Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

— To spend, spend, if you’re not unemployed — Jake hails with arms in the air.

It’s as if she feels she must be the one to acknowledge between them, if he wants to spare her what might appear as reproach: it turns out the party she voted for, COPE has its own share of corruption. A huge parastatal fuel and other energy sources company (she reads to him from a document) has COPE strongly represented on the board. Bonuses of 1.8 million and 3.5 million rands have been awarded to top executives of the company. Lifestyle. Everyone has corporate membership of a golf estate which costs a princely initial fee and there are yearly fees on the matching scale. The company’s spokesperson says expansion plans require its executives to engage in networking initiatives with current and potential business partners, customers, investors.

At the eighteenth hole. Whatever he may have felt about her defection (said nothing of this at the time) both share a general outcome.

President Zuma again declares the ANC will rule until the Second Coming. The Council of Churches has objected to his statement as sacrilege. (Jake evokes — Shades of the Mohammad cartoon in Denmark? Don’t demean our gods. — ) In the confusion of public tightrope acts, while students riot because they can’t afford university registration fees, ‘Financial Exclusion from Education’ is the subject on the tacked-up posters’ call to a mass meeting at the university and among the discussants, student union leaders, heads of departments, known ‘activists’ Lesego and himself, are three-piece-suit Professor Neilson and his one or two other colleagues from various faculties who usually absolve themselves, now, from public protest. A Brother (or is it a Sister) university last year saw a 154 per cent increase in student enrolment. First-year maths students sit on the floor, have to share desks. Other ‘tertiary’ institutions: one failed in the last financial year to spend 142 million made available by the government for bursaries. What’s happened to the money? Nationally, mid-year marks of engineering students in a developing country short of engineers dropped to 35 per cent passes. Like the voice of authority unexpected from an opened tomb, it’s Professor Neilson speaking. — There is everywhere, among all of us, enormous — a staggering strain on teaching staff, on our possibility of educating, our dedication to disseminating knowledge on required levels for this country.—

The Old Boy product of exclusive educated class, clubman, has never before been applauded at present gatherings.

There’s an Australian exclamation picked up from the books in the process of being read: Good on him!

What is the difference between not doing anything, and having arrived, while desperately opposing yourself, at recognition that what had been believed, fought for hasn’t begun to be followed — granted, couldn’t be realised — in fifteen years — and right now, every day degenerates. Oh that fucking litany, Better Life, how often to face the dead with it, the comrades who died for the latest executive model Mercedes, the mansions for winter or summer residence, the millionaire kickbacks from arms deals and tenders for housing whose brand-new walls crack like an old face. Who would have had a prescient nightmare of ending up sickened, unmanned of anything there is for you to take on, a luta continua .

She has been ‘lent’ to a firm of lawyers in a case of rape. Although any violation of the human body would seem under rights in the Constitution a case for defence by the Justice Centre it would first have to be heard in a civil court before, lost or dismissed, going on appeal to the Constitutional Court. She’s been chosen because it’s remembered she has done so much in her early time as a recruit to the Centre preparing disorientated people to bear witness; her natural empathy would be an advantage in a case of this nature. And someone may have noticed her presence in the crowd at the President’s rape trial.

— Have you ever known a woman who’d been raped? — Surely no one among the women they knew, but the country is said to have one of if not the highest incidence in the world. Maybe if it had happened, a woman wouldn’t want to talk about it. Not even an Isa, much.

— How would we know. Among the girls at the university. Did we know that one in four men in the country is willing to admit committing a rape? Statistic: I’m so amazed, can’t believe…you…can you believe it. — She is asking him not as her husband but as a male, whether this is an instinct all males share but all don’t follow. Calling her up not as a lawyer but his lover is his certainty that the instinct or whatever else it may be has nothing to do with his making love to her impulsively perhaps demandingly sometimes not in their marriage bed but as they had to on the run against the law. Might as well have asked if he could understand murdering someone, yes? What is turned up under these stones. If you kill in a revolution for freedom that’s not murder. Too late to question.

— Senior Counsel says these one-in-four men, they’re boasting…to him that’s perhaps the ugliest manifestation of the — she pauses for precision — the ‘commingling in South Africa of culture of impunity with one of masculine sexual entitlement’. That’s how it’s put. Conviction rate of those men who do go to trial is only around seven per cent.—

— What are the police doing about this masculine entitlement.—

— Police don’t have any real ability to prevent rape, do they — not the way they can catch thieves escaping with cash. Unless they come across flagrante delicto in cars, bushes…most rapes take place in private places. Homes: the men are friends of members of the family.—

— State of the nation. — His voice is as if speaking to someone else. — State of the nation address after he became President, Jacob Zuma, himself accused of rape, saying the most serious attention would now be given to crimes against women and children.—

She is the one, not he, who faces the victim in whose defence she is present at Chambers of the firm to which she is on loan. The victim isn’t a woman but half-woman-half-child. Fifteen years old. There has to be unlimited patience to draw her to tell. To be called upon at all is like being brought to the headmistress’s room and you wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t done something wrong.

It’s not drawing blood from a stone, it’s looking at the blood and semen that ran down the thighs; there is the medical report from the doctor on night duty at the hospital where a taxi driver, evidently the lover of one of the women in the house, took the girl ‘because the auntie (there was no mother) didn’t know what to do with her’.

The looks and manners of the lawyer woman who was asking the girl to speak about It — nothing like a headmistress, this beautiful lady out of TV, what an African woman’s supposed to look like, wearing the cloth wound high round the head and the smart jacket-and-pants suit you see in shop windows, white women wear. She’s what you would like to be; and she must have been a black kid, too, some time.

Yes I know the man, he comes to the house and brings things, a bottle for auntie, she likes brandy, and takeaway, chicken and stuff. That Friday the others were out, even the little brother her sister’s kid, she washed her school shirt for Monday and the man came up behind when she was ironing it, he said shame, they’s left you all alone, shame, I just laughed, and then he said come talk to me a little while I take you to get us curry rolls from the Indian’s then he took the iron away, his hands were big, he turned me around and he was…kissing, I began to hit him, kick, and then he pulled up my dashiki I had on for the weekend how can I say — I screamed but he didn’t care he knew there was nobody in the house lots of noise in our street — He got the zip and opened my jeans, I fought I tried to bite, he pushed me on the floor there’s a rubber mat there by the sink and then with the other hand he was doing something at his clothes—