Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

A shebeen coterie although they’re in what are obviously rescued chairs from somewhere, each different with a lopsided leg or a seat replaced by double cardboard, drink beers from the bottle, maybe this battered shed is or was a shebeen, it’s withdrawn, can’t say protected from whatever’s happened to it, by a tarpaulin as a devout Muslim woman hides behind a veil the compensatory visions for the ugliness of life. Children rat-scatter; and there are a few hens, not much shattered glass you’d expect of violence, because shacks generally don’t have windows but there are shard reflections from smashed mirrors, whatever else people can’t have, it’s clear from mirrors seen still to survive in wrecked shelters, hung up somehow, men and women must have their image, to shave and (young Afrosoul voice) make up; have sight of themselves not just as others choose to see them.

The man stops evidently come to what he’s making for. It’s a shack like any other but iron railing, the kind of screen put up to protect a store front in a risky street stands propped over what would be the entrance, and some piece of broken furniture hung with a cloth image of the President in leopard-skin regalia blinds anyone from being able to see inside. A woman with the facial bone structure recording she was once beautiful (as Jabu the lawyer is beautiful) interferes with Lesego’s man shaking the bars for attention. — They say there’s somebody very sick, that’s why you mustn’t worry the people — The man jerks a shoulder to back her off in reproaches. A voice comes from in there, questions, and gets an answer in their shared language that satisfies identity. A man pregnant with a belly that means his belt only just holds up his pants below it at the crotch appears round the side of the curtain. He signs to approach and heaves the iron screen sideways, it’s not flab, that belly, at an angle for the arrivals to push in.

There’s a double bed with nobody lying in it. A young woman tending a baby among jars, mugs and a head of cabbage on the table. Confusion. A shack is a dwelling-place all purpose in one, a motorbike, piled clothing, mobile phone, stroller strung with limp toys, a car seat has two neat white pillows on it, must double as a bed.

Lesego was introduced to the man who bore his belly so confidently, names, elaborate greeting exchanged. And Lesego presents — Steve, my good friend. — The man might or might not have been reassured by what came from a white, the traditional handshake — forearm grasp. The young woman with the baby on her hip drew up: and as if now remembered — My daughter. — Lesego asked the name as he greeted her and touched the baby in salute. — This’s Steve. We teach at the university together.—

— Oh great, that’s nice.—

What to say. — Are you all right? It must have been terrible for you.—

— They were trying to get in but that iron — they tried and tried and there was such fighting in the street they got mixed up in it and went to another place, a woman we know just near us, she was killed.—

Her father is impatient with the platitudes of circumstance. He swings the belly to a stained blanket hanging from where the tin sheet of wall meets the tin roof and lifts it enough for the three men to see — a gap there; it’s open on a lean-to shed made of whatever, propped to the battered relic of a truck door. There’s a man standing. Looking straight at them, where he would have been thrust before they were let in past the storefront guard.

He’s a young man and he’s wearing one of those bold bright-patterned topknot balaclavas women sell among sweets and single cigarettes on city pavements this year. It crowns and covers — his identity? — over the ears and down to join under the jawbone.

There is close and intermittently argumentative exchange between Lesego, the master of the shack and the man who led to this confrontation with what has become circumstance rather than a crisis. It’s the dialogue all over the country.

What purpose in being here with them. What are any of us veterans of the Struggle doing about it. (Sitting around… shocked…Eish. )

The exchange has ended in abrupt conclusive silence. Lesego turns from it. — We have to get him out of here.—

The company stoops back under the cloth of the shed, hidden man follows. The girl looks about with random instinctive foresight, taking up this and that, the foresight of what can’t be done without anywhere, piece of soap, razor, into a plastic bag, underpants and small towel, chemist-labelled pill bottle along with a leather lumber jacket folded into a carryall she empties of baby clothes.

He doesn’t take off the elaborate headgear that surely will draw attention; he’ll be exposed a moment when he comes out from behind the storefront guard to Lesego’s car. But no — of course the thing is what every young black is buying this winter for warmth — shows you’re cool, man.

The young man is talkative in the back of the car beside the one who led the way to the hideout. In the rear-view mirror see the topknot bobbing with nervous loquacity. He speaks English with more confidence than many South African brothers although obviously he isn’t one of the class of some immigrant Zimbabweans, teachers and doctors — reminder that Mugabe started off well, reforming and advancing education out of its colonial limits. — I can’t follow what’s got into them, the people around Josiah’s place, we were good mates, we worked in the same kinds of jobs we could get, Nomsa and I, we all partied together I was best man at the wedding of one of her friends — that I have to be afraid when I’m living with her…Some of the others, Somalis with their shops, they think a lot of themselves, annoy people, but most of us in those shacks, we give each other a hand. I couldn’t believe Joseph first when he told — I mean even the people next door, round about, we drink and dance together between our shacks, we did, this Christmas even — now they’re after me ! All of us! Out! Out! They think if we’re thrown out, they kill us, they’ll be rich in our jobs can you believe it, the pay we get? They’ll stay poor like we are—

But where will Lesego take him; Lesego must be thinking in the silence between our seats. The shacks are left behind, no one stones us from the trap of the dirt road to be travelled to the highway, no one’s recognised an enemy from Zim known to them and tried to drag him from the car where a white man was one of his protectors.

The silence, against the man’s monologue as Lesego drove, held, with the response of occasional throat-clearing sounds, syllables to show the victim he was being listened to.

— Where to take him. Who will. — Lesego in low bass just for that shared silence.

You can’t ask the young man if he knows anyone, anywhere. So there’s no answer, and that confirms they must keep thinking: where. The Methodist Church asylum the last place, now, must be overflowing the usual overflow — unless it’s been raided for its Zims.

Lesego seemed vaguely to be following the way to the Suburb, maybe considering somewhere else: or first to drop off the comrade seated beside him without hope that either will have a solution to offer.

As if come to a realisation he began again in the same confidential bass. — Jabu’s whatever-she-is, she doesn’t live in the outhouse now?—

— She moved in with Sindi — after what happened.—

Lesego doesn’t take his gaze from the road to accompany what he’s saying. — He could be there, couldn’t he — An observation. As if in anticipation of an obstacle in mind — Jabu might not like the idea… — A moment has to be left for response. But in the delay — I can’t take him to our place, the parents are with us these days, there isn’t even a bed — Jabu — oh maybe Jabu can fix something so at least he can become a legal immigrant.—