A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  “You’re saying socialism is the absolute?” Neil loved strong sentiments, as a form of entertainment. He at once took charge. “The standard of reference by which any political undertaking is to be judged?”

  “Yes! Must be, if we believe, people like Roly and me, what we’ve been saying all our lives—the lawyer and the civil servant. Yes! What else?”

  “But I am still a lawyer and you are no longer a civil servant,” Dando said, looking at him. Their eyes engaged; and then he withdrew, under Dando’s gaze of a man who stands watching another go out of sight.

  The talk had gone back to Tola Tola, the Foreign Minister. “But what about the Msos,” Hjalmar was insisting. “Neil—how will Mweta get him out without causing trouble for himself there?”

  Neil Bayley stood about among his seated guests like a ringmaster, running his hands up through his bright curly aureole of beard and hair. “Ah, there’s the advantage of the strange position of Tola Tola—although he’s nominally Mso, it seems he actually comes from the Congo … someone’s dug that up. It’s clearly not an Mso name … is it, James? Tola Tola?”

  “Probably not; you don’t get the two—syllable repetition …”

  “—So even though he’s got an Mso seat, there’s some”—he swivelled his hand right and left, fingers fanned stiffly— “ambiguity about the whole business. But Mweta’d have to put an Mso in his place, that’s the snag. Apparently the Msos would want Msomane. Or rather Msomane would want to make sure he was the man. He’s mad keen to get rid of Labour, which is hardly surprising.”

  Bray said, “Neil, would you say Mosmane was one of the people who’re pushing Mweta?”

  “Depends what way. It’s always a tricky business to keep the Mso faction happy. Without making too much of them.”

  “I don’t mean that. Would he have had enough influence with Mweta to get him to approve the Company setting up its private army?”

  “Is that story true?”

  “Hjalmar has to be told twenty times if it’s something he doesn’t want to believe,” Margot said. “You’d have to run him over with a tank first.”

  “My source of information only mentioned armoured cars,” Bray put in lightly to protect poor Hjalmar. And Vivien’s clear commanding voice that stamped her origin as undeniably as any princely birthmark on the backside of a foundling: “Hjalmar, I’m just like you. I wouldn’t have believed it if one of the Company mothers who picks up children at Eliza’s school hadn’t told me how much safer she feels now. —I told her how much less safe I feel.”

  Neil still held the floor. “Cyprian Kente’s more likely to be the one who’s done the pushing, and even Guka, maybe. If your Interior and Defence boys give advice, it’s difficult not to take it.”

  “And no one’s asked any questions in the House.”

  “It’s been done so discreetly … the first anyone heard was when these men appeared out of the blue last month at Ngweshi Mine—the report was that ‘police’ reinforcements had come down from here. Then it leaked out that they were a new kind of police.… But when the House sits again”—his mind went back to the “worry” about Mweta he had begun with earlier. “Of course, it looks so sinister. I don’t doubt that he’s tough enough to keep it under control. But it would have been better to keep the Company in the background—could have been called a force of civilian reservists, some such. He’s been badly advised to let the Company’s name come in openly—I wouldn’t agree that he shouldn’t use the resources of the Company if he needs them, one may have to use existing resources—”

  “It doesn’t help me to talk about the Company as if it were a natural phenomenon,” Vivien said. “It still looks like the old days we read about down in Zambia and Rhodesia, with the old Chartered policing the place for the Great White Queen.… What sort of thugs will the Company recruit, anyway? It’s terrifying. All those mercenaries from the Congo wandering around Africa looking for a job …”

  “I gather it’s a black affair, mainly, no whites—” Neil dismissed her.

  “And the Company administrators are running an army? You believe that?” Vivien laughed at him.

  “Well I suppose they’ve borrowed a few people from George Guka. Anyway, you’re exaggerating as usual.”

  Vivien’s speckled blue eyes balanced the two men in a sceptical challenge, inquiringly. “Tell Rebecca I’m keeping my riot bag packed. … I am so glad that Gordon’s disappeared again, everyone is always much more content without him.” Perhaps Rebecca had made a confidante of her; Bray didn’t know. But she spoke so easily, linking him naturally with Rebecca as a friend who lived in the same place; it might have been—as this was Vivien—a way of showing him her acceptance of his relationship and her calm and capable intention to protect Rebecca and him from the others.

  He said, “Oh the children didn’t seem to think so. They loved having him around.”

  “Yes, exactly, Gordon rouses expectations and that’s always exciting—he makes people feel all sorts of things are going to be changed. But if he stays, they aren’t. So it’s always better for him to move on, you know. Now they’ll see him in the school holidays, and that will be fun for them without lasting long enough for any damage to be done. Rebecca shouldn’t worry about them. She’s managed awfully well. I really ought to send our young to my mother or somewhere for a while; they’ve been too unrelievedly in my company. Neil objects for some reason or other.” He knew she didn’t believe it; she was establishing, in this company, the ordinariness of Rebecca’s situation. But her husband said swaggeringly, “I’m here, my girl, not digging some bloody dam for Vorster and Caetano at Cabora Bassa.”

  Ras Asahe and Emmanuelle burst in with a few of Ras’s satellites. One was a lecturer at the university, a young black man who caught a pink end of tongue between his perfect teeth in amusement as Neil, his registrar, mimicked the staff at a recent meeting, drawing him into a professional privilege of burlesquing their institution. The gathering began to change character, with more drinks and disjointed chatter. The subjects they had been talking about were dropped; whether this was a matter of mood, or because it was not possible, once again now, for black and white to talk in a general way of these things without seeming to extract from the blacks secret loyalties and alliances that might be dangerous for them. It had been like that before; before Independence, when the Governor’s hospitality in detention camps and prisons waited at the other end of candour become indiscretion. The ease in between—the ease of a few months ago—belonged to a time when the people from Europe were neither in a position of power on their own behalf, nor as witnesses of a situation in which the Africans had something to fear from each other. He felt a wave of impatience with the capital. While he was drinking and lending himself to the air that it was “marvellous” to be back among these friends again, he wanted to be off, driving alone through the night for home, Gala.

  Before he left he telephoned Rebecca at the boma and told her to send him a letter granting him her power of attorney. She sounded chastened, on the other end of a bad line, as people often do at the idea of urgency. He prepared himself to be kept a few days, hanging about in Roly’s house. But she must have made some arrangement for the letter to come up by air courier in the government bag—he hoped she had not discussed the contents with Aleke—because it was delivered to him at Roly’s very promptly, by government messenger. Folded as an afterthought round the formal letter whose wording he had dictated, was a half—sheet of green copy—paper with a foolish password of endearment scribbled on it; exclamation marks. She was an awkward letter—writer; the things he got from her reminded him of his daughters’ letters from school. He carefully burned the half—sheet and smiled, aware that the other document was the kind that would be best burned, too.

  But he took it to the bank and withdrew the money from the sale of the house Rebecca’s parents had built for her when she married Gordon, the man everyone was more content without. Half the sum would have equalled the maximum amount
exchange control regulations permitted to be taken out of the country, and then only by people leaving permanently. In breakfast table conversations with Roly about foreign exchange, Roly was easily led to turn his tongue on the officials who didn’t seem able to put a stop to money going out of the country illegally, just the same. He said it was well known how these things were done; there was one crowd, a South African white man and a couple of Congolese, who had agents in the capital and just plain smuggled the cash over to Lubumbashi and thence wherever the client wanted it, and there was a certain Indian down in Old Town who was known to have more reliable ways and means—a relation of the people who had taken over the garage since old Haffajee died. How was it done? Well, travel allowances for one thing; poor students going off on scholarships to study abroad; they were allowed a maximum allowance that was invariably in excess of the money they had, so they were paid a small percentage to take out someone else’s money as their own. Businessmen; the wives of white Company officials going “home” on leave; Moslems going on a pilgrimage to Mecca—lots of people one wouldn’t think it of were happy to earn their profit on the side.

  He thought it might easily be that the Congolese would turn out to be Gordon’s friends. It was not too difficult, through casual inquiry at the garage, to find out where to go in Old Town. Again with the sun on his head and purpose at his back he tramped over waste ground. If the elderly gentleman in the grey persian lamb fez knew who he was he showed no surprise; and perhaps he had long ceased to be surprised at the people he recognized. It was all satisfactorily concluded. Rebecca’s name would never appear, in fact the elderly gentleman would never know it. The money, nearly four thousand pounds in English currency, twice that figure in local currency, would become Swiss francs in a numbered account. In due course Rebecca’s signature would be lodged with the Swiss bank as the one required to draw on that account. He explained that delays in the transfer of the money—a piecemeal transfer, for example—would not do. This too, was accepted as a matter of routine practice: then the commission rate would be higher, of course. The money would be deposited within two or three weeks at most.

  After it was done he walked back to the empty lot where African and Indian children were playing together with hoops made of the tin strips off packing—cases. For the first time he could remember, the Volkswagen was reluctant to start, and they made a new game of helping him push it so that he could take advantage of a downward slope. As he got going and turned into the street a young man in the usual clerk’s white shirt and sunglasses greeted him. He did not feel worried that he had been seen; such a worry had no reality for him because it had never seemed it could ever apply to him, have relevance to his way of life. He felt the commonplace peace of being on one plane of existence alone, for once: his mind was entirely occupied with practical matters to be ticked off one by one through a series of actions, before he could get away. The dentist; resoled shoes to be collected; wine as a present for his host.

  On the way back to Dando’s to pick up his things he was held up, as he had been once before, by the passing of the presidential car. The outriders on their motorcycles rode before and behind—the car was borne on the angry swarm of their noise.

  He saw only the black profile of Mweta’s face rushing away from his focus. The next time, next time they met—it was difficult to realize that it had ended like that, this time. But human affairs didn’t come to clear—cut conclusions, a line drawn and a total added up. They appeared to resolve, dissolve, while they were only reforming, coming together in another combination. Even when we are dead, what we did goes on making these new combinations (he saw clouds, saw molecules); that’s true for private history as well as the other kind. Next time we meet—yes, Mweta may even have to deport me. And even that would be a form of meeting.

  Part Five

  Chapter 18

  Her car parked outside the Tlumes’, Kalimo’s washing on the bushes, the fig, like the trees over the main street, under a hide of coated dust, the quality of the silence that met him in his bedroom with the thin bright curtains and in the shabby living-room—he walked through the rooms with clenched hands, suddenly. All here; not a memory; life, now. He entered into it and took possession. Kalimo’s welcome flowed over him like an expression of his own joy.

  And soon she came, he heard her walking up the veranda steps and the squeak of the screen door that let her pass—in the rush of assurance that in a few seconds she would be standing there in the room, alive. There she was, herself. The self that couldn’t be stored up even in the most painstaking effort of the mind and senses, the most exact recollection, never, never, the self that was only to be enjoyed while she was there. The moment he embraced her (slight awkwardness of disbelief that it was happening, taste of the inside of her mouth coming back to him, feel of the flesh on her back between his spread fingers) the sense of that self entered him and disappeared, a transparency, into familiarity. She wanted to hear “all the stories” with the amused eagerness of one who has been content, waiting behind—she hadn’t envied him the capital or the company of her old friends. They ate their first meal: yes, that was exactly how she was, her way of considering, from under lowered eyelids, what she should help herself to next. He kept pausing to look at her and she, every now and then, reached for his hand and turned it this way and that, squeezing the bones.

  “You took the phone call very calmly.”

  She was hardly expectant. She said with tentative curiosity, “You were very calm yourself.”

  “Don’t you want to know what I wanted the letter for? Aren’t you concerned about what I did with it? Rebecca, I’ve taken your money out of the bank.”

  She searched him for the joke. “No, really.”

  “I did. The money from the house. I sent it away. It will be there for you in Switzerland whenever you need it. No one else can touch it, no one will block the account. You can use it wherever you are.”

  She became at once tense and helpless, an expression that flattened and widened her face across the cheekbones. “Why? I’m not going away.”

  “You must be safe. You and your children. Now I feel satisfied you are.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t see … you don’t see …” He had to get up from the table and come over to her, enfold her awkwardly against his side. He took her arms away from her face; it was roused, red. A vein ran like a thickness of string down her forehead. He thought she was going to cry. He chivvied, humoured— “You’re a very trusting girl, I could have run off with all your cash. You handed over without a murmur.”

  She squared her jaw back against her soft full neck for self—control. “The trouble is that you never try to deceive me. I know what you will do and what you would not do. I could never change it.”

  “At least I hope the money’s in a Swiss bank. We’ll know in a week or two whether it’s there or whether I’ve been a gullible ass who’s lost it for you.”

  Between the “stories,” the unimportant news of friends, he talked a little of Congress: but it was massive in his mind, it could not be dealt with anecdotally, nor as an account of events, even an explanation. It broke, over the days, into the components most meaningful to him, and these took on their particular forms of expression and found their own times to emerge.

  She said that night, “What you did—the money from the house—it’s not allowed, is it?”

  He had been asleep for a blank second and her voice brought him back. “No, it’s illegal.” He found his hand had opened away, slack, from her breast; in sleep you were returned to yourself, what you dreamed you held fast to was nothing, rictus on a dead man’s face. She said, “It’s more in Gordon’s line. And if they find out?”

  “What’s left of the settlers who had me deported will say they knew all along what kind I was.”

  “And Mweta?”

  Her nipple was slack for sleep, too. His hand could hardly make out the differentiation in texture between that area and the other sur
face of the breast; he dented the soft aureole with his forefinger until it nosed back. She shifted gently in protest at this preoccupation, evasion.

  He was suddenly fully awake and his hand left her and went in the dark to feel for a cigarette on the one—legged Congo stool that was his bedside table. He smoked and began to talk about the day of the debate on the UTUC Secretary-General, told her how he had gone down to the carpark to persuade Semstu to support Shinza.

  “You knew Semstu from before?”

  “Oh yes, an old friend. That’s how I could do it. I’ve known him as long as Mweta and Shinza.”

  “And Mweta?” she said again, at last.

  “I had every intention of telling him. He knew anyway what I thought about the Secretary-General, so I don’t suppose it would have been much of a surprise.… But it seemed to me after all it was my own affair.”

  “How d’you mean? You did it for Shinza.”

  “For myself, I’m beginning to think. Shinza’s trying to do what I believe should be done here.”

  She said, “I’m afraid you’ll get into trouble, Bray.”

  “You’re the one who told me once that playing safe was impossible, to live one must go on and do the next thing. You proposed the paradox that playing safe was dangerous. I was very impressed. Very.”

  “I didn’t know you then”—she always avoided the word “love,” like a schoolboy who regards it fearfully, as something heard among jeers.