Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

In a different place you become different people. Not that it isn’t pleasurable.

They stayed with comrades from home, emigrants who shared an old house in a working-class suburb with a West Indian couple and were looking for something affordable in Kensington (fat hope!) or somewhere else not too upmarket for them. Both couples were doctors, and three worked in the same hospital while the fourth was studying for a further degree in paediatrics at a specialist institution. The London comrades had little leisure, he and she were free as they were glad to be, about, alone. Within the separate circles of their careers, the lawyers, clients, court officials foremost in her consciousness, as was his among students and academics; the demands of children, practical distractions of a household, liens with comrades in the Suburb, they were often preoccupied, whether together alone, or together in company of others. Except for that blessed place, bed.

Here London was a twenty-four-hour exchange of self: theirs. They didn’t watch the changing of the guard but did follow others of foreign tourist itinerary, while selective of what was sometimes a discovery, now, of interests each did not know the other had. He wanted to wander through the famous hothouses in the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, she wanted to catch the last day of an exhibition of Mexican artefacts she’d seen advertised on the posters. They went to the British Museum because they felt they ought; and then spent three hours totally absorbed in all there was to learn, also of how a culture makes itself out of others — the glorious Parthenon frieze that a British ambassador took from Athens and which was displayed under his name as the ‘Elgin Marbles’. The National Gallery high on Steve’s list; in the Reed home there had been a book of reproductions from the Gallery he took to his room, becoming aware of the mystery of art maybe an answer to adolescent emotional confusion, as later he was to turn to science, and finally political revolution as the rationale for him to understand human existence. Even the private school for whites, to which he had been sent for the privilege-above-privilege beyond state schools for whites, had not taken pupils, as part of education, to art museums; any more than Jabu could have been. And in clandestinity days she was not admitted to the Municipal Art Gallery in Johannesburg; he wouldn’t go where she couldn’t. What they knew was the work of the black and white artists shown in small galleries that tightroped the fine line between what would pass as surreal licence (not much to do with anything, far as censors knew, eh) and defiance of apartheid law and religious taboo. No black-and-white lovers sur l’herbe . No Jesus on the cross other than a blond man whose pierced body is pale. Dark-skinned Saviour: blasphemous. One such happened to be, even greater travesty, painted by a white man, traitor — it was seized from the gallery wall and banned.

The centuries of painters and sculptors which had created the visioning of the world was work neither he nor she had seen other than as reproduction. Quietly not remarked to one another, in the National Gallery it was to each another pair of eyes given. For her, da Vinci. She walked back again to The Virgin of The Rocks . Steve stood beside: her experience. She turned at last, to him, as if it were he who had given it to her, it came from his past, which was not only the colonial heritage.

Returning to the entrance foyer of these places is coming to the souvenir shops, bookshops, people struggling into coats for the return — to the city. She bought a postcard of The Virgin of The Rocks . Directed to a post office in Trafalgar Square she stamped and mailed, sent it to her father. The Elder in his Protestant church.

He said — Do you think he’d really like the Virgin, she’s so Catholic.—

— Aren’t you dying for tea? Or coffee. I am. — She was gone, back into the street. Looking this way and that, as if expecting to be hailed. Spied a coffee bar where they sat behind a heat-blurred window and agreed and disagreed, transported, about what had confronted them.

Another day they were at an exhibition of African Art. It was meeting in another place, space in life, someone you know intimately. They had the special animation of pride ethos shared, although here was her ethos, and it was his by adoption — no, earned with formulae and chemicals for explosives while in the paint factory! The Greek gods and warriors in some museums are all aeons dead but the African sculptures that combined without contradiction the abstract of reality, the totality — bone structure of human faces, feet, limbs, the perspectives of features profile, frontal, appearing anywhere in single, the one image which Picasso took for himself from the African vision, they are still being created at home, by people of Africa whose vision it was and is.

Macbeth probably had been chosen of Shakespeare at her Swaziland school because it was thought young Africans would more easily understand this play, it would relate to the tribal chieftains of their own history. When in the London rain he declared ‘Let it come down!’ he confessed to her amusement he’d played Banquo in his school’s production: they must get tickets for the performance at the Globe listed in Time Out . She didn’t know about the continued existence of Shakespeare’s Globe; but that he had been familiar with as living heritage in the English culture from which the Reeds came far back and passed down indiscriminately along with the imperialistic ones the comrades set the Spear against — and there occurs to him, too, from The Tempest —he quotes Caliban for her: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on it is I know how to curse’—his island’s invaders from Europe.

In the Globe they stood in the audience as in Shakespeare’s time, in its open auditorium. The endless conversation of English downpour drowned the beautiful delivery of the cast and drenched her; bewilderment at this primitive worship of the Bard’s shrine — What’s the idea of having people stand out in the rain?—

Their comrade hosts offered as their treat a Soho night club: a black singer from home (she’s made it in London, a wow) sang with the instrument of her whole body along with the voice, music by Todd Matshikiza, the composer and jazzman from Johannesburg who had died in exile, some other country in Africa. Too wide awake with the beat they lingered together before giving up the evening. In the shared living room the West Indians and their friends had left empty glasses, the shed coats of bananas, and a mat of newspaper sheets, open bottle of wine, as if welcoming, Steve was stretched out on the floor with his head against the base of the sofa between Jabu’s feet as she sat. He was playing with the spindle heels of those sandals of hers, scuffed by London streets, as a light late-night context to what he was saying to their comrades — When are you coming back?—

There was a pause. Perhaps the English rain had stopped, outside. A silence when something that shouldn’t have been said has been said. A subject the speaker knows is taboo. The woman, Sheila, began — But why? — and the man snatched from her — Why do you think of that, what would the reason—

To go back.

— Home. — Jabu addressed nobody in particular, as one stating the obvious. The two doctors had been avid for details of the mounting number of AIDS infections and deaths in the country they had left. — There’s a shortage of doctors.—

— And you two are good ones. — Added, perhaps it was the wine in him that found plain speaking from Steve. — You had your training at our medical schools. — It could be a reproach.

— I believe you’ve got doctors from Pakistan and even Cuba. It’s a choice, where you do your work as a doctor. Your obligation to the patient, the profession…it’s the same.—