Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

— So no good just talking. What do you suggest we can do, my brother. Go to the church and invite them home with us? You ready to share this room?—

The Dolphin Marc has become a comrade, beyond the pool gatherings where the Suburb bond is simply neighbourly, since he is the one among the local inhabitants who moved in to take care of Isa and the family when Jake was in hospital after the hijack attack. It is he who this week leads them to what he’s come across when hopefully visiting a backer for one of his plays, living in a townhouse complex (upmarket he classed it), walled and with guards at electronic gates.

Purple bougainvillea luxuriating over a wall and a uniformed man sat in a summerhouse version of guardhouse chattering to himself on a mobile. The street a wide well-maintained one.

On its opposite side there was a confusion of coiled razor wire rising and sagging along a stretch of open land whose limit couldn’t be made out, where haphazardly some sort of organised shelter had dumped itself, a small brick outhouse left over from whatever had been built there, overcome by makeshift of board, plastic sheets, planks, old rugs, like something organic, a wild creeper grown out of the dust.

What was once a gate hung collapsed in the fanged security of this fence. — Ever since I came here I’ve been thinking, what the hell was this, squatters? Here? — He’s been answered now by one of the guards of the residential complex: people from Zimbabwe who were living in Alex township. Our people got fed up with them, taking our houses, taking the jobs in town, there was big trouble.

Read about the violence, the killings unlike murder for money; survival is something else. This is the flood of pavement overflow from the Methodist Church. Here, nobody stops you from going in. The men inside don’t pay any attention to the visiting intruders, white men some authority again, inspectors come to harass. The black woman — if she’s come to give something to the women — there are no women living here. Perhaps the wives are sheltering somewhere else, the only other ones who fulfil a man’s need get in with the dark at night.

The intruders come up to tents where a man is washing clothes in a bucket, pants and shirts sag to dry on the tent ropes. A weary beached Volkswagen is the source of the cavorting heard over the radio; but this raises nothing of the lively assertion that is in the homeless supermarket in town. — Dumela , hullo — their approach is taken up by one among the men bent under the bonnet of the car, apparently giving advice about what’s to be done there, another standing as if in defence at the lifted flap of a tent. The responsive one speaks confident English — when Mugabe became president in British Rhodesia become Zimbabwe, ex-teacher himself the first thing he did was scrap the colonial education system and establish a general standard of literacy and numeracy higher than that in post-apartheid South Africa. He’s telling: all people here — we have been told get out of this place at the end of the month. — Go back! Back! There’s nothing there in Zimbabwe. No school. No hospital when you get sick. The money is paper you can’t even buy a loaf of bread. I’ll rather go back to Alex, I don’t care.—

A truck stumbles through the gate and makes for the brick outhouse. While the informant keeps talking — his wife and children are there in the old apartheid Alexandra, someone is hiding them. Him? He has a job, he’s been two years an assistant electrician in a construction firm — men are coming slowly from the direction of the truck each holding before them carefully balanced a tin bowl, same as the church ones. It’s the Salvation Army truck that has brought a meal. — Yes, every day. — The man does not leave with the others, their heads lifted from under the car hood, the bucket of soapy water flung out and its owner drying his hands against the legs of his pants. He takes from a bag hooked to his belt a Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway; he has this job someone else covets, even if his room in a house shared with Zim brothers was burned down, he had to carry the kids through fire — he has money, to eat.

From the tin bowls brought back there is being scraped up to mouths a small mound of stiff pap, a hunk of bread and what might be a slice of cabbage.

They don’t like to intrude further but it’s obvious it has been sensed, the whites and the woman who has shown herself to be a sister — she even speaks their language — are not eviction officials. Then let them be the exception for whatever the reason, to the other side of the street where the ones behind the walls have got city bosses to give the police order — the people of Zimbabwe, out!

An escort of several along with the informant, names have been exchanged, takes the visitors down the irregular order of tents and here and there occupants come out as if to exchange mutual curiosity, and a few words. How long have you been in this place. (It’s not taken as ‘in this country’.) We’ve stayed in this place more months than three. Where will you go. They say we must go home to Zimbabwe, there’s nothing…

In most tents no privacy to respect in ‘this place’; that’s stripped along with everything else — inside the ground is taken up like flooring by what once might have been uniform bright-coloured mattresses that must have been donated by some international refugee agency along with the tents?

The academic will find out, he’s an instinctive researcher. The playwright, man of theatre props used to reveal characters, will see flotsam of individual identities in the few objects, possessions from personal life, a pair of fashionable pointed-toe shoes, a magazine photograph of a naked woman in jackknifed erotic position tacked up on the sack wall; some sort of certificate in a plastic folder; on wire hangers shirts in stripes, checks or Afro-design, the signature of the tent’s occupant or the donor of the hand-me-down. And of course there are in these tents the displaced’s, the outcast’s remaining connection, proof of existence in the world, the cell phones.

Spared nothing. They don’t go near, but here are the toilets, single booths in their escaped trickles of pee. The marquee signposted ABLUTION BLOCK — it’s closed. No water. That’s why the man was washing clothes in a bucket — there’s water to draw from some of the single taps standing here and there between the tents. Dumps are not trash but stored households with the leg of a chair poking up, periscope of a life.

Leave it all behind. At least, faced.

You’ve seen it all.

But stepping round the collapsed gate to the street: they haven’t.

She clutches his hand on one side, the Dolphin’s on the other, the difference in relation to lover, to neighbour, of no account in what all three are seeing in the street. Curving figures-of-eight displaying mock collisions skilfully avoided, there are white boys on bicycles in the gentlemanly uniforms of the most expensive private school, and have parents who can afford it. They are being joined, happily zigzag, by fellow pupils in the same garb, riding out of the town-house complex gates opened for them with greetings from the guard.

They are black schoolboys. The sons of a new middle class.

They are innocent; their parents are tenants white and black of the upmarket garden complex whose residents’ association must have declared the presence of homeless people is a danger, a health hazard to residents of the suburb. A devaluation of their property in the housing market. They have succeeded in getting eviction ordered, across the street.

Couldn’t have afforded that school anyway! But he had thought…remarked to her when they went to consider a very different one, that first time, the school outfit there was a bit too showy. A triviality. As it turned out we couldn’t have expected to find anything else as close to what we want, a democratic education.