No Time Like the Present: A Novel (21 page)

Only Pierre, the Afrikaner Dolphin can speak about the Free State, aloud:—
Boere
. Afrikaners.—Pierre’s taken on the hardest kind of recognition, responsibility for what his people have done to themselves.

While they also produced a Dominee Beyers Naude who wouldn’t preach in a segregated Gereformeerde Kerk.

In that only refuge from what’s happening elsewhere, another university—in bed again away from all intrusions, there was tension to be felt in her. He stroked her hip where his hand lay. She drew away as if she were going to speak, say something that among crossing voices hadn’t been heard.

How not to have understood! He and the others mindblown by what had been done in the name of the white-skinned; themselves. She is part of the old women cleaners, the men lured to drink with the sons of the past masters, fed in a stew all that they’d had thrust down their throats all their people’s lives, the whites’ rejection pissed out as blacks’ share of life’s abundance.

Make love to her, would be the tender healing, most respectful acceptance of what she couldn’t release herself of without cursing him in the wordless sense of what his skin represents. But for once, first time ever, since the bold boy-girl desire met, ignoring the Reeds, ignoring Baba, in Swaziland, he could not expect to enter, taken in by her. How long will it be—it’s the country in mind now, not the Free State, no-no it’s too easy to say it’s colour, race, Jabu has multiple identities in living: in her convictions, ethics, beliefs, along with the congenital. A love between them, her Baba and her, which that other love, woman and mate, has not supplanted. Her bond with her Baba survived the disillusion and pain of that other visit the day when she went back home to KwaZulu after sitting—witnessing—at the rape trial and found her father outraged by the trial and triumphant in the dismissal of the charge against Zuma.

Also easy to miss within her multiple identities something you would rather miss. The attachment tangle, strength beneath any acquisition to selfhood, of that history called ‘tradition’ (didn’t colonials dub as a basket of customs anything other than their own ways dealing with the events of life and death). The attachment, not in sense of emotion but of a history alive in the present which he cannot claim to share with her and her Baba. Must face, like it or not—comrades and lovers as they are with their definitive shared history of the Struggle—leaving is different; for her, Jabu. Call it Australia. Whatever. He’s not leaving what she’s leaving.

What her father knows, she’s leaving.

—What did he say.—

—Nothing. At first. I almost thought he hadn’t heard me right. What I’d told.—

The father removed beyond belief. She read the conclusion taken, this one of the communication facilities of growing up together not as children but as adults.—No, his way of not being pushed, you know, taking his time…you see…for the meaning of what’s been said. He just opened the door in his room and sent a boy to fetch tea and only when we started to drink—Are you and your children going too.—Like asking a man in the family who’s off to a job he’s found in the city. I said again, opportunities…you’ve heard about.—Australia, England, America, Ghana—he said it—‘all the same’.—

Opportunities. Quoting from the cuttings—as a circumstance, reason Baba would perhaps respond to that she herself had not shown any recognition of to himself, Steve; but this was her Baba who had seen sending her away to education in Swaziland was his decision of opportunity for her.

—And then. He was angry. So then—

She pinches in her nostrils a moment, concentration to repeat her Baba faithfully, of course they would have been speaking in isiZulu.—He changed to English, ‘There are many white people going there, I read they call it something, relocating, that must be the word they took when they put us, black people into Locations outside the towns.’—

—That’s all? Didn’t ask anything, more about you.—

What about her; first thing she knew was coming upon the cuttings wasn’t it.

She smiled with closed lips and paused—before the evocation of Zuma’s man, the father.—
Uzikhethele wena impilo yakho!
You made your life, I let you choose, you must live the way it is in this time.—

What is she saying, comrade Jabu, that whatever her betrayal of her Baba, his bitter sorrow, her rejection of him; her betrayal of herself, Ubuntu, her country: a woman, in the order of her Baba’s community, she will live this time as ever on the decision of her man.

Australia, I am leaving with him, leaving our country, KwaZulu, leaving you. The woman goes where her man goes, that’s the ancient order understood, but
he
knows, Baba knows, had his own kind of revolution in nurturing his female child to independent being. Wouldn’t be deluded, would accept that she was emigrating—that reversal of what brought foreigners to take the continent, Africa which was not theirs—as a wife obedient to her husband. Baba will still force her to meet him on common if not equal ground—he is the father, ultimate authority after the Word of God—he had provided for her. She has to defend herself on the choice made for the children, hers and thereby Baba’s lineage, children of Africa, of the Zulu nation.

Protect herself from knotted liens of nature her man must recognise, always should have recognised, liens he didn’t have. Being born here is not enough. Even in the equality of the Struggle.

Sindiswa is about to be fourteen. When she’s asked what she wants as her birthday present she says one of the new mobile phones where you can see movies and read books, the pages passing, you don’t have to turn—her cell phone is old stuff.

—Oh please—must she be like all the kids (and his students) a clamp on her ear, apparently talking aloud to themselves.—

He keeps his ‘old style’ mobile in the car—for hijack emergencies…? There are breaks in real communication in the faculty room just when someone is putting together an argument worth hearing and he/she is claimed by a singsong sounding somewhere under clothes like a digestive gurgle. When a student comes to him to discuss a formula not clearly grasped—that’s what he’s there for, a teacher always available—he has bossily made it a rule that the thing must be switched off. He’s not cool, Prof Reed, although they say he was one of the whites in
Umkhonto
.

—Everybody has them. Gary’s nagging too.—

—Exactly.—

Brenda has called—for Jonathan’s sake, Steve is a brother after all, even if their ways were parted during the bad years—everyone agrees now they were that, although not personally involved except in being white. Brenda keeps tally of family anniversaries and birthdays as calendars mark Christmas and now Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and so on, holy days. She’ll just pop round and drop a little something for Sindiswa, big girl, no more toys, what would she like?

—Your aunt—

Sindi comes from her room enquiringly—Baba’s place?—

—Your aunt Brenda.—They chatter, Brenda has an assumed understanding of young people (it works) who are balancing on the edge of adulthood.

The outdated landline is handed back happily to Jabu. A natural connection has been made by her daughter and the wife of Steven’s brother.—Won’t you and Jonathan eat with us when you come to wish happy birthday, no party, I’m sorry, because she’s taking her school friends to celebrate at McDonald’s that evening, believe it or not.—

The receiver resounds Brenda’s dismissal.—Of course I believe it!—

—Just lunch. On Sunday, then. How many of you?—

—Only Jonny and me. As you know, Ryan’s overseas and the others all make weekend plans.—

—Should we have a
braai
.—Jabu’s suggestion, for his approval. She’s such a South African, this descendant of amaZulu warriors!

—Whatever’s going to be easiest for you, m’love.—

She doesn’t mind family occasions, even on his side (why does he make the distinction) although their kin, his-and-hers, are the comrades. That progeniture is the one they live, survivors, while Ruth was blown apart as she opened a parcel, the gift sent to her, Albie lost an arm and the light of one eye…who else? The great ones.

They’re moving to eat on the terrace, the garden table upgraded with a cloth. Jonathan is volunteering to carve the leg of lamb that was decided on, although there’s putu with beans as well as roast potatoes Reed style (or what Jabu knows as white style). Steve grants expertise to his brother. While Jonathan tests the knife for keenness he’s telling of his son Ryan.—It seems he’s been working hard, and the great standard of the courses—you know he got into the London University School of Engineering? He’s still found time, ay, to fall seriously for a girl, sister of one of his top student friends. He’s bringing her to show her, not us—Africa, sometime next year, the swimming pools and the lions.—

Brenda proudly amused.—Sindiswa, you better get ready to be a bridesmaid. A wedding in the family. We’d like him to graduate first, but it’s not our
affaire
to decide!—

She has given Sindiswa a beribboned packet. Sindi is fitting something from it round the principal recognition of her birthday, the iPhone she has chosen. The gift is an elegant cover for the mobile. Sindi must have told Brenda in the kitchen, Steve didn’t want her to be just ‘talking to herself’.—But these things are educational as well as a good safeguard for us parents, your child can always reach you if she’s in trouble in any way, this place, you never know…this dangerous city.—

The weekend papers he was out early to buy in addition to the two subscribed to. Scattered about, the image of Jacob Zuma is the front page.

When he has made coffee, his share of tasks of a meal, with some aside of excusing himself nobody hears under the table’s rally of voices, Jonathan is teasing flattered Gary Elias about the sporting prowess he’s sure of the boy, Brenda has another social gift, orchestrating subjects and gossips about celebrities which animates herself, Jabu and Sindi in femininity if not liberation, he goes to the living room and snaps on the screen, the roar—

Awuleth’ Umshini Wami

Weeks go by, when they don’t speak of whether he’s still in contact with the possibility/opportunity, Australia. Normal life takes up attention and energy. The immediate on its track. There was a connection apart from what they customarily share when a winter school on the interface between law and social sciences was organised at his university and she, Jabu the freedom fighter-cum-lawyer was one of the invited participants, some from other countries in Africa, the USA, Brazil, India. He left the Science Faculty the day she was a panellist on the connection between law and public access to power and heard her speak, with interruptions of applause for the points she expounded. As part of an audience, to see, hear, one you know intimately, sexually, intellectually, in temperament, oddities, as nobody else does is to find that no one knows anyone utterly. He’s sat in on a few court cases but there she was a modest member of a legal team, one of the attorneys assisting advocates, a combined presence. Here, up at a microphone with the attention of all around him on her become oddly, strangely one of them, sees the supple length of her brown neck above the small well between her collarbones as she raises her head to acknowledge the audience in her relation to them; the iconic image in the elaborately wound cloth giving height to the piled hair it holds, a few locks painted with coloured strands free from it, moving in emphasis while she speaks. She is in African dress not the businesslike garb for the courts. Which is hers: Jabu’s? Why is she dressed in this one for an occasion whose subject is the law. You have to be in an audience to come upon, why; what you should know and don’t.

In the July school holidays Gary Elias went as usual to spend part of the time with his grandfather and the boys of the KwaZulu collateral. It was for him a privilege above his sister, a girl of course, he wanted to offer his buddy Njabulo to share. They—the authority of his parents who were also always his friends, said there might be other plans made for Njabulo, and when Gary was sent by Steve and Jabu to ask Peter and Blessing if the boy could come along, this was so. That family was going to Blessing’s sister whose husband had landed a job in the parliamentary complex—through knowing the right ANC person at the right time, Peter tells confidentially—wouldn’t Gary like to join Njabulo there instead? Gary’s unspoken denial in wide-opened eyes and straightened body brought from Blessing and Peter, oh after all wouldn’t it be a better idea…opportunity for Njabulo to go with Gary to his grandfather’s place? KwaZulu. The Mkize roots there had long ago been dug up and transplanted to more industrialised parts of the country. But Njabulo opted for the sea. And there’s no question that Gary Elias would forego his princedom in Baba’s kingdom.

She was putting together Gary Elias’s clothes and necessities when he walked in to their boy’s room.—D’you want me to come with you.—

She sends her free hand out behind her to feel for his, pressed a moment, then she needs two hands to fold a shirt.—It’s all right.—Australia between them: he would bring it with him in his very presence before Baba. If she’s alone that might give some sort of assurance, however false, it’s not going to happen.

She left early drove without pause, the chatter of Gary Elias and Wethu the accompaniment—a present for her mother a warm shawl, a book for Baba, reprint of Dhlomo’s
An African Tragedy
he might not have, and after eating with the family, the aunts celebrating as usual the visit from the city, left the same day with Wethu. Australia was not present; she was not led apart to the privacy of Baba’s cubby-hole.

Steve and Sindiswa had prepared dinner or rather shopped together for takeaways at a supermarket owned by a Greek South African, maybe Sindi was a schoolmate of his children.

—You can see how happy Gary Elias is! Doesn’t ever want to come to say goodbye to his Babamkhulu. Too busy-busy with the boys.
Hai!
I never see him here like with them, they are best friends to him—and they make a fuss for him,
eish!
—Wethu entertains in Zulu and in English, because Steve only half-understands the Zulu tongue. Wethu has by now made her transformation to the country the government tells the people is in the process of becoming.
Eish
—we are all South Africans. She comes back from the home village to her converted chicken run in the Suburb, at home in both.