No Time Like the Present: A Novel (27 page)

They are reading aloud to one another from a batch of school prospectuses which have come with a friendly letter for parental concern from a civic educational organisation he found a way to contact. Over There. He rests the affirmative length of a hand on spread pages.—This’s the one for him.—

—For her.—It’s co-educational.—

—Yes yes—but for
him
now’s the time—that’s the chance going to a new country, everything will be different. When you’re that age you’re adaptable—(She’d forgotten she’d been sent off alone to Swaziland)—we’ll all be together.—

—He doesn’t like being at school with girls.—

Remember Aristotle. Another place another time.—Give him a year, a year older and he’ll be chasing curves.—They’re laughing.—That’s the advantage he doesn’t know about yet.—

Shouldn’t he be called from the garden and fruit-box wicket, he and Njabulo are teaching Wethu’s protégé to play cricket, the game popular at their school where bats are also weapons for another kind of initiation, shouldn’t their boy have a say. These are parents who respect children’s rights, don’t they, not only at the protection level of the Constitution familiar to her as ABC.—What does he think…considering—

The new life to be served upon him and his sister.

His mother—Jabu pronounces authority—We decide. We’ll apply for him at that co-educational. Him and Sindi.—The tone final, not in manner of judgment handed down in court; something parentally fundamental making itself heard to her.

—We’ll think about it some more—over this weekend.—It’s Easter interregnum anyway, when Gary is expected to be brought for the holiday weekend with Baba in KwaZulu.

Yet then—she’s gathered the prospectuses now, cover on cover of impressive school buildings laid out in gardens, the kangaroo emblem as the lion is in Africa; she looks up not at him; no.—I don’t want to go.—As if speaking to herself.—Will you go. Mama told me on the phone yesterday, there’s going to be a huge gathering—election—he’s organised, he’ll introduce the speakers, his choir from the church, freedom songs she says, if Msholozi doesn’t come himself it’ll be one of his closest. Can you take Gary.—

The moment outside the Glengrove Place door. But no threshold to carry the bride over. She asks him, alone to take the boy to spend the usual promised weekend there, her home KwaZulu.

I don’t want to go.

Her Baba. The consequence: meaning this—it can’t be questioned, dissuaded—what an intrusion he feels that would be of the commitment of love, the confidences kept, you for me, I for you, in areas I don’t, others don’t, have access to. The mystery of sexual intimacy, that’s called upon, unknown.

All he could ask in response to their need, the specific need of Jabu in her torn bonds with her father was take to her what practical reason could be the lie he must produce. But he has it: she is involved in a difficult case, cannot miss the sessions of preparation required of her by her senior advocates—what else, the Elder of the church, headmaster of the boys’ school is one who strictly observes the pre-eminence of duty.

Sindi of course had other plans anyway. Wethu has also cried off. She has become so popular in the women’s league of the city church she chose that they insist they need her with them for the rising from the dead of their saviour.

There’s the poster he was told by Jabu she saw after she attended the rape trial. It was honouring the not guilty judgment in celebration then, still does; many more posters are tacked up now, including an example of one of Msholozi’s marriages, picturing him and whatever wife in full guise of flesh and leopard skin.

Even without the daughter of the village who had given legitimacy to the presence of the white man in the extended family by marrying him, he was familiarly welcomed with accompanying grandson of their churchman, schoolmaster. Elias Siphiwe Gumede observed male protocol, greeting him before allowing the interrogation of questioning eyes: was his daughter back gathering something from the car, women always at that sort of arrival fuss—and here is the boy, tall enough, this holiday come home, to put his arms round his Babamkhulu in joyous cityman style, why not, that the other grandsons around would not dare. The high greetings were in their language; standing smiling by, he caught the assurances not questions coming from the grandfather that the boy was happy, happy to be back, heh, and the boy’s gush of names, how’s Sibiso, is Xamana here?—Where is your mother, already with the women?—

His Zulu could pick that up. And he began in isiZulu but had to resort to English.—Babawami, Jabulile sends a special message to you (quiet a moment, Gary!) she asks me to tell you, explain for her, she couldn’t come home for Easter although she very much wants to be here with you and Mama—there’s a terribly important case coming on and she has to be with the advocates the whole weekend, meetings preparing for it, no way out of this, she instructed me—she apologises, she said, but Baba he’ll understand.—

Not home for Easter, sorry sorry (she would have used that bowed-head jingle before him as a little girl); these are the inspiration come to him in a lie.

—What trial is this? Did you bring papers?—

No lie stands; it has to lead to others. But necessity makes this glib.—Too bad, it hasn’t come to court yet so there’s nothing in the papers, she would have given me these for you…there wasn’t any document she could, unfortunate…she says—

And the next lie, to offset any mood, absence darkening over the occasion.—At least I’ve brought Gary Elias for you, that’s what she absolutely insisted, and you know what Jabu is when she wants you to do something!—

—You are always welcome here.—Out of a phrase book. As if granted, between Jabulile’s two men, that without her he doesn’t count.

Elias Siphiwe Gumede is already disciplined to the preeminence of what this weekend is: not the Easter devotional celebration of Jesus rising from the grave to which each year the daughter was respectful for her father’s sake even if for her the rising was that of the Struggle from the grave of apartheid; this is the Easter when her father will be the man who has brought home more than an election meeting: a gathering for the congregation of Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma.

There is no soccer game for Gary Elias and team of extended family boys. The open land that was the field is an amphitheatre of planks being totteringly tiered by the usual home-boys back from the coal mine and the cities’ factories (it’s still the Whites and Indians who own them) along with old men back in their birthplace to die, and the schoolboys for whom this is another game.—It’s all us guys!—Gary Elias is off to join them; the dignitary whose namesake he is gives the stern flourish of a permissive order—
Hamba ushone
.—

Good Friday is not one on which the usual weekend drinking in city bars, shebeens happens; here the Elder might come out of his house and wither with authority of disapproval any groups of men squatting round liquor which the daughter’s man joins whenever she brings him to her home. But one of the group that always welcomes him hears he’s arrived and sends a child to beckon—there’s a private Friday, just displaced to someone’s mud-insulated house that’s more or less out of sight of Baba’s range.

Msholozi, in what would have been the persona of his clan name, did not come, either, to honour Elias Siphiwe Gumede, his influential campaign organiser in the village and surrounding communities, including shack dwellers from around the coal mine. The substitute wore no leopard skin (perhaps he was not at that level of traditional authority) but was dressed in the well-tailored dark suit, tie and fashionable pointed-toe shoes as if already a cabinet minister, anticipating Zuma’s government. He spoke with impressive cadence bringing out all the beauty of Jabu’s mother tongue, that she sometimes said was becoming lost in the adoption of it to pop slang,
tsotsi
talk, American and international substitutions for isiZulu’s own forms of expression—she caught herself out in the practice she accused.

This isiZulu ringing over the football field-cum-stadium with pauses as if to take breath, but actually skilfully handing over to calls, chanting, cheers, was clear enough to get the gist with his limited grasp of the language his son had turned to so effortlessly the moment he stepped onto his mother’s home place. What was caught in the full spate of words was the same litany of Zuma’s speeches, as expected; who would presume, in the entourage of the man to deviate from what was so successful even without the rousing of dance and battle song ‘
Awuleth’ umshini wami
’. The home brew downed in secrecy with the home-boys perhaps released a facility to understand some of this; perhaps to feel not rejected; a response—what would Jabu think of that!

Gary Elias as usual had to be called, sought out again and again when it was the day and time to leave this home for the other. He has over visits gathered to himself a rather special place among the boys, they clung and pushed about him, playful punches and trippings-up as he finally appeared at the car, and an always unfinished teasing exchange continued through the window as he was driven away. A flushed face twitching animation, joyful sweaty presence beside the father. His last yell,—
Ngiyokubona ngontulikazi—Nagokhisimazi! Khisimazi! Shu!
See you in July!…And Christmas, Christmas!
EISH!
—

In July; yes. But Christmas. If the Melbourne post was confirmed, just a few minor details still, but the certainty is there, the departure would be latest November—it was expected at the other end that the immigrant family would come with the provision of weeks to get accustomed to the way of life, settle in, before the university and whatever schools the children were entering began the year in January. A New Year.

While the formal preparations are being followed in accordance with a process by the parents, in the jostling public presence of election time in a free country, normal life goes on for children; suppose to Gary Elias and even Sindi…Australia is an abstract (as ‘when you grow up’) with no effect on the day-to-day of school and weekend pleasures. They haven’t known loss. It’d be difficult for them to feel, while the parting is so protracted, what it will be to leave behind bosom friends and buddies.

What about the house. Jake, who found it for them, has asked, as if it were a detail forgotten in the total decision made, with all its implications comrades cannot intrude upon.

—Yes. Of course sell it—for occupation at the end of this year. But don’t agents always want immediate sales?—

—Or let it. For then.—Jake has the alternative. Does he refuse to believe the departure is lifetime, no return. Or has he a friend ready in mind, wanting to rent. Bringing up the subject, is it a sign of end of sensitivity in a friendship, Jake is not affected by the departure; or is it an indirect reproach. Australia.

When he speaks of Jake’s suggestion to Jabu it becomes referent to something else; the home of their daughter and son—for themselves Glengrove Place was home, the first, the original possible for them. They ought to consider the meaning for Sindi and Gary of this one; ready them more considerably for change, not explicitly, something looming, but as preparation making Australia part of life in the present.

Again the matter of the right time—not to make it heavy. Favourite food is always the adults’ resort to counting on a good mood shared, it maybe comes from that between the woman and the infant when it is sucking at her breast. He and Gary Elias went to a takeaway to bring pizzas, each for everyone’s individual taste, including one to put aside for Wethu who was out with her church women somewhere.

The mother has her courtroom confidence.—We’ve found what we think is the school for you, I’ll show you the photographs, curriculum and so on, subjects extramural—to choose along with the usual—drama, music, there’s even a special communications high-tech group in the science department, space exploration, it’s called astrophysics, stars and planets, and of course all sports, there’s a fine gym near the swimming pool.—

But no. Gary Elias is quick.—A school for me?—

The father’s turn.—For both. You and Sindi.—

He can’t believe it.—A boys’ school for me.—

Sindi’s private smile of approval to her mother, for the moment they look alike although Sindi is not as beautiful, only a man (himself) would recognise that the DNA mixture hasn’t worked so well aesthetically, this time, although it so often does. The boy is the beauty.

—A co-ed, like Aristotle.—Her mother and father know she won’t agree to be separated by gender, that’s old stuff in education, her father doesn’t teach in a single-sex university.

There has to be male response to a male.—I have to enter you for next year—now. But when we are there, November most probably, we’ll go to the school. And you’ll see for yourself. I’ve had the best reports about it from someone who’ll be my colleague at the university, he’s got two sons at the school—and he has no daughter, so—

He’ll have to talk to the boy alone, just the two of them over the coming months; he’s the educationist yes but Jabu is the one who affirms their comrade-and-lover conviction that there’s an end to all nature of segregation. Under whatever rubric. Apartheid. It’s over.

—And you, Sindi—

—My friends think I’m so lucky, have the chance. Travel to new places…I mean you know—Spoken as might a woman complimented on her enviable shapeliness.

What he was really searching is how she accepts in the other emotional life-upheaval of adolescence, itself departure from the familiarities of childhood—Australia. They have given her books, she’s been a reader since she learned to recognise words at the age of six, journals of the glories of the country supplied by seminar organisers.

What is the process of acceptance. The ‘envious’ remark of Sindi’s schoolfriends was really of the excitement of holidays; not deportation. Gary calling from the car in KwaZulu, Christmas, Christmas—the summer holiday he’d be back.