Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

Jabu has given the boy a date: next Saturday.

— I don’t think you have to come.—

Not have to come, does she mean this time? Or any time before the daughter’s husband finally has to make his farewells; face her father with his own male responsibility. Nearer the time she said. Compassionately, why burden her Baba with appalled attempts to assert authority to prevent the rejection of home, country. Place.

The poster of Jacob Zuma when the rape trial — went away.

Is she going to say goodbye? Now. Goodbye with Sindiswa, Gary Elias: her children who are also the headmaster’s, the Church Elder’s, the grandmother’s, the aunts’, by lineage and blood children of KwaZulu.

The question of his, the Reed family, no likelihood they would have any reaction of personal or clan abandonment, there is their pride in Jonathan’s qualifying as an engineer at an English university prestigious enough for him to find a good position anywhere in the world. His mother: she has surround of sons, daughter and grandchildren to accept his absence as she and his father had to when he disappeared in that fight against apartheid. She will certainly come to visit in the other country for some reason chosen rather than Britain; many people are relocating.

It wasn’t a good time for Jabu to have to accede to Gary’s rightful demand, although it made sense in another way; it decided when the actual date of departure would be — how to say it — put before Baba. The present coincided with a time when the Centre was concentrated on the development of the highest seat of justice in the country, the Constitutional Court about to appoint new judges to replace retirement of the four originally appointed by Nelson Mandela himself.

Someone has tacked a piece of plastic over the Zuma poster ragged but still there.

The boys are on the lookout for Gary Elias and colliding with each other run to meet the car, Wethu and Gary Elias announce arrival, and the boys yell back throwing the football up to the volume of their voices. The women have heard, led by her mother come clustering. Wethu has her bundles of fulfilled requests for city products to hand over to a clamour of joy, Sindiswa is embraced by the girls, the little ones clinging round her legs, the young her own age admiring her knee-high jeans, touching a forefinger to her double earrings, one hoop above the other in each twice-pierced lobe. Someone calls out in proud recognition the name of the TV star whose style this is.

Her father awaits his daughter in welcome; Baba, on the veranda of the house which is the place of the church Elder and headmaster of the boys’ school with a standard of education exceptional in rural areas. The house not like any other in the village.

The homecoming visit the same as it always is — was — Gary Elias coming to spend school holidays or an extended family gathering at Christmas, these years — although the Struggle that had taken her away has ended, she and the white man she had chosen within it meant another life for her — she had never come home.

Her mother has confidences to pass on in the kitchen when she joins her to help with the skills learnt as a female child obliged to have tasks there since she was lifted from her mother’s back and set down to shell peas, happily eating many on the way to the bowl. Hear about Eliza Gwala. She and her husband took in Es’kia Zondo when his wife died shame she was only forty-something, he had nobody to keep him to his diet he’s diabetic since a long time, and next thing he’s getting into bed with Eliza when Gwala on night shift you remember he’s at the coal mine? We all know but we never said…Now she want to marry Es’kia, she tell me she’s going to town to see about a divorce — but you know, it’s your kind of work, a lawyer, costs a lot. And Sophie passed on after you were here last time, she was my best friend, Baba never liked her but he arranged the funeral and everything the son nobody knows where to find him, he was supposed to have a job some Indian’s factory in Durban, they say he left to work at the docks — I must say Baba tried everything —disappeared, it’s easy in Durban so many people there from all over — they say you can hear every language, not isiZulu. Everything changed…

As wife and daughter come out to the table, laid on the colonial veranda, with the women bearing pots and dishes it’s as if from familiarity with the mother’s preoccupations Baba takes up where the conclusion he didn’t hear, left off. — Murumayara now has as hard a time as Mandela had — in a different way, and Mbeki didn’t take it on, he failed, so it has all come up for Murumayara Zuma to deal with. But he’s strong. Ready. With God’s will. And ours. — The injunction about will, in the language that is theirs, all of them gathered without him (her man).

A better life for all. She doesn’t say, what’s become of it — that wry observation among comrades.

What is Baba’s demand to everyone at his table, she receives as directed to her. From his mind, that time she came from Zuma’s trial for rape. Reproaching — no, tutoring her — which while she rejects she has the confusion of feeling part of — close with, not to him — an identification that is called love. In the Suburb there is the intense exchange over shared food and drink, perceptions of what’s happening around and to them, their conception of the country now, as much a sustenance necessity as what they’re reaching out forks for, swallowing. Here at home there is no such compulsion to the reality that contains them all, KwaZulu and the Suburb, the commuters stoning the trains that leave them stranded, the doctors on strike in hospitals so ill-equipped in one month a hundred babies have died, while although the money from sons out of work in the city isn’t coming any more, here the hens are laying and there was a fair crop of mealies for the winter, the matric passes at the boys’ school were the highest in the province last year and the headmaster has every intention (the will) to bring the mark still higher this year. It is only in the late afternoon when he comes back from a church meeting that Baba and daughter can find themselves alone. The women are about women’s business, you hear now and then the anecdotal exclamations, a drift of song. Distant thump of the ball on hardened winter earth, the boys on the football field, Sindiswa with one of the girls who is making herself a dress, showing intrigued Sindi how to use a sewing machine powered by foot on a treadle.

— So COPE is in trouble. What a mistake Mosiuoa Lekota made ever to think he would get away with it — but maybe Zuma is better off without him.—

They are at home; in its own language.

He knows her so well, from her promising childhood, better than the sons of which more could have been expected (he’s never disguised his disappointment in her brothers’ lack of attainment, no lawyer, doctor or politician among them). Perhaps she voted COPE. He will not have, he never will forget her reaction to the trial that was a ploy to disgrace the future president.

— Baba, we need an opposition. Not those little old clubs of whites, or new black ones. — She in turn knows he wouldn’t betray Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma even for the kingdom’s traditional one, the Inkatha Freedom Party. — You know history better than I do, you’ve been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.—

— Zuma is the guarantee of democracy as our President. He was a poor boy growing up in the worst time, he knows what it means to be hungry without rights, he was a freedom fighter for what? — to make sure our people will never again be ruled by any power from outside, we’d have a government where we all have the same rights — isn’t that what you mean when you say democracy? And in that government — if there are men who want power against it, quarrel with their own brothers, like Lekota, turn against the man the people want, Zuma their man no doubt about that, if those men work in government against him, is that democratic? — In English now, its colonial origin better suited to betrayal. — So they try their little opposition party game, what can they offer our people that the ANC doesn’t? Nothing. You’ll see, some will come crying to be taken back by Zuma into the Party. He is the man to make our African democracy.—