A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  He took a detour past the prison instead of going home. He thought there was a track that led round the hill behind the hospital to the prison road. It was as he remembered; followed by the yapping dogs of a squatter family, he came out upon the road and saw it up ahead, like any military camp or prison in Africa, a bald place with blind low buildings exposed to the sun. He did not know what he expected: there was a new, very high fence of diamond mesh wire, barbed on top, rippling tinny light; the new flag drooped. He had been inside many times, while he was D.C. He knew the hot, white courtyard and the smell of disinfectant and sour manioc. No political prisoner had been kept there, during the British administration; they had been sent to detention camps in the various emergencies. He had seen those, too; encampments set down in remote places where no one lived, and, inside, the weeks, months, years, passed in heat and isolation. People had been beaten in them; died of dysentery. A commission of inquiry hadn’t healed them or brought them back to life. His agitation on the journey from the Bashi suddenly became something inflated. It sank out of an abnormal glare; he considered it dispassionately. He had looked on that scarred back; but was it really something so inconceivable, for Mweta, for himself—for anybody who had ever ventured out of Wiltshire? His hands had shaken—over that, a commonplace horror?

  To condemn it was as much the centre of his being as the buried muscle that pumped blood in his breast. But to tremble virginally at the knowledge that it happened, here under his nose …

  Part of common knowledge. The air we breathe; I have lived my whole life with that stink in my nostrils. Why gag, now? You work with the stink of violence in your nose just as a doctor must work within the condition of disease and death.

  The screw of noon turned upon everything. It held in the breathless house when he sat down to the lunch Kalimo had burned. (Kalimo was much less efficient than he had existed in memory, in Europe; or was it just that Kalimo was older, old?—Bray noticed a bluish ring like the ring around the moon demarking the brown iris from the red—veined yellow of the man’s eyeballs.) The more he thought about confronting Mweta the more urgently doubtful he became about his own purpose, and beyond it the shadowy matter—like the area of darkness over a suspect organ in an X—ray plate—of his own authority. If the affair of the boy were an example of abuse by some official making free of new—found power, the conversation with Aleke in itself might be enough to put a stop to this particular incident; Aleke would pass the word to Lebaliso, and Lebaliso would be afraid to act again to please (presumably) some local PIP lordling. The intervention of Mweta might go one step further and ensure the censure of Lebaliso. But there would continue to be other such incidents about which nobody would hear, about which there would be nobody to pass the word. The only way they could be counted upon not to happen at all would be if things were to go well enough, long enough, in the country for a code of efficiency to supersede the surrogate of petty power among administrators and officials. Then only the sort of abuses, involving profit rather than flesh, that are tacitly time—honoured in the democratic states of the West and East, would remain. And for the country to go well enough, long enough, Mweta needed the help of Shinza.

  But if what happened to the boy was what Onabu ordered, from the capital?

  If such things were part of the regular activities of the Special Branch, State Security—whatever name such an organization chose to go by? His mind went cold with refusal. Yet he had lived so long, and so long here, among white and black, that he half—knew it could not be otherwise. And if that were so, then more than ever what was pointed to was that the country could not afford to have Mweta make an enemy of Shinza.

  Mweta was in a neighbouring state on a few days’ official visit. Bray could not see him at once. He did not post the letter he had written him; the one to Olivia, either. He went about the house and the boma and the broad, shade—dark main street that was Gala like someone who has packed his belongings and sent them ahead to some unknown destination. He kept away from the few people—the Alekes, the Tlumes—he had got to know. One lunchtime on his way home he stopped for a beer at the “native” bar near the vendors’ trees. Young men from the industries were there; the elite of Gala, with money coming in regularly every week instead of intermittently, from the occasional cash crop. Old men sat alone at dirty trestles over a mug of home brew, blear and tattered, turning coins and snuff from cotton tobacco bags in that miserly fingering—over with which the aged spin out time left to them. The young ones drank European bottled beer from the local factory and he listened to them arguing about soccer and the price of batteries for radios. Some wore PIP badges as others wore buttons given away by a soft drink company. They ignored him suspiciously; one of the old ones shifted on his seat in a gesture of respectful salute.

  At the turn—off to the road where his house was he caught up with Aleke’s secretary, trudging along in the heat. Above big sunglasses her forehead shone damp and white. She said, “It’s only another hundred yards,” but got into the car. “The clutch’s gone on my old faithful—going to cost me fourteen pounds.” “It’s madness to walk in this heat. I can always give you a lift to work.”

  She said, “Well, I didn’t want to force you to go up and down at eight and twelve and so on, just because of me … I mean, you don’t have to keep office hours, do you …”

  The house was cool, stuffy, dim, empty; Kalimo had drawn the curtains against the heat, thin and violently coloured as flags against the light. It was true; he didn’t have to keep office hours, his job was his own invention, he was responsible only to himself. Those were the conditions he had wanted, in order to make himself useful. The small clink of a cup replaced in a saucer and the faint screech of his knife accompanied him at table in the dim room. Well, there was no reason why anyone else should have to walk in the sun, just because he did not have to be back at the boma or anywhere else, at two; while he was having coffee he sent Kalimo over with a note and the Volkswagen key, telling the Edwards girl to use it. Kalimo said, “The Doña she very please, she say thank you, she must fetch children, thank you.”

  He carried some work out under the fig tree; while compiling his own reports he had also sent to England for whatever literature on education systems in underdeveloped countries was available. A tome dealing with Latin America was among the stuff that had arrived while he was at the Bashi. He set himself to read and take notes; the unfamiliar Spanish names provided grist for the tread of his attention, gone smooth and glassy: he plodded on in heat thickening the atmosphere like gelatine setting a liquid. The garden was a bad place at that time of day. The white of the sun under cloud moved a welder’s flame along the outlines of branches and skinny leaves and thrust into the nerve that throbbed, a Cyclopean eye, between his eyes. Yet it was too much trouble to move indoors. At half—past four, since that was the time colonial officials had come home, Kalimo brought tea, and Bray asked for cold water as well. It hurt his teeth and seemed to touch the nerve achingly in that third eye. He left the books under the tree and went into the shrouded living-room, the calm decision coming to him matter—of-factly as he entered: he would go to the capital tomorrow. He lay down on the sofa, whose loose cover hitched up under his weight, and smoked a cheroot. His mind was blank of what he had read. He slept; and must have been asleep more than two hours.

  He was waking up in a cooling, darkening room from which the day was withdrawing in a pinkish darkness reflected from one of those brilliant sunsets outside the veranda. The air was mottled with rose and dark like the inside of an eyelid. A shape moved in the room. She was putting the keys down on the table without a sound, keeping her eyes on him so as not to wake him. She stopped as a child does in the game of “statues,” as he saw her. There was a ringing in his ears—the ringing of crickets all round the house, from the garden. He put out the dark shape of his arm—to receive the keys; a gesture of apology.

  And then, with a second’s hesitation, she turned with that sideways movement of the hips
with which a woman moves between pieces of furniture, came over, and took the forearm—not the hand—in the strange grip of consolation, a kind of staying. As if he were falling asleep rather than waking, he saw with great awareness and clarity what he had scarcely taken in at the time: her hands drawn back, palm open, her breasts offered by the involuntary gesture of backing away, the first day he walked into her as he opened the office door and she was standing there behind it.

  They were looking at each other but the faces were concentrations in the half—light, not to be made out as features. He said, “Sit down,” and turned his forearm in her grip to take her wrist and press it towards the sofa.

  “The door was open,” she said, sitting there beside him. Darkness was running together all over the room. A mirror of lemon—coloured light hung in the doorway.

  “I don’t know when I’ve had such a headache.”

  “Oh did you? The humidity was terrible about three o’clock.”

  “The Volksie behave itself?”

  “It was a blessing. The children were way over the other side of town, at the Reillys’.”

  He would get up, turn on the lamp, offer her a drink. While he thought this he was taken by such desire that his whole body felt swollen with it, the awful undifferentiated desire that he hadn’t felt since he was an overgrown youth.

  In spite of this, he was not one; he kissed the mouth and caressed the flesh with the skill of experience, got up to make sure Kalimo was not in the house and to lock the doors, and stood there a moment, looking down at the glimmering shape of the body that he had unwrapped from its disguising clothes, the prototype at once familiar and a marvel. He remembered to ask her whether it was all right, and the voice said in the dark, “No,” trusting him. He began to make love to her, they began to make love to each other fiercely and while his body raced away from him—extraordinarily, he was thinking of Shinza. Shinza’s confident smile, Shinza’s strong bare feet, Shinza smoking cigars in the room that smelled of baby. Shinza. Shinza. He brought a small yell of triumph from her; and again.

  She took up her clothes by feel and went to dress in the bathroom. For him, with the light, there sprang back the sofa, table of untidy papers, bookcase with its huddle of books tented on one shelf and its spike of invoices and spare light bulbs. A cockroach ran under the rug. He pulled on his trousers and shirt and went to the kitchen for water for drinks. But she came out and said softly, plainly, “What about your boy? I’d better go.” She meant that the servant might already have noticed the darkness and the locked door; if anyone saw her now he would put a face to the unusual circumstances.

  She was gone before there was the necessity for some sort of show of tenderness, of a change in their acquaintance as strangers. She was gone down through the garden and, he supposed, across the empty scrub. He heard the dogs bark at her approach; she was home already. He realized that he had made love to her without seeing her face. He was alone again in the quiet house; and now remembered that it was Kalimo’s evening off to go to church; otherwise the old man could so easily have come battering at the door. The moon had come up and shone upon the books he had left in the garden as it does upon the stones in a graveyard.

  He banged the Bashi dust out of his suitcase and put a few things in it again. He tried to put through a call to Roly Dando but after an hour the exchange rang back to say there was no reply. He took a lamp and changed a worn tyre on the car. Flying ants came to the light and shed their wings like soapflakes underfoot. There was the smell of his sweat, and, as he worked, very faintly, that other odour. He had a shower and at ten o’clock felt very hungry and put together a strange meal out of all the small souvenirs of past meals that Kalimo hoarded in the refrigerator. He left early, getting up before light. The trees of Gala had not yet come to life with birds, but the main street was not quite empty. An old man rested on the post office steps, his day’s journey already begun, patiently digging a jigger from his big toe.

  Bray reached the capital by lunchtime next day and did not go to Dando; instead he went straight to the Silver Rhino and took a room there. “No difficulty about that,” Margot Wentz said dryly, and, keys in hand, flung open the doors of empty rooms and rondavels for him to choose from.

  “Of course things’ll pick up again, it’ll pick up again now.” Hjalmar Wentz was awaiting their return to the office, watching their faces as they appeared. His wife ignored the remark. “Don’t go in for lunch, eat with us,” Hjalmar put in, and she said to Bray, “Of course, you remember where to come—just down the passage here, to the right. You don’t mind waiting till about two? I can’t get out of the kitchen before then.”

  Hjalmar seemed in a state of happy alarm over his arrival. They went into the bar and he appropriated an order of Danish beers meant for someone else. The bar was full, even if most of the rooms were empty. The fan on the low ceiling churned voices that it seemed had not stopped since Bray had left the capital last time. “If the Czechs can turn them out at five pounds a thousand, there’s nothing in it for us….” “He used to be down in Zambia, with the R.S.T. crowd, little plump Scotsman, you remember …” “… played to a five, but that was when I was a lot younger …” “… yes, but what’s the point, you can’t work on less than twenty—five per cent, a waste of time …” “… at head office in Nairobi, I said, you might get away with that sort of attitude … stupid bastard …” White men in bauxite, in road construction, in mining equipment, in technical aid, textiles and tin, black men from Agriculture, Public Works, Posts and Telegraphs—the Ministries down the road. The black ones were more carefully dressed than the white and most spoke a back—slapping, jolly English instead of the local language. They were youthful and good—looking, with their little ears, round black heads, and black hands, among the bald pale heads and drooping, gin—flushed ears. “I was at his home yesterday, my dear chap, I know him well, ever since we were at teacher—training in Salonga …” “… very inconvenient, the wife said to me, ‘How was it Mr. Mapira didn’t see you at Chibwe’s place’—oh yes—there’s nothing you can keep from a wife, good Lord—” “… have a chat with the Minister next week, yes that’s what I intend …” “… these garage chappies, man, something should be done about them, I mean they charge a person what they like….”

  The tiny Viking ships of the mobile above the bar spun slowly in the sluggish draft; Hjalmar was plunged into an account of the Silver Rhino’s finances and the terms of sale under which the place had been acquired. His voice burrowed through the babble with the obliviousness of a man for whom everything around him is a manifestation of the problem that possesses him. He could never sell so long as the legality of the original sale was not settled, meanwhile the first mortgage wasn’t met and the bank refused to give a second mortgage because of the dispute about ownership. The builder was “getting impatient” over the alterations he had done when they took over; everything would be all right if the brewery would advance money in exchange for a share, but now with the new legislation the breweries weren’t supposed to advance to people who were resident aliens and not citizens of the country.

  Living alone, remote from the demands of friendship for the past few months, Bray had become unaccustomed to this European intimacy, this steamy involvement in other people’s lives. All he could do was prompt with the sort of brief questions that enabled Hjalmar Wentz to unburden himself—though it was an unburdening only of the facts: Bray could sense that they construed a kind of front— “Margot and I think …” “… all we really need, then, is, say, another year to get straight”—out of a more private struggle that could not be talked about. Wentz was saying, after a pause, “The thing to do, I suppose, would be to talk to Ras Asahe….” The haggard, handsome Scandinavian face seemed to be waiting, as if for a blow. The cuts of strain slashed across the cheekbone under each eye. “He has an uncle on the board—you know.” All large white companies had a token black man on their boards. “A word from there, and everything … well. It would g
et us out of a hole for the meantime.”

  “Yes, if the brewery were to be persuaded—”

  Wentz was still waiting, ready not to flinch. He said, “But Emmanuelle is not easy to deal with. My wife—Margot—we don’t know how Emmanuelle would react. And apart from that, what would it look like, I mean to the man? Up till now, we’ve never encouraged it, this friendship with Emmanuelle.”