Free No Time Like the Present: A Novel by Nadine Gordimer Page A

how does a woman judge.—You’ve always done your share with Sindiswa.—
    —OK. But all the mother stuff. You’ll neglect the work, your mind will be elsewhere, and you’ll be guilty, either way, before the children or the accused.—
    His hand, shield on her breast as if some avid infant is already sucking her hard-won chosen life out of her.—I don’t want you unhappy.—
    —I won’t be. We’re not talking about a brood, five, six. There’s Wethu—look how she and Sindiswa get on.—
    A member of the extended family is not a nanny.
    A woman is mama to all babies.
    Jabu’s reasons for convincing Steve they should have another child.
    Her reason is not the stated one that Sindiswa needs a brother or sister. Neither is it that when back Home the women look at the flat waist where they expect to see a belly; her mother puts forth what in the extended family is taken for granted: your husband wants sons.
    Jabu’s the one who wants a son. She has produced a reproduction of herself, the female who has to prove her own identities beside the sexual one. If it hadn’t been for her father she might never have done it; would never become an advocate (some day). A son doesn’t have predetermined by what’s between his legs, his function in any extended family, at Home or in that of the world. He’s born free. At least in this sense. She wants a son, everything she isn’t. It’s the Other, to complete the fulfilment of favourable court judgment. Looking to the ambitions Steve has for her—If I’m an advocate I can’t be a woman?—That’s all she’ll say of her reason.
    He can only understand it differently. Reversed, as happens in pathways of the maze in which humans meet one another.—It’s that a woman can be an advocate now!—At least it’s understood mutually he doesn’t have to specify ‘black’.
    Nothing is agreed to, as was the decision not to have children after Sindi. When he made love he had within the ecstatic ineffable there was perhaps something he was not, could not be aware of. She was the one who swallowed or didn’t—how would he know—a pill in place of God’s will some believed made the decision whether or not there was to be life.
    Jabu had somewhere read or on Internet consulted learnt that conception of males was more likely in winter than summer (something to do with the body temperature, the semen stored in the testes?) and it must have been when winter came that she had not taken the pill. The son was conceived in the Southern Hemisphere’s African winter, and born nine months and three weeks later, in confirmation of the theory she’d accepted on the principle some of the Home women called book-learning.
    The delight and power over the future in naming a child. Among comrades there were Fidels and Nelsons and Olivers taking their first steps. But these comrades didn’t want to choose for their infant who his heroes must be; he would be growing up in a time when there might be others. Then there’s the happy fact that race, colour are a synthesis in their children; African name, European name? The name for the son came from somewhere out of the short list in mind, by looking at him: he was Gary. (Some film-star name?) Jabu was trying it out on herself and Steve: Gary Reed, the G and R, the initials went well together. It was Steve who named the son also for her father: Elias.
    How? Why Steve? She laughed, all tears, scooping up the baby. Elias . Steve knows her better than she knows herself. The Mkizes, Jake and Isa, the Dolphin boys come to celebrate their son. She carries him in, Wethu in Sunday church dress beside her, and presents:—Gary Elias Reed.—
    The Dolphins have brought along guitar and drums, they pluck and pound out Kwaito but also know older African music, and Wethu, although she hasn’t taken any of the wine that’s going down throats to the baby’s future, born in the Suburb won over from the past, she is roused as if summoned to ease forward in a