Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

As Domanski bounced down beside him entangled in briefcase, shopping bags, rolled newspapers, she was out there. Her waving arm was for everyone.

The homecoming at the airport is a welcoming combined embrace.

Gary Elias, Sindiswa, Jabu, in hugging chorus about him, Sindi and Jabu women sharing his cheeks, the boy hung somewhere around his body. It was Sunday so everyone was there, of which he could at once make it an outing by taking all to the children’s choice of one of the airport coffee and pizza dens instead of going straight home.

The house in the Suburb claimed him, didn’t look any different. Why feel it should have. Jabu with the natural alertness that had developed into lawyerly analytical attention had questions on some of the subjects of the conference that had interested her when she had seen the scope outlined on his invitation. Water pollution, in both rural and urban areas, was becoming the cause of litigation in the human rights cases taken up by the Justice Centre. What was the name of the man who’s spoken with such knowledge about the sea, not only rivers — there’s still debate, here at the Cape, about the whales every now and then beached and dying — where could he be contacted? She knew one of her colleagues would want to, it’d be useful.

She was taking his underwear and his shirts from him as he unpacked clothes and the papers doubled in bulk from those he’d set out with. But she abandoned what was intended for the washing machine, at the sight of the papers, and carried off a few at a glance, to ask — What’s this about monkeys and AIDS come up again? — So he made her laugh with a description over whether it was toxins in food which originated in the primate family the mysterious disease we call AIDS, when a trendy young professor (he did not name the Beard) proposed the theory. Someone then pressing to know more precisely the diet, what did they eat. And another professor in a way of dismissing the whole thesis as if remarking on something everyone must have experienced for himself — Omnivorous. From what I see when I take my children to the zoo.—

Sindi and Gary went about their own preoccupations. Sindi to the secrecy that was her own small room from which there came always, regular as a muezzin’s cry from a mosque, the adolescent beat of whichever pop group in favour with her friends, Gary to clean his bicycle companionably in the garden where Wethu was entertaining some of hers. Not spring yet in the Southern Hemisphere, no one goes off to swim at the Dolphins’ pool. The Sunday papers whose pages he and Jabu exchange, as they always do, have nothing further of something he heard from her on the phone last Sunday. She gives him whatever facts have come up in the meantime about the white farmer who shot dead his servant’s son he says he thought was a baboon. It’s an odd connection, grim, with the story of the omnivorous monkeys. The father says he was only protecting himself against a marauding primate come to eat his maize.

Wethu didn’t sit as a family collateral at the family supper table — although she isn’t a servant she takes Sundays off as servants in white people’s houses do. But however she conceives her relationship in the home of a child of the Elder in her village church, her kinsman, it includes coming by to say goodnight although it’s Sunday and she’s spent the day apart, attending church (not the one that the people in this place, shame on them — God will punish — make into a swimming bath) and inviting friends to be with her in the garden she shares with the family of the Elder’s daughter. A clan daughter is a daughter to her as the daughter’s man and children therefore are family. She has no inhibition about going to Sindi, who is back in her room immediately after supper, Wethu is an exception in being welcome — nosey Gary Elias has to be kept out. There is a high happy duo of voices from in there, above the music, and Wethu emerges hugging her arms with delight — That Sindi! — She turns the light of it on Jabu and Steve. — And how were you in England, my, my that must be a wonderful time, London, and I’ll never see — did you take some pictures?—

— Eish! I forgot my camera! — But she closes one eye, at him, she knows he’s fibbing, joking because he’s let her down.

And Jabu joins her kin, both in chorus — Next time. He was working with many important people, Sisi, I’m sure they were on TV…not our TV.—

Didn’t send Wethu a promised postcard, should have thought of it. Buckingham Palace not that spring countryside.

Jabu sees jet-lag weariness she herself felt on return from the first, their trip, to London. It goes without saying it’s early to bed. Her palm between his shoulderblades after Gary has been hugged and sent off and Sindi called to be kissed. Fresh short-pant pyjamas laid out on the wide bed. She’s gone to take her bath, she’ll run the tub after, right mixture of hot and cold for him, the way he likes it. He goes in to brush his teeth while she lies there; all the time since Swaziland, the sheen of water on her soft brown shapes.

The nipples are dark berries.

They kissed as this bed returned to recognised, but neither of them would distinguish which of them would not proceed to lovemaking: just her bent arm doubled against his chest, his arm enlaced across her.

He knows — knew — he is attractive to women — that either comes at adolescence or doesn’t, and not always implying conventional good looks (although they seem to find he’s not short of some). While a student he had a few — could hardly call ‘affairs’ the fancy term of the white middle class — and the brief interludes in time of the Struggle, snatched, smuggled for relief and about pleasure out of the many different deprivations commitment to the Struggle implied. That faith made even the man or woman’s children come second. Freedom demands everything. The price, none of these hasty asides had anything beyond the moments, at best a gift — occasionally not without tenderness — the quick fuck, as it’s known. But all before. Once he had ‘slept with’—another of the polite euphemisms for the indescribable act, from the exaltation of ecstasy to the desecration of rape — once he had made love in Swaziland with the newly recruited comrade just out of teacher’s training class, it was unlikely there were any beckons of passing attraction followed. She taking him in, to her, he entering her, body and being, out of reach of all differences perceived in them by others’ categories, both wanting answers to the same questions in the circumstances decreed of their existence — even got themselves married as their particular symbol of the meaning of this state — he had not made love to any other woman.

What brought us together, the Struggle.

That was the attraction?

Looking for reasons for the mill.

And she, Jabu, ‘his Jabu’—that’s seeing her as an attachment, never mind her independent effectiveness in the world, the time and place they live in. There come random — never thought of, the lunches with a lawyer in successful private practice, very different from her new kind of comrades at the Justice Centre. Has there been one time. Once. Something that wasn’t lunch. A passing ‘in-house’ affair. An unmarked hour that has nothing to do with her constant life.

So. Looking for justifications?

There is some other way. Come out with it. He must tell her what happened at the conference, not the findings of discussions that she was eager to have him relate. Quash. Erase this convenient speculation under the heel of frankness, tell her, Jabu, about the mill. Rehearsing how to say it.

Ah that the final indulgence! She’s oblivious, make her hurt and unhappy, who can take the sounding in her of what she would make of it — a reflection on herself, what she might fail to be for him?