Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

She was glad for them, for him, in the way of someone who has always had such expectations of someone like him. The idea that she might sit in on one of these sessions somehow didn’t come off. Peter and Jake were elated at the participation of the band-aid students when invited to an exchange between them and a visiting luminary.

Jabu had asked — would he manage care of the children, meals and all that, if she went to KwaZulu for the weekend, taking Wethu with her, Wethu hadn’t been home lately, a visit was due.

Could he manage! He laughed, butting her cheek with his. — The kids’ll have a ball, undisciplined, and I can get takeout I’m sure from the Dolphins’ jambalaya. — He knew what she did not say: she needed to be with her father in what must be to him the betrayal of the amaZulu, the people, disgraced by the behaviour of one who had been MEC for Economic Affairs and Tourism in their provincial government; one with whom the church Elder and headmaster had grown to be inducted to manhood by the killing of a bull by bare hands.

All the way with her attention an automatic pilot performing the functions of driving she was rehearsing what she would say. What she would say, best. What would invoke naturally with respect, the particular relation between them, the only way to speak. Wethu beside her was not so much uncommunicative as in the same state — there and not there — but with a different absence, already taking the paths from clay-smeared house to house, seeing from behind door to door the brothers, sisters, the old and new born of the collaterals from which she came. So neither felt any awkwardness in their silence.

— We’re nearly home. — And Wethu’s composure half-woke to her habitually tired smile along with some low sound of assent, as if every huddle of trees, wave of sugar cane under the wind was landmark of a personal map. Only when there was a roadside store or an old church surviving in childhood memory the experiences by which she had left behind the images, Jabu saw that there was no longer time to prepare herself for sharing her Baba’s troubled self as somehow nobody else could.

As she took the turn to the village: a big poster of Jacob Zuma grinning lopsidedly as it had lurched loose from a fence pole.

Must be relic of a meeting of some sort: before.

The dirt road to the house passed the headmaster’s school, there were boys leaping, crouching about in a football game where Gary Elias had played. It was as if walking not driving, step by step, the final road that was drawing her to his presence, Baba.

She has told her mother on landline, she’s coming; he never answers that phone, it’s for the convenience of the women, he has his mobile. That way it wasn’t needed she would have to guard herself against giving away her purpose, demeaning it by the conventional means of overcoming distance. Her mother quite naturally assumed it was the daughterly duty to all women of the extended family that obliged her daughter to consider it time Wethu had a visit to take up liens from home. So a group gathered round Wethu in cheerful welcome, some then furtively drawing back to eye the changes in dress that on each return marked their sister a city woman, and the mother’s arms claimed her own daughter. Baba was there apart, as always in his contrasting calm, the stance special for her, ready for her. The hands of each went out to clasp and hold the hands of the other, he drew her to him without her breasts and his body meeting.

They exchanged the usual: how was the road, not too busy, yes, the children are fine, Steve in charge. — We were expecting you next month, with Gary Elias. — The handover for the school holidays. — Oh of course we’re coming then, everyone. — Baba must need all the support he can get, grief comes not only from death, but the debilitating anger of shock. She felt anger in him, the tightened grasp on her hands, and the impatient lower of his eyes as they sat through the serving of tea and cake, even a bowl of potato chips from the store (her mother thinking Gary Elias might have been along). Wethu was another being, here; but it wasn’t the time or purpose to observe and feel troubled at having isolated the woman from belonging. Her father put down his cup and stood up, his signal everyone accepts every time she comes home. Father and daughter left the veranda gathering unremarked.

The passage to his cubby-hole study where at her beginning so long ago he had told her she was going to school before her brother Bongani — she had gulped a yell and laughed tears. She felt something now, a strength of him, Baba — she didn’t have for (her others) Steven, Sindiswa, Gary Elias.

On the door to his privacy there is the same poster that was hanging on the fence pole.

Amazed disbelief. Collisions of fast-rapping heart — her father such a man, so distinct from anyone else in his dealing with ambiguities self-contradictions which are yes or no to others. The remarkable headmaster; the Elder.

Some Christian faith that this man grinning on his front teeth gap must be saved, in the way of the church. Something they term a lost soul. An image set up for redemption? An Elder could believe that. It has been her — what — shame, regret, guilt that although she has been part of the Elder’s congregation since she was old enough to be in church on her mother’s back and she still believes in the first revolutionary, the Lord Jesus and the ultimate Father, God, she never depended on Him when she was in detention, in a bush camp, there was that other faith, the only one, Freedom. She can’t understand: but is Zuma set up, to be saved.

She comes in and performs the action, pulling out one of the two hard chairs for herself as is expected. He’s walked round the side of his desk and is seated in the chair with pressure-sagged leather arms that belonged, she knows, to his father the minister of the Methodist Church.

It is usual when they are at last alone together that she waits for him to begin their time to talk.

He sits straight-backed, opens and then closes his lips, once, and looks to her. As if he can’t find the words.

They come bursting from her. — I’ve been thinking of you, all the time, Baba, I couldn’t talk on the phone, I was in the court and I heard him, I heard it all. He said it himself. And when I left, the women outside shouted terrible things. She must be burned. The women shouting that—

He hears something different. — The papers attack him like wild animals. They are out to tear him to pieces, that’s all. It doesn’t matter the court, the judges found him not guilty, the lies of that woman—

— Baba—

— I’m saying what we can see, what we know.—

— What we know. Baba what is it we know.—

— Mbeki and his people he gives the important posts, they’ll do everything, anything to stop Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma from being president next time.—

— Zuma. — She says it to make it real.

He pronounces across this as confirmation of everything he is expounding, feeling, and that she must be experiencing with him. They are speaking in the language, Zuma’s tongue they possess with Zuma: their own. Father and daughter have always shared perceptions, hers from maturity instinctively received, his from the time-step ahead of the young, received by him. His daughter. Zuma . When she says Zuma . It’s the affirmation of all he has said, is saying for them both. It would not be necessary to speak of it at all between them, what they feel, the vice of appalment clamped inside them, the spoken cadence is only to put it out to the air like the blast-wail of the raging women outside the court.