No Time Like the Present: A Novel (12 page)

What to do was to make a meal for the two on their return, persuade Isa she was hungry although she didn’t know it. She first refused the panacea, a vodka or wine—Steve and Jabu didn’t have whisky in their house (Jake and Isa’s tipple). Then when Jabu brought in a plate of spaghetti and some bottled tomato and basil sauce she’d found, Isa helped herself to wine with some unconscious instinct of her usual resilience available. Jabu said she would spend the night with her.—Oh I know you would, I know—Comrade: that remains more than a friend.—You mustn’t…I’ll take one of the kids in bed with me…don’t worry. I’m not alone.—The Reeds would drive the children to their schools on Monday morning along with the Reed children, that’s understood.

Steve walks Isa and children to their house as if it were not the familiar two blocks around the corner.

Gary Elias was ‘sleeping over’ at a school friend’s. Sindiswa has begun menstruating this year already and the change in her body, barely any sign of breasts yet, has taken her out of the security of happy childhood—and it was one, from the time she lay kicking on the balcony, Glengrove Place, and the motorcycle tore up the sky like a sheet of paper—to an inkling in herself of the happenings adults have to find the way, what to do about, instead of having this done for them by parents. She is a reader and Jake—Jake’s the one who lends her books he thinks she will like, enter into the imagination he senses there in her, not books she ought to read (as Steve sometime presses on her). The young shouldn’t be exposed to the horror of violence coming so close, although it is round them in this city, this country, the world they know at the remove of its mirror TV screen entertainment; Isa has thought it best now to tell all the children, her own and the Reeds, of the kind of injury Jake has and that he was hijacked.

As they prepare to go to bed, in the absence of Wethu, Steve, Jabu, Sindiswa washing the day’s dishes, Sindi breaks in.—Everything’s tied, I mean, to your spine, I’ve seen it on a chart…will his legs and arms work if it’s broken somewhere…?—Her father’s in the science department at the university, he will say,

—I don’t know enough about the intricate nerves in the spinal column—I’ll talk to the medical school professor on Monday. Maybe if the fracture is at the neck this will affect mainly the upper part of the body.—And although she’s almost grown-up, he doesn’t add, the brain.

Jake spent weeks in hospital and finally in rehabilitation before he regained memory, spoke—could use his hands; walk. Sympathy bored Jake, family had to show love by other means (his younger son did a wicked cartoon of his father as a puppet, nurses pulling him about). Comrades were expected to know, however terrible, unforgivable the attack on him had been:—My turn.—Wryly with the twitch of grimace smile; the comrade knew he, Jake, sees that bullet in his column of life was return fire,
eish!
For all the bullets that killed, yes, the always-cited times, 1976, the ’50s, ’60s, ’80s, the Trek way back in 1820, how limit the past?—and the shortfall in delivery of fought-for promises by freedom. Peter Mkize present at the bedside of Jake in hospital visiting hour, his brother hacked up among the meat for the apartheid army men’s
braai
, thrown into the river.

During the weeks that Jake is absent there is something that couldn’t have been expected. Among Jake’s
Umkhonto
comrades there was uneasy talk that someone among them ought to be with Isa, but it seemed no one could shelve other, their peacetime personal attachments, for an indeterminate time. A veterans’ association was approached to ask if there was not some woman who’d been a cadre, a woman like herself, who could stay with Jake’s wife in support for a while; no one found.

It was a Dolphin. Marc the theatre-man, playwright, who unannounced moved in with Isa and the children. Not cross-dressed, a woman like herself. A human like herself. A man from the church swimming pool. Sunday mornings.

At the night-table on Steve’s side of the bed Steve lay with his mobile, that other form of communication, a book he’d just been given by its translator, Lesego from African Studies. A book of African fables IZINGANEKWANE-IZINTSOMI, with the kinds of truth fable carries. The quaint mode of understanding stays with him in his closing down to sleep. The Dolphin and Isa. This is another fable; out of the violence, some way the country is supposed to be, now, somehow come about. You don’t have to be a cadre of
Umkhonto
to be a comrade. A new identity in what’s called freedom.

Professor Goldstein, head of Faculty, is over-occupied with vital financial problems, equipment replacement and what some of his staff feel is their work overload, to accept an academic invitation he would wish to, abroad. Assistant Professor Steve Reed has been chosen by the department to attend a conference on the presence of toxins in industrial production, domestic products, the food industry, cosmetics, as part of a series of international environmental studies. He was unbelieving; surprised that he was to be the delegate: Jabu surprised that he thought so little of himself.—Of course it’s you, it’s up your street, and look at all the extra work you take on for the students, the university—who else in the department—

She sees the appointment from his and her political mindset: the opportunities of students to have him bring back to them advances in their right to contemporary knowledge.

But this is a scientific conference not one concerned with social justice…except, it can be supposed, elimination of toxins from unaware inhalation, ingestion, is some wider form of the mantra justice for all…

He has the address of the London hotel where the delegates will be living and gets himself delivered by a taxi from Heathrow. The programme brochure for delegates asks that they call the host organisation on arrival. The foyer is lively with other arrivals introducing themselves to one another or greeting acquaintances with exclamations as if these had come from Mars rather than the distance of some past conference; he doesn’t know anyone in this batch, wouldn’t know with whom to begin introducing himself, and takes his key card for an assigned room. The receptionist addressed him from a checklist of reservations as Professor, well, Assistant Prof. is rather a mouthful but plain Mr probably doesn’t do for conference protocol.

He dumps his bag on the bed: a double, as giving the message that two inhabitants were expected. Hotel rooms like detention cells are so accustomed to a succession of occupants that they have their special air of belonging to no one, ready for anything that might occur along an experience of many kinds. People have made love in them, fought in them, died in them. He took out a folder of newspaper cuttings he’d thought might be useful but too messy for his briefcase and tossed the few clothes he’d provided himself with on the bow-legged chair. The style of this cell is a disguise, old English, nice enough. What’s next is to follow the instruction to report himself to a Doctor Lindsey Wilson at the institute’s headquarters.—Your name please.——Steven Reed.—The usual interval for connection then a woman’s voice, young voice, high-English, confidently casual—Professor Steven Reed, you are here, already in the hotel, welcome.—

—Thank you. I’m supposed to speak to Doctor Lindsey Wilson—

—I am Lindsay Wilson.—Laughing.

—Sorry, I thought a man—

—And sorry to disappoint you—

—The name—

—Oh I know, but it’s also a girl’s name, just a slight difference in the spelling.—

They are both laughing at him.—I didn’t know the difference.—

Where I come from.

The customary exchanges about the flight, long but OK comfortable, yes, the hotel all right?—and there’s to be transport for the delegates to the welcoming drinks gathering at the time in the programme, see you then.

She is as she sounded, this female Lindsay. Between the instructions to men mostly older than him, and the few women of generations who have followed Marie Curie’s breakthrough into the profession of science, she is the facilitator, a type of straight slippery-haired blonde that is the icon of the present’s aesthetic for their sex. Many have that ideal of a fall of yellow silk that is down this one’s back. In the crowd even
he
finds himself with someone he’s met before, Professor Alvaro from Cuba who once had been brought to South Africa by the Cuban Embassy with a visiting cultural group from Havana: comrade. Not here as comrades but in another identity, despite their special greeting embrace of recognition in a place where handshakes and token slaps on the back are the ritual.

She, the woman official who introduced him, as were others to the director of the Institute, chairman of the conference; what her position was, not clear. As this is the host country the welcoming entourage is British, with all the vocal variations of that identity, Scots, Irish, some accents class rather than territorial in origin. Among the French, German, Ukrainian and far-flung delegates his Kitchen isiZulu wasn’t much use. But everyone had more than Kitchen English—even us Americans, disarmingly quipped one of them, and all had the vocabulary of their related branch of science to supplement with its jargon in Latin and Greek a more general colloquial understanding across disciplines. Whatever she might be at the Institute, the young woman was to be heard clear as running water talking to an Italian in his own language and then her cadence coming from another part of the bar, to a trio of French, in theirs. He and Alvaro instinctively resisted getting together aside, after so long. Having been introduced as from Africa, he was approached and drawn into questions not restricted to any territory of the continent, while he was conscious of his own particular identity. Well, again, this’s not a political get-together. Yet this enclave standing and sitting about in the curve of a worn cushioned area turns to talk about AIDS.

From South Africa? One of them challenges the apocryphal spinach, garlic and beetroot cure. The Minister of Health’s made us the laughing stock of the world; laughter can be an expression of being appalled, he’s laughing with them: cuts off—reproach to himself—and confirms, his country has the highest number of infected population in the world.

—Who has discovered the virus—the cause—where from?—

Someone gives a token snort—Not in the field of discussion tomorrow.—

—It’s supposed to have first occurred in Africa, yes, people eating monkeys.—

—How were the monkeys host to the virus?—A delegate with a shaved head (unlikely to be to disguise a circle of bald pate, he’s young) and a beard that may be signal of strong sexuality to attract women and or men.

—That’s out of date.—Cast away by someone’s tipped hand.

Because it was racist—if only blacks eat monkeys maybe because they had nothing else. But he doesn’t produce his inevitable reaction.

The bold image of manhood potency speaks with underlying reproach at the casual dismissal of a subject by a gathering of scientists, lack of the compulsion of inquiry that is science. His question isn’t irrelevant to a conference on the presence of toxins in industrial production, domestic products, the food industry:—What did the monkeys eat.—

Dismissal, a professor’s second chin wobbles.—They’re omnivorous from what I’ve seen with my kids at the zoo.—

—Omnivorous. What did they ingest in that diet spectrum, what did they inhale as mines, coal, gold, producing waste dumps from the underground elements, invaded their habitat. The environment.—

Others in the academic discourse habit must introduce their ranges of knowledge.—Oh that’s all known since way back, silicosis—

Just as this is getting to be contentious the way you’d expect, the Lindsay woman flashes interruption—Look, there isn’t a dinner tonight, that’s after the opening tomorrow, but some of us could go to a restaurant if you don’t fancy eating at the hotel.—It clearly isn’t a general invitation but perhaps would interest this small enclave apparently getting on animatedly.

She’s chosen the bistro, as a Londoner habituée. The group was along with her, it would have looked unappreciative of hospitality to have dropped out on some obvious-sounding excuse of a previous arrangement—they’ve hardly arrived. She patted the shaven-head bearded contestant to the seat at her side, a kind of recognition, and then looking round passingly over the others, randomly nodded upon anyone to take the table seat at her other side—it happened to be him, Steve. She was cosily warming to both, as if they were children strangers to her adult self and each other at a birthday party.—It’s a bit of a joint, but the food’s not as bad as ‘intercontinental’ suggests, I don’t want any complaints from Dr Milano that the osso buco is tough and Professor Jacquard turning up his nose at the hollandaise on the asperges.—It turns out that she’s the Conference Chairman’s Personal Assistant. She gives this information with upper case initials mouthing formality.

—What a relief, I thought you were his wife.—

The mood lifted by Dr Milano as if the waiter had then drawn the cork from the bottle of Antinori. How happily ridiculous! Probably in her thirties, she could more likely have been his daughter.

—Why the relief—

—Taste the wine, someone—you, Dr Sommerfelt, no one trusts a woman to decide whether it’s what it should be—

—Why?—because it means we don’t have to watch our tongues with the danger of indiscretions coming to our chairman in pillow talk.—

—Let’s not talk shop, anyway. Serious for five days of sessions that’s enough, come tomorrow.—

The volume rises, anecdotal. A nuclear physicist from Texas tells the colleague from Norway his adventure in the fjords last summer. The Mexican virologist discovers a fellow bird-watcher in a German from Stuttgart—You know, Herr Doktor,——I’m Gerhardt, please——Oh thank you, this is Carlos—in my country people like to eat the birds but I like to be with them, look at the beauty of the world that is in the conformation, structure of bone and nerve in the movements on the ground—not only up there, the first astronauts—

Someone is vague about which of the Africas he comes from:—You’re at Makerere, I was once offered a sabbatical in Kenya but unfortunately…—

—South Africa—no, no doesn’t matter.—

After the rapid apologies habitual to an educated upper-class Englishman Dr Thomlinson tells a confession that he heads the department of the university where he actually graduated ‘donkey’s years ago’.—What about you? You study here or in your own country? Is it where you teach now? I feel I’m the stick-in-the-mud academic curiosity.—

—Then I’m another one.—

—Oh so you’re back in the same science department that produced you.—Glass raised to this shared status.

—Not exactly. There were interruptions.—Raising his glass perhaps to these, the wine is not the stuff passed round at Sunday swimming pool and it’s so instructive to the tongue and wakening, down the gullet that he’s thinking back to what he won’t relate, what it’s releasing; the absences in the camps and the other kind, Detention. Has no place in the objectivity of science, its history is of discoveries not battles in the bush.

Dr Thomlinson stretches to fill their glasses, to hell with the Pakistani waiter’s sense of protocol.—So you were the bad boy playing hookey.—

His glass meets the neck of the bottle halfway; each is laughing at a different reference of the amiable remark. For Thomlinson it will be having missed lectures after a thick night, student skipping Monday classes, gone beyond the youthful Sunday limit of an amorous weekend.

He couldn’t have an exchange with the bearded guy, lean either behind Lindsay Wilson’s back or across her breasts, although he would have liked to take further the monkey diet theory with him. She did throw-away rather than address him—We ought to do a Mad Hatter’s tea party, but then didn’t suggest this move to the rest of the table. A woman opposite him (maybe old but partly reconstructed by a branch of science) took the salt cellar from him, meeting his eyes widely, hers held not in a frame of glasses but of outlining blue and green cosmetics.—I know it may be toxic but I have a craving for this stuff, this Neapolitan’s rather tasteless.—It was the opening of a conversation at the pace of savour and swallow, carry on with what was being said, take another mouthful. She was eloquent over any attempt, accepted as useless, of the man beside her to add an opinion or make a comment. Had to guess what it might have been from the phrase or two not overridden; she would tilt her head in her neighbour’s direction now and then, and use what must be an intimately abbreviated ‘Malcolm’ to indicate he agreed or (second’s pause, lift of the shoulders) he would be privately disagreeing. Who—which—was the delegate and who—which—was the consort, gender identity couldn’t decide. The subject the woman set with the opening command of the salt cellar was effectiveness or otherwise of conferences. Were they a process, or an end in themselves. Was there ever a
practice
that the intention, the duly passed, minuted, published record of proceedings was complied with, that anything was actually being carried out. Significantly. That all a conference accomplished, arrived at, was simply the agenda for the next conference. And the next.

The man beside her at last got in his word.—Don’t come unless you’re going to be the capacity. Not words.—

She was talking again. He said under her bel canto and hoped the man would hear—This’s my first in the big world. I’ll have to remember.—

Not much to be expected of the day of arrival; Lindsay Wilson directed who would go with whom in the cars back to the hotel. He and the Beard were led out of the confusion to her car. But apparently the man—had his name now, drawn from him by others at the table, Adrian Bates—was not living along with the other delegates. Himself—he was dropped off at the hotel entrance even received an absent goodnight from the Beard, and an obligatory welcoming ‘Sleep tight, I’m sure you need it’ from the Lindsay Wilson who’d turned out not to be a man. She drove off with her duty to deliver the other man to wherever it was he was privileged to be lodged.