Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

The man beside her at last got in his word. — Don’t come unless you’re going to be the capacity. Not words.—

She was talking again. He said under her bel canto and hoped the man would hear — This’s my first in the big world. I’ll have to remember.—

Not much to be expected of the day of arrival; Lindsay Wilson directed who would go with whom in the cars back to the hotel. He and the Beard were led out of the confusion to her car. But apparently the man — had his name now, drawn from him by others at the table, Adrian Bates — was not living along with the other delegates. Himself — he was dropped off at the hotel entrance even received an absent goodnight from the Beard, and an obligatory welcoming ‘Sleep tight, I’m sure you need it’ from the Lindsay Wilson who’d turned out not to be a man. She drove off with her duty to deliver the other man to wherever it was he was privileged to be lodged.

This was a London not the London he and Jabu had excitedly mapped together, famous landmark to landmark, Hyde Park (detour to the Centre for The Arts of Africa), the British Museum, da Vinci’s Virgin of The Rocks where Jabu had that other kind of religious experience which can come from a work of art and had bought the image of the experience as a postcard to send to her father, Elder in a KwaZulu Methodist Church. When they had stayed with immigrant comrades in a working-class district and he who had never chosen and paid for her clothes, apologised for the cold and wet, as if it were somehow a fault of his side of the old British colonial colour distinction, and bought her a ski jacket, the warmest one there was, the salesman assured.

There was no obligation now, this time, to see the sights. In leisure between sessions of conference, for most delegates to leave behind concentration was the object; no doubt a few of the old scholarly and the avid young attaching themselves for the benefit or favour they might catch, tocsin of ambition, sat on in one of the rooms at the Institute to continue some discussion beyond the time allotted. Alvaro wanted Spanish food if there were no genuine Cuban place anyone knew of and he and the comrade from Africa followed directions gained from the Cuban Embassy to an address, on foot, because Alvaro had been ordered by a doctor to take at least a three-kilometre walk a day (what’s that in old English miles) — You know Cuba we have the best doctors, you know that? If ever you get ill — serious ill, you come to us.—

— What he didn’t tell you, comrade, if you stuff so many helpings of paella you’ll cancel the effect of the English miles.—

There’s a light-hearted take-off from the morning’s proceedings when the delegate from a South African university had given his maiden dissertation on the level of laboratory research into the possible and in some instances proven presence of toxic substances in food as defined by the conference.

This had been taken even more broadly: whether the addition of chemicals to boost growth and the nourishment content of crops did not introduce toxic elements, and whether phosphates added to some wines did not represent the same risks at table. A Canadian delegate responded — this was a rather journalistic approach, prompted by the commercial interests of farmers who didn’t want the expense of buying new enhanced-variety seed each year essential for enlarging food crops in a world of hunger, and as for the second count…the agitprop of crusaders against the pleasure of imbibing alcohol.

There was laughter of the modest-superior kind from those who share that pleasure. Although good-natured, the charge — journalistic — made him feel his inexperience of the cut-and-thrust of these world conferences along with their necessity for the new salvation, Development, that has to take into consideration the ideas of a continent which had been regarded as only a ward in need of tutoring, before? With the exception of its Robert Broom, Leakey, Phillip Tobias…Those out there, down there, who brought to the surface knowledge of what we all were : in the process of becoming human. Whatever it is that we’ve become, now. Evolution a process of freedom? From whatever restricts your being? What part had Umkhonto had in the late getting up off the ground on your own two feet: never thought of that in quite this way before, taken the recognition in quite this train. Had to leave what’s politically taken for granted in order to see it not confined, contained by the Overcome: the Struggle a scientific process of existence. After a day of being received in groups at various scientific institutes the Canadian professor made the suggestion they might get together with a couple of others apparently thought well of and compatible, and do what — oh, go to some night-spot, we are in London after all, it’s more than a smelly laboratory. This from a man of age to be guessed at, his lips full and chapped, a little crease lengthwise under each lower lid suggesting he was always inwardly amused while intellectually focused. The casual approach, turning to Steve, was a way of assuring whoever this fellow was, academic from Africa whom nobody knew, so no reputation could be offended. — D’you think Steinman would like to be along? Professor Domanski — or maybe Jeff Taylor, and we don’t want to be all male, have you spoken at all to Sarah Westling from Gothenburg, and of course — Lindsay, she’s taken such good care of us, Dr Salim, no…that wife…—

He had no particular names to come up with. — Sounds fine…I’m on. — They set off raggedly assembled, late, everyone having had other obligations before; he took time to call home; Jabu would want to hear his version of how his ‘dissertation’ went down (he’d read it to her, tried it out after the department’s secretary word-processed it cleanly). Sindi picked up, Jabu was out. He said tell her not to call, I’ll call later.

The Toronto professor had hired a car for the period of the conference — Learn my way about what my grandparents called it, The Mother City. If I lose my Chair of Environmental Studies I can become a London taxi driver, famous guild, now consisting of foreigners like myself, Russians, Africans, Israelis, Pakistanis.—

Professor Domanski was fellow passenger on what they told the Canadian was his first cab call. A lot of wine was downed without any quips about additives, he was at a table beside the Swedish professor who expressed herself in the manner of an actress projecting the drama of her role, dark eyes inescapable, she knew the need to explain them — I’m half-Lapp on my father’s side that’s why I look a fake Swede—

— Well then I’m a fake African, not black. — But not the time or mood to exchange confidences, tell appropriately to the woman from surely the least racist country in the world that his wife is the real thing: Jabu. They talked occupational social shop for a while, she had taught in America and a semester as a biologist in Ghana. The people — they remember the time when South Africans were there from the liberation army, training — the name of The Spear of The Nation, wonderful — But it also wasn’t the time, place to take up her eagerness to press him: what is it really like living in your country now, tell me about how it is, people are with each other after so long apart ? How without Mandela — what about the new one—

There is good music, a group of musicians’ instrumental individuality, also wearing outfits to express this, Indian punk, African, retro-skinhead? — cross-dressing not only gender style. They’re giving everyone — Domanski who had his dancing days many years behind him, French Desmoines looking so much in his own habitué night-club atmosphere — each dancer their rhythm, from current kwaito to jazzed-up twenties tango, whether a memory from blackout partying under Nazi bombs to a recall of last week’s secret farewell with the lover that students would never have credited their professor had. Professor Sarah Westling’s eager questioning about Jacob Zuma (she’d read the scandals, rape and arms deal) — to have at this point place him prancing, knee-after-knee flying up summoned by drums — couldn’t he now offer the other one, Thabo Mbeki — read of him?