A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  Aleke said, “Borrow PIP’s, I suppose. They’re the only people who’ve got one ready fitted—out.”

  For some reason or other Rebecca wanted him to come to the Tlumes’ for lunch—usually she was busy fetching the children from school and feeding them, unless they happened to be going home with school friends and she could come to him. He agreed without thinking about it, anyway, because he had had a call at the boma about noon from Joosab, and had to go off and see him, knowing before he got there what the urgent and apologetic summons would be about. Sure enough, I.V. Choonara of the Islamic Society was in Joosab’s tailor shop. There among the ironing board, the sewing machine and the counter with its long—beaked shears attached to a string, the two elderly gentlemen “expressed the worries of the community” about the Gandhi Hall and School. He was giving his twice—weekly class to the local PIP branch there—the economic basis necessary for Pan—African aims. The Islamic committee members wondered whether it was wise to have these young men gathering at the Indian school just now.… What they really hinted was that they wanted to close the school and workshop to the adult education centre while there was disturbance about. He was not surprised; though he privately doubted whether this PIP class would have been likely to turn up anyway, for the time being. Several Indian stores in town had kept their wooden shutters down, he’d noticed that morning.

  At the Tlumes’ Rebecca and the assortment of black and white children she had brought home from school were already at table. There was lemonade and a cake. “They insisted you must be here”; he realized that it was her birthday, not one of the children’s. “Didn’t I know when your birthday was?” She laughed— “I think I once must have told you. When I wanted to know your astrological sign.” “Mine’s a fish,” the little one, Clive, said.

  He could kiss her for her birthday, in front of the children. Although she was apologetic for making him suffer the noisy and not very palatable lunch—party she was rather happy and flattered at being the centre of the children’s attention. They had presents for her—drawings and painted plaster—of-Paris objects made at school. Clive reminded that Daddy’s present was on top of the wardrobe. A fancywrapped box held a transparent stone on a silver chain. The kind of thing that comes from Ceylon and is set by Indian jewellers in Dares—Salaam or Mombasa. Suzi made her put it on and all through the meal it dangled where those breasts of hers were pressed against their own divide in the neck of her dress. She must have kept the parcel specially to open on her birthday.

  Whether Selufu had sent for them or not a reinforcement of police from other posts appeared round the town in the afternoon. Dazed and dusty, they stood with the faceless authority of strangers on the street corners, outside the African bar, at the bootblacks’ and bicycle menders’ pitches in the gigantic roots of the mahogany trees of the main street, under the slave tree in the industrial end of town. He was about everywhere, trying to find something decent to buy Rebecca, and there was nowhere he didn’t come upon them.

  What could one find in Gala? He even went back to Joosab’s to ask whether any of the Indian shops, who had had nothing to show him but Japanese cottons, didn’t have some elegant silk sari hidden away against the marriage of a daughter. But there was nothing; not even a good bottle of French perfume at the chemist’s— “no call for that.” In the end he bought her a leather suitcase produced from a back room in the gents’ outfitting corner of Deal’s supermarket; it was the only beautiful thing he could find in Gala, must have been there for years, too expensive to sell—standing wrapped in a cheap travelling rug since before he left, ten years ago. He carried it to the Volkswagen, not entirely satisfied, but it was better than nothing, and had to halt before crossing the road while the PIP loudspeaker van went past. A buried voice bellowed forth in a terrific blare that could not fail to be heard but whose sense could not be made out. Frank Rogers, owner of the bottle store, the Fisheagle Inn, former mayor of Gala, and once one of the organizers of the move to have the D.C. recalled, stood waiting beside him. Rogers’ teeth had gone the same rusty yellow as his golden hair. He grinned. “Not walking out on us again, Bray, are you?”

  “Farewell present for one of my staff at the education centre.”

  Of course, everyone knows Bray’s got a woman—first he took up with the wild men among the blacks, now he comes back to find himself a floozy, safe from any trouble at home. That’s the big attraction for white men like him—do what you like, the blacks don’t care.—He knew that old rumours about his keeping black women had been revived, the moment he had come back to Gala—all hankerings after their own back yards were projected by indignant whites onto those who shared their colour but not their politics. Would the undoubted existence of a white mistress prove less of a smear than the mere fabrication of a black one? It would have been amusing to know if a white mistress were considered a lesser or greater sign of degeneracy.

  And would Olivia, in her way, mind a black woman less than this white one? (She knew of the lovely black girl he had been so attached to in Dar-es-Salaam, before his marriage.) Would she find a black girl more understandable, in him? Not because she thought black women didn’t count on her level, but because she herself had found many of them beautiful, and could well imagine a man might find in Africans certain qualities that Western women had traded for emancipation. It would be interesting to know that, too; but there again, he never would. Olivia would never know about this girl, never suffer. This fact seemed incontrovertible while at the same time he was living with the girl, had no plan or thought that did not assume her presence. The idea of “giving up” the girl didn’t exist; and yet there was the equal acceptance that Olivia would in some way remain unharmed, untouched, embalmed in the present. All his life he had lived by reason; now unreason came and paradoxically he was resolved; whole; a serpent with its tail in its mouth. An explanation? The point was that he didn’t feel any necessity to ask an explanation of himself. None at all.

  Tom Msomane’s Permanent Secretary for Labour flew to Gala to look into the Kasolo railway affair, landing on the airstrip near the prison watched by bare—bellied children. But by then the whole thing was settled. Three men who were alleged to be responsible for throwing government property into the Solo River were awaiting trial and the rest had gone back to work; only the Italian who had bounced through the bush for help refused to return. The Permanent Secretary was welcomed by a big beer—drink at Kasolo village, where he made a speech telling the villagers how the railway would bring more money and work to the district.

  Caleb Nyarenda was a guest of the Alekes while he was in the area. He was a small, bushy—haired lively man who belched a lot behind a neat hand while he drank strong tea and told anecdotes from the days when he had been a burial society collector in the capital. Perhaps he still had too much of a professionally tactful no—farther-than-the-door manner with people; he remarked that the Kasolo villagers had been very friendly, but “no one came forward to tell me what was really going on. ‘Oh that business last week’ “—he showed how they waved it away—”—after all I didn’t come up for a wedding.”

  “Well, they were just pleased to see you, that’s all,” Aleke said. “People like to think the government takes notice of them.”

  “Heaving one of those great big earth—eating things into the river, that’s some way to get noticed!” Nyarenda laughed, looking round for confirmation.

  Someone mentioned the Italian foreman, who was still in Gala, sitting all day on the veranda of the Fisheagle Inn, dark glasses observing without being observed, the cross round his neck gleaming on the curly—haired breast in his open shirt. Bray could speak a little Italian and made a point of being friendly if he happened to pass. The foreman told him he was going to hitch a lift to the capital as soon as he could get his things from the site; then he was going home to Foggia, and the company could sue him if it wanted to. “He says the Virgin Mary saved his life once, but you could never be sure she would do it again. ‘—Do i
t in time, again’ was what he actually said.”

  “That’s the man who pushed my trolley round for me in the supermarket yesterday.” Agnes Aleke wore the wig and eye make—up, reserved for special occasions, all day while the Permanent Secretary was there, not out of a desire to attract him but to set some sort of standard for the remote Northern Province.

  “Didn’t he realize you were government property?” Nyarenda was quick.

  Agnes stood with her hand on her hip. “All I can tell you, that’s the first time in my life a white man ever offered to carry anything for me.”

  “And the blacks?” Edna Tlume said in her soft voice.

  “Oh them. Don’t talk about them. You don’t even expect it of them.”

  While the banter went on, Aleke turned, in conversation aside with Bray, to the Kasolo villagers again. He had accompanied Nyarenda, of course. “They want a dam there, I’m told, but they wouldn’t discuss it with him. I asked why but they said he’s an Mso, why should he tell the government to make a dam for the Gala? Naturally, he’ll see that dams are built for the people where he comes from.” Aleke shrugged and laughed.

  “But why didn’t he bring up the subject?”

  “How’s he to know what they want?”

  Aleke’s system of leaving well enough smoothed over; if order were restored and the people had had some pride in entertaining an important representative of the government even if they had no personal confidence in him, why turn their attention back to their dissatisfactions? Well, if the dam were discussed and then not built, Aleke would be the man who’d have to deal with the resentment.

  Gala township calmed down, too; Mr. Choonara consented to have the Gandhi School opened to the use of the centre again. At the iron mine there continued to be trouble of one kind and another. The phosphate mines in the Eastern Province threatened a wildcat strike. One broke out among the maintenance depot workers and drivers of the road transport company, which carried mail and newspapers to Gala. For a week Gala was without papers, and letters were long delayed. In spite (or perhaps precipitated by the silence?) of irregular mails, Rebecca got a letter from her husband. He had apparently changed his mind about boarding school for the children; he had entered them for a school in South Africa.

  “That where he is?”

  “He wrote from Windhoek, but the school’s in Johannesburg.”

  “And the little one?” Bray said. With the father’s face; surely too young for school—only five years old.

  “He’ll stay with Gordon’s sister. For a while. That’s more or less the idea. She’s got twin girls his age. —So’s Gordon can see something of him.”

  He said to her, “Didn’t he ask you to come, too?”

  She had a shy, cocky way of concealing a danger once it was over. “Yes, he wanted us all to leave—but I’ve explained, I can’t break a government contract, and there’s the money—and the money from the house, too, I can’t just leave that here, all in a minute….”

  “What house?”

  “The house in Kenya—my father built a house for us when we got married. It was sold last year and we managed to get the money out and bring it here. But you can’t get money transferred from here to South Africa, now.”

  “Oh my God.” He saw her stranded in Johannesburg: Gordon Edwards ensuring the ice for his whisky far away in the Mozambique bush; himself unreachable. It was one of those prescient visions of destitution and abandonment that come in childhood at the sight of a beggar asleep in the street.

  “What does he say?”

  “About me?” Her voice slowed. “But I told him. I couldn’t come. I ought to finish my contract. At least I can’t leave unless Aleke can get somebody else.”

  Her full, square jaw set but her eyes were exposed, held by him, like hands quietly lifted at gunpoint.

  They went on to talk about the practical details of the children’s departure.

  That night at the end of love—making she began to cry. He had never seen her cry before. The tears, released, like his semen, trickled into her hair and the hollow of his neck. He put up his hand to make sure and his fingers came away wet as if from a wound he had not felt. She didn’t bury her head or hide her face; she was lying on her back within his arm. He thought of the little boy, and said, “I know. I know.” He smeared the tears against himself. Because she was not a woman who wept, she became for a few moments just like those others he’d known, who did, and there was nothing to offer her but the usual comfort—he kissed her eyes and ran his tongue over the eyelids. She said, “He’s so independent, but all the same … little, isn’t he?”

  He brought her an aspirin and a glass of water and she slept, snoring a bit because of the weeping. A process of dismemberment began to take place in him. She would go with her children. He would tell her. He held her and the current of her body carried him, as if nothing had changed, finally to sleep.

  In the morning they overslept and it was impossible to begin to talk. She could not come to him in the evening; Nongwaye was away in the bush and Edna was on night duty, so she had to sleep at home with the children. He went over for supper and again there was no chance—it was Friday and the children were allowed the treat of staying up late. He and the girl played musical chairs with them. She was full of private jokes and was happy and when the children had gone to bed it was not the time to make her sad again. She was happy because Edna’s mother was coming to look after the family next day, and he had promised that they would go alone to the lake. Every day made what he had to say more difficult. Driving to the lake brought back each time a renewal of the first time they had been there alone together. They went to the island—these days they took the spear—fishing equipment with them—and she got her first fish. It was spring; the heat that built up over the two months before the rains was beginning, and he had to drag up the pirogue and balance it against the rocks to make shade—the baobab was not yet in leaf. Even then, the stasis of one o’clock was formidable. Drawn up into their covert of shadow they talked in the mood of animated confidence that, for them, went with being at the lake. At one point she said, “… and when I was miserable—you know. It really was that I hardly mind at all. It’s awful, isn’t it. I look forward to you and I … not having them around, just … The trouble is I want to burst with joy at the idea of us being left alone—” and for a moment he did not quite realize what she was saying—he had forgotten, in the familiarity and pleasure of the day, what it was that had to be said by him.

  And so it was not said; there was no need for it.

  The children left Gala by car with the United Nations husband—and-wife medical team who were on loan to advise on the country’s health services. They were old friends of Rebecca from her time in one African country or another, and were returning to the capital after a trip to the lake communities. In the capital, Vivien saw the children off in the care of a friend of hers who was travelling on the same jet to Johannesburg.

  In the last days before her children went Rebecca was sometimes sad, and wept again—but perhaps this time really because of the parting from them. They were too excited by the importance they assumed and the prospect of flying to their father to have much emotion left—and now and then, when they were babbling all at once about Johannesburg and what “we” were going to do there, there would be a moment of vacancy in the face of one or the other, and the remark— “Silly, Mummy won’t be there yet.” They seemed to believe—or had been told by her?—that she would be following soon. Perhaps it was true, and she had not told him.

  Edna Tlume was found sobbing in the Volkswagen after the children left; she had gone there to be alone, and had to be brought out and comforted. Her starched uniform was crushed as if she’d been violated and the ink from the two ballpoints she kept with the scissors in her neat nurse’s pocket had leaked a stain. She said to Bray while Rebecca went to fetch a lemon for tea, “Don’t tell her—I would never leave my children, never. Don’t tell her.”

  It was n
ot necessary to creep out of his house back to her rooms at the Tlumes’ before it was light, now. Gordon telephoned from Johannesburg when the children arrived; it was a radio telephone call, the reception very poor, but sufficient for her to understand that all was well.

  They sat under the fig, afterwards, she with her sandals kicked off and her feet up because they were swollen from the heat. “He wanted to be remembered to everyone—the Tlumes, and you.”

  He said to her, “He asked me to see that you and the children got out in good time, if ever I thought it necessary.”

  She was tranquil. “Oh? Well now there’ll be no need for that.” She put out her palm for his, and their hands hung, loosely clasped, between the two chairs.

  Part Four

  Chapter 15

  The Luxurama Cinema was owned by Ebrahim and Said Joshi, second generation of a family of Indian traders who came to the capital before the railhead. A Joshi brother was usually in the foyer at all performances, making sure the unemployed African youths did not push their way in without paying, but neither was to be seen the day of the opening of the PIP Congress and the expanse of red and green tessellated floor quickly being blocked out by feet in sandals and polished shoes, figures in trailing togas, in Mweta tunics, in dark suits and even in suits with a metallic sheen, and the intense gathering of voices in place of the apathy of cinema queues, gave the place the air of forced occupation. Fish lit up in ornamental tanks (the Joshis claimed theirs “the most lavish cinema in Central Africa”) sidled along the glass and gasped mutely at their beaded streams of oxygen, like the playthings of a vanquished people, left behind in panic. The popcorn machine was not working; the soda fountain had been taken over by a committee of Party mothers with hired urns for tea.