Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Professor McDonald lets the students take over. Freedom of speech even if this means there’ll be no coherent resolution to be issued for the university press. But Professor Lesego Moloi jerks back his chair and rises, mike a staff in his hand. He summons with it a student, black, who has a poster open across his knees. The student turns his head looking for friends to tell him what is expected of him. You’re not to be ordered about, university isn’t a school, but this professor is a Brother, this is a different kind of authority. He gets up and does what appears is wanted, he’s taking the poster to the edge of the proscenium and Lesego is there to have it held out to him. Professor Lesego Moloi’s regained the table but stands in front of his colleague academics with his back to the restless hall, he’s writing in hard strokes on the poster laid out on the table. He turns. The poster is presented, with him. A thick marker pen has crossed out XENOPHOBIA the poster reads in giant strides POVERTY.

It’s not an answer: what are you going to do about it. The meagre spoils people are killing for. But the blunt confrontation changed the uneasy quarrelsome mood of the students to real attention, wanting to hear seriously what those among them who should have some qualification, by their particular courses of study — Social Science, Economics, Politics and History — had to say about the condition many came from in their own family background, and for which they were acquiring theories of ‘schools of thought’ from the professors who now are exchanging with them convictions about the state of the country as if on an equal level of democratic responsibility for it.

This lunch hour get-together not only re-baptised the refugees as an identity, but broke the focus wide to that of the Outer Space on Earth, which separated the poor from what constitutes the rich — a range, factory worker from the new or old-time multi-millionaire in the promised delivery of our slogan a better life for all. Somehow there’s the slow move, wake-up. That meeting. And the ecosphere seminar. The group of students from environmental studies, they’re taking field trips to see for themselves what they’re learning about, the draining, deconstruction of wet lands for mining explorations. — He’s telling her all this, and without demeaning it, grins. — Yesterday on the landing between stairs there was something like the ice-cream cart that’s pushed by a man in the street, sort of ice-box on wheels. Trashing the campus on principle, rioting on the issue of student grants, OK, that’s one thing, but bowling at gutters or chucking into shrubs what’s left of your pizza — the conservation group students and staff, have put this — thing — where you’re ashamed not to drop your junk on the way to class.—

Jabu’s been offered a position by one of the three-name partnerships of commercial legal practice for whom the Justice Centre had generously allowed her to undertake work from time to time. Her keen intelligence of legal process in present circumstances has been noticed; or the firm wanted to strengthen its image with the appointment of a black female attorney, gender equity in addition to its non-racial one. He might have thought that in private resentment — anyone not simply recognise her ability and devotion to the law, a South African who had lived on the wrong side of it in a detention cell. But he doesn’t say this. The appointment would be an advance in her career towards taking Silk. One day. He wants that for her; as her Baba had wanted her to be educated. — Of course, I’ll still be able to do work at the Centre in my own time. — She’s questioning herself?

Missed period for the second month. The doctor looks up from examination: pregnant. Stupid not to have gone to the doctor at once. It seemed so unlikely. Or some atavistic hangover. Baba’s women running a gaze as wisdom over a flat stomach: husbands expect sons for their perpetuation. Her man is different. She doesn’t have to tell him. Couldn’t explain how this happened to them, her usual precautions, no impulsive take-a-chance lovemaking.

Do they want a third child? There are other kinds of fulfilment for us. For him, at this stage in the chancey development of the university; of course he’s too optimistic about her taking Silk, it’s a love wish…but there’ll be much wider experience, the variety in common law cases as well as constitutional ones, so much to know, need to learn.

Another? Sindi blossoms every day, top of her class, at just the right kind of school to prepare for now . Gary Elias. Perhaps trouble to be expected in trying to understand him; anyway he seems to have been right in choosing a school for himself, he’s far from withdrawn these days; if the closeness is more with the Mkizes than at home.

The doctor is a comrade, from the time they were in detention together, women’s prison where the so-called matron accepted books from a prisoner’s father because he was an Elder in a Methodist Church. In the brief chance to talk in the exercise yard this comrade had seen the future only as the passion to study medicine. Abortion is no longer illegal, a dangerous backyard matter, except for the Catholic Church and some other religious or tribal edicts. It is skilfully done by the comrade’s freedom achieved as a gynaecologist.

If they can’t make love that night, men don’t keep count of the days between bleeding, why should they, he’ll think she has her period, their desire will fade away in sleep. Although the refrigerator is making a weird clinking racket, it’s coming from the kitchen…Wethu has complained, you must buy a new one, more big one, too much inside.

Simplify tasks that have to go along with the purposefulness of living — working for justice to be done in the courts, working for the right of knowledge to be given in the laboratories of the science faculty — by buying each Saturday enough food for the week.

A normal life. (At last?) What is that. In what time and place?

Doesn’t matter. A life where the personal comes first.

But it — would be — is — clandestine, like the Glengrove Place one. Not ‘the same’; ‘like’: which resembles in some way. (Glengrove isolation was by decree.) There’s Outer Space on Earth between our people, and the others; what spacecraft can be launched to make it humanly part of the country. While she offers her little bit of justice, he offers his scrap for education.

A resort from it all. In such time as they have to themselves he reads these days more than he ever has, and differently than she does, the law means so much delving into precedents for each type of case to learn why the tactics of a particular prosecution or defence have been decided on.

At his Reed family traditional school he was taught Latin, not Greek. But Sindi/Antigone’s fair pick-up of the local demotic of the language, her growing interest in bringing home to meals the fascination of philosophy and politics which she knows as Greek myth, moves in him an impulse. To look to another age for some enlightenment — help — with a present one. Take from the university libraries the works he wasn’t privileged to, in the privileges of his white school. And that urgent faith of his youth decreeing him in a factory mixing chemical elements for explosives instead of paint, kept him from. As with most of the supposedly well-educated of his white generation the names of ancient Greek sages were tags to describe characteristics, derived from those whose works and thought the users didn’t know. Call so-and-so epicurean, doesn’t have a capital initial, that’s someone who indulges in fine wine, fine food. A luxury-loving fundi. As some ministers in the present government take to Cuban cigars, not a badge to show brotherhood with Castro but as a right to what the capitalists kept to themselves.