No Time Like the Present: A Novel (23 page)

The Christmas season—not in climate sense, the southern hemisphere is summer holiday time. Instead of snow for the old man’s sleigh, time of peace and goodwill brings also the time of summing up the academic year ended. Total enrolments, 97 per cent of the country’s children are in schools, 40 per cent are now no-fee schools. Recent statistics show 67.4 per cent of schools have no computers, 79.3 per cent have no libraries. And 88.4 per cent no functional lavatories.

Under the ‘Outcome Based’ education system (what’s happened to ‘Results’?) due to the National Student Financial Aid Scheme black enrolments doubled this year: black students now may enter universities with a lower academic qualification than coloured, Indian or white students.—The freedom hierarchy.—No one catches Lesego’s low bass, or if they do, takes him up on devaluing his own university. Between Faculty room farewell exchanges of who is going where, sea or mountains there is the rumour that our universities are going to lose accreditation in the world because here students are accepted without adequate qualification.

Over the seasonal get-together drinks at house or church pool in the Suburb it’s not the comrades’ academic who turns within the holiday mood to interrupt, it’s Marc, there with his bride, who’s brought up the subject—How do we know that the students are not granted degrees on the same principle, that’s the
Outcome
of Outcome based education…—

—How are you going to open up higher education without making some concessions for blacks to get in—

—But that’s still exactly where we were months, a year ago.—Since the injury to his spine Jake has a tic of gathering himself to pout his chest.—Can you tell me the ‘advancement’ in granting degrees to students who’re going to enter professions unequipped to do the work they’re supposed to do. What’s the sense? So people are happy to say—see, dumb blacks! That’s perpetuating the racist ‘inferiority of blacks’ brains’, that’s apartheid dolled up as Black Economic Empowerment.—

In the flying decibels of voices these are directed at Steve, the university professor. Although the comrades know about Australia: what has he to do with what happens, is going to come about in education, here.

So what right has he to be asked. To give any answer. Are they pretending
not
to know about Down Under, avoid, deny judgement of him, one of their own.

Presuming the comrade still has the decision for Australia in mind whether or not negotiating it; at the university Lesego in African Studies and one or two other academics sometimes speculate on who might have the chance to succeed him in the Faculty of Science; an opportunity, however come about. Everything in what’s known as the country’s new dispensation erupts, and then drags on, become somehow everyday life. The country is in its adolescence.

The Christmas season.

By chance brings return of one of those violent happenings whose consequences are resolved by Jake’s other gesture, his sweep of the arm, delay, delay, delay, it’ll just go away. The initiation of black cleaners by white students into the barbarity of white culture seemed to have done just that. There had been now and again a few inner-page references to what the university’s intentions were to be ‘dealing with the incident’. These apparently were whether the students should be allowed to continue with their studies; whether or not the university’s concern included the consequences of the ‘incident’ for the cleaners wasn’t mentioned. But while the year was running out the incident of the year before untimely surfaced; as black and white unemployed men took the Santa Claus job in supermarkets under the ritual beard, one of those students gave or sold a copy of the video and more photographs appeared in newspapers. Greeting of the guests, circus of prancing drunken display under the glee whip of encouragement, heads bent over the pot the guests were uproaringly forced to eat from; again the back of the student pissing in preparation of the
potjiekos
. It hasn’t just gone away: a reminder. But maybe at the wrong time. Everyone preoccupied elsewhere.

For him the reminder was, could be taken as to himself. Although happenstance, he had received after an on-off of contacts with Australian consultancies, slow progression to the education authority, some finality to be approached: presentation to specific universities. Academic credentials, CV stuff; he could and did ask Professor Nduka to write a character and personality recommendation for him—Nduka the man who had left for his reasons his own Nigeria to take up a foreign appointment. Could not approach one of those in cabinet posts whose supporting testaments would really count, the Struggle comrades who had known him in that time and could vouch best for what were his qualities—this comrade leaving the country.

An
impimpi
. In the new life: caught a glimpse of himself in that shop window.

Applications for a post in the Faculty of Science are very encouragingly received by the three or four he approached. The consultancies supply glowing pamphlets describing the climate, flora and fauna, sports facilities, cultural activities, likely to be decisive for an intellectual of wide interests in the community where each university is situated. He tells—University of Adelaide, South Australia, Melbourne, Victoria State, James Cook University, Queensland. After a pause—Show me the map.—Sindi has an atlas handy among her school books she lends her mother without curiosity about the purpose, she is gasping, conspiratorial, into her mobile as called from her room she brings it. The children don’t know about Australia, there has been care that they don’t overhear—too soon.

Only Sydney and the Great Barrier Reef mean anything conjured up visually, it’s consideringly admitted. But not that there are actual institutions, universities named and placed in the unknown; simply possibility confirmed as existing. Nothing has been spoken of opportunities in the practice of law. The acceptance of his opportunities as if understood, of course also hers, in common.

He had seen in those first advertisements of welcome to Australia, civil engineers, opticians, nurses, refrigeration mechanics, armature winders, crane operators, no lawyers on the list of desirables. They had not talked in the private hours where they might have, of what would be open to her—there. Not as someone’s wife brought along in his baggage. Whether her LLB degree was a recognised one in that country’s judicial system. Whether Australia has enough lawyers, thank you. Whether her present experience as an attorney in a Justice Centre is a plus in the capacity of an appointment to commercial legal practice or a social service created to provide defence lawyers for people who can’t afford to hire them.

—You could ask about that.—Ceding to him the possibilities for her.

So they have been living on Baba’s customary law that a woman will as ever live on the decisions of her man.

—Look, you ask, you’re the one who knows the ins and outs of law. There’s a seminar next week, some hotel.—

—What day. I’ve got to be in court Tuesday—no, Wednesday.—Her casually practical response was the answer: she is independently with him in the decision of the possibility—Australia.

Unaware of its significance between these two at the consultancy seminar on Thursday, a hotel one of whose five stars was a Thai sauna and karma massage centre neither had ever heard of. The conference room was not full of chancers, but men and women mainly in early middle age, from the look of them, and confidently prepared questions by them; young men and girls both with gold loops in their earlobes, Australia’s apparently known as not fuddy-duddy square, if you have the skills they need, and there was what must be somebody’s son whom BEE might have discriminated against because of his lack of pigment, who has with him an old woman, face defiantly made up. Jabu the only black. She was dressed in her African complexity, the high cloth around the pile of her hair more sober in colour than usual, and no locks escaped. People in the room noticed her covertly; few individuals want it witnessed that they too are giving up birthright. Defeated? Defecting; it’s known as taking the plane for Perth.

Jabu surprises anyway (now they turn to look) by the precision of general questions she asks that they themselves are here to pursue, as if she’s doing it on their behalf, and better, in presentation of matters they don’t have the knowledge of jurisprudence to follow. The law is present, somehow, in their favour. It turns out she is a lawyer married to the white man beside her. He’s a university professor who’s in correspondence with some universities already interested in him; his questions don’t concern that advance alone, however, but whether appointments in any capacity of employment are restricted in terms of a valid period or are permanent immigration granted. And what is the position in regard to membership of professional associations, may immigrant workers in industry join trade unions? Not employed on the cheap—no benefits?

Isn’t he putting his foot in it for everyone by dragging up politics! Is it because he’s got himself a genuine black wife (look at the Black-is-Beautiful power outfit) he’s unlikely to be discriminated against in jobs for professors here at home—so what’s the reason for the pair going to emigrate?

But this conference room isn’t the place for exchanges across the floor among would-be immigrants, it’s not good form to address one another. He gets his information, she gets hers, and is told there is further available in the brochures.

There has been the mutual experience, to break tacit non-communication, so now it’s all right to speak. Going down in one of the elevators the man with the old woman engages him.—You’ve already had some responses from over there? You’re lucky. ‘Explore hidden opportunities’, ‘all visa-types’, ‘in-depth accurate, honest assessment’, ‘spectacular success’, blah-blah. ‘Welcome’ they advertise, and the guys at these consultancies are gung-ho encouraging, but I’ve had no response to my applications, firms they’ve put me in touch with. I’m beginning to think about New Zealand, what’s your take on the country? Of course you’re a university man, I see, I suppose you have a better chance than I do with all the ‘conditions apply’—the small print. Every time I come to these meetings the consultant gives me a different story, whether they’re actually from Down Under or some hired local lawyer…—

The old woman has the lowered blue-painted eyelids and tucked lip corners of one who has heard all this before, dinned many times over. To everyone pressed together in the confinement carrying them, she speaks.—I’m taking the final emigration.—

It’s all too solemn; someone titters patronisingly kindly,—You’re doing the tourist trip to the moon?—At your age?—

—No. Cremation. You go up in infinitesimal particles to infinity.—

They are in Steve’s car bundled with presents and contributions of Christmas food, for once the complete family, Gary Elias off to his second home, Sindiswa acceptant after having exacted the assurance they’ll be back in her home by New Year’s Eve when she’s invited to a party with her Aristotle schoolfriends, Wethu humming some hymn she knows she’ll soon be singing in the Elder’s Methodist Church.

Baba himself called to invite them all; when Jabu told this was uncertain—unlikely that there would be some obligation to the Reeds, but the comrades, the Suburb, the Dolphins and a new body round the pool, Marc’s defection, had some party plans. Yet it seemed to take for granted, between them, that if her Baba summoned, they would come to her home-place. The rape case was behind; and the corruption case set aside although appeal against that judgment being proceeded; Jacob Zuma remains, he is, the African National Congress’s nomination for the presidential election in the new year.

There’s an ox slaughtered in the village, the meat butchered from it isn’t in plastic packets from the supermarket, it comes straight to the great iron vessels straddling the women’s cooking fires. For Sindiswa, who doesn’t often visit in KwaZulu this is not exotic; at the birthday party of a Greek schoolfriend there was a sheep on a spit he and his pals, directed by his father, were turning.

Steve’s drawn into the football game with Gary Elias, the boy cousins, along with other fathers in Baba’s collateral clan. Many of the men who live away in the industrial towns, miners, construction workers, are Home-Boys back for Christmas. They form their own enclave drinking the supply of canned beer they’ve contributed as well as
imbamba
that has been generously brewed. They are amiably drunk and then there’s a discrete breakaway by a few who protectively surround a woman bowed and weeping among the laughter and chatter of a good time; her son has died in some city where he found work. Jabu goes with her mother and other women to console, when she finds herself nearby.

He’s given himself half-time from the football match.

—It was AIDS.——Who?——The one who didn’t come.—Her tilt of eyes to the city workers. He and she followed the toll of AIDS, she could quote straight off the latest infection count published but so far no one either knows has died. At the Justice Centre she meets men and some women—out of fear of disgrace they are even more cautious about letting it be known—who are HIV-positive, on antiretrovirals, and even some who have AIDS. They are people dismissed from their employment because they are infected with the virus: she’s involved in court actions against employers illegally ignoring workers’ Constitutional rights.

Who knows which among his students is positive, aware or not; a lecturer in another faculty has made what’s called his ‘status’ public and addressed the students in every faculty, urging them boldly, like himself, to take the test, and if it is positive start treatment immediately; if it is negative, wake up, be sure in your love-making you take every means of protecting yourself and your partner of whatever sex from infection.

There are two comrades—not of the Suburb but theirs from the wider association of the shared past—who are out of the closet and on treatment that will keep them alive maybe without developing AIDS. The Dolphins? Don’t fall into the wishful belief that it’s a homosexual curse passed on to heteros.

Still flushed by a football game taken unseriously by everyone, fun—like the absurd contests there used to be sometimes in camp lulls between action, he goes to join the workers in their loss. But they come from dispersion in whatever jobs they’ve found all over the industrialised country, most will not have known the man as grown men, and if there were a few of the man’s comrades—fellow workers, they will have mourned him, away at the graveside; it’s the mother’s sorrow revived by the son this year missing among the Home-Boys returned for Christmas. These welcome the white man the church Elder’s, headmaster’s daughter married, exchanging happily, interrupting each other’s anecdotes that come from the kind of life the towns and cities offer them, hostels where you must survive violence, the cost of backyard rooms if you manage to find them—there’s the thigh-slapping story graphic in their mix of isiZulu and English, of one who’s got himself a share of a room on the skyscraper roof of what used to be rich whites’ apartments. Up there, the servants lived, now the new tenant class don’t have live-in servants, and the building’s owner rents sky rooms to anyone—there’s a shebeen run by some women at weekends, there are kids up there, men and their girls,
Izifebe Onondindwa
.

Sindi is speaking isiZulu she learnt from her mother since the first words heard as a baby in Glengrove Place to a cluster of girls who find they have the same jokes and complaints about boyfriends although her freedom at her kind of school is something unimaginable to them at the girls’ equivalent of Headmaster Elias Siphiwe Gumede’s school for boys.

Instead of going home for Christmas, the Zimbabweans fleeing from home in tens of thousands, finding a way to that other Methodist Church, the beds of city pavements, the empty suburban lots. New Year a week ahead bringing the elections, another post-apartheid government; the hiving-off of ANC heroes to start a rival party—no one’s talking of this, these are the KwaZulu Home-Boys, back drinking home brew. It’s going down plentifully to the great promise—the promises of the idol, Zuma. Jacob Zuma will change all that hasn’t been changed to make better the better life for all. Msholozi, his praise-name: one of them, the workers; Zuma, their own.

Her Baba has given her husband his share of the presence and attention he distributes among everyone in traditional hospitality both of the Christian in this holy season and amaZulu feasts of celebration. He has the easy male subject to introduce—having to buy a new car.—The garage man tells me my old model isn’t worth repairing any more, and the tyres—our roads you know—a new set would be a lot of money thrown out…they say you must buy a new car every six years.—

—In that case, mine should be in the scrapyard! Nearly three years out of date.—

—And you got here with Jabu all right?…of course…of course if I do have to replace, I must have my wheels, there’s a Japanese model or maybe I should stay with Ford.—

Their expressions show each has other things occupying their minds, but this is friendly talk on safe ground in respect of whose this is beneath where they sit. No venture to mention a corruption trial lingering above the certain election of Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, as if allusion first would be an offence to the host, and second could be tactless in consideration of the politics whatever they might be, of the daughter’s husband. Her reactions when she paid that visit after Msholozi was found innocent in the rape trial: she will have influenced her man. Or his could have been the influence on her attitude. A daughter of mine.

They passed a night in comfortable spirits at her parents’ house, sleep understandably delayed by the singing and rising scales of ululating joy, background static of the radio commentary until some uncounted hour. The children were distributed where they elected to be among collaterals their own age who were delighted to make place for them, Gary Elias of course sharing a bed he occupies on his regular visits.

She didn’t have to ask if he would come with family led by the Elder to church for the service on Christmas Day.

—Am I all right?—He wore a jacket despite the heat, and the tie he’d thrown into his duffle bag, remembering decencies observed in the Anglican church attended with his father.

He would pass; she had brought her formal Pan-African outfit and although this elaborately distinguished her from the simple traditional dress of the other up-to-date women and the tight tailored skirts, flowered hats hung over from the colonial period of decorum worn by a few old women, her beauty as a tribute to worship of the Christ Child, coming from their continent of Africa, was admiringly received. Their headmaster. Their Elder, in the line of his family’s distinguished leadership in this, their church, had educated his daughter for the world but she had not forgotten to come back, bring something, symbol of her achievements, to them.

Enjoyed himself. Really. He felt—at home. In her home. In place. Is it because the personal life can become, is—central over the faith—political faith? (That’s heresy…)

He’s
got over
(unthinkingly there) his rejection of, no wasn’t that—his detachment from the Reeds, Jonathan. A reconciliation brought about by Jabu, by life with her? Yes, a comrade; but she has never given allegiance to their faith—Struggle—as a religion, substitute for religious faith. She’s free? What an easy way out. But she doesn’t take easy ways.

It’s killingly difficult to accept a priority between choice of existences in the meanly allotted human span. Oh, stuff the philosophy. There is her heritage KwaZulu Africa as exemplified in her father with whom she is bonded although parted from by the poster she came upon on the fence.

Tonight he sees her reading and making notes on the information supplied by the Australian consultancy on the jurisprudence and legal system Over There. He’s addressing her to himself by her full name: has Jabulile Gumede accepted, decided for Australia. They discuss the move practically, they’ve talked about schools, about whether it would be more to a lifestyle perhaps envisaged, to be in a city rather than well, some suburban outback, a suburb, not the Suburb?

That’s not a decision, an acceptance within the self, herself.

It is expected that some time after the return to the Suburb, as promised, in Sindi’s concern to be back for her schoolfriends’ New Year’s Eve party, there’ll be an afternoon or evening with his mother—perhaps the last before she moves to Cape Town—and whoever among the Reeds may be around her.

Jabu has made the arrangement, it’s an evening. Jonathan and Brenda are there, the Jonathan-Brenda daughter Chantal who with her mother’s ebullience hugs cousin Sindiswa whom she has seen only a few times in the childhood almost outgrown. And Ryan the son who is studying engineering in England for a degree which will favour him to take up a post there or anywhere. He hasn’t waited to graduate, he’s married, his Welsh-English wife Fiona is with him, Sindi won’t be a bridesmaid after all. Ryan’s speaking confidently of life in London, acclimatised in every way—even his South African English has somehow naturally lost its old inflections which come from the way the language is used by the Babel of citizens, isiZulu, Setswana, Sepedi, isiXhosa, Afrikaans—all notes sounding up and down the linguistic tune.

His wife works in an art gallery in Cork Street and her brother is first violinist in a chamber orchestra that performs all over the world.—Not just the stress and strain of engineering structures I’m wise to, we never miss an exhibition of developments in art, trends, the different conceptions, what art
is
, I mean, taking in new technology as means the way paint brushes used to be and then of course the music—Fiona’s brother the open door to concerts, everything new that’s happening in music, fantastic, post-Stockhausen to post-Jackson.—As if suddenly remembering the concerns of Steve and the beautiful—yes, she is—black wife.—And we don’t have to feel why am I having all this while people here are living in shacks still kicked around—Wrinkles his nose, and then tosses the situation, as it should be for the evening, away with jerk of his head.

—What about the Muslims in England?—Jabu’s gentle witness-interrogation voice.

—Well there are, there’ve been nasty incidents, of course you’ll always get thugs who’ll take out their own frustrations on people who don’t look like themselves.—He arches his eyebrows to make known he’s not among them.

Australia wiped out its aboriginals. Almost. So you don’t have to feel guilty of privileges, there. The few who’re left, the descendants, are mostly specimens, they have no real part in national life?

He isn’t hearing the exchange continuing between Ryan and Jabu.

Neither is Jonathan, who’s telling him,—I’m looking for the way to finance buying a house for the young couple in London or wherever he gets a post, most likely one of the big construction companies—maybe even a municipality or what do you call them, county. My lawyer’s busy with control hassles, how to get permission to send the money from here, there’s the provision you can own one property abroad, you know…oh, conditions apply. Officials go nosing into every nook and cranny of your finances. However. I’ve got some friends who know their way around.—

So the son’s not coming back. Home.

As was clear when Jonathan came to ask for advice about the best university faculty of engineering for his son. Home is transferable. It always has been. Long before tribes coming down from the equatorial North, the Dutch following the reconnaissance of the Dutch East India Company, the French and their viniculture, the English colonial governors, the indentured Indians for the whites’ sugar plantations, the Scottish mining engineers, the Jews from Czarist Russian racism and later Nazi Germany’s persecution, the Italians who took a liking to the country during their spell as prisoners of war here, the Greeks whose odyssey launched by poverty brought them—all these and others of distant origins made home, this South Africa. It hasn’t managed to wipe out completely the San and Khoi Africans whose homeland of origin was taken from them.

You can make of somebody else’s your home anywhere. It’s human history. But it’s less complex if the indigenous population has been more or less disposed of.

Has Jonathan heard of connections with the Australian consultancy maybe through a friend who has noted who else was there at a seminar; or has Jonathan beside him read his mind.—Ever think of England? You have such good connections haven’t you, that conference you went to? You could surely get a pretty good appointment in a university. But I suppose you have your ties here…no reason to…Brenda and I—the awful violence growing—we talk about it don’t we all, but when you come down to nitty-gritty I say…
everywhere
. God knows what country’s safe, and I just have the idea that once the world recession’s over, investment, business is going to boom here; well, stick it out. The metal industry, we’re not doing too badly even now, my outfit, we’ve managed to redeploy—not so many worker lay-offs in our show. But that doesn’t solve the question of getting money out for Ryan’s house.—