No Time Like the Present: A Novel (26 page)

We’re going to hear Terror.—One leg then the other, shaking off the shine of drops as she gets out of the bath. It’s a statement.

He’s shaving.—Yes.—

And it is not a simple agreement, it’s a consent. She will not question, for either, the right to be at gatherings at which declarations will be made for the present and future of the country. The question which Isa’s moment of blank regard had realised in him at the ANC meeting.

Neither the Andersons nor the Mkizes would be asked if they would be coming to hear the Congress of The People gathering.

There are some comrade faces they know in the crowd neither as tight-packed nor palpably at one with each other as at the ANC parent-party electioneering. In the courage to break with the political fortress of the shared Struggle, defiantly exuberant voices exchanged, there is the unaccustomed shrill timbre of defection, inevitable in human self-consciousness no matter how convinced of the political validity brought about by the parent Party’s own betrayals of its battle-avowed politics. There are whites present; a few prominent ones, also defected from other parties? Prospective or already COPE committed? And maybe relics who regard themselves as not before having found a political home which might be their own: roughly awakened to the push and shove of the country’s situation, a never-before. Perhaps you can’t now be apolitical, that old solar topee of colonialism?

Lekota spoke with the individualities of his personality—the Terror of the football field—and the standard raised fist of rhetoric dedicated to victory, but smiling intelligence rather than berating, and he neither danced, pranced nor produced an armed theme song, while leading the cry and response that belongs to all who defied apartheid, his AMANDLA! bringing AWETHU from a following avowing themselves to him. The Reverend whoever-he-is, standing by; he has his turn invoking Christian values in COPE under the restlessness of the gathering’s preoccupation with Lekota.

Sling-shot questions from the people around him and her, praise and disagreement dart to the platform, some verbal litter without hitting target, a few respectfully join the Reverend’s invocation of God as a member of the new party; the pertinent ones find Lekota ready for them.

—It’s true COPE says blacks shouldn’t get the jobs instead of whites?—The man is referring to the party statement that race as the determinant in the policy of Black Economic Empowerment would produce only a small black elite.

Lekota rallied to the opportunity.—I called for Affirmative Action to be scrapped because it doesn’t provide the real answer for us, our own people. The big one. Giving a man or woman the post because their hands are black like mine doesn’t make our economy equal and opened to all, if that man or woman has been historically deprived of acquiring the skills you need to do the job, to fill the post with the special knowledge it demands, and the young are still not getting these skills and knowledge to take up what is theirs…You won’t improve the living standard of the workers and the poor until equality in our education standards inevitably makes Affirmative Action out of date, into the waste-paper bag, simply by the number of qualified blacks who’ll be able to fill the senior positions. Our country needs everyone, never mind the skin. That’s the issue. That’s justice.—

Through the ears the mind takes immediately some statements more tellingly than others. With the closing AMANDLA! rising from the crowd to the platform the leaders’ chorus response AWETHU, Lekota came down and mingled, arms about people he knew and greetings to their presence for others made brothers and sisters by hearing him in his new political identity. On the way out through groups, ignoring, in their eagerness to be heard, the obligation to clear the exit, he may or may not have recognised Jabu—she had once been in the background of a legal team he was consulting. Anyway, he turned a moment, to ensure he had seen her, remembered (perhaps he too has Madiba’s faculty of face-recall among crowds, over years).

She took up her part in the moment.—When I was a young girl that book you wrote in prison…
Letters To My Daughter
, it had so much in it for me—what made me.—Of course (it is in his eyes) this is a recognition beyond that of the identity of himself he had just been creating up on the platform—but his arm was tugged by a handsome youth with black spaghetti dreadlocks.—Why dinnen you say wha’ about Zuma’s corruption?—And before he could respond (to the eagerness of those who’d heard the challenge) he was pulled the other way by somebody else.

There’s something of a moral assertion, responsibility, that the decision to leave the country doesn’t mean you don’t go to hear what the contesting parties’ hypotheses are if they succeed in coming to power; or in holding onto it. It’s not become an abstraction. What you hear, there, confirms—or contests, within that decision. Without changing it. Perhaps it will be contested within, for ever, without denying its validity. That’s the reality in all decisions. No reason to make a subterfuge out of going to hear Zuma or Terror.

—Jabu and I’ve been to the COPE election meeting. Last week. You weren’t curious? Seems the—other—parties won’t even have the chance to get hands on power unless they make alliances which contradict their individual aims, Where-They-Come-From; the ANC’s the only one with a sofa-size throne more or less able to contain nationalism, communism, traditional leadership—so far.—

He knows Lesego will be with the ANC, split or not.

He and Lesego are having their usual Friday lunch together in what used to be known as Chinatown (the Chinese, who had been segregated, but closer to whites on the colour scale, have moved upmarket in freedom) although now it is a street of Indian traders whose shops are closed and takeaway curry and Bunny Chow stalls left unattended during noon prayers at a nearby mosque. There’s one Chinese restaurant left. Lesego speaks of Lekota as of one dead—well, ‘passed on’, the euphemism generally used is perhaps apposite in the different, political sense, for Lekota.—What’d Terror have to say for himself. I just supposed I’d read it all…Lots of people turn up?—

—Full. But of course he’s not the one-man-band of Zuma.—Spring rolls arrived and mouths were occupied.

—Were there any of ours there, heckling from the youth group?—

An appreciative swallow of the bite dipped in sweet sauce.—Not that we saw. Someone did ask the big question and Terror answered well, or rather turned round on itself to his own advantage.—

—Oh he’s cool. That he is.—

Lesego started his won ton soup, tasting a spoonful, pausing to add drips of soya sauce, applying himself again, while he heard the account of Lekota’s response to the haltingly posed question about the call to abandon Affirmative Action. Between spoonfuls, he once waved the spoon licked clean, go on go on.—So you and Jabu were there. Heard it from him.—And as the colleague who had reported, turned to his soup, Lesego above his emptied bowl was beginning gestures not concluded…opening lifted hands, fingers running a scale, drawing a long breath through a scenting nose.

He was silent, as if he were the one now occupied with the soup. When he saw the last mouthful captured and he was sure of attention, he leant a little across the table and then drew back.—That’ll be one of the nails in the coffin. You’ll see. He’s attacked head-on by Cosatu. The new baby’ll be buried before it gets to squawk in parliament. I’ve got hold of that booklet the unions’ve put out, they’re saying COPE could cause great damage to the workers if it came in to power. It’d roll back the gains the unions and the poor have made since ’94, even if it drums up a small number of votes, gets a few seats in parliament. It would put brakes on policies to create jobs, cut poverty, accuses Lekota and his deputy Shilowa—big businessman, they’re cosying up—they’ve left the ruling party ‘to pursue an agenda of the capitalist class, international capital and its local allies’! The booklet’s to set the record straight, my man, so voters won’t be cheated by COPE. Lekota’s handing on a plate ammunition against himself, scrapping our genuine African herb medicine, Affirmative Action, that national
muti
. Man, it’s heresy to list our open sores for which it’s no use.—

There on the floor. Lesego must have slid the booklet under the door of his room while he went to the laboratory for a class after their lunch. Was it a sign, some sort of hesitant encouragement taken from the fact that Steve and Jabu went to hear the election speeches of the Party, congenital for them in the Struggle whatever’s become of it now, and then followed the electioneering of its break-away—this seen to mean the comrades were not going; anywhere. Except where the country was going in this election. Otherwise what was the point of sitting among people whose lives were being ordained.

Her legal qualifications are insufficient for Australia: part of the information going back and forth on many aspects, requirements for visa application—permanent visa, working visa, probably if you just want to go and visit the Opera House with its wing like a bird (picture in all brochures) ready to take off over Sydney harbour, attend the Adelaide Festival, fish on the Barrier Reef, you can get the tourist one without more collateral than ID, proof of funds, and medical certificate you don’t carry any communicable disease, what’s it now—swine flu? Of course the Australians are justified (the professional qualifications), no one wants shysters practising law who aren’t conversant with and observant of the legal system of the country. And she’s informed also that this may differ in some aspects from province to province. It looks as if it’s going to be Melbourne, but that is not settled.
[email protected]
had informed her she would have to complete additional legal subjects by correspondence from Australia through application to an ‘Additions’ Board. This study material is coming efficiently through email to the Suburb but she takes a batch from time to time to the Legal Agency’s library to make clear to herself the precise difference between clauses in the South African Constitution under which she is living and their counterparts—in that other country.

His academic qualifications: if the post is confirmed, he will qualify for a permanent residential visa and she and the children would emigrate with him. She could take the new subjects while already resident as his appendage.

They were told the immigration process takes about a year. Which fits in with the academic year, in Australia, just as in his university in South Africa, opening in January and running through November. Too late, for comments as he’s had to accept, for this; election year. There’s no haste.

She takes the material and her notes onto the terrace table at weekends and applies herself to what has no application to the life around her that catches her attention every now and then—Sindiswa taking the fashion and events pages from her father as reading weekend newspapers he discards these: the teeth-bared acolytes in the company of someone who must be famous. Gary Elias squatting on the grass with a bottle of Coke, swallows turn-about with a new friend, son of a KwaZulu countryman Wethu had found, attendant at the local fuel station.

He felt a touch ill at ease that she his lawyer would have to go back to school, while his qualifications as an industrial chemist and academic were approved. But looking at her on the terrace he would see that her application was absorbed concentration; Baba had given her a love of learning for its own sake, even if for an object like that of her present, as people who exercise regularly do so out of instinct of their bodies even if not committed at that time to some sports contest. She makes synthesis of the concept of law deriving from colonisation, and traditional authority—the cultural image of that crown of hair majestically mounted, thread-woven locks falling to her shoulders, like some ancestral memory. Come back, Africa.

The documents are loose on the passenger seat so driving home she can glance at marked clauses while held at traffic lights.

At the next she’s at the back of a pile-up of vehicles having to wait edged close as each change to green allows only a portion to proceed—there’s a strike today, this time municipal workers, and their procession has left hazards of rubbish spewed from their trucks blocking the parallel street. Nothing to be done, but for once
something
—impatience is occupied, she can take hands off the wheel and turn the pages of her study material to verify margin notes made when finding comparisons she sought in tomes at the Centre’s library. A touch control sends her windows down for the breeze sluggish with bad breath of exhaust fumes, it brings cool, anyway—but something else, laboured breathing and—a sight, summons:

The open mouth.

The gaping down which the first finger of a hand is pointing to the wall of the throat that’s where food is taken in. On the city streets there are often waylayers rubbing circles at their stomachs to indicate hunger, some it’s obvious have found drink at least. This, this, is a bony articulated forefinger repeatedly stabbing through the empty mouth to the empty passageway. The owner is nothing behind jaws that have distorted all features; no face. This giving-of-the-finger comes to her as the final version of the insult of that gesture used, in the air, to end quarrels. She groans at the uselessness of the response: pulling her bag from under the emigration study papers and fumbling at the zip for the pouch of coins—and at once there are blaring horns, aggressive, cars ahead are moving, the return of the green light is at last for them, the bus behind her has the driver throwing up his elbows, the spaceman helmet of a motorcyclist is cursing her to fucking move, move—her foot falls on the accelerator, the mouth falls away from the window, somehow that shadow relic of what they in their vehicles all are, one flesh, must be slipping away between them, their onrush. If he’s been hit everyone would stall again. Dead is one thing, barely alive, that’s another. What could she have offered if the small change pouch had opened in time. The finger black, like hers. As she drives home to what is her own solution brought about by Baba getting her a white education, her marrying into Them—she finds herself expressing within what she hasn’t, even in detention cell: hatred of whites. Election posters on street lamp poles passing. Terror, Dandala, Zuma Zuma Zuma. What will they do to wipe out,
make good
is the term, what whites did and blacks must change, pointed down the open mouth.

A private incident lost in the statistics. At the church pool on Sunday where life goes on, talk of the power blackouts the past week, the hell someone’s having at the dentist’s, Marc’s news of his new play may be going into production with a cast from the rural villages, amazing talent, why do those ignorant Yankee directors bring black Americans to play Africans in their films. Peter asking in trust of comrades’ shared experience—Forty thousand jobs going to be lost. Is that
all
my brothers? Oh shame. That’s nothing. Fourteen thousand more on the line, in the mines, ‘it’s the global downturn in demand for minerals’. Minerals are what we’ve got.—

—So the government says unemployment’s down shade less than twenty-two per cent—but more than thirteen million are out of work—

—Never mind, you know this new idea of whether or not you’re employed? Anyone who hasn’t found a job in four weeks, you’re officially unemployed. There you are, too broke to take a bus to look for work any more, you sit selling a couple of cigarettes outside the supermarket. Man!
Eish!
—

Everyone has their own focus in the profusion of what’s being uncovered beneath daily life—that thin layer—by coming elections of those who’ll take power to rule over that life.

—What’s happening in the Alliance?—The lawyer has the calm to raise.

—Cosatu going to force the ANC into a policy pact, no more cosy mating, mixed economy—

—What else can they go for? They know there wouldn’t be any chance in a breakaway—not à la COPE, but a big one—standing as a worker party for election maybe joined by little brother, the communists. They’re counting on Zuma, man of the people to steer left for what the Alliance hasn’t delivered so far.—

Jake concludes for others what they’ve left out. His laugh-bark.—The man of the people who’s been sitting with frightened big industry and business telling them there’ll be no policy changes? That means it’s on hold: state ownership of their mines. If they know what’s good for them, they’ll go along with The People and vote ANC, that’s
him
.—

—But what can The People think—whose side is their Zuma on, colonialist-capitalist or worker—He hears himself. Perhaps both; that may come out when/if the arms deal corruption trial ever does.

Read about it in Melbourne.

Isa presses her hands together between jean-covered knees.—Look, he can’t shut that mouth, Zuma needs the support of the youth group, they might easily turn to Cosatu, why not? What are their prospects, why not just more marches with strikers, they’re enough to choose from, burning tyres on the road, yelling for municipal-speak ‘service delivery’ for shit buckets to be emptied water taps to run.—

She doesn’t happen to be the comrade to remark on it—There was one this week, right in town, I don’t know what union made the chaos there.—

—
I’ll kill for Zuma
, the ANC should outlaw Malema—call him Baby Face but he’s no innocent.—Like the cry of a passing bird over the pool a voice from one of the Dolphins as he takes a dive; the Sunday morning swimming party has fallen away, as attendance at the Gereformeerde service did with the transformation of the church into a commune free of cages, political and gender, the Suburb drifts round there for discussion, not the pool. This young man defies the necessity: plunges enjoyment.

Jake is senior not alone in age but analysis, he’s telling—Yes, we need the youth, even the brat—if Mandela and Sisulu hadn’t come along and broken with Luthuli’s knocking on the back door, we wouldn’t have had
Umkhonto
, yes? But that youth group didn’t waste energy bad-mouthing, ridiculing opponents, the tactics of Julius Malema. If they felt anti-white, and Gareth’s right, why shouldn’t any black after the Boers the British and all the other rag-tag-and-bobtail from across the sea—I’m myself descended from them, ay—stole the country. The Fifties young got down to the business of
taking back
—taking power.—

A lawyer’s a professional listener; she comes with what perhaps has not been caught by others in flash back and forth.—Zuma’s glad to have someone ready to kill for him to be President. He’d better look out for Julius Malema planning to take over from him, not too far off, one of these days.—

Blessing is offering some small flag—seems out of character.—When he’s President, I mean—Zuma won’t be fighting to get up there, any more. Zuma may be good for us.—What is she saying: everyone condemning bad-mouthing is also bad-mouthing, in advance, the Brother who is going to be only the third Freedom President? Impulse or fairness? More likely she has a Baba, distant authority; troubling to discard.