No Time Like the Present: A Novel (5 page)

She is the only black woman, yes.

—Who’s the black beauty?—

The speaker is waiting with Brenda a turn in the ladies’ room. The heavy kosher wine releases polite social inhibitions.

—That’s Jonathan’s sister-in-law, his brother’s wife.—

—How did it happen?—

—Oh they were in the Movement.—Brenda knows the terminology, if her friend doesn’t.—In detention here, or over the border somewhere in camps. His family never knew where he was while he was supposed to be at university, between times he got his degree, mysterious guy. Yes, she’s lovely; sharp as well.—

—You knew him? The brother. Never mind the racist thing…it still must be strange, with a black woman…at least at the beginning, no?—

—Oh ask some of the respectable husbands you know!—

The occupants of the two toilets are taking their urinary meditation, whoever they are.

In the female privacy Brenda emerges from the persona the occasion makes of her, traditional wife of traditional Jonathan and traditional mother of the son inducted to manhood.

—I’ve always wondered. Something else. Not the same but. What’s it like, to have that…a black cock coming into you. Are they really black or like the inside of their mouths when they laugh, and the palms of their hands, sort of rose-colour, always wanted to know.—

The friend contrives to look as if this confided attraction has not been said, coinciding with an avalanche whoosh behind one of the doors, and the occupant comes out.

Alan was there unnoticed among the seated in the synagogue but not to be missed balancing heaped plate and glass in the style of a partygoer. They meet one another, these other brothers of the one become a real Jewish boy’s father, with an unspoken you here too. Alan laughs; it’s for himself, he’s no longer what’s queer in the family—in the dictionary not the sexual gender sense, it’s sibling Jonathan who’s for some reason deviated from the non-observant but accepted the identity of Christ inherited from their father, given up what may be protection against anti-Semitism that hasn’t disappeared with the smoke from Auschwitz. He tweaks one of Jabu’s coloured-thread-plaited locks.—My favourite woman.—

—That’s not saying much, considering.—Steve’s endurance of being there diverted to one of the sharp exchanges that began in boyhood fun against the solemnity of grown-ups.

—Where’s Tertius?—

—Jabu sweetie, I didn’t know, with what’s going on with Jonathan, whether it’d be kosher, as a couple…—

—Well you’re the one that’s read up all the religions—

—Except Marx, Che and Castro, my brother—

—They say the Torah has some good advice, you’d know if God’s quoted there, as the Gereformeerde Kerk says the Bible does declaring an abomination?—

Daughter of the other abominated, the sons of Ham, Jabu enjoys family jokes for the occasion.

Steve judges they can decently leave ‘Jonathan’s farce’ and go back home to reality.

They’re alone apart, she and he, each, in his brother’s family celebration. They have been together in the meaning of so many situations, in that each has chosen resistance, revolution, it isn’t one of the conventions that order existence in white suburb or black ghetto. It’s a place of encounter in an understanding that hasn’t existed before. As with falling in love.

What’s he mean by ‘farce’? Nothing unusual in reviving a custom. Your people are your people, Baba is my Baba, I still serve him the way of a daughter of our people although I moved on.

Back home to reality, Sindiswa under care of a widowed relative of Jabu’s father who has come to live with them; not exactly a nanny employed as in the old order of the whites (a quick denial) but at the request of father to daughter. Some solutions to what she knows are his too many responsibilities to church and extended family. Steve grew up of course in his, Pauline and Andrew’s home, where servants were taken for granted as part of the household, black, separately housed in the yard, with what was decided a decent wage considering they were also fed.

He could not have a servant, man, woman, doing what everyone should be doing for himself. In Glengrove he and Jabu washed their clothes and dishes, sucked away their own dirt into the vacuum cleaner. His guilt at the obliging presence of Wethu, specially attentive to him in the subservience owed to males in the Elder’s extended family—he had to take out of her hands his shoes she expected to polish—was something he saw Jabu didn’t share; he insisted Jabu’s distant cousin or whatever she was must be paid. But of course that makes her a servant; in the extended family at the coal-mine village women in her dependent position are sheltered and granted respect but not paid. Jabu hadn’t thought of money; to her, that he did—more than sense of the revolutionary equality, justice; it was a sign of sensitivity, one of the qualities of her man. Wethu occupied what was supposed to be the room for comrades in need of a bed when passing through the city from their dispersed lives—but she told Jabu by way of her tears she couldn’t explain even in the language they shared, my child, I want a place, you can fix the window in that shed.

And it was so; she was without their intention, left out when Jabu and Steve animatedly exchanged opinions of what they’d heard, read and seen on the news, and told of what each experienced with whom, achieved or been frustrated by in the working day; Wethu’s vocabulary in English didn’t include the references and slang understood between them; she was in communication only with the child, or when Jabu remembered to say something that might be of interest to her, in their language.

His isiZulu, taught—passed on—to him by Jabu so that he could speak to his daughter in her other heritage, and in linguistic aspect of intellect as one a little less inferior in his efforts to communicate sociably with his students invited home, who were voluble in up-to-date hip-hop English—this also wasn’t isiZulu usage familiar to this woman, Wethu. So he was experiencing in himself: class difference could take over from colour in what’s going to be made of freedom.

Steve had the shed of the empty chicken run pulled down and a room with a bathroom built in its space by a friend of Peter Mkize, a construction worker at a white consortium who had taken the chance of setting himself up independently as a builder. The house owner approached through the estate agent had no objection to the improvement of the amenities of his property. Wethu’s all-purpose tears again; Steve had gently to return the pressure of his hand to that of hers wringing his in gratitude. May God bless you. May God bless you.

A room in a yard.

It was the year the Holy Father decided to appoint their most progressive teacher, loved by the children, to direct the junior school.

Why did she give up teaching?

It was also the year she completed with high marks the correspondence courses as preliminary study for a degree in law.

Look at this without any quick answer of unquestionable certainty ready to slip off her tongue. There was the attempt at objectivity they had learnt necessary in examining a choice between decisions to be taken in the revolutionary cadres.

What the reasons could be, and these were with them in the times of silence which keep the balance of living together in the tenderly joyous interpenetration of love-making, and the need to be a self. Whatever that identity may be, or in the process of becoming. She was the child of a rural ghetto, daughter of an Elder in a Methodist church, she is the woman—wife, that legal entity—to a man of the pallor of colonialism. Which of these identities, or all, make hers. The books her father had brought her to read, from childhood; their text contained more than messages she was to spell out by stringing disparate underlined words. The reading habit he’s nurtured (another identity); while reading as a student she’d smoked good Swazi marijuana but given up that as a cadre with the need of a clear head. One among books she and Steve buy as presents for each other and the bookshelves they’d put up in the house, is by an Indian, Amartya Sen, and these ideas of who you are, made up of the activities, genre of work, skills, shared interests, environments you are placed and place yourself in, are his definition of identity. Multiple in one. That’s who you are. It’s something her own life, Steve’s life, fits. But so far the most definitive self comes from the Struggle. Whatever that means now.

It’s not something to talk about even to him. It’s not left in the bush camp or the desert or the prison, it’s the purpose of being alive; still a comrade. And it’s law that confirms or denies it. There’s the Constitution to make freedom possible.

So she’s going to become a lawyer. He’s aware it is not a choice enticed by money although teachers are poorly paid as if they owe a special tithe to the country’s development. She’ll be somebody’s articled clerk for some time, earning peanuts. A kind of pupil herself, again; didn’t the devout Elder, her Baba, send her away to get something better than apartheid education, something of freedom, over the border.

Whenever she arrived on a visit to that definition of home as where you come from, no matter home has become somewhere quite else, the women looked at the flat stretch of cloth between her hips; and then towards her mother: what was she saying to the daughter about this. All that should be said again and again. When are there going to be more babies? The child she brought to her
magogo
,
gogo
, sisters, brothers, aunts, cousins in the Elder’s congregation, was a girl. How could she tell them without offence, those with high bellies and those with round heads and exquisitely tentacled miniature hands at the breast, that she and Steve postponed another child rather than taking the obligation to fecundity, because the nuclear one isn’t the only family, its brood the only children. Your time doesn’t belong to you exclusively or even foremost to own progeny. The revolution comes first because the sacrifices that were and are its right demand are for your own and all children. That’s not a plug from political rhetoric. There’s no good breeding future slaves of one kind of regime or another.

Of course Jabu’s work influences their postponement of a companion for Sindiswa. With the achievement of her LLB she has been taken in as attorney by one of those new three-name legal practices which are literally up on the board, signs of change, one with an Indian name, another with an African name, among the partners. No denying that her political CV if not her colour was an advantage in the choice out of other applicants, but that’s no reflection on the abilities she had to offer. The firm did not deal with divorce cases, the partners kiddingly accusing one another of turning down the most lucrative briefs, but was known as appearing for the defence in property disputes which used to be more or less exclusive to whites, with a few Indians who had acquired business concessions in the urban area where at one period Indians had some undetermined rights. Blacks had none. Now, anyone may own property anywhere—capitalism freed of its chains, Jake says wryly, announcing he and Isa, who always could have had that white right, were buying the house they rented—but inheritance rights were compounded by the remnant of religious or traditional law that had been recognised by the apartheid system, whether just or not. Keep the natives quiet where this doesn’t affect anyone else. Among blacks, after the husband’s death the wife has to quit their home acquired together; the house was to be passed to his brother. Jabu was Ranveer Singh’s assistant in court on one such case, taken up and instructed by a legal aid organisation as a Constitutional rights issue, let alone a humanitarian one. The Justice Centre had briefed a prominent civil rights Senior Counsel, comrade whose patriarchal white face did not match his feared cross-examination techniques. At tea recesses he was centre stage in discourse, an oratory she was too impressed and inexperienced to know an attorney should not interrupt, and her unexpected questions surprised him with their aptness to the relevance of his anecdotes to the case being heard. This young black woman must have grown up as what it meant to be black in that old regime—his big head agitated encouragement at her—the political nuances in such cases, while upholding the breach of law, not to mention (he did) preposterous breach of human dignity, one must know that from the perspective of custom, unwritten laws, by getting the verdict in favour of the complainant you are putting down Constitutional law’s feet sacrilegiously on some traditionalists. Black victims again…and without them, what sort of national unity? A legalistic-moral system seceded from it? The traditionalists believe freedom includes recognition—no, incorporation of the particular organisation of life that governed their ancestral relationships, their concepts of entitlement, before colonialism and apartheid. Apartheid dead, black president in the cabinet, members of parliament, but their traditional laws are alive. Can we afford to insult for their own just benefit members of the majority population. Answers himself.—Well we’re going to win this case.—A wide laugh, everyone joins him.—Law enforcement means taking risks—on principle.—

The other lawyers use his first name, first names all round, she addresses him formally as she has been inducted since childhood in approaching an elder and anyone of obvious rank; the other siblinghood, of comrades, hasn’t outmoded that for her even while she’s uninhibited as a result of that comradeship.—The majority of the black majority (she underlines the neat significance with drawn breath in tightened nostrils)—I don’t think would want to see traditions made law, certainly not when it comes to property. I mean, there was so little we could own that all white people had a right to, who would want to have in the Constitution the right to evict a woman, hand over a woman’s home to a collateral—a man, of course.—

It was a diverting contradiction, appreciated by the Senior Counsel and others; that the member of the population from which traditionalists came should speak treason.

At the end of the trial, which indeed the S.C.’s lead won for the defence, as she thanked him for her benefit of having been allowed to be even a small part of it, he said as if he suddenly had his attention tapped by a detail overlooked—You should be at the Justice Centre. Why don’t you come along and see the director, I’ll have a word with him.—

This man of her father’s generation, distanced, distinctive by public achievement, recognised in a marginal note of judgement what was for her the fulfilment of something not to talk about even to comrade, confidant, lover. To come out with a claim as a boast. The purpose of being alert—still as a comrade. The possibility of it. Opportunity.

In her new employment at the Justice Centre Steve lived with her transformation, the growing confidence in the voice, the certainty of gesture, the pleasure of relaxation evident in intervals between concentration on the current work at night preparing précis from notes taken on an advocate’s sessions with the attorneys and, soon, appointed to what she was gifted for: speaking to witnesses to assess what could be expected of them in the dock—coaching was the disallowed description. Whatever was mandated in this aspect of her professional responsibilities, she took it as her responsibility to give the nervous, frightened or angry people understanding of the fears even of this kind of interrogation; hadn’t she known the other, in a prison cell.

He found Jabu happy; fulfilment, isn’t that what ‘happiness’ is. That he wasn’t responsible for this part of it—component—is of no account; he shared it. It was unexpected when she brought up something that did involve him. They had made love. Whatever the daily apartness of the worlds of work, in identity, the illusion of exalting into one leaves an echo in which anything can be broached.—We should have another child.—

Heard.

Hadn’t they decided for good reasons on which they also were at one, their purpose wasn’t to perpetuate the human race, not even in the advancement the mixture of their distinctive bloods did, there were billions of others just as well equipped to breed, billions of women for whom this honourable task was the best they were equipped for. No condescension, discrimination in this fact. Be fruitful. The father’s church said so, probably Jonathan’s Torah said so, the eyes of the women at her home village said so.

—Sindiswa needs…to be an only child isn’t a good thing.—

—Sindiswa gets enough companionship. She’s very sociable, school buddies, kids of our neighbours here, in and out.—

—But they have the same mother and father.—

—If you’re going to take Silk one day. An advocate with the kind of twenty-four-hour work that means, you know how Bizos and Chaskelson and Moseneke slave but they’ve had wives to stop the squabbles dry the tears and wipe the bottoms—

Touch of her lip to the crook of his neck, the skin the softest most vulnerable of a man’s body, before the sandpaper of shaved beard begins—unless male lovers find the anus the most, how does a woman judge.—You’ve always done your share with Sindiswa.—

—OK. But all the mother stuff. You’ll neglect the work, your mind will be elsewhere, and you’ll be guilty, either way, before the children or the accused.—

His hand, shield on her breast as if some avid infant is already sucking her hard-won chosen life out of her.—I don’t want you unhappy.—

—I won’t be. We’re not talking about a brood, five, six. There’s Wethu—look how she and Sindiswa get on.—

A member of the extended family is not a nanny.

A woman is mama to all babies.

Jabu’s reasons for convincing Steve they should have another child.

Her reason is not the stated one that Sindiswa needs a brother or sister. Neither is it that when back Home the women look at the flat waist where they expect to see a belly; her mother puts forth what in the extended family is taken for granted: your husband wants sons.

Jabu’s the one who wants a son. She has produced a reproduction of herself, the female who has to prove her own identities beside the sexual one. If it hadn’t been for her father she might never have done it; would never become an advocate (some day). A son doesn’t have predetermined by what’s between his legs, his function in any extended family, at Home or in that of the world. He’s born free. At least in this sense. She wants a son, everything she isn’t. It’s the Other, to complete the fulfilment of favourable court judgment. Looking to the ambitions Steve has for her—If I’m an advocate I can’t be a woman?—That’s all she’ll say of her reason.

He can only understand it differently. Reversed, as happens in pathways of the maze in which humans meet one another.—It’s that a woman
can
be an advocate now!—At least it’s understood mutually he doesn’t have to specify ‘black’.

Nothing is agreed to, as was the decision not to have children after Sindi. When he made love he had within the ecstatic ineffable there was perhaps something he was not, could not be aware of. She was the one who swallowed or didn’t—how would he know—a pill in place of God’s will some believed made the decision whether or not there was to be life.

Jabu had somewhere read or on Internet consulted learnt that conception of males was more likely in winter than summer (something to do with the body temperature, the semen stored in the testes?) and it must have been when winter came that she had not taken the pill. The son was conceived in the Southern Hemisphere’s African winter, and born nine months and three weeks later, in confirmation of the theory she’d accepted on the principle some of the Home women called book-learning.

The delight and power over the future in naming a child. Among comrades there were Fidels and Nelsons and Olivers taking their first steps. But these comrades didn’t want to choose for their infant who his heroes must be; he would be growing up in a time when there might be others. Then there’s the happy fact that race, colour are a synthesis in their children; African name, European name? The name for the son came from somewhere out of the short list in mind, by looking at him: he was Gary. (Some film-star name?) Jabu was trying it out on herself and Steve: Gary Reed, the G and R, the initials went well together. It was Steve who named the son also for her father: Elias.

How? Why Steve? She laughed, all tears, scooping up the baby.
Elias
. Steve knows her better than she knows herself. The Mkizes, Jake and Isa, the Dolphin boys come to celebrate their son. She carries him in, Wethu in Sunday church dress beside her, and presents:—Gary Elias Reed.—

The Dolphins have brought along guitar and drums, they pluck and pound out Kwaito but also know older African music, and Wethu, although she hasn’t taken any of the wine that’s going down throats to the baby’s future, born in the Suburb won over from the past, she is roused as if summoned to ease forward in a kind of swaying genuflection and raise her voice clear of the chatter and laughter. She sings. The scale is low, high, ululating, up to the roof and out through the open terrace, claiming the Suburb. Nothing like it ever came from the choir of the Gereformeerde Kerk, in its day.