A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  The Finn squinted down at his chest and said as if putting a hand on the head of a dog that had accompanied him everywhere, “Sylvanus Olympio.”

  “But alas, assassiné—he’s dead.” Bray turned to Agnes, giving her the advantage.

  The Finn said unmoved, “Never mind,” in a tone that implied he was a good fellow anyway, dead or alive, in fact better than some who were still about, perhaps in this room.

  Agnes’s patronage collapsed into the African internal feminine giggle that paralysed her, and, by a quick glance, infected Edna. This uninhibited and inoffensive amusement at his expense, along with a lot of beer, melted the Northerner. He began to dance wildly, but preferred to do so on his own. He was so thin that the only curve in his entire form was the curve of his sex in the shrunken jeans.

  The immigration officials had impounded his money at the frontier. Bray said, “That’s quite normal, any country’ll do it—he hasn’t a return ticket. They have to protect themselves in case they get stuck with him here.”

  “So we’ll have to be keeping him in pocket—money in the meantime.” The Frasers considered him, parenthetically.

  “Oh he won’t have any great needs.”

  Aleke smiled and remarked to Rebecca, “We can write to immigration? The mission would give a guarantee for him, ay? Maybe we can get them to release part of the money.”

  “That would be marvellous,” Hugh Fraser said. “He must report to the Police Commissioner, by the way, while we’re in town.”

  “But I don’t think the Commissioner is.” Aleke looked undecidedly at Bray for a moment, and then said to him in the far—away manner with which he referred to such matters, “There was the rumour of some trouble up at the iron-ore mine.”

  “Oh? What sort?”

  “Nobody knows how these things start, until afterwards. Something about overtime.”

  The union had just agreed to a forty—eight-day cool—off period before any strike would be recognized. “Striking?”

  “Apparently.”

  “We heard a truckload of local PIP boys’d been seen driving up the Bashi road,” Fraser said. “We’ll know tomorrow when the broken heads start coming in to the hospital. Ota, better not knock yourself out, old son, you may have to start work sooner than you think.”

  “That’s okay. I rather bandage heads than bury.” The light, light blue eyes that had emptied themselves of Europe turned with neither compassion nor judgement on Africa. His rib—cage heaved under the freedom shirt and he began to dance again.

  “Where’d he get it, anyway?” Rebecca said.

  “A man give it to me,” he said. “I stayed in his hut, it was a small place, banana leaves on the roof, but it’s cool inside. At the end of the time, you know, he say, it’s not a new shirt—but he give it to me.”

  “We must get him a Mweta one now that he’s here. Not secondhand. We can afford it.” Rebecca’s new comradely way of talking to Bray. Not entirely new; it was rather the way she had been when she was odd—woman-out in the Bayley set in the capital, rather the way she talked to the men there. The usual concealment of the whereabouts of another kind of relationship existing within the general company, maybe. Her other new manner—the oblique flirtatiousness—also showed under the surface now and then. Speaking not to him but at him, she asked, “Wasn’t there a strike at the fish factory not long ago?”

  “Oh they’re a difficult lot. Always something simmering there. But that was settled, that other business.” Aleke answered for everyone.

  Bray felt her attention on him. He said, “All’s peaceful on the lake. We should take advantage of it and go down. What about Sunday?” Everyone was enthusiastic. “I’ll bring the food. Kalimo will get busy. No, no—it’s my party.” “What’s the spear—fishing like?” Gordon wanted to know from him at once. “I hope to God you’ve got my gear up here?” he added to Rebecca, and she said, indulgent, pleasing— “All in the brown tin trunk. All intact.” “I’ve never tried, but it should be good.” “We’ll have a go, anyway, eh? You’ve got a boat?” “There are pirogues everywhere and anybody’ll let you use one.”

  “You won’t need it,” Rebecca assured enthusiastically. “There are millions of fish. They were swimming in and out my legs. You don’t need to go miles out into the lake. They’re everywhere round the island.”

  The husband began to question her closely and patiently, as one does when making certain allowances for personal characteristics one knows only too well. “If she’s once had a good time in a place, she exaggerates like hell, this girl.”

  Her eyes shone, brimmingly; it was her way of blushing, and she pressed back her square jaw before the two of them. Gordon Edwards turned to appreciate her with Bray. “Have you ever seen anyone so much like Simone Signoret? Have you ever? The set of that head on the thick neck? The shape of the jaw?”

  She did not look at him. She flew out appropriately, animatedly, at the husband. “She’s fat and middle—aged. She’s got a double chin!”

  “Bunk. I just hope you’ll age the way she has, that’s all. Consider yourself damn lucky.”

  He wasn’t sure who Simone Signoret was—an actress, of course, but he and Olivia hardly ever saw a film. “Well, I hadn’t really noticed …”

  “That old bag!”

  They laughed together at her indignation.

  He was living at the Tlumes’ all right; he would appear, talking already before he entered, at any time of day—the perfectly brushed, white-streaked hair, the olive, tanned skin, the black eyes resting confidently round the room. He treated everyone as if he had known him all his life and decided unquestioningly into what part of his own established pattern of relationships with the world each person would fit. So Bray, in whom he had been quick to recognize a long—time professional wielder of authority just as he would impartially have recognized the particular usefulness of a currency smuggler or a doctor who wouldn’t be unwilling to help out with an abortion, was at once assumed to be the ally for various decisions to be taken up not so much against Rebecca as sweeping her unprejudicedly aside.

  “No sense at all in sending Alan and Suzi off to some school while the little one stays at home. They’re all still at an age when they need their mother and a proper family life. What’s the point of a woman having children if she doesn’t bring them up? She was so mad keen for babies. It’s a crazy idea to uproot them again for a few months—it just depends how long it takes for me to arrange things, and she joins me. What’s the point of having to pack up all over again, in the meantime? The trouble is, wherever she finds herself she begins to arrange things as if she was going to be there forever. This place. I mean, have you ever heard … ? I find her landed here like a bird on a bloody telegraph pole. I should have done as I wanted in the first place, and sent her to her mother in England. ‘She didn’t want to be so far away.’ But what could be farther from anywhere? Camping out with the locals, not even a bathroom of her own. This’s no place for my boys to grow up. Becky tells me proudly they’re learning to speak Gala. Where in the world are they going to need to speak Gala, for Christ’s sake? Who’s going to understand their Gala?” He laughed, “In England? In France? In Germany? How would I get around with Gala instead of French, and my bit of Portuguese I’ve picked up—I was in Angola for a while, you know, one of the best times of my life, as it turned out”—he smiled, showing his charming, slightly translucent—looking teeth, a man with no regrets, and offered at least half the story— “Good God, just the other side of Benguela, the spear—fishing! It looks like Greece—bare yellow rock and blue sea. Not a tree or a blade. I was doing a contract for the harbour at Lobito. Every weekend we used to go off across the desert and pick our bit of coast. Garoupinhas—like that. Well, I learnt Portuguese among other things. I can make myself understood … and now there’s a contract for Cabora Bassa, the dam—you know? The French and Germans are going to build it for South Africa and the Portuguese. I get on well with Continental engineers—we’ve worke
d together before. I’m tempted to go back to engineering. For a while, anyway. So my Portuguese’ll come in handy again, in Mozambique. You find yourself stuck in the bloody hot bush, miles from nowhere, it helps if you can chat the local storekeeper or the police, they’ll do things for you. I like ice in my drinks … This may be a particularly hot spot in other ways”—the understanding was that this was between themselves, not for Rebecca’s ears— “you’ve probably read about the terrorists’ threat to blow up the thing while we’re busy on it. Well, I don’t want to die for the South African and Mozambique governments any more than I want to die for anybody else. The blacks or the whites—they’re not getting this one. Personally, I don’t think there’ll be a chance for them to come near—the whole thing’ll be guarded like a military installation. You can trust the South Africans for that. Nowhere’s what one can call safe, anyway. I wonder about here. The strikes going on up at the iron mine. I know these countries; once they start with labour troubles, it’s sticks and stones and they don’t care who it is who gets in their way. One road out and a small plane twice a week—one mustn’t forget that. D’you think it’s all right? Well—I trust you to know that if ever it looks as if it’s going wrong, you’ll tip her off and see that they go without waiting for trouble to come. I know you’d do that?”

  “Of course.”

  “Because you can see how Becky is—she never believes that anyone would do her any harm. To come to the bundu in the first place—just mad. Well, if you want one of the good—looking sexy ones you settle for having to do the thinking yourself, don’t you? Can’t have everything—” His daughter had come up to him and he wound up the visit, talking of the mother but playfully transferring the reference as if it were applied to the daughter, hooking her ragged strands of hair behind her ears with his first finger, turning her meagre urchin’s face to rub noses with his own. “Is that all you’ve got to wear, your brother’s old pants? Lovely bird like you? Shall we go and buy you a decent dress?” She did not speak, only nodded her head vehemently to everything. It was true that there was something shabby and deprived about Rebecca’s children. Bray had a curious loyal impulse to distract the father’s attention from this by changing the subject. “What sort of equipment have you got for the lake—you don’t mean diving suit and oxygen and all that?”

  And so Gordon Edwards insisted, at the lake on Sunday, that he try spear—fishing with him. There were several pairs of goggles, flippers and three spear—guns. He found a strange and delightful engulfment, freed from association with anything else he had ever experienced. He caught only one small fish, while the other, of course, expertly got quite a catch, including a Nile perch weighing about fifteen pounds. Once they met underwater, the two men, coming up to face each other at the end of the gliding momentum of their web—extended feet. He met the smile behind the goggle—plate, the wet—darkened hair, the undulating body; the encounter hung a moment in that element.

  “Well, how’d you like it?” She was waiting for them when they came back.

  “Oh wonderful. I felt like a fish in water—”

  Nothing would persuade Aleke or Tlume to go down. “And these’re the guys who shout about other people exploiting their natural resources, ay, James?”—Gordon Edwards, cocking his head at them. Aleke said from under a hat, lying in the shade, “My country needs me. Life too valuable.”

  The Frasers’ rumour was borne out. While they were all at the lake that day a party of PIP thugs drove through the workers’ quarters on the bald hillside at the iron-ore mine and kicked over the Sunday cooking fires that were going outside nearly every house, burned bicycles, and in one case, killed somebody’s tethered goat. Aleke related all this later—when they got back from their picnic there was an urgent message for him from the new Commissioner of Police, Selufu, to come to the mine. There was a moment when Aleke half—suggested Bray should go with him but it was no sooner broached than both of them, for different reasons, let it pass, as if it had not been serious. Perhaps Aleke had been told to let it be seen that Shinza’s old friend had, in fact, some quasi—official status in the interests of Mweta; perhaps he merely had been told to make Bray feel important.… On the other hand, if he had no directive from above, maybe the moment the words were out of Aleke’s mouth he had wondered whether an uncertain quantity like the Colonel should be allowed an inside view of difficulties in the district. They had never talked again about the boy Lebaliso had beaten in Gala prison.

  But down at the boma next day Aleke, his fan turning from side to side all morning although the winter weather was pleasant, talked about Sunday’s affair rather as if it had been a rowdy football match. He was critical of such behaviour but described it with gusto. “One old woman was worried as hell about her sewing machine—she ran out with it on her head, I don’t know where she thought she was going—and a fellow”—he always called PIP militants “the fellows”— “made a grab at her more out of devilment than anything. A policeman grabbed him, so she puts down the machine and she starts punching and kicking the fellow while the policeman’s holding him.… You’ve never heard such a carry—on. And the women are always the worst … our women! Nothing gives me a headache like one of those old mothers when she starts yelling.”

  The PIP “fellows” had gone to the mine with the purpose of supporting the union officials’ decision (made against the decision of the miners themselves) not to start a wildcat strike. They said they wanted to hold a meeting at the mine— “to let them know that not only the union but PIP expects them to go to work,” Bray supplied. “Exactly,” Aleke said. “The fellows say it was going to be a peaceful appeal to loyalty and so on. And nothing would have happened, man, if the moment the lorry arrived at the compound everyone hadn’t started shouting, specially those old ones. …” A few heads had been broken; not enough to create an emergency at the Mission hospital. “You’re lucky, Aleke, when I was doing your job, I’d have had them all up before me in court next day.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Aleke offered good—natured professional sympathy. Although he described the night with such laconic detachment, he and Selufu apparently acted efficiently. Selufu arrested most of the PIP fellows and they had been remanded for preparatory examination by the Gala magistrate. It was all as it should be; Bray allowed some inner tension to relax. Of course he wondered about Shinza—there in the area of the mine the week before the proposed strike. Well, Shinza would see that the PIP militants at least had been arrested.

  Mweta’s letter came back promptly; Bray certainly would be invited to the Congress—under what label, he didn’t say. As Bray knew, the Congress was going to be held in the capital this time. (There was already much criticism over this move; it had always been held in the small village of Yambo, on the border of Central Province and Gala, where just after the war the first successful political demonstration and the first arrests by the British administration had taken place.) Mweta ignored the fact that Bray hadn’t written the letters he had wanted from him and simply said, as if there had been no silence of rebuff in this area of their relationship, he wondered what Bray thought about the dispute at the iron mine?

  He wrote at once from under his fig tree that what interested him was the pattern emerging from disputes like those at the fish factory and the mine. In both cases it was the same: an issue raised by the workers was not backed by their shop stewards and other union officials, who were also PIP officials. The issue in both cases was an agreement reached between the union and the employers which apparently was not acceptable to the workers as a whole: in the fish factory, the status of so—called casual labour (and Mweta knew, he had told him himself, how those people were employed and lived); at the mine, a question of rates of pay for overtime. It seemed clear that PIP interference in the unions was in danger of defeating the function of a trade union itself—to represent the workers’ interests as against those of the employer. This was what could happen where the interests of the employer and the state appeared to coi
ncide, and the government, in turn, was the Party. It led to labour unrest without union leadership which had the confidence of the workers sufficiently to be able to control them. “If you destroy the unions, you need the police—more and more police. At the beginning. In the end, of course, it’s peaceful, because the workers have no more rights to assert. State and employer, knowing what’s best for the economy, decide what they need and don’t need. And there’s a name for that, too.” Taking his tongue out of his cheek, he remarked that he would look in on the court when the PIP militants appeared; it was a good thing for the Party that they had been arrested and committed for trial.