Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

These days Steve and Jabu are invited to rehearsals of the freed talent of writers, actors, singers from whom the opinions of friends are sought, criticism argued. Growing up in the ‘location’ beside the coal mines Jabulile had never seen a play until she was at the students’ Christmas effort at her teachers training college over the border. But her opinion was found worth listening to when one of the comrades’ plays reimagined a setting and social arrangements half-lost or half-ignored in the generation of labour herded down mines or in factories instead of themselves herding their cattle, and the generation that has lived by the edicts of Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Guevara instead of tribal custom. The Dolphin Marc put before her the draft of his play, with its version of the dimension of freedom gained. From her half-rural, half-industrial base, as a background to her transformation first as a revolutionary and then school teacher, she seemed able to believe with certainty that this custom now wouldn’t be followed exactly like that , this reaction to a girl refusing to be sold for a bride price to a man she didn’t want was likely to be different from the submission of the past; a pastor portrayed might not have been a sellout reporting as God’s will a secret ANC meeting of the time in his parish. People who had written out, so to speak, since 1994, inside knowledge of the lives devastated and endured, were publishing in mushroom ventures heroic stories from precolonial legends, appropriating these to their present as Europeans do those of ancient Greece. What the white regime called tribal chiefs now were Traditional Leaders sitting in parliament like any other political party. They too had brought ancient individual authority in languages and territorial fiefdoms to something of a common identity within the powers of government to direct people’s lives. Yet — in the bewilderment — paradox of freedom, who would have thought of it — the Traditional Leaders at least offered the support of observances of conduct that had directed life in some certainty; so — the ancestors are still with the people as they were through humiliation, the racist assaults, the wars; there through eternity. And to whom the people are still responsible? A few traditional Leaders had collaborated with apartheid, given status in reserves for blacks known as Bantustans—‘Bantu’ = people, as in racespeak reference to those areas.

The ex-Bantustan leaders aren’t exactly impimpis from the past in a modern democracy. People are free to recall themselves as they wish, just as the couple Jabulile, Steve, are revolutionaries become citizens. The Constitution confirms it. The normal life, the one that never was.

There’s a hand-delivered envelope, messenger, not post. ‘Steve from Jonathan’.—This’s come. — She hands it to him with a shoulder lift of curiosity. Inside, a printed card with the celebratory scrolls of some occasion. He reads; then reads aloud not so much to her as to himself. It’s an invitation, an invitation to the ‘barmitzvah’ of a son of his brother. The date, the address of a synagogue. — What is this? — He waves the card.

The amazement surprises Jabu, she takes the question literally. — Isn’t it something the Jews do… — Jewish cadres might have referred to it when memories of childhood were exchanged to pass the time between tense preoccupations in the bush.

— To make a boy a man. Like you do with ritual circumcision schools, only it doesn’t hurt.—

Of course she knows his circumcised penis was done when he was a baby.

— It’s a religious ceremony, isn’t it?—

— What is this? Jonny, Alan and I were snipped at my mother’s whim, I suppose, that’s all Jonny can claim for the religion, just as our father introduced us to Father Christmas not Jesus on the cross. What’s got into him .—

— Maybe his wife wants it. — Brenda, the one who embraced her so enthusiastically when she was introduced to the family.

— Why should she, not Jewish, is she. Not so far as I know, I’ve been away from them so long. — He slides his mobile out of his pocket. — I’m going to ask him what’s it all about.—

— No, Stevie no — She’s beguiling, her hand on his wrist, there’s a mock tussle, always good to grasp one another but he prevails.

Jonathan has an evasive easy answer for his brother who surely knows him well even if different politics meant they were out of touch during the years when Steve disappeared from family life. — I think Ryan is happy with the idea.—

But what, whose? Why shift it onto the child.

— Well…we didn’t have much idea who we were, when we were kids, did we, Andrew and Pauline didn’t seem to think it mattered, then.—

— The human race.—

Oh yes, the Leftist in the family; knows the answer we got wrong. We businessmen golf players — except that the black president plays golf now.

— Whatever. Did we know the difference between our mother and father. I don’t remember anyone telling us. Andrew Christian Pauline Jewish, and us…—

— Did categories matter.—

— Stevie, there’s so much that has, if you’re going to talk about categories. Everything you were was decided just like that. It isn’t enough to be black or white, finish and klaar , the way it was, in the bad old days — you belong somehow to something closer…more real, you can, it’s possible…right.—

Muslim girls, daughters of Indians themselves third- or fourth-generation South African; he sees them on campus, buttock-sculpted pants, asserting breasts, high heels, film-star faces, and heads shrouded to the shoulders in widow’s black cloth.

— You’ll come. — His brother spoke with assurance.

— Love, you don’t have to. — He had told her.

— But of course I’m coming — and then — You don’t want me to. — It was not a question but an accusation, were there still situations in his life where she would be considered out of place. (Were there any likely in her life where he might be.)

He gently denied the ridiculous. — Just don’t want you to be subject to this kind of thing.—

Jabu consulted Brenda about what to wear; the outfit she’d be expected to by her father elder in his church, on a special occasion in the calendar of worship? He would give the eye of approval, according to the season, to modest summer dresses or skirt, blouse and jacket, Western style, like the three-piece Sunday suit he wore although Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the Anglican Church had introduced traditional African robes in which he even danced down the aisle as part of church services.

— African! Your lovely skirts and those beaded collars.—

— Do you cover your heads?—

— Oh no, your hairdo looks marvellous. The Jews and Africans are such ancient people, they both had their special get-up for women, yours’s great, but thank God we won’t be likely to have anyone arrive wearing wigs.—

— Women had to wear wigs? Over their hair?—

— Their heads were shaved. I’ve picked up all about this while Ryan’s been at school to the yeshiva , that’s religious school, like the Muslims’ madressa .—

She has a maze of pathways round and across her head. You trip over pavement hairdressers in the city but hers is achieved in some fancy salon she goes to. What women will allow to be done to themselves. Fashion; or conformity. What’s in fashion’s a conformity of some kind? I loved her first with the busy halo of African hair she had. To my hand it was the hair at the place I go into her.

He wears a hat borrowed from Jake, although it turns out there are skull caps laid ready at the entrance to the place of worship they’ve been given on the invitation instructions to reach. They are led in by a young man who takes his function ceremoniously, hesitating before the rows of seats, indicating the best choice. The synagogue is large, high-ceiling but without the elaborations of a church of such proportions, no graven images, bare of chapels where special favours are asked of this saint or that, like highly qualified doctors specialising in different pardons, benedictions, solutions for various spiritual conditions. It is simple in spacious lack of distraction from the only focus, the curtains behind which there must be something holy hidden, on the far wall above a platform with a discreet pulpit-podium to one side.