Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

He allows the enthusiasm. — I have arrangements, soon as tickets will be available for us in our own country.—

The women laugh and slap open palms of one another.

Baba and her alone together, he had not for a moment taken attention from her in a hold that penetrated, appropriated from the statement of her pauses anything being withheld in what she was saying to him, for him. Here among the company where they belonged, his wife, her mother, the boys and the girls half-grown women among the family women, he did not pass a word or glance to her, it was as if she had taken her leave of him, already in her car, gone. Later there were the customary farewells, turnabout, as there had been the gifts of arrival, new-laid eggs from the ranging hens, mealies from the winter’s store, all in baskets where purpose and beauty met in the first art form she had, unconsciously, known, that of the extended family women who gathered the reeds and stripped sheaths of cobs to weave strength, each in a personal pattern through the agility of fingers. For some reason — parents never seem to think it necessary to give this honestly — this visit was to be shorter than usual. Gary Elias had been brought late in the second half of the school holidays, and this time his mother would come back to fetch him after a stay of only a few days. He happened to hear from one of the uncles who would be making the trip to Egoli where a son, once an outstandingly clever pupil nurtured in the headmaster’s school, had just been made a director in a food-chain enterprise — the uncle would be happy to have the chatter of the boy to accompany him. The proposed date coincided with the end of the school holidays. Gary Elias was eager to accept. If he took the lift with the uncle he’d gain four more days with the team. Wethu would stay on, too, and take the same ride with the man who was known to her by some generic in the complex of family relations.

Baba has come to the car with the women, as is not his custom, although he keeps his space from them, he’s there. She and Sindiswa open the doors, linger, get in, lower the windows so they are still in contact.

The football team has run up in claimed possession of Gary Elias. Which one calls out, not needing to name Jabu — You gonna bring him for the World Cup?—

No matter from where.

As she turns the ignition key it comes. The realisation that Baba’s ignoring her among the goodbye talk of others is his acceptance that if this is not the last time, before she is gone farther and further than any other time life has taken her; it may be.

Australia. Leaving like the men, the sons who for generations have left to work down in the gold mines, and now are gone Home-Boys, she’ll be coming back maybe as they do for a funeral. The long flight for the World Cup; the boy Gary Elias to witness it with his team.

Withdrawal now while they were among others is her Baba’s final permission for the future she and her chosen man have made without her father. It is Baba’s unspoken blessing on Down Under. Another journey. Beyond any he could or had ever planned for her, an unspeakable kind of freedom he couldn’t foresee.

It’s not something to tell.

Sindiswa is gossiping with her father about Gary Elias’s clever snatch at the chance to stay on with his football mates and get a lift later with some man who’s coming to the city.

— So you don’t have to go. — He’s guiltily relieved she won’t have to fetch Gary Elias, a trip he ought to have offered to make if there hadn’t been a solution.

— I won’t go back.—

When they are alone, she says it again — I won’t go back.—

So she has said something other, told something different from casual understanding of an alternative arrangement.

— Wha’d’you mean…?—

— It’s only a few months to November.—

He’s waiting.

— We don’t have to say… — She cups a hand on his arm, a little pressure on the biceps. — Goodbyes would be so disturbing for them eih , and Baba doesn’t like emotional things. I always had to make the partings with mama, and then he’d put me on the bus or train whatever with that sort of salute he has — you know.—

Yes, he sees it; commending the daughter to God, her father has this authority conferred by belief — she’s wrong, there, it’s surely the highest emotion there is, something genuine about it even while you don’t believe in its reality.

— Baba’s got the privilege to buy advance tickets for the World Cup match that will open the stadium that’s going up, great coup for KwaZulu — tickets for the boys’ football team and it’s somehow understood we’ll be there with Gary Elias, make a visit next year.—

He’s drawn a slow breath of time for comprehension.

— I don’t think I have to go back. Before we leave. — She is smiling almost with anticipation that seems to have come, as a gift to her, from her father.

Arm around his neck bending his head to her, breasts nudging, mouth on his. Embracing Australia with him. He knows as the kind of total sense of being which is happiness, that what he has not been quite sure of: he has not forced her against some instinct in her, she is an African as he after all can never be, to become an immigrant in someone else’s country.

The municipal cleaners’ strike had lasted so long the rat guerrillas who exist holed up in every city had multiplied on the abundance, resource of rotting trash in the streets and when the strike ended and the feast was cleared away they began to appear scavenging in the suburbs. In the Suburb. Blessing screamed high and shrill at confrontation with one in her kitchen, Peter thought she was being attacked by a thief who’d somehow breached the electrified security system and he grabbed the Peace handgun as he would his AK-47 back in the Struggle.

On the first day of August telecommunications workers began a strike of 40,000 union members. The workers at the zoo in the capital city Pretoria were on strike; local animal lovers called upon themselves to help feed the animals and clean cages. A metropolitan railway strike continues. The union says the offer they’ve rejected would have resulted in members losing pay because overtime would be cut. In some provinces no trains to get other workers to their work; where there are a few manned by scabs a commuter has died and four were injured, falling in the crush from packed trains.

As if turning momentarily in the subconscious away from all this — the Suburb’s place in citizenship responsibility, comradely identification with workers existing on no-work-no-pay; and unexpected new middle-class frustration felt at disruption of telecommunications — Marc suddenly tells what’s come up. The sale of the house arrangement. He’s speaking as if from a lost note scribbled during an unwelcome interruption. — The guy’s chickened out. Our deal’s off, I’m sure he’s lying about a change in his life, the partner, some hint — he’s pissed off and he’s going to forget the idea of a move to the Suburb.—

What can he say — giving her the news, such as it is in comparison with the news within which, still here, they are living. A house to vacate. Sell. The shacks of how many homeless thousands: no market value upfront. You don’t have to say it — her brisk silence, getting up, jutting the chair from her, the pause with which she stays herself as she strides to the door, turns to him with a lift of shoulders, is admission and defiance for them both. The TV screen is filled with footage that could have been that night’s or last night’s reportage, same thing, heaving arms thrust as weapons of bone and flesh against batons and guns.

Later she is her pragmatic self: the house must go public, handled by an estate agent for possession after they are in Australia. No rent-paying clauses. There will be a board outside, now, For Sale. She’s right. Departure. It can’t be a Suburb comrades matter.