A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  “And the rebels will have to be blamed for the whole thing.”

  “Of course. -So-called rebels,” Shinza corrected automatically, with the politician’s alertness never to be caught out in any semantic slip that could be construed to bely the legitimacy of one’s position. “Agitators! Shinza and Goma and Nwanga were there!”

  “A good excuse to put us all in jail.” Nwanga had never been in one; spoken aloud casually, the subject of fear loses some of its potency.

  Shinza had, many times; for him it was irrelevant to waste time contemplating eventualities in which one would be out of action. “The basis for whatever happens is the corruption in the unions, eh—?”

  “Corruption?”

  “Government interference. Same thing. That’s why I’ve been thinking, why not bring someone—some authority—who can show this up? Without taking sides in the political sense. Some opinion that no one can turn round and say … Well, I thought, while we’re going ahead here, you could take a little trip, James, go and see the family”—he stretched himself, gestured ‘something like that’— “you could go by way of Switzerland, say; lots of planes make a stop there, don’t they?”

  For an idiotic moment to him the reference was to the money in a bank.

  “Go on.”

  “Oh nothing very terrible, nothing very difficult … you could go to the ILO and see if they would send someone—an observer, commission of inquiry—someone to look into the state of the unions here … what d’you think?”

  It was his way to look at practical aspects first, to withhold other reactions until these were considered. “If the ILO did agree, don’t forget there’s no guarantee such a delegation would be let in. If I remember, there was the same sort of thing—in Tunisia, wasn’t it?—and the government refused. Of course it would be awkward for Mweta to say no, a man of his reputation for reasonableness, but … Then there would have to be a proper report to present to the ILO

  “Oh Goma’s got all the stuff for that,” Basil Nwanga said, and Shinza added, “We’ll knock that out, no problem.”

  “—And what would my authority be?” Logical considerations were nothing but playing for time; they were overtaken by others. “Ex-civil-servant busybody? Black Man’s Best Friend?” And as they all laughed. — “Political mercenary?” Basil Nwanga’s laugh became a deep delighted cluck and he hit his thighs. “—Yes, that’s it, that’s about the nearest definition we’d get for me—”

  “Oh you’ll be properly fitted out,” Shinza said airily, sweepingly.

  “I’d have to have credentials. At least show I’d come at the request of a pretty representative string of unions—even then, it’d be going over the head of UTUC—”

  “It’ll all be fixed up, we’ll get to work on it,” Shinza overrode. “That’s nothing. That’s easy. Nothing at all.”

  He had the curious impression that this was the thoughtless insistence of assurance on a matter that has served its purpose and is no longer of much interest or validity. He said to Shinza, rather hard, “You say you’re going ahead here.”

  “Well, I want to talk to you about that.” Shinza clapped at the flies that kept settling on his dainty African ears; caught one and looked at the spot of blood and mess on his hand with disgust. He tore a strip off the morning paper Bray had brought and wiped his palm clean as he spoke. “We know who our friends are in the Party as well as the unions now. We’ve got to keep up the contact and work together.”

  “Openly?”

  Shinza slowly unbuttoned his shirt. “As far as you can expect.”

  “Which isn’t very far, is it.”

  The creases under Shinza’s breast were shiny lines of sweat, he passed one hand over the hair and nipples. “Oh I don’t know. You can put a few union men in jail, you can’t arrest the whole labour force.” Again and again, the hand skimmed the flesh.

  “But you and Goma and Nwanga won’t last long.”

  Shinza caressed his bared, vulnerable chest. “Goma and Basil’ve got their seats in parliament to protect them a bit—I’ll have to make myself hard to find.”

  “Until you surfaced at Congress, you were rather that way already weren’t you. But no one was looking for you all that hard. I have the feeling it’s all going to be different now. You’ll be arrested the moment you move.”

  Shinza looked at the ceiling and smiled; turned to Bray. “Because he won’t have to explain it to anyone any more?”

  A small boy with the beer arrived skittering barefoot onto the veranda and stopped, dead-shy, panting in the doorway. Shinza got up and took from him the plastic container that had once held detergent for washing Boxer’s dishes. He gave him a coin and teased him about the strength of his dusty little arms. “Why isn’t he at school, James? You know that there’s no place for him in the school? Put it in your report.”

  “It’s all there, don’t worry.”

  “Your last word,” Shinza said.

  “Possibly.”

  “I mean on the subject—there won’t be anything left to say.” Shinza was pouring the beer. “Which was yours, Basil?”

  “Thanks I won’t—I don’t know, my bowels are not right today—”

  “Come on. It’s good stuff, this!”

  Shinza filled Bray’s glass. “Of course—needs money, to keep going. I don’t suppose any of my old friends at the ILO would do anything about that, though …? I’ll have to see what I can find. Goma wants to print a paper … we need a couple of cars … everything takes money.”

  “Who’s been providing it so far?” Bray said.

  Shinza was eager to be frank. “We’ve been depending on my pain-law, Mpana. But that’s a nothing. That old car of his is just about a write-off, ay, Basil?”

  “Needs a new engine, to start with.”

  “It depends how far you want to go,” Bray said. “ ‘Openly’—that mayn’t take you there.”

  “You heard me.” Shinza meant at Congress. “That’s where I’m going. To see this country given back to our people. You know me. I’ve never wanted anything else. Yes, I think I know what’s good for us”—his fingers knocked a response from his own breastbone, angrily— “just as he’s decided what’s good enough for ‘them.’ That’s the big difference between him and me. I hope I’m stinking in the ground before I come to what he’s settled for. Stinking in the ground. Only I was cunt enough to believe all those years that we’d taught him what independence was—cunt enough.” Nwanga sat dead still. Bray saw with amazement Shinza’s tears shining at him, holding him. “If this bloody country ends up belonging to the Company, the cabinet ministers, the blacks who sit on white men’s boards, after all the years we’ve eaten manioc and presented our arses for the kicking and asked and begged and had our heads cracked open and sat it out in jail”—his voice reeled, saliva flew from his teeth— “then I blame myself—myself. And you, Bray. I blame you, and you’ll never get out of it, never! So long as I’m alive, you’ll know it, I don’t care whether you sit in England or the end of the world, I don’t care if you’re white. So long as I’m alive!”

  The room was a vacuum for a moment. Outside children must have been playing with Chief Mpana’s car; there was a blast on the hooter, then shocked silence. Shinza stalked out. He could be heard chasing the children. He came in again with his walk of an embattled tomcat.

  Shinza was looking at him and slowly buttoning his shirt.

  He said, “Shinza, what would you do with him?” There was the strong feeling between them that Nwanga had no place in their presence; huge Nwanga, caught in this very current, was unable to leave.

  “But I could not kill him,” Shinza said.

  “You will lock him up somewhere for years, or give him over to some other state so that he can waste his life plotting to oust you.”

  “… Oh God knows.”

  “But the others around him—they’d have to go?”

  “They’d have to be locked up, certainly.”

  A feeling of distanc
e, like faintness, came over him. Without pause, he said matter-of-factly, “You are still seeing Somshetsi and the others. Am I right in thinking you have a deal—they would help you with men and arms in return for some promise that, afterwards, you would give them a base?”

  “Along those lines. It need not be too—not cause too much—” Shinza struggled, suddenly flashed, “Not much more damage than he’ll do whenever he lets his Company guerrillas loose among the workers. It need not—if the time’s right.”

  “You’re going to try to make the time right.”

  Nwanga’s presence had slowly become accepted again. Shinza was silent while the young man, looking to Bray, nodded heavily.

  “If I come through Gala one night and want to see you, that’s all right—you’re alone at your house, h’m?” Shinza remarked.

  “I’m not alone.”

  Shinza said, “Oh then I’d send a message, okay? Come let’s move—I want to take you to this fellow Phiti, disappeared after the ironmine case was dropped, been in detention all this time while those bastards from PIP went scot free. —That’s Chekwe and our old friend Dando.”

  The tall, protruding—eyed man’s nose had been broken while he was under interrogation. He was at once listless and yet loose—tongued, the real misery he had suffered came out mixed with the obvious lies of self-dramatization. There were two hundred men in the prison camp-three hundred-five hundred. He had been kept in solitary confinement; he had been locked in a shed with fifteen, twenty others. They were half-starved, they had lived on cane rats from the sugar fields, their shoes were taken away. “Why the shoes?” said Shinza, cold at this poor showing before Bray. “Why? Why?—Look at this, they hit me with the leg of the chair that was broken.” The man kept feeling the crooked saddle of his nose and looking round at them all to see if they were reacting properly.

  Shinza need not have been embarrassed before Bray; as a magistrate he had come to know that suffering was not the noble thing that those who had never seen it thought it ought to be, but often something disgusting, from which one’s instinct was to turn away. The man sat in a hut full of relations who had come to be there as if at a sick bed; more squatted among the chickens and dogs outside, the old and the children. A tiny girl crawled into the doorway in a rag of a garment that showed her plump little pubis with its divide; every time Phiti touched his nose her small hand went up with his and felt her own face.

  Compassion was too soft a thing anyway. Anger came of disgust, and was of more use, most of the time.

  The camp where Phiti was held was at Ford Howard; the old “place of safety” where the colonial government had “confined” Mweta. Shinza was alert to Bray all the time, intent to be one jump ahead of his mind. He said dramatically, “We’ll plough that place over and plant it. It just mustn’t be there, any more.”

  A tremendous dust-storm blew up on Boxer’s ranch, coming through the pass from the Bashi Flats. Feathers, leaves, maize-husks, ash and rubbish from people’s fires danced in the vortex of dust-devils that swayed toppling columns up into the sky. The wind was hot. In place of the sun an apocalyptic red intensity moved down the haze; people sniffed for rain in the turbulence, although it might not come for weeks yet. They sat tight in their huts. Bray stayed the night after all, sleeping naked in a stifling room closed against the wind with Shinza, Nwanga, and the schoolmaster. He could just as easily have driven home through the night, but he had a strange reluctance to step outside the concreteness of the atmosphere between himself and Shinza; these men. They talked until very late: the unions, Vietnam, the Nigerian war, the Arabs as Africans, Wilson’s failures in Africa, and Nixon’s cooling towards its white-dominated states; about the unions again. He had allowed himself to forget, for years, the superiority of Shinza’s intellect. Lying there in the room that smelled of the sweat of all their bodies, the dregs of their beer, and the bitterness of cigarette ends, hearing the man snort, turn on the cheap iron bed uninhibited in acceptance of himself in sleep, as he was always, Bray thought how it was a remarkable man, there—like many of the other remarkable men on this continent who had ended up dead in a ditch. Then the blacks blamed the white men for manipulating power in a continent they had never really left; the whites blamed tribalism and the interference of the East (if they themselves were of the West) or the West (if they themselves were of the East). The remarkable men talked of socialism and the common man, or of glory and Messianic greatness, and died for copper, uranium, or oil. Mweta was one of them, too. Mweta and Shinza. For him-Bray-the killing had been made, for Mweta, already. The phrase in political jargon was “yielding to pressure”; it’s finished him off, as I knew him. Couldn’t say how Shinza would go, yielding to another kind of pressure (but I couldn’t kill him, he lied; and I lied, accepting it?).

  Neither away in England, nor the other end of the world …

  He thought he didn’t sleep but he must have, because the words hung there.

  Chapter 19

  A man was sitting with Rebecca in the living-room. The room was dimmed against the heat.

  But Hjalmar Wentz was in the Silver Rhino; in the capital!

  Wentz and Rebecca sat deep in the sagging old morris chairs on either side of the empty fireplace, sunk in the silence of each being unable to explain his presence to the other. So great was the awkwardness that neither could get up.

  “Well Hjalmar! What are you doing here!” He released them, Rebecca’s eyes signalling a complicated anguish, warning, heaven knows what, Hjalmar saying with a painful smile, “Well, you did ask me, perhaps you remember … ?”

  The fact that his platitude of greeting had been taken as a protest warned him more explicitly than Rebecca’s eyes. “I just never thought I could get you up here no matter how hard I tried … this is splendid … when did you arrive … are you”—but the eyes, absolutely yellow now with intensity, signalled—”… you drove up all the way?”

  A shaky gesture—a smile that twitched faultily and an attempt at humour: “Don’t ask—I got here. And Rebecca gave me a nice lunch.”

  “That’s splendid. I simply gawked … couldn’t believe it. I’ve been off trudging round some schools … just eating dust all day. I must have a shower—was there a terrible wind, here, last night?” They talked about the weather; “Well, some tea first and a bath later. Wash the dust down instead of off … have you got your things in, did Kalimo look after you all right?”

  “Yes, yes—Rebecca gave me a very good lunch, avocados fresh from the tree, everything, the service was first class!” The voice seemed to wind automatically out of the stiff blond face. Bray and the girl were standing round him as if at the scene of an accident. She said, “I must dash.” “My best to Aleke,” Bray said, but followed her to the garden by way of the kitchen on the pretext of ordering tea.

  She was waiting for him. “Something ghastly—you didn’t hear the radio?—Ras Asahe’s fled the country. Emmanuelle went with him.”

  “Why should Asahe do that? Are you sure? Has he—”

  “Only mentioned Emmanuelle. ‘I suppose you know Emmanuelle’s gone away,’ he said to me, but I was afraid to ask, I was afraid he wouldn’t stay calm. Oh my God, I thought you’d never come. I phoned the boma and said I couldn’t come back, I was feeling ill or something. I couldn’t leave him alone. I don’t know what’s happened … with them. He doesn’t mention Margot. ‘Emmanuelle’s gone’—that’s all. And then we just sat with nothing to say. I don’t know what he thinks about finding me in the house as if I owned the place. Well—I don’t think he notices anything at the moment. But why come here? Why to you?”

  “Oh my darling … I’m sorry … don’t worry.” He looped her hair behind her ears—she was so pretty, now, with her hair grown. He wanted to kiss her, and doing so, not caring that Kalimo had come out to throw tea-leaves on the compost, felt the whole warm body fill the shape it had made for itself within him.

  “How long will he stay?”

  “My love, don’t worry.�
��

  “Now I won’t be able to come here tonight.” She suddenly pressed her pelvis up against him in misery.

  “Bloody hell. Oh come, why shouldn’t you. We simply won’t offer any explanation, that’s all.”

  “Yes. Yes. —Oh why choose here, why couldn’t he have gone somewhere else.”

  “It’s all right, it’s all right.” He stroked her hair as if it were some delightful new texture he had never had in his fingers before.

  “Would you like to make love to me now?”

  “Of course.”

  “Damn him,” she said. They nursed each other against their resentment.

  He went with her to her car, touching her hair. As she started the engine she turned to him a smile of pure happiness. “So I’m coming.” He nodded vociferously. She lingered over him a moment longer: “You’ve got dust in every line of your face.” He understood what she was saying. “I know, my darling.”

  And there was the man and his misery waiting.

  Bray went in, to him.

  He felt conscious of his own height, his heavy, healthy muscular bulk—his wholeness—as he stood there; it seemed to owe an apology, to be an affront. He took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his bush jacket and gestured it to Hjalmar before taking one.

  “Anyone have any idea why Asahe should have done it?” he said.

  The haggard blond face winced into life. “He was at the hotel on Wednesday evening—she rushed in and said she was going out for an hour. She came back very late—must have, I had already tidied up and gone to bed, and she wasn’t home yet. Then on Thursday I understand she took some clothes to the cleaner and insisted they must be done the same day. Apparently she begged Timon—the head—waiter—you know—it was his day off and she asked him to pick them up when he came from town. She didn’t want her mother to know about it, you see—so she must have already decided then.… Friday she was quite normal, quite normal, nothing … and in the afternoon she said she was going with a few friends for the weekend at Matinga, to the dam. She even, came into the office and asked me to get her water skis out of the storeroom. Can you believe it?” The face went blank again. He got up suddenly, struggling slowly out of the chair so that Bray had to hold back the urge to put out his hands to help him, as from interference in a private act that should not be observed. The man walked across the room, his jacket peaked up crushed over his shoulders; faltered in sudden loss of purpose. “She was with me in the storeroom and we looked among the rubbish for the water skis. She said to me had I never tried, and I told her we didn’t do it when I was a youngster, and she said but you used to ski properly in the snow and you use the same muscles—she said I must come one day and try. She said, you feel powerful, don’t you, when everything is rushing past—you feel you can do anything you want.” He began to shake his head very hard in order to be able to go on. “She actually went with me to get the water skis.”