Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Dispersal begins raggedly. Some small groups re-form with attempts at addressing the break-up, the campus is haggard with destruction.

His keys there in his pocket; he gets — escapes? — to the academic staff car park; few cars, no damage done to them — most of the academics have made off as soon as the protest grew. His book-bag and papers are on a table somewhere in his room and the door’s left unlocked — irresponsible. There’s one of the academics about to open his car. — You’re all right? You get caught up in that chaos?—

— Not caught up. I was there.—

Professor of Classics — yes it’s Anthony Demster — takes this as a philosophically sophisticated way of dealing with the disturbance.

— What went on at the university — the police — I tried and tried to call you after we heard at the office but you didn’t pick up!—

To put it to her; they were so familiar with each other’s reactions to the predictable or the unpredictable in their not far-off life on the wrong side of the law.

As customary, she’s doing something; she’ll continue routinely with some part of her unconscious (what is it — pushing the heads of keys into the clips of a leather holder) while her voice is intense with concern. The Classics Professor: did you get caught up in it. But she knows better than that. As if she knew he would leave his little academic enclave and go down there, among the crowd, who this time happened to be students, some of them his. As she would.

— Wasn’t there anyone among the leaders who could direct, I mean the way it was going. So they could be heard…—

She’s asking; she who sleep-deprived and in imminence of other torture had resisted giving the names of comrades the interrogators wanted of her.

A way now. Meeting in the Great Hall with the vice chancellor principal of faculty and the Students Council in discussion of the matter of tuition fees? — That’s the government’s affair.—

What would the result have been? Agreement that the Convocation would meet to consider an inquiry into the implications etc. of social responsibility implied by free tuition at university level? Who can pay and who can’t. A means test?

— I couldn’t even get together a so-called delegation to tell the minister the university’s little problem, attempting to teach students who come out of school half-literate. What choice is there for them. Out from the lecture halls and our baby-care seminars, to the campus!—

He tells her like a confession only just realised — to himself, that when the swell of bodies landed him back near the science block he ejected himself and went back up to his room, met nobody in the corridors — keeping themselves scarce in their rooms, quit the campus or holed up in the faculty coffee room. But what did he have to feel himself more honest about as he stood again at his window, looking down at what was officially referred to collectively inoffensively as ‘The Student Body’ and now really was that, a mythological entity of many limbs. So down again, leaving the room open.

— The campus is really badly trashed? What’s the sense in that. They have to live with the mess, themselves. No, no what’m I saying, the black cleaners’ll have to come on… — Jabu still has in her the discipline of the Struggle: you must answer for your own actions…

Burnt documents trampled kicked about like dead leaves. A computer (whose from where) lying among broken shrubs. Who knows what, from bins in the women’s toilets. As someone offering knowledge, however mingy the access, one who’s accepted to be an academic, wouldn’t he be against students fouling their nest. If he believes in the purpose of a university existing however inadequate to circumstances it may be. If not, why be there? Teaching in the limitation of what you’re able and writing some fucking thesis so that you can pass on something more to those who need it, whose right it is.

Principal, Vice-Chancellor, faculty and representatives of the students were summoned to a meeting where the students succeeded in the university’s condemnation of brutal police action and arrests; and the principal and faculty succeeded in condemning the destruction by the students of campus facilities.

Sindiswa was born at a time when the new life of freedom was just three years old, child of change. She was even-tempered and happily responsive to everyone and everything. Her brother, Gary Elias, who had taken his first steps in the security of the suburban house was not, as Steve, while distrustful of fatherly judgements said, ‘easy’; would not go further than that. Jabu laughed — this was a naughty boy, as someone might say ‘tall for his age’. His primary schooling was at a local school, as Sindiswa’s had been before the Greek school, where she was reported by her teachers as top of her class. But the character of naughtiness the boy’s mother saw as usual began to be troubling. He punched a classmate, narrowly missing the eye — Steve and Jabu had to visit the parents to apologise. Gary ‘borrowed’ without her permission Sindiswa’s treasures (a conch in which she had been shown you could hear the sea, a carved box one of her Indian friends had given her) and damaged or, as he said, lost them. She was forgiving but hurt; and that seemed to annoy him. Jake told Steve he ought to take the kid along to watch football, the university games, join Jake and his rather older boys, giving him innocent male status. Gary listened to his father’s and Jake’s explanatory comments of what was happening on the field without reaction: tugged Steve’s shirt — When will it finish—

— I’m going to take Gary home over the long weekend.—

— That’s an idea. We’ll all enjoy a break.—

— Stevie, I want to take him to my father. He’s experienced with boys, he’s been head of that school, how many years…I’ll talk to my father. It’s better if I take him alone.—

There’s still — always — something distancing about Jabu’s bond with her father. For Steve, who did not know any such unique relation to his, only felt the loss for those few moments when his father was dead. He got up and folded his arms around her back, she turned not to release herself but so that they could kiss, their secular blessing, whatever happened to pass between them.

Jabu and the boy came back late on the Monday, last holiday night, she lively, not tired by the long drive and he bounding, in charge, out of the car with the usual spoils of her natal place, this time avocados and eggs — Gary brought them from my mother’s hens himself, she told. Steve cooked a second supper, some of the eggs with leftover meat and he and Sindiswa ate again with her and the boy, praising the taste of the bright golden yolks, Gary unusually talkative telling of the calf he had touched, just born, all wet, and the bird— inyoni , Jabu prompts with the Zulu name — that nearly hit the windscreen, these events in the sum of days he’d passed. — You lucky thing — Sindiswa presented him with her admiration.

In bed, before turning out the light above their pillows — Your father, what’d he say.—

— We’ll talk tomorrow. Lala now, masilake manje. —

Tomorrow was a working day, breakfast, Wethu demanding news from home, how-is-Baba-mama-auntie — all right, delivery of the children, routes divided by alternative maps drawn by traffic, Jabu in her car the Greek school, him to Gary’s primary before the science faculty, her destination Justice Centre. So it was night again when the children were in bed that there was time for her to tell him her father’s thoughts, advice about the naughty boy. The loyalty of her mother love to persist in seeing him as just that despite behaviour gone beyond the happily mischievous.