No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  Where would anyone go, first time out of the African continent—far from Mozambique, Botswana where he had been deployed (never got as far as Ghana, let alone Moscow), Swaziland where they met and made love for that first time. Now you had a valid passport.

  London it was. Of course. England, from where the missionaries had come who founded the school where her father gained along with religious devotion some knowledge of the world with which he had determined she, his daughter, should be armed. Missionaries, who Jabu learnt in her first kind of clandestinity talk with detention cell comrades under lights that stared the continuation of the day’s interrogations all night—had come with the Bible in one hand and the gun accompanying them in another, to take the people’s country from them. Drew it on maps under a geographical name: South Africa. The continent the shape of a great bunch of grapes dangling towards the South Pole, and the weight of territory at the bottom the country of the isiZulu, Sepedi, isiXhosa, TshiVenda, Sesotho, XiTsonga. The same England where one of these same Englishmen started a campaign that banished the slave trade which had made many of the English rich both as flesh merchants and as owners of sugar fields in other people’s countries, where slaves did the work remote from the small island which was England. These contradictions don’t seem so unlikely to an African—South African—in a country no longer anyone else’s claim, Dutch, English, French for a few years in one region—because the present of freedom has its contradictions. These were in the lives of the people who came to the Justice Centre for redress after employment dismissal, eviction from their homes, traditional or religious customary law against Constitutional law. These were before her every day as an attorney assisting one or other of the advocates who represented the right of citizens to be heard in the country’s court.

  London not exotic, as arrival would be in China, say, even France, Germany. Descendants of those who lived as subjects of the overlord always know much about him, his habits. Both he and she had been ‘brought up’ with strong tea brewing in its pot; in Steve’s case, also Andrew’s bacon and egg breakfasts. London that her father had been taught was the heart of the mother country, the empire (‘wider still, and wider, shall thy bounds be set’ sung in school choir) of which his coal-mine village was part; London that was the ‘home’ elders in his father Reed’s family referred to when going on a visit, although several generations hadn’t been born or lived there. The famous parks legendary for soap-box speakers in tirades against this or that seemed to have fewer, and the shaven Hare Krishna, familiar from their place among black street hawkers on the pavements in Johannesburg, apparently had been succeeded by punks whose designer heads, ear- and nose-rings were reminiscent of ancient tribal distortion/decoration in her ancestry: a sign of one world, unbroken past and present, in contradiction (again) of the conflicts that were tearing life-fabric as a motorbike tore the street at Glengrove Place. But the lovers or would-be lovers—even in a permissive democracy you generally can fondle only so far in public—must be as they’ve always been. Here, always on the wet grass—Steve’s tolerant remark about the climate and stoicism of the British, that brought from Jabu the South African local exclamation that can express empathy rather than judgemental disapproval —Shame!— She ignored the summer rain and chill, wearing her high-heeled sandals. Steve had given her love-presents but never chosen and paid for her clothes; suddenly, here—wanted to buy her ‘things’. What? That wasn’t the kind of male/female contract between them, theirs, comrades. He bought her a ski jacket, the warmest garment there is, the salesman assured him.

  In a different place you become different people. Not that it isn’t pleasurable.

  They stayed with comrades from home, emigrants who shared an old house in a working-class suburb with a West Indian couple and were looking for something affordable in Kensington (fat hope!) or somewhere else not too upmarket for them. Both couples were doctors, and three worked in the same hospital while the fourth was studying for a further degree in paediatrics at a specialist institution. The London comrades had little leisure, he and she were free as they were glad to be, about, alone. Within the separate circles of their careers, the lawyers, clients, court officials foremost in her consciousness, as was his among students and academics; the demands of children, practical distractions of a household, liens with comrades in the Suburb, they were often preoccupied, whether together alone, or together in company of others. Except for that blessed place, bed.

  Here London was a twenty-four-hour exchange of self: theirs. They didn’t watch the changing of the guard but did follow others of foreign tourist itinerary, while selective of what was sometimes a discovery, now, of interests each did not know the other had. He wanted to wander through the famous hothouses in the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, she wanted to catch the last day of an exhibition of Mexican artefacts she’d seen advertised on the posters. They went to the British Museum because they felt they ought; and then spent three hours totally absorbed in all there was to learn, also of how a culture makes itself out of others—the glorious Parthenon frieze that a British ambassador took from Athens and which was displayed under his name as the ‘Elgin Marbles’. The National Gallery high on Steve’s list; in the Reed home there had been a book of reproductions from the Gallery he took to his room, becoming aware of the mystery of art maybe an answer to adolescent emotional confusion, as later he was to turn to science, and finally political revolution as the rationale for him to understand human existence. Even the private school for whites, to which he had been sent for the privilege-above-privilege beyond state schools for whites, had not taken pupils, as part of education, to art museums; any more than Jabu could have been. And in clandestinity days she was not admitted to the Municipal Art Gallery in Johannesburg; he wouldn’t go where she couldn’t. What they knew was the work of the black and white artists shown in small galleries that tightroped the fine line between what would pass as surreal licence (not much to do with anything, far as censors knew, eh) and defiance of apartheid law and religious taboo. No black-and-white lovers sur l’herbe. No Jesus on the cross other than a blond man whose pierced body is pale. Dark-skinned Saviour: blasphemous. One such happened to be, even greater travesty, painted by a white man, traitor—it was seized from the gallery wall and banned.

  The centuries of painters and sculptors which had created the visioning of the world was work neither he nor she had seen other than as reproduction. Quietly not remarked to one another, in the National Gallery it was to each another pair of eyes given. For her, da Vinci. She walked back again to The Virgin of The Rocks. Steve stood beside: her experience. She turned at last, to him, as if it were he who had given it to her, it came from his past, which was not only the colonial heritage.

  Returning to the entrance foyer of these places is coming to the souvenir shops, bookshops, people struggling into coats for the return—to the city. She bought a postcard of The Virgin of The Rocks. Directed to a post office in Trafalgar Square she stamped and mailed, sent it to her father. The Elder in his Protestant church.

  He said —Do you think he’d really like the Virgin, she’s so Catholic.—

  —Aren’t you dying for tea? Or coffee. I am.— She was gone, back into the street. Looking this way and that, as if expecting to be hailed. Spied a coffee bar where they sat behind a heat-blurred window and agreed and disagreed, transported, about what had confronted them.

  Another day they were at an exhibition of African Art. It was meeting in another place, space in life, someone you know intimately. They had the special animation of pride ethos shared, although here was her ethos, and it was his by adoption—no, earned with formulae and chemicals for explosives while in the paint factory! The Greek gods and warriors in some museums are all aeons dead but the African sculptures that combined without contradiction the abstract of reality, the totality—bone structure of human faces, feet, limbs, the perspectives of features profile, frontal, appearing anywhere in single, the one image which Picasso took for himself from the Afr
ican vision, they are still being created at home, by people of Africa whose vision it was and is.

  Macbeth probably had been chosen of Shakespeare at her Swaziland school because it was thought young Africans would more easily understand this play, it would relate to the tribal chieftains of their own history. When in the London rain he declared ‘Let it come down!’ he confessed to her amusement he’d played Banquo in his school’s production: they must get tickets for the performance at the Globe listed in Time Out. She didn’t know about the continued existence of Shakespeare’s Globe; but that he had been familiar with as living heritage in the English culture from which the Reeds came far back and passed down indiscriminately along with the imperialistic ones the comrades set the Spear against—and there occurs to him, too, from The Tempest—he quotes Caliban for her: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on it is I know how to curse’—his island’s invaders from Europe.

  In the Globe they stood in the audience as in Shakespeare’s time, in its open auditorium. The endless conversation of English downpour drowned the beautiful delivery of the cast and drenched her; bewilderment at this primitive worship of the Bard’s shrine —What’s the idea of having people stand out in the rain?—

  Their comrade hosts offered as their treat a Soho night club: a black singer from home (she’s made it in London, a wow) sang with the instrument of her whole body along with the voice, music by Todd Matshikiza, the composer and jazzman from Johannesburg who had died in exile, some other country in Africa. Too wide awake with the beat they lingered together before giving up the evening. In the shared living room the West Indians and their friends had left empty glasses, the shed coats of bananas, and a mat of newspaper sheets, open bottle of wine, as if welcoming, Steve was stretched out on the floor with his head against the base of the sofa between Jabu’s feet as she sat. He was playing with the spindle heels of those sandals of hers, scuffed by London streets, as a light late-night context to what he was saying to their comrades —When are you coming back?—

  There was a pause. Perhaps the English rain had stopped, outside. A silence when something that shouldn’t have been said has been said. A subject the speaker knows is taboo. The woman, Sheila, began —But why?— and the man snatched from her —Why do you think of that, what would the reason—

  To go back.

  —Home.— Jabu addressed nobody in particular, as one stating the obvious. The two doctors had been avid for details of the mounting number of AIDS infections and deaths in the country they had left. —There’s a shortage of doctors.—

  —And you two are good ones.— Added, perhaps it was the wine in him that found plain speaking from Steve. —You had your training at our medical schools.— It could be a reproach.

  —I believe you’ve got doctors from Pakistan and even Cuba. It’s a choice, where you do your work as a doctor. Your obligation to the patient, the profession . . . it’s the same.—

  His woman Sheila came to his rescue perhaps to prevent giving away before comrades in this hour of indiscretion released by beat of rhythms and drink, more personal and questionable reasons. Isn’t there a right to ambition and professional prestige, after years that these had no claim against dedication to the Struggle. What do you owe; after.

  He spoke for himself. —I’m getting skills for the care of babies and children that don’t exist at home, no such facilities.—

  When they stirred for bed and the usual token goodnight embrace, he hung back to be last beside Steve, and shaking his head to dismiss his woman’s loyal justification on his behalf along with his own —I envy you. And Jabu.— The voice the murmur allowed oneself in the dark; he switched off the lights.

  They hadn’t missed the children. Didn’t have to confess or tax one another with this unnaturalness. Those two weeks in London, mother lair of the imperialism they along with their comrades at home saw lingering while the USA was the successor imperialist, were freedom they never had tasted. Free of the discipline of the Struggle, free of the discipline of the Aftermath, the equally absolute necessity to resist, oppose the underside prejudice and injustice persisting, whether with the witnesses she must coach when the Justice Centre is to testify for their defence or whether he must be regarded in the academic establishment as a Leftist troublemaker self-righteously supporting students in their ungrateful demands of the higher education system granted them by a Constitution. Time; to be alive for each other, without other commitment. Is the term for a first ever like that—holiday.

  The children. Sindiswa had quickly become a directing personality not the guest of hospitality, she didn’t want to hear anything about London—the place the presents came from, yes—unable to tell fast enough in her splendid shrill tumble of words everything said and done in the adventure of Isa and Jake’s home. Isa said Sindi was an entertainment she didn’t want to part with.

  Gary hung back. He had the air of someone nowhere, self-misplaced. If such, an adult state, can be attributed to a child. With that guilt upon them, Steve and Jabu were back in the Suburb and with the exploited coming for redress at the Centre and the students coming from their university, circumstances centuries-long in measure against a two-week desertion.

  The rent has been raised; he remarked with a mock sigh to Jake —Your comrades and gays’ Suburb’s going upmarket.—

  —Yes my brother, the bourgeoisie created by the landlord capitalist . . . Well well whatever.— He and Isa had bought their house.

  Was it after Steve one month paid the rent again among other obligations, online, that he and Jabu first thought of buying the house. It had made claims of being their home—Gary Elias learnt to walk there, Wethu’s quarters evolved out of a chicken shed, grease marks on the wall behind the divan-doubling-as-a-sofa where comrades had leaned their heads, garden progressed under Jabu’s hands from initial planting of the Dolphins’ welcoming hibiscus plant—ownership wasn’t legally justified. Jabu looked up the lease: they could be given three months’ notice to evacuate, relocate was the term she used for the clause, if the owner decided to sell the house. Wasn’t that rather unlikely. But if the landlord has a relative or a chum, now that there was a shortage of housing and the enclave was indeed going upmarket, it might be sold over their heads. They were able to raise a bond without much difficulty at the bank; both members of a couple in middle-class level of employment, professional. If in his case, the lower financial echelon of the academic; she in the legal one, non-profit making, but could become an attorney in commercial practice any time.

  —So we’ve bought ourselves a house while others including comrades . . . millions are still under tin and cardboard.— Who takes census in squatter camps.

  The statement is for both of them. It’s also the accusation. They are sitting in the dark on that terrace where the neighbour’s tree leans and hides before them a wall defining a limit, this side, of what they’ve just exclusively acquired.

  The tsk tsk tsk of cicadas is in the silence. Where is the difference to be felt between this occupancy of the house as owned property, or living in it, paying for the privilege to some other property owner. Principles are so impractical in the compromise reached of the ideal envisioned when it didn’t exist.

  —It isn’t a big smart place with I don’t know how many rooms.— She sounds indulgent of him, as if she were not involved. He thinks too much; didn’t used to be like that. In the Struggle you acted, gave yourself orders in response to what came up had to be done, this day, this area of operation.

  —Just enough for two kids, the mother and the father. And just one collateral, Wethu. Own that space.— He waves: I know.

  —So you’re sorry we bought the house.—

  He stiffens head back nostrils flared. Doesn’t speak.

  —Sweetheart— The childish call that was picked up from whites’ vocabulary of affection when first she was at the college in Swaziland. —We’ve lived all over. Why shouldn’t we have a small home now, we’re not taking it away from somebody else.—

>   —Well so far as that’s concerned you’re right, it’s a bit late, how do we know whose kraal this once was, here where the Tswana were before Mzilikazi came down on them, and then the Boers, and the English.— That’s her own history. —You’ve never seen the remains of those ancient gold—or was it copper—workings, not far from here?—we must show the kids.—

  —But how far can we go back. How far are we supposed to . . .—