Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

— Forget it. The Centre acts for people who’re being denied their Constitutional rights as South Africans. Anyway since when does ‘xenophobic’ ask whether or not you’ve been let in legally?—

What the purpose is in being there, in a passenger’s seat, in having been there in the shelter of shacks and the bashed relic of a truck door. What any of us is doing. Brought down the crowned centuries of colonialism, smashed apartheid. If our people could do that? Isn’t it possible, real, that the same will must be found, is here — somewhere — to take up and get on with the job, freedom. Some must have the — crazy — faith to Struggle on. Past the Gereformeerde Kerk pool choppy with winter wind to the house that will be occupied only until November; the outhouse is already empty. The passenger door opens just as Lesego switches off the ignition. — I want to go in and tell Jabu we’ve brought someone. Who…again? — There was a name, mumbled by the authority of the belly. Lesego thinks, Albert-somebody.

Saturday afternoon, Gary Elias and Njabulo in their football shorts and pullovers after the game, sprawled at ease while another sports match on television is vociferous blast. Concentrated by it they don’t hear Gary’s father come into the house. This generation inured to disturbance, muzak the atmosphere, commentary the broadcast chatter in public places, registering only the one side of cell-phone intimacies and banalities. Their aural senses are going to be worn ragged before beards begin to sprout. (Yes. But didn’t you have the Beatles going strong while you studied.) Sindi’s not there — where would she be but absent with her friends on a Saturday. Jabu’s taking notes from tomes dealt out around her — brought home some research from the Centre, concentration stops her ears against noise. She jumps up in welcome and dread. — Was it awful…why isn’t Lesego coming in.—

She gets the signal. Not that the boys would overhear. In the passage he makes for the kitchen but she takes his elbow, there’s the rhythm of chopping something, Wethu must be busy in there. — A man’s in the car — he was hidden by the family he’s been living with in the shacks. He wasn’t among all the other Zims attacked last week but people know where he is and they’re after him, now.—

She’s waiting.

— Lesego doesn’t know right away where to put him.—

Is some suggestion, solution expected from her.

— Lesego’s place isn’t possible, full house, the parents are there. We’ll have to take him.—

Her head is still lifted questioning; but not the unexpected.

— Lesego remembered Wethu’s place. I didn’t want just to walk in on you without a word.—

She turns without one, instead her lips, a quick kiss, not explained.

Lesego and the man came in and were welcome. — Would you like some tea. Or a drink, maybe that’s better. I’m Jabu Reed — our son Gary and his pal. — She’s silenced the sports match.

The stranger now takes off the headgear as the boys titter appreciatively, this is a sharp guy. He sets down the carryall; in this house.

It’s a claim recognised by Jabu. — I’m not going to ask what happened to you, it’s all been — we see it. On TV…the papers, hear the radio… — But the man: become by Lesego, their Zimbabwean. — It’s terrible — our people, whatever our people here feel—

He has a beer and again tells his history, the packer at a wholesale electrical appliance firm, truck driver, fast-food waiter. A dossier, three years of acceptance.

When Lesego swallows the last of his beer — he wasn’t offered his usual red wine, it’s not a usual gathering — and gets up to leave the other does not attempt to follow; it’s understood. But to be sure. — You say I can stay here…Meantime. — He thanks Lesego under Lesego’s dismissing protest.

Jabu appeared with bedding under her arm. — Steve’ll show where you’ll sleep, it’s not part of the house but there’s a bathroom and so on. If you need anything…Supper’ll be late we don’t hurry when there’s no school next day.—

In the brief argot of domestic intimacy — That camp bed, when we went with the Dolphins to the Drakensberg — oh Gary Elias knows where you put it, Gary?—

And then as he leads the stranger out to Wethu’s chicken-house cottage. — Shouldn’t you slip him some clothes, your jeans’ll be best, he’s smaller than you but you wear them tight they won’t be much too big…that shopping bag all he has with him.—

Gary Elias and Njabulo are rounded up by her to find the dismantled camp bed, release its bandy wooden legs in flourishing style and stretch the canvas its length. Gary Elias is roused to a grievance — When can we go camping again, we never go any more. — Any more. Not the distracted moment for a father to remind him what he’s been told, there’s another wilderness of bush Over There; just as the bush that has been his adventure holiday place here is not the Angolan desert, bush, where his mother and father were in the Struggle. So what. That the boy, their boy, my boy, knows the bush as happy adventure, that’s a small gain — in the better life that hasn’t reached people in the shacks, so that they need to defend with fire and panga possession of the scraps of the survival they can’t share.

Over supper for which Wethu had been chopping carrots and celery for the salad everyone listened to stories, accounts of Zimbabwe. When you are twice displaced — first the long rough trial of escape from conflict and hunger bringing your country to ruin, then rejection in a brother country — perhaps it’s a need of unconscious return to sanity symbolic of what was at home — before. What doesn’t exist. Any more. There was the dragged-on palaver over independence and then the fighting years, the battle of the Smith imperialists (that’s the label for them freedom fighters learned) against the African people. But always there was the village with the Christian Brothers school, good teachers, there was the river where the uncles and grandfathers taught you to fish, there was the stick-fighting contest to make men of you, there were the drinking parties and the very old men who told of fighting lions way back. Before, before. There’s the motorbike bought from the white farmer with cash saved, two years’ work on the cattle farm — that’s another skill along with the variety of employments; he’s expert at culling. And he’s explicit, for Gary Elias, on what this means. Wethu ignored him, the Suburb is a place where many friends from the working lives of Baba’s educated daughter, a lawyer, and Steve, a teacher at a university, are brought to this house from time to time. Sindi was spending the night with a schoolfriend, she’d be given the news of the arrival if Wethu could get in first, Sunday morning on return from early church service. Jabu: responsive to the man as if taking part in village occasions he described; and when he spoke of Mugabe, asking pointed questions he evaded. Her lawyerly habit of going into areas of witness confusion between — fear? Residual loyalty in the victim to the power that had turned against its own constituency flesh? She is matter-of-fact. As the meal ended she asked whether the guest wanted to call anyone, perhaps a cell phone was missing in the essentials of the shopping bag and — as her man would be expected to assure — was the geyser in Wethu’s place functioning, hot water for the bath. There was a cheerful goodnight exchange, now in isiZulu, she chanced apparently rightly that in three years the man would have picked up enough of that most widely spoken of many languages in his workplace.

He glances about and picks up the headgear, puts it on his head.

In that place of discarding the happenings of a day along with jeans and underwear. — He said nothing to you about what he left behind in the shack.—