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 celclass="underline" 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.—