Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Why does he give up.

If you’re used to rejection you just go on for what you need, working at it. How could we have got to vote in ’94 if we hadn’t followed the banned Freedom Charter. How’d I have got to school ahead of my brother and then away from ‘Bantu Education’ to Swaziland, if my Baba had accepted that at Home females come second, for a black daughter education comes last. Hopeless. Why doesn’t he just carry on. If that first lot is left hands-down there will be others in the university and even outside who’ll act differently. You only decide it’s hopeless if you’re used to having everything. If you’ve been white.

Ashamed to be thinking that. Of him.

Life intervenes. Coincides with the group putting an approach to the minister on the back burner. The time for death of a parent; parents are always older and closer to this than a son realises, the main relationship was in childhood, boyhood. The Struggle brought other fundamental bonds in its place; if it’s something for regret. Wasn’t there a time once for the good son to have joined the father’s cricket club. He’s going to be cremated, as stated by him in his will. The son’s moment of presentiment…Jonathan’s not going to turn up with a rabbi? How ignorant of part of your inheritance can you be! Jews are forbidden cremation. Don’t worry.

Pauline somehow persuaded their father to have their sons snipped. But seems to have recognised. Andrew’s non-observant Christianity. Andrew’s will also specifies — no religious service. Several of his friends and business associates are invited or appoint themselves to speak of him before his coffin in the hall of the crematorium, its seating suggesting a place of worship of some kind. Strange for a son to hear his father summed up in eulogy, oratory. Jonathan (no rabbi) as the eldest son speaks for the family.

It’s over, people are tentatively about to stir, as Jabu does beside him, but she rises to sing. Unselfconscious, she rises to sing for him, Steve’s father. She is in her full African dress as the understanding of the import of the final occasion in life. As the nanny-relative understood it first, at the presentation of a newborn son. No one moves, arrested.

Some potent substance is being generated in his body by the voice. He knows now that his father has left him, has always been within, with him, and is gone. At the last note, there’s a susurration of admiration, movement urged by emotion, Jonathan’s Brenda is propelled to shackle Jabu’s robe in embrace, weeping proudly. She takes Jabu’s hand through people making for the doors, as if Jabu is her own production. Brenda’s changed the admiration, appreciation of some special tribute, into embarrassment, for some, at their own emotion; if it transcended something, it’s true that one of the characteristics of being black is that peasant or lawyer, they certainly can sing.

The years are identified by event not date. The year of the third election in freedom was the year Sindiswa was of an age to have her education considered seriously. He had taken for granted, Pauline and Andrew’s son, that when the time came they must have chosen, for him, a school from where they believed he would be prepared at a university for some career. For the Headmaster of the boys’ school and Elder of the Methodist Church in the ‘location’ outside the coal-mine town, seriousness about his daughter’s education was a strategy against a social abnormality and — eventually, contriving to have her continue the learning process over the border — a political defiance?

With what anticipation did they sift through the options open to choose a school for Sindiswa after the one she’s graduated to from day care. On their principles, she should go to a state school. Those that had been white schools, at last open to all children, were well equipped but deteriorated by lack of funding for maintenance, and teaching standards lowered by overcrowded classrooms.

They could afford to give her something better.

Privilege? Come on; admit it!

He’s the one who challenges himself and her; she reacts to this as absurd, a convention craven to dogma even if it’s their own. Her Baba didn’t betray the black freedom movement in sending his daughter to a training college over a border, the result of which she has qualified to work for the advance of justice!

He hears this as specious, something never to be expected from her. That was entirely different, another time.

But now the child. All right. Not to be argued over; the child must have the right to come first, beyond orthodoxy of comrade principles.

A different time.

There is only one time, all time, for principles you live by.

The Senior Counsel who had found a moment to put in a word for her employment at the Justice Centre was a descendant of immigration from a natal country once occupied by others: the Nazi army. He had escaped to a distant mirage Africa as a child with his father. They were poor and without a word of any language but Greek, but they were white. Acceptable. He grew up eking from whatever opportunities he could grasp an education which had culminated in his apocryphal appearances as defence of the accused in apartheid trials of liberation leaders, at risk of landing up in prison himself, and in the aftermath he is equally preoccupied with the process of justice in unforeseen occurrences of its transgressions in a free country. But he had never forgotten that as a South African — African who had earned that one-word identity — he also was Greek. When he became well enough known, which means recognised in the outside world for his standing in the annals of the legal profession, and was able to raise money among the diaspora Greeks who had either feared or admired him, he brought them into the founding of an open school where Greek would be a compulsory subject along with the usual curriculum. From something rather in the category of the sports and cultural clubs of Italians, Scots, Germans, and the eternal diaspora of Jews, the school had responded to the country’s freedom by expanding with the energetic promotion of admission of black children, any mix of colour on the population palette, the only stipulation that they learn Greek among their other subjects. The privilege of a classical education thrown in.

A fee-paying school. It’s not an innovation to deal with illiteracy, but there are a number of bursaries endowed; any child with proven ability could come from a makeshift rural school without toilets or electricity among the shacks.

She should see it for herself; naturally her mentor says it is the right, the only place for a child. But no, a father’s responsibility as much as hers, he must come although this child is a girl and back where her mother lived she’d — still, maybe — be last in line for school. Unless she had an exceptional Baba.

So as they had taken up Jake’s invitation to look at the house which was their first home together (for him: she might not agree) they went on Senior Counsel’s invitation to visit the school. He toured them round classrooms, art studio, music section, library and Internet facilities, swimming pool, sports fields, botanical garden, with a volunteer entourage of eager pupils to whom he turned aside, interrupting his accounts of the values by which the school was directed, to chat and chaff.

Each saw the other was picturing Sindiswa in these settings.

On their terrace that early evening, with the subject, Sindiswa, there, as they had sat alone with her as a baby that evening in Glengrove when the street sky was ripped apart; a decision was made. But this time there was quiet.

Only Gary busy building and then gleefully attacking his Lego fortresses.

It distracted her father’s attention from Sindiswa. There was only the caveat from him, in his mind; the school uniforms are too elaborate. — Those sports team blazers, white with braid and gold. Waste of money enriching some outfitter. ‘Conspicuous consumption’ crap. — He pulls a face at himself in admonition of this pious old tag of political correctness.