Read Online No Time Like the Present: A Novel by Nadine Gordimer - Free Book Online
Authors: Nadine Gordimer
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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
—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
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