  End of Outback Bantustans.

  ‘The Australian government is committed to the process of reconciliation between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians. Reconciliation involves symbolic recognition of the honoured place of the first Australians and the implementation of practical and effective measures to address the legacy of profound economic and social disadvantage experienced by many Indigenous Australians, particularly in health, education, employment and housing. Fewer Indigenous students attend and finish school than Non-Indigenous students. Today Australia has a population of 21 million. More than 43 per cent were either born overseas themselves or have one parent who was born overseas. The Indigenous population is 23 per cent of the total.’

  In South Africa everything in reverse. Whites 12 per cent of the 49 million population, still dominate the economy, the black majority which overcame also produces those who join the white class and take freedom as the advance to corruption and distancing from the majority living jobless between shack
s and toilet buckets.

  Take the Down Under information to her; familiarising herself with law over there, unlikely she’s not aware . . .

  The fact that she’s never brought it, to us.

  We’ve paid our Struggle dues: and the result? What our son and daughter must grow up to be here, at home, by birth and genes, responsible to a Zuma, a Malema.

  Gary Elias is practising on his newly acquired guitar and Sindi, Jabu and Wethu are watching the news on TV, Wethu doesn’t want to see again alone in her cottage the excreta of city’s life where she found herself that afternoon, the rotting food nesting flies, the shore of dirty paper, broken bottles, torn T-shirts cast by municipal workers on strike again, when she was there to buy some special headache muti demanded by a sister back home in KwaZulu.

  Education:—no, mustn’t allow himself to be distracted by sections on agriculture, bird life, entertainment, Internet cafés. Education: over the past decade the Australian government has committed to halving the gap in literacy and numeracy between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians (that’s a humbling admission in identity, imaging South African whites agreeing to call themselves Non-Africans!) . . . Although it’s admitted there’s still a long way to go to increase the educational levels of the Indigenous, the progress is encouraging. Out of the country’s total population the number of Indigenous children attending school has increased to 4.2 per cent . . . universities: the proportion of Indigenes attaining Bachelor or higher degrees, 5 per cent of the national intake—

  And at that moment, darkness—Oh fuck! from Sindiswa, a wild thrum from Gary Elias—electricity blackout.

  He and Jabu share the moment. Just some piece of the vast equipment that misfunctioned. Probably failure to be routinely checked. Or, other times, the explanation, cables stolen. Evidently you can get good money for them from metal dealers, one of the ingenuities of having no job, the culture of unemployment, as a professor coined it at a social science seminar last week.