No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  Saturday afternoon, Gary Elias and Njabulo in their football shorts and pullovers after the game, sprawled at ease while another sports match on television is vociferous blast. Concentrated by it they don’t hear Gary’s father come into the house. This generation inured to disturbance, muzak the atmosphere, commentary the broadcast chatter in public places, registering only the one side of cell-phone intimacies and banalities. Their aural senses are going to be worn ragged before beards begin to sprout. (Yes. But didn’t you have the Beatles going strong while you studied.) Sindi’s not there—where would she be but absent with her friends on a Saturday. Jabu’s taking notes from tomes dealt out around her—brought home some research from the Centre, concentration stops her ears against noise. She jumps up in welcome and dread. —Was it awful . . . why isn’t Lesego coming in.—

  She gets the signal. Not that the boys would overhear. In the passage he makes for the kitchen but she takes his elbow, there’s the rhythm of chopping something, Wethu must be busy in there. —A man’s in the car—he was hidden by the family he’s been living with in the shacks. He wasn’t among all the other Zims attacked last week but people know where he is and they’re after him, now.—

  She’s waiting.

  —Lesego doesn’t know right away where to put him.—

  Is some suggestion, solution expected from her.

  —Lesego’s place isn’t possible, full house, the parents are there. We’ll have to take him.—

  Her head is still lifted questioning; but not the unexpected.

  —Lesego remembered Wethu’s place. I didn’t want just to walk in on you without a word.—

  She turns without one, instead her lips, a quick kiss, not explained.

  Lesego and the man came in and were welcome. —Would you like some tea. Or a drink, maybe that’s better. I’m Jabu Reed—our son Gary and his pal.— She’s silenced the sports match.

  The stranger now takes off the headgear as the boys titter appreciatively, this is a sharp guy. He sets down the carryall; in this house.

  It’s a claim recognised by Jabu. —I’m not going to ask what happened to you, it’s all been—we see it. On TV . . . the papers, hear the radio . . . — But the man: become by Lesego, their Zimbabwean. —It’s terrible—our people, whatever our people here feel—

  He has a beer and again tells his history, the packer at a wholesale electrical appliance firm, truck driver, fast-food waiter. A dossier, three years of acceptance.

  When Lesego swallows the last of his beer—he wasn’t offered his usual red wine, it’s not a usual gathering—and gets up to leave the other does not attempt to follow; it’s understood. But to be sure. —You say I can stay here . . . Meantime.— He thanks Lesego under Lesego’s dismissing protest.

  Jabu appeared with bedding under her arm. —Steve’ll show where you’ll sleep, it’s not part of the house but there’s a bathroom and so on. If you need anything . . . Supper’ll be late we don’t hurry when there’s no school next day.—

  In the brief argot of domestic intimacy —That camp bed, when we went with the Dolphins to the Drakensberg—oh Gary Elias knows where you put it, Gary?—

  And then as he leads the stranger out to Wethu’s chickenhouse cottage. —Shouldn’t you slip him some clothes, your jeans’ll be best, he’s smaller than you but you wear them tight they won’t be much too big . . . that shopping bag all he has with him.—

  Gary Elias and Njabulo are rounded up by her to find the dismantled camp bed, release its bandy wooden legs in flourishing style and stretch the canvas its length. Gary Elias is roused to a grievance —When can we go camping again, we never go any more.— Any more. Not the distracted moment for a father to remind him what he’s been told, there’s another wilderness of bush Over There; just as the bush that has been his adventure holiday place here is not the Angolan desert, bush, where his mother and father were in the Struggle. So what. That the boy, their boy, my boy, knows the bush as happy adventure, that’s a small gain—in the better life that hasn’t reached people in the shacks, so that they need to defend with fire and panga possession of the scraps of the survival they can’t share.

  Over supper for which Wethu had been chopping carrots and celery for the salad everyone listened to stories, accounts of Zimbabwe. When you are twice displaced—first the long rough trial of escape from conflict and hunger bringing your country to ruin, then rejection in a brother country—perhaps it’s a need of unconscious return to sanity symbolic of what was at home—before. What doesn’t exist. Any more. There was the dragged-on palaver over independence and then the fighting years, the battle of the Smith imperialists (that’s the label for them freedom fighters learned) against the African people. But always there was the village with the Christian Brothers school, good teachers, there was the river where the uncles and grandfathers taught you to fish, there was the stick-fighting contest to make men of you, there were the drinking parties and the very old men who told of fighting lions way back. Before, before. There’s the motorbike bought from the white farmer with cash saved, two years’ work on the cattle farm—that’s another skill along with the variety of employments; he’s expert at culling. And he’s explicit, for Gary Elias, on what this means. Wethu ignored him, the Suburb is a place where many friends from the working lives of Baba’s educated daughter, a lawyer, and Steve, a teacher at a university, are brought to this house from time to time. Sindi was spending the night with a schoolfriend, she’d be given the news of the arrival if Wethu could get in first, Sunday morning on return from early church service. Jabu: responsive to the man as if taking part in village occasions he described; and when he spoke of Mugabe, asking pointed questions he evaded. Her lawyerly habit of going into areas of witness confusion between—fear? Residual loyalty in the victim to the power that had turned against its own constituency flesh? She is matter-of-fact. As the meal ended she asked whether the guest wanted to call anyone, perhaps a cell phone was missing in the essentials of the shopping bag and—as her man would be expected to assure—was the geyser in Wethu’s place functioning, hot water for the bath. There was a cheerful goodnight exchange, now in isiZulu, she chanced apparently rightly that in three years the man would have picked up enough of that most widely spoken of many languages in his workplace.

  He glances about and picks up the headgear, puts it on his head.

  In that place of discarding the happenings of a day along with jeans and underwear. —He said nothing to you about what he left behind in the shack.—

  —What d’you mean.—

  —There’s a girl with a baby, she suddenly found a photograph pushed it at him for the bag, in tears.—

  —Her father’ll take care of them. Her, the baby.— She knows that. He knows that. It’s the circumstances of generations in KwaZulu, Baba’s village and thousands of villages, the eternity of colonialism, doesn’t matter whose, the recency of its apartheid evolution, Bantustans, and its circumstance now in freedom. You have to eat. The men go off to the industries, the factory farms of chickens, wine, and Baba and magogo are left with care of the wives and children conceived when the men come home on leave, with money. It’s their emigration. She’s known it; this form, all through her childhood, her companions grew up in the absence of fathers. Even though she was by chance the exception, her father: the headmaster, in place.

  The present is a consequence of the past.

  Including the newspaper cuttings she found.

  She and he have the same intense conception of horror at the degradation to violence people have descended against Zimbabweans. She, he—poverty is what it’s about, again and again, reality that’s avoided under the useful ‘xenophobia’. If they didn’t share this as they do within them their lives in the Struggle, their ultimate relation in love with one another wouldn’t remain intact.

  He sees now with this disaster come indoors to them right in the Suburb, enclave of human variety where at last race, colour, gender are simply communal, that she has an ancestral sur
ety he hasn’t, never will. They—hers—have known and know how to survive what his antecedents never experienced.

  The end product of colonial masters in Africa even if he’s redeemed himself in Umkhonto.

  If he’d been born a generation earlier and in Europe, that capillary thread of Jewish blood from—a maternal grandmother was it—could have resulted for him in that other kind of ancestral surety, known and knowing how to survive escape extinction, Holocaust.

  All this crowds, remote, out of mind, what is going to happen is happening in the present to everyone everywhere, the whole planet. Nature’s holocaust coming with the effects of pollution. And the result of this human self-destruction, or—some scientists/philosophers say, a recurring phenomenon over the existence of planet Earth—climate change to destroy the resources of life.

  The man in Wethu’s chicken-coop cottage is also of course a ward of Suburb comrades—some answer against the inevitable shame and revulsion the impact of ‘xenophobia’ his situation brings among them. At least the humiliation of charity can be relieved while he is there—the idea Blessing might give him some sort of job in her catering venture, which is doing rather well, was offered—and then realised by everyone as unsafe for him, among her staff there could be resentment at a Zimbabwean being employed when they had brothers and sisters out of work. The Dolphins while assuring him he’d be welcome to swim but brrr water was still too early spring cold, asked if he would be willing to help with the clean-out of the pool they did at this time of year, and he was enabled to earn something from joining this task with them. Isa had put off the need to have two shabby rooms painted and here was the opportunity of employing someone to do it. No one wanted shelter to be a handout; though when Jabu passed Albert a clip of banknotes in concern of needs of the baby whose photograph he had among his few essentials, he took the money with a curt thank you of something owed. Wethu did not object to his occupying, for the time being, her cottage, while keeping him aware that this was by her permission; although—that night—she hadn’t been asked by Jabu. She took for granted he’d take his evening meal with him from the kitchen to his borrowed quarters although he had his mealie-meal, bread and tea with her in that kitchen when the family had gone to work and school; but Jabu made the statement of laying a sixth place at table while she and Wethu prepared dinner.

  How long would he, could he stay.

  November.

  The man had some unexplained inner assurance—couldn’t be questioned about? Things would settle down in the shacks, he who had been living there with the people, three years, a South African woman and a child his compact with a life just as theirs (he determinedly would nod in agreement with whatever his own assurance was) he would go back. Soon. It will be all right. Soon.

  Every week there’s another collection of shacks crowding to be a settlement, identified popularly if on no map, by the name of a Struggle hero and taking up another kind of struggle against people from over frontiers. In some areas the problem was solved by Better Life development as an industrial zone or country club, then it’s everyone out.

  Soon. November. There’ll be no Wethu cottage. The new owners will move in. —They didn’t buy a Zimbabwean bonsella with the price.—

  Confronting Jabu and himself. This kind of farewell.

  The Mkizes, no. Jake and Isa . . . take him in; take him on?

  She’s looking at discovery: —The Dolphins.— The words don’t have a questioning lilt.

  But how does she know these things; he has nothing less demanding to offer—for the meantime, which is any time between when the man thinks he can go back to his wife and child in the shack, and when there’ll be a Zimbabwe fit to return to.

  Only Dolphins Donnie and Brian are at home, indoors with the newspapers and their glasses of good Cape Pinotage before a pinecone fire for the beauty of it, winter’s nearly over. Brian is a telecommunications expert who often has feasted them his other expertise, his jambalaya since they moved in to their welcome in the Suburb.

  —No problem! There’s only junk we should throw out anyway since Marc’s got himself a wifey, it used to be his studio, he called it, but you know he’s never painted, no Picasso or Sekoto, always wrote plays there, he’s said he’d come to work back there in peace—whatever that tells the tale about life with Claire—we’ll just need a bed, if you have a spare—

  They will have everything to spare of beds, tables, cupboards, chairs, freezer, TV—no, the new living-room widescreen will go along with furniture Wethu should have, perhaps Baba might like to give away the desks, keep his daughter’s, for himself—when transport is arranged, time come for her to go to KwaZulu. Soon.

  When that time comes, if ‘meantime’ still needs it, the Dolphins will shelter the man with the topknot crown of city pavements. Imagine the ghosts/ghouls of the old Gereformeerde congregation: the sinful moffies in God’s house—now they even have a black man to bugger. Who’s thinking this, himself or others when Steve tells them the Zimbabwean will not be cast to the streets . . .

  Autumn of parties, in summer. An ending.

  The children are possessed by TV-Land, somewhere. He and she are on the stoep, that’s what the terrace was called when the house was built in the forties, as the Dolphins’ pool-house was the Gereformeerde Kerk before there came about a comrade takeover. Eyelids of light open upon the Suburb from houses on another hill, the conversation is that of cicadas rubbing legs together. But watchface glanced at in half-dark—they’re expected for another of the unacknowledged farewells. At Jake’s now.

  They’re tardy. The comrades, Blessing and Peter, the Dolphins with their sexual renegade Marc and his honorary Dolphin woman—the comrades have been drinking before the arrival. Jake’s trying out one of the new vintages from an old well-known vineyard taken over by German (or are they Chinese) entrepreneurs with the precaution of one of the new black capitalists drawn in as a partner. —Why should whites own the wine resources as they do the mines—and there’re high voices in the ANC Youth none of the prosperous white oldsters are hearing yet—toyi-toying, calling for gold, diamonds, platinum industry to be nationalised.— Jake is even more loquacious than usual rather than drunk on this experimental Pinotage, unstoppable, uninterruptable (if there isn’t such a word there ought to be).

  He and she—they sit on an unsteady swing couch. Hand within hand while these are not touching, not held.

  —ANC’ll have to dig the wax out of ears before the elections come in 2014, that squalling prodigy Malema rallied his generation Brothers to vote first time Zuma Zuma Zuma, Zuma’d better start worrying whether they’ll dance with him all the way knee-high next time. Isn’t Malema lifting his to lead the dance himself? If not this time . . . after. One day. Soon. The five hundred thousand jobs Zuma promised as President? So where are they? The multi-million election victory celebration. The four hundred thousand he spent on a birthday bash for his daughter, and what about his nineteen or so other offspring and by-blows, will they all have birthday bashes at our tax expense? How many houses could have been built for three-generation families slumming in those abandoned downtown buildings, how many roofs could go up from the bill for French champagne gone down and pissed out by government ministers—

  —There’ve been about two million houses. Eish. That’s nothing . . .— Peter is talking over Jake not defiantly but dismissively as if compensating for some congenital circumstance Jake himself—comrade—cannot be aware. —I’m the lucky one I have a house (spread hand waves to encompass the Suburb) I’ve got not just a job—it’s what we call a position, my wife has a business of her own, yes. But I—black, all of us, the beggar and big boss—I can walk where I like, move about my country, live in any place, city, get on any bus come in any door, send my kids to any school. That’s not nothing.—

  Jake accepts—flinging right arm to catch his left below the shoulder—what a white cannot experience. But there’s no stalling him. —Strikes, they’re the employer these months, telecommunicati
ons, transport, electricity, every public servant from dustmen up, they’re taking over the country with blackouts and no-go streets they’re the worker-boss as full-time marcher to the headquarters of this commission and that. And NOW—the army, army—who can blame them, the ones it’s counted upon to do the head-bashing on workers if it comes to that. The army. Yesterday didn’t you see, the South African National Defence Force, three thousand rampaging under their banner at the Union Buildings, that’s boss government itself. Those supposed to protect us are the lowest paid government employees—

  Blessing laughs out —So that’s the place to go! When there’s a strike I’m without my two cooks, although they share our profits, they want to show solidarity with other workers, their husbands from the municipality, one son with a bus company . . .—

  —Since when do they have a union?— Eric of the Dolphin pool was in the apartheid army, remembers what doesn’t change with any regime. —Soldiers never have the right to strike. Jesus! Haven’t you heard call-in programmes, people saying the guys should be thrown out of the army in disgrace. Who cares if our ‘military force’ earns peanuts while we can send them off to earn us kudos, Congo and anywhere UN organisations are trying to prop up peace against oppressors—who those are and aren’t—

  —Who’s for peace—

  —Who’s doing the oppressing—

  —ESCOM’s strike’s suspended anyway, going to be ‘allowed negotiations’ of the sticky issue, housing allowance—so we don’t risk rolling blackouts—for the time being, maybe.—

  —What we ought to be worrying about is the mines, my man, platinum, the output’s about three thousand ounces a day, that’s worth fifty-eight million to the economy . . .—