No Time Like the Present: A Novel

by Gordimer, Nadine

  She remarks at supper one evening while everyone is around the table helping themselves to spaghetti drooling from the bowl’s serving spoon—she’s going this weekend to KwaZulu, it’s been some months since she’s visited. Wethu enthuses—Bheka Baba! See Baba! His good girl that’s right!—

  Sindiswa goes along to KwaZulu only on occasion when it is understood that everyone goes. Gary Elias, Wethu’s usual companion on visits, attacks—Ooww no, not this weekend, we’ve got some guys from Pretoria, our first team against them—I’ve got to be there, we must vuvuzela our guys. Who’s going to take me to school sports, Saturday?—

  —I am of course.—Steve will not be going to KwaZulu, not expected to share all daughterly duty.

  After the meal the children and Wethu watch an episode of a television thriller they follow and she is in the kitchen with the two mugs of coffee she makes every night for the Suburb’s patrol watch he has suspected of being personnel of impimpi veterans.

  —Anything special happening at home this weekend?—

  —Not that I know of.—She lifts the mugs in a gentle hint for him to open the kitchen door for her.

  She’s gone out to the front gate to hand out what has become the men’s comfort.

  Back in a few moments, and stood while he locked the door behind her. He turned and smiled: forgotten something? But she wasn’t looking round the kitchen.

  —I think I have to tell him about Australia.—

  —But why. What for?—

  He’s saying what has it to do with your father.

  —What he would think about leaving. Us leaving. Me leaving.—

  —I can’t see how that can have anything to do with us just looking at—What’s got into you, we’re not taking the plane tomorrow, are we, we’ve made a hell of a lot of decisions, we’ve always had to have all the circumstances clear, simply considering. Why does he have to know—right—it’s ‘common knowledge’ gossip among comrades even, I’ve picked up although I don’t know how it spread, by someone’s Twitter Face Talk or whatnot, to the Faculty. But how would this have reached the village…the school, the church.—While he is speaking: her leaving. What business is it of anyone. What the Reed clan would think about him leaving; a son has opted for a superior degree that will qualify him for a post in another country while civil engineers are needed for the future of this one. ‘Her leaving’—her Baba. Yes her Baba. What Baba thinks in every decision for every move she makes in her life, the life he propagated and that is deep in her being as Sindiswa and Gary Elias were embedded in her womb; it matters to Jabu. It’s not a question of influence; between her and Baba, his comrade wife and her Baba there is an identity. Final one?

  What is called the intake of shades-of-black students at the Faculty of Science has increased at least sufficiently to more than compensate for those who have failed their year or abandoned the idea of becoming an industrial chemist, engineer, and other scientific professionals, either because they’ve run out of scholarship support or the best intentions of band-aid classes have not proved able to subvent poor teaching of maths in schools from which they came. Research has become part of the curriculum, study of climate change, as well as alternatives to fossil fuels as producers of electric power. The university Business School has the largest number of new students, no longer seen as a dead end if you weren’t white and had the footprints of a businessman father to lead you into company directorship, banking, commerce. There are black directors in mining cartels and shopping mall complexes, insurance companies. It’s encouraging, while understood, certainly by an academic that attending lectures together, working in labs, libraries, side by side at computers and canteen takeouts is the simple side of transformation; so long as students live at home or in some pad in the city. Hostels bring together in the intimacy of shower stalls, adjoining beds, place for the need of differing personal possessions, the skin colours and habits of young people who have never lived together in the same closed space before. There’ve been some incidents of minor spats at the ‘mixed’ hostels—mixed only in the old jargon of race—these students play hard rock recordings when others are trying to study, this guy blocks the wash basin with combings from his hair; nothing serious as inference of racism.

  A New Year.

  The newspaper report of what happened last year at a university, in a part of the country that still has its old Boer Republic name—Free State—long preceding apartheid, dating from Boer defiance against the British (fellow) colonisers—it’s hardly credible in the version now revealed by whoever the informant or informers were.

  There are accounts pursued for months by journalists on the Internet from individuals anonymous, reluctant to be interviewed, and then—photographs. Somehow got hold of, clips of a video apparently made by some of the participants in whatever the event was supposed to be. White students at the traditionally Afrikaans university of The Free State held out the ultimate hand of non-racialism and no class prejudice by inviting the university cleaners of their hostel, black, to a party customarily marking the initiation of new students, usually a very private clandestine ritual. The mostly elderly four women and one man whose role in these students’ higher education was to clean up after them, danced in drunken freedom, and then on their knees forced to help themselves generously from a pot of stew. One of the students had pissed into it.

  What was the progenitor.

  Yes. yes. Need to know. It goes that far back, initiation. Beyond ancient history, not of battles and kings, tyrants and slaves. Back beyond all that—into evolution. But not how apes stood upright and lost their tails. So very far: back to the intimate anatomy. If you’re female, Jabu is a girl, you have a definitive initiation in your body. The day of that is when you bleed. (What it must be like to put your hand between your thighs and there it is.) You have become a woman. As a male, a boy, for us nothing so drastic as bloodletting. The rising of the worm you pee through, become a stiff upright, it happens apparently in the womb and you can make it happen through childhood by toying with it. Must have experienced when the attention of your hand became urgent and there was fluid spurting excitement, pleasure. So. Then you were not a boy: a man.

  Rituals the body has.

  Was there some sort of other, gleeful ceremonial in the dorms at the high school where Reeds have been educated over at least two generations. Don’t remember so could not have been significant either as good or traumatic. Must anyway have felt by it totally recognised, safe and accepted, in that manly white enclave, sons of those who mattered.

  University. Could you call it recruitment outside the curriculum. Nothing so authoritative. Initiation; beginning to understand a contradiction in the ways of living, let alone thinking—that’s political initiation. Didn’t really come out of the bibles of revolution read: rather the disappearances into Swaziland, putting into practice tentatives of what theory called liberation, contradictions resolved by action, you can choose sides, you don’t have to belong in the one you were born to. Guts not obedience. The proof of it later at the paint factory, ingredient of concoction of explosives to blow up power substations and rupture the service of apartheid. Initiation: what you yourself did.

  And Umkhonto. The comrades who went for the first time on raids, into battle across the desert and through the bush, to kill the apartheid army and be killed by them—what student hostel initiation, if it is to test endurance, did they need.

  Religious initiation. But of course how could you remember that you must have yelled as you were snipped—when do Jews do it—before two weeks old?—at some atavistic whim of your mother married to a Gentile (if not observant Christian). Muslims do it at a stage in development, marriage, when at least it makes more sense to become a man by ordeal of some sort; we males don’t go through childbirth. And the justification, for non-believers: it’s not mutilation but a hygienic advantage. And there are differing opinions apparently, among women frank enough in gender freedom to come out with these: intercourse with a circumcised pe
nis is more/less rousing than with an intact foreskin. What will she say. It’d imply a wider experience than with me. Before me? Since. You don’t ask such opinions of your woman.

  As with Jews and Muslims, initiation to manhood is tribal among Africans. AmaXhosa circumcise in adolescence or adulthood, in time to be considered a man ready for marriage, Zulus don’t, any more. It’s probably not in the traditions observed now by her Baba.

  Not only is the coffee hot in the Faculty room. Westling from Psychology should have something enlightening to say on the Free State. He is professionally beyond disgust, judgement:—Suffering. Doesn’t have to be surgical. It seems adult initiations all involve that other form: humiliation. You have to show you can take it, the jeering and taunting by your peers. And then you get drunk with them. That’s exactly what it is, what it’s supposed to signify you become one of them, behaviour of your own adult-kind, as in turn you will initiate the next student.—

  —But it is exactly that what has happened at that university was not.—

  Lesego is ready.—What do the people who scrub the floor flush the shit from the lavatory have to do with students becoming men? It wasn’t, can’t be initiation. Tell me, say it, into what? Those students accepting them as their own, same as themselves? Out of despising those men and women who clean their dirt they trick them into something you can’t even think about. Was the come on in, the worst insult of all; invite these poor blacks to party with the students, get them drunk, make them dance for you—and then eat from a pot one of the same students has pissed in. It’s all there, filmed on video.—

  But the academic colleagues don’t commit themselves to probing revulsion, disgust, and—understood but not breathed—something like that, unimaginable as it is, could happen only in that province, that university.

  Disgust. Disgust can’t be the end of it.

  It’s raining and instead of the church swimming pool the comrades are in Jake and Isa’s house.

  —Who’re these superior louts receiving higher education—no, tertiary, eh in our new ‘dispensation’—sounds less discriminatory between high and low opportunity? Who are these superiors themselves more degraded than any filthy degradation into which they initiate their ‘inferiors’.—it’s Jake.

  Some things you can argue out only with yourself. He is hardly aware of his own voice—Were those young men so brutalised, don’t let’s call them beasts, beasts are innocent, hunt and attack only for survival—did their parents’ torture of so many in ingenious crude daily apartheid routine—did this seep into their DNA—do what?—haunt them into some hideous farce of repetition.—

  Jabu launches across the room at him; for everyone there.—So they can’t help it?—

  What had to be said—excuses? There cannot be any kind of haunting justification of present behaviour taken from that of grandfathers, uncles, fathers, who were the torturers in their Special Branch, their police, their army! Is there a skin-branding of shame which scars into defiance, indecency, the extortionate unbelievable?—So you don’t have to take any blame for your kind that an old bloodied coat can’t shrug off.

  Only Pierre, the Afrikaner Dolphin can speak about the Free State, aloud:—Boere. Afrikaners.—Pierre’s taken on the hardest kind of recognition, responsibility for what his people have done to themselves.

  While they also produced a Dominee Beyers Naude who wouldn’t preach in a segregated Gereformeerde Kerk.

  In that only refuge from what’s happening elsewhere, another university—in bed again away from all intrusions, there was tension to be felt in her. He stroked her hip where his hand lay. She drew away as if she were going to speak, say something that among crossing voices hadn’t been heard.

  How not to have understood! He and the others mindblown by what had been done in the name of the white-skinned; themselves. She is part of the old women cleaners, the men lured to drink with the sons of the past masters, fed in a stew all that they’d had thrust down their throats all their people’s lives, the whites’ rejection pissed out as blacks’ share of life’s abundance.

  Make love to her, would be the tender healing, most respectful acceptance of what she couldn’t release herself of without cursing him in the wordless sense of what his skin represents. But for once, first time ever, since the bold boy-girl desire met, ignoring the Reeds, ignoring Baba, in Swaziland, he could not expect to enter, taken in by her. How long will it be—it’s the country in mind now, not the Free State, no-no it’s too easy to say it’s colour, race, Jabu has multiple identities in living: in her convictions, ethics, beliefs, along with the congenital. A love between them, her Baba and her, which that other love, woman and mate, has not supplanted. Her bond with her Baba survived the disillusion and pain of that other visit the day when she went back home to KwaZulu after sitting—witnessing—at the rape trial and found her father outraged by the trial and triumphant in the dismissal of the charge against Zuma.

  Also easy to miss within her multiple identities something you would rather miss. The attachment tangle, strength beneath any acquisition to selfhood, of that history called ‘tradition’ (didn’t colonials dub as a basket of customs anything other than their own ways dealing with the events of life and death). The attachment, not in sense of emotion but of a history alive in the present which he cannot claim to share with her and her Baba. Must face, like it or not—comrades and lovers as they are with their definitive shared history of the Struggle—leaving is different; for her, Jabu. Call it Australia. Whatever. He’s not leaving what she’s leaving.

  What her father knows, she’s leaving.

  —What did he say.—

  —Nothing. At first. I almost thought he hadn’t heard me right. What I’d told.—

  The father removed beyond belief. She read the conclusion taken, this one of the communication facilities of growing up together not as children but as adults.—No, his way of not being pushed, you know, taking his time…you see…for the meaning of what’s been said. He just opened the door in his room and sent a boy to fetch tea and only when we started to drink—Are you and your children going too.—Like asking a man in the family who’s off to a job he’s found in the city. I said again, opportunities…you’ve heard about.—Australia, England, America, Ghana—he said it—‘all the same’.—

  Opportunities. Quoting from the cuttings—as a circumstance, reason Baba would perhaps respond to that she herself had not shown any recognition of to himself, Steve; but this was her Baba who had seen sending her away to education in Swaziland was his decision of opportunity for her.

  —And then. He was angry. So then—

  She pinches in her nostrils a moment, concentration to repeat her Baba faithfully, of course they would have been speaking in isiZulu.—He changed to English, ‘There are many white people going there, I read they call it something, relocating, that must be the word they took when they put us, black people into Locations outside the towns.’—

  —That’s all? Didn’t ask anything, more about you.—

  What about her; first thing she knew was coming upon the cuttings wasn’t it.

  She smiled with closed lips and paused—before the evocation of Zuma’s man, the father.—Uzikhethele wena impilo yakho! You made your life, I let you choose, you must live the way it is in this time.—

  What is she saying, comrade Jabu, that whatever her betrayal of her Baba, his bitter sorrow, her rejection of him; her betrayal of herself, Ubuntu, her country: a woman, in the order of her Baba’s community, she will live this time as ever on the decision of her man.

  Australia, I am leaving with him, leaving our country, KwaZulu, leaving you. The woman goes where her man goes, that’s the ancient order understood, but he knows, Baba knows, had his own kind of revolution in nurturing his female child to independent being. Wouldn’t be deluded, would accept that she was emigrating—that reversal of what brought foreigners to take the continent, Africa which was not theirs—as a wife obedient to her husband. Baba will still force her t
o meet him on common if not equal ground—he is the father, ultimate authority after the Word of God—he had provided for her. She has to defend herself on the choice made for the children, hers and thereby Baba’s lineage, children of Africa, of the Zulu nation.

  Protect herself from knotted liens of nature her man must recognise, always should have recognised, liens he didn’t have. Being born here is not enough. Even in the equality of the Struggle.

  Sindiswa is about to be fourteen. When she’s asked what she wants as her birthday present she says one of the new mobile phones where you can see movies and read books, the pages passing, you don’t have to turn—her cell phone is old stuff.

  —Oh please—must she be like all the kids (and his students) a clamp on her ear, apparently talking aloud to themselves.—

  He keeps his ‘old style’ mobile in the car—for hijack emergencies…? There are breaks in real communication in the faculty room just when someone is putting together an argument worth hearing and he/she is claimed by a singsong sounding somewhere under clothes like a digestive gurgle. When a student comes to him to discuss a formula not clearly grasped—that’s what he’s there for, a teacher always available—he has bossily made it a rule that the thing must be switched off. He’s not cool, Prof Reed, although they say he was one of the whites in Umkhonto.

  —Everybody has them. Gary’s nagging too.—

  —Exactly.—

  Brenda has called—for Jonathan’s sake, Steve is a brother after all, even if their ways were parted during the bad years—everyone agrees now they were that, although not personally involved except in being white. Brenda keeps tally of family anniversaries and birthdays as calendars mark Christmas and now Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and so on, holy days. She’ll just pop round and drop a little something for Sindiswa, big girl, no more toys, what would she like?