Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

This alerted Jabu professionally, away from the guilt she was struggling with, in herself acknowledging to Baba that she had left helpless Wethu alone in the city climate of savage lawlessness in which — yes, there’s no racism, Wethu’s black as you are while you kick and hit her.

Jabu stops Wethu’s monologue. — You are sure. You’d recognise him? We’ll go to that garage and you’ll point him out. Show me. If you are sure, quite sure. — There’ll be a warrant for his arrest. Grounds for bodily harm as well as house-breaking, robbery. — To the doctor, fellow professional — I need a detailed report on her condition as result of the attack on a woman her age, physical and psychological.—

— Yes, blood pressure’s high, that could be stress. I suppose you don’t know what her level was, before — at her age…blood pressure problems quite common.—

Wethu is weaving her head as if being accused of the crime of age. And Jabu as if deftly discarding a piece of evidence likely to be negative. — I don’t think back home she will have had blood pressure check-ups…—

Several visits to the petrol station with Wethu bring no possibility of arrest, of finding the attacker among the people-within-the-people, potential burglars and hijackers, street muggers. The young man whose face was recognised as he hit her was not to be seen. Eish , she was sure, Wethu was sure. She talked with her petrol attendant friend, they exchanged description of eyes, dreadlocks, scars, nose and ears; the man was no longer among the layabouts at the filling station. Did he, streetwise, know she might remember him? And the other attendants didn’t want to be connected with any trouble, have the police questioning them, a presence alarming to clients — where the police are there’s suspicion that crime is a risk to your person and your car — better drive on and fill up somewhere else.

Sindiswa has moved Wethu into the house: her room. Sindi did not ask permission. With Gary Elias’s help simply carried Wethu’s bed from the outhouse cottage while Steve and Jabu were at the Dolphins’ in one of their many needs to thank them for what there were no adequate thanks. The move was discovered only when already accomplished.

The daughter gave the order.

— She can’t live there alone in the yard any more. — Sindi has a dependency of attachment to the member of Baba’s extended family she doesn’t have to — whom? Her mother, her father? She is a member of the extended KwaZulu family now.

It’s something unexpected; to be understood. Sindiswa’s in a way more affected than Wethu herself. Whenever they can be alone, away from the laboratory, the Centre, Gary Elias — Wethu — Sindi — they must try to reason about this. Sindiswa’s disturbed by everything that’s happening — it’s not only the awful travesty of Wethu, the Wethu she loves — at that school (it’s what we wanted for her) the seniors are made aware, they’re kept informed, there’s no privileged shelter from facts that there are schools without electric light or desks, no libraries or laboratories, the kids live in cardboard and tin shacks, this winter a candle or paraffin lamp fell and children were burned, died…And what about us? We adults, we’re always talking strikes, the rights of workers — some of the kids on scholarships at her school come from slum townships, the father isn’t paid enough to provide decent food, back in their homes.

So what Jabu is saying: even children cannot be innocent.

She has her precision. — Not guilty of the exploitation but not innocent of knowing about it…it’s all too confusing. For a child who isn’t really a child any more — not here. She told Wethu and me — one of the girls saw how the man who has a township store near where her family lives was beaten and the store set on fire, the girl’s proud of this, says he was cheating people, charges high prices for bread and baby food and firewood. Was he a man everyone knew, one of themselves? From the description given by the girl, and passed on by Sindi, seems to have been a Somali.—

Xenophobia is being discussed while senior lecturer from department of psychology and adjunct professor of sociology are drawing coffee. Steve remarks aside to Lesego how what is externalised as xenophobia has wormed itself into a schoolgirl, classmate of his daughter, against the high human principles taught at that school.

The man was a foreigner? But if he’d been a local who was overcharging? You don’t believe he’d be attacked, you don’t see that a capitalist (oh, a capitalist now, even a spaza shop-man’s screwing the poor is a class issue, my Bra, economic). You think he’d’ve been allowed to exploit them if he’d been one of their own?—

— Long as he was home black—

They can have a down-mouth laugh, just between them at Steve’s, the white man comrade’s subconscious fear of racism in reverse — a local strain of xenophobia? That’s economic, too, isn’t it.

Wethu lives with Sindi in the house yet still holds court during the day in her cottage with city friends, women from her church and the petrol attendant from the filling station, his seems more than the empathy from the church women; a kind of responsibility expressed for what her association with him brought upon her, the disrespect of vicious blows from a man who could have been her grandson.

The right thing to do is send her, take Wethu home to KwaZulu. Baba. She would have had to be returned in good time before November anyway, that had been decided upon for unwanted emotional farewells, now more certain than ever. Wethu must feel threatened; horror proven to her there is no shelter, in the Suburb from the city that Baba’s daughter and her husband could provide, good people, family, though they were.

Nothing is what’s expected: the old woman appeared not to hear when she was told she’s going home, even when Jabu went to her in the privacy of Sindiswa’s room, that temple of female adolescence, and gently explained in isiZulu, with all the traditional reverence between young and aged, that she would have been parting from this extended family soon; she knows they are going to another country.

Sindiswa had walked in and listened.

She followed her mother out, and to the living room, where her brother and father were about to play chess. Gary Elias set up the board and men while Steve watched at the flimsy distance of a television screen municipal strikers threatening weapons — sticks, clubs, anything they could pick up — against nurses, before angry, terrified patients in a hospital, a plaster-encased arm flung back and forth jerking across the camera’s vision.

Sindiswa’s voice reduced everything else to mere noise. — Wethu’s coming to Australia.—

Jabu’s eyes sharply silenced, stopped him, her knee rocked the chess table shivering the men as she cut off the other reality, of the city in whose midst they were. — I hope you haven’t given her that idea, Sindi.—

The child (could you be a child while grown-ups made violence around you, entered this house of theirs and tied down trampled on the body) wasn’t to be deflected. Not only could Wethu not be returned to the chicken coop he had converted into a cottage, she could not be left behind where there is no respect for one of the grandmothers who could be attacked and beaten in exchange for a television set.

— Wethu will go home, to Baba, she’ll be able to forget what happened here.—

Sindiswa was scraping her foot up and down the floor in hard-won patience. — She won’t. She came here, she wants — she’ll go with us when we go.—

Now he speaks to forestall Jabu. — Sindi. She’d be lost. Absolutely. In Australia. There’s no one there for her, lonely, lonely.—