Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

The elevator was in use, he bounded up three flights of stairs three steps at a time as if he were a schoolboy again and called out at the top, Let’s go!

His stride almost stumbled: she pressed further against the door frame.

— What’s been forgotten?—

She moved her head slightly in dismissal, and he was stayed.

It was nothing he could put a name, a cause to, ask what’s the matter would be some sort of intrusion. Although it’s impossible to accept that there are times when the trust of intimacy fails. She said very distinctly, I don’t want to go. It resounded in his silence as if she had shouted. She was so known to him, the pillars of her thighs close together, the line of her neck he would follow with buried face to her breasts, yet this was someone he couldn’t approach in whatever was happening. How say stupidly, what’s wrong.

Of course she is thrilled delighted with the house, the terrace where she’s looking forward to putting out their child to play in the sun…she had planned zestfully how the rooms would serve them, she agreed that he could sign for occupancy. I don’t want to go. She knows it has no meaning; they are gone, it remains only to close the door and drop the keys with the caretaker.

Nothing could break the moment. Carrying the bride over the threshold was in his embrace. She didn’t cry but took a few rough broken breaths. Her breasts pressed familiarly against him. He didn’t ask, she didn’t tell.

Leave behind, a drop into space. From the place that took them in when nowhere, no one allowed them to be together as a man and a woman. The clandestine life is the precious human secret, the law didn’t allow, the church wouldn’t marry you, neither his for whites nor hers for blacks. Glengrove Place. The place. Our place.

Isa, Jake and Peter Mkize surprised them that first night, arriving with Isa’s chicken and mushroom stew to heat up for the first time use of the stove, wine for which glasses were dug out of packing boxes. Jabu was putting Sindiswa to sleep alone in her own room. — Khale, Khale , take it easy getting her accustomed to things. If I were you I’d keep her at her old day care for a bit before you move her to the one that’s nearer. — Isa, the senior resident, wants to be useful. Slowly, careful . Comrades, even if white, find expressive the few words in the languages of black comrades they’ve picked up. The presence of the three neighbours in the impersonal chaos of displaced objects is order of a kind. They slept well, the new tenants.

On Sunday someone shook at the wrought-iron gate for attention and there was one of the dolphin-men from the church pool holding a potted hibiscus. — Hi, welcome to the residents’ association, there isn’t one but make yourselves at home anyway. — In shared laughter of the unexpected they gestured him in for coffee but he couldn’t stay, was due to make a jambalaya lunch, his turn to cook. — Come and swim when you feel like it, it’s a teacup, but it’s a cooler…In the afternoon when they tired of unpacking Jabu decided they should take Sindiswa on a walk and they passed the fondly mock-wrestling water, as they had seen the day they came to find Jake’s house. Jabu lifted Sindiswa’s little arm to wave a hand at the revellers.

You shift furniture about: this way, that, not in the relation bed to door, sofa to window these had before, back there. And the new purchases must find the right relation.

Commonplace physical acts can lead to the jolt of other, acceptedly established arrangements. He had gone back to the chemistry of paint as decoration, protection against the weather, after concocting Molotov cocktails in local adaptation. With the need of the demand of using it illegally in the cause of revolution that had somehow justified his rather random choice of a career, was he to stay in the paint manufacturing industry as the meaning of his working life. It came to him — again. A shift implied. Wasn’t there some other, a need of now, that would verify a working life in some way, as concocting a Macbeth witches’ brew had been imperative in another time. A luta continua , the avowal goes. The battle has been won; it continues in the practicalities of the abstract, the big word, justice for all. Where does an industrial chemist fit in.

He replied on impulse to an advertisement for a position as lecturer in the chemistry department of the faculty of science at a university. Again, a move came from him, but this time not with a motorcycle ripping the street as a sheet of paper torn. He raised the subject, the shift, before making application. That also brought to light the difference between her working life and his, its meaning. Education a primary right of justice that was doled out, table scraps to blacks, before. She is teaching the freed generation, there’s continuity between her part in the Struggle, her detention, her having taught at the Fathers’ school even while clandestine in Glengrove Place. She had perhaps been waiting for it to come to him that part-time do-good associations are not enough to justify the life of someone like him, like her. When he was called to an interview she crossed her arms and hugged herself for joy.

— I’ll earn a lot less, way down from what I do now, Jabu.—

— So what. I’m probably going to be Deputy Head of Junior School next year, that’s for sure, first woman among the Fathers, and with your degrees and your Struggle record — well yes, it must count — you’ll end up a professor!—

The university was in transformation.

Not alone had the intake of black students been advanced by various scholarships; the attitude of some of the white lecturers towards blacks had come into question.

He’s an academic of the new kind, particularly apposite since in the needs of the country and the policy of Black Empowerment, blacks must be encouraged to study science rather than favour, as they do — Business Management against Engineering — for the ambitions evidently dangling on the capitalist side of the country’s Mixed Economy. Getting on in life? And as luck would have it, he’s turned out to be a gifted lecturer to whom his students respond with alerted intelligence; another kind of comradeship — in the learning process. His facility of rousing response when speaking at political gatherings, toned down for a different situation, unexpectedly responsible.

A personal transformation.

Occupying a house in a suburb is a sign of the shedding of whatever remnants of the old clandestinity, the underground of struggle and defiance of racial taboos.

If either his parents or hers — so far apart in every South African way — had come to know about the clandestine couple, they had not been told by the son or the daughter. Once sexual segregation laws had gone with apartheid Jabulile arrived in KwaZulu one day to present rather than introduce him to her father and mother — for her very much in that order of whom she needed to inform of how she was conducting her life. No difficulty for him; he was accustomed from birth, one might say, to adapting naturally to the different tribal customs of his father’s Christian family and his mother’s Jewish family, as later with comrades he took part in the customs of blacks, Indians, any DNA mixture of these. That underlay what mattered: ethos of liberation. Jabu had been less at ease with the idea of being produced for his mother and father to meet his choice — for him very much in that order. (Jewish women and their sons.) But the self-confidence in having taken her own emancipation from any restrictions on her freedom from custom in the sexual relations of her own tribe, meant she entered his parents’ home as if she were an unexceptional guest.

The presentation, in both places, passed without any more familial exchange than general light conversation, avoidance of politics as if these would draw attention to the consequence of politics; the daughter’s choice of a man, the son’s choice of a woman, to whom now the law, at least, gave its blessing.