A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  He poured tea for her and stroked her hair. “England?”

  “It’s illegal to have something done here.”

  So there was no child from him this time; but there could be, any time. He could see that she was afraid of it and accepted being afraid. She had told him she couldn’t take the pill because it made her get fat.

  Sampson Malemba and his wife were coming to supper. It was taken for granted that Rebecca was in the position of the woman of the house, now. She helped Kalimo when he would allow it; Kalimo kept Mahlope firmly confined to outdoor work—Mahlope’s vegetable garden supplied the Tlume and Aleke households as well as its own. Mrs. Malemba (much too shy to call any white person by his first name or to invite anyone to call her by hers) would come to Bray’s house if he asked the Malembas alone. She was content not to talk at all except for her extremely polite responses to offers of food and drink, and as soon as there was a mew from the bundle of infant she always had with her she would disappear into the kitchen to feed or tend it. Rebecca managed to draw her out a little; Rebecca was a woman whom other women liked, anyway, but these days it was easy for Bray or her to be nice to other people. They had awakened together in the morning and, when everyone parted for the night, would be going to sleep together in his narrow bed; this was the source of an overflowing generosity of spirit.

  The adult—education-centre-cum-trades-school was going surprisingly well. Sampson had clerks from the boma running literacy classes for older people in the townships. Bray had persuaded the most unlikely people among the white community to teach various skills at the Gandhi Hall workshop; white people, in a skin—wrinkle of apprehension hardly interpreted, were beginning to feel that perhaps it wasn’t a bad idea, so long as it didn’t cost you anything, to make a gesture of cooperation towards the blacks who were running the show. He also quietly counted on the ordinary, unconfessed pleasure anyone takes in demonstrating what he knows. The Americans had supplied a couple of surprisingly useful workers as well as money—not Peace Corps people, but Quakers of some sort—who were teaching fitting and turning, motor winding and various other skills that fitted in with the needs of the beginnings of light industry in the Gala area, and they took their jeep into the country to teach people how to use and maintain the heavy agricultural machinery that was available on loan from Nongwaye Tlume’s department. Even Boxer had come down for a week and enjoyed talking uninterruptedly, in an intensive course on animal husbandry. The Americans had a tape recorder and the whole thing was preserved for use again and again; as Boxer spoke in Gala, it could be played to and understood by people in the remotest village. Boxer stayed with Bray; Rebecca had had to keep away, of course, not even an early morning visit was possible. Boxer was up at five and moving about his room. He brought with him that old—maidish bachelor cosiness which he assumed he and his host shared: there was the feeling that he thought it would be ideal if they could live together permanently. He was the sort of man in whom sexual desires die early; perhaps he was already impotent? He talked about Shinza without prompting: the continuing trouble at the iron-ore mine was due to the meddling of “his lordship,” coming from the Bashi in his “pa-in-law’s” car and getting at people. The Mineworkers’ Union secretary had come from the capital to see what was up, but who would listen to him?—they were all Mpana’s crowd, and they would listen to whomever Mpana told them. And Mpana told them to listen to his son—in-law, his lordship Shinza. Boxer gave the facts as a piece of local gossip.

  The morning Boxer left she came at lunchtime and they made love. The lunch table waited, draped in Kalimo’s mosquito—net cover. She said while they ate, gay to be rid of the visitor, “Why’s he such a depressing man?”

  “Because he’s a vision of myself without you.”

  She laughed with pleasure and indignation. “You! Ever like him!”

  “Everybody has a private vision of what he could be at the other end of the scale, the very bottom. Nobody else recognizes it, only oneself.”

  She was filled with curiosity. “Extraordinary that you should ever think of yourself in terms of him. The private vision must also be the most unlikely thing that could ever happen. Quite crazy.”

  “But haven’t you got one?”

  “Have I? I don’t know.” After a moment she said, “Oh yes. After all, I left the capital because of it.” And now she was sombre, dreamy, while he was talkative and hungry.

  The centre was perhaps even achieving something useful; he worked on at it with Malemba in spite of all that was happening. It continued to exist and to take up daily action while the context—of the country and of his mind—in which it had that existence was broken up and riding at different levels, swirling and giddying. The practical working intimacy with good solid sensible Sampson Malemba, the attentive faces gathered at the Gandhi Hall or the converted police compound, the Quakers’ jeep carrying the momentum of its own dust to villages down on the lake savannah or towards the Bashi—all this purposefulness was taking place on a land—floe on which people moved about their business unaware that their environment had broken free and was being carried, a house riding upon a flood, the furniture still in place and the pot—plants in the windows. What one does oneself every day is real, he thought; she was sitting on the bed under the reading lamp, picking hard skin off her little toes (“It’s my winter layer peeling off—in the summer when I wear sandals all the time I don’t get it”).

  He woke in the small hours of the mornings and his mind punched the facts out of the clarity of darkness. Shinza always had been able to count on influence with the advanced sections of the community, the workers, through his connections with the trade unions. On the side he also had had a useful pull on tribal loyalties through his relationship with the Paramount Chief’s family—he was a nephew, if Bray remembered correctly. It was mainly because of him that the Lambala—speaking people—an offshoot of the Gala, distributed widely through the Bashi country—had been kept within PIP from the beginning. With his marriage to Mpana’s daughter he must now greatly have extended his support, and taken into his influence not only Mpana’s considerable following at home but also the scattered thousands who had always formed a large part of the labour force all over the country. Mpana was the man who, in Bray’s time, had been appointed Tribal Authority by the colonial government when it deposed the Paramount Chief, Nagatse, for intransigence and support of the nascent PIP; with Independence, Nagatse had been reinstated as Paramount Chief and Mpana found himself once again an ordinary chief with a souvenir of better times—his battered American car. Well, Shinza drove that car, these days. It was a logical enough alliance, marriage apart. Mpana and his people certainly would not forgive Mweta the demotion; however far removed from theirs Shinza’s cause was, if it opposed Mweta, it would serve their own.

  And Shinza? Nagatse had been one of his converts, his “enlightened chief who wasn’t afraid of a nationalist movement. Mpana had been one of the “good government boys,” a stooge Shinza made fun of, which was his sharp and generous way of despising. Family feeling would hardly change that; but no doubt expedience did. Shinza had curious friends, everywhere, these days.

  Sometimes as he lay awake among these facts it seemed to him that Shinza’s roster of friends now constituted a stark assembly—in assessment, in the dark. He placed Mweta before them. He could not decide what Mweta would do, should do. If I were Mweta—but the point was, he was not. He tried to rid himself of lifelong preconceptions, discard the last hoary virginity. But there was always another and another—if he could come to the end of them! His mind was freed by the night. If there was a revolution to let people out from under intimidation, exploitation, and release them from the chalk circle drawn by the wrong sort of power, how far could the revolution go to protect itself and what it gained for people? How far, before it slowly picked up the rubble of the same walls and weapons it had smashed; began to use them against what it called the counter—revolutionaries? What were counter—revolutionaries? The
enemies of the revolution, or revolutionaries who thought the revolution was being betrayed? Shinza and Mweta had both identities dubbed on them, each by the other. Shinza believed that Mweta had betrayed the principles of the revolution, and was its enemy; Mweta believed the same of Shinza. And he wanted them both to be wrong. He wanted to believe that together, neither would sell out the new life more than the daily attrition of human fallibility in power made inevitable. He defined it precisely as that to himself, to hold his ground that what he believed was flatly reasonable.

  Sometimes, as the dead silent interval (minutes? hours?) between the cessation of night—sounds and the beginning of predawn sounds was invaded by a shrill unison of birds chipping away the dark, the hard—edged facts in his mind arranged themselves differently. The importance of Shinza’s alliances sank; Mweta had only to reinstate Shinza beside him, placate Mpana with some provincial office, disengage PIP’s domination of the trade unions—it could be done. And Shinza had said, “I like to know I have a chance to win.” With his roster of allies—Mpana; perhaps even some of Nagatse’s people; a following in the trade union movement whose strength and numbers one couldn’t assess; that wild business of Somshetsi over the border—could he have any real chance?

  But this was choosing to ignore, behind closed eyes where everything was present at once, other facts, boulders of facts. Tom Msomane, the Minister of Labour, said one day that industrial unrest was not based on “real demands” but “agitation,” and the next day was at pains to cover up this implication that there was political dissatisfaction among the workers. How many of the strikes and disputes were blown on by Shinza’s inspiration? One could be crediting him with too much or too little. And what was the sense of thinking that all Mweta had to do was lift PIP’s heavy hand off the back of the unions—Mweta believed that the way to expand the economy quickly for the benefit of the workers themselves, and everybody else in the country, was to support investor—employers by guaranteeing a docile labour force.

  Surrounding this firmament of facts that could not be reconciled was its own atmosphere—emotion like the layer of spit an insect wraps round the great concern of its existence, its eggs: he resented Shinza because he thought Shinza was right, and he resented Mweta because he could not admit that Mweta was wrong. And at the same time (four o’clock, now, five?) he was ready to turn over, like a tombstone, his own judgement, and find there beneath only the sort of things that lie under stones.

  He would get up and go to pee in the stuffy bathroom. He used the basin, running the water softly as a flush in order not to disturb her with the noise of the lavatory. Once he suddenly remembered with obstinate urgency something Shinza had said— “… people must be taught to cry ‘Stop thief!’” What was the context? Shinza had said, look it up. He padded down the passage to the living-room and turned on the light. The ashtrays were coldly full. There were raisin stalks in the fireplace and a cup of scummy coffee on his table. He was naked and knelt, dangling, the wet touch of himself against his own ankle, searching through the government—issue bookshelf. He had brought Fanon to Africa with him, after all. The pages of the paperback had gone the colour of the shaded nicotine stain round a cigarette butt. He found the place: “ ‘Stop thief!’ In their weary way towards rational knowledge the people must …” He went back a few lines, for the sense. “… yet everything seemed to be so simple before: the bad people were on one side, and the good on the other. The clear, the unreal, the idyllic light of the beginning is followed by a semi—darkness that bewilders the senses. The people find out that the iniquitous fact of exploitation can wear a black face, or an Arab one; and they raise the cry of ‘Treason!’ But the cry is mistaken; and the mistake must be corrected. The treason is not national, it is social. The people must be taught to cry ‘Stop thief!’ In their weary road towards rational knowledge the people must also give up their too—simple conception of their overlords.”

  He went back to bed and lay again, awake, with her head on his arm and her leg slid up between his; if she rose anywhere near the surface of consciousness she moved her lips against the hair of his chest. All the hours of these nights when he was in turmoil he was also in the greatest peace. He was aware of holding these two contradictions in balance. There was once a crony of his mother’s who used to say gleefully of anyone who found himself suddenly subjected to extraordinary demands—Now he knows he’s alive.

  He wondered if she had known what she was saying.

  He saw the silver aerials of the two police jeeps lashing along through leaves and brush, full of Selufu’s men. He was coming home in the afternoon from a village that would one day be in the suburbs of Gala. That was how one got to know what was going on: one saw something, heard something. He mentioned it to Aleke when he called in at the boma, and Aleke must have telephoned Selufu once he was out of the room. Anyway, by next afternoon everybody knew what had happened. A labourer on the construction of the railway, now within forty miles of Gala, had been killed. The other workers downed picks in protest against working conditions; they threatened the Italian foremen. One of these drove to Gala half through the bush, half on forest track. When Selufu’s policemen got to the construction site they found that the people of the village of Kasolo, nearby, from where casual labour for this stage of the construction was recruited, had carried the dead labourer home for burial and in a kind of mourning frenzy gone straight from the funeral to join forces with the strikers. The foremen had locked themselves in the railway car they slept in; a freight car had been burned and equipment had been tipped into the river.

  “Things are hotting up a bit before the Congress,” Aleke offered, as if that were simply to be expected. He and Bray and Rebecca were drinking tea to give some purpose to their standing about in Aleke’s office. Now, while Selufu was without the best men of his small force, some obscure trouble had started between the Young Pioneers of PIP and the workers at the fish—meal and lime factories, down in the industrial area of Gala town itself. It spread to the townships after working hours, and there was even a triumphant roving gang who wandered through the town and the main street. Rebecca had encountered them driving home; she repeated, “I hooted and they sort of parted to let me through, yelling all the time, but I don’t think it was at me.” Perhaps she wanted to be told she had been foolhardy, or insouciantly bold; what she questioned was her own behaviour rather than the gang’s. He said to her, “Well, you should have been able to make that out?” pretending to chide her as her instructor in the language. “All I could hear was something about ‘we are coming’ “—she repeated the phrase in Gala, for confirmation.

  “People like a bit of excitement, that’s all, that’s the impression I got this morning.” Aleke had been called to the township to drive around with the mayor, Joshua Ntshali. Selufu was no fool and thought that a show of civil service and civic authority might not only disguise his shortage of police but even suggest that the presence of policemen was not necessary. “Quite a few people were home from work for no reason—we saw them standing about outside the houses, they ought to’ve been out of the way at work by that time. —People who’ve got nothing to do with the fish—meal factory or the lime works. One said he’d taken the day off because his wife and mother didn’t want to stay home alone. Another one’s wife wouldn’t let him go because she was afraid he would get into trouble in town. And so on. It’s ridiculous. Josh gave him a lecture that covered everything from how to keep a wife in place to his responsibility for the health of the famous city of Gala. Turned out he was a cleaner at the abattoir.”

  But there was more than excitement at the hostel, the big new block on the hill that once separated white Gala from the native town, keeping it out of sight. “If these youngsters are out—of-works who attach themselves to the Young Pioneers what are they doing living there?” Bray asked. The hostel was supposed to accommodate unmarried men who were employed in industry and public works.

  “That’s what I said to old Ntshali. It’s a m
unicipal affair. That hostel is full of people who haven’t any right to be there—they have no jobs, they just move in and share the rooms of their relations who are working in the town.”

  “Then PIP should disown them.”

  “PIP doesn’t disown any of our people,” Aleke said.

  “My dear Aleke, PIP can and does—what about the iron miners who defied the union?”

  Aleke granted it with a smile, passing no judgement. “That hostel’s a bad idea anyway, whoever it was thought it up.”

  “Of course. Too much like a compound. It was planned by people who still thought in terms of migrant workers.” He added, for Rebecca, “—The last white village board, before Independence; it was their baby.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Aleke said. “How do you go about getting everyone to know there’s going to be a curfew tonight, in a place that hasn’t got a newspaper? Selufu insists we need a curfew for a day or so.”

  Rebecca said, “The radio?”

  “Well, no … I don’t know.” Aleke and Bray both knew the objections to that; one didn’t want to publicize over the whole country the impression—hardly borne out—that Gala was in a state of emergency.

  He looked at Aleke. “Of course, it’ll probably be in the news service—curfew imposed and so on.” But that was different from broadcasting an injunction to the people of Gala, a warning that everyone else would hear.

  “Selufu wants a van with a loudspeaker to go round.”

  “That’s certainly the best.”

  “But he hasn’t got a police van to spare—they’re all up in the bush at the railway.”

  “What’ll you do?” Rebecca said. She came and stood beside Bray. They were looking out across the neat boma garden (hibiscus had been planted where the Christ—thorn had pierced the toe of an Aleke child) down the slope of the town half—hidden by the cumulus of evergreen, where a part of the market with its splotches of vegetable colour, a top—heavy, faded yellow bus with its canvas flaps waiting at the open ground of the bus depot, the yard of Parbhoo’s store with its Five Roses advertisement on the roof, and the comfortable, squatting queue of women and babies outside the clinic, were all in the frame of vision. The usual bicycles and pedestrians moved in the road, bicycles bumping down over the bit where the five hundred yards of tar that had been laid in front of the boma ended and there was a rutted descent to the dirt. He had the feeling—parenthetic, precise—that they were both suddenly thinking of the lake at the same time. The lake with its upcurved horizon down which black pirogues slid towards you. The lake still as a heat—pale sky.