No Time Like the Present: A Novel (7 page)

As customary, she’s doing something; she’ll continue routinely with some part of her unconscious (what is it—pushing the heads of keys into the clips of a leather holder) while her voice is intense with concern. The Classics Professor: did you get caught up in it. But she knows better than that. As if she knew he would leave his little academic enclave and go down there, among the crowd, who this time happened to be students, some of them his. As she would.

—Wasn’t there anyone among the leaders who could direct, I mean the way it was going. So they could be heard…—

She’s asking; she who sleep-deprived and in imminence of other torture had resisted giving the names of comrades the interrogators wanted of her.

A way now. Meeting in the Great Hall with the vice chancellor principal of faculty and the Students Council in discussion of the matter of tuition fees?—That’s the government’s affair.—

What would the result have been? Agreement that the Convocation would meet to consider an inquiry into the implications etc. of social responsibility implied by free tuition at university level? Who can pay and who can’t. A means test?

—I couldn’t even get together a so-called delegation to tell the minister the university’s little problem, attempting to teach students who come out of school half-literate. What choice is there for them.
Out
from the lecture halls and our baby-care seminars, to the campus!—

He tells her like a confession only just realised—to himself, that when the swell of bodies landed him back near the science block he ejected himself and went back up to his room, met nobody in the corridors—keeping themselves scarce in their rooms, quit the campus or holed up in the faculty coffee room. But what did he have to feel himself more honest about as he stood again at his window, looking down at what was officially referred to collectively inoffensively as ‘The Student Body’ and now really was that, a mythological entity of many limbs. So down again, leaving the room open.

—The campus is really badly trashed? What’s the sense in that. They have to live with the mess, themselves. No, no what’m I saying, the black cleaners’ll have to come on…—Jabu still has in her the discipline of the Struggle: you must answer for your own actions…

Burnt documents trampled kicked about like dead leaves. A computer (whose from where) lying among broken shrubs. Who knows what, from bins in the women’s toilets. As someone offering knowledge, however mingy the access, one who’s accepted to be an academic, wouldn’t he be against students fouling their nest. If he believes in the purpose of a university existing however inadequate to circumstances it may be. If not, why be there? Teaching in the limitation of what you’re able and writing some fucking thesis so that you can pass on something more to those who need it, whose right it is.

Principal, Vice-Chancellor, faculty and representatives of the students were summoned to a meeting where the students succeeded in the university’s condemnation of brutal police action and arrests; and the principal and faculty succeeded in condemning the destruction by the students of campus facilities.

Sindiswa was born at a time when the new life of freedom was just three years old, child of change. She was even-tempered and happily responsive to everyone and everything. Her brother, Gary Elias, who had taken his first steps in the security of the suburban house was not, as Steve, while distrustful of fatherly judgements said, ‘easy’; would not go further than that. Jabu laughed—this was a naughty boy, as someone might say ‘tall for his age’. His primary schooling was at a local school, as Sindiswa’s had been before the Greek school, where she was reported by her teachers as top of her class. But the character of naughtiness the boy’s mother saw as usual began to be troubling. He punched a classmate, narrowly missing the eye—Steve and Jabu had to visit the parents to apologise. Gary ‘borrowed’ without her permission Sindiswa’s treasures (a conch in which she had been shown you could hear the sea, a carved box one of her Indian friends had given her) and damaged or, as he said, lost them. She was forgiving but hurt; and that seemed to annoy him. Jake told Steve he ought to take the kid along to watch football, the university games, join Jake and his rather older boys, giving him innocent male status. Gary listened to his father’s and Jake’s explanatory comments of what was happening on the field without reaction: tugged Steve’s shirt—When will it finish—

—I’m going to take Gary home over the long weekend.—

—That’s an idea. We’ll all enjoy a break.—

—Stevie, I want to take him to my father. He’s experienced with boys, he’s been head of that school, how many years…I’ll talk to my father. It’s better if I take him alone.—

There’s still—always—something distancing about Jabu’s bond with her father. For Steve, who did not know any such unique relation to his, only felt the loss for those few moments when his father was dead. He got up and folded his arms around her back, she turned not to release herself but so that they could kiss, their secular blessing, whatever happened to pass between them.

Jabu and the boy came back late on the Monday, last holiday night, she lively, not tired by the long drive and he bounding, in charge, out of the car with the usual spoils of her natal place, this time avocados and eggs—Gary brought them from my mother’s hens himself, she told. Steve cooked a second supper, some of the eggs with leftover meat and he and Sindiswa ate again with her and the boy, praising the taste of the bright golden yolks, Gary unusually talkative telling of the calf he had touched, just born, all wet, and the bird—
inyoni
, Jabu prompts with the Zulu name—that nearly hit the windscreen, these events in the sum of days he’d passed.—You lucky thing—Sindiswa presented him with her admiration.

In bed, before turning out the light above their pillows—Your father, what’d he say.—

—We’ll talk tomorrow.
Lala
now,
masilake manje.
—

Tomorrow was a working day, breakfast, Wethu demanding news from home, how-is-Baba-mama-auntie—all right, delivery of the children, routes divided by alternative maps drawn by traffic, Jabu in her car the Greek school, him to Gary’s primary before the science faculty, her destination Justice Centre. So it was night again when the children were in bed that there was time for her to tell him her father’s thoughts, advice about the naughty boy. The loyalty of her mother love to persist in seeing him as just that despite behaviour gone beyond the happily mischievous.

Boys will be boys. Yes, will be seen, lived with differently in KwaZulu her home (no other home will ever deny its status) than in the suburb of freedom. That’s really what there is to hear about.

Whenever she’s approaching that way back it’s a route inside her as well as a road taken, and it is her father, whose stance imaged above the road. Only when she slows the car for the safety of the children who recognise it, leap alongside calling out Jabulile Gary Elias,
wozani
! to be the first to announce her—does the entire familiarity of the place of origin come to her as if she were pinching peaches from the tree before they were ripe, being pulled along wild tumbling rides on the fruitbox sleds of the boys, sitting with the Church Ladies at their prayer meetings.

Her mother comes to greet her and the grandson in the usual attendant women, everyone embracing her as also a mother and not sparing the grandson, who presses his elbows tight against his body in attempt at evasion.

Her father stands on the red-polished cement steps of the headmaster’s European-style house, his stance that is there, imprint in her mind. She moves to him and he down to her in the respect with which the women back off. He and she, father and daughter, embrace, enfold in one another’s arms almost like some special wrestle, but do not kiss. She can’t remember Baba kissing her even when she was a little girl. He doesn’t have to; the way everybody’s father husband boyfriend does among comrades in the Suburb. He takes her palm and walks her away into the house after she’s made a brief halt for his grandson Gary Elias to be greeted with a grown-up grasp of hands, and to be released among the boys who have already claimed him, always taken up from where previous family visits left off.

Her father leads her to the cabin-of-a-room which is the only completely private space of the house except for the brief use of the combined bathroom-lavatory. Her mother hastens up with some half-reproach half-concern about tea and food, but the exchange with her father’s calm ends in his instruction that the grandson be fed and tea be sent to this room for his daughter and himself, Jabu will join the others later.

Until one of the young girls brings a buckling tin tray with tea and two slices of cake (the headmaster has a mobile phone and of course his daughter has told him she was coming over for the long weekend) they exchange the expected: how is everyone, was there too much holiday traffic on the roads. She reminds the headmaster of what he already has been told, his daughter’s husband has been appointed Assistant Professor as the result of his thesis on approaches to the transformation of education. Baba tells he believes he has succeeded in getting a Carnegie grant to set up a library and eventually an Internet facility at his school.

This opening somehow establishes his instinct—always intuitive of her—that this isn’t just a family visit. She speaks in their language without being aware of it when she is back home, but he as unconsciously often speaks to her in English, perhaps recall of the years when he was preparing her for the standard of the language that would be required when he sent her over the border for the education he was determined she should have. The synthesis of communication: cultural authority of the natal, and the other one taken of right, freed of the colonialism it signified, are an intimacy they have with no one else. Her lover Steve would never, in his valiant efforts to learn isiZulu from her, reach this. Their children: Gary Elias playing games where action not words matter, with cousins in whose blood he has a share, would have the language from them, a second language; never home tongue.

—Baba, about Gary. Gary Elias.—

Before she could go on, her father took moments to look at her, them together on the time-plane for this.—How old is he?—He certainly knew but it was necessary for him to be accurate: if you have spent a lifetime with schoolboys you have learnt that every week, month, is a whole period as a year is in adulthood, not alone the body is budding, changing with awareness of itself. The question of the child’s place among others is looking for some form of assertion.

He has a better way of seeing this.—What does he do, in the family.—

—Baba?—

—What I say, my child.—

—We’re his parents, we do…for them, the children, I hope the right things.—English now, comes as the language.—I mean, we love him…show him…we are busy with whatever he needs at school, we let him have his friends around welcome, any time. If he gets into trouble he can come to us…help sort it out, he doesn’t have to become aggressive, Steve’s the last man in the world even to slap a naughty child…
sesibone udlame sekwanele
. It’s difficult to understand how our child could punch another kid in the face—he did it—a close friend thinks we should encourage him to take more interest in sport even though he’s still only kicking a ball around, but at a big soccer match he couldn’t wait for it to be over. Of course Steve’s not a great fan, himself.—

Her father takes his time.

—A boy must have duties. Yes, he must do things for you. Yes. A family can’t be together if children have no part in what has to be done every day. When they have these things, obligations (he was speaking in their language but now changed to the particular harsh cadence of English) tasks they don’t like too much, these give them the knowing they count for something, they’re not just there for what did you say, love.—

It is always clear from her father when the final word has come.

Mothers, sisters and the one brother still left at home, the others, absent husbands, gone to work and live in the cities—they were ready for her. Only the eldest sister, born a year ahead of her, was aware of the sister’s difference as the one who had been in prison in the apartheid past; the others placed the difference as her being among the women transformed, in the soaps they watched on TV. When, once or twice, a sister had been invited to visit Johannesburg, the house in the Suburb, she wanted to wander shopping malls as a tourist in a real-life television scene—there was the admired sister’s difference, the world to which she belonged; although that house didn’t look much like a television set.

Now sitting all together with her among them at home the difference, prison cell or shopping mall, wasn’t present; they chattered and laughed in their shared idiom, the latest-born baby was handed to her lap and stared to her encouraging drawnback face with eyes newly able to focus—
Uyabona ukhuti uyaba ngummeli omkhulu!
—exclamation from an aunt or grandmother chipping in, she’s seeing you will be a great lawyer. The exaggerated gasping, whooping of people who are happily at ease to be gathered when there are so many partings, this sister-daughter long missing from among them for unimagined reasons, prison and marrying a white man. But the oldest aunt or grandmother kept her everted lips down-pressed on either corner in the withdrawn certainty that this is one who can inhabit the future.

—What do you do?—A girl of about twelve, from the look of her breasts, has been mouthing to herself for the courage to speak, nervously remembers respect to add—Mama Jabu, please.—

Her father is there in the background ignoring moves of homage to vacate a chair for him.—If someone is arrested by the police for something he didn’t do, mama tells what really happened and why he should not go to jail. She works for justice, that’s what’s right.—

—And if he did do something bad?—The Zulu language is voluble about transgression:—
Uma enze okubi?
—

Laughing Jabu calls as if across to her father what he might answer.—Then there’ll be another lawyer who’ll say he didn’t do it.—Shall she try to explain the concept of justice Constitution defines, to this child—it would seem like bragging. The small place she’s made for herself in the new dispensation (that’s what it’s called among lawyers)—and isn’t it him, he who made it possible for her to do it.

She’s carried off to admire the queen-size bed and the paraffin-powered refrigerator-cum-freezer one of the husbands working in the city has had delivered to his wife. (And didn’t she herself want just such possessions when Steve and she were moving to the Suburb.)

Her father walked with her to the car, his very presence having made clear to her mother and the extended family all were to respect this, once the exuberant and tearful farewells had been made. Gary Elias was already scuffling with two boys in the back seat.

—Baba…I don’t usually appear in court, I mean for a complainant. Mostly I prepare witnesses. For cross-examination. It’s scary for them, the kind of close questioning, they need to know how to deal—say—

She doesn’t need to add, not to incriminate themselves.

—That is just as important.—He’s standing by the praise he gave, not something glibly produced to impress children. She turns to cling to him for a moment and his arms in his stiff black jacket are firm around her, with a quick release. A few words over his shoulder to the boys and they tumble out of the car; her boy, as if commanded, takes his place in the front passenger seat.—Wave to Babamkhulu!—as she shifts into gear.

Her father’s hand, lifted like a salute.

Time to talk; pack the day aside. Sindi and the boy have been allowed to watch a wildlife documentary DVD, and although in the shared living room, their attention to the screen means isolation from anything, anyone else as the way is for children of their time. (Nothing to be done about it, and at least a nature series is not a channel soapie.)—You were going to tell. What did he say.—

—My father. Well.—Can’t take him lightly.—He says he must have—tasks, he called it (old word, italicised, from Baba’s childhood among missionaries)—things to do, for us, the family, some of the everyday things. Responsibilities.—

—I don’t get it. Responsibilities? Nine years old.—Of course the father’s not only a headmaster he’s also an Elder in the church, always with the habit, some subject to preach on. But her attachment to Baba is central to her, mustn’t be fingered.

—He should have duties.
Kufanele abe nezibopho
. When children have these—even doing things they don’t like too much—this means they’re important, they know they count for something. They’re somebody.—

—You love him, I love him, we love him isn’t that what shows how he counts.—

—Do, give something, not just here to be loved.—

Love. Irrelevantly at this moment he knows how he desired her.—Jabu my darling. What could he do for us, empty the kitchen bin instead of me taking it out, wash his shirts in place of Wethu and the washing machine. What ‘tasks’—no goat for him to milk here, no chickens to feed here, no wood to fetch.—The sharpness is kindly—not patronising?