A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  The man will change his life, Bray thought burningly. Mweta became no more than the factor whose existence would bring this about, rouse it into being. Shinza might as well have been thirty as fifty—four. No, it wasn’t that he was an ageing man who was like a young man—something quite different—that he was driven, quite naturally, acceptedly, to go on living so long as he was alive. You would have to have him drop dead, to stop him.

  The house in Wiltshire with all its comfortable beauty and order, its incenses of fresh flowers and good cooking, its libations of carefully discussed and chosen wine came to Bray in all the calm detail of an interesting death cult; to wake up there again would be to find oneself acquiescently buried alive. At the same time, he felt a stony sense of betrayal. Olivia moved about there, peppermints and cigarettes on the night—table, her long, smooth—stockinged legs under skirts that always drooped slightly at the back. A detail taken from a painting, isolated and brought up close to the eye. He suddenly tried to remember what it was like to be inside Olivia’s body. But he could not. All that he produced, driving through the scrubby forest alone, was the warm reflex of a beginning erection in response to the generalized idea of the warmth inside women, any woman. His mind switched to Mweta again, and his body shrank. He ought not, he was perhaps wrong to question Mweta about anything. He had made it clear from the beginning that he would not presume on any bond of authority arising out of their association because he saw from the beginning that there was always the danger—to his personal relationship with Mweta—that this bond might become confused with some lingering assumption of authority from the colonial past. I mustn’t forget that I’m a white man. A white man in Africa doesn’t know what to see himself as, but mentor. He looks in the mirror, and there is the fatal fascination of the old reflection, doesn’t matter much, now, whether it’s the civil servant under a topi or the white liberal who turned his back on the settlers and went along with the Africans to Lancaster House. If I don’t like what Mweta does, I’d better get out and go home to Wiltshire. Write an article for the New Statesman, from there. He almost spoke aloud to himself. He wished Olivia would be at the house in Gala, when he came back. He suddenly felt alone, as he might have felt cold, or tired. He began to write a letter to Olivia in his head, telling her to make up her mind and come quickly. He felt he missed her very much.

  He would have liked to get back to Gala the next night—could have done it, prepared to drive through the night until one or two in the morning—but he stuck reluctantly to his original intention to make a loop on his return so as to include the Nome district. On paper, it was the site of a resettlement scheme; the people were poor and apathetic, one came upon them laboriously picking about some task in the forest with the dazed faces of those who are underfed from the day they are no longer suckled. Some villages had no school hut at all. Filthy and silent, children appeared from the forest and sold him those mushrooms big as plough disks that grew at this time of year. Their cool flesh gave off a soothing cellar—smell; the depressing odour of luxury in the midst of human poverty that he always recognized as peculiar to Africa. Here in the forest there were extravagant left—overs from some feast of gods—huge mushrooms, lilies blooming out of sand—but no ordinary sustenance for the people.

  He drove the last lap back to Gala in a complete preoccupation of the will to get there, tense for any change of rhythm that might indicate trouble in the car, crossing off the hours and miles with each look at his watch. When at last he turned into the main street and the mahogany trees swallowed him in their well—deep shade and quiet he saw the shops were shut—it was Sunday. He went to the office just the same; Aleke might be there, doing some work. But there was nobody. The Christ—thorn had been dug up. He could hardly go to Aleke’s house—his own old house—and confront him in the midst of the Dinky cars and the children. The same old sound of Sunday drumming thudded faintly through the afternoon. The gleaming backs of cars huddled round the club. A car turning into the entrance paused as he drew level and the occupant was grinning at him invitingly, importantly. Broughton, the secretary, mouthing something at him. He rolled down the window and grimaced politely to show he couldn’t hear. “You don’t answer your phone. I’ve been trying to get you all week. Your application’s been approved by the committee. Henderson seconded it. So there you are, I knew you’d be pleased but you’ve been the devil to get hold of.” They were blocking the entrance and the man gestured and drove in, expecting Bray to follow, his face bright with the readiness to resume the barely interrupted chat.

  Henderson was the owner of one of the two local drapers’ shops: preparing the ground against Olivia’s return, thoughtful man. Bray drove on down the quiet dirt road past the half—hidden houses, past a male Gala “nanny” wheeling a white child, and the children and dogs of one of the black administrative officials who had moved into government houses, bounding round a meeting of flashing new bicycles. His eye separated from the other greenery the towering, spreading outline of the fig tree; nothing has changed, nothing has changed. And all the while, when everything was as it is now, the boy had been shut up in the prison in the bush outside the town.

  Mahlope had cut the grass on the verges of the road before the house. Aprons were spread stiffly dried on the hibiscus hedge. Bray had a revulsion against entering the empty, closed—up bungalow where all he would meet were the signs of his own occupancy. His sense of urgency was thrown back at him, an echo.

  He began to lug his things out of the car and dump them on the grass. The soft questioning of children’s voices rang through the sunny quiet; he looked round and saw a woman and three small figures coming across the half—cleared scrub between his house and the one from which he was pleasantly isolated. Their heads were wrapped in something—towels. But everything—the club secretary’s happy interest, people with their heads wrapped up in towels—was simply part of the distance that had been put between himself and the life of this familiar place by what he had heard existed there, beneath these appearances of which he himself was part.

  It was the girl, Rebecca Edwards, again, with three of the numerous children who overran the Bayleys’ house in the capital. Soapy trickles ran from under the turban down her temple and cheek. Bray said to the children, “Been swimming, eh?” and the smaller one clutched his mother’s thigh. She wiped away the soapy tear. “Oh, it’s awful to worry you—you see there suddenly isn’t a drop of water, and I’d just put this stuff on our hair …” Another tear ran down and fell on her bare foot. “If we could stick our heads under the garden tap—” “Heavens, come to the bathroom. I’ll open the house.” She and the children all wore cheap rubber—thonged sandals. They trooped in behind him, driving away the silence with their squelching footsteps and displacing the emptiness with their invading bodies. He pushed open the stiff bathroom window, he turned on the taps; there were exclamations of relief when the water gushed out— “It’s even hot,” he said, and left them to it.

  There was unopened mail addressed in familiar hands, newspaper rolls; the cardboard folders of notes and papers, as he had left them: DISTRICT, SCHOOLS, POPULATION UNDER 18. He put a carbon between two sheets of paper and rolled them into the typewriter. He began a letter to Mweta; and then pulled out a cheap blue pad, the only kind you could buy in Gala stores, and began to write by hand, a letter or the draft of a letter. Before he could touch any of this again—the folders and notes—before there was any point in going on, he must have an answer from Mweta. The stammering, repetitive questions of a small child whose need for expression runs ahead of its vocabulary came muffled from the bathroom. He tore the wrappers off a couple of newspapers and rolled them the opposite way to flatten them. What he wrote, what he was saying to Mweta was not about the boy at all.… the whole opposition between you is false, I don’t believe it’s based on any real difference of approach at all, but you have pushed Shinza into the position where if he is to do anything at all he must oppose you, and not in a negative way. He must set
up something against what you are setting up without him. If you behave differently in power from the way you did before, so of course would he.… If you had him with you, now, both of you would be facing the same problems of adjustment, and there’s a pretty good chance, taking into account the closeness of the old association, you’d come to the same sort of solution. Don’t you see? To put it at its worst, it would at least ensure a kind of complicity … at least you’d avoid finding yourself in the position where you’d have to do some of the things you’ll find you have to do now…. Rebecca Edwards and her children came to thank him; with an abstracted awareness of bad manners, he realized that he hadn’t even asked how she came to be making for this house; where she had come from.

  “Did you find somewhere to live? You’re not still at the Inn?” She explained that she had moved into the house across the scrub, was sharing it with the agricultural officer, Nongwaye Tlume, and his wife. “I don’t mind, there’s a kind of extra kitchen attached to that rondavel outside. Anything to get out of the hotel, anyway, it was costing me such a lot of money.” The children’s hair was rough—dried and spiky, hers was combed out neatly like a wet dark fringe all round. Her bare big forehead and the wings of her nose shone faintly from the ablutions. She had yellow eyes, like a pointer he had once had. The four went off the way they had come, through the scrub. Poor thing; there was some story there nobody bothered to ask—she and her children could have stayed in this house instead of the Fish—eagle Inn while waiting to move in to the Tlumes’, he should have thought of it. Probably that was something of the kind that Roly had expected of him. … I can’t believe Shinza would have made a move to oust you, standing beside you as it were. No moral reason, but because there’s always been something secretive in his nature, some pleasure in being behind the scenes, recognized for his importance only by a few people in the know… he likes to be the face you can hardly make out between the other faces, but there.… And he has a laziness about people—you know that—he can’t be bothered with the continuity of day—to-day contact, shaking hands and grinning crowds. He’s essentially a selfish and withdrawn man—I mean success would become vulgar to him, he would always have left that part of it to you….

  Kalimo arrived back and cooked him some supper. Afterwards he stood under the fig tree in the dark, smoking one of the big cigars he didn’t allow himself too often. There were bats at the fruit, the most silent and unobtrusive of creatures, torn—off rags of darkness itself. He wondered with whom he could take the traditional refuge of dropping in for a drink. Not the club, the new member taking up his rights. Not Aleke. He could go to that girl, Rebecca Edwards, one of the group in the capital. But he and she would have nothing to talk about; his mind was blank of small talk. He leant against the tree and the cigar burned down to a finger of firm ash. Ants ran alerting a fine capillary tree of nerves over his back.

  He went inside and wrote to his wife, suggesting that she make up her mind and fly out within the next two weeks. He had to go to the capital in any case, and this would mean that he could meet her and drive her back on the same trip. After he had signed, he wrote: All our reasons for your not coming seem to be simply because we can’t put a name to why you should come. It was a love letter, then. He scored it out. He wrote, experimentally, All our reasons for your coming seem to be defeated by some unknown reason for your not coming. He felt he did not understand what he had said. He did not stick down the envelope. He put it with the pages he had covered for Mweta; about Mweta.

  In the morning, he left the pages there. At least until he had spoken to Aleke. At least until then.

  Aleke and his new secretary were starting the day with a cup of coffee when he arrived at the offices. It was an atmosphere he had known all his life—what he thought of as “all his life,” the years in Africa. The offices still stuffy but cool before the heat of the day, the clerks talking lingeringly over their shoulders as they slowly began their to—and-fro along the passages; the time before the satchel of mail came in. Aleke filled his pushed—back chair and questioned Rebecca Edwards with the banter of a working understanding.

  “You didn’t forget to stick in Paragraph B, Section Seventeen, eh, my girl.” She leaned against the windowsill, cup in one hand, cigarette in the other. “I did not.” Of course, she could be counted on to take work home over the weekend; Aleke said it himself: “You’re an angel. And will you get that file up to date by Friday? Cross your heart?” He had for Bray the smile with which a busy man greets one who has been off on some pleasure—trip. “Well, how was the bush? Get through all right?” There was chatter about the condition of the road. “Mr. Scott said to Stanley Nko, ‘The best thing would be for the Bashi Flats to secede….’” (Nko had taken over from the white Provincial Manager of Public Works, Scott.) Quoting, Aleke was immensely amused at this solution to the problem, and they all laughed.

  “Could I have a word with you, Aleke?” Bray asked.

  “Oh sure, sure.”

  Rebecca Edwards tactfully made to leave at once. “Here, here, don’t forget these—” A file was waved at her.

  Aleke got up, took the lavatory key from its tidy nail, and went off for the daily golden moment, saying, “Be with you right away—if you want to listen to the news—” He gestured at the transistor radio on his desk.

  Chapter 8

  Aleke was washing his hands with boma soap, drying them on the strip of boma towel.

  “I gave a young fellow a lift,” Bray said.

  Aleke began to nod and turned smiling at a story he could guess— “Long as he didn’t bash you over the head. It’s getting as bad as down in town. What’d he take off you? Some of these fellows from the fish factory—I don’t stop for anybody, any more, honestly.”

  “Yes, from the fish factory—but he’d just come out of prison. He’d been inside more than two—and-a-half months. No trial. No charges laid. Here in Gala, in Lebaliso’s jail.”

  Aleke sat down at his desk and listened to something he knew instead of guessed. He put out his hand and switched on the fan; he probably did this every morning at exactly the same time, to ward off the heat as it came. His face was open to Bray. “You know about it,” Bray said.

  “Lebaliso kept me in the picture.”

  “So it was Lebaliso’s decision?”

  “We’d been keeping an eye on that fellow a long time. Shinza’s chap.”

  Bray said, “What d’you mean, Shinza’s chap?”

  “There’re a lot of Bashi working here now. Shinza sees they make a nuisance of themselves now and again. In the unions and so on.”

  “Aleke.” Bray made the attempt to lift the whole business out of the matter-of-fact, where Aleke let it lie like a live bomb buried in an orderly garden. “Aleke; Lebaliso shut up a man for two months and seventeen days.”

  “From what I was told, this one was a real trouble—maker. I mean, it’s not my affair, except that what’s good for the province concerns me. From that point of view, I’m expected to keep an eye on things. If there’s likely to be any trouble, I just like to know what I’m expected”—in mid—sentence he changed his mind about what he was saying— “well, I must be kept more or less in the picture.”

  “And what you see is Lebaliso taking the law into his own hands.”

  Aleke was friendly, tried to invoke the amusement at Lebaliso he and Bray had shared. “Of course I said to him at the beginning, the magistrate’s the man to go to with your troubles. Not me. Anyway it seems something had to be done about that fellow. They wanted to know a bit more about him.”

  Bray said, “Was Onabu the one who was interested?” Aaron Onabu was Chief of Police, in the capital.

  Aleke agreed rather than answered. “I suppose so.”

  Bray said, bringing out each word steadily, “And I never heard a word from anyone in Gala.”

  “We-ll, you’ve had other things to do but think about old Lebaliso up there—” The hand waved in the direction of the prison, behind the trees, b
ehind the village. “We’ve all got enough on our hands. But this girl, Bray—I’m telling you, my life is different now. When I want something, it’s there. If I forget something, she’s remembered. And give her anything you want done, too. If you want your reports typed. She’ll do it; she’s a worker, man.”

  Bray watched the fan turning its whirring head to the left, the centre, the right, and back again, the left, the centre, the right, and back again. He wanted to ask: And are there others up there—with Lebaliso? But the telephone rang and while Aleke’s warm, lively voice rose and fell in cheerful Gala, he felt the pointlessness of pursuing this business through Aleke and, signalling his self—dismissal, left the room.

  In his office he set himself to put some order into the files he kept there; they were constantly being moved back and forth between the boma and the house. The office was not exclusively for his use and Godfrey Letanka, the clerk, came carefully in and out. He gave him some typing to be done; he couldn’t bring himself to take advantage of that girl. The heat grew and filled the small room; he stood at the window and looked across the village muffled in trees. At twelve o’clock it was alive with bicycles taking people home to the African township for lunch, black legs pumping, shouts, talk, impatient ringing of bells. He went out and the sun was dull, behind cloud, on his head; he had the feeling that he was not there, in Gala, really: that he had lost external reality. Or conversely that he carried something inside him that set him apart from all these people who were innocent of it, uninfected. What was he doing among them? He dropped at Joosab’s a pair of pants with a broken zip; Joosab stitching, moulding layers of interlining upon a lapel, the naked bulb over his sewing machine, Mweta on the wall. Joosab’s brother—in-law and mother—in-law had just been to Mecca, and the brother—in-law was in the shop, wearing his white turban. “Home again, Colonel.” Joosab celebrated the two travellers, one from the bush, one from the pilgrimage, in vicarious pleasure. “Your tuhn will come, your tuhn will come, Ismail.” The brother—in-law was generously reassuring from the bounty of his importance. “More than fifteen year now, I been thinking next year and next year … but seriously, Colonel, I have plans to make the trip.” At the general store, where he had to pick up a cylinder of domestic gas, changes were in process: a cashier’s turnstile was being set up at the new EXIT ONLY—a second door formerly blocked by rolls of linoleum and tin baths. Already men and women in the moulded plastic sandals that were now worn by all who could afford shoes were shoving and shuffling for a share of supermarket manna—a free pocketcomb with every purchase above two—and-sixpence. An old crazy woman who wandered the streets of Gala had somehow got in behind the turnstile and was singing hymns up and down the lanes of tinned food and detergents.