A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  It was not yet ten o’clock and the darkness was thickly hot. A flying cockroach got into the car and slid itself, flattened like a knifeedge, under the torn floor mat when he swatted at it. Well, there were probably tasty pickings beneath the seats and in crevices, left over from journeys with the children. They had made the car as homely with crumbs and broken toys as Rebecca’s always was. He didn’t feel like bed, or drinking with Roly; he thought he would go round by way of the Silver Rhino and say hello to the Wentzes. They would expect him some time and he didn’t mean to linger in the capital after Congress was over. The Rhino was full; “Reduced rates for delegates—what can you do,” Hjalmar said. “We have to pay the staff the same, no matter what the guests pay.” Margot was in bed; “Not ill?” “Who knows, with Margot? She says she’s tired; and she’s ill. She says she’s ill; and she’s tired. I want her to go on a holiday. She says why don’t I go away for a few days.” He left the office unattended and they sat in the little private sitting—room with its round table under the cone of light from the low—hanging shade, the windows of this Vuillard interior pushed gasping—wide into the hot night smelling of red dust and grass fires. Hjalmar Wentz always generated the immediate intimacy of someone who has no one to talk to; he gave the impression, tonight, of a prisoner of whose cell Bray unknowingly had sprung the lock. The son Stephen had taken his A levels but there was no question of a university—it was the first time for as many generations they knew of in either his (Hjalmar’s) family or Margot’s that anyone simply left school and became one of the half—educated petite bourgeoisie. “He is a natural colonial—the adaptable kind who enjoys the sort of popularity you get when you run a bar and everybody calls you Steve—you know what I mean. There’s nothing you can do about it. Everybody likes him. Margot finds it disgusting. Of course I don’t exactly rejoice … but I see it as a solution to the problem of survival, nhh? We brought him here, in this world and this place, and that is how he’s worked things out for himself. Not intellectually, you understand—he has only instincts. Margot in Europe never knew such people. Her father, the old professor—when they went to a spa, he took all his meals in a private room. They were taught that solitude and contemplation develop the human faculties and wasting time with stupid people prevents them from—inhibits them. He was a great Hegelian; they were made to turn every accepted idea round about and think the opposite before making up their minds—you know, negative thinking and all that. He had a great contempt for middlemen … well, who hasn’t, specially if you have to become one. But he never did … he died before that might become necessary. Ah—ja-a-ah!”—it was not the German exclamation, but the unmistakable longer—vowelled Scandinavian one, with a rising cadence at the end— “All very Jewish—intellectual, although he hardly considered himself a Jew. If he’d been in Eastern Europe instead of Germany the old man would’ve been one of those Talmudic holy men who don’t have anything to do with earning money—part of the rabbinical tradition that to him was a much worse kind of ghetto than the real ones.”

  Bray remembered the daughter was named after that remote and forbidding European. To distract Hjalmar from his son, he turned his attention to the girl he was much closer to. “And Emmanuelle? How’s her musical career on the radio going?”

  “She broadcasts regularly every Thursday evening.” Hjalmar looked slightly taken aback; surely that was something everyone knew. But Bray never listened to anything except the news and was oblivious of his neglect.

  “Oh, jolly good.”

  Hjalmar rejected his own easy pride in her as contemptible. “She should be at the conservatoire in Copenhagen. In Paris. Blowing little flutes made of sticks and pinging away at bits of tin over a calabash. Ahh, I can’t talk about it. And now Margot with her ideas”—he took a breath and held it; let go hopelessly— “now Margot goes and brings her to the doctor, to fix her up. You take a pill and you take a man just like an aspirin, too.” He was addressing the absent Margot. “Who are you to decide for her whether she’s going to sleep with any man who comes along? She didn’t ask for it; you decide. You decide that’s how girls live these days.” He turned away from himself. Accusations followed him. “And I’m the one who is out of touch with reality, I’m the one who lives in a dream world. Oh yes. Any man with five or six children and a wife at home in the bush is all right for her, there’s nothing to worry about because Emmanuelle is protected. Against what? Can you tell me? Are there no miseries and sorrows left once a woman knows she will not risk a child?”

  “We do what we can, that’s all,” Bray said.

  “Your daughters are married.”

  “Yes. That’s no form of immunity, either.”

  There was an easy pause; Hjalmar tugged the rim of his wellshaped ear. “You know, often I’ve felt I’d like to come up to your place for a couple of days—just a break, just to have a look. I’ve seen nothing of the country.”

  “Well, why don’t you.”

  “An idea to play with.” He shrugged. “You can’t get away half a day, in this game. It’s becoming more impossible to get staff, all the time. Margot’s just been back in the kitchen again—the cook was stabbed in a fight. Well, what can I do? You can’t call up cooks from thin air. I’ve told her, what we should do is get someone out from Europe, an immigrant. Advertise in Italy or Germany.”

  Emmanuelle appeared, at once the expression on her face registering: on about that again. She held out her slender sallow hand, shaking it like a tambourine. “Keys, keys, please. —Hullo, Colonel Bray, I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Unfortunately he’s snubbed us this time, he’s with Mr. Dando. We’re deserted.”

  What did one say to girls of Emmanuelle’s age? Not you’ve grown … although it seemed she had. She looked taller than when he had seen her last, and even more elegantly thin. They chatted a few moments; but she asserted an equality of adult status that, of course, they had established last time. He had forgotten the talk in the garden. “Come and have a drink with us,” she said, leaving the invitation open, as if he would know the company she had temporarily left. She shook her hand for the keys again, standing legs planted apart, before her father. “What do you want?” “Never you mind.” He smiled, giving in. “No, Emmanuelle, what is it?” “I’m going to unlock all the family secrets and display before the jealous eyes of the populace all the family jewels, that’s what.” Her dark, narrow face was still bare of any make—up but her hair was grown and hung forward on either side of her long neck from the pointed peak of her skull, straight, coarse and shiny. She looked at him with love and pity, a strangely ruthless and devouring look. So one might make the decision to put down a faithful and beloved horse, when the time came. Then she was gone, with her sloppy stalk, very female in its disdain of femininity.

  Hjalmar Wentz was another person when speaking of matters outside his private life. In a curious reverse, his public self was preserved as a retreat where he felt himself to be most himself, shored up against attrition. He leant intensely forward (he still wore espadrilles and rumpled linen trousers, as if he had been kidnapped on holiday from Denmark on the Costa Brava) while they talked of the strikes and disturbances of the last few months. “Behind every good man in the politics of reform, there is a gang of thugs. —No different for him. In a country of illiterate peasants they know the arguments to persuade where reason isn’t understood.” Mweta’s opening address was in the evening paper; this day is ours—president mweta. “What does it mean to people when he says the needs of economic development come before anything? What does it mean if he says work, and more work, and still more work? But when the Pioneer boys beat them up when they defy the unions and strike, then they understand. They know then that the union is the Party and the Party is the country. It’s all one and anybody who squeals at what the union bosses decide is a traitor. Between ourselves, I hear the fact is the Pioneer hooligans are the only active link left between the Party and government in lots of places. The pity is that he�
��s let Party organization in the bush go to pots”—Hjalmar didn’t always get his English idioms right— “the branches are neglected … if the youths didn’t kick up a row plenty of country branches would feel they had no connection with the PIP government at all.… It’s a mistake.… But what can you do. He’s had to centralize for efficiency. Well, these are teething troubles.”

  “The trouble is many of the Young Pioneers are already a bit long in the tooth.”

  “Yes, well, that’s the paradox of these countries—a shortage of manpower and a surplus of unemployables.”

  “We’ll need two and a half thousand school—certificate holders, alone, next year, and thirteen thousand in fifteen years’ time. On a hopeful estimate, there won’t be more than a thousand next year. But in fifteen years it should be possible to make it.”

  “That’s what you’re working on, eh?” Hjalmar acknowledged the comfort of figures, perhaps spurious. “You are right. I still believe education’s the only hope. I still have to believe it, in spite of everything”—he meant Germany, the failure of the knowledge of human sciences to make people more humane; that axis his life had turned on. “Nowadays it’s love, eh? Back to love. And not even Christ’s formula. I don’t trust it any more than I would hate.”

  Bray said, “In Europe we’ve talked from time to time of a lost generation, but in Africa there really is one. What’s going to happen to them?”

  “They help to make the coups, I suppose. Who knows?—They’ll get old and go home to grow cassava somewhere. We won’t be here to see.”

  “But even now you’d say things aren’t going too badly?” Bray asked, curiously.

  “No. No. On the whole. He’s keeping his head.”

  “And his promises?”

  Hjalmar took on the look of an old woman giving a confidence. “He made too many. Like everyone. But if they give him time. If they don’t squeeze him from all sides, the British and Americans, the OAU.”

  “I’m afraid the involvement of the Young Pioneers is simply something on the side—a circumstantial phenomenon. They’re there; they’re idle; as you said, their very hooliganism has a certain function in being just about the only dynamic participation in the country’s affairs left to some PIP branches. But forgetting about them for a moment—what happened in the rolling strikes at the gold mines, the dispute on overtime at the iron-ore mine, that affair at the Kasolo railway: they are all signs that the workers are losing confidence in the unions. They don’t feel the unions speak for them any more. All the way from the smallest local matters right up to federation level decisions affecting them are being made over their heads. If the Secretary—General becomes a presidential appointment, UTUC will be more or less part of the Ministry of Labour. —It’s no good bringing in PIP chaps to break the heads of people who strike against wage agreements and so on made without proper consultation. The split in the unions is the real issue.”

  “But is that a fact? The President would never encourage a fascist situation here. No one can tell me that. He would never allow it. He doesn’t like totalitarianism of the left or the right, it’s all the same to him.… But this man Edward Shinza—you used to know him?—people say he’s behind the whole thing.”

  Bray had forgotten that he was the one who was asking questions. “But it’s a real thing. He hasn’t invented it. All these issues are coming up openly at the Congress. It’ll be a great pity if they’re fought down as a power bid.”

  Hjalmar Wentz wriggled confidentially in his chair. “Isn’t that what it is?” His smile confirmed the shared experience of a generation. “Well, it’s interesting to be there—you are lucky. Is that cinema all right? There was talk at the beginning they might want to hold it here, you know….”—a twinge of amused pride— “but I suppose we’ve got enough troubles.”

  Emmanuelle, Ras Asahe, and a rumpled young white man were sitting in the residents’ lounge. She hailed Bray as he left; he refused a drink but stood talking a moment. The young Englishman had the amiably dazed and slightly throttled look of one who has been sleeping in his clothes, in planes, for some weeks. He was from one of the weekly papers or perhaps a news agency correspondent (again, Bray was expected to know, from his name) and was on the usual tour of African states. Ras Asahe was briefing him on people he ought to see; stuffed in his pockets he had a great many scraps of paper from which he tried to identify various names recommended to him by other names: “Basil said not to miss this chap, wha’d’you-call-it.… Oh and do you know a fellow … Anthony said he’s marvellous value….” He said to Bray, “I’m sure someone gave me your name?”

  “Oh yes, Colonel Bray is one of the well—known characters,” Ras Asahe said.

  Emmanuelle gave Bray one of her infrequent and surprisingly beautiful smiles, in acknowledgement of the slightly sharp imputation, due to Ras’s equally slight misunderstanding of the nuance of the English phrase.

  “You’re the one who was imprisoned or something, with the President?”

  “Just or something.”

  “Don’t snub him.” Emmanuelle put Bray in his place; it was perhaps her way of flirting with the journalist. She slumped in the deep sofa with the broken springs, her little breasts drooping sulkily and apparently naked under the high—necked cotton dress.

  “Colonel Bray knew that crowd well—my father, old Shinza.” Asahe, the man of affairs, turned to Bray with a flourish— “They ought to put Shinza inside, ay? The trouble is the President’s too soft with these people.”

  The journalist was still matching identities. “You don’t know a man called Carl Church? I think he was the one who mentioned you. Used to be with the Guardian … about forty—five, knows Africa backwards.”

  He did know Carl Church; but when he began to ask for news of him, it turned out that the young man didn’t—they’d met for the first time in a bar in Libreville a few days before.

  He said goodnight. “Why d’you want Edward Shinza imprisoned, Ras?”

  “He ought to be expelled from the Party, at any rate. They say he’s been to Peking with Somshetsi.… Anyway. Well, that’s the story. But he was going round holding secret meetings with the gold miners, he gave them the blue—print for the rolling strike, masterminded the whole business. How could they’ve had the knowhow on their own? I had an idea to do a live documentary, interviews and such, talking to the strikers—but the new Ministry of Info’ boss turned it down … it had to be played cool, so … If I’d’ve done it, Edward Shinza’d have been inside by now.”

  Ras Asahe had the particular laugh of complete self—confidence (as Bray remarked of him to the Bayleys) guaranteed not to dent, scratch, or fade. No wonder the Wentz girl, who loved her father, the natural victim, was attracted to one in whom the flair for survival was so plain. One ought perhaps to comfort Hjalmar by pointing out that Emmanuelle, too—not only her brother—displayed an unconscious instinct of self—preservation.

  Chapter 16

  Linus Ogoto’s branch resolution condemning the high salaries of government personnel turned up the pitch of Congress early on in the morning session. A wary silence stalked his first few sentences, but concentration and alarm pressed in as he went on, scaling the abstraction of figures and suddenly coming up face to face with a petrol pump doling out free petrol; arranging percentages like a handful of cards; on behalf of Congress, inviting himself to take one—any one—and producing the dimensions of the weekly cut of cheap meat a labourer could buy his family on his contribution of man—hours as compared with the man—hours that brought the official his chicken—sometimes deductible as entertainment allowance into the bargain.

  A woman near Bray sounded to these revelations, very low, like a cello accidentally bowed. Men who belonged to the income group under attack showed the wry superior patience with which the rich everywhere remark the poor’s ignorance of the bravely borne burdens of privilege. When the debate opened two or three of them rose to the chairman’s eye wherever he rested it; eloquence swelled again
st fountainpen—armoured breast—pockets. It was asked again and again whether high—ranking government personnel would be expected to clock in the hours of sleep that were lost while problems affecting the life of the nation kept them up far into the night? The claims of these men to a “modest remuneration” for their knowledge and untiring work— “what a lie to talk about man—hours because the truth is that in a big position you can’t knock off at five like any lucky workman”—almost defeated the motion, but Ogoto’s innocent revelation that three—quarters of the delegates present themselves earned under six hundred pounds a year was enough to tip the decision in his favour. Ogoto’s mouth was twitching; Bray saw he had to purse it to control an impulse of triumph. He kept smiling uncertainly in this direction and that like a short—sighted person who doesn’t want to seem to ignore greetings. Up on the stage, Shinza smoked.

  In a curious kind of contradiction of Ogoto’s success, the Tananze branch’s call for a freeze of earnings above six hundred produced uncertainty in Congress. Jason Malenga, the Minister of Finance, did not actually admit the whole basis of the political system might be challenged by more equal distribution of money, but warned that a wage freeze and levelling—off would endanger foreign investment; he got the matter referred to a select committee.

  The beginning of the rural branches’ offensive, asking for the organization of agricultural workers, and the demand for a minimum wage according to region with which it was linked, also took a little time to get under way. The chairman had first to clear the debate of speakers who wanted to ramble through local cases of the abuse of farm labour rather than speak to the issue itself; there was restlessness, and the sense of conflicting preoccupations. Shinza, Goma, looked stony. Then, emerging as though it had not been there all the time, the particular pattern of this Congress, the disposition of human forces present in the gathering, began to come clear. Bray knew the moment from all the conferences, talks, discussions of his life: there was always a time when what the gathering was really about came out strongly and unmistakably as the smell of burning. No conventions, evasions or diplomacy could prevent it. Since many of the Party officials and leaders were also in the government, there was always some member of the appropriate government department to give—in the guise of his presence as a Party delegate—the government line on each issue. The Under—Minister for Agriculture had been primed for this one. The seasonal nature of farm work, primitive farming methods, and the predominance of unskilled labourers who still keyed their efforts to subsistence rather than production, he said with almost bored urbanity, made the organization of farm workers totally impracticable and “ten years too soon.” “The government’s agricultural development schemes must first be allowed to make the land more productive. He warmed to the common touch. “It’s always been traditional for people to hire themselves out for weeding or harvesting when the white farmers need them—are we going to say that these women and children and old people who can’t work regularly must give up their chance to earn a little cash and help cultivate the lands, because the organization of farm labourers along the lines of factory workers will forbid it? You can’t make a modern working community out of the most backward part of the country, overnight; not by a charter or any other bit of paper.”