Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Steve walks Isa and children to their house as if it were not the familiar two blocks around the corner.

Gary Elias was ‘sleeping over’ at a school friend’s. Sindiswa has begun menstruating this year already and the change in her body, barely any sign of breasts yet, has taken her out of the security of happy childhood — and it was one, from the time she lay kicking on the balcony, Glengrove Place, and the motorcycle tore up the sky like a sheet of paper — to an inkling in herself of the happenings adults have to find the way, what to do about, instead of having this done for them by parents. She is a reader and Jake — Jake’s the one who lends her books he thinks she will like, enter into the imagination he senses there in her, not books she ought to read (as Steve sometime presses on her). The young shouldn’t be exposed to the horror of violence coming so close, although it is round them in this city, this country, the world they know at the remove of its mirror TV screen entertainment; Isa has thought it best now to tell all the children, her own and the Reeds, of the kind of injury Jake has and that he was hijacked.

As they prepare to go to bed, in the absence of Wethu, Steve, Jabu, Sindiswa washing the day’s dishes, Sindi breaks in. — Everything’s tied, I mean, to your spine, I’ve seen it on a chart…will his legs and arms work if it’s broken somewhere…? — Her father’s in the science department at the university, he will say,

— I don’t know enough about the intricate nerves in the spinal column — I’ll talk to the medical school professor on Monday. Maybe if the fracture is at the neck this will affect mainly the upper part of the body. — And although she’s almost grown-up, he doesn’t add, the brain.

Jake spent weeks in hospital and finally in rehabilitation before he regained memory, spoke — could use his hands; walk. Sympathy bored Jake, family had to show love by other means (his younger son did a wicked cartoon of his father as a puppet, nurses pulling him about). Comrades were expected to know, however terrible, unforgivable the attack on him had been — My turn. — Wryly with the twitch of grimace smile; the comrade knew he, Jake, sees that bullet in his column of life was return fire, eish! For all the bullets that killed, yes, the always-cited times, 1976, the ’50s, ’60s, ’80s, the Trek way back in 1820, how limit the past? — and the shortfall in delivery of fought-for promises by freedom. Peter Mkize present at the bedside of Jake in hospital visiting hour, his brother hacked up among the meat for the apartheid army men’s braai , thrown into the river.

During the weeks that Jake is absent there is something that couldn’t have been expected. Among Jake’s Umkhonto comrades there was uneasy talk that someone among them ought to be with Isa, but it seemed no one could shelve other, their peacetime personal attachments, for an indeterminate time. A veterans’ association was approached to ask if there was not some woman who’d been a cadre, a woman like herself, who could stay with Jake’s wife in support for a while; no one found.

It was a Dolphin. Marc the theatre-man, playwright, who unannounced moved in with Isa and the children. Not cross-dressed, a woman like herself. A human like herself. A man from the church swimming pool. Sunday mornings.

At the night-table on Steve’s side of the bed Steve lay with his mobile, that other form of communication, a book he’d just been given by its translator, Lesego from African Studies. A book of African fables IZINGANEKWANE-IZINTSOMI, with the kinds of truth fable carries. The quaint mode of understanding stays with him in his closing down to sleep. The Dolphin and Isa. This is another fable; out of the violence, some way the country is supposed to be, now, somehow come about. You don’t have to be a cadre of Umkhonto to be a comrade. A new identity in what’s called freedom.

Professor Goldstein, head of Faculty, is over-occupied with vital financial problems, equipment replacement and what some of his staff feel is their work overload, to accept an academic invitation he would wish to, abroad. Assistant Professor Steve Reed has been chosen by the department to attend a conference on the presence of toxins in industrial production, domestic products, the food industry, cosmetics, as part of a series of international environmental studies. He was unbelieving; surprised that he was to be the delegate: Jabu surprised that he thought so little of himself. — Of course it’s you, it’s up your street, and look at all the extra work you take on for the students, the university — who else in the department—

She sees the appointment from his and her political mindset: the opportunities of students to have him bring back to them advances in their right to contemporary knowledge.

But this is a scientific conference not one concerned with social justice…except, it can be supposed, elimination of toxins from unaware inhalation, ingestion, is some wider form of the mantra justice for all…

He has the address of the London hotel where the delegates will be living and gets himself delivered by a taxi from Heathrow. The programme brochure for delegates asks that they call the host organisation on arrival. The foyer is lively with other arrivals introducing themselves to one another or greeting acquaintances with exclamations as if these had come from Mars rather than the distance of some past conference; he doesn’t know anyone in this batch, wouldn’t know with whom to begin introducing himself, and takes his key card for an assigned room. The receptionist addressed him from a checklist of reservations as Professor, well, Assistant Prof. is rather a mouthful but plain Mr probably doesn’t do for conference protocol.

He dumps his bag on the bed: a double, as giving the message that two inhabitants were expected. Hotel rooms like detention cells are so accustomed to a succession of occupants that they have their special air of belonging to no one, ready for anything that might occur along an experience of many kinds. People have made love in them, fought in them, died in them. He took out a folder of newspaper cuttings he’d thought might be useful but too messy for his briefcase and tossed the few clothes he’d provided himself with on the bow-legged chair. The style of this cell is a disguise, old English, nice enough. What’s next is to follow the instruction to report himself to a Doctor Lindsey Wilson at the institute’s headquarters. — Your name please. — Steven Reed. — The usual interval for connection then a woman’s voice, young voice, high-English, confidently casual — Professor Steven Reed, you are here, already in the hotel, welcome.—

— Thank you. I’m supposed to speak to Doctor Lindsey Wilson—

— I am Lindsay Wilson. — Laughing.

— Sorry, I thought a man—

— And sorry to disappoint you—

— The name—

— Oh I know, but it’s also a girl’s name, just a slight difference in the spelling.—

They are both laughing at him. — I didn’t know the difference.—

Where I come from.

The customary exchanges about the flight, long but OK comfortable, yes, the hotel all right? — and there’s to be transport for the delegates to the welcoming drinks gathering at the time in the programme, see you then.

She is as she sounded, this female Lindsay. Between the instructions to men mostly older than him, and the few women of generations who have followed Marie Curie’s breakthrough into the profession of science, she is the facilitator, a type of straight slippery-haired blonde that is the icon of the present’s aesthetic for their sex. Many have that ideal of a fall of yellow silk that is down this one’s back. In the crowd even he finds himself with someone he’s met before, Professor Alvaro from Cuba who once had been brought to South Africa by the Cuban Embassy with a visiting cultural group from Havana: comrade. Not here as comrades but in another identity, despite their special greeting embrace of recognition in a place where handshakes and token slaps on the back are the ritual.