Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Boys will be boys. Yes, will be seen, lived with differently in KwaZulu her home (no other home will ever deny its status) than in the suburb of freedom. That’s really what there is to hear about.

Whenever she’s approaching that way back it’s a route inside her as well as a road taken, and it is her father, whose stance imaged above the road. Only when she slows the car for the safety of the children who recognise it, leap alongside calling out Jabulile Gary Elias, wozani ! to be the first to announce her — does the entire familiarity of the place of origin come to her as if she were pinching peaches from the tree before they were ripe, being pulled along wild tumbling rides on the fruitbox sleds of the boys, sitting with the Church Ladies at their prayer meetings.

Her mother comes to greet her and the grandson in the usual attendant women, everyone embracing her as also a mother and not sparing the grandson, who presses his elbows tight against his body in attempt at evasion.

Her father stands on the red-polished cement steps of the headmaster’s European-style house, his stance that is there, imprint in her mind. She moves to him and he down to her in the respect with which the women back off. He and she, father and daughter, embrace, enfold in one another’s arms almost like some special wrestle, but do not kiss. She can’t remember Baba kissing her even when she was a little girl. He doesn’t have to; the way everybody’s father husband boyfriend does among comrades in the Suburb. He takes her palm and walks her away into the house after she’s made a brief halt for his grandson Gary Elias to be greeted with a grown-up grasp of hands, and to be released among the boys who have already claimed him, always taken up from where previous family visits left off.

Her father leads her to the cabin-of-a-room which is the only completely private space of the house except for the brief use of the combined bathroom-lavatory. Her mother hastens up with some half-reproach half-concern about tea and food, but the exchange with her father’s calm ends in his instruction that the grandson be fed and tea be sent to this room for his daughter and himself, Jabu will join the others later.

Until one of the young girls brings a buckling tin tray with tea and two slices of cake (the headmaster has a mobile phone and of course his daughter has told him she was coming over for the long weekend) they exchange the expected: how is everyone, was there too much holiday traffic on the roads. She reminds the headmaster of what he already has been told, his daughter’s husband has been appointed Assistant Professor as the result of his thesis on approaches to the transformation of education. Baba tells he believes he has succeeded in getting a Carnegie grant to set up a library and eventually an Internet facility at his school.

This opening somehow establishes his instinct — always intuitive of her — that this isn’t just a family visit. She speaks in their language without being aware of it when she is back home, but he as unconsciously often speaks to her in English, perhaps recall of the years when he was preparing her for the standard of the language that would be required when he sent her over the border for the education he was determined she should have. The synthesis of communication: cultural authority of the natal, and the other one taken of right, freed of the colonialism it signified, are an intimacy they have with no one else. Her lover Steve would never, in his valiant efforts to learn isiZulu from her, reach this. Their children: Gary Elias playing games where action not words matter, with cousins in whose blood he has a share, would have the language from them, a second language; never home tongue.

— Baba, about Gary. Gary Elias.—

Before she could go on, her father took moments to look at her, them together on the time-plane for this. — How old is he? — He certainly knew but it was necessary for him to be accurate: if you have spent a lifetime with schoolboys you have learnt that every week, month, is a whole period as a year is in adulthood, not alone the body is budding, changing with awareness of itself. The question of the child’s place among others is looking for some form of assertion.

He has a better way of seeing this. — What does he do, in the family.—

— Baba?—

— What I say, my child.—

— We’re his parents, we do…for them, the children, I hope the right things. — English now, comes as the language. — I mean, we love him…show him…we are busy with whatever he needs at school, we let him have his friends around welcome, any time. If he gets into trouble he can come to us…help sort it out, he doesn’t have to become aggressive, Steve’s the last man in the world even to slap a naughty child… sesibone udlame sekwanele . It’s difficult to understand how our child could punch another kid in the face — he did it — a close friend thinks we should encourage him to take more interest in sport even though he’s still only kicking a ball around, but at a big soccer match he couldn’t wait for it to be over. Of course Steve’s not a great fan, himself.—

Her father takes his time.

— A boy must have duties. Yes, he must do things for you. Yes. A family can’t be together if children have no part in what has to be done every day. When they have these things, obligations (he was speaking in their language but now changed to the particular harsh cadence of English) tasks they don’t like too much, these give them the knowing they count for something, they’re not just there for what did you say, love.—

It is always clear from her father when the final word has come.

Mothers, sisters and the one brother still left at home, the others, absent husbands, gone to work and live in the cities — they were ready for her. Only the eldest sister, born a year ahead of her, was aware of the sister’s difference as the one who had been in prison in the apartheid past; the others placed the difference as her being among the women transformed, in the soaps they watched on TV. When, once or twice, a sister had been invited to visit Johannesburg, the house in the Suburb, she wanted to wander shopping malls as a tourist in a real-life television scene — there was the admired sister’s difference, the world to which she belonged; although that house didn’t look much like a television set.

Now sitting all together with her among them at home the difference, prison cell or shopping mall, wasn’t present; they chattered and laughed in their shared idiom, the latest-born baby was handed to her lap and stared to her encouraging drawnback face with eyes newly able to focus— Uyabona ukhuti uyaba ngummeli omkhulu! — exclamation from an aunt or grandmother chipping in, she’s seeing you will be a great lawyer. The exaggerated gasping, whooping of people who are happily at ease to be gathered when there are so many partings, this sister-daughter long missing from among them for unimagined reasons, prison and marrying a white man. But the oldest aunt or grandmother kept her everted lips down-pressed on either corner in the withdrawn certainty that this is one who can inhabit the future.

— What do you do? — A girl of about twelve, from the look of her breasts, has been mouthing to herself for the courage to speak, nervously remembers respect to add — Mama Jabu, please.—

Her father is there in the background ignoring moves of homage to vacate a chair for him. — If someone is arrested by the police for something he didn’t do, mama tells what really happened and why he should not go to jail. She works for justice, that’s what’s right.—

— And if he did do something bad? — The Zulu language is voluble about transgression — Uma enze okubi? —