Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

The moment came; and went — in what would have been the moment for it Jabu is voluble with — Then a row broke out just in front of the doors, some shopkeeper and the men coming from the church, he was shouting they’d left their blankets and dirt outside his place, spoiling the business, it was awful…I was right there…you’ve got to see what it’s like, when are you free this week…—

She is speaking where, in what, they are together, the present. The compassion of a Protestant church (denomination of her Baba) not evidenced by the Catholics, the Jews, the Muslims in their religious establishments, had sheltered refugee immigrants from countries in conflict around this one’s borders since the influx started, Christianity appropriate to the circumstances of the times. But now it was becoming a disruption of the city, intrusion, invasion of rightful tax-paying citizens, a threat to business and health. The church turned dormitory flowed over to the pavement where people slept like corpses under any old shroud on scavenged cardboard.

Into this form of reality she drove him. The street they reached didn’t look like the familiar fast-paced city, the displacement of functions was the home stage-set struck.

There were the magistrates’ courts, fine contemporary architectural expressions of the dignity of the law, human rights. There was the red-brick dignity of the old Methodist Church. The entrance façade of the Magistrates’ Courts ignored, obscured by a clutter of occupant people, their makeshift shelters dismantled by the police, piled up like bedclothes to be used again, not trash to be removed. Some men and women, tripped over where they squatted on flagstone surrounded by children wanting a share of takeaway food adults held — these men and women were the fortunate who found small change, washing a car somewhere or begging (the nature of Jabu’s work keeps her up to date with how the destitute exist). Others came by carrying their tin plates of food doled out in the church. They pass him without seeing him seeing them: he doesn’t exist. Jabu greets them in her language, for her and for him Sanibonani bafowethu nondade! When this is acknowledged in the tongue of a neighbouring country she understands, she speaks again, using their language. He is the Stranger.

What are we doing gawping like tourists at these people from Congo, Zimbabwe, their share of Africa. Even though she has some legitimacy and he associated with her through her words, her black skin.

They ought to go into the church, greet the pastor, she’s the daughter of an Elder in the same House of God even if not observant. They’ve seen the pastor many times in the newspapers — a white man, once he was in a scandal of some sort the press won’t forget, true or false. Who can put on the moral scale the weights of right and wrong, lies and truth when these people are left without shelter by himself, the Umkhonto cadre, and this pastor keeps them alive for conceivable time when there will be peace for them to go home to whichever country it was where they had to leave their lives behind. But the uncountable numbers of this church’s different kind of congregation mean that it has to have some of the formalities of a business institution, now. There are a couple of the church’s representatives (marshals? Or plain-clothes police taken over) who question, first addressing the white intruder. He has an appointment with the pastor? What organisation does he come from? Is he from a newspaper? There must be a list of people seen as of ill intent, he might be one of the street’s shopkeepers.

He cannot enter the church.

She, a woman and black like themselves, is ignored; their manner is flirtatiously dismissive when she surprisingly speaks up for herself, in the way of asserting a right of common law, there is also the law of God’s house: you can’t refuse to let a Christian into her church. They are sceptical, appreciative of what they take in the tone of sexual banter, but won’t let her in, either.

It’s not in the nature of comrades’ experience to give way to discouragement of what they believe they ought to do. — What is the pastor’s mobile number. Please give it. He’ll see us. — She is speaking in English now. Pulling rank, an educated Sister, she thinks she knows the high-up people to get her in anywhere she wants. The man grins and twists his shoulders before her, doesn’t need to say it; no.

What is unexpected is that there is — impossible — an atmosphere of some sort of home in the organised squalor of this place. A suckling at a mother’s bare breast where she sits cross-legged on a bit of blanket and looks so young — how’s a man to judge — it might have been born while she took shelter in the pastor’s church. There’s an old man rolling cigarettes out of torn bits of newspaper filled with tobacco he’s taking from a small pile of stubs, there are fag-ends drifted like leaves to the gutters. Step round the woman who has seen the opportunity to count on women’s desire to look good in the current city style although they are not of the city, and set herself up in business: a client sits on a box having a pattern woven more elaborate than the one Jabu used to wear, composed of the hair on the head with devices, from a spread of combs, clasps, and what look like rat-tails. There’s refusal to accept the denial of ordinary small pursuits.

He and she are the foreigners here. Even she. Black skin isn’t enough. She turns down an exit from this scene of someone else’s claimed territory which opens suddenly on a street where a wide passageway, sign declares ‘Boulevard’, of closed elegant shops has become the homeless’s version of a walkway supermarket. Takeover. Two young men dance bangles of cell-phone batteries for sale before him. Second-third-hand frayed jeans with the natural injuries of hardship which some white students in his classes reproduce on their jeans as the sign that they’re not squares, are splay-legged in paving display with crumpled dashikis and dresses reminiscing on the shapes of their previous wearers, baby clothes that have survived generations.

Everybody’s trying to sell something. The importuning cheerful refugees turned traders know only too well this man and woman wouldn’t ever need. There’s a special kind of animation when you’ve got nothing left to lose?

Back in the territory of the Suburb, he describes this before Jake, Isa, Marc, Peter Mkize who’s come to pick up his son from an afternoon of tackle technique practice with Gary Elias. Isa clucks her tongue, stops herself, then — You’ve read how people in concentration camps made instruments out of rubbish, played music, there were even stand-up comics, with the gas ovens there waiting.—

— It’s not the same. — Jabu will never let pass examples of brutality committed by Europeans as some part of the human condition blacks must inevitably share in their attitudes between themselves, Africans, just as they’ve taken to computers, Internet, Facebook, Twitter. What the whites did to one another — even if it produced among the inmates of the Holocaust, as she’s just seen in the people outcast by conditions in their own African countries and in this one of refugees — a dire spirit. Nothing to lose.

— Of course it’s not the same! In the Holocaust you died in gas ovens. Finished and klaar . You died because you were Jews. People here come from Zimbabwe where you can die slowly, because your brothers take everything from you, that’s the Mugabe way, for themselves.—

— And their other brothers here in Africa?—

— Cousins, not same-mother-same-father—

— All r-right! The same blood of Africa…—

Here it comes again — the charge that can’t be ducked, held off.

— Eish! Of course, what’s it with you from Umkhonto , why don’t you veterans do something for these brothers who let us operate from their countries in the Struggle?—