Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

There are strangers who arrest Steve, knew him as a little boy, take the opportunity to recall incidents he hasn’t retained; time overlaid. There is a garden to this place of worship and food and drink laid out on decorated tables under the trees. Jabu provides plates for him and herself and keeps up a running commentary to him this looks good, aren’t you going to try that, and in friendly asides to others, before the choice. Jonathan has emerged from his robe and headdress, he comes over to his brother it seems to present himself in uniform dark suit and tie. He is carrying two glasses to take up from a tray another to hand to Jabu. Instructs her: Mazeltov! She’s congratulating him again — she and Steve were caught up with the family on the way outdoors — and he leans to be kissed cheek by cheek. — So glad you came.—

Is it to confirm to the revolutionary brother that she is today converted. Or that he’s not himself conventional, isn’t this ritual just concluded, another kind of sign. In reverse? Or is it that he’s sexually attracted to her — they shared toys in brotherly compact. Anyway, she’s a better guest than Steve, she moves and talks easily among the crowd.

She is the only black woman, yes.

— Who’s the black beauty?—

The speaker is waiting with Brenda a turn in the ladies’ room. The heavy kosher wine releases polite social inhibitions.

— That’s Jonathan’s sister-in-law, his brother’s wife.—

— How did it happen?—

— Oh they were in the Movement. — Brenda knows the terminology, if her friend doesn’t. — In detention here, or over the border somewhere in camps. His family never knew where he was while he was supposed to be at university, between times he got his degree, mysterious guy. Yes, she’s lovely; sharp as well.—

— You knew him? The brother. Never mind the racist thing…it still must be strange, with a black woman…at least at the beginning, no?—

— Oh ask some of the respectable husbands you know!—

The occupants of the two toilets are taking their urinary meditation, whoever they are.

In the female privacy Brenda emerges from the persona the occasion makes of her, traditional wife of traditional Jonathan and traditional mother of the son inducted to manhood.

— I’ve always wondered. Something else. Not the same but. What’s it like, to have that…a black cock coming into you. Are they really black or like the inside of their mouths when they laugh, and the palms of their hands, sort of rose-colour, always wanted to know.—

The friend contrives to look as if this confided attraction has not been said, coinciding with an avalanche whoosh behind one of the doors, and the occupant comes out.

Alan was there unnoticed among the seated in the synagogue but not to be missed balancing heaped plate and glass in the style of a partygoer. They meet one another, these other brothers of the one become a real Jewish boy’s father, with an unspoken you here too. Alan laughs; it’s for himself, he’s no longer what’s queer in the family — in the dictionary not the sexual gender sense, it’s sibling Jonathan who’s for some reason deviated from the non-observant but accepted the identity of Christ inherited from their father, given up what may be protection against anti-Semitism that hasn’t disappeared with the smoke from Auschwitz. He tweaks one of Jabu’s coloured-thread-plaited locks. — My favourite woman.—

— That’s not saying much, considering. — Steve’s endurance of being there diverted to one of the sharp exchanges that began in boyhood fun against the solemnity of grown-ups.

— Where’s Tertius?—

— Jabu sweetie, I didn’t know, with what’s going on with Jonathan, whether it’d be kosher, as a couple…—

— Well you’re the one that’s read up all the religions—

— Except Marx, Che and Castro, my brother—

— They say the Torah has some good advice, you’d know if God’s quoted there, as the Gereformeerde Kerk says the Bible does declaring an abomination?—

Daughter of the other abominated, the sons of Ham, Jabu enjoys family jokes for the occasion.

Steve judges they can decently leave ‘Jonathan’s farce’ and go back home to reality.

They’re alone apart, she and he, each, in his brother’s family celebration. They have been together in the meaning of so many situations, in that each has chosen resistance, revolution, it isn’t one of the conventions that order existence in white suburb or black ghetto. It’s a place of encounter in an understanding that hasn’t existed before. As with falling in love.

What’s he mean by ‘farce’? Nothing unusual in reviving a custom. Your people are your people, Baba is my Baba, I still serve him the way of a daughter of our people although I moved on.

Back home to reality, Sindiswa under care of a widowed relative of Jabu’s father who has come to live with them; not exactly a nanny employed as in the old order of the whites (a quick denial) but at the request of father to daughter. Some solutions to what she knows are his too many responsibilities to church and extended family. Steve grew up of course in his, Pauline and Andrew’s home, where servants were taken for granted as part of the household, black, separately housed in the yard, with what was decided a decent wage considering they were also fed.

He could not have a servant, man, woman, doing what everyone should be doing for himself. In Glengrove he and Jabu washed their clothes and dishes, sucked away their own dirt into the vacuum cleaner. His guilt at the obliging presence of Wethu, specially attentive to him in the subservience owed to males in the Elder’s extended family — he had to take out of her hands his shoes she expected to polish — was something he saw Jabu didn’t share; he insisted Jabu’s distant cousin or whatever she was must be paid. But of course that makes her a servant; in the extended family at the coal-mine village women in her dependent position are sheltered and granted respect but not paid. Jabu hadn’t thought of money; to her, that he did — more than sense of the revolutionary equality, justice; it was a sign of sensitivity, one of the qualities of her man. Wethu occupied what was supposed to be the room for comrades in need of a bed when passing through the city from their dispersed lives — but she told Jabu by way of her tears she couldn’t explain even in the language they shared, my child, I want a place, you can fix the window in that shed.

And it was so; she was without their intention, left out when Jabu and Steve animatedly exchanged opinions of what they’d heard, read and seen on the news, and told of what each experienced with whom, achieved or been frustrated by in the working day; Wethu’s vocabulary in English didn’t include the references and slang understood between them; she was in communication only with the child, or when Jabu remembered to say something that might be of interest to her, in their language.

His isiZulu, taught — passed on — to him by Jabu so that he could speak to his daughter in her other heritage, and in linguistic aspect of intellect as one a little less inferior in his efforts to communicate sociably with his students invited home, who were voluble in up-to-date hip-hop English — this also wasn’t isiZulu usage familiar to this woman, Wethu. So he was experiencing in himself: class difference could take over from colour in what’s going to be made of freedom.

Steve had the shed of the empty chicken run pulled down and a room with a bathroom built in its space by a friend of Peter Mkize, a construction worker at a white consortium who had taken the chance of setting himself up independently as a builder. The house owner approached through the estate agent had no objection to the improvement of the amenities of his property. Wethu’s all-purpose tears again; Steve had gently to return the pressure of his hand to that of hers wringing his in gratitude. May God bless you. May God bless you.