A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  Bray asked everywhere about Edward Shinza; certainly he was not in evidence at any official occasion. Bray felt he must be somewhere about; it was difficult to imagine this time without him. It was his as much as Mweta’s. But no one seemed to have seen him, or to know whether he was, or had been, in the capital. There were other faces from the past; William Clough, the Governor, lifting his bristly eyebrows in exaggerated greeting at Mweta’s banquet, the way he used to do on the tennis court in Dar-es-Salaam. “James, you must come and say hello to Dorothy before we leave. I daren’t say dine—we’re homeless, you know—”

  “Uncle Willie’s Independence Joke,” Vivien said. “Produces a hearty, man-of-the-world laugh from Africans.”

  “The kind of laugh they’ve picked up from people like Uncle Willie,” said Neil.

  Still, the Cloughs pursued Bray through Vivien. “Aunt Dorothy says her secretary’s been trying to get hold of you. They want you for drinks on Monday. I’d go if I were you, or she’ll tell everyone in London you were buttering up to the Africans and didn’t want to see them.” He laughed. “No, it’s true. She says that about me, to my mother. And she knows quite well that we’d never see each other in London either.”

  The Cloughs had moved into the British Consulate for the last week or two before their departure, a large, glassy, contemporary house placed to show off the umbrella thorn-trees of the site, just as in an architect’s scale model. The consul and his wife had been swept into some back room by the presence of aides, secretaries, and the necessity to keep their cats out of the way of Lady Dorothy’s dog. There was some sort of scuffle when Bray arrived—he saw the consul’s wife, whom he had met briefly, disappearing upstairs with her head bent consolingly to a Siamese. Flower arrangements were placed everywhere, as if there were illness in the house.

  “Well, the job is done, one asks nothing more but to fold one’s tents….. He’s a good chap, if they’ll let him alone, he’s learnt a lot, and one’s done what one could … if he keeps his head, and that one can’t be sure of, not even with him, mmh? Not even with him.” An elderly servant came in with a silver tray of glasses and bottles, and Clough interrupted himself to say with the sweet forbearance of one who does not spare himself, encouraging where others would give way to exasperation, “It would be so nice if we could have a few slices of lemon … and more ice?—Yes, all I’ve said to Mweta, again and again—make your own pace. Make your own pace and stick to it. He knows his own mind but he’s not an intransigent fellow at all—well, of course, you know. Some time ago—a word in your ear, I said, you’d be unwise to lose Brigadier Radcliffe. Well, they’ve been clamouring away, of course, but he’s refused to touch the army. Oh, I think I can say we’ve come out of it quite good friends.” It was a modest disclaimer, with the effect of assuming in common the ease with Africans that he believed Bray to have. He looked pleasantly into the martini jug and put it down again patiently. The elderly servant who brought ice and lemon had the nicks at the outer corner of the eyes that Northern Gala people wore. “That’s perfect. Thank you so much.”

  Bray greeted the servant in Gala with the respectful form of address for elders and the man dumped the impersonality of a servant as if it had been the tray in his hands and grinned warmly, showing some pigmentation abnormality in a pink inner lip spotted like a Dalmatian. The ex-Governor looked on, smiling. The servant bowed confusedly at him, walking backwards, in the tribal way before rank, and then recovering himself and leaving the room with an anonymous lope.

  “I’ll pour Dorothy’s martini as well, maybe that’ll bring her. If only one could be transported on a magic carpet … anyway, we shall have three months in London now, with perhaps a week or two in Ireland. What’ve you been doing all these years in your ivory tower in Wiltshire? Were you a golfer, I can’t quite remember … ?”

  “It was tennis … and afterwards we took the girls for beer to the old Dar-es-Salaam hotel with the German eagle?”

  Dorothy Clough came in and Clough cried out, “Does it fit? Come and have a drink with James—”

  “My dear James— it must be a hundred years—”

  “We’ve had a crate made to transport Fritzi, and she’s been trying it on him.”

  “My niece Vivien found a carpenter. She has the most extraordinary contacts, that girl. It’s very useful!”

  William Clough took a pecking sip at his martini. He said with gallant good humour, “Reposting was child’s play compared with this. One has had to learn how to camp out … I’m sure it’s terribly good, keeps the mind flexible.”

  “Denis thinks your angle lamp’s been left at Government House, did he tell you?” Dorothy Clough sat forward in her chair, as if she had alighted only for a moment.

  “For heaven’s sake, let them have it, it’s someone else’s turn to burn the midnight oil there, now—wha’d’you say, James …”

  Roly Dando asked with grudging interest about the visit. “He’s never been sent anywhere where there was anything left to do,” he said. “Clough only goes in for the last year, after self-government’s been granted and the date for independence’s been given. An early date.”

  Bray was slightly embarrassed by gossip, when quite sober, and said hesitantly, smiling, “The impression was that he and his wife were slipping away quietly after the field of battle.”

  “Since he arrived eighteen months ago there’s been damn all for him to do except go fishing up at Rinsala.”

  At the Pettigrews’ house that night, Dando’s voice came from the group round someone basting a sheep on the home-made spit: “… damn all except go fishing with his secretary acting ghillie….” Rebecca Edwards had just told Neil Bayley that Felix Pasilis, the Pettigrews’ Greek friend, was furious with her because she’d forgotten some essential herb that he wanted for his sheep— “If I were Felix I’d make you go back home and get it, my girl,” Neil said, and the look of inattentive exhaustion on her rather heavy young face moved Bray in fellow-feeling to distract attention from her, saying, “My God, I’m afraid I behaved like a child at Cloughs’! I showed off by making a point of speaking to the servant in Gala.” Neil and Rebecca Edwards laughed. “Poor Uncle Willie.” “He was quite a nice young man in Dar-es-Salaam. He took Swahili lessons conscientiously and he certainly spoke it better than I did.” They laughed at him again.

  Everyone was gathering round for servings from the roast sheep, and the fair stocky man from the airport signalled a greeting with a piece of meat in his fingers. “Wentz, Hjalmar Wentz, we met on the plane.”

  “How are you? Roland Dando said we probably should be seeing you at the Rhino.” They moved off with their plates of food, and Wentz said to a woman settled in one of the canvas chairs, “Margot, here is Colonel Bray.”

  “No, no, please stay where you are.”

  In the fuss to find somewhere to sit he saw the light of the fire under the spit running along the shiny planes of the woman’s face as it did on glasses and the movement of knives and forks. Bright hair was brushed up off a high round forehead and behind the ears, in a way he associated with busy, capable women.

  “Try some, Margot, it’s wonderful—”

  “Aren’t I fat enough—” But she took a tidbit of crisp fat from her husband’s fork.

  “To tell the truth, this’s the first time for a week we’ve had time to sit down to eat. Honestly. Margot’s had to be in the kitchen herself from six in the morning, and some nights it’s been until ten. She literally hasn’t sat down to a meal….”

  “Oh, not quite … I must have had hundreds of cups of coffee….”

  “Yes, with one hand while you were busy stirring a pot with the other. The cook went to the Independence ceremony and we haven’t seen him since—just for the afternoon, he said, just to see the great men he’s seen in the papers—well, what can you say?”

  “We felt it was his day, after all.” The woman showed a well-shaped smile in the dark.

  Bray asked, “How on earth have you managed?”<
br />
  She gestured and laughed, but her husband was eager to break in, holding up his hands over the plate balanced on his knees— “A hundred and twenty-two for dinner! That’s what it was on Thursday. And yesterday—”

  “Only a hundred and nine, that’s all—” They laughed.

  Bray raised his beer mug of wine to her.

  “What about my assistant cook? You mustn’t forget I’ve got help,” she said. Wentz put down his glass beside his chair, to do the justice of full attention to what he was going to say. “Her assistant cook. I got him from the new labour exchange— I thought, well, let’s try it, so they send him along, five years’ experience, everything fine.”

  His wife was listening, laughing softly, sitting back majestically for a moment. “Fine.”

  “Five years’ experience, but d’you know what as? —You know the barbers under the mango trees there just before you get to the second-class trading area?”

  “Our son’s comment was the best, I think. ‘Mother, if only Barnabas had worked for a butcher and learnt to cut meat instead of hair!’”

  “Well, here’s to three crazy people,” said Wentz, excitedly picking up his glass. “Everyone knows you must be crazy to come of your own free will to one of these countries.”

  “Colonel Bray isn’t going to run a hotel.” She had a soft, dry voice and her accent was slighter than her husband’s.

  “I’m not as brave as you are.”

  “Oh, how do you know?” said Wentz. “We didn’t know what we were going to land up doing, either.”

  She said quietly, “We certainly didn’t think we’d be the proprietors of the Silver Rhino.”

  “Anyway, that’s another story. —I heard you were going to the Ministry of Education?” said Wentz.

  “Oh, did you?” he laughed. “Well, perhaps I am, then. I should think the bar of the Silver Rhino’s as good a place as any to learn what’s really going on.”

  “If you want to hear how much ugliness there is—yes.” Mrs. Wentz had the tone of voice that sounds as if the speaker is addressing no one but himself. “How people still think with their blood and enjoy to feel contempt … yes, the bar at the Silver Rhino.”

  “Our son Stephen is looking after it tonight. It’s amazing how he deals with those fellows—better than I do, I can tell you. He keeps them in place.”

  “We promised him a liberal education when we left South Africa, you see.” Mrs. Wentz had put down her food and she sat back out of the light of the fire, a big face glimmering in the dark, caverns where the eyes were.

  “He’s at Lugard High, taking the A levels,” said Wentz, innocently. “—You’re not going to finish?” The white blur of her hand moved in a gesture of rejection—“You have it, Hjalmar.”

  It rained and people felt chilly on the veranda and drifted indoors. There was a group in loud discussion round the empty fireplace where the beer bottles were stacked. “… banging on the Governor’s door with a panga when the others were still picannins with snotty noses …” Now Dando had the sulky outraged attention of a young patriot from the social welfare department, the glittering-eyed indifference of Doris Manyema, one of the country’s three or four women graduates, and the amused appreciation of a South African refugee whose yellow-brown colour, small nose and fine lips set him apart from the blackness of the other two. In the light, Margot Wentz’s head was the figurehead of a ship above the hulk of her body: a double-chinned, handsome dark blonde, the short high nose coming from the magnificent forehead, water-coloured eyes underlined with cuts of fatigue deep into each cheek. With an absent smile to Bray across the room, she took up, for a moment, an abandoned beauty. When he joined the group, they were listening to her. “We don’t have to argue; we can take it that colonialism is indefensible, for us, no? You think so, I think so—right. But the forty-seven—” “Forty-eight”— Timothy Odara’s eyes were closed; leaning against the wall he kept his lips drawn back slightly, alert. “—I’m sorry, forty-eight years you were under British rule, digging their mines, building roads for them, making towns, living in shanties and waiting on them, cleaning up after them, treated like dirt—now it’s all over, you really think there was any way at all you could enter the modern world without suffering? You think there was someone else would have given you the alphabet and electricity and killed off the malaria mosquito, just for love? The Finns? Swedes? The Russians? Anybody? Anyone who wouldn’t have wanted the last drop of your sweat and pride in return? These are the facts. From your point of view, as it luckily lasted less than two generations, wasn’t it worth it? Would anybody have let you in for nothing? Anybody at all? Wouldn’t you have to pay the price in suffering? That’s what I’m asking—”

  “Oh you make the usual mistake of seeing the life of the African people as a blank—and then the colonialists come along and we come to life—in your compounds and back yards.”

  She was shaking her head slowly while Odara was speaking. “All I’m saying, don’t wear the sufferings of the past round your necks. What does independence mean—I don’t use ‘freedom,’ I don’t like the big words—what does your independence mean, then?”

  “The past is useful for political purposes only” said Hjalmar, as he might have said: she’s right.

  Someone said, “Watch out for the man from the CIA.” “Down with neo-colonialism.”

  “Of course, Curtis,” said Hjalmar. “But if you have to do it by keeping that forty years or whatever sitting at the table with you and your children—ach, it’s not healthy, it makes me sick. What do they want to hear how you had to go round to the back door of the missionary’s house?—”

  Mrs. Odara had joined the group, ruffling a big, silver-nailed hand through Curtis Pettigrew’s crew-cut hair. “Oh God, Timothy, not that again.”

  “—Let them hold up their heads naturally in their own country without having to feel defiant about it!”

  Odara laughed. “But it always comes down to the same thing: you Europeans talk very reasonably-about that sort of suffering because you don’t know … you may have thought it was terrible, but there’s nothing like that in your lives.”

  Bray saw Margot Wentz put up her head with a quick grimace-smile, as if someone had told an old joke she couldn’t raise a laugh for.

  “Well, here you’re mistaken,” her husband said, rather grandly, “we lived under Mr. Hitler. And you must know all about that.”

  “I’m not interested in Hitler.” Timothy Odara’s fine teeth were bared in impatient pleasantness. “My friend, white men have killed more people in Africa than Hitler ever did in Europe.”

  “But you’re crazy,” said Wentz gently.

  “Europe’s wars, white men’s killings among themselves. What’s that to me? You’ve just said one shouldn’t burden oneself with suffering. I don’t have any feelings about Hitler.”

  “Oh but you should,” Mrs. Wentz said, almost dreamily. “No more and no less than you do about what happened to Africans. It’s all the same thing. A slave in the hold of a ship in the eighteenth century and a Jew or a gipsy in a concentration camp in the nineteen-forties.”

  “Well, I had my seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays in the detention camp at Fort Howard, the guest of Her Majesty’s governor,” said Odara, “that I know.”

  “Her two brothers died at Auschwitz,” Hjalmar Wentz said; but his wife was talking to Jo-Ann Pettigrew, who offered blobs of toasted marshmallow on the end of a long fork.

  “For God’s sake, Timothy, stop baring your teeth and sink them into something.” Evelyn Odara spoke to her husband as no local woman would dare; yet he ignored it, as if turning the tables on her with his countrymen’s assumption that what women said was not heard, anyway. He said angrily to Wentz, directing the remark at the wife through the husband, “What did you get in return that was worth it?”

  Margot Wentz said, looking at no one, “That one can’t say.” She waggled her fingers, sticky from the marshmallow, and her husband took his handkerchief fr
om his pocket and gave it to her.

  It was the evening when Bray, Neil, Evelyn Odara, one of the South African refugees, the Pettigrews, and a few others set off for the Sputnik Bar. While Bray was standing about in the group with the Odaras and the Wentzes, Jo-Ann Pettigrew, having failed to get him to eat her last marshmallow, put it in her mouth and signalled to everyone there was something they must hear. “Rebecca’s been to the Sputnik and she says it’s terrific now. They’ve knocked out a wall into that sort of yard thing and they have dancing. With girls laid on.”

  Neil said, “Hey? And which one of us’s been taking Rebecca to the Sputnik?”

  Laughter rose. “Well, why don’t we all go, that’s what I want t’know.” The young Pettigrew woman was always in a state of enthusiasm; her long curly hair had sprung out, diademed with raindrops, because she had done her marshmallow toasting outside over the spit fire. She was an anthropologist, and Bray accepted this as an explanation for her passion for arranging excursions, on which she carried her baby tied on her back, African style.