Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Of course she began to weep a jumble of words and snot.

So she must have been intact — what’s known, with biblical reference, as a virgin. Or maybe did have a boyfriend who entered her secretly as it was long ago in Swaziland. But it was the brutality of this man that brought her blood and his semen running out of her.

To go to her, take her in your arms within a bonding of the common language — the girl is Ndebele but the language is through old tribal conquest close to isiZulu — that’s not in lawyer’s protocol of objectivity essential for extracting truth from clients’ emotions, but she takes the girl’s wet hands firmly in her own. Although the girl comes from what’s emerged as a background of poverty, a household of women managing an existence — where have the men disappeared to after insemination? — she’s not a bedraggled frail slum child. Something in the highways and byways of African DNA, a strain of strength and grace has sustained her. She doesn’t go to school in a dirty shirt on Monday. She is tall, for fifteen, with good long legs from what can be seen of the calves below the rolled-up jeans, a narrow waist above our jutting buttocks, and our African lips. Her story, evidence. She didn’t thank the unexpected kind of questioner but the dazed relief in her glance was an expression of this.

Fifteen.

She could be Sindiswa. Shades of brown deepening where the light catches the flesh. As Sindi would be. If Sindi had more share of me than share of her father.

Professional detachment by which you live now as you could not in the Struggle — misplaced as if it’s a document put down somewhere, can’t be found.

This is Sindi with the one man in four in our country.

The advocate on the same case met them cheerfully at reception and forbore to murmur aside to his attorney and expect an answer, how did it go. She left him with her tidy pad of notes. Many thanks, I’ll call you at the Centre, he patted the notes as he spoke, an assurance between the code of colleagues that he was confident in her special qualification for this case. These are worthy, not reprehensible situations when race does count.

She’s fifteen.

— The girl is fifteen years old. Same age as Sindiswa.—

He turns his head swiftly away and back again; does she have to be reminded this is not one of her cases to be told about with Sindiswa in the room, lately interested in her mother’s, a lawyer’s work; she and her schoolmates are being engaged seriously, at that school where there is a curriculum assumed responsibility with what pupils are going to do in life, for others, within the career they choose for themselves. What you going to be, as the schoolmates put it. Butcher-baker-candlestick-maker, oh no no no it’s nothing like the old jingle — television film-maker, advertising copywriter, sports coach, actress, five-star hotelier — teacher, doctor, lawyer, architect, engineer — these last are what the school hopefully advises while not encroaching on individual freedom of ambition.

He and she never had had the idea that you don’t bring your work preoccupation home with you, enough is enough as the phrase goes, one of those that have come into the country’s English from the colloquial of a long-mixed population, precolonial indigenous and immigrant usage. The university is about to send students and academics — himself — out on the winter vacation, with the poor mid-year exam results, solidarity with protest against inadequate bursaries, poor living conditions at hostels — the endemic of tertiary education — until these reassemble for the new term.

The month is ending with doctors again on strike. In a province that has the name Mpumalanga, ‘Rising Sun’, a town which still bears the name of a Boer War leader against the British, Piet Retief, two are killed as a mob round pyres of burning tyres, brandishing ‘traditional weapons’ clubs and pangas not out of date, protest against what’s dubbed ‘service delivery’, a non-existence for them, their needs, water, electricity, refuse removal ignored with promises for fifteen years. In frustration they rage indiscriminately destroying what they do have, what’s passed for a clinic, a library.

She speaks about the rape once more.

Gary Elias was at the Mkizes where Njabulo is allowed to call up Facebook on his father’s new computer and they enter themselves to be received by others they’re unlikely ever to meet within touch. Sindi has Mandoza playing so batteringly that the walls of her den and the walls of the living room seem to act as drums resounding. He got up and made to go to her. — Don’t — no, leave her.—

It was imperative; he smiled, the objection in court; but his legal representative counts on the volume to ensure privacy, the daughter won’t overhear. — She could be Sindi. Could have been her, I had to stop thinking.—

He must concentrate on what he can’t know, what it was like drawing a woman — a girl, to tell what rape is while it is happening; to have the body, the opening that can’t resist forced entry down passage to female being. — She’s not Sindi, I mean it’s not what we’d want to admit, but look, that one comes from the shacks, there for any man to grab — that’s the fact.—

— She’d remind you of Sindiswa.—

She is black. Living as the fag-end of racism. Can’t say it. She’s not the product of a Baba who sent his daughter away to Swaziland for the evolution of education, and of the white Reed breed whose offspring evolved into a revolutionary comrade, she isn’t the product of an Aristotle school where the origins of democracy are taught relevant to Here and Now. Can’t say this.

But they are too long through many circumstances for her not to follow. — Girls are forced into cars when they’re taking a walk to a shopping mall in their suburb, a gang gets over the security fence and breaks into a house, one rapes the woman while the others collect the TV and computer. You’ve read about it. An eight-month-old baby was raped, at the Centre we’re looking into a commission of psychiatrists to explain this.—

— Male entitlement. — He supplies.

She doesn’t bring home the rape case again until the week when she’s going back to her work at the Centre, the rapist has been found guilty and sentenced, his lawyer is applying for an appeal, but her bit-part is over.

— Nothing to be done?—

Her voice closes a file. — Nothing.—

Apparently she is not seeing the girl; probably handed to the care of one of the organisations for abused women which Blessing Mkize is supporting with leftover food from the weddings and corporate dinners, as she does for old-age homes.

It’s noticeable — the interest of his documentation on Australia; lately come, as if only now she sees on the calendar that November is four months near. It’s not on the practical settlement arrangements, the school decided for Sindi and Gary Elias, that she is turning pages. It’s the legal profession in a country which is not a republic under a president but still some residue of a British Empire, in the Commonwealth, a federation where the Queen is the highest authority as represented by a governor-general. What conditions are going to be the immigrants’ in relation to the statistics of crime, the nature of crimes. She has struck up quite a lively Internet exchange with a group of women lawyers Over There. Of course — not strange — logical if we look at the map, that what Australians call their dialogue partner is South-East Asia, those nations, people nearest to them. They signed a ‘Comprehensive Partnership’ (she’s reading it out) two years ago, political, economic, socio-cultural and on security, trans-national issues including terrorism.

He and she each walking over in projection their own future field. Sometimes afford the other a glance there, afterthought. — There are women on the judges’ bench…city hold-ups in certain quarters…low incidence of rape.—