No Time Like the Present: A Novel (8 page)

Here. There will always be these moments when she is not ‘here’ with him. And when he’s not ‘here’, wasn’t ‘here’ in the clandestine Glengrove with her, some tug of your outgrown kind.

They made love not war between them that night.

What was still mustered of the academic group eventually did get that appointment to meet the Minister of Education. Couldn’t be called a delegation, that would imply representation of the University Convocation. It seems one always keeps the identity of dissident whether as a revolutionary or what’s known as a law-abiding citizen taking the right of consultation. That’s how they presented themselves, their spokesperson initiator from the Science Faculty falling into line.

The Minister most unfortunately is unable (or has the foresight?) to receive them as he is in talks with a delegation from abroad. They are before a senior member of his department, a heavy finger stuck between the pages of a file, should he pause for recollection of a date, a fact. Lesego Moloi remarked afterwards over something more reviving than a coffee, that one’s been dug up as a loyal member of the Party from a
kraal
college somewhere to show that the department’s really Africanised.

The Minister’s deputy listened with the posture and occasional stir of close attention, to be read as agreement or doubt, then gave the account they knew would come, they could have recited it for him. The redeployment of available finances from the days when ten times more was provided in education subsidy for every white child than for a black child meant that an equal subsidy for all, now, required greater resources than the department’s budget allocation from the Department of Finance. The need to fund justice in education in less than one generation in something like five centuries of discrimination (he hawks to clear his throat, turning to pages where there might be a decade fixed by historians when missionaries first transcribed a people’s volubility into written symbols)—yes, it’s inevitable that resources are inadequate; but the limit the country can afford.

What’s the purpose of one of Steve’s group bringing up money found for spending on arms when no enemy exists to threaten the country which has the strongest defence forces on the African continent?—that’s not the Minister’s Department, you’re in the wrong building, Bra, take your guys to the Ministry of Defence.

The man assures the Minister’s concerns for the consequences, for university teaching, at a time when the continuation of the country’s remarkable renaissance (doesn’t miss the buzz word) must have engineers, scientists, economists, geologists—he pauses; every one of these academics will add the inclusion of his particular discipline.

—Literacy.—Steve presumes to speak for them.—Nothing of this can come about unless you can raise literacy. In any of the mother tongues the children speak, and English, Afrikaans, the languages of their instruction. The vocabularies used in university subjects are way beyond students, no fault of their own. They run to Internet, quick fix, for words they don’t understand, can’t spell, not to the dictionaries where all different meanings, contexts, uses of the word are to be discovered.—He doesn’t know or care whether it’s understood he’s using the ‘word’ in an adapted creational sense, the Word is not God, it’s Man, what gives humans the text of thought. The Minister’s stand-in does not take offence at bluntness, he puts a politician’s hand on this academic’s shoulder as the group leaves. He has assured them their openness and trust in coming to the department is the way forward (renaissance-speak again). The department is applying itself intently to changes that will bring about development necessary for the times.—What the fuck does that mean—Lesego, using current limited vocabulary of the pub to which they have retreated. But nobody takes up the irony.

Not long after (there’s probably a change of minister in a cabinet reshuffle by then) there is announcement from the Department of Education to mark the esteem of the people for education and the dignity of those in school: the children are now officially designated as and are to be referred to as ‘Learners’. The demeaning ‘pupil’ belongs to the discriminatory past. And what resolves in final examinations from the years of being a Learner is now called ‘Outcomes’. Results no longer exist.

The church pool friends are the best of hosts—female guests noting that old conventions in allocation of domestic roles have been discarded in Constitutional normalcy of gay households more completely than in heterosexual ones. Ceddie, the jambalaya cordon bleu, cooks while Guy the apprentice (in the order of sexual relations managed by the commune, as well?) peels and chops, Justin who seems to be the Elder (as Jabu’s father in another church) mixes drinks, chattering ice in glasses along with animated indiscretions about the clients in the decorator’s business where he works as an interior designer.—I make houses habitable after the architects have cleared out.—That’s the way he mockingly describes himself.—Wifey wants a full-length mirror in the bathroom so that she can check the spread of her backside against the kilos on the scale, husband prefers not to see what he’s neglecting in favour of the new girl he’s picked up among women who’re now getting theirs down on boardroom seats.—And he gets his laughs, as he distributes the drinks, for his unprejudiced tolerant gossip: the
kugels
—Jewish sweetmeat term he’s picked up for all over-dressed rich women—these days they’re also Indian, black, mixed palette of the risen middle class. Politics touched on indirectly with Justin’s quips from the underside of progress are not the subject of talk the way they are when Struggle comrades, Steve, Jabu, the Mkizes, Isa and Jake gather alone, belong for ever under that rubric, which needs no tattoo to mark it—although Isa was never a cadre but a fellow traveller late-come recruited as Jake’s freely chosen wife. At times she’s good leaven in their set. That property in her personality isn’t necessary in the company of the Dolphin commune and its friends, some of whom are still arriving. Lively anecdotes of where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to, holiday trips, the predicted break-up of ‘this’ relationship and the surprise blooming of ‘that’; ambitions in professional activities, Marc’s just written a second play and does anyone know a backer for production, he’s found amazing, you’d never believe it—such talent—among young black men who wave you into parking bays, no education, can’t read a script you have to teach it to them orally—

—Illiterate.—Jake confirms, reminded.—What happened to your call on the ministry?—

Steve asking Marc what his play’s about—turns aside: this is for everybody—Haven’t you learned the new terminology for your kids?—

—You mean?—

—They are Learners and there will be Outcomes.—

—The ministry have any plans to get them past ABC?—

Steve’s shoulders rise and drop. His response is curt.—Euphemisms.—

Jabu is concerned that this exchange means the happy lunch is going to be spoilt for the Dolphins by the preoccupation of Steve and Jake—heavy. She glances at Steve as a mother hushes a child with a certain loving look.

He pauses in dismissal and turns back to Marc and his play. Euphemism. Not a word Jabu would be likely to use. Not in her vocabulary of what?—her three, four languages he doesn’t know, not in the vocabulary her father expanded for her through his reading of books in English smuggled from a library for whites. Everything’s been definitive for her, imposed. Her experience. He dismisses again—in himself, the glib judgement. Black is being black that’s all, has been; in some circumstances, still is.

The gay commune like every household in the Suburb except Steve and Jabu’s, which has a resident relative, deploys a domestic servant called a Helper as a school child is a Learner, but the Dolphins’ woman doesn’t work over weekends. Isa knows this through her own helper informing her that those men in the church house grant this desirable condition of employment which she doesn’t. A word aside to Jabu, and Isa and Jabu insisted they would do the washing-up. Comrades don’t exploit their hosts.

Yet a kitchen is like a Ladies’ Room in a public place, the secure refuge for confidences—same food-warmed air despite the fan the Dolphins have installed in their conversion of the chancel into the place where (some of) the appetites of the flesh are catered to by the latest models of microwave and blender, and a dishwasher helps with the aftermath of sinful indulgence.

—I’ve never known them, you know, so close before. They seem just like us, don’t they—living here like us in this suburb, keeping house, bothered having to call the plumber because of leaks, paying the monthly fee of security patrol. All the stuff that goes along with being married, domestic, in the end however you started together. Steve and you, Jake—coming in from the cold. No—the heat,
Umkhonto
—I don’t count myself in your class, Jake has to stand in for me; well, another way, they’ve come in from the cold. They’re neighbours with the rest of us. We lend each other the lawnmower, soda water when we run out. Comrade bourgeoisie. Oh, by the way, I resent, that’s one thing I hold against them, they’ve hijacked the word. You can’t say you had a gay time, you like gay colours, and what about ‘gaily’, you can’t walk gaily along feeling happy—all these have a special meaning these days. Theirs. You can’t have that word just for living it up. Having a jol.—Isa was stacking the plates into the machine, word by word.

Both were laughing, because they were doing just that, themselves with these good neighbours.

Jabu put the detergent tablet into its slot and snapped the latch, Isa pressed the right combination of switches. Under the machine’s swirling tidal rush that isolated them she was able to speak as if without being heard.—Have you ever had a man do, I mean what they do—to you.—

Jabu runs the palm of one hand down the fist of the folded other, cautious as what she understands Isa has said cannot be what she meant.

There was never a curtained confession box in a Protestant Gereformeerde Kerk, but there can be confession under the leap tide of the dishwasher. Isa places herself before the black box curtain.

—Once I did. I was crazy about the man and he told me, to know everything sex is, can be, do. It was so horrible Jabu—some goo, Vaseline, so he could get into me and it hurt I was ashamed I felt like I wanted to shit he came on his own without me. All I could get out of it was the idea of the dirt in that place, my dirt, coming off on him, his thing. How can they do it to each other?—An abrupt gesture—stayed—in the direction of the swimming pool.—And we have the clean soft smooth place specially for them. To take them in.—

Jabu could only move to take Isa’s hand as if whatever had happened had only just happened. This woman Isa-and-Jake, Jake didn’t know, would never know? That’s certain, the way some things can’t be said between a man and a woman: what had been told now. It’s a responsibility she didn’t want—to have received it.

Isa was asking as if to put finality to the moment in the kitchen—A black man wouldn’t do it to a woman.—

A question. Or an affirmation to compensate for all the assertions of blacks’ savagery that she had lived among as a white.

Jabu was finding herself as she so seldom had time, was ever challenged within, to be set in the past—going home was done easily now, with a sense of belonging unchanged though experienced in a new self; no estrangement. The way sexuality had been, was still ordered there—and the way it was far from home, Swaziland college, recruitment to detention, bush camp; correspondence courses, Freud included, in Glengrove clandestinity. This kind of order is what she would think of as ‘sexual code’. What did she know.

Men. Was there a black man who would do the same thing to a woman. Who is she to say—in her reaction. Claim a superior decency—sensitivity, for blacks?

The two women left the cloister of the kitchen and came among the company mainly of men with Mkize’s wife there innocent of what had passed between her comrade sisters in the domesticity for which they were being jokingly lauded.

Everybody goes overseas.

It’s understood that Steve and Jabu have a particular life of their own and are not often involved in the many occasions of celebration which are observed in the Reed clan. But when they do take part (it’s Jabu who says it’s only right they must) Jonathan seems always to have just returned from a business trip or holiday ‘abroad’ with his wife. Brenda tells graphically of Trafalgar Square, castles they have seen, Montmartre, Roman tavernas, the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, the beaches in Portugal.

Places Steve and Jabulile have never been. Steve might have once gone on a student tour to Europe if it hadn’t meant fiddling while the townships burned in police fire. Only a very few blacks, venerable as scholars or Christians, promoted by the institutions or white benefactors got out of South Africa for reasons acceptable to the powers-that-were for the issue of passports; the others were escaped freedom fighters receiving military training in Moscow, China, Ghana…If any of these came from the coal-mine village no one would know of this. Except maybe the schoolmaster Elder. His daughter had got as far as Swaziland and detention in a South African prison; that he knew. She had learnt something of the existence of the outside world by some pictures of it in her father’s clandestine store of books secretly coming from and to be returned to the library he had no right to use.

Both she and Steve had seen it all on television, the daily devastation of wars, and the Sistine Chapel. While, of course, his brother Jonathan and eagerly receptive wife had never experienced the inside of a tent in the bush or desert camp where each night you could be spending the last of your existence without ever having had the chance to look elsewhere, at the wonders of the world.

Everybody goes overseas.

With the new millennium came the time they could and did. Justice Centre cooperatively allowed her leave to coincide with the winter vacation at the university, summer in the other hemisphere. As his brother Jonathan was so knowledgeable about airlines and flights and Steve, against her suggestion, wouldn’t ask advice, Jabu herself called Brenda, and Brenda delighted, insisted on coming over to give hers. Where exactly was the house again, she’s been there once, how long ago—bringing a generous gift of the latest baby equipment when Gary Elias was born—wasn’t there some old church where you had to turn…

Even though she and Jonny didn’t need to skimp it (this was the way she put their resources) she always made it her business to get the best value for a reasonable fare, and of course there were cheaper ones she could also recommend, their daughter and a pal had happily travelled that way. It was a Saturday morning and Steve was at the gym; Jabu offered coffee and the two women talked for the first time outside his clan occasions.—Is your little family complete now?—If Brenda was thinking, though not from the same authority, of the home women’s expectation always of more babies—isn’t that the African way?—this wasn’t patronisingly white, coming from this woman. Quite the reverse. She is eager to be loved by a sister-in-law, the Reed family’s black stake in the new dispensation. Steve boyish in brief shorts and with hair flat from a shower walked in just as she was irrepressibly repeating the embrace with which she had waylaid Jabu at his father’s funeral. His quiet greeting just as irrepressibly expressed that this was excessive, but when Jabu was released the women were two bells set pealing.

She and he come from an era where the nuclear family was not, could not be, the defining human unit. This young comrade parent or that was in detention, who knew when she, he, would be released, this one had fathered only in the biological sense, he was somewhere in another country learning the tactics of guerrilla war or in the strange covert use of that elegantly conventional department of relations between countries, diplomacy to gain support for the overthrow of the regime by means of sanctions if not arms. Children were taken into care by whomever among the comrades was still available to do so, sometimes handed on from one possibility in this family of circumstance to another when the first surrogates were in turn detained or had to flee, take up the Spear from across borders and seas. The conception of family formed from when there was survival necessity, without religious edicts (the Methodist church of Jabu’s father, the synagogue for which Steve’s mother had declared herself with her insistence on the circumcision ritual for her baby sons) was like a discipline left over from the circumstances of a freedom struggle taken for granted, naturally, so that if a comrade had a career obligation to go abroad for a time, or there was the opportunity for a couple to enjoy a trip overseas, someone from the past would take in the children. Jake and Isa doubled up their children’s two bedrooms to add Sindiswa and Gary Elias to the cheerful occupancy of beds, cricket bats, skateboards, figures of space monsters in their boys’ quarters; of beauty queens, junk jewellery in the daughter’s den.

Where would anyone go, first time out of the African continent—far from Mozambique, Botswana where he had been deployed (never got as far as Ghana, let alone Moscow), Swaziland where they met and made love for that first time. Now you had a valid passport.

London it was. Of course. England, from where the missionaries had come who founded the school where her father gained along with religious devotion some knowledge of the world with which he had determined she, his daughter, should be armed. Missionaries, who Jabu learnt in her first kind of clandestinity talk with detention cell comrades under lights that stared the continuation of the day’s interrogations all night—had come with the Bible in one hand and the gun accompanying them in another, to take the people’s country from them. Drew it on maps under a geographical name: South Africa. The continent the shape of a great bunch of grapes dangling towards the South Pole, and the weight of territory at the bottom the country of the isiZulu, Sepedi, isiXhosa, TshiVenda, Sesotho, XiTsonga. The same England where one of these same Englishmen started a campaign that banished the slave trade which had made many of the English rich both as flesh merchants and as owners of sugar fields in other people’s countries, where slaves did the work remote from the small island which was England. These contradictions don’t seem so unlikely to an African—South African—in a country no longer anyone else’s claim, Dutch, English, French for a few years in one region—because the present of freedom has its contradictions. These were in the lives of the people who came to the Justice Centre for redress after employment dismissal, eviction from their homes, traditional or religious customary law against Constitutional law. These were before her every day as an attorney assisting one or other of the advocates who represented the right of citizens to be heard in the country’s court.

London not exotic, as arrival would be in China, say, even France, Germany. Descendants of those who lived as subjects of the overlord always know much about him, his habits. Both he and she had been ‘brought up’ with strong tea brewing in its pot; in Steve’s case, also Andrew’s bacon and egg breakfasts. London that her father had been taught was the heart of the mother country, the empire (‘wider still, and wider, shall thy bounds be set’ sung in school choir) of which his coal-mine village was part; London that was the ‘home’ elders in his father Reed’s family referred to when going on a visit, although several generations hadn’t been born or lived there. The famous parks legendary for soap-box speakers in tirades against this or that seemed to have fewer, and the shaven Hare Krishna, familiar from their place among black street hawkers on the pavements in Johannesburg, apparently had been succeeded by punks whose designer heads, ear- and nose-rings were reminiscent of ancient tribal distortion/decoration in her ancestry: a sign of one world, unbroken past and present, in contradiction (again) of the conflicts that were tearing life-fabric as a motorbike tore the street at Glengrove Place. But the lovers or would-be lovers—even in a permissive democracy you generally can fondle only so far in public—must be as they’ve always been. Here, always on the wet grass—Steve’s tolerant remark about the climate and stoicism of the British, that brought from Jabu the South African local exclamation that can express empathy rather than judgemental disapproval—Shame!—She ignored the summer rain and chill, wearing her high-heeled sandals. Steve had given her love-presents but never chosen and paid for her clothes; suddenly, here—wanted to buy her ‘things’. What? That wasn’t the kind of male/ female contract between them, theirs, comrades. He bought her a ski jacket, the warmest garment there is, the salesman assured him.

In a different place you become different people. Not that it isn’t pleasurable.

They stayed with comrades from home, emigrants who shared an old house in a working-class suburb with a West Indian couple and were looking for something affordable in Kensington (fat hope!) or somewhere else not too upmarket for them. Both couples were doctors, and three worked in the same hospital while the fourth was studying for a further degree in paediatrics at a specialist institution. The London comrades had little leisure, he and she were free as they were glad to be, about, alone. Within the separate circles of their careers, the lawyers, clients, court officials foremost in her consciousness, as was his among students and academics; the demands of children, practical distractions of a household, liens with comrades in the Suburb, they were often preoccupied, whether together alone, or together in company of others. Except for that blessed place, bed.

Here London was a twenty-four-hour exchange of self: theirs. They didn’t watch the changing of the guard but did follow others of foreign tourist itinerary, while selective of what was sometimes a discovery, now, of interests each did not know the other had. He wanted to wander through the famous hothouses in the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, she wanted to catch the last day of an exhibition of Mexican artefacts she’d seen advertised on the posters. They went to the British Museum because they felt they ought; and then spent three hours totally absorbed in all there was to learn, also of how a culture makes itself out of others—the glorious Parthenon frieze that a British ambassador took from Athens and which was displayed under his name as the ‘Elgin Marbles’. The National Gallery high on Steve’s list; in the Reed home there had been a book of reproductions from the Gallery he took to his room, becoming aware of the mystery of art maybe an answer to adolescent emotional confusion, as later he was to turn to science, and finally political revolution as the rationale for him to understand human existence. Even the private school for whites, to which he had been sent for the privilege-above-privilege beyond state schools for whites, had not taken pupils, as part of education, to art museums; any more than Jabu could have been. And in clandestinity days she was not admitted to the Municipal Art Gallery in Johannesburg; he wouldn’t go where she couldn’t. What they knew was the work of the black and white artists shown in small galleries that tightroped the fine line between what would pass as surreal licence (not much to do with anything, far as censors knew, eh) and defiance of apartheid law and religious taboo. No black-and-white lovers
sur l’herbe
. No Jesus on the cross other than a blond man whose pierced body is pale. Dark-skinned Saviour: blasphemous. One such happened to be, even greater travesty, painted by a white man, traitor—it was seized from the gallery wall and banned.

The centuries of painters and sculptors which had created the visioning of the world was work neither he nor she had seen other than as reproduction. Quietly not remarked to one another, in the National Gallery it was to each another pair of eyes given. For her, da Vinci. She walked back again to
The Virgin of The Rocks
. Steve stood beside: her experience. She turned at last, to him, as if it were he who had given it to her, it came from his past, which was not only the colonial heritage.

Returning to the entrance foyer of these places is coming to the souvenir shops, bookshops, people struggling into coats for the return—to the city. She bought a postcard of
The Virgin of The Rocks
. Directed to a post office in Trafalgar Square she stamped and mailed, sent it to her father. The Elder in his Protestant church.

He said—Do you think he’d really like the Virgin, she’s so Catholic.—

—Aren’t you dying for tea? Or coffee. I am.—She was gone, back into the street. Looking this way and that, as if expecting to be hailed. Spied a coffee bar where they sat behind a heat-blurred window and agreed and disagreed, transported, about what had confronted them.

Another day they were at an exhibition of African Art. It was meeting in another place, space in life, someone you know intimately. They had the special animation of pride ethos shared, although here was her ethos, and it was his by adoption—no, earned with formulae and chemicals for explosives while in the paint factory! The Greek gods and warriors in some museums are all aeons dead but the African sculptures that combined without contradiction the abstract of reality, the totality—bone structure of human faces, feet, limbs, the perspectives of features profile, frontal, appearing anywhere in single, the one image which Picasso took for himself from the African vision, they are still being created at home, by people of Africa whose vision it was and is.

Macbeth
probably had been chosen of Shakespeare at her Swaziland school because it was thought young Africans would more easily understand this play, it would relate to the tribal chieftains of their own history. When in the London rain he declared ‘Let it come down!’ he confessed to her amusement he’d played Banquo in his school’s production: they must get tickets for the performance at the Globe listed in
Time Out
. She didn’t know about the continued existence of Shakespeare’s Globe; but that he had been familiar with as living heritage in the English culture from which the Reeds came far back and passed down indiscriminately along with the imperialistic ones the comrades set the Spear against—and there occurs to him, too, from
The Tempest
—he quotes Caliban for her: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on it is I know how to curse’—his island’s invaders from Europe.