Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

While he shaves and she’s in the bath next morning he, also, is practical. — What about the money. You know we can’t transfer the lot.—

She bloats a sponge with suds and draws it the length of her lovely thigh, bends the knee up out of the water and carries the gesture down the muscle of her calf. — The Centre could administer it with my father. I think they’d do that, for me…One of my comrades. For use when Gary Elias comes. When there’s a visit…any of us.—

Zuma on the poster.

KwaZulu. The man standing apart, at the entrance to the house unlike any in the community of the Elder of the church where the Gumede clan have served and been honoured for generations, the headmaster whose faith in education, achieved under strict discipline the best results in the province against a national record of dropouts and failures. — He’d be willing? — He’ll take it on. — Although he hasn’t been asked: she is the daughter.

She is right, her Baba doesn’t oppose, no matter how much he must be in pain against it within the fundament of his being, his identity, ancestral and present — that she is through her identity with her generation’s experience of Struggle, and her educational opportunities bringing understanding of the existence of Struggle throughout the world — a free citizen of the world. She fought for liberation of her people. It must be granted as earned that she does not have to take on the present Struggle, in place of promises, promises, the better life for all.

Experience in the world outside may make her think differently. White kept choice to itself, Black has choice now.

They don’t make love much these days — or rather nights, too many things to complete, do. It’s not premature, what they decide must be taken has to be set aside in the mind, from what is left behind. The bulk of their lives, what they decide must be taken will have to go by sea and that means well in advance, the road transport to port in Durban, the ship in a time warp of one of Captain Cook’s voyages, crossing the Indian Ocean. What each of the four — Jabu, Steve, Sindi, Gary Elias — find can’t be left behind is an insight to what they don’t know about each other. Gary Elias doesn’t want to take his racing bicycle, pride of his last birthday, where somehow has he got the idea that there’ll be a better model waiting Over There? Sindiswa insists that the version of the ancient Greek statue of Antigone, high and heavy, carved by the art students at Aristotle and presented to her in honour of the performance, must be cargo, and Jabu for some reason that doesn’t match her lack of attachments to objects so easy to transport, such as elegant KwaZulu baskets, includes a hairdryer — must be a special type? He and she go through the shelves of their books (there’s the shelf where she came upon his cuttings, Australia) setting aside the essential while dumping others to be given to the university libraries. There was the sacrifice of some law volumes, apocryphal here, famous so-and-so against such-and-such, but unlikely to be of interest anywhere else, and education reports in the same category. Before throwing away: a last look at reports of a university where white students pissed in a stew and forced four black women and a black man, cleaners at the student hostel, to eat it. They’ve apologised since. What’s left behind is that no one so far has brought to the courts the case of the cleaners to receive justice as victims.

There was nothing, nothing he wanted that it is possible to transport.

‘Our members are determined as hell. End apartheid wage gap, black workers are still earning lowest pay.’ Now the post offices stay-away, that euphemism for strike.

Who cares, everybody has email, SMS, Facebook, who needs some face behind the post-office counter. Metro rail not running, clinics closed, patients not receiving their HIV and AIDS antiretrovirals, threat of darkness as the National Treasury refuses to give money to meet claims of electricity workers: people live with all that. The newspaper falls and slides rustling under the bed.

They have not kissed goodnight. Inert beside him, dozing, there’s barely awareness of her there — out of nowhere the hand — her hand on his penis. The pyjama pants cover is a token, he’s there. She’s found him.

She’s there amidst everything else that surrounds them. He does not wait in the erotic response but turns to her along with the other, to all that is desolately happening in that better life for all. He’s able to confirm in their embrace: confirmation we’re leaving, casting behind all we ‘cadre veterans’ are useless to change, street dirt only the shit symbol of it.

Or there’s just the confirmation of persistence of desire. That equality in rich and poor; even in this country, which he’s just read is the most economically unequal in the world.

Can’t live the cheat, travesty. What use an assistant professor and a lawyer where education is the sum of schools producing pupils to be accepted as university students without the level of comprehension for their course; the law dodges corruption charges of guilty comrades high in government. It’s a worn holier-than-thou to cite your children when you make decisions. But Sindiswa and Gary Elias growing up to all that all this . Children in whose very conception there was faith in a present that hasn’t come. No sign of the equality of their black-white fusion in the country, born of Struggle, which is the most unequal in the world.

It’s been taken without mention that Wethu will simply go back home to KwaZulu. What sort of goodbye gift would she like, when the time comes; but shouldn’t the time be now, when all the other sorting out of what departs from what remains is being done. There’s also the circumstance that what’s been applied to Baba, the emotional one applies here: avoidance of a vision of Wethu insisting on being at the airport farewell. Sindi is particularly attached to her, she’s been a kind of extension of schoolgirl friendships, probably confided in with secrets as mother Jabu is not. Wethu will go back these few months earlier in a sense as one of her usual visits; only this time it will be homecoming.

— Perhaps we shouldn’t be putting it — telling it quite like…I mean… — Baba’s daughter and a human rights lawyer is sensitive to what might seem to be dismissal.

— D’you think she would’ve spent the rest of her life here if it hadn’t been—

The expressive face goes through considering changes. Of course Wethu’s not a servant; family, in a way. An accessory life: is that a Better Life. What is said is different. — In the things she sees in the streets, the abandoned old buildings that some of the friends she’s picked up — through the garage men — they live in, the way she’s become streetwise, they’ve taught her don’t go into this park, keep away from the traders at that taxi station, don’t go out of the Suburb when you hear there’s a crowd of strikers on the freeway, shots can fly wild and hit you while you’re watching — how can she want to live here.—

— She’s been, well, it looks as if she has. — The chicken coop cottage he built for her: her independence. Away from the collateral family under the jurisdiction of Baba. — Her emigration.—

They give a shrug-smile at the category, he goes on — Who knows how this applies to other people.—

There’s still so much to conclude. Professional colleagues, comrades, are moved to mark them with recognition of their work, their loyalty, their different modes of friendship, understanding, support — despite Down Under. The cop-out.

They are even involved in obligations to the appointments of their successors in the niches they’ve functioned from. Steve at the university, his activism beyond teaching, to transform the institution in its needs. Jabu, her commitment to justice as legal defence for the country’s people too poor to pay for it; above any ambition to become a better life phenomenon, a highly paid black advocate (maybe on the bench some day?). He is taken in by the dean of the Science Faculty and called privately for his opinion on the successors considered for his place in the laboratories, lecture halls (the coffee room never mentioned although, for him, it was from there he achieved anything — which was doubtful — that had been argued for and conceived). At the Centre she was asked to add her informal talks to interviews with applicants as essential advice in the Centre’s choice for her replacement. Rather the way as a novice in law, she had been assigned the task of preparing in the languages she shared with them, nervous black witnesses for answers to be given under cross-examination. The way she had made herself useful in the case of the young girl, not Zuma’s victim, raped.