Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Another silence. His eyes are on her, they see each other in a way they do, not in the familiarity dear to them, if sometimes taken for granted. — I was, I am going to talk to you.—

— Australia. — She is slowly working not just her shoulder but her body. She doesn’t want to go on. — Tell me, you’re not really thinking Australia. Us.—

— I have been. For us, Sindi, Gary Elias. I know how you feel, it’s how I feel too — felt. — He went away carried the tray to the kitchen she heard it meet the metal surface of the space beside the sink.

He brought the declaration back with him, standing it unfurled to them. — Was this what it was for, what we did — The Struggle. Comrades — reborn clones of apartheid bosses. Our ‘renaissance’. Arms corruption, what’s the nice procedure in your courts, the never-never — the Methodist dump just one of the black cesspots of people nobody wants, nobody knows what to do with—‘Rights’ too highfalutin’ to apply to refugees — shacks where our own people supposed now to have walls and a roof, still living in shit, I could go on and on as we do, the comrades. I’m in the compound of transformation at a university, schools don’t have qualified teachers — or toilets — children come to learn without food in their stomachs.—

At the Fifty-second Annual Conference of the African National Congress in Polokwane: Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, Praise name Msholozi, Chief of Intelligence in Umkhonto we Sizwe who had been a prisoner on Robben Island for ten years, and operated in exile from Mozambique and Swaziland.

He was elected President of the ANC by a majority against a breakaway faction as well as supporters of the country’s President Thabo Mbeki, who had dismissed him as Deputy President over the case, two years earlier, of corruption, President Mbeki making whatever the court verdict — the court decision was that the indictment was set aside — a moral judgement of involvement with a charge of this nature as disqualifying a man from the second highest position in the land.

There was tumultuous celebration, particularly by the youth, who sang with Zuma his theme song ‘ Awuleth’ umshini wami ’, bring me my machine gun, an Umkhonto we Sizwe war cry which (if not to be used literally) was surely going to bring them jobs, houses, cars, feast of the good life when — again taken for granted — he would be next President of the country. He had testified in court he was aware the young woman with whom he had sexual intercourse in the rape charge was HIV-positive: in his victory speech at the Polokwane Conference he declared ‘all structures of government should actively participate in the fight against HIV and AIDS in all facets of the national strategy — prevention, treatment, support for families affected, infected.’

Zuma President of the Party.

— Your father will be elated.—

If it was meant wryly to share her feelings, it was a mistake. She turned her head in her familiar gesture of finality. Stupid of him, he saw: how could she, as they both did, deplore the result and, as she would have to, accept in the privacy of her relationship with Baba, her father’s satisfaction.

What he could do right: he enquired from a friend (if not a comrade) at the university who had often spoken of the joys of a cottage on the Cape Coast, whether it might by chance be for hire during the Christmas and New Year period. It belonged to the friend’s father-in-law, and as the family was going to be overseas, this was arranged.

He took the liberty of making the announcement of distraction, Holiday At the Sea, to Jabu and the children as a treat offered rather than a decision to be made between him and her…Coming out of love and concern. She could hardly reject the proposal as irrelevant — in the face of the children’s excitement, Gary Elias announcing at once he would go surfing, his friend had a board he’d borrow.

No Christmas visit to the KwaZulu home at present: understood. — Gary’ll have his time with the cousins in the Easter holidays.—

A New Year.

There was one of the many beaches, clean sand runways to the sea and the sky shown in tourist brochures for foreign visitors. The cottage only a walk away through the bushes. If it were not for newspapers and the radio — no TV in the father-in-law’s retreat — Polokwane, Zuma and what the consequences might have been left behind the door in the Suburb. Australia.

When he came back to the right umbrella among many, with fruit juice and ice cream from the beach shop — And the papers? — He didn’t have to return. Jabu ran loping off across the sand.

They both read with the compulsion that matches thirst with which Sindi and Gary downed juice and ice cream. Sea and sky blotted out in newsprint: the split in the Party confirmed at the Polokwane Conference, rivalry even over the name chosen by the breakaway faction for their new party, ‘Congress of The People’—COPE — claiming both the masses and the ability to meet their needs. Congress of The People. — Well…how can you take the title of an actual, a specific event of ANC history, how many years ago? — That’s what it was.

Flips up her sunglasses. — Why can’t you? It’s a statement, what it promises it’s going to be. Anyway does the name matter. Just the Zuma crowd angry that anything claiming ‘the people’—they’re its property, his property, even the words.—

— It is a threat . Look what we’ve lost — Lekota to begin with. — Both have strong convictions of the political integrity, intelligence, honesty of Mosiuoa Lekota, Struggle man known as Terror Lekota until with peace-and-freedom that’s too suggestive of terrorism although in fact it was a nickname celebrating his fame as a football player. — Terror gone — that’s on ANC’s cost of the bill for infighting, back-stabbing, who’s taking bribes from whom, the whole Shaik mess smeared on the party…COPE. This name’s not nothing it’s the sign of take-over from our party’s failure, failure of ideals. Promises?—

And that final word has a tone which questions what it means. The election of a new President, new government, new promises. Only a year away from this New Year which has arrived at the beach.

— Don’t we have to have promises—

— Even if our leaders don’t — can’t — keep them.—

Sindi gets up to go and swim.

Sindi hitching at her bikini. Sindiswa’s adolescence, summons of attention to another current of time running with change, she’s walking now with the side-to-siding of buttocks Jabu had when he first saw her in Swaziland, the side-to-siding attractive to men black women have. His daughter in this kind of present.

Gary Elias is out of sight fishing with pals he’d immediately made on the beach. They are coloured, like himself, and various, some black as well as white, nothing remarkable about that, to them. But unthinkable remembered from another childhood: playing on the Whites Only beaches. And at last Sindi and the boy are getting a decent — a human education; but this is because the parents — we — can afford (we’ve ducked comrade principles enough) to send them to private schools. Open to any child of the people. Whose parents can pay.

They’re alone under the umbrella. He takes a swill from a bottle of juice and holds it out for her.

As if she doesn’t see.

— Has something happened at the university.—

The jostle of waves and the hush of their retreat. Doesn’t she understand. That’s not it. You don’t come suddenly to the stage of considering, at a certain point in the living of it, your life, the multiple living of Sindi, Gary Elias, Jabu and self. A shock at some academic decision taken by the Principal he trusts? No. An un covery — like the recent one the science faculty dealt with so well, that one of his own brightest students was peddling drugs on campus. The culprit’s defence: to pay hostel fees. No. Or a bypass, when a colleague was given a promotion of responsibility above the Assistant Professor’s own? No. That’s not it. She always had ambitions for him he didn’t covet, care about for himself.