Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

She is saying again, again, what she heard in the court before the judge, the lawyers, the people she sat among, anyone will tell this was what they heard, she’s heard, the young woman was his comrade’s daughter, he had been ten years on the Island in prison with the woman’s father, he knew she was sick—

Baba listens to her patiently; almost recognisably. The Bible Constitution, its laws that command human behaviour in which (yes) he is satisfied she has had the opportunity to become learned, cannot deal with this matter of spiritual morality. Of course she doesn’t know the stricken souls of men, she can’t believe what indeed she does know now , that power ravages the soul and a brother, Mbeki (she’d call Umkhonto comrade) takes it in fist to strike brother out of its way.

She cannot speak to her father about the other proud statement to the court — a Zulu man ‘cannot just leave a woman if she is in that state’. That it is traditional in Zulu culture for a Zulu man to satisfy a woman who shows she is sexually aroused.

Share politics, yes, even passionate disagreement, disruption in the confidence between them neither shares with anyone else quite the same way. But the matter of sexuality. No.

The evening passes somehow in the company of her mother among the lively women. As customary, it was their turn to have a share of her time back with them; she becomes more and more desperately aware of the need to take herself and her mobile into a corner somewhere in that family home where there is no privacy except Baba’s, or the lavatory; call Steve. To say — what. The landline is continually occupied; the children taking a holiday at least from one parent’s surveillance to chatter with friends without using up cell-phone batteries, and Steve’s mobile responded with the message (recorded on his request in her voice because he likes it so much) that he was not available but would call back. Later she slipped out into the dark and against the live voices and contests of radios between rap, gospel and kwaito coming from earth-wall houses, the running, brushing past of children’s games, found Steve’s voice.

— I’ll be coming home tomorrow not Sunday.—

— Poor darling, is it hard going, he’s in a state of shock to put it mildly, I can imagine.—

She isn’t in tears but her voice has the heightened register of that level. — Yes but it’s not that — what we — he’s up in anger, it is all a plot to keep Zuma out of becoming president. He’s — he’s like stone, furious on behalf of Zuma.—

— Not at Zuma? Disgusted?—

— No no, the papers, the woman. It’s lies, all a plot.—

— But you’ve told him. You were there—

— I told him — and she silences herself — I want to come home—

— I wish I could fetch you right now.—

These are better than love words.

Wethu is not to be deprived of half her visit as someone will be going back to work in the city on Sunday night and would transport her.

Alone in the car rehearses not as she had on the drive to her other, KwaZulu home what she was going to say to her Baba sharing with him the disgrace, the betrayal of the amaZulu by Jacob Zuma: but the recall of the small private place, the hour between her father and her while he turned betrayal around. Completely: to represent people named and unnamed who were not that giant body naked power, but power fully garbed with lies and scurrilous scenarios — woman paid to cry rape — disgrace and destroy the great man who is president elect.

Burn the bitch. Hadn’t spoken of it to her although he said he had read all accounts of the trial and events around it. Does the devout Christian, son of the pastor and himself an Elder in his community church allow a call that a woman be burned as some sort of heretic to the faith of power, as heretics of the Christian faith were burned in the Crusades.

Something else she hadn’t wanted to come to surface with the threading of the road back beneath her. Just as respectfully she couldn’t speak before her father of sexuality, out of his respect for her, his daughter, in her choice of a man — white — as husband and father of her children, he couldn’t say what else he had read: there are whites who own the newspapers, behind tactics to smear Zuma, along with his black political rivals for power. Is it possible that her father who gained for her as a child the rightful chances wrested from within white race privilege, could somehow, facing her yesterday see her, his private revolutionary creation, as part of the whites who fear and want to destroy Zuma.

And she will never be able to tell Steve this that has come to her on the road home to the Suburb where she belongs, has chosen.

Parallels in life reduce the obsessive impact of one when they suddenly meet. While she was driving back to the Suburb Jake was leaving it early in the morning to pick up an old comrade visiting downtown. At a traffic light as he fumbled for small change to give a beggar at his window two men thrust this accomplice aside and one held the hard cold snout of a gun at his head. His car is an automatic, a foot free, he accelerated to throw them off and as the gunman lost his balance the gun slid from ear to neck, the man’s reaction was to fire. The bullet broke a vertebra, the men snatched the keys from the ignition, pushed the slumped driver to the passenger seat and drove to a deserted building site where they dumped him among the rubble, disappeared with the car.

She arrived to find Jake’s children over in the house, the vivacious, talkative Isa with the drained face of someone standing at a grave; Jake had just been discovered by vagrants who led a policeman to the dead man they’d found in the place that was their shelter. But Jake wasn’t dead; an ambulance had taken him to hospital and surgeons were assessing the damage. The stunned, stunted language Isa used as if someone were totting up a bill. Steve had met Jabu in their doorway, her embrace unable to be returned; he was about to drive Isa to the hospital although Jake was in the operating theatre, she couldn’t hope to see for herself, believe he was alive. What else can one do for her. Steve. He has no answer, only a deep breath with his mouth forgotten, half open.

What to do for her, Jabu: to be with the children, feed the children, apparently they had been told Jake had an accident, car pile-up, but wasn’t really badly hurt. Although disbelief was in the turning away of the eldest son; how could he not know differently from evidence of the stranger his mother had become. He is the one Jabu told the truth, when Steve called from the hospital, the bullet has been removed; she hoped this was heard by the boy as that his father was alive .

Steve stayed beside Isa hours at the hospital. He saw she had to witness Jake out of that theatre anteroom of life and death, recognisable as himself in a bed in an intensive care ward, although not conscious, and detained by a straitjacket collar of plaster and bandages; either arm in a sling, the rest of him under shroud of sheets.

What to do was to make a meal for the two on their return, persuade Isa she was hungry although she didn’t know it. She first refused the panacea, a vodka or wine — Steve and Jabu didn’t have whisky in their house (Jake and Isa’s tipple). Then when Jabu brought in a plate of spaghetti and some bottled tomato and basil sauce she’d found, Isa helped herself to wine with some unconscious instinct of her usual resilience available. Jabu said she would spend the night with her. — Oh I know you would, I know — Comrade: that remains more than a friend. — You mustn’t…I’ll take one of the kids in bed with me…don’t worry. I’m not alone. — The Reeds would drive the children to their schools on Monday morning along with the Reed children, that’s understood.