Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

— What d’you mean.—

— There’s a girl with a baby, she suddenly found a photograph pushed it at him for the bag, in tears.—

— Her father’ll take care of them. Her, the baby. — She knows that. He knows that. It’s the circumstances of generations in KwaZulu, Baba’s village and thousands of villages, the eternity of colonialism, doesn’t matter whose, the recency of its apartheid evolution, Bantustans, and its circumstance now in freedom. You have to eat. The men go off to the industries, the factory farms of chickens, wine, and Baba and magogo are left with care of the wives and children conceived when the men come home on leave, with money. It’s their emigration. She’s known it; this form, all through her childhood, her companions grew up in the absence of fathers. Even though she was by chance the exception, her father: the headmaster, in place.

The present is a consequence of the past.

Including the newspaper cuttings she found.

She and he have the same intense conception of horror at the degradation to violence people have descended against Zimbabweans. She, he — poverty is what it’s about, again and again, reality that’s avoided under the useful ‘xenophobia’. If they didn’t share this as they do within them their lives in the Struggle, their ultimate relation in love with one another wouldn’t remain intact.

He sees now with this disaster come indoors to them right in the Suburb, enclave of human variety where at last race, colour, gender are simply communal, that she has an ancestral surety he hasn’t, never will. They— hers —have known and know how to survive what his antecedents never experienced.

The end product of colonial masters in Africa even if he’s redeemed himself in Umkhonto .

If he’d been born a generation earlier and in Europe, that capillary thread of Jewish blood from — a maternal grandmother was it — could have resulted for him in that other kind of ancestral surety, known and knowing how to survive escape extinction, Holocaust.

All this crowds, remote, out of mind, what is going to happen is happening in the present to everyone everywhere, the whole planet. Nature’s holocaust coming with the effects of pollution. And the result of this human self-destruction, or — some scientists/philosophers say, a recurring phenomenon over the existence of planet Earth — climate change to destroy the resources of life.

The man in Wethu’s chicken-coop cottage is also of course a ward of Suburb comrades — some answer against the inevitable shame and revulsion the impact of ‘xenophobia’ his situation brings among them. At least the humiliation of charity can be relieved while he is there — the idea Blessing might give him some sort of job in her catering venture, which is doing rather well, was offered — and then realised by everyone as unsafe for him, among her staff there could be resentment at a Zimbabwean being employed when they had brothers and sisters out of work. The Dolphins while assuring him he’d be welcome to swim but brrr water was still too early spring cold, asked if he would be willing to help with the clean-out of the pool they did at this time of year, and he was enabled to earn something from joining this task with them. Isa had put off the need to have two shabby rooms painted and here was the opportunity of employing someone to do it. No one wanted shelter to be a handout; though when Jabu passed Albert a clip of banknotes in concern of needs of the baby whose photograph he had among his few essentials, he took the money with a curt thank you of something owed. Wethu did not object to his occupying, for the time being, her cottage, while keeping him aware that this was by her permission; although— that night — she hadn’t been asked by Jabu. She took for granted he’d take his evening meal with him from the kitchen to his borrowed quarters although he had his mealie-meal, bread and tea with her in that kitchen when the family had gone to work and school; but Jabu made the statement of laying a sixth place at table while she and Wethu prepared dinner.

How long would he, could he stay.

November.

The man had some unexplained inner assurance — couldn’t be questioned about? Things would settle down in the shacks, he who had been living there with the people, three years, a South African woman and a child his compact with a life just as theirs (he determinedly would nod in agreement with whatever his own assurance was) he would go back. Soon. It will be all right. Soon.

Every week there’s another collection of shacks crowding to be a settlement, identified popularly if on no map, by the name of a Struggle hero and taking up another kind of struggle against people from over frontiers. In some areas the problem was solved by Better Life development as an industrial zone or country club, then it’s everyone out.

Soon. November. There’ll be no Wethu cottage. The new owners will move in. — They didn’t buy a Zimbabwean bonsella with the price.—

Confronting Jabu and himself. This kind of farewell.

The Mkizes, no. Jake and Isa…take him in; take him on?

She’s looking at discovery — The Dolphins. — The words don’t have a questioning lilt.

But how does she know these things; he has nothing less demanding to offer — for the meantime, which is any time between when the man thinks he can go back to his wife and child in the shack, and when there’ll be a Zimbabwe fit to return to.

Only Dolphins Donnie and Brian are at home, indoors with the newspapers and their glasses of good Cape Pinotage before a pinecone fire for the beauty of it, winter’s nearly over. Brian is a telecommunications expert who often has feasted them his other expertise, his jambalaya since they moved in to their welcome in the Suburb.

— No problem! There’s only junk we should throw out anyway since Marc’s got himself a wifey, it used to be his studio, he called it, but you know he’s never painted, no Picasso or Sekoto, always wrote plays there, he’s said he’d come to work back there in peace — whatever that tells the tale about life with Claire — we’ll just need a bed, if you have a spare—

They will have everything to spare of beds, tables, cupboards, chairs, freezer, TV — no, the new living-room widescreen will go along with furniture Wethu should have, perhaps Baba might like to give away the desks, keep his daughter’s, for himself — when transport is arranged, time come for her to go to KwaZulu. Soon.

When that time comes, if ‘meantime’ still needs it, the Dolphins will shelter the man with the topknot crown of city pavements. Imagine the ghosts/ghouls of the old Gereformeerde congregation: the sinful moffies in God’s house — now they even have a black man to bugger. Who’s thinking this, himself or others when Steve tells them the Zimbabwean will not be cast to the streets…

Autumn of parties, in summer. An ending.

The children are possessed by TV–Land, somewhere. He and she are on the stoep, that’s what the terrace was called when the house was built in the forties, as the Dolphins’ pool-house was the Gereformeerde Kerk before there came about a comrade takeover. Eyelids of light open upon the Suburb from houses on another hill, the conversation is that of cicadas rubbing legs together. But watchface glanced at in half-dark — they’re expected for another of the unacknowledged farewells. At Jake’s now.

They’re tardy. The comrades, Blessing and Peter, the Dolphins with their sexual renegade Marc and his honorary Dolphin woman — the comrades have been drinking before the arrival. Jake’s trying out one of the new vintages from an old well-known vineyard taken over by German (or are they Chinese) entrepreneurs with the precaution of one of the new black capitalists drawn in as a partner. — Why should whites own the wine resources as they do the mines — and there’re high voices in the ANC Youth none of the prosperous white oldsters are hearing yet — toyi-toying, calling for gold, diamonds, platinum industry to be nationalised. — Jake is even more loquacious than usual rather than drunk on this experimental Pinotage, unstoppable, uninterruptable (if there isn’t such a word there ought to be).