No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  He allows the enthusiasm. —I have arrangements, soon as tickets will be available for us in our own country.—

  The women laugh and slap open palms of one another.

  Baba and her alone together, he had not for a moment taken attention from her in a hold that penetrated, appropriated from the statement of her pauses anything being withheld in what she was saying to him, for him. Here among the company where they belonged, his wife, her mother, the boys and the girls half-grown women among the family women, he did not pass a word or glance to her, it was as if she had taken her leave of him, already in her car, gone. Later there were the customary farewells, turnabout, as there had been the gifts of arrival, new-laid eggs from the ranging hens, mealies from the winter’s store, all in baskets where purpose and beauty met in the first art form she had, unconsciously, known, that of the extended family women who gathered the reeds and stripped sheaths of cobs to weave strength, each in a personal pattern through the agility of fingers. For some reason—parents never seem to think it necessary to give this honestly—this visit was to be shorter than usual. Gary Elias had been brought late in the second half of the school holidays, and this time his mother would come back to fetch him after a stay of only a few days. He happened to hear from one of the uncles who would be making the trip to Egoli where a son, once an outstandingly clever pupil nurtured in the headmaster’s school, had just been made a director in a food-chain enterprise—the uncle would be happy to have the chatter of the boy to accompany him. The proposed date coincided with the end of the school holidays. Gary Elias was eager to accept. If he took the lift with the uncle he’d gain four more days with the team. Wethu would stay on, too, and take the same ride with the man who was known to her by some generic in the complex of family relations.

  Baba has come to the car with the women, as is not his custom, although he keeps his space from them, he’s there. She and Sindiswa open the doors, linger, get in, lower the windows so they are still in contact.

  The football team has run up in claimed possession of Gary Elias. Which one calls out, not needing to name Jabu —You gonna bring him for the World Cup?—

  No matter from where.

  As she turns the ignition key it comes. The realisation that Baba’s ignoring her among the goodbye talk of others is his acceptance that if this is not the last time, before she is gone farther and further than any other time life has taken her; it may be.

  Australia. Leaving like the men, the sons who for generations have left to work down in the gold mines, and now are gone Home-Boys, she’ll be coming back maybe as they do for a funeral. The long flight for the World Cup; the boy Gary Elias to witness it with his team.

  Withdrawal now while they were among others is her Baba’s final permission for the future she and her chosen man have made without her father. It is Baba’s unspoken blessing on Down Under. Another journey. Beyond any he could or had ever planned for her, an unspeakable kind of freedom he couldn’t foresee.

  It’s not something to tell.

  Sindiswa is gossiping with her father about Gary Elias’s clever snatch at the chance to stay on with his football mates and get a lift later with some man who’s coming to the city.

  —So you don’t have to go.— He’s guiltily relieved she won’t have to fetch Gary Elias, a trip he ought to have offered to make if there hadn’t been a solution.

  —I won’t go back.—

  When they are alone, she says it again —I won’t go back.—

  So she has said something other, told something different from casual understanding of an alternative arrangement.

  —Wha’d’you mean . . . ?—

  —It’s only a few months to November.—

  He’s waiting.

  —We don’t have to say . . .— She cups a hand on his arm, a little pressure on the biceps. —Goodbyes would be so disturbing for them eih, and Baba doesn’t like emotional things. I always had to make the partings with mama, and then he’d put me on the bus or train whatever with that sort of salute he has—you know.—

  Yes, he sees it; commending the daughter to God, her father has this authority conferred by belief—she’s wrong, there, it’s surely the highest emotion there is, something genuine about it even while you don’t believe in its reality.

  —Baba’s got the privilege to buy advance tickets for the World Cup match that will open the stadium that’s going up, great coup for KwaZulu—tickets for the boys’ football team and it’s somehow understood we’ll be there with Gary Elias, make a visit next year.—

  He’s drawn a slow breath of time for comprehension.

  —I don’t think I have to go back. Before we leave.— She is smiling almost with anticipation that seems to have come, as a gift to her, from her father.

  Arm around his neck bending his head to her, breasts nudging, mouth on his. Embracing Australia with him. He knows as the kind of total sense of being which is happiness, that what he has not been quite sure of: he has not forced her against some instinct in her, she is an African as he after all can never be, to become an immigrant in someone else’s country.

  The municipal cleaners’ strike had lasted so long the rat guerrillas who exist holed up in every city had multiplied on the abundance, resource of rotting trash in the streets and when the strike ended and the feast was cleared away they began to appear scavenging in the suburbs. In the Suburb. Blessing screamed high and shrill at confrontation with one in her kitchen, Peter thought she was being attacked by a thief who’d somehow breached the electrified security system and he grabbed the Peace handgun as he would his AK-47 back in the Struggle.

  On the first day of August telecommunications workers began a strike of 40,000 union members. The workers at the zoo in the capital city Pretoria were on strike; local animal lovers called upon themselves to help feed the animals and clean cages. A metropolitan railway strike continues. The union says the offer they’ve rejected would have resulted in members losing pay because overtime would be cut. In some provinces no trains to get other workers to their work; where there are a few manned by scabs a commuter has died and four were injured, falling in the crush from packed trains.

  As if turning momentarily in the subconscious away from all this—the Suburb’s place in citizenship responsibility, comradely identification with workers existing on no-work-no-pay; and unexpected new middle-class frustration felt at disruption of telecommunications—Marc suddenly tells what’s come up. The sale of the house arrangement. He’s speaking as if from a lost note scribbled during an unwelcome interruption. —The guy’s chickened out. Our deal’s off, I’m sure he’s lying about a change in his life, the partner, some hint—he’s pissed off and he’s going to forget the idea of a move to the Suburb.—

  What can he say—giving her the news, such as it is in comparison with the news within which, still here, they are living. A house to vacate. Sell. The shacks of how many homeless thousands: no market value upfront. You don’t have to say it—her brisk silence, getting up, jutting the chair from her, the pause with which she stays herself as she strides to the door, turns to him with a lift of shoulders, is admission and defiance for them both. The TV screen is filled with footage that could have been that night’s or last night’s reportage, same thing, heaving arms thrust as weapons of bone and flesh against batons and guns.

  Later she is her pragmatic self: the house must go public, handled by an estate agent for possession after they are in Australia. No rent-paying clauses. There will be a board outside, now, For Sale. She’s right. Departure. It can’t be a Suburb comrades matter.

  While he shaves and she’s in the bath next morning he, also, is practical. —What about the money. You know we can’t transfer the lot.—

  She bloats a sponge with suds and draws it the length of her lovely thigh, bends the knee up out of the water and carries the gesture down the muscle of her calf. —The Centre could administer it with my father. I think they’d do that, for me . . . One of my comrades. For use when Gary
Elias comes. When there’s a visit . . . any of us.—

  Zuma on the poster.

  KwaZulu. The man standing apart, at the entrance to the house unlike any in the community of the Elder of the church where the Gumede clan have served and been honoured for generations, the headmaster whose faith in education, achieved under strict discipline the best results in the province against a national record of dropouts and failures. —He’d be willing?— —He’ll take it on.— Although he hasn’t been asked: she is the daughter.

  She is right, her Baba doesn’t oppose, no matter how much he must be in pain against it within the fundament of his being, his identity, ancestral and present—that she is through her identity with her generation’s experience of Struggle, and her educational opportunities bringing understanding of the existence of Struggle throughout the world—a free citizen of the world. She fought for liberation of her people. It must be granted as earned that she does not have to take on the present Struggle, in place of promises, promises, the better life for all.

  Experience in the world outside may make her think differently. White kept choice to itself, Black has choice now.

  They don’t make love much these days—or rather nights, too many things to complete, do. It’s not premature, what they decide must be taken has to be set aside in the mind, from what is left behind. The bulk of their lives, what they decide must be taken will have to go by sea and that means well in advance, the road transport to port in Durban, the ship in a time warp of one of Captain Cook’s voyages, crossing the Indian Ocean. What each of the four—Jabu, Steve, Sindi, Gary Elias—find can’t be left behind is an insight to what they don’t know about each other. Gary Elias doesn’t want to take his racing bicycle, pride of his last birthday, where somehow has he got the idea that there’ll be a better model waiting Over There? Sindiswa insists that the version of the ancient Greek statue of Antigone, high and heavy, carved by the art students at Aristotle and presented to her in honour of the performance, must be cargo, and Jabu for some reason that doesn’t match her lack of attachments to objects so easy to transport, such as elegant KwaZulu baskets, includes a hairdryer—must be a special type? He and she go through the shelves of their books (there’s the shelf where she came upon his cuttings, Australia) setting aside the essential while dumping others to be given to the university libraries. There was the sacrifice of some law volumes, apocryphal here, famous so-and-so against such-and-such, but unlikely to be of interest anywhere else, and education reports in the same category. Before throwing away: a last look at reports of a university where white students pissed in a stew and forced four black women and a black man, cleaners at the student hostel, to eat it. They’ve apologised since. What’s left behind is that no one so far has brought to the courts the case of the cleaners to receive justice as victims.

  There was nothing, nothing he wanted that it is possible to transport.

  ‘Our members are determined as hell. End apartheid wage gap, black workers are still earning lowest pay.’ Now the post offices stay-away, that euphemism for strike.

  Who cares, everybody has email, SMS, Facebook, who needs some face behind the post-office counter. Metro rail not running, clinics closed, patients not receiving their HIV and AIDS antiretrovirals, threat of darkness as the National Treasury refuses to give money to meet claims of electricity workers: people live with all that. The newspaper falls and slides rustling under the bed.

  They have not kissed goodnight. Inert beside him, dozing, there’s barely awareness of her there—out of nowhere the hand—her hand on his penis. The pyjama pants cover is a token, he’s there. She’s found him.

  She’s there amidst everything else that surrounds them. He does not wait in the erotic response but turns to her along with the other, to all that is desolately happening in that better life for all. He’s able to confirm in their embrace: confirmation we’re leaving, casting behind all we ‘cadre veterans’ are useless to change, street dirt only the shit symbol of it.

  Or there’s just the confirmation of persistence of desire. That equality in rich and poor; even in this country, which he’s just read is the most economically unequal in the world.

  Can’t live the cheat, travesty. What use an assistant professor and a lawyer where education is the sum of schools producing pupils to be accepted as university students without the level of comprehension for their course; the law dodges corruption charges of guilty comrades high in government. It’s a worn holier-than-thou to cite your children when you make decisions. But Sindiswa and Gary Elias growing up to all that all this. Children in whose very conception there was faith in a present that hasn’t come. No sign of the equality of their black-white fusion in the country, born of Struggle, which is the most unequal in the world.

  It’s been taken without mention that Wethu will simply go back home to KwaZulu. What sort of goodbye gift would she like, when the time comes; but shouldn’t the time be now, when all the other sorting out of what departs from what remains is being done. There’s also the circumstance that what’s been applied to Baba, the emotional one applies here: avoidance of a vision of Wethu insisting on being at the airport farewell. Sindi is particularly attached to her, she’s been a kind of extension of schoolgirl friendships, probably confided in with secrets as mother Jabu is not. Wethu will go back these few months earlier in a sense as one of her usual visits; only this time it will be homecoming.

  —Perhaps we shouldn’t be putting it—telling it quite like . . . I mean . . .— Baba’s daughter and a human rights lawyer is sensitive to what might seem to be dismissal.

  —D’you think she would’ve spent the rest of her life here if it hadn’t been—

  The expressive face goes through considering changes. Of course Wethu’s not a servant; family, in a way. An accessory life: is that a Better Life. What is said is different. —In the things she sees in the streets, the abandoned old buildings that some of the friends she’s picked up—through the garage men—they live in, the way she’s become streetwise, they’ve taught her don’t go into this park, keep away from the traders at that taxi station, don’t go out of the Suburb when you hear there’s a crowd of strikers on the freeway, shots can fly wild and hit you while you’re watching—how can she want to live here.—

  —She’s been, well, it looks as if she has.— The chicken coop cottage he built for her: her independence. Away from the collateral family under the jurisdiction of Baba. —Her emigration.—

  They give a shrug-smile at the category, he goes on —Who knows how this applies to other people.—

  There’s still so much to conclude. Professional colleagues, comrades, are moved to mark them with recognition of their work, their loyalty, their different modes of friendship, understanding, support—despite Down Under. The cop-out.

  They are even involved in obligations to the appointments of their successors in the niches they’ve functioned from. Steve at the university, his activism beyond teaching, to transform the institution in its needs. Jabu, her commitment to justice as legal defence for the country’s people too poor to pay for it; above any ambition to become a better life phenomenon, a highly paid black advocate (maybe on the bench some day?). He is taken in by the dean of the Science Faculty and called privately for his opinion on the successors considered for his place in the laboratories, lecture halls (the coffee room never mentioned although, for him, it was from there he achieved anything—which was doubtful—that had been argued for and conceived). At the Centre she was asked to add her informal talks to interviews with applicants as essential advice in the Centre’s choice for her replacement. Rather the way as a novice in law, she had been assigned the task of preparing in the languages she shared with them, nervous black witnesses for answers to be given under cross-examination. The way she had made herself useful in the case of the young girl, not Zuma’s victim, raped.

  It seems there are more occasions to be together, get together than usual. Lesego’s brother is down from Uganda where he’s in
some international conflict-resolving position, the brothers in general are spread all over, now, in various opportunities. There’s a big bash on Saturday, it’s a family reunion but you and Jabu must come along, open house and go on most of the night into Sunday, a getaway from the troubles in Uganda and ours, here. Marc comes back from rehearsals in Cape Town of the play he’s at last found—may have found—financial backing, only here for three days, up to the eyes in hassles with the money bags, but will Jabu and Steve, must see them . . . Peter and Blessing have a calendar when they come over. —There’s the long weekend, ay? Njabulo said something the other day, all the boys at school talk about the parks they’ve been to, elephants round the camp at night, lions eating a kudu, I don’t know what else—but we’ve never taken our kids. And you? Your Sindi and Gary Elias ever seen their Africa. They all know it on TV like the English and the Yankees, right?—

  He and Steve take, grinning privately: ‘our Africa’ shared in Umkhonto bush camps—but this, something other, their children ought to have now outside the animal prison of a zoo: a sense of the birthplace they share with animals. Used to be a luxury only white children had, the Kruger Park; while blacks were barred entry, except for warders and camp servants. Peter made the booking and Blessing would provide the food from her catering business. —What are we going to bring, my man?— —The booze of course. Steve, you load up the beer, Coke for the kids.— They occupied thatched rondavels with bathroom blocks and took their place in bush and riverbed, shared the vast enclosure of freedom with animals as the ancestors must have shared the whole of Africa—Sindi contributing unexpectedly what she had learned at her enlightened school. Africa is the origin of all humans in the world—despite that the Suburb comrades were moving in warders’ vehicles not on foot among the three-toed elephants, the hooves and claws of buck, leopard and lion. Time out. Nothing to do with either present or departure.