No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  And doesn’t make sense for Gary Elias to leave the school, now. Next year. He won’t be here, in the Suburb.

  Whatever she said then was drowned by a plane trampling the sky, grumbling away.

  Australia.

  The public relations department of the university—where every detail of his post has been confirmed—has considerately sent a photograph and description of the residence assigned to him and his family. It is larger by several rooms than their Suburb house where they’re handing round the photograph and obviously has no history of the kind this house has, taken over from the community of the Gereformeerde Kerk transformed into a Dolphin pool; it is the colonial version of open-plan Californian, attractive, which suits sunny countries like South Africa and Australia. There happened to be a racing bicycle against the façade wall when the picture was taken. —Is that my bike— Gary in joking anticipation.

  —Is there a pool?— Sindiswa speculated. Some of her boy- and girlfriends at the school she will be leaving have swimming pools at home taken for granted; she has been the exception.

  There are conditions her father could not meet in the adventure, another country, which her friends see privileging her. —I shouldn’t think so—but there’s an Olympic-size one along with a gym, apparently the team swimmers compete nationally.— Quote from a brochure. Sindi takes the photograph of the house. —I’ll borrow it to show Aretha.— A friend whose family have a house on a Greek island.

  Gary flips it from her. —Give here, I’m going to let the Mkizes see.— But on the way he changes direction and goes to the Dolphins. The pool is a watercolour painted by the setting sun. The men are in the house, with Marc and Claire, he remains part of the Dolphin family although she is, in a sense, a foreigner, they are drinking wine and watching election meetings, exclaiming over speeches on TV as Gary would heckle at a televised football match. —This’s the house my father’s got for us, over there (he’s picked up the geographical colloquialism) isn’t it fantastic. I’m not taking my old bike. I’ll be getting a new racer, like this. Cool.— The notion momentarily dismissed the co-education school about which he never speaks. But the Dolphins and the woman pass the photograph between them with abstracted glance taken from the screen or hand it on without notice. Marc gives him a welcoming punch on the shoulder while his attention stays with that of the passionate crowd hailing a bear-hug of Msholozi Zuma and his pop-star acolyte Malema, who, going beyond confidence of his own presidency, he predicts as a future candidate some day. —Where’re the folks— Gary Elias is just a sprig of the Reed entourage. —At home? Be a good guy and call them to come over.— The boy draws past his buttock the mobile in his pocket—although he hasn’t yet been granted one of his own, has filched his sister’s. There’s some sort of questioning from the other end—what’re you doing at the pool, you said you were going to the Mkizes’—but in a short while Steve and Jabu arrive amid welcoming laughter at the invitation coming from their son. Who then leaves to proceed to where he was supposed to be, the Mkizes’; in the interim he, too, has been watching the crowd out of habit as at any spectacle on TV, without taking in the exhortation of the speeches, he’s too young to be recruited as a Malema disciple—or just not black enough, only half-half and middle-class nourished, Julius Malema at the age of nine was a poor black child demonstrating protest against apartheid and rejoicing Mandela’s release from prison.

  The Dolphins and comrades continue to follow the electioneering but their counter-crossfire to the blast prevails at the touch of a remote control that drops the politicians into night.

  Wherever Suburb comrades and comrades of the Struggle are together there is now an underlying strain felt almost in the juxtaposition of the familiar bodies, the known characteristics of crossed legs, cracking of knuckles—they may have become strangers. Since the split, breakaway in the party, each unbelievably—unacceptably—does not know how the other right there at the Dolphin pool, in the Mkizes’ house, on the Reed terrace, under the Jake and Isa garden umbrellas—is going to vote. It has become a fact of life in common, better left unsaid. Unasked.

  This can’t mean there is no exchange of impressions, arguments over the tendencies, Left, Right, uneasy Centre—politics no longer simply white against black.

  Peter Mkize, Umkhonto cadre, is a scornful descendant of tribal society, the—nevertheless legitimate?—base of the black Traditionalist party. —Are they Left, Right, Centre? What? If you sit yourself in a European model parliament, that’s what we’ve taken over from the colonialists, that’s what we’ve got, my Bras—you have to position yourself—see what I mean—in the way that House knows politics, like the way followers of the church see Catholic, Methodist, Seventh Day Adventist, so on, everybody knows the different kinds of Christians all expecting to be saved.—

  —Sharp sharp! But no no no.— Lesego, all colloquial in defiance of being an academic, has come to the Mkize house with Steve, this time. —There’s nationalism, the African nation, wasn’t that how it was, early days of the ANC, Mandela, until the SACP brought the light of the Left, scared some people it might be kind of Outside: colonial. There’s nationalism in power in many countries on our continent, maybe under a different fancy African name. For them . . . The rest of the world can go to hell, not Brothers in the Underdog we still share.—

  Jake looks to Steve for his concurrence. —We’re as a nation committed to switching away from the old North–South, South–North axis, yes we’re getting good trade and other connections, India, Brazil—

  —China.— It’s Mkize again. —I’ll bet everyone here’s wearing jeans made in China. Including me. Our textile people can’t compete with the cheap price of slave-labour stuff. Has Zuma or Lekota said anything, what they will do about that. China coming. Already own twenty per cent in our biggest bank.—

  At election time you question the intentions of those whose political eloquence is hooked for your vote. He can’t ask—but what if the Party whose human aims you share, even risked lives for, is snarling against itself, now in what is only the third election in freedom—which side, now, in the break has what you and she believe in?

  Where you ‘belonged’.

  Other political parties are of no account to members of the African National Congress although they’re disgusted—embarrassed?—by the behaviour of their own Youth League’s crude insults to a white woman, leader of a liberal party generally regarded as white with a growing tint from voters in its territorial majority of descendants of the indigenous San and Khoi aborigines, mixed with blacks and colonialist variety, the real people native to South Africa. Babyface Malema said the politician was a white whore who selected only white males for her provincial cabinet because she sleeps with them all. A political wily caper: at the same time he also claims respect for women’s rights. Anything goes in platform audacity.

  The two halves of what was the unity of the comrades’ Party.

  Zuma—of course—its Presidential candidate—his sacredly danced promises of integrity to the Party’s great vision, the mantra ‘Better Life For All’, is obsessively seen and heard.

  Mosiuoa Terror Lekota shares his COPE platform with that Reverend Dandala who turns out to talk some sober sense on what could be done for the better life but hasn’t the flair of Terror to suggest COPE could achieve it. Terror has been joined by another deserter of the Party, Tokyo Sexwale, a stronger ally than the Reverend. But maybe a risk as a rival to head COPE?

  Insecurity added to the great breach between Terror and Zuma, broken apart in this other Struggle—it’s Jake who’s said it, and repeats —Who could ever have thought. We’d come to this.—

  What are we, Steven and Jabulile doing here, giving opinions like our comrades, about what the politicians actually are dealing with both when they declare their policies of government are those the people need and want, and when they attack (not with Malema’s obscenities but just within the limits of free speech) the hopelessness of other parties to meet these.

&nbs
p; Comrades; about to vote. Each sees in the familiar aspect of the other—is it to be loyalty to the Party, Mandela’s, that brought freedom. That means: Zuma. For the purpose of power to the Party.

  —Tales of corruption among his peers are being unearthed, tattered and dirty; who revealed state security information in exchange for how much.—

  Zuma is the Party now. If its self-severed half is the alternative—and for the comrades there’s no third—has Terror Lekota taken the ethos of the Party in his pocket, rescued it. To keep it alive: a shift of the loyal vote. That means: Lekota.

  The decision the comrades are having to make exists as a state somehow in common rather than as it is, irrelevant to the two among them who have taken the option of leaving behind the obligation—no, giving up the birthright, to vote for what kind of leaders, what government commitment to justice there’ll be in the fairy-tale slogan.

  Jake can’t keep his mouth shut even to spare himself. —Who’re you going to vote for?—

  Some sighs to reject the intrusion, others laugh at exposures that could threaten comradeship, and no one remarks that he and she laugh with them.

  The bookshop and university library have few books by Australian writers compared with, say, literature of India, contemporaries from Satyajit Ray to Salman Rushdie, novels, poetry, within that country and its relation to the world. But the presence of India is historical. The population’s share of South Africans of Indian origin: indentured labourers in the nineteenth century, through the years of Gandhi’s presence and influence on the early liberation movement; the enterprise of a shopkeeper class despite segregation: the emergence of South African Indians beside Mandela in the Struggle and continuing prominently in freedom politics. Australia; that country to which people emigrate doesn’t have a pervading presence among local images. Online he can order Patrick White (whose early books he’d read long before there was any idea he’d ever live in the country they invoked), David Malouf, Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally. Jake says he’d better not read Germaine Greer, and he’s therefore ordered a work with a kick in the butt title Whitefella Jump Up and the subtitle claim, ‘The Shortest Way to Nationhood’. It turns out to be a skilled tirade with some home truths about the attitudes of white Australians to the remnant of Australian aboriginal people. He comes to a page where she says ‘it was only when I was half a world away that I could suddenly see that what was operating in Australia was apartheid, the separation and alienation South Africa tried desperately and savagely to impose on their black majority . . . I want to see an end to the problemisation of aborigines. Blackfellas are not and never were a problem. They were the solution if only whitefellas had been able to see it.’

  She once owned a rainforest property in Australia and for a time divided her life between professorship at a university in England and her home forest.

  The half-and-half cop-out.

  They’ve never talked about it, but there’s no question there’ll be a change of communication. Nothing foreign as there so often is in a decision such as theirs. English. Their language, except for her for whom it was once a second language, and there’s family usage of what was her first, passed on as some sort of accomplishment inheritance to Sindiswa and Gary Elias. There is indirect allusion, for him, when the talk around the coffee machine is of frustration of teaching in English while the student’s home language is one of the African nine. —I find I’m resorting to pidgin concocted by putting together with a first-year student a common concept, just differently expressed, he may have in his own tongue.—

  The Leftist refusing to face facts. —Couldn’t just be the student’s lack of intelligence you’re finding.—

  —That’s not what Steve’s saying, it’s the chaotic failure of the schools—

  —The ‘learner’ has been ‘learned’ way below the level of literacy where scientific terms and processes have to be acquired as part of whatever world language is to be used—

  —Because you have to have one—

  —Is English as our entry to the world a survival of colonialism? Many of us blacks see it like that—

  —And French, Portuguese the same, the old masters—

  —Should a country that’s got rid of them demand world entry for an indigenous language—let them understand us.—

  —So which among the nine that were here before the Europeans came—

  Christina van Niekerk is such a quiet woman, usually it’s not noticed if she’s there (why isn’t she in an Afrikaans university)—stands sounding her Afrikaans rounded vowels. —Some among those whites evolved a language that mixed something of their Dutch with the words of Malay slaves they brought from countries they’d invaded in Malaysia, but without inclusion of languages of the indigenous San and Khoi, except for words that describe what the Dutch didn’t know, animals, customs, landscape of the natives. So we claim the taal, Afrikaans is an African not a European language.—

  —And our English? Such a taal of cockney, Oxbridge posh, tribal Scots, Liverpudlian, mispronounced names of Huguenot origin, turns of phrase ‘you should be so lucky’—translated from Yiddish of grandfather immigrant Jews—we can’t claim it to be an African language? Just a relic of colonisation?—

  Hominids have lived in South Africa for nearly two million years. Australia inhabited less than 60,000 years ago. He’s been reading that like the San and the Khoi, the indigenous Down Under had languages of communication between themselves and the reality of their environment before the English came to colonise, first with convicts exported. But there’s no question—Australians recognise as their language and lingua franca, English. Their created taal is known as Kriol: it’s not a mix of settlers’ tongues from Europe, but the indigenous people’s language with some English, the need to make themselves understood, by the masters.

  —Whites don’t speak indigenous languages, even Kriol.— Professor Rouse invited to the coffee room from Linguistic Studies (Lesego trawls people from various faculties in eagerness to bring exchange between what he calls another apartheid). —Maybe not in Australia, but come on, you can’t say that of us—many whites, particularly males brought up on farms, they played with the farm workers’ boys, they’ve grown up isiZulu or isiXhosa or Sepedi speaking along with their parental English or Afrikaans.—

  There’s another way to have your English language boy speaking an African language; this time a mother tongue since the boy’s mother is Baba’s daughter. But it isn’t appropriate to bring that up—Lesego and others who know this is their colleague’s last year among them—would be thinking, much use isiZulu will be to the boy where there are no Zulus.

  She’s the one to bring up what they have taken for granted. The co-educational school they’ve decided on for Sindi (of course) and Gary Elias, his strong reservations dealt with by the promise he will be taken to look it over while in November there’s still time to make a change.

  —Is the school for anyone, we’ve never asked, really. The black children.—

  His reading doesn’t give an answer to a question no need of asking. The emigration people haven’t for one moment in all the to-and-fro of acceptance as desirable citizens shown any reservations (For Christ’s sake! As father Reed would say of the preposterous presented) about a black wife, she’s been there before them, the lawyer but in all her assertion of formal African dress, regal adorned head, from that first day at the seminar—what could the children be but black and white, an identity, not a ‘mixture’.

  He’ll ask, although there cannot be any question on what Jabu really is raising, which is about those Australians known just as indigenes rather than black in any degree or variation. The young woman at the emigration agency is a South African employee who makes an assumption on necessity to reassure a white, like herself —Schools are open to all races, of course . . . it’ll depend where the schools are, if it’s not a school near where most blacks live, there’ll probably be only a few . . . you know, the ones whose parents . . . you know, can afford private schoo
ls—

  He relates this to her like a feeble racist joke.

  Julius Malema is in a bid to be taken seriously these last weeks before the election, his child prodigy leadership of the Youth celebrating Zuma in triumph they’ll be voting to bring about for him. Malema’s reinventing himself again, new avatar as peace envoy. He’s getting a good press now (although it was the bad capitalist–colonialist press that ridiculed, demonised—and thereby first, made him) since he’s gagged his cry ‘We’ll kill for Zuma’. His arrogation of leaders’ right to make promises there’ll be a new, functional country run by an ANC united (forget COPE): the Party has the Youth vigorously empowered with testosterone, alongside or ahead of it. A count of potency to match Zuma’s own, sexual and political.

  You have to be young to ignore or be unaware of what that future may look like. A schoolfriend of Sindiswa has asked, —You’ll be coming back?— Sindi answers in a variation of emigrants’ assumption of reassurance. —Oh in the holidays—not this Christmas we’ll only just have moved there—but next year, oh sure, maybe—they have the same winter and summer as here, I think the same school holidays.—

  She hasn’t told Gary of this question. But as the family eats Sunday evening takeaways he asks —Are we going back home, I mean, to see everyone, sometimes.— His father gives a gentle lesson in realities children must be trusted to understand —It’s very expensive, the flight for all of us— —You can send me. I can stay with BabaMkhulu.—

  —Are elections the same everywhere, other countries?— For Peter Mkize the choice of a government is a right he, Jabu, and everyone else tanned with a black DNA have experienced only twice before. The first, the euphoric freedom one, Mandela from Robben Island, prisoner to President. The second his successor Thabo Mbeki also a Struggle man despite being an intellectual who forgot that a man of the people doesn’t quote Yeats to comrade voters who are half-literate, have had poor schooling even in their own languages—and then he’s President betrayed by his brain in refusing scientific evidence that AIDS is a disease caused by a virus.