No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  They got on well enough with his Jewish wife Pauline. Maybe she too was non-observant of her religion. She and Andrew brought Steven, Alan, Jonathan to sit cheerful and expectant round the Christmas tree with cousins, receiving their presents from the hands of grandfather Thomas Reed beard-disguised as Father Christmas. Pauline and Andrew exchanged gifts for each other secretly placed under the tree and opened between laughter and embraces. His parents had not remarked on not being invited to any baptisms of Andrew’s children; he didn’t see the need to tell them about the circumcisions.

  Steve remembers from childhood those Christmas celebrations as the only family occasions. And his mother once saying guiltily with a mock thankful grimace something he didn’t understand because he didn’t know of the occasion she referred to, she never had to spend those Friday nights sitting around a Sabbath table listening to her brother’s responses to the groaned blessing. Andrew went along with her to the weddings of her collaterals in synagogue just as they attended marriages of his in church. Their own community was that of his business associates and their wives with its own rituals of dinner parties in favoured restaurants, gala cocktail parties at the golf clubs where the men discussed the stock exchange and shots from the rough and the women traded experiences of their leisure-time diversions. Pauline belonged to a book club and took up silk-screen printing in private recognition that this was the limit of the talent as a painter she once believed she had. What an irony one of her sons should have ended up an expert in an industrial paint factory as his first career—her sense of this wasn’t seen by her husband who had been impressed by her daubs when they met, part of his falling for her, as the expression went in those days; her wry, bright irony in respect of many circumstances perhaps comes from the Jewish side she brought to the marriage. Somehow paid her due to what she was, always would be, by the odd obeisance of her sons. Alan was the only one of their children who turned out to have any bent for the arts. In the circles in which she and Andrew move round accepted ideas, there was one that there was a predilection among men with ambition in the arts to become homosexuals, expressed in the usual epithets, Queens, Moffies. Did what had become Alan’s sexual choice along with his passion for poetry come from her blood. He had suffered for it, his worldly mother was his confidante, she knew the doors that had slammed on him because he was gay—what an irony (again) that misnomer was, no gaiety in being sneered at and despised. But what a great result of whatever his brother Steven had done to bring about a revolution—it hadn’t only freed the blacks, now it had given the same Constitutional rights in legal recognition that men like Alan, who love other men, are entitled to! She knew too well this was a—what’s the word—reductionist view of what freedom means, but it’s her minority experience of it, as a white privileged by oppression of the others in the too-close past. Andrew, his father, had accepted that this son among his sons made ‘love’ to men (yes, entering the place of shit) a version of sexual desire; he couldn’t understand how this chosen deprivation of the love of women, the place for perfect consummation in their lovely bodies, could come about. He loved his son and continued to show it, and did not let appear what he felt on his son’s behalf. Not disgust: regret. He could not go so far as behaving exceptionally welcoming to Alan’s lovers, as Pauline did, as if they were the same as the other sons’ wives, the producers of grandchildren. Hard for him to dictate to himself: so long as he’s happy.

  Steve brought students to the house. There would be peanuts and cartons of fruit juice dumped on the small terrace for hospitality, although they might have preferred beer and good pot. These were not seminars, their prof (as they called him although he was still only a senior lecturer) invited them as young friends. That most of them were in what used to be called the ‘non’ category, non-European: African Black, African Indian, African-God-knows-mixture-white, something new to the science faculty at the university, as company was nothing new to Jabu and him as it was for many who might receive them in their homes as people other than servants. Struggle had no non-categories among identities of comrades. There was no sense of inadequacy of a white comrade in that he didn’t know the languages of the cadres where he was minority with communication only in his native English. The few friendly colloquialisms of African tongues he had picked up as every kind of collective with shared aims, activity, conditions, has its own jargon, made do; after all, there were the Cuban cadres most of whom didn’t even know two words of lingua franca English, brothers though they proved themselves, coming from vast distance other than that between the black and white cadres when they were boys.

  That was then. Now the allowance made—to himself, and by his black friends, Mkize and others, the students attracted to the subjects he had taught—it belonged to the dead and the buried. He was an African although he didn’t understand, couldn’t communicate in any African language—allowance made by his lover, mother of their child, Jabulile herself? Had never spoken to her those intimate words that must be known to her more committing than darling my love etc., the second-hand.

  And Jabu was a teacher.

  She was surprised, curious when he announced: You’re going to start teaching me Zulu. What other tongue should he learn; it was her own. She lightly used the everyday English endearment —Darling what’s it with you?—

  A new thought. —You talk to Sindiswa in Zulu. Already she’s able to say quite a lot. Demanding what she wants . . . I don’t understand her. She won’t understand me.—

  Jabu laughed. —I talk to her in English too, and you do.—

  —She’ll grow up talking to me in a language she and I share, and I won’t be able to speak to her in a language that’s also hers but we don’t share.—

  —Is that so bad. Many people have one parent who doesn’t know the language of the other, that’s passed on to the child.—

  —I’m not a foreigner.—

  To have the need to bring up again, now to her—he’s a white who has earned his identity, not non-black: African.

  —So when do we begin? It’s going to be fun. I’m strict you know. What about tonight. No, we’re due at the Mkizes’, her sister’s back with the Ghanaian she’s married, big excitement. He’s some kind of special surgeon, hoping he’s going to get a post at the medical school, wants to talk to you about the university.—

  —Oh there’s no hurry, I’ve remained dumb so long, whenever you can take me on as another one of your Holy Father’s school kids.—

  So one of her father’s maxims comes back from childhood. —No time like the present. Say with me Ngingumfana ohlankiphile eckasini lika thishela uJabu?—

  —Which means . . .—

  —How are you going to pay me for my after-school classes.—

  —Only if you stop sniggering at my pronunciation.— Hugging her, which led him to her mouth and the deep kiss that belonged in another time of day, or rather, night.

  There was nothing playful about the lessons, however. Over the weekend he wrote grammar exercises she set, and learnt vocabulary, her selected dictionary of spoken words she judged should be the most apt for, example, interchange with his students when he brought them home; it became also a rather enjoyable exchange of roles, lecturer turned pupil. Jabu never corrected him in the students’ presence, left it to them to slap their jean-armoured thighs in applause as they could coach him, throwing in some useful near-obscenities that she vetoed, sharing laughter. This did not affect his authority as their lecturer, a kind of authority other than that of her father, which had done so much in the past for her to be equal to the present. Surely it was in her Baba’s tradition, smuggling books to her when she was imprisoned without trial, an after-hours class of headmastership and spiritual duties as an Elder in the church, that she was furthering her husband’s emancipation by giving him the ability to express himself as an African, not only by a European tongue. Once her father had spelled out for her to read, by making sequence of the words underlined in the pages of textbooks he somehow managed to get
to her in detention, another maxim. ‘It is unfortunate that we use the language of the oppressor to speak for our freedom.’ She learnt afterwards those were the words of Gandhi.

  Steve was right about the ‘Alertwatch’ company whose fees the Suburb subscribed to every month; there would be among them impimpis, black traitors who worked with the apartheid army. There are not many skills of guerrilla warfare of much use in the aftermath known as peace. The only aptitude that might be useful is that for violence, and it has been taken up by the defeated army’s rank and file. Join the present version of the country’s army, but because of your past there’s no place for you there—be employed by the new industry, the security companies. You’ll have at least familiar guns in your hands with a different licence to use them, not to defend apartheid but to defend private possessions. At Christmas Jabu had the Alertwatch patrol on the list, postman, municipal street cleaners, to whom it was apparently the suburban custom to give a small cash gift; poor devils, what chance did they have of training for anything else, coming from the poorest of the poor who were her people; his people too, God’s people. It is not often she shows a remnant of what it must have been to be a pastor’s granddaughter, church elder’s daughter; he assumed that like him, being a ‘Christian’ was something of an ethnic label long come unstuck in the only dedication they knew, under that other rubric, justice. But in the chances of change, many labels, Blankes Alleen off benches, Whites Only off public toilets, people seemed to be looking for a hand-up to some authority beyond, no, outside the common condition won by revolution, although such other kinds of authority had proved useless in the past. The Dolphin boys were seen in well-pressed pants actually going to the neighbouring church (though Alan and lover still had been turned away from one elsewhere), what need was there of baptism other than splashing benediction in the pool? Some genuflection of thankfulness that the law had recognised their gender. Thank God. Comrades were dispersed among a sometimes unpredictable range of activities and professions. Some were qualified to return to the professions and enterprises they had abandoned for battle camps of bush and desert. There were lawyers and doctors the beginning of whose youthful careers was interrupted for those years, the demand beyond making your way. Most took up the career rather differently than what might have been if the Struggle hadn’t taken first place from the child’s ambition of what it wanted to be, or precepts social as well as intellectual expected. There were white doctors who chose to treat, along with black doctors the days-long queues in urban squatter camps instead of setting up private practice in city complexes of the latest architectural design. What is Roly doing? Where’s Terence these days? Somewhere in industry, perhaps disappeared into big business, one back in the fold, family supermarket chain, another had found his place in a vast mining consortium and—perhaps seen as useful—representing for the times its conscience, he was promoting policies of better living conditions for the black miners as poorly paid as poorly housed in compounds. Some black heroes of the Struggle with the spirit of high political intelligence, leadership, powerful personality, had been seated at once in Mandela’s government; some survived into his successor’s, others opted for the other power, at last attainable, in the financial institutions of the old days which still own natural resources of the country below ground and the means above to convert them into wealth. But this is all official report language stuff. He and Jabu know another that creates things as they are. The normal life. The one that never was. Among their friends are comrades who are writers and actors. Poetry was written on paper meant to wipe your backside, in the years in prison. From the one everybody in the world knows about, Robben Island, the manuscript of an entire book was smuggled out in the reckless ingenuity that’s devised only within circumstances of impossibility as a factor stimulating an unknown faculty in the brain. Men who had within themselves the third sense of entering the identity of other people, places and times relevant to their own—actors who had never been on a stage—performed Antigone, known to a reader from a smuggled book among them, in their hour in the prison exercise yard. Meanwhile, during those years in the segregated cities there were blacks and whites who wrote and performed plays which enacted the relationships of the apartheid country in all their racist contortions, boldly and usually getting away with this because there were no theatres in the small white towns, in the black ghettos, the squatter camps, where the general population could be corrupted. For the same reasoning the Censorship Board rarely bothered to give any credence to these plays by forbidding them and closing the performances before colour-mixed audiences in a theatre declared for whites only.

  These days Steve and Jabu are invited to rehearsals of the freed talent of writers, actors, singers from whom the opinions of friends are sought, criticism argued. Growing up in the ‘location’ beside the coal mines Jabulile had never seen a play until she was at the students’ Christmas effort at her teachers training college over the border. But her opinion was found worth listening to when one of the comrades’ plays reimagined a setting and social arrangements half-lost or half-ignored in the generation of labour herded down mines or in factories instead of themselves herding their cattle, and the generation that has lived by the edicts of Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Guevara instead of tribal custom. The Dolphin Marc put before her the draft of his play, with its version of the dimension of freedom gained. From her half-rural, half-industrial base, as a background to her transformation first as a revolutionary and then school teacher, she seemed able to believe with certainty that this custom now wouldn’t be followed exactly like that, this reaction to a girl refusing to be sold for a bride price to a man she didn’t want was likely to be different from the submission of the past; a pastor portrayed might not have been a sellout reporting as God’s will a secret ANC meeting of the time in his parish. People who had written out, so to speak, since 1994, inside knowledge of the lives devastated and endured, were publishing in mushroom ventures heroic stories from precolonial legends, appropriating these to their present as Europeans do those of ancient Greece. What the white regime called tribal chiefs now were Traditional Leaders sitting in parliament like any other political party. They too had brought ancient individual authority in languages and territorial fiefdoms to something of a common identity within the powers of government to direct people’s lives. Yet—in the bewilderment—paradox of freedom, who would have thought of it—the Traditional Leaders at least offered the support of observances of conduct that had directed life in some certainty; so—the ancestors are still with the people as they were through humiliation, the racist assaults, the wars; there through eternity. And to whom the people are still responsible? A few traditional Leaders had collaborated with apartheid, given status in reserves for blacks known as Bantustans—‘Bantu’ = people, as in racespeak reference to those areas.

  The ex-Bantustan leaders aren’t exactly impimpis from the past in a modern democracy. People are free to recall themselves as they wish, just as the couple Jabulile, Steve, are revolutionaries become citizens. The Constitution confirms it. The normal life, the one that never was.

  There’s a hand-delivered envelope, messenger, not post. ‘Steve from Jonathan’. —This’s come.— She hands it to him with a shoulder lift of curiosity. Inside, a printed card with the celebratory scrolls of some occasion. He reads; then reads aloud not so much to her as to himself. It’s an invitation, an invitation to the ‘barmitzvah’ of a son of his brother. The date, the address of a synagogue. —What is this?— He waves the card.

  The amazement surprises Jabu, she takes the question literally. —Isn’t it something the Jews do . . .— Jewish cadres might have referred to it when memories of childhood were exchanged to pass the time between tense preoccupations in the bush.

  —To make a boy a man. Like you do with ritual circumcision schools, only it doesn’t hurt.—

  Of course she knows his circumcised penis was done when he was a baby.

  —It’s a religious ceremony, isn’t it?—
r />   —What is this? Jonny, Alan and I were snipped at my mother’s whim, I suppose, that’s all Jonny can claim for the religion, just as our father introduced us to Father Christmas not Jesus on the cross. What’s got into him.—

  —Maybe his wife wants it.— Brenda, the one who embraced her so enthusiastically when she was introduced to the family.

  —Why should she, not Jewish, is she. Not so far as I know, I’ve been away from them so long.— He slides his mobile out of his pocket. —I’m going to ask him what’s it all about.—

  —No, Stevie no— She’s beguiling, her hand on his wrist, there’s a mock tussle, always good to grasp one another but he prevails.

  Jonathan has an evasive easy answer for his brother who surely knows him well even if different politics meant they were out of touch during the years when Steve disappeared from family life. —I think Ryan is happy with the idea.—

  But what, whose? Why shift it onto the child.

  —Well . . . we didn’t have much idea who we were, when we were kids, did we, Andrew and Pauline didn’t seem to think it mattered, then.—

  —The human race.—

  Oh yes, the Leftist in the family; knows the answer we got wrong. We businessmen golf players—except that the black president plays golf now.

  —Whatever. Did we know the difference between our mother and father. I don’t remember anyone telling us. Andrew Christian Pauline Jewish, and us . . .—

  —Did categories matter.—

  —Stevie, there’s so much that has, if you’re going to talk about categories. Everything you were was decided just like that. It isn’t enough to be black or white, finish and klaar, the way it was, in the bad old days—you belong somehow to something closer . . . more real, you can, it’s possible . . . right.—