No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  There is continued avoidance of any discussion of politics out of consideration of people’s feelings on both sides. It is salutary for the comrade-husband, comrade-wife to see how social relations can imply this; despite all that has happened to everyone, if differently. Occasionally the invitation is for an evening with one or other of the couples who comprise his siblings. The gay one, Alan, takes them with his current lover to an African restaurant, new venture in the city, offering traditional mopani worm snacks, tripe and usu with beans. —Is this because of me?— Jabu opens the uninhibited mood of the evening. —No, we like this place, exotic for us whites, nê.— Alan’s manner is flirtatious but brother Steve doesn’t have to worry because (so far as he knows?) this sibling is not bisexual in his desires, which are obviously centred on the lover. Brother Alan, in family congenital variation of physique and face, looks a more manly man than Steve, which, without vanity, Alan amusingly concedes himself. —How’d a guy like you manage to kidnap this girl, what’d you cook up in your paint lab to spike her drinks.—

  —He was cooking up fireworks to blow up pylons.— She can speak this out aloud now, in certain company, it’s a qualification of honour.

  —She loves me for myself.— Steve enjoys the banter.

  But here with Alan politics are not to be considerately avoided. The lover, Tertius (what a name—only Afrikaners would lumber a kid with it) is a journalist regarded by many of his family as a traitor to the volk. Whatever his paper will publish of his gleeful post-mortem of his people’s past as a hangover in the present—in the case of reconciliation the press must be prudent with the truth—brings punching denial from readers.

  Alan himself took no part, neither in the Struggle nor safe liberal ones signing protests, those times. As he once told his brother in the handy dismissive style that invoked their secrets of shared childhood —It’s a Struggle to deal with gay-bashing. Enough, enough shit already.— Yet Steve knows he shared revulsion against the regime that denied human reality in the time and place to which by birth both belonged. Steve could go, once when he had to disappear quickly, to Alan, confident there was somewhere to be concealed for a few days. Alan was not afraid. This was not brought up now to claim comradeship with Steve and his woman.

  —What do you two in-the-know think of the heir apparent so far?—

  Steve claims. —Mbeki’s keeping up, so far. Except for what’s unbelievable—that he takes it on himself not to believe AIDS is a virus. He appoints a Minister of Health who prescribes African potatoes and—what is it—garlic and olive oil as a cure. Mandela had to deal with the morning-after when we all woke up from the party, FREE-DOM FREE-DOM FREE-DOM. But the hype was there, the thrilling possibilities the—how d’you say—absolute reassurance of Mandela in person while he was leading, making the changes—the immediate ones that could be brought off. Now it’s a different story . . . Government has to pick up the spade and tackle where we bulldozed apartheid. How long are whites going to dominate the economy? Who out of the handful of blacks who managed to gain the knowledge, know-how that qualifies, will really be able get into that powerful old boys’ cartel? Who’s going to change the hierarchy of the mine bosses—from the top. The goose that makes the country rich—blacks, they’re the ones who continue to deliver the golden eggs, the whites, grace of Anglo-American and Co. make the profit on the stock exchange.—

  —Blacks are becoming shift bosses and mine captains, used to be only whites.— Jabu in the habit of their arguing enlightenment together, rather than interrupting.

  —Underground! Kilometres down! Mine managers? No Radibes or Sitholes sitting in the manager’s chair, my girl.— She’s a Gumede or was until she became partner in the postbox identification at Glengrove Place, Mr and Mrs S. Reed. Twitch of a smile, eyes of others not following, meant for her. —I’m not looking at promotion at shaft levels, there’ll be no real change until there are black chairmen of the boards of directors. Black owners! Minister of Industries has to work on that. Trade unions have to work on him.—

  —State ownership of mines, that’ll be coming up. Ask the unions—

  —Mine managers . . . co-option to the capitalist class!— Is Tertius trotting out a label or expressing his own politics? Alan has a private laugh with his man.

  —But Stevie, what about Mbeki’s high style, he quotes poetry in his speeches, English, Irish poets, what the hell does Yeats mean to your mine workers coming off shift—

  —Sure. It’s always a mistake to be an intellectual if you’re a president. The Man of The People knows your rat-a-tat street march slogans, quotes from the fathers of the liberation. He’s got to get used to being sharp-sharp, eh, you’re saying. Cool. As if the way we gabble has anything to do with policy drive, getting change done.—

  —It has, it has! The way people feel about power, it’s parodied in the way we express ourselves.—

  —Madiba could—he had to concentrate on the country within its borders. The chaos of the old regime left, the chopped-up map people were fenced in, ghettos, locations, Bantustans called Separate Development, Madiba dealt with the dismantling at home. Our identity wasn’t a continental task then, OK. But we’re the African continent. Just as Europe is not Germany, Italy, France and so on, individually. Mbeki has to integrate us as a concept if we are ever going to be reckoned with in the order of the world. Seeing us, the country individually, it’s the other hangover, from when we belonged piecemeal as Europe’s property. Backyard. Grant Mbeki sees that.—

  —Democracy begins at home. That’s what locals say.— Tertius flourishes the wine bottle. Jabu puts a hand over her glass. —No no? Congo’s been the DRC since the sixties and they’re still fighting each other regionally. Mugabe’s good start in Zimbabwe has careered off into dictatorship. We can’t pretend other neighbours aren’t in trouble or heading for trouble and we won’t be involved.—

  Jabu’s lifted hand tilts. —There are girls from the Congo out on the streets near where we used to live, the local ones complain they take away their customers—

  —Darling, that’s always been the first form of international trade.— But Steve is not sure either, whether his quip is stale repartee or solidarity against a liberation which has not changed the last resort of women—to go into the business of trading entry to their bodies for survival.

  —So you’re back on the Sunday lunch circuit. Oh ho.— A swap to family politics. Alan to Steve, although he’s turning a shoulder, mock coy attention to Jabu. —You and I, they have to give us a seat at the table. It’s the new democracy, ay. Which doesn’t extend further to our kind— He catches Tertius’s earlobe between thumb and forefinger. —We still have the tattoo Queer setting us aside from the bear-hug. We’ve been beaten up by bully boys when we danced together in a night club, and Tertius’s dominee brother thunders to his congregation God’s love-wrath at ours—the love that dares not speak its name. There you are . . . quoting high-falutin’ like Mbeki.—

  ‘A seat at the table’ will not be recognised by the lover or the brother’s wife, and maybe Steve himself won’t get the allusion, either, he’s removed by revolutionary distance from the maternal Jewish connection that is the reason for all three of them, the brothers, being circumcised males.

  The seat at table is laid at the Sabbath, Friday night family dinner, for the stranger whom the head of the household leaving the synagogue after Sabbath service shall invite to share a meal. Ancient, it is a meaningful origin of charity with dignity. Alan once studied religious faiths—including the secular one of his brother Steve. This on his way to trying out Buddhism. Maybe the ‘research’ had not to do with any gods but with his adolescent need for some explanation why he was not after girls, as all his friends were. He read poets alongside—what he retained was to have no discrimination against what was evidently the poetry of political ideology; it was poetry that was holy to him; why shouldn’t Mbeki quote Yeats—lines, images recalled that distilled what he wanted to invoke better than in any way a politician
could. If he, Alan, could have chosen to be anything he would have been a poet rather than a revolutionary; that’s the revolution against all limits of the ordinary.

  He’s a copywriter in an advertising agency.

  Jabu didn’t always expect, or even want Steve to come with her on her return home—that other kind of home he didn’t have, couldn’t have as his ancestors were of another country or countries, for that matter; they had come to this one, at best, only some generations back. Her parents and extended family lived in what had been a ‘location’ for blacks outside a coal-mining town in what remained a rural area. There had been and still were large farms long owned by whites, where location men who didn’t dig coal were labourers. But the ‘location’ was not the urban slum of city ghettos. Her father’s house—her grandfather’s house—was a red-brick villa in the adopted colonial 1920s-style of those provided by the mining companies for its white officials. It marked the standing in the ‘location’ community of the Pastor of the Methodist Church for blacks, which her grandfather had been, and that of her father, an Elder, Diakone, in the church and headmaster of the high school for black boys. There were round annexes in the yard, mud walls smoothed by the women builder-occupants under thatch of straw gathered by them. Collaterals lived in these.

  The women were accustomed to leading a woman’s life alongside a man in a bed but sharing, apart, their own preoccupation with care of children, cooking, maintenance of the family commune in their activities, from growing vegetables to building shelter. Jabu has always been her father’s child. She wasn’t kept at home while a brother, males always first in line for education, went to school. Her father found a place for her at a mission school, paid the fees and a younger brother waited his turn for entry.

  Elias Siphiwe Gumede was not a tribal chief yet he was the man of authority in recognition that he had managed to get himself educated to a high standard with letters after his name, BEd., due to his own proud determination dismissive of the difficulties for a rural black boy; but sisters’ and cousins’ husbands did not take the example of favouring girls, although nobody would contradict him with disagreement over the way he ignored the correct procedure of the people. At first her mother endured, with silence like consent, the disapproval of the women to be read in their faces when they chanced to look up from private gossip; then the daughter brought home excellent reports, the mother proudly walked in on the enclaves to announce, 76 per cent in arithmetic, 98 in isiZulu, 80 per cent in English, each term further success. The girl child’s learning achievement. Well, English, that was something, but isiZulu—that’s our language of course she knows—from home, from the time she learnt to speak.

  Her father was not aware either of the gossip or the counter boasts, or if he knew was not concerned; he expected to have her homework presented to him every night and equally could not be expected to fail to see where her attention had strayed or she had scamped what should have been pursued. She soon did not resent this strict condition because of the way in which he presented it, it was as if it was some special occupation, special game only she, among the children, shared with him. And as she grew up she realised how much she had gained in the process of real comprehension, from her father, beyond the instruction by rote, of school.

  Was it his intention or her idea that she go away over the border to Swaziland to a teacher’s training college?

  The one over the border was not restricted by colour. This was not the advantage mentioned when the possibility of her entry was discussed, it was the quality of degree offered which, her father insisted to his wife, was decisive, the standard of the teachers—and he knew who they were, people who had studied in Africa and overseas, universities in Kenya and Nigeria as well as in England.

  The mother did not want a child of hers to disappear, out of sight in another country, even if neighbouring. —So young, young still, this year seventeen, our child should stay with us a few years and then when she’s more ready— She broke into English from their own language.

  —Jabulile has done well. You want her to forget how to study? What will she do?—

  —A teacher’s training somewhere we can see her. Later on she can study away, plenty of time for that.—

  His own studies never ended, not only did he read biblical commentaries borrowed from the White Fathers’ mission, he had roused the shamed Christian conscience of the white librarian of the municipal library in the town at the fact that, high school headmaster, he could not be a member, and for years she had been secretly supplying him with the loan of books he requested, taking them to her house from where he could collect them. There came to his mind, stayed with him, maxims he had read and that remained meaningful to his own particular place and life—‘No time like the present,’—breaking into English: one of them. He’d used it often as a reproach for tardiness among pupils and his children. It could now have been an admonition to his wife, but for his daughter it was a signal she was to be granted a venture over the border, independent, the way she and her father wanted for her.

  Apparently he was not a member of any political formation, banned or still tolerated, although some churches were under surveillance as taking the revolutionary example of Jesus as contemporary; but he certainly knew Swaziland harboured activists on the run from apartheid police or sent out by the liberation movement to contrive smuggling of arms to the cadres at home in South Africa? He must have been aware that she, his daughter, would be living in a different atmosphere—of acceptance, support of the revolutionary struggle next door, even though Swaziland itself was ruled by a king—if still kind of ward of the dwindling British Empire. The influence she’d be open to. He did not speak of this to her, no fatherly warnings despite the confidence between them. She went in all innocence and ignorance to her teacher’s college, happy to be boarding not in a hostel but with a distant relative, great-aunt on her father’s side who had married out of the Zulu clan, to a Swazi. In 1976 headmaster Elias Siphiwe Gumede confused the African National Congress members, whose gatherings he had never attended, and that they disappointingly interpreted as fear of losing his position as headmaster in an apartheid state school, by intervening between the boys and the police who arrived with their armoury of dogs, batons, tear gas, to break up the boys’ demonstration of solidarity with riots in Soweto against ‘Bantu Education’ and Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in their state schools. Natural authority somehow prevailed—some of the police might have been ex-pupils of the school?—he stood with his back against the chanting toyi-toying boys, arms outstretched as a shield before them: the sergeant strangely distracted by the old authority enacted the same stance, but to hold his men back. The boys continued their defiant dance and song as the sergeant and the headmaster stood face to face in discussion. Their headmaster then took his place quietly again before the triumphant uproar while the police left the school grounds with their dogs straining to bark. What had he said to the police? The amazed community never learnt; he ignored questions as if he had not heard them.

  His daughter was recruited by Freedom Fighters from South Africa in Swaziland, he was informed by the great-aunt who came back home apparently on a usual family visit, bearing pineapples and litchis; she talked to Jabu’s mother and the other women only of how happy the girl was at college, how many new kinds of friends she’d made, how pretty she was, how helpful in the house, everybody loves her.

  He sent back money and two books he had bought for her by James Baldwin and Lewis Nkosi, not guns but arms of the mind.

  When she was deployed on a mission back to the home country, arrested and detained for three months, he applied for parental right to visit her in the women’s prison in Johannesburg and was refused.

  He went to Johannesburg and persuaded the chief wardress, entitled ‘matron’, to accept clothing sent by the girl’s mother and what he declared as study materials, from him, her father. In which textbooks he sent messages by turning down dog-ears on certain pages and marking words to b
e linked up from the text. He had introduced himself by caringly enquiring what church the matron belonged to (over her uniform collar there was a crucifix) and it was indeed Methodist, the denomination of worship where he informed her he was himself an Elder.

  So long as he’s happy.

  Pauline pronounced on their son, to his father, Andrew.

  A mother always goes to the essential, she’s right, but the father came to have other more objective, if supportive reasons for approving Steve’s choice of the woman. The physical attraction goes without saying—she’s extremely pretty in her way as any man knows the distinctive attractions of a blonde as different from those of a brunette, although he himself has never (so far; all changes possible at all ages in the wonderful mystery of sexuality) been attracted to a black girl. He finds her intelligent, beyond question, quick on the uptake with opinions of her own and respectful of those of others, also you don’t have to feel you must be careful of what you say because experience of the world they happen to live in has been different (like the looks you don’t share). Her manner. She is neither unspokenly aggressive in some reprisal for whites’ denigration of black; whether or not Andrew Reed ever held it? Her presence is not the hostile proud grudging one of some blacks now; making clear it’s no privilege to be accepted in white circles. She’s simply herself. And he, he’s not simply a Father, he’s a new individual in her life she’s getting to know.

  So long as he’s happy.

  Andrew Reed’s parents: somewhere unexpressed to him might have had the same thought when Andrew married Pauline Ahrenson. They were not anti-Semitic—of course not! Discrimination is unchristian. But if as they were reluctant to think, he might have become not just neglectful of observance but an unbeliever, he was still Christian by his father’s background, ethics and culture.