No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  Back at Glengrove Place Steve holds a towel ready while Jabu coaxes their small girl out of the bath. In the steam haze his voice is softened as reflection rather than question, he doesn’t want to press her.

  —What do you think of it?—

  The gathering, the house, the church as gay commune something to laugh about together; and something not to be avoided, the practical future there was no time to think about from Glengrove asylum, before.

  She’s a clear-headed person always capable of occupying her hands in some task while active elsewhere in her mind. —It’s a nice house, far as you can tell from the outside.—

  —Of course I’ll get the estate agent to take us, or give us the keys, that’d be better, next week. But the set-up, the place.—

  —How can I say. I don’t have any comparison, I mean I’ve never lived in such places, suburbs, whatever, have I.— Smiling, whether at the wriggling child she was patting dry, or for him.

  —I rather like the idea.— He doesn’t have to explain, taking over from the Boere, if even Pierre welcomed the displacement of his own clan, although everyone is supposed to live together, no ghettos, luxurious or new black-and-white middle class.

  Alone, if you can be said to be while those whose being you share are somewhere close by in kitchen or bedroom; not lonely, he wonders whether he really wants to prolong in some way the intimacy between comrades that was survival in detention or the bush, there’s a resistance to nostalgia. And at the same time self-reproach; what will there ever be like the bonds between cadres, the rest will always be strangers.

  Jake gave him the name of the estate agent and offered to accompany them to enter the house, but they wanted to be without anyone else’s observations and went, after work, with Sindiswa; after all, without offering any opinion, she would be subject to any decision made. He found the bedrooms poky, you could knock out the windows and put in something more generous with light. There was a red-brick fireplace thirties-style in the living room and space enough for a good-sized table and chairs along with sofa, television and so on. A rather shaky sliding door, obviously an improvement on the enclosing box that was the original room, opened onto another improvement, a small terrace. They were pleased to walk out and find shrubs beyond that half-hid the wall that was overhung with shade from a neighbour’s tree —Acacia.— But she was not interested in the identification. As a kid given every advantage he was taken to plant nurseries with his father and learnt to match botanical names to certain trunks, leaves and bark. She had learnt on walks with her grandmother in the forests of Zululand what wild fruits were safe and good to eat.

  The kitchen was a surprise. She tried the four plates on the big electric stove—no result. —Just that the current’s cut off, of course.— He reassured, opening cupboards. They moved their feet approvingly on the tiled floor; Jabu peered into the shelves to confirm capacity. The bathroom had a shower stall as well as a large tub, not bad, ay? The paint throughout was in good condition although candy pink in what was supposed to the main bedroom made him groan. —We could put a lick of white over it, I suppose—I don’t know if you’re allowed to make any changes in a house you rent?— They toured the rooms again, hand in hand with Sindiswa. —She’d have her own room, toys and all her gear— Jabu touched her head against his shoulder a moment; at Glengrove Place they shared the single bedroom with the child, strange to make love with even a sentient in the room; who knew how much a young child is aware of, perhaps the cries of pleasure sound fearful to an emerging awareness. They checked the sliding door to the terrace and locked the front door behind them in unspoken accord.

  But next morning, the reality of Monday, driving the child to the day-care centre—Jabu took a bus to her school from there while he went on to the city—putting a hand down on the keys in his pocket —I’ll go to the agency and sign for us.—

  She drew her lips hidden between her teeth, her familiar gesture of acceptance. When she got out of the car to deliver Sindi, suddenly kissed him. Coming back to the car, her eyes were held narrowed as if she were seeing some inner vision. He read it as, we’ll be happy there.

  Decisions always divide into practice. They had to give notice of vacating Glengrove, and it turned out several months’ advice in advance was required. He negotiated this successfully and the stipulation was reduced to one month. As for the house, Jake knew the agent well and the rent was not unaffordably higher than the apartment’s had been, on the guarantee to the owner that although the woman was black these were reliable tenants who wouldn’t fill the house with immigrant refugees or whatever they were from Congo and Zimbabwe, property values must not be allowed to go down as the result of rowdiness. Well, at least the condition wasn’t gender prejudice, they didn’t have to worry about moving into a mini-community where that prevailed. The gays could enjoy their holy pool. Some of the things that had been made do with in Glengrove, second- or third-hand necessities given by comrades when they first clandestinely moved in there, were not worth taking; new purchases, in keeping with a house, had to be made. A table and chairs for the living room—at Glengrove they ate in the kitchen or off the coffee table in the all-purpose room. Jabulile wanted a large refrigerator and freezer, to be paid off along with the furniture on the never-never instalment plan, it was the usual way in the communities she knew, but Steve was alert to how business economy worked to its own advantage, charging hidden interest on the amounts the poor paid every month. He would buy only what they had money to pay for on purchase—these are just trivial differences born of background which come up not only between a couple like theirs. The curtains: on the other hand, she knew a woman in Kliptown (old Location), mother of a colleague teacher, who would make them in her home at a cost below any decorator’s shop. They were completed and could be hung—Jake and Isa helped, it was fun—before the actual move to the house would take place.

  On the morning of the move Jabulile took charge. She bustled authoritatively between the men handling the cardboard cases he and she had filled the night before, herself correcting the carelessness with which they ignored the bold FRAGILE with which some had been carefully marked. Her reproaches were joking, she laughed with the men encouragingly. Displacement made everything unfamiliar to him, out of mind, as if they had never lived there—he was already, as if going home, in the house. He thought it unnecessary when Jabu made tea for the movers, just a delay. But she took mugs out of one of the boxes, talking in the language she shared with the men and he couldn’t follow. To speed things up he broke into her hospitality and quickly took back the emptied mugs with a gesture that they be left behind, not bothering to wash and pack them up again. He became authoritative now, giving a heaving arm to despatch of the boxes to the elevator, ready when it rose again to load it once more. She continued the laughing exchange in their common language with the men, darting back to the kitchen and bedroom to check what she must have already known, that nothing was missed, left behind. With the last batch he squeezed in to go down and help, hasten the loading of the van. The movers had been put in a good mood and took their time, arguing about the placing, how the bed, those chairs, could go here, that box balanced there. At last the double doors were barred across. He and Jabu could follow, with keys to the new kingdom. He had already taken the car out of Glengrove Place’s underground garage; for the last time.

  The elevator was in use, he bounded up three flights of stairs three steps at a time as if he were a schoolboy again and called out at the top, Let’s go!

  His stride almost stumbled: she pressed further against the door frame.

  —What’s been forgotten?—

  She moved her head slightly in dismissal, and he was stayed.

  It was nothing he could put a name, a cause to, ask what’s the matter would be some sort of intrusion. Although it’s impossible to accept that there are times when the trust of intimacy fails. She said very distinctly, I don’t want to go. It resounded in his silence as if she had shouted. She was so known to
him, the pillars of her thighs close together, the line of her neck he would follow with buried face to her breasts, yet this was someone he couldn’t approach in whatever was happening. How say stupidly, what’s wrong.

  Of course she is thrilled delighted with the house, the terrace where she’s looking forward to putting out their child to play in the sun . . . she had planned zestfully how the rooms would serve them, she agreed that he could sign for occupancy. I don’t want to go. She knows it has no meaning; they are gone, it remains only to close the door and drop the keys with the caretaker.

  Nothing could break the moment. Carrying the bride over the threshold was in his embrace. She didn’t cry but took a few rough broken breaths. Her breasts pressed familiarly against him. He didn’t ask, she didn’t tell.

  Leave behind, a drop into space. From the place that took them in when nowhere, no one allowed them to be together as a man and a woman. The clandestine life is the precious human secret, the law didn’t allow, the church wouldn’t marry you, neither his for whites nor hers for blacks. Glengrove Place. The place. Our place.

  Isa, Jake and Peter Mkize surprised them that first night, arriving with Isa’s chicken and mushroom stew to heat up for the first time use of the stove, wine for which glasses were dug out of packing boxes. Jabu was putting Sindiswa to sleep alone in her own room. —Khale, Khale, take it easy getting her accustomed to things. If I were you I’d keep her at her old day care for a bit before you move her to the one that’s nearer.— Isa, the senior resident, wants to be useful. Slowly, careful. Comrades, even if white, find expressive the few words in the languages of black comrades they’ve picked up. The presence of the three neighbours in the impersonal chaos of displaced objects is order of a kind. They slept well, the new tenants.

  On Sunday someone shook at the wrought-iron gate for attention and there was one of the dolphin-men from the church pool holding a potted hibiscus. —Hi, welcome to the residents’ association, there isn’t one but make yourselves at home anyway.— In shared laughter of the unexpected they gestured him in for coffee but he couldn’t stay, was due to make a jambalaya lunch, his turn to cook. —Come and swim when you feel like it, it’s a teacup, but it’s a cooler . . . In the afternoon when they tired of unpacking Jabu decided they should take Sindiswa on a walk and they passed the fondly mock-wrestling water, as they had seen the day they came to find Jake’s house. Jabu lifted Sindiswa’s little arm to wave a hand at the revellers.

  You shift furniture about: this way, that, not in the relation bed to door, sofa to window these had before, back there. And the new purchases must find the right relation.

  Commonplace physical acts can lead to the jolt of other, acceptedly established arrangements. He had gone back to the chemistry of paint as decoration, protection against the weather, after concocting Molotov cocktails in local adaptation. With the need of the demand of using it illegally in the cause of revolution that had somehow justified his rather random choice of a career, was he to stay in the paint manufacturing industry as the meaning of his working life. It came to him—again. A shift implied. Wasn’t there some other, a need of now, that would verify a working life in some way, as concocting a Macbeth witches’ brew had been imperative in another time. A luta continua, the avowal goes. The battle has been won; it continues in the practicalities of the abstract, the big word, justice for all. Where does an industrial chemist fit in.

  He replied on impulse to an advertisement for a position as lecturer in the chemistry department of the faculty of science at a university. Again, a move came from him, but this time not with a motorcycle ripping the street as a sheet of paper torn. He raised the subject, the shift, before making application. That also brought to light the difference between her working life and his, its meaning. Education a primary right of justice that was doled out, table scraps to blacks, before. She is teaching the freed generation, there’s continuity between her part in the Struggle, her detention, her having taught at the Fathers’ school even while clandestine in Glengrove Place. She had perhaps been waiting for it to come to him that part-time do-good associations are not enough to justify the life of someone like him, like her. When he was called to an interview she crossed her arms and hugged herself for joy.

  —I’ll earn a lot less, way down from what I do now, Jabu.—

  —So what. I’m probably going to be Deputy Head of Junior School next year, that’s for sure, first woman among the Fathers, and with your degrees and your Struggle record—well yes, it must count—you’ll end up a professor!—

  The university was in transformation.

  Not alone had the intake of black students been advanced by various scholarships; the attitude of some of the white lecturers towards blacks had come into question.

  He’s an academic of the new kind, particularly apposite since in the needs of the country and the policy of Black Empowerment, blacks must be encouraged to study science rather than favour, as they do—Business Management against Engineering—for the ambitions evidently dangling on the capitalist side of the country’s Mixed Economy. Getting on in life? And as luck would have it, he’s turned out to be a gifted lecturer to whom his students respond with alerted intelligence; another kind of comradeship—in the learning process. His facility of rousing response when speaking at political gatherings, toned down for a different situation, unexpectedly responsible.

  A personal transformation.

  Occupying a house in a suburb is a sign of the shedding of whatever remnants of the old clandestinity, the underground of struggle and defiance of racial taboos.

  If either his parents or hers—so far apart in every South African way—had come to know about the clandestine couple, they had not been told by the son or the daughter. Once sexual segregation laws had gone with apartheid Jabulile arrived in KwaZulu one day to present rather than introduce him to her father and mother—for her very much in that order of whom she needed to inform of how she was conducting her life. No difficulty for him; he was accustomed from birth, one might say, to adapting naturally to the different tribal customs of his father’s Christian family and his mother’s Jewish family, as later with comrades he took part in the customs of blacks, Indians, any DNA mixture of these. That underlay what mattered: ethos of liberation. Jabu had been less at ease with the idea of being produced for his mother and father to meet his choice—for him very much in that order. (Jewish women and their sons.) But the self-confidence in having taken her own emancipation from any restrictions on her freedom from custom in the sexual relations of her own tribe, meant she entered his parents’ home as if she were an unexceptional guest.

  The presentation, in both places, passed without any more familial exchange than general light conversation, avoidance of politics as if these would draw attention to the consequence of politics; the daughter’s choice of a man, the son’s choice of a woman, to whom now the law, at least, gave its blessing.

  When the baby was born, there was a different result of political overturn. Of course, both sets of parents had grandchildren from their other offspring but this grandchild Sindiswa was the first infant progeny of a new age, for them. There’s a whole population who share the subtle skin colour toned by her mixed blood, and nature’s arbitrary intriguing decisions to pick this bone structure or that, which nose which flesh-line of lips to perpetuate from this or that different progenitor. Once she was there, alive, with Jabu and Steve in what was no longer a clandestine Glengrove Place but nevertheless was the origin, the place of her conception, the grandchild already had brought about a different relationship between her parents and grandparents. Occasional Sundays Steve and Jabu took her to visit the Reed parents—he had to be reminded by Jabu that this was necessary. Whether this means Jabu was closer to her family—cliché sentimental concession of whites to compensate for depredation of blacks’ other characteristics—was not remarked by him, or claimed by her as a reproach to him; reminder of a son’s duty was enough. When the baby was a few months old there was the v
isit to KwaZulu where the women carried her away, daughter Jabulile’s first-born, once the infant had been presented to the grandfather. No one, particularly Jabulile’s Baba, showed any expected reaction to the light-skinned face and clutch of miniature hands. A baby born to one of their own, the extended family, is in itself a rejoicing of them all, their being.

  Moving to a house is more than arranging furniture. There’s the child, however small and young, now in possession of a room of her own. There’s the planting of the gift hibiscus in a private garden; the acknowledgement that there is a neighbour, neighbours, not only comrades Isa and Jake, the Mkizes. The gay commune, all moving to a middle class of a kind. It involves something Steve is not sure about—subscription to a communal security patrol. —They’re almost certainly former impimpis, bastards who betrayed and murdered comrades. Who needs to be protected by traitors?—

  Jabu teases. —I’ll pay the fee.—

  A house. It implies home, not a shelter wherever you can find one. Home is an institution of family, his come to visit now—lost touch with when it was better for them not to be known as relatives of political activists, exposed to police questioning. But their Reed children are Sindiswa’s cousins. She squeals with excitement when they play with her. Son Steve brother Steve, his wife and child, are expected more often than they would like, to arrive at the obligatory Sunday meal at one or other family home. It would have been nicer to drive out somewhere into the veld and picnic alone, Sindi playing with her toys on a rug and the Sunday papers handed between them. Jabu seemed to mind the obligations less than he did. He doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know that the family, his family, intend to show they accept (for some must swallow hard the prescription, non-racial democracy) that Steve’s wife is black. One sister-in-law, wife of Steve’s brother Jonathan, rather overdoes it; Brenda flings her arms round Jabu, kisses, rocks their bodies together, pulls back her face to look at Jabu as in delighted discovery. This with every arrival and departure from a gathering.