Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Men. Was there a black man who would do the same thing to a woman. Who is she to say — in her reaction. Claim a superior decency — sensitivity, for blacks?

The two women left the cloister of the kitchen and came among the company mainly of men with Mkize’s wife there innocent of what had passed between her comrade sisters in the domesticity for which they were being jokingly lauded.

Everybody goes overseas.

It’s understood that Steve and Jabu have a particular life of their own and are not often involved in the many occasions of celebration which are observed in the Reed clan. But when they do take part (it’s Jabu who says it’s only right they must) Jonathan seems always to have just returned from a business trip or holiday ‘abroad’ with his wife. Brenda tells graphically of Trafalgar Square, castles they have seen, Montmartre, Roman tavernas, the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, the beaches in Portugal.

Places Steve and Jabulile have never been. Steve might have once gone on a student tour to Europe if it hadn’t meant fiddling while the townships burned in police fire. Only a very few blacks, venerable as scholars or Christians, promoted by the institutions or white benefactors got out of South Africa for reasons acceptable to the powers-that-were for the issue of passports; the others were escaped freedom fighters receiving military training in Moscow, China, Ghana…If any of these came from the coal-mine village no one would know of this. Except maybe the schoolmaster Elder. His daughter had got as far as Swaziland and detention in a South African prison; that he knew. She had learnt something of the existence of the outside world by some pictures of it in her father’s clandestine store of books secretly coming from and to be returned to the library he had no right to use.

Both she and Steve had seen it all on television, the daily devastation of wars, and the Sistine Chapel. While, of course, his brother Jonathan and eagerly receptive wife had never experienced the inside of a tent in the bush or desert camp where each night you could be spending the last of your existence without ever having had the chance to look elsewhere, at the wonders of the world.

Everybody goes overseas.

With the new millennium came the time they could and did. Justice Centre cooperatively allowed her leave to coincide with the winter vacation at the university, summer in the other hemisphere. As his brother Jonathan was so knowledgeable about airlines and flights and Steve, against her suggestion, wouldn’t ask advice, Jabu herself called Brenda, and Brenda delighted, insisted on coming over to give hers. Where exactly was the house again, she’s been there once, how long ago — bringing a generous gift of the latest baby equipment when Gary Elias was born — wasn’t there some old church where you had to turn…

Even though she and Jonny didn’t need to skimp it (this was the way she put their resources) she always made it her business to get the best value for a reasonable fare, and of course there were cheaper ones she could also recommend, their daughter and a pal had happily travelled that way. It was a Saturday morning and Steve was at the gym; Jabu offered coffee and the two women talked for the first time outside his clan occasions. — Is your little family complete now? — If Brenda was thinking, though not from the same authority, of the home women’s expectation always of more babies — isn’t that the African way? — this wasn’t patronisingly white, coming from this woman. Quite the reverse. She is eager to be loved by a sister-in-law, the Reed family’s black stake in the new dispensation. Steve boyish in brief shorts and with hair flat from a shower walked in just as she was irrepressibly repeating the embrace with which she had waylaid Jabu at his father’s funeral. His quiet greeting just as irrepressibly expressed that this was excessive, but when Jabu was released the women were two bells set pealing.

She and he come from an era where the nuclear family was not, could not be, the defining human unit. This young comrade parent or that was in detention, who knew when she, he, would be released, this one had fathered only in the biological sense, he was somewhere in another country learning the tactics of guerrilla war or in the strange covert use of that elegantly conventional department of relations between countries, diplomacy to gain support for the overthrow of the regime by means of sanctions if not arms. Children were taken into care by whomever among the comrades was still available to do so, sometimes handed on from one possibility in this family of circumstance to another when the first surrogates were in turn detained or had to flee, take up the Spear from across borders and seas. The conception of family formed from when there was survival necessity, without religious edicts (the Methodist church of Jabu’s father, the synagogue for which Steve’s mother had declared herself with her insistence on the circumcision ritual for her baby sons) was like a discipline left over from the circumstances of a freedom struggle taken for granted, naturally, so that if a comrade had a career obligation to go abroad for a time, or there was the opportunity for a couple to enjoy a trip overseas, someone from the past would take in the children. Jake and Isa doubled up their children’s two bedrooms to add Sindiswa and Gary Elias to the cheerful occupancy of beds, cricket bats, skateboards, figures of space monsters in their boys’ quarters; of beauty queens, junk jewellery in the daughter’s den.

Where would anyone go, first time out of the African continent — far from Mozambique, Botswana where he had been deployed (never got as far as Ghana, let alone Moscow), Swaziland where they met and made love for that first time. Now you had a valid passport.

London it was. Of course. England, from where the missionaries had come who founded the school where her father gained along with religious devotion some knowledge of the world with which he had determined she, his daughter, should be armed. Missionaries, who Jabu learnt in her first kind of clandestinity talk with detention cell comrades under lights that stared the continuation of the day’s interrogations all night — had come with the Bible in one hand and the gun accompanying them in another, to take the people’s country from them. Drew it on maps under a geographical name: South Africa. The continent the shape of a great bunch of grapes dangling towards the South Pole, and the weight of territory at the bottom the country of the isiZulu, Sepedi, isiXhosa, TshiVenda, Sesotho, XiTsonga. The same England where one of these same Englishmen started a campaign that banished the slave trade which had made many of the English rich both as flesh merchants and as owners of sugar fields in other people’s countries, where slaves did the work remote from the small island which was England. These contradictions don’t seem so unlikely to an African — South African — in a country no longer anyone else’s claim, Dutch, English, French for a few years in one region — because the present of freedom has its contradictions. These were in the lives of the people who came to the Justice Centre for redress after employment dismissal, eviction from their homes, traditional or religious customary law against Constitutional law. These were before her every day as an attorney assisting one or other of the advocates who represented the right of citizens to be heard in the country’s court.

London not exotic, as arrival would be in China, say, even France, Germany. Descendants of those who lived as subjects of the overlord always know much about him, his habits. Both he and she had been ‘brought up’ with strong tea brewing in its pot; in Steve’s case, also Andrew’s bacon and egg breakfasts. London that her father had been taught was the heart of the mother country, the empire (‘wider still, and wider, shall thy bounds be set’ sung in school choir) of which his coal-mine village was part; London that was the ‘home’ elders in his father Reed’s family referred to when going on a visit, although several generations hadn’t been born or lived there. The famous parks legendary for soap-box speakers in tirades against this or that seemed to have fewer, and the shaven Hare Krishna, familiar from their place among black street hawkers on the pavements in Johannesburg, apparently had been succeeded by punks whose designer heads, ear- and nose-rings were reminiscent of ancient tribal distortion/decoration in her ancestry: a sign of one world, unbroken past and present, in contradiction (again) of the conflicts that were tearing life-fabric as a motorbike tore the street at Glengrove Place. But the lovers or would-be lovers — even in a permissive democracy you generally can fondle only so far in public — must be as they’ve always been. Here, always on the wet grass — Steve’s tolerant remark about the climate and stoicism of the British, that brought from Jabu the South African local exclamation that can express empathy rather than judgemental disapproval — Shame! — She ignored the summer rain and chill, wearing her high-heeled sandals. Steve had given her love-presents but never chosen and paid for her clothes; suddenly, here — wanted to buy her ‘things’. What? That wasn’t the kind of male/ female contract between them, theirs, comrades. He bought her a ski jacket, the warmest garment there is, the salesman assured him.