No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  Himself. Within this reality he’s not achieving, won’t be achieving anything . . . get out. Get out! What will Sindiswa and Gary Elias’s life be. Get out.

  And how about Elias Siphiwe Gumede’s Zulu people, her people—same village, same people who attack each other as tribalist traditionalist against African nationalist ANC . . . while one side isn’t a threat to the livelihood of the other in KwaZulu. Well, that’s political rivalry, that’s about power. Refugees don’t have any. The mobile is felt rather than heard against his thigh. Shift in the bed and draw in the stomach muscles to reach this intruder out of pants pocket.

  Jonathan. Now it’s Jonathan. So far from in mind. His brother who always prefaces what he’s calling about by a litany of family exchanges, how you all are, how we are, what this one is doing, where that one is right now. And why feel impatient, this is the way communication out of absence of current contact is shown; as Jonathan calls me Stevie, we’re kids wrestling together on the grass.

  Well, mother is selling the old home and going to move to somewhere around Cape Town, it’s not decided yet, Jonathan is looking into the apartment question, she’s had enough of the security situation, a break-in two houses away, I don’t suppose she told you, you know our independent Pauline.

  But the purpose of the call is that the boy whose ritual ceremony of entry to manhood was attended by Jabu and Stevie, is now ready for postgraduate studies in engineering. Jonathan and Brenda want him to go overseas; what country, which university would the academic in the family recommend they choose, approach for admission. Brenda depends on good advice from Stevie, the one in the family whose opinion she trusts. And such an admirer of everything Jabu achieves, she’s really attached to her—she feels Jabu will understand her caution.

  Engineering: it’s a science but it is not that of the faculty to which the man from whom they seek advice—and probably imagined influence through academic connections—belongs.

  The boy did his undergraduate degree in Cape Town, doesn’t Stevie have a colleague there, who might be useful?

  Again, not in engineering. But he’ll certainly speak to one of the professors in engineering at his own university and hope to come back with information. In the meantime able to say with genuine impulse, for himself —It’s good to hear he wants to be a highly qualified engineer—there’s a shortage in our country—we need him.—

  His brother concludes the statement —And with that kind of qualification you can make your way in another country.— Jonathan perhaps is speaking of a decision.

  Months gone by. Now Jabu has been to another school rehearsal with Sindi, they are in the flush of enthusiasm flood-lighting the room as if both are proud schoolmates. Jabu practitioner of the objective letter of the law is that other kind of comrade, that of her children, which he isn’t, doesn’t manage to be, even with the one of his own gender, Gary Elias. —Sindi’s so good. I’d never have had any idea she’d understand Antigone so well, she does, she does, you have to hear her—and the school of course, the literature teacher and the athletics coach he’s also in the arts dance group, they direct together.—

  The girl is laughter-gasping, can’t contain the praise, the pleasure of her mother.

  —What’d you and Gary get up to? He hasn’t been sitting at the TV has he?—

  —Could be . . . he’s at the Mkizes.—

  —He should have been with us to see his sister—and there’s the boy playing Creon, must have known him.—

  But Gary Elias would feel unwelcome, self-outcast, self-reject, appearing in the school he’s insulted by leaving.

  At this period in the emerging version of herself Sindiswa is wearing dreadlocks like the ones remembered she, Jabu, had appeared in, first, instead of her Afro bush, and that he had regretted. They flung defiance about Antigone’s face (not as beautiful as her mother, diluted by Reed strain) as she offers—

  ‘Never, had I been a mother of children, or if a husband had been mouldering in death, would I have taken this task upon me in the city’s despite. What law, ye ask, is my warrant for that word? The husband lost, another might have been found, and child from another, to replace the first-born, but father and mother hidden with Hades, no brother’s life could ever bloom for me again . . .’

  Squeezes eyelids a moment at a hitch in the sequence.

  ‘. . . And what law of heaven have I transgressed? Why should I look to the gods any more . . . when I have suffered my doom I shall come to know my sin; but if the sin is with my judges, I could wish them no fuller measure of evil than they, on their part, mete wrongfully to me . . .’

  If her father didn’t go to a Greek school she doesn’t think he might know. —Antigone’s brother Polynices is killed and left to rot by the cruel king Creon when he’s involved in a kind of revolution, Antigone’s buried him, that’s forbidden, so she’ll have to die . . .— Oh the plot’s much more complicated than that but her mother and father were in the fight against apartheid so they’ll . . .

  Feels Jabu’s watching him, not the performance; as if she has learnt the role for herself. Reminding of those among them who never knew if the comrades were buried and had hoped some confessions to the Truth Commission might have meant they could find and claim what is left of each other. Exactly. —Go and fetch your brother now, Sindi, it’s time he came home—and tell Blessing and Peter, we’d like to see them.— She wants the Mkizes to have a chance to be warmed by the glow of Antigone inside Sindi, the girl they know with their own young in shared childhood of the Suburb . . . and Marc, Marc must see a rehearsal, he’ll be so amazed . . . the adaptation attempt, he’ll be able to give some tips to the cast.

  What’s the word—simultaneity. While the school was dramatising justice for the children to understand as the condition for them to pursue living their future in this country, Jonathan was telling of the success of the plan of another, to leave, quit.

  —Jonathan called, the son Ryan, he’s going to emigrate. He’s accepted at the university my Cape Town man suggested . . . Lucky boy.—

  —Going to study, you mean. That’s not emigration.—

  —But you know. It was the idea? He’ll be qualified to join a firm, the UK, the USA.—

  The footfalls and voices of son and daughter arguing their way in, Gary Elias already calling —Wha’d’ you want me for?— and to his mother Ilantshiekhaya kwaNjabula beye mnandi impala! Lunch was lovely, Njabulo’s place, his uncle’s there from home, he brings greeting and stuff for you from Baba, Sindi’s been showing off reciting something, why’d you send her, Umthumeleni!—

  What are you doing about it.

  Again.

  This time the country’s share of the world’s refugees sleeping in doorways and fouling neighbourhoods; it’s climate change like the carbon monoxide that is everywhere, it’s the atmosphere, in greater or lesser degree. Just keep breathing. What can universities do but study, research the phenomenon in the Department of Social Science, Politics, History, Humanitarian Studies—the law of human rights eternal above its distortions in the codes of differing countries, societies, circumstances. A seminar in the appropriate department, which a good number of lecturers from other faculties attend, addressed by the Nigerian Vice Chancellor Principal with the firm intellectual decorum broken only here and there by a slip, emotional anger in the African phrasing of his voice.

  And a lunchtime meeting of students and some faculty members in a half-filled hall.

  Again. Persuaded by students from the bridging classes now become voluntary coaching also for those in their second year, he’s one of the academics sitting at a table, each tapping a microphone like the clearing of a throat before giving a view on the subject. Xenophobia. That’s the identification, one word, on the Students Council posters hung on the railings outside. Is he the only one among the Professors Jean McDonald of economics, Lesego, African Studies, and the two elected final-year undergraduates, who will question it as glib.

  In the audience the students sprawl atten
tively, there’s a girl in a chador gracefully upright in the front row and a male at the far end eating from a takeaway, it’s democratically correct, the people must not go hungry. He can’t point this out (tempting)—there’d be laughter making a spectacle of their fellow student—the simple presence of a basic need being followed inappropriately is an example of that need as what’s being evaded under the poster rubric.

  —‘Xenophobia’—it’s our distancing from the fact that our people right here in our own country, at home (his hand unconsciously knotting itself, a fist) an existence as refugees from our economy, unemployed, unhoused, surviving by ingenuities of begging, waving cars into parking space for the small change (all of us who have cars drop this handout), standing at traffic lights with packets of fruit to sell through driver’s windows, if you’re female standing with a baby or one that can propel itself playing in the gutter. It’s easy—to call them, our own people xenophobic when they resort to violence to defend the only space, the only means of survival against competitors for this almost nothing. It’s not hatred of foreigners. The name for the violence is xenophobia?—

  There’s some sort of applause, the confusion of palms smacking together, a couple of feet whose impact with the floor is muffled because the obese soles of canvas sports shoes don’t have the force of leather, contesting voices are thrown like paper darts. Jean McDonald is informally chairperson. She takes full advantage of her microphone. —You are pointing out the fact that we are not succeeding in meeting the rights of disadvantaged citizens of our own country—if we can’t do that, haven’t the resources or the will, government policy, how do we deal with the refugees, who are a threat to even the level of that state—of deprivation.—

  —Capitalism! Keeps out people producing wealth for whites just like in apartheid—

  —The West backs black dictators whose oppression leads to the wars—people have to get out or die—

  —And the black fat cats? Here? They’re not living it high style while the Home Boys dig for the platinum, gold, bring dividends, seats on boards, capitalist BEE—

  —Crap! What are we talking about? So—these people are Africans? Crap. They come from other countries, languages, cultures, they are foreigners.—

  —Not foreign? Exceptions because they’re black?—

  A white girl whose rising breasts jiggle emphasis. —African Union. There’s a European Union, and plenty of prejudice in England when immigrants come in and take jobs, the trade unions—

  —Not if they’ll do the stuff the British don’t want to, plumbers are all from Poland—

  Professor McDonald lets the students take over. Freedom of speech even if this means there’ll be no coherent resolution to be issued for the university press. But Professor Lesego Moloi jerks back his chair and rises, mike a staff in his hand. He summons with it a student, black, who has a poster open across his knees. The student turns his head looking for friends to tell him what is expected of him. You’re not to be ordered about, university isn’t a school, but this professor is a Brother, this is a different kind of authority. He gets up and does what appears is wanted, he’s taking the poster to the edge of the proscenium and Lesego is there to have it held out to him. Professor Lesego Moloi’s regained the table but stands in front of his colleague academics with his back to the restless hall, he’s writing in hard strokes on the poster laid out on the table. He turns. The poster is presented, with him. A thick marker pen has crossed out XENOPHOBIA the poster reads in giant strides POVERTY.

  It’s not an answer: what are you going to do about it. The meagre spoils people are killing for. But the blunt confrontation changed the uneasy quarrelsome mood of the students to real attention, wanting to hear seriously what those among them who should have some qualification, by their particular courses of study—Social Science, Economics, Politics and History—had to say about the condition many came from in their own family background, and for which they were acquiring theories of ‘schools of thought’ from the professors who now are exchanging with them convictions about the state of the country as if on an equal level of democratic responsibility for it.

  This lunch hour get-together not only re-baptised the refugees as an identity, but broke the focus wide to that of the Outer Space on Earth, which separated the poor from what constitutes the rich—a range, factory worker from the new or old-time multi-millionaire in the promised delivery of our slogan a better life for all. Somehow there’s the slow move, wake-up. That meeting. And the ecosphere seminar. The group of students from environmental studies, they’re taking field trips to see for themselves what they’re learning about, the draining, deconstruction of wet lands for mining explorations. —He’s telling her all this, and without demeaning it, grins.— Yesterday on the landing between stairs there was something like the ice-cream cart that’s pushed by a man in the street, sort of ice-box on wheels. Trashing the campus on principle, rioting on the issue of student grants, OK, that’s one thing, but bowling at gutters or chucking into shrubs what’s left of your pizza—the conservation group students and staff, have put this—thing—where you’re ashamed not to drop your junk on the way to class.—

  Jabu’s been offered a position by one of the three-name partnerships of commercial legal practice for whom the Justice Centre had generously allowed her to undertake work from time to time. Her keen intelligence of legal process in present circumstances has been noticed; or the firm wanted to strengthen its image with the appointment of a black female attorney, gender equity in addition to its non-racial one. He might have thought that in private resentment—anyone not simply recognise her ability and devotion to the law, a South African who had lived on the wrong side of it in a detention cell. But he doesn’t say this. The appointment would be an advance in her career towards taking Silk. One day. He wants that for her; as her Baba had wanted her to be educated. —Of course, I’ll still be able to do work at the Centre in my own time.— She’s questioning herself?

  Missed period for the second month. The doctor looks up from examination: pregnant. Stupid not to have gone to the doctor at once. It seemed so unlikely. Or some atavistic hangover. Baba’s women running a gaze as wisdom over a flat stomach: husbands expect sons for their perpetuation. Her man is different. She doesn’t have to tell him. Couldn’t explain how this happened to them, her usual precautions, no impulsive take-a-chance lovemaking.

  Do they want a third child? There are other kinds of fulfilment for us. For him, at this stage in the chancey development of the university; of course he’s too optimistic about her taking Silk, it’s a love wish . . . but there’ll be much wider experience, the variety in common law cases as well as constitutional ones, so much to know, need to learn.

  Another? Sindi blossoms every day, top of her class, at just the right kind of school to prepare for now. Gary Elias. Perhaps trouble to be expected in trying to understand him; anyway he seems to have been right in choosing a school for himself, he’s far from withdrawn these days; if the closeness is more with the Mkizes than at home.

  The doctor is a comrade, from the time they were in detention together, women’s prison where the so-called matron accepted books from a prisoner’s father because he was an Elder in a Methodist Church. In the brief chance to talk in the exercise yard this comrade had seen the future only as the passion to study medicine. Abortion is no longer illegal, a dangerous backyard matter, except for the Catholic Church and some other religious or tribal edicts. It is skilfully done by the comrade’s freedom achieved as a gynaecologist.

  If they can’t make love that night, men don’t keep count of the days between bleeding, why should they, he’ll think she has her period, their desire will fade away in sleep. Although the refrigerator is making a weird clinking racket, it’s coming from the kitchen . . . Wethu has complained, you must buy a new one, more big one, too much inside.

  Simplify tasks that have to go along with the purposefulness of living—working for justice to be done in the courts, working for the ri
ght of knowledge to be given in the laboratories of the science faculty—by buying each Saturday enough food for the week.

  A normal life. (At last?) What is that. In what time and place?

  Doesn’t matter. A life where the personal comes first.

  But it—would be—is—clandestine, like the Glengrove Place one. Not ‘the same’; ‘like’: which resembles in some way. (Glengrove isolation was by decree.) There’s Outer Space on Earth between our people, and the others; what spacecraft can be launched to make it humanly part of the country. While she offers her little bit of justice, he offers his scrap for education.

  A resort from it all. In such time as they have to themselves he reads these days more than he ever has, and differently than she does, the law means so much delving into precedents for each type of case to learn why the tactics of a particular prosecution or defence have been decided on.

  At his Reed family traditional school he was taught Latin, not Greek. But Sindi/Antigone’s fair pick-up of the local demotic of the language, her growing interest in bringing home to meals the fascination of philosophy and politics which she knows as Greek myth, moves in him an impulse. To look to another age for some enlightenment—help—with a present one. Take from the university libraries the works he wasn’t privileged to, in the privileges of his white school. And that urgent faith of his youth decreeing him in a factory mixing chemical elements for explosives instead of paint, kept him from. As with most of the supposedly well-educated of his white generation the names of ancient Greek sages were tags to describe characteristics, derived from those whose works and thought the users didn’t know. Call so-and-so epicurean, doesn’t have a capital initial, that’s someone who indulges in fine wine, fine food. A luxury-loving fundi. As some ministers in the present government take to Cuban cigars, not a badge to show brotherhood with Castro but as a right to what the capitalists kept to themselves.