No Time Like the Present: A Novel (10 page)

The talent-spotting eminence, Senior Counsel who in her first years at the Justice Centre moved on appointed as a judge, had not been mistaken in casually recognising her potential. Her quick capability in providing preparatory work for the Centre’s advocates became noticed in court and she was several times approached by lawyers from commercial firms whether perhaps she was available part-time to take on Assistant Defence in one of their Common Law cases. Whether this was influenced by the fact that she was black as well as a woman would show the adherence of the firm, Abdillah Mohamed, Brian McFarlane & Partners or Cohen, Hafferjee, Viljoen & Partners, to standards of transformation of the legal profession from whites only status, was of no account so long as it was being put into practice. What was of account was that the Justice Centre, knowing it was conviction to defend the exploited that kept this bright and conscientious attorney from going into commercial practice, gave her leave to take part in private legal work now and then. The earnings at a Constitutional Rights organisation are a matter of commitment in comparison with what a lawyer can earn in commercial practice.

She might have stayed on at the firm where she was articled after she abandoned teaching at the Catholic Fathers’ School; just when he left the paint business and went into education. Hers would have been a choice of money over what had decided her concept of being alive since her recruitment to freedom struggle, the induction through detention in a prison. As generations of uncles and brothers from Baba’s extended family had been imprisoned for walking the streets of the city without the passbook in their pocket. But the choice—chance—now to engage as a lawyer honestly enough, without depriving the Justice Centre or herself of dedication, meant some resources to meet the expenses, mouths gaping for money, of the nuclear family life in the Suburb. Steve and back-up Peter Mkize, who had once been a motor mechanic before
Umkhonto we Sizwe
(and proved a usefully skilled cadre in the transport vehicle deficiencies of a guerrilla army) decided that her car was a write-off dangerously unreliable and selected for her to buy one that had safety features, fancy locks, she couldn’t be expected to think she’d have need of, was more pricey than she thought right for her limit of acquisition. But school fees were raised—that should be, she and Steve agreed if teachers are to be paid adequately in private schools even while those in state schools must be supported in their demands against miserable reward as if they were the least important factors in a ‘developing country’, United Nations-speak for one with no man’s land between the heights of the rich and the poverty swamps.

Education. That’s Steve’s department isn’t it, in the partnership of ideals with love and sexual fulfilment and the pledge of children, which is the mystery called marriage. There’s rock beneath their feet, below the different work each does; their common beliefs. He waves her off to test-drive with all this between them in his smiling confidence and in her recognition of his supervision for her safety. What is love? You learn only as you go along. It’s not what overwhelmed at the beginning…Any more than you would have thought of hijacking (everyday on the roads now) as part of freedom; but you should’ve because there could be consequences of freedom not succeeding—not possible to in less than one generation? Not accepting the revolutionary ways and means to achieve the closure, historically vast as Space itself, between the rich and poor in human span as opposed to eternity.

He knows. She’s said it fondly many times, he thinks too much. Better just get on with it. His thesis has been published in a scientific journal. He’s still the Lefty in the Faculty—yes Leftover from the Struggle in his attitudes towards the orientation of the university. Always arranging seminars interdisciplinary on this aspect or that, the relation of academics to students, some process of new learning for both; while some white academics have spent half a lifetime in research of one nature or another, both as students and in honoured posts at universities abroad in the world, École Normale, Universität Hamburg, Institute of Advanced Studies Boston, St John’s Oxford, Japan, God knows where else students haven’t heard of. Assistant Professor Reed and his Comrade coterie are surely encouraged by the appointment of a professor from another country on the African continent to the Chair of Economics—some sort of tentative towards recognising cultural interdependence not as customarily defined with Europe and the USA. The economist, with his Oxford degrees and accent, was in academic rank more on that of the old guard round coffee, even though in elaborate West African dress and embroidered cap. He warmed his manner of speech with expressions, slipped into locutions from his own people’s usage, and drank with the Steve coterie, initiated to the bar where they met. At Steve’s house he was jauntily delighted to find the man had a black wife—apparently the sexual mores if not the taboos of the past in this country were still in his mind. He immediately started addressing Jabu in his own African tongue as if somehow she must understand; a verbal embrace just between the two of them. It was a compliment to her. She looked round to the others crowded on the tiny terrace, the place of welcome, as if someone did, could understand—there was a burst of laughter from Peter Mkize—He’s making a praise song, how beautiful you are, your eyes, your—

—Don’t let’s go into details any further.—It was one of the Dolphins, cupping his palms and giving a curving thrust of the pectorals.

—How’d you know what he was saying—

—I don’t, we know she’s a beauty, don’t we, she’s got features.—

The brother from another part of the continent lowered his eyes on himself and moved his fine head in confirmation or sophisticated contrition. Everyone agreed he was an acquisition to the university; congratulatory, as if Steve had had something to do with the appointment. But it was most probable that it was through Professor Nduka that students from countries on the African continent were accepted for registration at the university; they can afford to pay the fees or are protégés of some international foundation that does, unlike the country’s own youth, who do not have enough either of money or scholarships; ‘the university is open to all’, Steve mouths the quote to Jabu. She will be thinking even if she doesn’t say as she did before, What are you going to do about it. Act. Act. He and the others of the group at the university who are again questioned: How do you promote the integrated culture of the institution in its identity as African with appointment of a Nigerian as head of a department—and march in protest with the men and women of our people who can’t afford to pay for a place in higher education.

If some churches still outcast homosexuals the theatre celebrated the opening night of Marc’s play, at last, having been rewritten by him in its successive versions, to his satisfaction. Like Jabu’s Baba, Marc has his philosophical clip to serve all circumstances: Tell it like it is.

The Developed World has been used to this probably since the Oscar Wilde trial (although he only said he had nothing to declare but his genius—not that he had nothing to declare but his love that dare not speak its name), but in the Developing World homosexuality has been a titillating subject for insinuating patter by stand-up comedians in sleazy night clubs, not a theme for the theatre.

Jabu is at the opening with one of the lawyers for whom she is what she calls ‘on loan’ from the Justice Centre in a child custody case; Steve was to be at a dinner for a visiting scientist that night. The play, which Steve and Jabu had been elected to read as a duty of their objectivity as well as privilege in its early versions, is very different in the dimension of performance, real voices and bodies. Live, it is seen to shirk the temptation of reverse claims, superiority above heterosexual relationships; if there are no wife-beatings and female ball-busting emasculation in this other sexual love relation, there is jealousy, betrayal and—a characteristic or irreverent teasing laughter, at one another, over all.

There was no interval so after the end the audience lingered in the foyer and bar to talk about the play and the full-frontal style of performance. Jabu felt a gentle tweak at one of her piled-up locks—Alan is there, behind her.

—Have you ditched my brother, who’s the guy?—

She’s worldly enough now to answer in kind.—Why should I do such a thing, a man from a family as distinguished as you Reeds.—She introduces him to her lawyer colleague. Like the temptation to mention a present malady to a doctor one meets, for a free consultation, Alan takes the opportunity to interrupt enthusiastic exchanges about the performance, in the spirit of Marc’s clip.—D’you think gay marriage is going to be legalised? What’s the talk among you male—and female—members of the profession.—An intimate cosy tip of the head acknowledges Jabu as among them.

—I should say it’s inevitable, but who can predict how soon.—

—Sooner or later, then.—That’s all the information you get for free: the unspoken, Alan feels he shares in amusement with Jabu. He won’t embarrass her by harassing the lawyer.

The performance perhaps creates a certain atmosphere along with the air-conditioning that allows frankness and wit. She asks playfully—You thinking of getting married?—

Alan gives her a little—hush there—hug.

Home, just past the church that usually exudes light and the latest digital recording, dark and silent, the pool in reflected streetlight the only open eye.

Steve is already in bed, arrived before her. He wants to hear all that he’s missed. She has questions that come to her, she wants to ask—sits on the bed pushing his book out of the way and they talk as if she were an animated guest walked in.—I can’t explain—it hit so hard, I don’t think I was the only one who saw how there’re ways we don’t even know we show prejudice, hurt them, maybe friends, our friends—comrades…our own. The pool was shiny when I passed, just now…And how they laugh at everything that happens to them. It was so funny, the play. I didn’t realise how they do this, when we read it.—

—Laugh at themselves.—

—Yes! At themselves.—

—Look, if you can do it you’re safe from what others say about you, your jokes quash their jeers, you poke fun at yourself and make a tough hide of it, the disgust and disdain just blunt themselves against it.—

Later when she had shed the evening experience along with her clothes and was in bed, the place in life each shared with nobody else.—If your people—Somehow this was not an attribution of separateness that was ever used by them, neither in naming his mother Pauline, Andrew, Alan, Jonathan, Brenda—the Reeds—nor her father’s gathering of Gumede collaterals, the broods black and white recalled in their familial clan relationships.—If blacks sometimes could do the same…Now that the old law is on the rubbish heap. Take up the small arms, you get what I mean, instead of the cowhide shields the waving
assegais
, the traditional show of identity, dignity against the white crap that’s still thrown at them—But at once he catches himself out. A correcting groan.—How can anyone compare a situation where you and your people have been used as a blank to be filled in with another people’s notion of what a human being is. Compare with the ridiculous—who should give a damn about who does which with what and to whom. In bed.—

She is down-mouthed smiling at her Steve, he doesn’t see, in their dark. He didn’t say ‘who should give a fuck about’.

As each practised the professions they might perhaps not have chosen if different youthful ambitions had not been put on hold by the Struggle, and in the aftermath freedom, overcome by necessities of private living, they often had obligations outside daily working schedules, hours each spent without the other. Hers, representing real advancement of what was better than ambition: fulfilment of her place in that basis of what’s called the New Dispensation, the law; his without the sense of common action in an alternative to the old confines of education, hers alternative to the defence of justice confined to those who can afford legal representation. She was embattled in the accepted opposition between prosecution and defence in court, but she’s at one with the colleagues, at her level the attorneys, and the advocates whom they serve, as she was among comrades in the Struggle. Even if most of the lawyers in the commercial firm she was ‘lent’ to had been fellow travellers onlooking from home, all are committed to justice now. In the laboratory, in his seminars, he served his academic purpose of imparting knowledge and skills; when the information notice that he was available to students in his room brought timid bewildered ones or cocky aggressive ones to his door, and the bridging classes which he and what remained of his like-minded academics persisted with the band-aid to school education he gave his obstinate best effort and encouragement. But in the faculty room he was in a coterie of the present among the structures of the past, fuming inwardly against the coffee machine’s mantra, the rites of scholarly self-esteem rising in fragrant steam. There were scientific conferences he attended to educate himself, faculty dinners for visiting research scholars he was invited to on the strength of his thesis being accepted by the university—the Vice Chancellor’s speech-making pride in the Department of Science, its choice for association by scientists prominent in astrophysics and the twenty-first century conception of the nature of the universe.

As well as formal gatherings of the legal profession, Jabu had restaurant lunch quite often with this or that partner of one of the commercial legal practices she happened to be working for temporarily. She would put her hand on her stomach that evening, not wanting to eat again when she sat at the table with the meal she and Wethu had put together to feed the children and Steve, his lunch having been a snack in a fast-food chain favoured by his students.

At her pauses in the day she and table companions would be occupied in shop talk, analysis of what had taken place in court; he and his students, along with their pizza, argued over how the university was or was not meeting their expectations.

As the muscular image of a professional sports player develops a certain conformation so Jabu’s image went through certain changes. Though her hair was the African crown of braided patterns and locks that was the general assertion of traditional African aesthetics reinstated in the free woman, she has as if unnoticed by herself begun to adopt the other traditional convention of female freedom, the informal but well-cut pants and jackets of professional men. This was an outward expression of something…an impression she had managed or been given a synthesis between the working relevance of the past and the present; which Steve had not.

Return from the daily separation of preoccupations is not only to the children as the core of the personal living state. It’s to the Suburb; it was with Jake, Isa, the Mkizes and other comrades who renewed contact that there was in place, space claimed to consider, with confidence of mutual experience and understanding, what they had envisaged to be achieved. What was happening in the country. Even the occupants of the old Gereformeerde Kerk that would have consigned their kind to condemnation were interested in the secular concern with the aftermath of the struggle for freedom in which they hadn’t taken active part, although some of their orientation, white and black, had been revolutionaries, comrades in prison and in the bush. The playwright Marc, probably researching for certain aspects of a new play in mind, brought dramatic first-hand accounts about what was not being done about the degradation of black workers existing in conditions worse than the ‘white farmer keeps his pigs’—it was Marc who confronted the Dolphins to see beyond the particular discrimination against themselves. Sunday’s permanent invitation for Jake, Isa, the Mkizes, Jabu, Steve and everyone’s kids to come to the pool became socially political amid the cult repartee and affectionate dunkings of the commune.

These—Suburb family occasions, public rather than private, were in a sense, guarded. While decisions taken by the government that affected everyone, taxes, health insurance, crime, were talked about with criticism of cabinet ministers and ridicule mimicry of some politicians livened the exchanges, laughter all round, there were aspects of these matters Jake, Isa, the Mkizes, Jabu, Steve, did not speak of. Did not offer, as if by political vows like Masonic vows. When they were alone together in the house of this one or that, the same matters were under a light different from that reflected by the pool.

Kinship of prison and bush between the comrades, tentacle within, this was a meaning of their lives that could not be erased. They had known rivalry for esteem, nose-picking habits, farts, hard to tolerate cheek-by-jowl in the tent and the cell, jealous sexual tensions when there were women comrades among them, all the human shortcomings, faults and passions; but outreached, outdistanced by the Struggle. Alone together now they could remark on veniality from inside, informative experience, signs it was always there, in this high government official, the cut-throat determination of this Under Minister to oust that Minister, the question why so-and-so, whose pathetic lack of capabilities comrades all knew too well, had been given the leg-up in a ministry while so-and-such, comrade of brains and integrity, seemed to be sidelined onto some minor committee chair.

These were not facts and doubts for Sunday morning gossip.

But the family of the same Shaik was continuing to appear in the newspapers in connection with the arms deals. The first democratic government had formed a Department of Defence Strategic Arms Acquisition Programme, on the principle that the country needed to strengthen its defence booty inherited in defeat of the apartheid army’s force. Corvettes, submarines, utility and marine helicopters, fighter trainers and advanced fighter aircraft went out for tender in the world with the proviso that foreign arms manufacturers promise to invest in the country and create employment. The Shaik name—family of brothers, Shabir, Yunus known as Chippy, Mo—is a front-page staple in the news since the delivery of arms under contract has been in progress for more than five years. There had been something called an Audit Steering Committee, and then the government signed this Arms Deal as a necessary expenditure of billions. A Shaik was a member of the steering committee.

—Who the hell is Chippy Shaik, anyway?—

—Here it is, you’ve just read, ‘Director of procurement in the Defence Force’ when the ‘irregularities’ in contracts to subcontractors now under investigation were awarded. No—but as cadre in
Umkhonto
. What
was
he.—Jake answering himself with the grimace of culpable lapsed memory.

There were so many levels of activity in the Movement (that other euphemism, this one for the Struggle). Some would have been familiar with the deployment, whatever, of Shaik, but along with Jake, Steve and Jabu weren’t.

Trust Peter Mkize.—Doesn’t matter. Shaik turns out now, eh, to be financial adviser of our Deputy President Jacob Zuma. You’ve seen what’s come from the Auditor General’s report, the cost of the deal in billions far higher than the government’s figure and nobody can say what the final costs might be—why? Something like ‘industrial offsets’.
Eish!
—

Steve knows what everybody in the outside world takes for granted.—The arms trade is the dirtiest of them all. ‘Industrial offsets’—that’ll be investments and trade opportunities that tender sinners promise to advance for the good of the country. Arms dealers know they can forget about these obligations. Their bribes to ministers?—government officials who decide tender awards.—

Jake snatches from him like a flag—That’s sufficient contribution to development of the country!—

The complex Shaik kin keeps being unravelled.—Zuma’s financial adviser’s brother Shabir got the arms deal contract although it was twice the price of another tender, of equal standard—

—Whose pocket took in the bribes—The refrain.

—If the deal ever does come to court we might—

—Zuma as President elect—as if the President will ever—

There’s a lawyer among them.—He was arraigned. And he appeared in court on another charge—of rape.—She was present when he did, and was declared not guilty.

The Suburb comrades follow the beginning of what is apparently an era in the aftermath of revolution attained.

—With apartheid we were the pariah of the world, with freedom we become what we never were, we’re part of the democratic world. Corruption doesn’t disqualify. It’s everywhere.—That’s Steve.

Jabu is withdrawn as if among strangers.

He interprets, from her manner of response lately to ordinary happenings: angry when a pot of food she’s not checked soon enough threatens to have dried away the gravy, chastising herself by tugging at her scalp with recalcitrant braids when she’s at the mirror in the morning, and at her self-accused carelessness at letting her car run out of petrol so that a colleague had to fetch a can from a service station before she could drive home from the Centre. At times when they are alone together she will get up abruptly, a gesture of rejection of some TV commentator, leave the room; on other occasions she will be so eye-to-eye with the image and so tense against what is being said she ignores what she is usually alert to against all other registers of her attention, conversation, music—the racket of some trouble between Sindi and Gary Elias. He sees, feels approaching, pressing upon him like her flesh against him in their intimacy, that Jabu is affronted and disturbed, beyond his own reaction.

She does not say much when he looks up from the newspaper—D’you see this—‘Zuma allegedly solicited a 500,000 a year bribe’ from the French company that won the contract to supply some equipment for corvettes. Shabir Shaik’s company was the French’s black empowerment partner—

—Why do we do what the whites do in their countries. What business is it of ours. We aren’t their black colonies any more.—

He noted but did not misunderstand the juxtaposition in opposition, whites and blacks; ‘we’ excluding him, her man, from its solidarity identity. Jabu is shamed by the betrayal of blacks, of whom she is one, by themselves; although racism is no part of her life, finally proven by the existence of her own two children?

Gary Elias’s periods of the year spent with his grandfather are regular, pleasures not outgrown as his activities and interests at home in the city, school and Suburb grow. At least once among the school holiday visits his dad came along with his mother to deliver him to the village and pay his own respects: husband of the daughter not only of the Elder of the Methodist Church and headmaster of the school, but of the family commune. While he drove Jabu mentioned in undertone, they wouldn’t bring up the subject of Zuma during the visit. Her father had known Zuma well, was associated with him way back while he was MEC for Economic Affairs and Tourism in the KwaZulu Natal provincial government.

Steve had thought the arms deal was exactly the subject to engage, of interest to everyone in the village. Her father who always directed the conversation among those who gathered with him, wife and extended family in welcome, did not mention it, and authority emanating from him as naturally as he breathed, no one did. There was much else to exchange. Two lively cousins Gary’s age were urged to tell about the science laboratory equipment that had been donated to the headmaster’s school by some Norwegian foundation—this news produced in recognition of Steve as a man of science, must be a professor.—The Education Minister was here himself with the Norwegian Ambassador, you have met the Education Minister, Jabulile?—No limits to the level of achievements won for this daughter he had somehow instructed even when she was in prison. Everyone, including the survivor of Jabu’s two grandmothers, carried in respect tenderly to a chair, went to see Gary Elias playing goalkeeper with the style of his triumphs in the junior team at school. The comrade’s advice has been right, the boy was no longer a reluctant spectator of sport—Jabu exchanged a look away from the leaping catch of the ball, at Steve, in their acknowledgement. He spoke his acquired isiZulu and those around celebrated in applause for both him and his son. At a signal from Jabu’s mother food was carried in a procession of pots and bowls and there was bottled beer as well as a calabash of home brew her father had learnt was much to Steve’s liking.

These visits passing the grandson from one home to what is another have coaxed his son out of his temperament of withdrawal into open security, a belonging that before existed only in his blood. A child’s secret example of Tutu’s truth and reconciliation?

And the timing of this visit seemed to have brought assurance to Jabu, she chattered all the way back to the city, the Suburb. She was recounting stories, events from her childhood in the place in the world they had just left; what, so young, she hadn’t recognised as rivalries between the Elder’s pious congregation, the in-house power struggles with the heavy presence of the relatives in their thatched annexes, the skill with which she’d understood later, her mother managed not to be totally extinguished by her father; while this daughter belonged—chose to be—only to him.

If the question of Jacob Zuma’s relationship with Shabir Shaik didn’t surface at her father’s house, it is raised where politics are also sidled round tactfully by Jonathan and Brenda, out of respect for commitments they don’t share with the combination of Steve and his wife, though they had warmed to and always welcome her personally. On the Reed mother’s eightieth birthday, a party is in progress at Jonathan’s house. It is Jabu who’s given time and thought to with what present Steve should honour his mother on what would be recognised with ancestral respect in the church Elder’s community. Someone addresses in kindly attention as to one who would be concerned—What’s going to be done about this corruption stuff that’s coming out. How serious is it—or just infighting, like all governments?—