Sasha has not yet come back home. His Dutch wife has twins and she is nervous of going to an unfamiliar country with small children too soon after the long struggle down there has ended. She has been accustomed to the kind of health and welfare facilities taken for granted in Amsterdam. There is also the unsolved problem of Pauline. No longer comrades of war, she and her son have been unable not to resume their own congenital war, but she is certain to want to follow him if he returns. Olga’s sons, Clive and Brian, are the only members of the sisters’ family left in the country. Clive already has been approached by the new Ministry of Agriculture to serve in a consultative capacity on the adaptation of the wine industry to the new social order. He sees no reason to leave. There is no black man with his specialised knowledge in this field, not anywhere. Brian, as the Foreign Exchange economist of one of the largest banks, has been appointed on a commission to review the activities of the Reserve Bank in consideration of the broadening of trade alliances with the world from which the old white regime was excluded, in particular the Afro-Asian and Eastern blocs. So he sees no reason — at present — to leave. Neither brother is in the crowd at the stadium, although there are thousands of whites among the blacks, some wearing the T-shirts that bear the face of the new President. (Clive, with a loan from the Afrikaner bank and in partnership with an Indian clothing manufacturer, was enterprising enough even as a very young man to have had a side-line in the production of such shirts for the liberation movements.) The brothers have always kept away from all that sort of thing, they wouldn’t get mixed up in any mob. The struggle was not their struggle. The celebration is not their celebration.
Now the surface of the living mass has changed, instead of heads it has become fists waving like spores. The wife of the Chairman of the OAU has slowly risen alongside her husband, beside the first black President and Prime Minister, his wife and the other leaders of a new nation, and the Presidents, Prime Ministers, party and union leaders of many others, in practised observance of her training in attendance at great and solemn occasions. She takes a breath, perhaps to ease her shoulders in the robe, and her hands hang at her sides a moment and then are lightly enlaced in front of her thighs in the correct position. Her face is the public face assumed, along with appropriate dress, for exposure.
If it is true that the voice of a life is always addressing someone — for the religiously devout it is a god, for the politically devout it is the human mass — there is a stage in middle life, if that life is fully engaged with the world and the present, when there is no space or need for reflection. The past is not a haunting, but was a preparation, put into use.
It also may be true that a life is always moving — without being aware of this, or what the moment may be, and by a compass not available to others — towards a moment.
Cannons ejaculate from the Castle.
It is noon.
Hillela is watching a flag slowly climb, still in its pupa folds, a crumpled wing emerging, and — now! — it writhes one last time and flares wide in the wind, is smoothed taut by the fist of the wind, the flag of Whaila’s country.
A Note on the Author
NADINE GORDIMER’s many novels include The Conservationist, joint winner of the Booker Prize, Get A Life, Burger’s Daughter, July’s People, My Son’s Story, The Pickup and, most recently, No Time Like the Present. Her collections of short stories include The Soft Voice of the Serpent, Something Out There, Jump, Loot and, most recently, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. She has also collected and edited Telling Tales, a story anthology published in fourteen languages whose royalties go to HIV/AIDS organisations. In 2010 her nonfiction writings were collected in Telling Times and a substantial selection of her stories was published in Life Times. Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She lives in South Africa.