Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

It is not easy to find the right time, the place in a day to bring the subject up with Gary Elias. His subject. She’s threading new laces in one of his football boots while he is threading the other, and naturally, without a choice, she finds herself asking — What’s it like at school now. Have the teachers changed, are they more strict with everyone…did you know, I mean…any of those boys.—

— Oh they’re matric, not in class with Njabulo and me, but Raymond, he’s one of them, he’s our top goalie, first team.—

— Were you very surprised he’d do — things like that. Does it make you…Njabulo and your other friends unhappy. In school. So awful such a thing happened.—

— Headmaster had us in the big hall — you know, I told you and Dad that day. There was Father Connolly from the Catholic’s church and Reverend Nkomo our school pastor, they were praying and now every morning at prayers those boys are there, we look at them — He breathes slowly on his hands deftly looping long laces.

Quickly lifts his head. He’s smiling directly at his mother to comfort her. — They’re mad. — Vociferous scornful dismissal.

It must be said although she has the confident answer already. — Gary, you don’t think, you wouldn’t rather be at another school. — If nothing else (he’s dealt with shock, disgust by declaring the perpetrators freaks) is he not afraid that as he advances to become a senior, the age at which such ‘madness’ takes place, he could be a victim.

Or — how could she ever have thought — a ritualised ‘man’ subjecting others to torture.

The freedom comrades fought for.

— Our boy is strong. — She’s telling how the necessary moment came about, of itself. — He’s not afraid. And not to worry. He’ll never become a bully. He won’t take on that ‘madness’ and he doesn’t want to run away to another school, I could see he already knows what happened is something, the sort of thing that is going to come up anywhere. As you grow, make your life.—

Even in Australia. He does not feel bypassed as a father; she has opened the way for him. — It wouldn’t come up at Aristotle. Ask Sindi; she’d freak out, as she’d say, even at the idea.—

It lies between them where their bodies and shoulders touch in bed at night, their hands encounter, settling for sleep. A conformation brought from clandestinity of Glengrove to that of the Suburb and wherever they may go. — Suppose it doesn’t make sense anyway — move school when there’s only the rest of this year here.—

He’s the one who took the initiative, if the process has been, is being followed by them together. — I just wish I could have taken up a post now. Bad luck it was too late for this year’s academic entry, all that paperwork, emails dragged on so long.—

— We’re stupid to think of it, crazy.—

Take him out of one school? Put him somewhere else? New surroundings, new teachers, new kids — and he and Sindi are going to have to deal with all that, new country, people don’t even speak — no, what is it, yes, don’t pronounce English like we do — And she breaks into a little snort invading the clandestinity of the darkness.

We’re going to hear Terror. — One leg then the other, shaking off the shine of drops as she gets out of the bath. It’s a statement.

He’s shaving. — Yes.—

And it is not a simple agreement, it’s a consent. She will not question, for either, the right to be at gatherings at which declarations will be made for the present and future of the country. The question which Isa’s moment of blank regard had realised in him at the ANC meeting.

Neither the Andersons nor the Mkizes would be asked if they would be coming to hear the Congress of The People gathering.

There are some comrade faces they know in the crowd neither as tight-packed nor palpably at one with each other as at the ANC parent-party electioneering. In the courage to break with the political fortress of the shared Struggle, defiantly exuberant voices exchanged, there is the unaccustomed shrill timbre of defection, inevitable in human self-consciousness no matter how convinced of the political validity brought about by the parent Party’s own betrayals of its battle-avowed politics. There are whites present; a few prominent ones, also defected from other parties? Prospective or already COPE committed? And maybe relics who regard themselves as not before having found a political home which might be their own: roughly awakened to the push and shove of the country’s situation, a never-before. Perhaps you can’t now be apolitical, that old solar topee of colonialism?

Lekota spoke with the individualities of his personality — the Terror of the football field — and the standard raised fist of rhetoric dedicated to victory, but smiling intelligence rather than berating, and he neither danced, pranced nor produced an armed theme song, while leading the cry and response that belongs to all who defied apartheid, his AMANDLA! bringing AWETHU from a following avowing themselves to him. The Reverend whoever-he-is, standing by; he has his turn invoking Christian values in COPE under the restlessness of the gathering’s preoccupation with Lekota.

Sling-shot questions from the people around him and her, praise and disagreement dart to the platform, some verbal litter without hitting target, a few respectfully join the Reverend’s invocation of God as a member of the new party; the pertinent ones find Lekota ready for them.

— It’s true COPE says blacks shouldn’t get the jobs instead of whites? — The man is referring to the party statement that race as the determinant in the policy of Black Economic Empowerment would produce only a small black elite.

Lekota rallied to the opportunity. — I called for Affirmative Action to be scrapped because it doesn’t provide the real answer for us, our own people. The big one. Giving a man or woman the post because their hands are black like mine doesn’t make our economy equal and opened to all, if that man or woman has been historically deprived of acquiring the skills you need to do the job, to fill the post with the special knowledge it demands, and the young are still not getting these skills and knowledge to take up what is theirs…You won’t improve the living standard of the workers and the poor until equality in our education standards inevitably makes Affirmative Action out of date, into the waste-paper bag, simply by the number of qualified blacks who’ll be able to fill the senior positions. Our country needs everyone, never mind the skin. That’s the issue. That’s justice.—

Through the ears the mind takes immediately some statements more tellingly than others. With the closing AMANDLA! rising from the crowd to the platform the leaders’ chorus response AWETHU, Lekota came down and mingled, arms about people he knew and greetings to their presence for others made brothers and sisters by hearing him in his new political identity. On the way out through groups, ignoring, in their eagerness to be heard, the obligation to clear the exit, he may or may not have recognised Jabu — she had once been in the background of a legal team he was consulting. Anyway, he turned a moment, to ensure he had seen her, remembered (perhaps he too has Madiba’s faculty of face-recall among crowds, over years).

She took up her part in the moment. — When I was a young girl that book you wrote in prison… Letters To My Daughter , it had so much in it for me — what made me. — Of course (it is in his eyes) this is a recognition beyond that of the identity of himself he had just been creating up on the platform — but his arm was tugged by a handsome youth with black spaghetti dreadlocks. — Why dinnen you say wha’ about Zuma’s corruption? — And before he could respond (to the eagerness of those who’d heard the challenge) he was pulled the other way by somebody else.