No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  —Wage settlement agreed today, strike continues tomorrow, tomorrow, all the tomorrows . . .—

  —Tomorrow, tomorrow, Zuma’s connection with the arms deal’s gone away, e-eh—never brought to his day in court.—

  —Three thousand ounces . . . The mining industry’s going to cut production, labour, avoid paying nearly fifty times more to its compensation fund for miners who’ve contracted silicosis TB over years. Some of them never saw a cent: went home to die. The owners got away with slow murder during apartheid. And after. Now, it’s part of our transformation: owners expect some compensation could close their record on exploitation if they paid up. Even if you can’t give men their lungs back.—

  Jake’s drumming fingers are against the chest of all —ARMS. Hear me! Our free country at peace, we sell arms to countries with human rights records like Libya, Iran, Zimbabwe. Deals ‘allegedly’ approved by our National Arms Control. Right, Jabu? You’ve got it all in the Centre’s files for sure.—

  (Cuttings come upon, dusting.) —The global village is too involved in arms trafficking to make laws against it.— Probably no one hears Jabu; Jake is the voice from the mountain, he’s thrusting a new bottle of wine round at each glass, potion all must imbibe from him in unspoken farewell toast: Australia. —Where are we. For once when he’s not in a tantrum Malema blames the old race of government ministers: whites. An accusation. But it’s a race whose characteristics have been adopted smartly by apt blacks in their ministry seats.—

  —At least women’re recognised even though they’re white—Gill Marcus Reserve Bank Governor, Barbara Hogan Public Enterprises—and she’s a Struggle veteran.—

  —Are these powers given to display the regime’s above revenge, in reverse for traditional white condescension that African—black—wasn’t capable of directing such portfolios? Or is it to woo the white voter for next time, 2014?—

  —Marc, no prizes—but who is it who defends the ‘minority appointees’ white, Indian, too-pale-to-be-black? The SACP Communists say while they’re opposed to ugly ‘chauvinistic’ attitudes which persist in some places, a country’s narrow African chauvinism simply reproduces what does he call it, its counterpart.— Jake is lifting this phenomenon with his wine glass. —But our Zuma he opposes Lindiswe Sisulu, head of our ANC’s Social Transformation Unit, over her proposal to debate this kind of—symbol is it?—of race transformation. We pride ourselves on being a multiracial organisation, she says, and Zuma comes with ‘the debate will take the country backwards’.—

  Ragged chorus —Don’t let’s talk about race— —It’ll go away— Isa fondly removes from Jabu the burden of the glass of wine she’s not drinking.

  Jabu and Steve are an example of those for whom it has all gone away. Away.

  —Where’s Albert?— Dolphin Eric notices—no, Albert isn’t here, these days he’s present at any gatherings on the Reed family terrace but perhaps he knows he’d still be a stranger on the terraces of others although soon to be part of the Dolphin household; how he’ll fit in with a way of life not only his refugee status but a gender one he’s going to find unfamiliar . . . cleaning a pool was sharing a job not the intimacies of everyday.

  —His wife was to come and be with him today.— Jabu’s locks shaking from the pinnacle of her fine head. —There’s no response from the cell phone, he doesn’t know what’s happening with this new violence. Trouble. As far as Steve and I can find out, it’s not in that place yet. But we had to stop him from going back there to see—if he hasn’t gone away after we left—

  —Who knows how many Zims are in South Africa. Three million the government said—three years ago? What’s that new count, the other day?— Peter expects Jabu to be the most accurate with the figure.

  Her way of running finger and thumb down an earlobe to the earring. —Nine-point-eight-four million. Twenty per cent of our population. Unlikely? Other officials’ and business organisations’ count is meant to be reassuringly lower.—

  —You know what one sane man among us says and nobody wants to listen.— Jake is standing as if before not just the Suburb: the city, the country. —‘It’s time to accept that migrants have been the lifeblood of this city since it was founded’. That’s the black mayor of Johannesburg.—Lifeblood of the country. The tribes who came down from the north of Africa to conquer the San and the Khoi Khoi, the Dutch and the English, Scots Irish landing from ships.— He’s propounding. Will he get to the Jews who came from Latvian shtetl, made African, eish, at last, a descendant of the colonialist Christian father and the Jewish great-grandmother while another descendant brother, Jonathan, turns from the man on the cross back to the scroll in the synagogue.

  Blessing as one who provides, no matter what, the comfort of good cooking has her confident interruption of Jake —We’ve got the World Cup next year, already such a thrill . . . the stadiums going up, people—

  —Buying the logo T-shirts made by slave labour in China, dirt cheap compared with those made by our garment workers who’re underpaid—on strike . . . People need bread and circuses, this binge is the big circus that’s going to take bread off the mind of our population that’s supposed to exist on two dollars a day—why anyway does the world use that currency as the standard for survival everywhere. Tell me? And for how many millions that’s not pay it’s handout to the unemployed, the destitute, and here’s where what’s surely the lowest form of our shit-art of corruption—it’s not only the fat cats finagling the profits of tenders, it’s the small fry who pay our old-age pensions, grants to feed children—they have their level, faking grants for themselves, Social Security just closes one eye . . . Do you hear me? Their loot from the poor has been more than a hundred million between last year and just so far this one!— Stricture in Jake’s face. Fury. —UBUNTU. One of the African words everyone, all of us, any colour, we know—we know it means something like we are all each other— shouting —Say it! Say it! Say it for what it is. Turned out to be! What we’ve produced! What we’re producing! Corruption’s our culture. The Spirit of The Nation. U BU U N TU UBUNTU U U

  They sit alone together, in this company of comrades.

  —UBUNTU UBUN-TU UBUNTU-U U U—

  Suddenly—facing this comrade Steve:

  Jake’s gut, stomach, lungs, sucked back to the spine under his Mandela shirt, spews, —You lucky bastard—you’re out of it—

  The moment holding a life.

  —I’m not going.—

  Nadine Gordimer thanks those whose own works mean much to her—

  Karel Nel, whose painting Zero (2002) is used on the cover of this book, is a South African artist of world renown. Examples of his work hang in the collections of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. A collector of African, Asian and Oceanic art, he advises museums in London, Paris and New York. He visualises art in terms of the continuing expansion of consciousness, his own work now in the exploratory vision where art meets science. He participates as artist-in-residence in an international astronomy project which is mapping two degrees square of the universe

  and

  The poet, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, ‘Sounds of a Cowhide Drum’, ‘Fireflames’, for his isiZulu translations

  and

  George Bizos, invaluable friend

  A Note on the Author

  NADINE GORDIMER’s many novels include The Conservationist, joint winner of the Booker Prize, Get A Life, Burger’s Daughter, July’s People, My Son’s Story and The Pickup. Her collections of short stories include The Soft Voice of the Serpent, Something Out There, Jump, Loot and, most recently, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. She has also collected and edited Telling Tales, a story anthology published in fourteen languages whose royalties go to HIV/AIDS organisations. In 2010 her non-fiction writings were collected in Telling Times and a substantial selection of her stories was published in Life Times. Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She lives in South Africa.

  By the S
ame Author

  novels

  The Lying Days / A World of Strangers / Occasion for Loving

  The Late Bourgeois World / A Guest of Honour

  The Conservationist / Burger’s Daughter / July’s People

  A Sport of Nature / My Son’s Story / None to Accompany Me

  The House Gun / The Pickup / Get a Life

  story collections

  The Soft Voice of the Serpent / Six Feet of the Country

  Friday’s Footprint / Not for Publication

  Livingstone’s Companions

  A Soldier’s Embrace / Something Out There

  Jump / Loot / Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

  Life Times: Stories 1952–2007

  essays

  The Black Interpreters / On the Mines (with David Goldblatt)

  Lifetimes under Apartheid (with David Goldblatt)

  The Essential Gesture – Writing, Politics and Places (edited by Stephen Clingman)

  Writing and Being

  Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

  Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954–2008

  editor, contributor

  Telling Tales

  First published in Great Britain 2012

  This electronic edition published in March 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Nadine Gordimer 2012

  The right of Nadine Gordimer to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved

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  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  Extract from Whitefella Jump Up by Germaine Greer

  reproduced by permission of Profile Books

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781408831762

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