No Time Like the Present: A Novel (37 page)

She’s looking at discovery:—The Dolphins.—The words don’t have a questioning lilt.

But how does she
know
these things; he has nothing less demanding to offer—for the meantime, which is any time between when the man thinks he can go back to his wife and child in the shack, and when there’ll be a Zimbabwe fit to return to.

Only Dolphins Donnie and Brian are at home, indoors with the newspapers and their glasses of good Cape Pinotage before a pinecone fire for the beauty of it, winter’s nearly over. Brian is a telecommunications expert who often has feasted them his other expertise, his jambalaya since they moved in to their welcome in the Suburb.

—No problem! There’s only junk we should throw out anyway since Marc’s got himself a wifey, it used to be his studio, he called it, but you know he’s never painted, no Picasso or Sekoto, always wrote plays there, he’s said he’d come to work back there in peace—whatever that tells the tale about life with Claire—we’ll just need a bed, if you have a spare—

They will have everything to spare of beds, tables, cupboards, chairs, freezer, TV—no, the new living-room widescreen will go along with furniture Wethu should have, perhaps Baba might like to give away the desks, keep his daughter’s, for himself—when transport is arranged, time come for her to go to KwaZulu. Soon.

When that time comes, if ‘meantime’ still needs it, the Dolphins will shelter the man with the topknot crown of city pavements. Imagine the ghosts/ghouls of the old Gereformeerde congregation: the sinful
moffies
in God’s house—now they even have a black man to bugger. Who’s thinking this, himself or others when Steve tells them the Zimbabwean will not be cast to the streets…

Autumn of parties, in summer. An ending.

The children are possessed by TV-Land, somewhere. He and she are on the stoep, that’s what the terrace was called when the house was built in the forties, as the Dolphins’ pool-house was the Gereformeerde Kerk before there came about a comrade takeover. Eyelids of light open upon the Suburb from houses on another hill, the conversation is that of cicadas rubbing legs together. But watchface glanced at in half-dark—they’re expected for another of the unacknowledged farewells. At Jake’s now.

They’re tardy. The comrades, Blessing and Peter, the Dolphins with their sexual renegade Marc and his honorary Dolphin woman—the comrades have been drinking before the arrival. Jake’s trying out one of the new vintages from an old well-known vineyard taken over by German (or are they Chinese) entrepreneurs with the precaution of one of the new black capitalists drawn in as a partner.—Why should whites own the wine resources as they do the mines—and there’re high voices in the ANC Youth none of the prosperous white oldsters are hearing yet—toyi-toying, calling for gold, diamonds, platinum industry to be nationalised.—Jake is even more loquacious than usual rather than drunk on this experimental Pinotage, unstoppable, uninterruptable (if there isn’t such a word there ought to be).

He and she—they sit on an unsteady swing couch. Hand within hand while these are not touching, not held.

—ANC’ll have to dig the wax out of ears before the elections come in 2014, that squalling prodigy Malema rallied his generation Brothers to vote first time Zuma Zuma Zuma, Zuma’d better start worrying whether they’ll dance with him all the way knee-high next time. Isn’t Malema lifting his to lead the dance himself? If not this time…after. One day. Soon. The five hundred thousand jobs Zuma promised as President? So where are they? The multi-million election victory celebration. The four hundred thousand he spent on a birthday bash for his daughter, and what about his nineteen or so other offspring and by-blows, will they all have birthday bashes at our tax expense? How many houses could have been built for three-generation families slumming in those abandoned downtown buildings, how many roofs could go up from the bill for French champagne gone down and pissed out by government ministers—

—There’ve been about two million houses.
Eish
. That’s nothing…—Peter is talking over Jake not defiantly but dismissively as if compensating for some congenital circumstance Jake himself—comrade—cannot be aware.—I’m the lucky one I have a house (spread hand waves to encompass the Suburb) I’ve got not just a job—it’s what we call a position, my wife has a business of her own, yes. But I—black, all of us, the beggar and big boss—I can walk where I like, move about my country, live in any place, city, get on any bus come in any door, send my kids to any school. That’s not nothing.—

Jake accepts—flinging right arm to catch his left below the shoulder—what a white cannot experience. But there’s no stalling him.—Strikes, they’re the employer these months, telecommunications, transport, electricity, every public servant from dustmen up, they’re taking over the country with blackouts and no-go streets they’re the worker-boss as full-time marcher to the headquarters of this commission and that. And NOW—the army,
army
—who can blame them, the ones it’s counted upon to do the head-bashing on workers if it comes to that. The army. Yesterday didn’t you see, the South African National Defence Force, three thousand rampaging under their banner at the Union Buildings, that’s boss government itself. Those supposed to protect us are the lowest paid government employees—

Blessing laughs out—So that’s the place to go! When there’s a strike I’m without my two cooks, although they share our profits, they want to show solidarity with other workers, their husbands from the municipality, one son with a bus company…—

—Since when do they have a union?—Eric of the Dolphin pool was in the apartheid army, remembers what doesn’t change with any regime.—Soldiers never have the right to strike. Jesus! Haven’t you heard call-in programmes, people saying the guys should be thrown out of the army in disgrace. Who cares if our ‘military force’ earns peanuts while we can send them off to earn us kudos, Congo and anywhere UN organisations are trying to prop up peace against oppressors—who those are and aren’t—

—Who’s for peace—

—Who’s doing the oppressing—

—ESCOM’s strike’s suspended anyway, going to be ‘allowed negotiations’ of the sticky issue, housing allowance—so we don’t risk rolling blackouts—for the time being, maybe.—

—What we ought to be worrying about is the mines, my man, platinum, the output’s about three thousand ounces a day, that’s worth fifty-eight million to the economy…—

—Wage settlement agreed today, strike continues tomorrow, tomorrow, all the tomorrows…—

—Tomorrow, tomorrow, Zuma’s connection with the arms deal’s gone away, e-eh—never brought to his day in court.—

—Three thousand ounces…The mining industry’s going to cut production, labour, avoid paying nearly fifty times more to its compensation fund for miners who’ve contracted silicosis TB over years. Some of them never saw a cent: went home to die. The owners got away with slow murder during apartheid. And after. Now, it’s part of our transformation: owners expect some compensation could close their record on exploitation if they paid up. Even if you can’t give men their lungs back.—

Jake’s drumming fingers are against the chest of all—ARMS. Hear me! Our free country at peace, we sell arms to countries with human rights records like Libya, Iran, Zimbabwe. Deals ‘allegedly’ approved by our National Arms Control. Right, Jabu? You’ve got it all in the Centre’s files for sure.—

(Cuttings come upon, dusting.)—The global village is too involved in arms trafficking to make laws against it.—Probably no one hears Jabu; Jake is the voice from the mountain, he’s thrusting a new bottle of wine round at each glass, potion all must imbibe from him in unspoken farewell toast: Australia.—Where are we. For once when he’s not in a tantrum Malema blames the old race of government ministers: whites. An accusation. But it’s a race whose characteristics have been adopted smartly by apt blacks in their ministry seats.—

—At least women’re recognised even though they’re white—Gill Marcus Reserve Bank Governor, Barbara Hogan Public Enterprises—and she’s a Struggle veteran.—

—Are these powers given to display the regime’s above revenge, in reverse for traditional white condescension that African—black—wasn’t capable of directing such portfolios? Or is it to woo the white voter for next time, 2014?—

—Marc, no prizes—but who is it who defends the ‘minority appointees’ white, Indian, too-pale-to-be-black? The SACP Communists say while they’re opposed to ugly ‘chauvinistic’ attitudes which persist in some places, a country’s narrow African chauvinism simply reproduces what does he call it, its counterpart.—Jake is lifting this phenomenon with his wine glass.—But our Zuma he opposes Lindiswe Sisulu, head of our ANC’s Social Transformation Unit, over her proposal to debate this kind of—symbol is it?—of race transformation. We pride ourselves on being a multiracial organisation, she says, and Zuma comes with ‘the debate will take the country backwards’.—

Ragged chorus—Don’t let’s talk about race——It’ll go away—Isa fondly removes from Jabu the burden of the glass of wine she’s not drinking.

Jabu and Steve are an example of those for whom it has all gone away. Away.

—Where’s Albert?—Dolphin Eric notices—no, Albert isn’t here, these days he’s present at any gatherings on the Reed family terrace but perhaps he knows he’d still be a stranger on the terraces of others although soon to be part of the Dolphin household; how he’ll fit in with a way of life not only his refugee status but a gender one he’s going to find unfamiliar…cleaning a pool was sharing a job not the intimacies of everyday.

—His wife was to come and be with him today.—Jabu’s locks shaking from the pinnacle of her fine head.—There’s no response from the cell phone, he doesn’t know what’s happening with this new violence. Trouble. As far as Steve and I can find out, it’s not in that place yet. But we had to stop him from going back there to see—if he hasn’t gone away after we left—

—Who knows how many Zims are in South Africa. Three million the government said—three years ago? What’s that new count, the other day?—Peter expects Jabu to be the most accurate with the figure.

Her way of running finger and thumb down an earlobe to the earring.—Nine-point-eight-four million. Twenty per cent of our population. Unlikely? Other officials’ and business organisations’ count is meant to be reassuringly lower.—

—You know what one sane man among us says and nobody wants to listen.—Jake is standing as if before not just the Suburb: the city, the country.—‘It’s time to accept that migrants have been the lifeblood of this city since it was founded’. That’s the black mayor of Johannesburg.—Lifeblood of the country. The tribes who came down from the north of Africa to conquer the San and the Khoi Khoi, the Dutch and the English, Scots Irish landing from ships.—He’s propounding. Will he get to the Jews who came from Latvian
shtetl
, made African,
eish
, at last, a descendant of the colonialist Christian father and the Jewish great-grandmother while another descendant brother, Jonathan, turns from the man on the cross back to the scroll in the synagogue.

Blessing as one who provides, no matter what, the comfort of good cooking has her confident interruption of Jake—We’ve got the World Cup next year, already such a thrill…the stadiums going up, people—

—Buying the logo T-shirts made by slave labour in China, dirt cheap compared with those made by our garment workers who’re underpaid—on strike…People need bread and circuses, this binge is the big circus that’s going to take bread off the mind of our population that’s supposed to exist on two dollars a day—why anyway does the world use that currency as the standard for survival everywhere.
Tell
me? And for how many millions that’s not pay it’s handout to the unemployed, the destitute, and here’s where what’s surely the lowest form of our shit-art of corruption—it’s not only the fat cats finagling the profits of tenders, it’s the small fry who pay our old-age pensions, grants to feed children—they have their level, faking grants for themselves, Social Security just closes one eye…
Do you hear me?
Their loot from the poor has been more than a hundred million between last year and just
so far
this one!—Stricture in Jake’s face. Fury.—UBUNTU. One of the African words everyone, all of us, any colour, we know—we know it means something like we are all each other—shouting—Say it! Say it! Say it for what it is. Turned out to be! What we’ve produced! What we’re producing! Corruption’s our culture. The Spirit of The Nation. U BU U N TU UBUNTU U U

They sit alone together, in this company of comrades.

—UBUNTU UBUN-TU UBUNTU-U U U—

Suddenly—facing this comrade Steve:

Jake’s gut, stomach, lungs, sucked back to the spine under his Mandela shirt, spews,—You lucky bastard—
you’re out of it
—

The moment holding a life.

—I’m not going.—