Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

— Laugh at themselves.—

— Yes! At themselves.—

— Look, if you can do it you’re safe from what others say about you, your jokes quash their jeers, you poke fun at yourself and make a tough hide of it, the disgust and disdain just blunt themselves against it.—

Later when she had shed the evening experience along with her clothes and was in bed, the place in life each shared with nobody else. — If your people — Somehow this was not an attribution of separateness that was ever used by them, neither in naming his mother Pauline, Andrew, Alan, Jonathan, Brenda — the Reeds — nor her father’s gathering of Gumede collaterals, the broods black and white recalled in their familial clan relationships. — If blacks sometimes could do the same…Now that the old law is on the rubbish heap. Take up the small arms, you get what I mean, instead of the cowhide shields the waving assegais , the traditional show of identity, dignity against the white crap that’s still thrown at them — But at once he catches himself out. A correcting groan. — How can anyone compare a situation where you and your people have been used as a blank to be filled in with another people’s notion of what a human being is. Compare with the ridiculous — who should give a damn about who does which with what and to whom. In bed.—

She is down-mouthed smiling at her Steve, he doesn’t see, in their dark. He didn’t say ‘who should give a fuck about’.

As each practised the professions they might perhaps not have chosen if different youthful ambitions had not been put on hold by the Struggle, and in the aftermath freedom, overcome by necessities of private living, they often had obligations outside daily working schedules, hours each spent without the other. Hers, representing real advancement of what was better than ambition: fulfilment of her place in that basis of what’s called the New Dispensation, the law; his without the sense of common action in an alternative to the old confines of education, hers alternative to the defence of justice confined to those who can afford legal representation. She was embattled in the accepted opposition between prosecution and defence in court, but she’s at one with the colleagues, at her level the attorneys, and the advocates whom they serve, as she was among comrades in the Struggle. Even if most of the lawyers in the commercial firm she was ‘lent’ to had been fellow travellers onlooking from home, all are committed to justice now. In the laboratory, in his seminars, he served his academic purpose of imparting knowledge and skills; when the information notice that he was available to students in his room brought timid bewildered ones or cocky aggressive ones to his door, and the bridging classes which he and what remained of his like-minded academics persisted with the band-aid to school education he gave his obstinate best effort and encouragement. But in the faculty room he was in a coterie of the present among the structures of the past, fuming inwardly against the coffee machine’s mantra, the rites of scholarly self-esteem rising in fragrant steam. There were scientific conferences he attended to educate himself, faculty dinners for visiting research scholars he was invited to on the strength of his thesis being accepted by the university — the Vice Chancellor’s speech-making pride in the Department of Science, its choice for association by scientists prominent in astrophysics and the twenty-first century conception of the nature of the universe.

As well as formal gatherings of the legal profession, Jabu had restaurant lunch quite often with this or that partner of one of the commercial legal practices she happened to be working for temporarily. She would put her hand on her stomach that evening, not wanting to eat again when she sat at the table with the meal she and Wethu had put together to feed the children and Steve, his lunch having been a snack in a fast-food chain favoured by his students.

At her pauses in the day she and table companions would be occupied in shop talk, analysis of what had taken place in court; he and his students, along with their pizza, argued over how the university was or was not meeting their expectations.

As the muscular image of a professional sports player develops a certain conformation so Jabu’s image went through certain changes. Though her hair was the African crown of braided patterns and locks that was the general assertion of traditional African aesthetics reinstated in the free woman, she has as if unnoticed by herself begun to adopt the other traditional convention of female freedom, the informal but well-cut pants and jackets of professional men. This was an outward expression of something…an impression she had managed or been given a synthesis between the working relevance of the past and the present; which Steve had not.

Return from the daily separation of preoccupations is not only to the children as the core of the personal living state. It’s to the Suburb; it was with Jake, Isa, the Mkizes and other comrades who renewed contact that there was in place, space claimed to consider, with confidence of mutual experience and understanding, what they had envisaged to be achieved. What was happening in the country. Even the occupants of the old Gereformeerde Kerk that would have consigned their kind to condemnation were interested in the secular concern with the aftermath of the struggle for freedom in which they hadn’t taken active part, although some of their orientation, white and black, had been revolutionaries, comrades in prison and in the bush. The playwright Marc, probably researching for certain aspects of a new play in mind, brought dramatic first-hand accounts about what was not being done about the degradation of black workers existing in conditions worse than the ‘white farmer keeps his pigs’—it was Marc who confronted the Dolphins to see beyond the particular discrimination against themselves. Sunday’s permanent invitation for Jake, Isa, the Mkizes, Jabu, Steve and everyone’s kids to come to the pool became socially political amid the cult repartee and affectionate dunkings of the commune.

These — Suburb family occasions, public rather than private, were in a sense, guarded. While decisions taken by the government that affected everyone, taxes, health insurance, crime, were talked about with criticism of cabinet ministers and ridicule mimicry of some politicians livened the exchanges, laughter all round, there were aspects of these matters Jake, Isa, the Mkizes, Jabu, Steve, did not speak of. Did not offer, as if by political vows like Masonic vows. When they were alone together in the house of this one or that, the same matters were under a light different from that reflected by the pool.

Kinship of prison and bush between the comrades, tentacle within, this was a meaning of their lives that could not be erased. They had known rivalry for esteem, nose-picking habits, farts, hard to tolerate cheek-by-jowl in the tent and the cell, jealous sexual tensions when there were women comrades among them, all the human shortcomings, faults and passions; but outreached, outdistanced by the Struggle. Alone together now they could remark on veniality from inside, informative experience, signs it was always there, in this high government official, the cut-throat determination of this Under Minister to oust that Minister, the question why so-and-so, whose pathetic lack of capabilities comrades all knew too well, had been given the leg-up in a ministry while so-and-such, comrade of brains and integrity, seemed to be sidelined onto some minor committee chair.

These were not facts and doubts for Sunday morning gossip.

But the family of the same Shaik was continuing to appear in the newspapers in connection with the arms deals. The first democratic government had formed a Department of Defence Strategic Arms Acquisition Programme, on the principle that the country needed to strengthen its defence booty inherited in defeat of the apartheid army’s force. Corvettes, submarines, utility and marine helicopters, fighter trainers and advanced fighter aircraft went out for tender in the world with the proviso that foreign arms manufacturers promise to invest in the country and create employment. The Shaik name — family of brothers, Shabir, Yunus known as Chippy, Mo — is a front-page staple in the news since the delivery of arms under contract has been in progress for more than five years. There had been something called an Audit Steering Committee, and then the government signed this Arms Deal as a necessary expenditure of billions. A Shaik was a member of the steering committee.