Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

This man of her father’s generation, distanced, distinctive by public achievement, recognised in a marginal note of judgement what was for her the fulfilment of something not to talk about even to comrade, confidant, lover. To come out with a claim as a boast. The purpose of being alert — still as a comrade. The possibility of it. Opportunity.

In her new employment at the Justice Centre Steve lived with her transformation, the growing confidence in the voice, the certainty of gesture, the pleasure of relaxation evident in intervals between concentration on the current work at night preparing précis from notes taken on an advocate’s sessions with the attorneys and, soon, appointed to what she was gifted for: speaking to witnesses to assess what could be expected of them in the dock — coaching was the disallowed description. Whatever was mandated in this aspect of her professional responsibilities, she took it as her responsibility to give the nervous, frightened or angry people understanding of the fears even of this kind of interrogation; hadn’t she known the other, in a prison cell.

He found Jabu happy; fulfilment, isn’t that what ‘happiness’ is. That he wasn’t responsible for this part of it — component — is of no account; he shared it. It was unexpected when she brought up something that did involve him. They had made love. Whatever the daily apartness of the worlds of work, in identity, the illusion of exalting into one leaves an echo in which anything can be broached. — We should have another child.—

Heard.

Hadn’t they decided for good reasons on which they also were at one, their purpose wasn’t to perpetuate the human race, not even in the advancement the mixture of their distinctive bloods did, there were billions of others just as well equipped to breed, billions of women for whom this honourable task was the best they were equipped for. No condescension, discrimination in this fact. Be fruitful. The father’s church said so, probably Jonathan’s Torah said so, the eyes of the women at her home village said so.

— Sindiswa needs…to be an only child isn’t a good thing.—

— Sindiswa gets enough companionship. She’s very sociable, school buddies, kids of our neighbours here, in and out.—

— But they have the same mother and father.—

— If you’re going to take Silk one day. An advocate with the kind of twenty-four-hour work that means, you know how Bizos and Chaskelson and Moseneke slave but they’ve had wives to stop the squabbles dry the tears and wipe the bottoms—

Touch of her lip to the crook of his neck, the skin the softest most vulnerable of a man’s body, before the sandpaper of shaved beard begins — unless male lovers find the anus the most, how does a woman judge. — You’ve always done your share with Sindiswa.—

— OK. But all the mother stuff. You’ll neglect the work, your mind will be elsewhere, and you’ll be guilty, either way, before the children or the accused.—

His hand, shield on her breast as if some avid infant is already sucking her hard-won chosen life out of her. — I don’t want you unhappy.—

— I won’t be. We’re not talking about a brood, five, six. There’s Wethu — look how she and Sindiswa get on.—

A member of the extended family is not a nanny.

A woman is mama to all babies.

Jabu’s reasons for convincing Steve they should have another child.

Her reason is not the stated one that Sindiswa needs a brother or sister. Neither is it that when back Home the women look at the flat waist where they expect to see a belly; her mother puts forth what in the extended family is taken for granted: your husband wants sons.

Jabu’s the one who wants a son. She has produced a reproduction of herself, the female who has to prove her own identities beside the sexual one. If it hadn’t been for her father she might never have done it; would never become an advocate (some day). A son doesn’t have predetermined by what’s between his legs, his function in any extended family, at Home or in that of the world. He’s born free. At least in this sense. She wants a son, everything she isn’t. It’s the Other, to complete the fulfilment of favourable court judgment. Looking to the ambitions Steve has for her — If I’m an advocate I can’t be a woman? — That’s all she’ll say of her reason.

He can only understand it differently. Reversed, as happens in pathways of the maze in which humans meet one another. — It’s that a woman can be an advocate now! — At least it’s understood mutually he doesn’t have to specify ‘black’.

Nothing is agreed to, as was the decision not to have children after Sindi. When he made love he had within the ecstatic ineffable there was perhaps something he was not, could not be aware of. She was the one who swallowed or didn’t — how would he know — a pill in place of God’s will some believed made the decision whether or not there was to be life.

Jabu had somewhere read or on Internet consulted learnt that conception of males was more likely in winter than summer (something to do with the body temperature, the semen stored in the testes?) and it must have been when winter came that she had not taken the pill. The son was conceived in the Southern Hemisphere’s African winter, and born nine months and three weeks later, in confirmation of the theory she’d accepted on the principle some of the Home women called book-learning.

The delight and power over the future in naming a child. Among comrades there were Fidels and Nelsons and Olivers taking their first steps. But these comrades didn’t want to choose for their infant who his heroes must be; he would be growing up in a time when there might be others. Then there’s the happy fact that race, colour are a synthesis in their children; African name, European name? The name for the son came from somewhere out of the short list in mind, by looking at him: he was Gary. (Some film-star name?) Jabu was trying it out on herself and Steve: Gary Reed, the G and R, the initials went well together. It was Steve who named the son also for her father: Elias.

How? Why Steve? She laughed, all tears, scooping up the baby. Elias . Steve knows her better than she knows herself. The Mkizes, Jake and Isa, the Dolphin boys come to celebrate their son. She carries him in, Wethu in Sunday church dress beside her, and presents — Gary Elias Reed.—

The Dolphins have brought along guitar and drums, they pluck and pound out Kwaito but also know older African music, and Wethu, although she hasn’t taken any of the wine that’s going down throats to the baby’s future, born in the Suburb won over from the past, she is roused as if summoned to ease forward in a kind of swaying genuflection and raise her voice clear of the chatter and laughter. She sings. The scale is low, high, ululating, up to the roof and out through the open terrace, claiming the Suburb. Nothing like it ever came from the choir of the Gereformeerde Kerk, in its day.

This is no alma mater, the university where he had somehow graduated with his industrial chemistry degree while acquiring the alchemy to sabotage the regime in which higher education was an exclusive facility. The new student ‘body’ was beginning to be many-limbed. Among the white students whose parents were paying tuition and hostel fees there were rising numbers of young blacks with confidence in their right to knowledge that would lift them out of the level of skills, money, dignity their parents had been dumped at.

The place of higher learning is open. The undenominational bible (want of a better title for secular faith), the Constitution, decrees this. But like most decrees it doesn’t, can’t ensure what’s called ‘capacity’ to benefit by them. Young men — so far, fewer women with that nerve half-grown Jabu had had abundantly — are registered on scholarships or sponsorships of some kind, there are even white employers who hand out a bonsella chance these times, to a servant’s bright son. The ‘bridging classes’ Senior Lecturer from the Science Faculty gives voluntary hours to: a band-aid. He knows it doesn’t deal with the chasm of poor schooling the students claw up from.