No Time Like the Present: A Novel (4 page)

Steve brought students to the house. There would be peanuts and cartons of fruit juice dumped on the small terrace for hospitality, although they might have preferred beer and good pot. These were not seminars, their prof (as they called him although he was still only a senior lecturer) invited them as young friends. That most of them were in what used to be called the ‘non’ category, non-European: African Black, African Indian, African-God-knows-mixture-white, something new to the science faculty at the university, as company was nothing new to Jabu and him as it was for many who might receive them in their homes as people other than servants. Struggle had no non-categories among identities of comrades. There was no sense of inadequacy of a white comrade in that he didn’t know the languages of the cadres where he was minority with communication only in his native English. The few friendly colloquialisms of African tongues he had picked up as every kind of collective with shared aims, activity, conditions, has its own jargon, made do; after all, there were the Cuban cadres most of whom didn’t even know two words of lingua franca English, brothers though they proved themselves, coming from vast distance other than that between the black and white cadres when they were boys.

That was then. Now the allowance made—to himself, and by his black friends, Mkize and others, the students attracted to the subjects he had taught—it belonged to the dead and the buried. He was an African although he didn’t understand, couldn’t communicate in any African language—allowance made by his lover, mother of their child, Jabulile herself? Had never spoken to her those intimate words that must be known to her more committing than darling my love etc., the second-hand.

And Jabu was a teacher.

She was surprised, curious when he announced: You’re going to start teaching me Zulu. What other tongue should he learn; it was her own. She lightly used the everyday English endearment—Darling what’s it with you?—

A new thought.—You talk to Sindiswa in Zulu. Already she’s able to say quite a lot. Demanding what she wants…I don’t understand her. She won’t understand me.—

Jabu laughed.—I talk to her in English too, and you do.—

—She’ll grow up talking to me in a language she and I share, and I won’t be able to speak to her in a language that’s also hers but we don’t share.—

—Is that so bad. Many people have one parent who doesn’t know the language of the other, that’s passed on to the child.—

—I’m not a foreigner.—

To have the need to bring up again, now to her—he’s a white who has earned his identity, not non-black: African.

—So when do we begin? It’s going to be fun. I’m strict you know. What about tonight. No, we’re due at the Mkizes’, her sister’s back with the Ghanaian she’s married, big excitement. He’s some kind of special surgeon, hoping he’s going to get a post at the medical school, wants to talk to you about the university.—

—Oh there’s no hurry, I’ve remained dumb so long, whenever you can take me on as another one of your Holy Father’s school kids.—

So one of her father’s maxims comes back from childhood.—No time like the present. Say with me
Ngingumfana ohlankiphile eckasini lika thishela uJabu?
—

—Which means…—

—How are you going to pay me for my after-school classes.—

—Only if you stop sniggering at my pronunciation.—Hugging her, which led him to her mouth and the deep kiss that belonged in another time of day, or rather, night.

There was nothing playful about the lessons, however. Over the weekend he wrote grammar exercises she set, and learnt vocabulary, her selected dictionary of spoken words she judged should be the most apt for, example, interchange with his students when he brought them home; it became also a rather enjoyable exchange of roles, lecturer turned pupil. Jabu never corrected him in the students’ presence, left it to them to slap their jean-armoured thighs in applause as they could coach him, throwing in some useful near-obscenities that she vetoed, sharing laughter. This did not affect his authority as their lecturer, a kind of authority other than that of her father, which had done so much in the past for her to be equal to the present. Surely it was in her Baba’s tradition, smuggling books to her when she was imprisoned without trial, an after-hours class of headmastership and spiritual duties as an Elder in the church, that she was furthering her husband’s emancipation by giving him the ability to express himself as an African, not only by a European tongue. Once her father had spelled out for her to read, by making sequence of the words underlined in the pages of textbooks he somehow managed to get to her in detention, another maxim. ‘It is unfortunate that we use the language of the oppressor to speak for our freedom.’ She learnt afterwards those were the words of Gandhi.

Steve was right about the ‘Alertwatch’ company whose fees the Suburb subscribed to every month; there would be among them
impimpis
, black traitors who worked with the apartheid army. There are not many skills of guerrilla warfare of much use in the aftermath known as peace. The only aptitude that might be useful is that for violence, and it has been taken up by the defeated army’s rank and file. Join the present version of the country’s army, but because of your past there’s no place for you there—be employed by the new industry, the security companies. You’ll have at least familiar guns in your hands with a different licence to use them, not to defend apartheid but to defend private possessions. At Christmas Jabu had the Alertwatch patrol on the list, postman, municipal street cleaners, to whom it was apparently the suburban custom to give a small cash gift; poor devils, what chance did they have of training for anything else, coming from the poorest of the poor who were her people; his people too, God’s people. It is not often she shows a remnant of what it must have been to be a pastor’s granddaughter, church elder’s daughter; he assumed that like him, being a ‘Christian’ was something of an ethnic label long come unstuck in the only dedication they knew, under that other rubric, justice. But in the chances of change, many labels,
Blankes Alleen
off benches, Whites Only off public toilets, people seemed to be looking for a hand-up to some authority beyond, no, outside the common condition won by revolution, although such other kinds of authority had proved useless in the past. The Dolphin boys were seen in well-pressed pants actually going to the neighbouring church (though Alan and lover still had been turned away from one elsewhere), what need was there of baptism other than splashing benediction in the pool? Some genuflection of thankfulness that the law had recognised their gender. Thank God. Comrades were dispersed among a sometimes unpredictable range of activities and professions. Some were qualified to return to the professions and enterprises they had abandoned for battle camps of bush and desert. There were lawyers and doctors the beginning of whose youthful careers was interrupted for those years, the demand beyond making your way. Most took up the career rather differently than what might have been if the Struggle hadn’t taken first place from the child’s ambition of what it wanted to be, or precepts social as well as intellectual expected. There were white doctors who chose to treat, along with black doctors the days-long queues in urban squatter camps instead of setting up private practice in city complexes of the latest architectural design. What is Roly doing? Where’s Terence these days? Somewhere in industry, perhaps disappeared into big business, one back in the fold, family supermarket chain, another had found his place in a vast mining consortium and—perhaps seen as useful—representing for the times its conscience, he was promoting policies of better living conditions for the black miners as poorly paid as poorly housed in compounds. Some black heroes of the Struggle with the spirit of high political intelligence, leadership, powerful personality, had been seated at once in Mandela’s government; some survived into his successor’s, others opted for the other power, at last attainable, in the financial institutions of the old days which still own natural resources of the country below ground and the means above to convert them into wealth. But this is all official report language stuff. He and Jabu know another that creates things as they are. The normal life. The one that never was. Among their friends are comrades who are writers and actors. Poetry was written on paper meant to wipe your backside, in the years in prison. From the one everybody in the world knows about, Robben Island, the manuscript of an entire book was smuggled out in the reckless ingenuity that’s devised only within circumstances of impossibility as a factor stimulating an unknown faculty in the brain. Men who had within themselves the third sense of entering the identity of other people, places and times relevant to their own—actors who had never been on a stage—performed
Antigone
, known to a reader from a smuggled book among them, in their hour in the prison exercise yard. Meanwhile, during those years in the segregated cities there were blacks and whites who wrote and performed plays which enacted the relationships of the apartheid country in all their racist contortions, boldly and usually getting away with this because there were no theatres in the small white towns, in the black ghettos, the squatter camps, where the general population could be corrupted. For the same reasoning the Censorship Board rarely bothered to give any credence to these plays by forbidding them and closing the performances before colour-mixed audiences in a theatre declared for whites only.

These days Steve and Jabu are invited to rehearsals of the freed talent of writers, actors, singers from whom the opinions of friends are sought, criticism argued. Growing up in the ‘location’ beside the coal mines Jabulile had never seen a play until she was at the students’ Christmas effort at her teachers training college over the border. But her opinion was found worth listening to when one of the comrades’ plays reimagined a setting and social arrangements half-lost or half-ignored in the generation of labour herded down mines or in factories instead of themselves herding their cattle, and the generation that has lived by the edicts of Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Guevara instead of tribal custom. The Dolphin Marc put before her the draft of his play, with its version of the dimension of freedom gained. From her half-rural, half-industrial base, as a background to her transformation first as a revolutionary and then school teacher, she seemed able to believe with certainty that
this
custom now wouldn’t be followed exactly like
that
, this reaction to a girl refusing to be sold for a bride price to a man she didn’t want was likely to be different from the submission of the past; a pastor portrayed might not have been a sellout reporting as God’s will a secret ANC meeting of the time in his parish. People who had written out, so to speak, since 1994, inside knowledge of the lives devastated and endured, were publishing in mushroom ventures heroic stories from precolonial legends, appropriating these to their present as Europeans do those of ancient Greece. What the white regime called tribal chiefs now were Traditional Leaders sitting in parliament like any other political party. They too had brought ancient individual authority in languages and territorial fiefdoms to something of a common identity within the powers of government to direct people’s lives. Yet—in the bewilderment—paradox of freedom, who would have thought of it—the Traditional Leaders at least offered the support of observances of conduct that had directed life in some certainty; so—the ancestors are still with the people as they were through humiliation, the racist assaults, the wars; there through eternity. And to whom the people are still responsible? A few traditional Leaders had collaborated with apartheid, given status in reserves for blacks known as Bantustans—‘Bantu’ = people, as in racespeak reference to those areas.

The ex-Bantustan leaders aren’t exactly
impimpis
from the past in a modern democracy. People are free to recall themselves as they wish, just as the couple Jabulile, Steve, are revolutionaries become citizens. The Constitution confirms it. The normal life, the one that never was.

There’s a hand-delivered envelope, messenger, not post. ‘Steve from Jonathan’.—This’s come.—She hands it to him with a shoulder lift of curiosity. Inside, a printed card with the celebratory scrolls of some occasion. He reads; then reads aloud not so much to her as to himself. It’s an invitation, an invitation to the ‘barmitzvah’ of a son of his brother. The date, the address of a synagogue.—What is this?—He waves the card.

The amazement surprises Jabu, she takes the question literally.—Isn’t it something the Jews do…—Jewish cadres might have referred to it when memories of childhood were exchanged to pass the time between tense preoccupations in the bush.

—To make a boy a man. Like you do with ritual circumcision schools, only it doesn’t hurt.—

Of course she knows his circumcised penis was done when he was a baby.

—It’s a religious ceremony, isn’t it?—

—
What is this?
Jonny, Alan and I were snipped at my mother’s whim, I suppose, that’s all Jonny can claim for the religion, just as our father introduced us to Father Christmas not Jesus on the cross.
What’s got into him
.—

—Maybe his wife wants it.—Brenda, the one who embraced her so enthusiastically when she was introduced to the family.

—Why should she, not Jewish, is she. Not so far as I know, I’ve been away from them so long.—He slides his mobile out of his pocket.—I’m going to ask him what’s it all about.—

—No, Stevie no—She’s beguiling, her hand on his wrist, there’s a mock tussle, always good to grasp one another but he prevails.

Jonathan has an evasive easy answer for his brother who surely knows him well even if different politics meant they were out of touch during the years when Steve disappeared from family life.—I think Ryan is happy with the idea.—

But what, whose? Why shift it onto the child.

—Well…we didn’t have much idea who we were, when we were kids, did we, Andrew and Pauline didn’t seem to think it mattered, then.—

—The human race.—

Oh yes, the Leftist in the family; knows the answer we got wrong. We businessmen golf players—except that the black president plays golf now.

—Whatever. Did we know the difference between our mother and father. I don’t remember anyone telling us. Andrew Christian Pauline Jewish, and us…—

—Did categories matter.—

—Stevie, there’s so much that has, if you’re going to talk about categories. Everything you were was decided just like that. It isn’t enough to be black or white, finish and
klaar
, the way it was, in the bad old days—you belong somehow to something closer…more real, you can, it’s possible…right.—

Muslim girls, daughters of Indians themselves third- or fourth-generation South African; he sees them on campus, buttock-sculpted pants, asserting breasts, high heels, film-star faces, and heads shrouded to the shoulders in widow’s black cloth.

—You’ll come.—His brother spoke with assurance.

—Love, you don’t have to.—He had told her.

—But of course I’m coming—and then—You don’t want me to.—It was not a question but an accusation, were there still situations in his life where she would be considered out of place. (Were there any likely in her life where he might be.)

He gently denied the ridiculous.—Just don’t want you to be subject to this kind of thing.—

Jabu consulted Brenda about what to wear; the outfit she’d be expected to by her father elder in his church, on a special occasion in the calendar of worship? He would give the eye of approval, according to the season, to modest summer dresses or skirt, blouse and jacket, Western style, like the three-piece Sunday suit he wore although Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the Anglican Church had introduced traditional African robes in which he even danced down the aisle as part of church services.

—African! Your lovely skirts and those beaded collars.—

—Do you cover your heads?—

—Oh no, your hairdo looks marvellous. The Jews and Africans are such ancient people, they both had their special get-up for women, yours’s great, but thank God we won’t be likely to have anyone arrive wearing wigs.—

—Women had to wear wigs? Over their hair?—

—Their heads were shaved. I’ve picked up all about this while Ryan’s been at school to the
yeshiva
, that’s religious school, like the Muslims’
madressa
.—

She has a maze of pathways round and across her head. You trip over pavement hairdressers in the city but hers is achieved in some fancy salon she goes to. What women will allow to be done to themselves. Fashion; or conformity. What’s in fashion’s a conformity of some kind? I loved her first with the busy halo of African hair she had. To my hand it was the hair at the place I go into her.

He wears a hat borrowed from Jake, although it turns out there are skull caps laid ready at the entrance to the place of worship they’ve been given on the invitation instructions to reach. They are led in by a young man who takes his function ceremoniously, hesitating before the rows of seats, indicating the best choice. The synagogue is large, high-ceiling but without the elaborations of a church of such proportions, no graven images, bare of chapels where special favours are asked of this saint or that, like highly qualified doctors specialising in different pardons, benedictions, solutions for various spiritual conditions. It is simple in spacious lack of distraction from the only focus, the curtains behind which there must be something holy hidden, on the far wall above a platform with a discreet pulpit-podium to one side.

Seats are comfortable as those in a luxury cinema, very different she finds them from the benches in her grandfather’s and her father’s church; Steve doesn’t remember how his young backside might have been accommodated accompanying father Andrew on one of his rare obligatory occasions to show up in church, a wedding perhaps, or a funeral. In front of them are books slotted in pockets on the backs of the next row of seats. The woman beside him—he gives a quick glance of polite acknowledgement, but she is passing the time pushing back the cuticles on her fingernails, the man on Jabu’s side is praying, just audibly, a white shawl falling round his neck. Jabu’s careful not to disturb him by jolting the chair arm and she manages with her usual natural grace to succeed in taking a couple of the books without doing so.

There is pervasive talk, even giggles from young boys apparently corralled to a block of seats across the aisle.

Is this an orthodox or a reform synagogue. The woman is satisfied with the condition of her nails and he can ask her. It’s reform. Jabu is turning pages to verify something she’s finding in one of the bilingual books, there’s movement of her lips—she’s trying to mouth Hebrew words, she who speaks at least four languages other than the natal isiZulu he’s picked up under her tutelage. If you’re black you’ve had to improvise communication with unilingual whites, she’d probably easily acquire this ancient one, too.

The rabbi welcomes the congregation in Hebrew and with colloquial English, not the tone Jabu’s accustomed to in church, whether spoken isiZulu or English, implicit chastening against inattention to the presence of the Lord. His Hebrew is poetry, there’s a choir singing in that language, you don’t have to be able to read music in order to understand the beauty of it.

Steve has been looking about to see where Jonathan is sitting, if he’s not behind the scenes, who knows what the protocol may be for the father in this male ceremony.

Andrew and Pauline—must be here, Jonathan’s and his parents, the boy’s grandparents. He has passed over the man in robes and a turban-like headgear, fringed prayer shawl, some ecclesiastical functionary among those in the gathering, although standing, not seated, where yes, the parents Andrew and Pauline have been spotted. He glances that way again as if to mark, we’re here too, Jabu and I. Family solidarity in the most unlikely circumstances after the years when I had to be removed from the way of life expected for me.

The rabbi or whatever he is: he has the face of Jonathan. He is Jonathan. That’s my brother. How could I not have seen. Known him.

Can those stage props have changed him; the sign of change, this one way: his. What was it he said that day, it isn’t enough to be black or white, finish and
klaar
the way it was in the bad old days, you belong to something…what was it, ‘more real’. What’s more real than what we are, now! My Jabu is a woman the same as your Brenda is a woman, same rights—must I spell them out. Your Ryan and our Sindiswa are growing up not tattooed White Master/
Swart Meisie
just as the Nazis tattooed numbers on the inmates of concentration camps. Why d’you need that ghetto disguise to make you real?

This Jonathan, the functionaries, the boy, are now grouped on the platform.

Jabu senses beside her that Steve is not aware of the address being given about the significance for the boy to be bar mitzvahed, he’s not even hearing the edict taken not only to be faithful to Judaism but to fulfil human responsibilities to everyone, the people and the country. Good sense to hear; she turns to him—and there are his hands splayed palm-down on his thighs. The male gesture of tense reaction she knows in him although she doesn’t, this time, know a cause. Her hand like a secret between them goes over his. There is some sort of text reading announced to which the assembly apparently is to respond at points from the pages and lines given in the books supplied. In the church most know the Bible but here at the occasion there is scuffling and consultation of Torah and prayer book among the congregation, which certainly includes Jonathan’s business associates of various backgrounds religious or otherwise, some Afrikaners, ambitious brother capitalists no longer the master race. There’s one black man among them, must be member of a board; an example of forward-looking recognition of Black Empowerment policy in the second Leninist definition of power, ‘first gain the political kingdom then the kingdom of finance’.

She is the only black woman.

Jabu flutters the pages of the right volume and speaks the responses at the right moment in the English version along with the Hebrew of the old man in his fringed prayer shawl. During pauses when nothing seems to be required of respect while there is activity of some sort going on up at the platform, Jonathan’s alter ego stands as if awaiting orders, there are men in the same kind of dress and in conventional dark suits coming to put a hand on the shoulder or briefly round the arms of the boy Ryan with instruction, advice or homage, the boy’s not seen to do more than nod slow and repeatedly. Brenda leaves her seat and goes up to the official group, comes down again, then once more summoned. There is no word seen to be exchanged between her and the figure of her husband. At some stage there is a rustle of hush in the congregation-cum-audience; a moment has come. The boy walks up to the podium-pulpit with back intently bent, straightens, swallows (you can’t see the movement of the Adam’s apple from the distance of the seats but everyone knows that brave pause) and delivers his candidacy speech in the English version and in Hebrew for which he has been under tuition for several years. Then comes the other Moment, the revelation by the young hand about to be that of a man, of what is most holy in this house of God, as the revealing of the likeness of the rebel Jew, Jesus, is in the other religion He inspired. The boy takes hold of a cord, the curtains sway on the wall, shake folds and curl back either side with the flourish of a retreating wave. He lifts out the Scroll of The Law. Jabu’s half-turned in her seat as if she’s about to applaud, but knows better than this secular impulse, in a house of worship.

And that’s only the beginning of the spectacle, there are ceremonial embraces up there, it’s like a scene from a religion ancient as an archaic Greek frieze, it looks as though some in embrace are going to succumb to the floor. And the solemnity changes key to something different, an order is being made of the rabbi, his cohort of family men and male friends, doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, businessmen, some transformed by a token enrobement, family women in whatever is their individual best (just as down in the congregation Steve’s wife is in hers) with the inducted boy carrying aloft like a trophy the Scroll of The Law on its staff. He leads the parade down from the ceremonial platform and everyone rises, the ignorant taking cue from the conversant, Jabu from the devout old neighbour and Steve from her. The procession is coming slowly down the first aisle, slowly round the second, apparently held back in pauses, by those congregants nearest. As it approaches the row where he and she sit, the woman on his left stands and pushes past their feet to get to the aisle, hampered by the unsteady old man already risen. Jabu, Steve see those who are closest enough to the aisle lean a hand straining to touch in the procession’s passing the holy object carried by the celebrant. There is silence except for the stir of feet and clothing.

The held breath is released. The Scroll back hung in place. In a gush the procession breaks, interrupted, disbanded by everyone crowding in with congratulation on the way out the doors, the excited, half-schoolboy-chaffing boys burst from their exclusion to entrap this one of theirs who has just breasted the tape on the finish line of the instruction they shared.

There are strangers who arrest Steve, knew him as a little boy, take the opportunity to recall incidents he hasn’t retained; time overlaid. There is a garden to this place of worship and food and drink laid out on decorated tables under the trees. Jabu provides plates for him and herself and keeps up a running commentary to him this looks good, aren’t you going to try that, and in friendly asides to others, before the choice. Jonathan has emerged from his robe and headdress, he comes over to his brother it seems to present himself in uniform dark suit and tie. He is carrying two glasses to take up from a tray another to hand to Jabu. Instructs her: Mazeltov! She’s congratulating him again—she and Steve were caught up with the family on the way outdoors—and he leans to be kissed cheek by cheek.—So glad you came.—

Is it to confirm to the revolutionary brother that she is today converted. Or that he’s not himself conventional, isn’t this ritual just concluded, another kind of sign. In reverse? Or is it that he’s sexually attracted to her—they shared toys in brotherly compact. Anyway, she’s a better guest than Steve, she moves and talks easily among the crowd.