Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

The open mouth.

The gaping down which the first finger of a hand is pointing to the wall of the throat that’s where food is taken in. On the city streets there are often waylayers rubbing circles at their stomachs to indicate hunger, some it’s obvious have found drink at least. This, this, is a bony articulated forefinger repeatedly stabbing through the empty mouth to the empty passageway. The owner is nothing behind jaws that have distorted all features; no face. This giving-of-the-finger comes to her as the final version of the insult of that gesture used, in the air, to end quarrels. She groans at the uselessness of the response: pulling her bag from under the emigration study papers and fumbling at the zip for the pouch of coins — and at once there are blaring horns, aggressive, cars ahead are moving, the return of the green light is at last for them, the bus behind her has the driver throwing up his elbows, the spaceman helmet of a motorcyclist is cursing her to fucking move, move — her foot falls on the accelerator, the mouth falls away from the window, somehow that shadow relic of what they in their vehicles all are, one flesh, must be slipping away between them, their onrush. If he’s been hit everyone would stall again. Dead is one thing, barely alive, that’s another. What could she have offered if the small change pouch had opened in time. The finger black, like hers. As she drives home to what is her own solution brought about by Baba getting her a white education, her marrying into Them — she finds herself expressing within what she hasn’t, even in detention cell: hatred of whites. Election posters on street lamp poles passing. Terror, Dandala, Zuma Zuma Zuma. What will they do to wipe out, make good is the term, what whites did and blacks must change, pointed down the open mouth.

A private incident lost in the statistics. At the church pool on Sunday where life goes on, talk of the power blackouts the past week, the hell someone’s having at the dentist’s, Marc’s news of his new play may be going into production with a cast from the rural villages, amazing talent, why do those ignorant Yankee directors bring black Americans to play Africans in their films. Peter asking in trust of comrades’ shared experience — Forty thousand jobs going to be lost. Is that all my brothers? Oh shame. That’s nothing. Fourteen thousand more on the line, in the mines, ‘it’s the global downturn in demand for minerals’. Minerals are what we’ve got.—

— So the government says unemployment’s down shade less than twenty-two per cent — but more than thirteen million are out of work—

— Never mind, you know this new idea of whether or not you’re employed? Anyone who hasn’t found a job in four weeks, you’re officially unemployed. There you are, too broke to take a bus to look for work any more, you sit selling a couple of cigarettes outside the supermarket. Man! Eish! —

Everyone has their own focus in the profusion of what’s being uncovered beneath daily life — that thin layer — by coming elections of those who’ll take power to rule over that life.

— What’s happening in the Alliance? — The lawyer has the calm to raise.

— Cosatu going to force the ANC into a policy pact, no more cosy mating, mixed economy—

— What else can they go for? They know there wouldn’t be any chance in a breakaway — not à la COPE, but a big one — standing as a worker party for election maybe joined by little brother, the communists. They’re counting on Zuma, man of the people to steer left for what the Alliance hasn’t delivered so far.—

Jake concludes for others what they’ve left out. His laugh-bark. — The man of the people who’s been sitting with frightened big industry and business telling them there’ll be no policy changes? That means it’s on hold: state ownership of their mines. If they know what’s good for them, they’ll go along with The People and vote ANC, that’s him .—

— But what can The People think — whose side is their Zuma on, colonialist-capitalist or worker — He hears himself. Perhaps both; that may come out when/if the arms deal corruption trial ever does.

Read about it in Melbourne.

Isa presses her hands together between jean-covered knees. — Look, he can’t shut that mouth, Zuma needs the support of the youth group, they might easily turn to Cosatu, why not? What are their prospects, why not just more marches with strikers, they’re enough to choose from, burning tyres on the road, yelling for municipal-speak ‘service delivery’ for shit buckets to be emptied water taps to run.—

She doesn’t happen to be the comrade to remark on it — There was one this week, right in town, I don’t know what union made the chaos there.—

— I’ll kill for Zuma , the ANC should outlaw Malema — call him Baby Face but he’s no innocent. — Like the cry of a passing bird over the pool a voice from one of the Dolphins as he takes a dive; the Sunday morning swimming party has fallen away, as attendance at the Gereformeerde service did with the transformation of the church into a commune free of cages, political and gender, the Suburb drifts round there for discussion, not the pool. This young man defies the necessity: plunges enjoyment.

Jake is senior not alone in age but analysis, he’s telling — Yes, we need the youth, even the brat — if Mandela and Sisulu hadn’t come along and broken with Luthuli’s knocking on the back door, we wouldn’t have had Umkhonto , yes? But that youth group didn’t waste energy bad-mouthing, ridiculing opponents, the tactics of Julius Malema. If they felt anti-white, and Gareth’s right, why shouldn’t any black after the Boers the British and all the other rag-tag-and-bobtail from across the sea — I’m myself descended from them, ay — stole the country. The Fifties young got down to the business of taking back —taking power.—

A lawyer’s a professional listener; she comes with what perhaps has not been caught by others in flash back and forth. — Zuma’s glad to have someone ready to kill for him to be President. He’d better look out for Julius Malema planning to take over from him, not too far off, one of these days.—

Blessing is offering some small flag — seems out of character. — When he’s President, I mean — Zuma won’t be fighting to get up there, any more. Zuma may be good for us. — What is she saying: everyone condemning bad-mouthing is also bad-mouthing, in advance, the Brother who is going to be only the third Freedom President? Impulse or fairness? More likely she has a Baba, distant authority; troubling to discard.

They are reading aloud to one another from a batch of school prospectuses which have come with a friendly letter for parental concern from a civic educational organisation he found a way to contact. Over There. He rests the affirmative length of a hand on spread pages. — This’s the one for him.—

— For her. — It’s co-educational.—

— Yes yes — but for him now’s the time — that’s the chance going to a new country, everything will be different. When you’re that age you’re adaptable — (She’d forgotten she’d been sent off alone to Swaziland) — we’ll all be together.—

— He doesn’t like being at school with girls.—

Remember Aristotle. Another place another time. — Give him a year, a year older and he’ll be chasing curves. — They’re laughing. — That’s the advantage he doesn’t know about yet.—

Shouldn’t he be called from the garden and fruit-box wicket, he and Njabulo are teaching Wethu’s protégé to play cricket, the game popular at their school where bats are also weapons for another kind of initiation, shouldn’t their boy have a say. These are parents who respect children’s rights, don’t they, not only at the protection level of the Constitution familiar to her as ABC. — What does he think…considering—