No Time Like the Present: A Novel (3 page)

—So you’re back on the Sunday lunch circuit. Oh ho.—A swap to family politics. Alan to Steve, although he’s turning a shoulder, mock coy attention to Jabu.—You and I, they have to give us a seat at the table. It’s the new democracy, ay. Which doesn’t extend further to our kind—He catches Tertius’s earlobe between thumb and forefinger.—We still have the tattoo Queer setting us aside from the bear-hug. We’ve been beaten up by bully boys when we danced together in a night club, and Tertius’s dominee brother thunders to his congregation God’s love-wrath at ours—the love that dares not speak its name. There you are…quoting high-falutin’ like Mbeki.—

‘A seat at the table’ will not be recognised by the lover or the brother’s wife, and maybe Steve himself won’t get the allusion, either, he’s removed by revolutionary distance from the maternal Jewish connection that is the reason for all three of them, the brothers, being circumcised males.

The seat at table is laid at the Sabbath, Friday night family dinner, for the stranger whom the head of the household leaving the synagogue after Sabbath service shall invite to share a meal. Ancient, it is a meaningful origin of charity with dignity. Alan once studied religious faiths—including the secular one of his brother Steve. This on his way to trying out Buddhism. Maybe the ‘research’ had not to do with any gods but with his adolescent need for some explanation why he was not after girls, as all his friends were. He read poets alongside—what he retained was to have no discrimination against what was evidently the poetry of political ideology; it was poetry that was holy to him; why shouldn’t Mbeki quote Yeats—lines, images recalled that distilled what he wanted to invoke better than in any way a politician could. If he, Alan, could have chosen to be anything he would have been a poet rather than a revolutionary; that’s the revolution against all limits of the ordinary.

He’s a copywriter in an advertising agency.

Jabu didn’t always expect, or even want Steve to come with her on her return home—that other kind of home he didn’t have, couldn’t have as his ancestors were of another country or countries, for that matter; they had come to this one, at best, only some generations back. Her parents and extended family lived in what had been a ‘location’ for blacks outside a coal-mining town in what remained a rural area. There had been and still were large farms long owned by whites, where location men who didn’t dig coal were labourers. But the ‘location’ was not the urban slum of city ghettos. Her father’s house—her grandfather’s house—was a red-brick villa in the adopted colonial 1920s-style of those provided by the mining companies for its white officials. It marked the standing in the ‘location’ community of the Pastor of the Methodist Church for blacks, which her grandfather had been, and that of her father, an Elder, Diakone, in the church and headmaster of the high school for black boys. There were round annexes in the yard, mud walls smoothed by the women builder-occupants under thatch of straw gathered by them. Collaterals lived in these.

The women were accustomed to leading a woman’s life alongside a man in a bed but sharing, apart, their own preoccupation with care of children, cooking, maintenance of the family commune in their activities, from growing vegetables to building shelter. Jabu has always been her father’s child. She wasn’t kept at home while a brother, males always first in line for education, went to school. Her father found a place for her at a mission school, paid the fees and a younger brother waited his turn for entry.

Elias Siphiwe Gumede was not a tribal chief yet he was the man of authority in recognition that he had managed to get himself educated to a high standard with letters after his name, BEd., due to his own proud determination dismissive of the difficulties for a rural black boy; but sisters’ and cousins’ husbands did not take the example of favouring girls, although nobody would contradict him with disagreement over the way he ignored the correct procedure of the people. At first her mother endured, with silence like consent, the disapproval of the women to be read in their faces when they chanced to look up from private gossip; then the daughter brought home excellent reports, the mother proudly walked in on the enclaves to announce, 76 per cent in arithmetic, 98 in isiZulu, 80 per cent in English, each term further success. The girl child’s learning achievement. Well, English, that was something, but isiZulu—that’s our language of course she knows—from home, from the time she learnt to speak.

Her father was not aware either of the gossip or the counter boasts, or if he knew was not concerned; he expected to have her homework presented to him every night and equally could not be expected to fail to see where her attention had strayed or she had scamped what should have been pursued. She soon did not resent this strict condition because of the way in which he presented it, it was as if it was some special occupation, special game only she, among the children, shared with him. And as she grew up she realised how much she had gained in the process of real comprehension, from her father, beyond the instruction by rote, of school.

Was it his intention or her idea that she go away over the border to Swaziland to a teacher’s training college?

The one over the border was not restricted by colour. This was not the advantage mentioned when the possibility of her entry was discussed, it was the quality of degree offered which, her father insisted to his wife, was decisive, the standard of the teachers—and he knew who they were, people who had studied in Africa and overseas, universities in Kenya and Nigeria as well as in England.

The mother did not want a child of hers to disappear, out of sight in another country, even if neighbouring.—So young, young still, this year seventeen, our child should stay with us a few years and then when she’s more ready—She broke into English from their own language.

—Jabulile has done well. You want her to forget how to study? What will she do?—

—A teacher’s training somewhere we can see her. Later on she can study away, plenty of time for that.—

His own studies never ended, not only did he read biblical commentaries borrowed from the White Fathers’ mission, he had roused the shamed Christian conscience of the white librarian of the municipal library in the town at the fact that, high school headmaster, he could not be a member, and for years she had been secretly supplying him with the loan of books he requested, taking them to her house from where he could collect them. There came to his mind, stayed with him, maxims he had read and that remained meaningful to his own particular place and life—‘No time like the present,’—breaking into English: one of them. He’d used it often as a reproach for tardiness among pupils and his children. It could now have been an admonition to his wife, but for his daughter it was a signal she was to be granted a venture over the border, independent, the way she and her father wanted for her.

Apparently he was not a member of any political formation, banned or still tolerated, although some churches were under surveillance as taking the revolutionary example of Jesus as contemporary; but he certainly knew Swaziland harboured activists on the run from apartheid police or sent out by the liberation movement to contrive smuggling of arms to the cadres at home in South Africa? He must have been aware that she, his daughter, would be living in a different atmosphere—of acceptance, support of the revolutionary struggle next door, even though Swaziland itself was ruled by a king—if still kind of ward of the dwindling British Empire. The influence she’d be open to. He did not speak of this to her, no fatherly warnings despite the confidence between them. She went in all innocence and ignorance to her teacher’s college, happy to be boarding not in a hostel but with a distant relative, great-aunt on her father’s side who had married out of the Zulu clan, to a Swazi. In 1976 headmaster Elias Siphiwe Gumede confused the African National Congress members, whose gatherings he had never attended, and that they disappointingly interpreted as fear of losing his position as headmaster in an apartheid state school, by intervening between the boys and the police who arrived with their armoury of dogs, batons, tear gas, to break up the boys’ demonstration of solidarity with riots in Soweto against ‘Bantu Education’ and Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in their state schools. Natural authority somehow prevailed—some of the police might have been ex-pupils of the school?—he stood with his back against the chanting toyi-toying boys, arms outstretched as a shield before them: the sergeant strangely distracted by the old authority enacted the same stance, but to hold his men back. The boys continued their defiant dance and song as the sergeant and the headmaster stood face to face in discussion. Their headmaster then took his place quietly again before the triumphant uproar while the police left the school grounds with their dogs straining to bark. What had he said to the police? The amazed community never learnt; he ignored questions as if he had not heard them.

His daughter was recruited by Freedom Fighters from South Africa in Swaziland, he was informed by the great-aunt who came back home apparently on a usual family visit, bearing pineapples and litchis; she talked to Jabu’s mother and the other women only of how happy the girl was at college, how many new kinds of friends she’d made, how pretty she was, how helpful in the house, everybody loves her.

He sent back money and two books he had bought for her by James Baldwin and Lewis Nkosi, not guns but arms of the mind.

When she was deployed on a mission back to the home country, arrested and detained for three months, he applied for parental right to visit her in the women’s prison in Johannesburg and was refused.

He went to Johannesburg and persuaded the chief wardress, entitled ‘matron’, to accept clothing sent by the girl’s mother and what he declared as study materials, from him, her father. In which textbooks he sent messages by turning down dog-ears on certain pages and marking words to be linked up from the text. He had introduced himself by caringly enquiring what church the matron belonged to (over her uniform collar there was a crucifix) and it was indeed Methodist, the denomination of worship where he informed her he was himself an Elder.

So long as he’s happy.

Pauline pronounced on their son, to his father, Andrew.

A mother always goes to the essential, she’s right, but the father came to have other more objective, if supportive reasons for approving Steve’s choice of the woman. The physical attraction goes without saying—she’s extremely pretty in her way as any man knows the distinctive attractions of a blonde as different from those of a brunette, although he himself has never (so far; all changes possible at all ages in the wonderful mystery of sexuality) been attracted to a black girl. He finds her intelligent, beyond question, quick on the uptake with opinions of her own and respectful of those of others, also you don’t have to feel you must be careful of what you say because experience of the world they happen to live in has been different (like the looks you don’t share). Her manner. She is neither unspokenly aggressive in some reprisal for whites’ denigration of black; whether or not Andrew Reed ever held it? Her presence is not the hostile proud grudging one of some blacks now; making clear it’s no privilege to be accepted in white circles. She’s simply herself. And he, he’s not simply a Father, he’s a new individual in her life she’s getting to know.

So long as he’s happy.

Andrew Reed’s parents: somewhere unexpressed to him might have had the same thought when Andrew married Pauline Ahrenson. They were not anti-Semitic—of course not! Discrimination is unchristian. But if as they were reluctant to think, he might have become not just neglectful of observance but an unbeliever, he was still Christian by his father’s background, ethics and culture.

They got on well enough with his Jewish wife Pauline. Maybe she too was non-observant of her religion. She and Andrew brought Steven, Alan, Jonathan to sit cheerful and expectant round the Christmas tree with cousins, receiving their presents from the hands of grandfather Thomas Reed beard-disguised as Father Christmas. Pauline and Andrew exchanged gifts for each other secretly placed under the tree and opened between laughter and embraces. His parents had not remarked on not being invited to any baptisms of Andrew’s children; he didn’t see the need to tell them about the circumcisions.

Steve remembers from childhood those Christmas celebrations as the only family occasions. And his mother once saying guiltily with a mock thankful grimace something he didn’t understand because he didn’t know of the occasion she referred to, she never had to spend those Friday nights sitting around a Sabbath table listening to her brother’s responses to the groaned blessing. Andrew went along with her to the weddings of her collaterals in synagogue just as they attended marriages of his in church. Their own community was that of his business associates and their wives with its own rituals of dinner parties in favoured restaurants, gala cocktail parties at the golf clubs where the men discussed the stock exchange and shots from the rough and the women traded experiences of their leisure-time diversions. Pauline belonged to a book club and took up silk-screen printing in private recognition that this was the limit of the talent as a painter she once believed she had. What an irony one of her sons should have ended up an expert in an industrial paint factory as his first career—her sense of this wasn’t seen by her husband who had been impressed by her daubs when they met, part of his falling for her, as the expression went in those days; her wry, bright irony in respect of many circumstances perhaps comes from the Jewish side she brought to the marriage. Somehow paid her due to what she was, always would be, by the odd obeisance of her sons. Alan was the only one of their children who turned out to have any bent for the arts. In the circles in which she and Andrew move round accepted ideas, there was one that there was a predilection among men with ambition in the arts to become homosexuals, expressed in the usual epithets, Queens, Moffies. Did what had become Alan’s sexual choice along with his passion for poetry come from her blood. He had suffered for it, his worldly mother was his confidante, she knew the doors that had slammed on him because he was gay—what an irony (again) that misnomer was, no gaiety in being sneered at and despised. But what a great result of whatever his brother Steven had done to bring about a revolution—it hadn’t only freed the blacks, now it had given the same Constitutional rights in legal recognition that men like Alan, who love other men, are entitled to! She knew too well this was a—what’s the word—reductionist view of what freedom means, but it’s her minority experience of it, as a white privileged by oppression of the others in the too-close past. Andrew, his father, had accepted that this son among his sons made ‘love’ to men (yes, entering the place of shit) a version of sexual desire; he couldn’t understand how this chosen deprivation of the love of women, the place for perfect consummation in their lovely bodies, could come about. He loved his son and continued to show it, and did not let appear what he felt on his son’s behalf. Not disgust: regret. He could not go so far as behaving exceptionally welcoming to Alan’s lovers, as Pauline did, as if they were the same as the other sons’ wives, the producers of grandchildren. Hard for him to dictate to himself: so long as he’s happy.