Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Jonathan doesn’t wait for response from Jabu. — People are confused about the sound of the name. Shabir —thank God he isn’t a Jew.—

He has to keep on reminding, telling himself. The arms trade, dirtiest in the world. The true cliché. There was no impulse, it was back then, no time to face this when Umkhonto had to lay hands on arms wherever and from whom they would come. Not the democratic powers of the Western world; these were busy stocking up the armories of apartheid, military and financial.

— So what d’you do.—

You knew what it was you had to do in the bush.

He answers himself, in new derogatory voice: Get together a delegation. Yes? This isn’t your troubles in the lecture halls at a university behind its security gates, my Bra. And we aren’t in your camp in Angola, ready for our Cuban comrades to fight beside us. Mustn’t apply the code, the morals of the Struggle, as adjusted to the tongue-twisted Peace-and-Freedom.

From Peter Mkize, Jabu and Jake the question, statement — whatever it is — comes outspoken. So what d’you do.

And answers himself again because no one else wants to, or knows. — You join the chorus from the opposition holier-than-thou, slam for your own upright benefit the corruption in the government, corruption by the ANC.—

Peter speaks as if constrained to betray under interrogation. — Zuma was our Chief of Intelligence in the bush.—

— And ten years on the Island! — Jabu keeps the calendar of armed resistance.

Heroism has an imperialistic halo, not to be invoked for individuals when every cadre was dedicated to whatever the Struggle demanded; in responsibility, stoicism, suffering.

Jake brings knuckles down on the table, crushing something. — How’s it possible to believe these same comrade leaders have forgotten what they were, what they fought through — in exchange for freedom as bribes, freedom as money.—

Perhaps it was the very same October evening that it was happening?

Not only the ware Boer suburb has transformed in accordance with political correctness as an expression of justice. The suburb of fine houses, many with fake features of the various Old Countries from which the owners came, that had been in well-off white ownership has also undergone invasion, if not transformation. Where the white inhabitants, some second or third generation in possession, have sold the family home for security reasons and bought an apartment in a gated complex supposedly quarantined from burglary and assaults, or left the country to live out of rule of a black majority government, there is no longer any law to prevent any black who can afford such a stately home from acquiring it. One block away from the house where Steve grew up, past which he rode first on his tricycle, later bicycle, the Deputy President Jacob Zuma had chosen to buy, and lived in flittingly from time to time, a house among his other homes about the country. During the week when the now ex-Deputy President Zuma, dismissed from his cabinet post by President Thabo Mbeki as the consequence of his financial adviser Shaik declaring in court Zuma received bribes from a French arms dealer, Zuma was in his house neighbouring Steve’s old home. A young woman, daughter of a comrade with whom Zuma had shared ten years on Robben Island, and who in respectful African custom addresses him as malume , uncle, asked or was invited to spend Saturday night after a party in the house. A confused story: both probably lying, they had intercourse — the only admitted fact. She laid a charge she had been raped. He, in this trial that did come to court after postponement from December to April, said there was consensual sex. Zuma headed the ‘Moral Regeneration Movement’, a government initiative on prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS. He admits he knew the woman was HIV-positive, he had no condom; he took a shower afterwards as this was, he said, post-coital cautionary prevention of infection. If not in so many words, a gift to the press. A cartoonist created a crown for the man that would surely ever after be his royal image: a plume in the form of a shower sprinkling over his head.

This is the subject of gleeful uproar in the Suburb round the church pool. The Dolphins rejoice in this other example of double moral standards, for both arms and sex deals. A man who had held the second highest position of power in the land, Deputy President, apparently committed to fight HIV and AIDS, tells the male population a good soap-and-shower on the penis, after, is all you need, no antiretrovirals necessary.

Jake can’t resist. — And if you do find you’ve caught the incurable clap, you just put yourself on a diet of beetroot, garlic and wild spinach — if you can find that traditional veg at the supermarket.—

Everyone laughing again at what’s become colloquially the priceless synonym of absurdity, the nature cure advised by the Minister of Health in her rejection of antiretrovirals. That other trial, the arms deal corruption, has been indeed referred again (it will go away) in legal complications of irregularities. Jabu is best able to explain, passing on the enlightenment from the access of her own intelligence to expert legal minds.

Marc dives into the pool and comes up exploding water and laughing, shaking a shower from his fashionably shaven head. — What a fantastic plot! What a cast! If only I could — The playwright seizing on a new twist to a marvellous plot.

She sits in the court with the onlooker crowd on the day when Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma is cross-examined about how intercourse came about if it was not intentioned by him and he answered that in view of the affectionate goodnight exchanges between Uncle and a friend’s daughter (her provocative scanty attire already described to the court) it was traditionally incumbent in Zulu culture for a Zulu man to satisfy a woman who showed she was sexually aroused. ‘You cannot just leave a woman if she is in that state.’

It is illegal to make public the name of a woman who has laid a rape charge. To protect her anonymity this woman is known in court and to the media as Kwezi, ‘Morning Star’.

Outside the court Jabu, a woman among black women, made her way past those shouting their message. — Burn the bitch! — The image, photographs of Morning Star, are in flames.

The ex-Deputy President is found not guilty in his rape trial.

Marriage. A common identity. Is that what it is. What it stands for, leave the takens, the sexual implication out of it, the biological, even the legal, the mutual health insurance, tax benefits et al. These are Sunday church swimming pool subjects aired, argued over, kindly jested about to the comrade Dolphins by the Straight in the company. — So you want the right to get divorced?—

Whether by words avowed in church, mosque, synagogue, temple, in a magistrates’ court or in love vows privately coupling two of the same sex — marriage: it’s a term for a common identity encircling all the individual difference between two human beings. But mustn’t assume the differences are not there, the other identities: mustn’t presume they are like elements in a laboratory that combine to produce one substance to create decorative endurance or an explosion, according to the imperative at the time. He and she share political dismay at the Zuma ‘affair’—in both senses of the word, in this instance — the arms deal corruption charge that may never come to court is the other. She’s a lawyer identified within a resource for justice. He has an identity as a teacher, for him the designation ‘academic’ is a social class distinction; both lower and upper levels of learning alike are served by teachers. If a hero comrade turns out to have sexual morals as feet of clay, at least the university is showing signs of transforming into what he believes such an institution should be in the need of the present. He was an industrial chemist in a paint factory clandestinely producing formulae for making bombs, he was a cadre (these terms seem too Stalinist post 1994?) in a liberation army, he has now yet another identity in the synthesis of self. What’s called in psychological jargon job satisfaction’s a distraction from political disillusion. He’s able to come home to tell how some of the students who attend band-aid coaching are turning out to have the determination, the unbeatable guts comrades had to summon in Umkhonto situations — discover in themselves what uninspiring schooling had stifled. An ability to concentrate, question, an urge to use that over-aweing tomb, the library, as well as quick-fix Internet, educate yourself in innate fascination of discovering the apparently limitless reach of that mystery concealed from your own mind. Some are opening to a vocabulary of ideas as well as words beyond so how’s it, cool . This he could exploit for them by persuading scientists from nuclear research, virology, particle physics, to condescend to brief seminars where the ‘underprivileged’ were bold enough to ask questions that showed they had some perceptions of the ecosphere not confined to the romantic monsters of space-busters. They are given the revelation of Grid, learning a scientist named Wilczek’s concept of stuff that exists in what is regarded as space, emptiness. So it’s not a void? There atoms and nuclei are held together by forces acting between all the pairs of particles that they contain. It’s a highly structured, powerful medium whose activity moulds the world where their eyes see nothing. Wonder…