A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  “He will think you’re siding with Shinza,” she said, out of her own silence. “—Won’t he? What’ll he do about that?”

  “I don’t think I can be regarded as a very dangerous opponent. Mweta’s the President; he can always get rid of me.”

  “That’s what I mean. You may not be dangerous, but his feelings will be hurt … that’s dangerous.”

  “Then for his part he’ll be able to say he threw me out because I was smuggling currency.”

  She sat upright in the narrow bed. In the dark he saw the denser dark of her black hair, grown to her shoulders by now. “Oh my God. You see! I wish you hadn’t done it. It’s all right for someone like Gordon—”

  “My darling … just a joke! … nothing will happen.” He drew her down, made a place for them again, told her all the things that neither of them, for different reasons, believed, but that both accepted for the lull before sleep. “I could see from the way it was managed, it’s perfectly safe.… Everybody considers currency laws, like income tax laws, fair game—”

  “You are not everybody.”

  They were overcome by the reassurance of being (in the sense of a state of being) so close together; something perfect and unreasonable, hopelessly transitory in its absolute security.

  Aleke, to save himself the bother of deciding how to deal with any other situation, behaved as though of course everyone—Bray included—was satisfied to see Shinza put in his place. He asked questions about the “fireworks” with the knowing grin of a man who expects boys to be boys and politicians to be politicians. As he sent one of his children running to fetch cold beer and wrestled fondly with another who persistently climbed over the back of his chair onto his head, he kept prompting, “They let him have it, all right … he didn’t get away with it….” Bray was giving a matter-of-fact account of some of the main debates, summing up the different arguments and the points that emerged. He said, when the beer had arrived and they were drinking, “Your cynicism amazes me, Aleke.”

  “Well, that’s the first time I’ve ever been called that.”

  “Exactly. That’s why I’m surprised. You don’t seem interested at all in the issues … they might just as well not exist. You see it as a contest.… They’re not concrete to you, then?”

  If it were possible for someone of Aleke’s confidence to be embarrassed, he was. It took the form of a quick understanding that to accept the charge would be to decry his own intelligence, since he’d already refuted cynicism as an explanation, but to deny would bring the necessity to discuss the issues themselves—and overcome a disinclination, half-laziness, half-apprehension, to find himself and Bray in disagreement. He smiled. “… such a lot of talk. It’s only when it comes down to getting busy with administration that you c’n see how things are really going to work out. Didn’t you always find that?—You get some decision to cull all cows with a crooked left horn because that’s going to improve the stock in some way the brains up in the veterinary department’ve discovered, but the result is some people won’t pay taxes because it turns out that in Chief So—and-so’s area, all the cows’ve got damned corkscrew left horns—”

  But the sidestep in itself was, Bray saw, a recognition of himself as an opponent.

  “Anyway, perhaps we’ll get some peace and quiet now,” Aleke said sociably, to include his wife in the talk as she appeared shaking a packet of peanuts onto a saucer.

  “Then take a week off, please, let’s have a holiday.”

  “I didn’t say anything about a holiday—just that Edward Shinza will be out of the way, that’s all. —I’ve told you, you can go off to your mother if you want to, I’ll join James as a bachelor again—”

  “I just hope he stays out of the way, then. I don’t like these night trips up to the iron mine and God knows where in the bush—and I’m alone here with the children.” She turned with her slightly sulky, flirtatious manner to Bray. “I’m scared.”

  “I heard the same complaint from a young woman when I was up at the Congress. Only she’s scared of the Company’s private army. She’s afraid they’ve recruited Schramme and his out-of-work mercenaries.”

  “Oh town. What’s there to be afraid of in town. It’s not like here with those bush—people from the lime works shouting in the streets, poor Rebecca, you remember in the car that time—”

  “Yes, yes—but now Shinza’s back in the Bashi with his tail between his legs, the Party Congress is over, all that nonsense will stop

  “Not only cynical; also very optimistic, Aleke.” For Agnes Aleke’s sake, he changed the subject. “Have you seen the Malembas since he’s been back? Sampson was a triumph with his resolution about the club, I’d no idea he was even contemplating it—”

  “Malemba? Really?” Aleke murmured amusedly; and once he said as he drank his beer and gazed round with the preoccupied contemplative criticism of a man too busy to do what he felt he should, “Agnes, either fix up that place like you said or chop it down for firewood.”

  His wife and Bray looked up uncomprehendingly a moment, and saw that he meant the old summerhouse in the garden. She said, for Bray’s benefit, “Oh no, we won’t pull it down. I want to make it nice again.”

  Olivia had built it—or rather had it built, the prisoners coming over under guard to put up the mud-and-wattle walls and tie the thatch (tea and bread sent out to them from the D.C.’s kitchen). It had been for the children, the little girls, dressing up in their mother’s clothes and playing in there with their English governess, that girl with hefty freckled calves luminous with ginger hairs who (Olivia said) had been in love with him. But to him now it was Aleke’s house; as he walked up the fan of steep, uneven veranda steps or entered the rooms, he hardly remembered he had lived there.

  Barely a month went by peacefully for Mweta. If he thought the rebels in the unions had been dealt with at the Congress, the most favoured workers, who had not made common cause with them, had received no such chastening. The “loyal” mineworkers began to renew the pay demands for parity with expatriate white miners that he had refused with his famous “empty hand” argument before. For the time being, he kept out of the dispute publicly, while first Ndisi Shunungwa—his “coming man”—then the Labour Minister’s secretary, and finally Talisman Gwenzi, the Minister of Mines himself, intervened. Yesterday’s newspaper arrived on Bray’s and Aleke’s desks each morning with the daily report of meetings and talks whose outcome—failure—was “not disclosed.” Aleke remarked, “Mweta should tell them where to get off—he’s the only one they’ll listen to.” Bray did not say, he can hardly show the necessity to do that, now. “That’s what he’s got Gwenzi for.” But it was hard, for people who had long been ruled by a faceless power across the seas not to see authority solely in the face of the individual from among themselves who had taken over in their name. “The government” was so long the alien, abstract puissance; “the leader” their own flesh-and-blood man.

  He wondered whether perhaps—for Shinza—one of those strange lulls would now come about; one of those apparently inexplicable breaks in African political life when someone turns away just as he seems about to close his grasp. He had contemplated (with strong unease) Shinza disappearing into the hiatus of that hut smelling of woodsmoke and sour baby, talking, smoking, while an old body slept in a bundle of rags outside in the yard waiting to die as Shinza waited—for what, sign or time, Bray did not know. But Shinza sent for him to come to Boxer’s ranch. They had just spent the day at the lake, on their island—he and the girl. It was much too hot and she was in full war-paint of the sun; streaks of scarlet down her shins and calves, across nose, cheekbones and round high forehead. “I hope you’re not in for heat stroke”; but she kissed him with burning swollen lips that suggested she was ready to make love. They were both rather exhausted and this seemed to put a fine edge of enervation on their nerves; since he had been back the urgency between them had been constant—sometimes he had to seize her hand and press it on his sex.

  Unde
r the rusty old shower she said between gasps and gulps, “I forgot to tell you—old Boxer turned up while you were away. Came to look for you at the boma.”

  “—Stay a bit longer, you may have a slight temperature.”

  Her hair conducted streams over her face, she pressed her thighs together and stood pigeon-toed in the cold water. She shouted, “He won’t be at the ranch.”

  “How d’you know?” It was a good thing her eyes were closed; the shower belched forth a dead insect with long filaments of drenched legs, and he flicked it unnoticed off her belly. “Oh how could I forget—just let me tell you—” She stepped out blindly onto the soggy mat and felt to turn off the tap, forcing him to come out of the bath too— “That’s enough hydrotherapy now, Bray. —Because he’s in England. He’s gone back to England! His wife died. So now he’s gone back to England!” They both began to giggle. “Well what’s so funny? I told you, his wife died!” But they laughed more than ever. “Is he coming back? Did he say for good?” “Of course not. He’s coming back. He’s just gone because she died … to see if she did, really, I suppose … I don’t know …”

  He made to kiss her on her sunburned eyelids, her neck, but suddenly she resisted with a kind of exasperated embarrassment even while she laughed. In just exactly that way her son, the little one, clenched his face, laughing or crying, and kicked to be free of her sometimes when she snatched him up. Bray fought her but her eyes flew open and he saw—accusation, complicity; an absent wife, a dead wife. “Come on. Pat yourself dry. I’m going to put some cream on your shoulders.” They went quiet and purposeful over the small task.

  In the morning she rested her face against his back while he was shaving, her sleep-slack arms round his middle. So pleasantly hampered, he cleared away in swathes of the razor the snowman’s face in the mirror, and freed his own to meet him, talking at himself, while they gossiped about the capital. He told how Vivien had said it was surprising none of them had taken Shinza as a lover. “Was that what she said—‘taken,’ I mean? That’s her upbringing coming out, dear old Vivien, when it comes to things like that she thinks she’s back in one of the stories of her grandmother—or perhaps it’s her great—grandmother?—she was a famous Edwardian beauty with a lord for a husband and she would decide on this man or that. Never mind what he thought about it.”

  “Have you told Vivien?”

  He felt a wet felt tip draw a line up the groove of his spine: her tongue. “Not directly. But when I write of course it’s always ‘we did this, we did that.’”

  “Because I had the impression she knows about us.”

  “She always knows about these things, Vivien. She knows but she never talks.”

  Of course Vivien has been discreet before; perhaps even when it came to her own husband and her friend. “And she’s never wrong about people—her judgement,” the mouth behind him was saying.

  He wanted to say, “She doesn’t like Gordon,” but his half—closed eyes, directing the shaving of his neck in the mirror, shamed him out of it amusedly. Without glasses, with the blood drawn freshly to the surface of the skin, the younger man whom for some not very convincing reason every man thinks of as his definitive self was almost present in the heavy, strongly planed flesh of the face that he supposed represented him. He saw that face with calm equanimity, feeling her at his back.

  When she left for the boma he promised to try and return that same night; gave a gentle, reassuring smile to reassert a certain perspective: “—And I’ll find out whether Madame Boxer was dead or only shamming,” but she busied herself with the heel of her shoe, which she said was loose, and rushed back to the house to change into a pair of red sandals. Red shoes Oriane de Guermantes had preoccupied herself with in order to evade the news that Swann was dying: but Rebecca wouldn’t know who Oriane and Swann were, it was with Olivia that he had reread Proust one winter in Wiltshire. Exactly the sort of treat retirement promises to compatibility beyond passion. One (final?) kick of the prostate and so much for that.

  Boxer’s house appeared shut up; the servants’ children were taking advantage of the luxury of playing on the veranda. Round the back, the kitchen was sociably full, with the cook and his friends among pap-encrusted pots soaking in water, jars of milk set to sour, the smell of meat burning on the stove and beer being drunk from jam tins. The cook gave Bray an hospitable tot of the sour thin stuff—in a white man’s glass—and sent a young boy to direct him to Shinza. The heat shimmered up from the cattle camps all around but Bray, out in the bush without the crevices of evasion which the shelter of the town offered, had taken it into his lungs, now, his body learnt again to exist within it, drawing it in and sweating it out without resistance like some perfectly adapted organism that maintains the exact temperature of the environment it enters, at one with it.

  Shinza and Basil Nwanga were in a little home-made house in European style that belonged to the teacher at the farm school. Shinza pressed upon him a leg of boiled fowl he had in his hand— “No, go on, go on.” “But I can have something else—I’ll help myself—” “Take it, man”—Nwanga grinned— “he’s already helped himself to everything there was—” “Who ate the other leg?” Shinza challenged him.

  “You man, there, look on the plate, what’s that bone—”

  Shinza held the bone up for the world to see: “What d’you mean, bone? That’s the wing bone, eh?” Nwanga dug a big greasy finger at Shinza’s plate. “There, there, what’s that big one—don’t show me any rubbish, just be straight, you hear—you take that leg, Colonel, take it, take it, you won’t get it for nothing, don’t worry—” Laughing, Shinza snatched up the bone the young man had singled out and threw it to a pale mongrel who caught it in midair. “He’s destroyed the evidence against him!” Basil Nwanga yelled, beating his palms on the table.

  “Send the boy up to the house for more beer.” And to Bray, “Just mention booze, Nwanga drops everything. —And say we want a big pot this time, no bloody lemonade bottles—They make good beer at this place, the best I’ve had for years, since that very good beer—very good, eh?—my wife used to make, you know, my first wife, the tall one. A big pot, Nwanga—”

  Making a pantomime of haste, fat Nwanga went over to the door to yell for a volunteer from among the children in the yard.

  “You seem to be well established here.”

  “Oh sure. These are all my father—in-law’s brethren. Their beer is mine to command.”

  Bray gestured round. “Not only their beer.”

  Shinza smiled at the unimportance of the place. “They’ll do anything for me. You want to stay up at the house tonight?” He had forgotten that Bray was, anyway, a friend of the owner.

  “Look, when you send a message, Edward, why the hell don’t you make it a bit more precise. This is a huge estate. —Oh I realize everyone on it knows where you hide out—but then there’s the matter of time as well as place. I never know if you’re going to be here three days or one, I don’t know how long it’s safe to wait without missing you, and suppose for some reason I can’t drop everything and come right away …”

  “I’m here until you come, of course.”

  They laughed. Nwanga said, “What was the Sunday school treat like?” He was talking of the Party rally. “We heard you were there,” Shinza said. “Asahe is the man who wants to have me arrested.”

  “Yes, I went with some friends—the daughter works with him.”

  “Oh everyone knows about Asahe’s white girl. She pretty?” Nwanga was amiably disbelieving.

  “Rather pretty.”

  “He should have seen the girls I used to have in London, ay, Bray? And my American—you remember how she brought me those pyjamas when I was in prison at Lembe—silk, man, Nwanga, with a red belt with a wha’d’you call it, a tassel.”

  “I’ve come into the political game too late, that’s the trouble.”

  “Is Mweta happy?” Shinza said.

  “Confident, yes, I should say, and that’s usually a sign one
has no doubts. Or has stifled them successfully. He doesn’t seek any reassurance that he’s right.”

  Shinza held a cigarette ready to draw but did not put it to his mouth while he listened; then said, “I see,” and took a pull.

  Bray saw that the “he doesn’t seek any reassurance” gave itself away as admittance that Mweta had released him. Mweta has broken with my approval. He’s cut loose; I’m free. So many different bonds, so many kinds of freedom. And each relative to another bond: the freedom to commit yourself to it. Free to make love with her and so become a petty currency swindler. Freed of Mweta—for Shinza.

  He said, almost impatiently, “Well, what’s happening?”

  “Oh there are plenty of things to talk about … I want to discuss with you, quietly, you know? I wanted a chance to talk….” Nwanga at once became studiedly attentive as Shinza began to speak; they must have settled it all beforehand. “There’s no good to go over that whole business at Congress—a waste of breath, eh … I think along other lines now.”

  “Yes?”

  Shinza looked at him almost exaggeratedly anxiously, perhaps, being Shinza, a hint of parody of the seeking for reassurance that Mweta no longer showed. His half-smile admitted it. “There’s going to be all hell in the unions. And even if I were to die tomorrow, I’m telling you, it wouldn’t make any difference, there’d still be hell—I mean some of what he’s got coming to him I wouldn’t have anything to do with, it’s absolutely contrary to our policy.… The miners, now. Already they’re better paid than anyone else in the country. But there you are. You’ll see, by the end of the month they’ll come out, there’ll be the biggest row ever, and we’ll see what he’ll do then. That’s the one crowd everyone’s afraid of. He won’t hold them down so easily this time. The authority of the unions is broken, the government begins to run them itself, and then it turns out even government stooges ask the price for keeping quiet the one industry they’re scared to manhandle. What’s he going to do? If the miners get more there’ll be new demands everywhere. If he gets tough, it’ll run like wildfire, there’ll be a solidarity between those who’ve followed the government yes—men and been let down, and those who’ve refused to follow and are put down.”