A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  He said. “I wonder about town. There’re a lot of people hurt.”

  “I can’t cut myself in half. The police are there. The shopkeepers will have the sense to shut up shop.”

  The Tlumes were with Rebecca, Hjalmar, and Letanka at the house. The children were making a party of it; Kalimo chased them out of the kitchen and they ran squealing through the rooms. Rebecca and Kalimo were carrying round coffee. Aleke swallowed a cup in a certain aura of awkwardness—the unspoken questioning that builds up round someone in authority. Edna Tlume was on night duty and supposed to be sleeping during the day but she had gone back to the hospital and had rushed in now only to make sure Nongwaye had fetched the children from school. She offered to dress Aleke’s ear but his wife, Agnes, had been telephoning Rebecca hysterically after getting no reply from his office—he dashed off to “shut her up” by showing himself to her for a moment. He had another reason, too: “Have you got a gun?” he asked Bray.

  “For the birds. Six thousand miles away.”

  Godfrey Letanka was worried about his mother and they were trying to persuade him not to go to the township. Bray telephoned Sampson Malemba’s house. Sampson’s wife answered; she didn’t know where Sampson was, there was trouble, trouble, she kept repeating. She had locked herself in. Cars and lorries of “those people”—she meant the Young Pioneers, but they might have been strikers, too—were going through the streets.

  “What can Aleke do about it? Whether you’re the P.O. or anybody—” Nongwaye Tlume said.

  “He has certain gifts, you know.”

  “Rebecca says you have a leg injury, James? Let me examine it quickly.” Little Edna had acquired her fluency in English while doing her nurse’s training course, and she had the vocabulary of hospital reports. She insisted, and he had to go into the bathroom and take off his trousers. He stood there in his underpants while she cut away the hair and cleaned the cut. He smiled. “Self-inflicted.” “It really needs a stitch. You should come up to the hospital. I could do it in a minute, but I’m not supposed to.” “Oh come on. You’ll do it better than the doctor.” They went hurriedly over to the Tlume house—unfamiliar with locked doors and closed windows in the middle of the day—and she brought out her curved needle and plastic gut, “like a good shoemaker,” he said. The needle stabbed quick-to-be-kind through the resistance of the tough skin, the thread was expertly drawn up, tied, and cut off. The pink palms and nails of the narrow black hands were beautiful markings. “What’s going to happen, James? Why can’t the President stop all this? A person doesn’t know what to do. You should see the burn cases at the hospital. Rebecca is lucky she hasn’t got to worry about the children.”

  She left him to dress; he pulled on his blood-stained trousers heavily. And Rebecca was still there, because of him. Events carried consciousness unreflectingly from one moment to the next, but this dragged on the mind.

  Back at the house Rebecca was playing with the Tlume children with the ingratiating attention of a childless adult; Kalimo and two or three friends presented a deputation, backing up each other’s words with nods and deep hums: Mahlope, the young gardener, had gone off to the golf course earlier “to look” and hadn’t returned. “There are a lot of rubbish-people here,” Kalimo pronounced. But his friends were trying to prevent him from going after the boy.

  “If we all start looking for each other, we’ll all be lost, Kalimo,” Bray said. They were speaking in Gala.

  An appreciative note went up from the chests of the others.

  Kalimo said, “He’s just got drunk somewhere. I know that. And there are always people ready to steal someone’s pay while trouble is going on.”

  “You’re worried about his pay?”

  “Mukwayi, you know yourself you paid him yesterday night.”

  “I’ll try and make inquiries about him later. You stay here. I need you, Kalimo.” An empty promise, a little flattery; the old man went off reluctantly.

  Bray was listening for Aleke’s car; Hjalmar kept him, describing the men who had come across the golf course. “… singing, you know—it was just like the student days in Germany, we were singing the Internationale like schoolkids and it didn’t seem true when they would come and beat us up.” He was excited. “It’s always the same, students and workers make mincemeat for police and thugs. —They’ve picked it up here like V.D. and measles.… Measles kills people who’ve never been exposed to the virus before….”

  Outside, the old fig wrinkled in its skin of dust was fixed as eternity. The midday peace of heat enclosed in the garden beneath it was unreachable indifference: Bray stood amazed for a moment—the grunts and screams and desperate scuffle, the yellow guts of crushed chickens and the miner’s face splitting into blood surrounded him in delusion. Over beyond the trees, an indefinable turmoil was apprehended through all the senses, atmospherically. The clamour in the township was too far away to be sorted out. There was only the roar of a sea—shell held to the ear.

  Aleke hooted in the road on the other side of the house, and he went round and got into the government car beside him.

  In the old part of the township, life was so dense that violence was obscured—in the mud houses, tangled palms, lean-tos of waste material, old vehicle chassis, piles of wood, paw-paws and lianas growing out of rubbish the distinction between dwelling and ruin disappeared, the pattern of streets itself disappeared, and if doors were broken, posts uprooted, weapon-like objects littered the dust, that might easily be part of the constant course of decay and patching-up by which the place maintained its life. Only the burned-out houses were a statement of disruption; and even one or two of those had already those signs—a bit of tin over the angle of standing walls, a packing-case door propped up—of habitation creeping back. The old township smelled of disaster and hid everything; the people were not to be seen, their cooking pots and fire tins left outside the houses to be taken up in the usual activity as soon as this threat to everyday life, like every other they had known, passed and left them once again to make a fire, to cook, to wash clothes in a tin bath. It also hid their partisanships, their sudden decisions to take the threat into their own hands. Bray and Aleke heard later that down here several people had been killed in street battles that morning, but they themselves met nothing but a sullen withdrawal and the faces and hands of children behind the flaps of sacking at window-holes.

  The new housing-scheme area near the hostel had no such protection. The substance of life there was still too new and thin to withstand assault. The web was broken. The fact that there were panes in the windows was enough; shattered glass lay everywhere among bricks, twisted bicycles, wrecked food stalls, yelling clusters of people—all this naked to the red-earth clearing bulldozed from the forest. It was impossible to get into some streets. They backed up the car and zigzagged. Knots of people meant hand-to-hand fighting or someone wounded. A police van tore through filled with shouting faces behind the wire cage; a miner’s helmet lying on the ground was caught and sent bowling like a severed head. A Gala woman with her dress ripped down her breasts, her turban gone, and her plaited snakes of hair standing up exposed, shrieked again and again.

  They followed the trail of chaos to the hostel. A gang of screaming youths ran into the car, clung to it, rocked it. As if they were a swarm of flying ants Aleke kept going until they fell away. Outside the hostel Selufu and some of his men were beleaguered in two open vans. Stones and tins were lobbing out of the windows in a battle between the strikers, and the Young Pioneers, whose “stronghold” the hostel was. Selufu’s men began to throw tear-gas bombs, not into the building but among the strikers. Bray opened the door of the car while it was still moving and while Aleke continued to grind on through the crowd, he hung outside, clinging to the roof and shouting in Gala for the men to fall back. He was deafened to noise and chaos by the bellow of his own voice, brutally commanding, hard and ringing, a voice dredged up from his racial past, disowning him in the name of sea—captains and slavers between whose legs
his genes had been hatched. His sight became blurred by the pressure of blood in his neck. Still he bellowed; raggedly they were turning back, making for the car, turning away from the building. He thought they were shouting, “Shinza! Shinza!”—Aleke had put the car into reverse, whining and jerking backwards through the fringe of the crowd, and the men were racing after, calling at Bray, “Shinza! Shinza!” as if he had come to deliver them. When Aleke must have judged they were out of range of the tear—gas he came to a stop and leapt out. The look the faces had turned on Bray, the name that they had called, were lost in the confusion. Aleke and Bray again formed an instinctive compact of discipline and moved urgently among the men, throwing an invisible cordon round the orgiastic excitement, shepherding them in the advantage of the moment of hesitation that deflects mob will.

  The immediate problem was to get the men from the iron mine out of the quarter. —Selufu couldn’t arrest the lot and wouldn’t have had anywhere to hold them if he had. It was obvious that every time the running battle that was going on between police, strikers and Young Pioneers died down, while the local men disappeared in their own streets, the “invaders” remained more or less collected, at least in bands, and were a target for both police and the next gang of Young Pioneers they might run into. One thing about Aleke, he was not bothered by protocol and it did not seem to occur to him that he was acting independently of the Police Commissioner. He had the idea of leading the miners away somewhere—where?— “Agricultural showground,” Bray suddenly thought of—and keeping them there until they could be transported back to the mine. Bray took the car and raced off through the littered streets to try and find Malemba and commandeer a couple of school buses. It was all absurd, as desperate measures often have to be: Sampson and Bray and Aleke with busloads of battered men, fighting off the interference of mobs who no longer knew whether the spectacle enraged or threatened them. When the operation was successfully accomplished, Bray and Malemba drove wildly between the showground and the town to pick up Bray’s car, fetch food and medical supplies and help. But at the house, Bray’s car was gone; Rebecca, Hjalmar, and Nongwaye had been telephoned by Edna to help bring in wounded people who were still left lying at the market. Bray and Malemba got back to the showground: there Aleke was in angry argument with two white men, Mr. George Nye and Mr. Charles Aldiss, president and secretary of the settlers’ agricultural society, who were demanding that he remove his “trespassers” from private property. An old dread, from the years when a black man and a white man shouting at each other signified a break in the particular order of society he was paid to maintain, caught Bray off guard. It had no special significance now; Aleke was the man in charge and Nye was simply the uncooperative private citizen; being white was no help to him at all. But at the sight of Bray, Nye turned on him. “Of course! This is just the day you were waiting for! That’s why we got rid of you once! You white bastard!”

  It was a cry that mingled with all the others of the afternoon. At nightfall—two truckloads of soldiers had arrived and were patrolling the town with sten guns—they collected back at the house again, Rebecca, Hjalmar, Nongwaye, himself. He was still in his filthy trousers; a dried bloodstain on the groin reminded him of something that might have happened days ago. Kalimo had been looking after the Tlume children the whole afternoon and the house had the roused and rumpled atmosphere of another kind of riot. Rebecca and Hjalmar shared the animation of having made themselves useful; the graining of her chin and cheeks showed coarsened by a glaze of sweat and self-forgetfulness. He said in a private voice, “Was it very bad?” and she answered breathily, vacant, “No, no. Luckily I didn’t see any of the dead ones.” He squeezed her hand.

  Nongwaye went home with the children and the night was suddenly very quiet around their exhaustion. They drank beer and heard over the radio that the strike had spread to the railway workshops and docks, and that in the capital transport workers, post-office workers, and teachers were out. There were “reports of disturbances in the Gala district,” the voice said with his own African accent but the BBC announcer’s standard indifference. Hjalmar pulled a face and laughed silently.

  Bray went out into the garden to have a look at the sky over the township but Rebecca called from behind the gauze of the veranda, “Aleke!” and he ran in to the telephone. The radio was turned up for news flashes, sending a can-can rhythm galloping through the house. Against it, covering his other ear, he heard Aleke’s beguiling voice, resonant in that great body. He was talking about a plane— “What plane?” The twice-weekly service was not due for two or three days.

  “Well, the thing from the department of agriculture … you know. Agnes is going down. To her mother, with the kids. I think she might as well. And she—well, you know. What about Rebecca? They can squeeze her in.”

  He was looking at her while Aleke spoke.

  He said, “I’ll try.”

  “It’s the best thing for them, get them out from under our feet,” Aleke said, with the carelessness which was his way of expressing embarrassment.

  “When would it be?”

  “In the morning. Tell her to stick a few dresses in a suitcase and come over. They want to take off about seven.”

  He stood a moment before Rebecca’s and Hjalmar’s expectancy. He turned down the radio. “Agnes and the children are going to her mother—getting a ride with the agricultural plane tomorrow morning. She wants you to come along, Rebecca—” her name stuck in his mouth awkwardly, it sounded like the name of someone neither of them knew— “you can spend a few days with Vivien and Neil. I think you must go.”

  Her eyes, on him, seemed to open up into her self, to force him to look there. “No.”

  “Just for a few days. Aleke agrees. It would be sensible.”

  She said, like a child shifting retribution, “And Edna?”

  “Edna’s a nurse.” And of course Edna belonged here, it was her bit of country, her home and people, while Agnes and Rebecca—even Agnes, a town girl, from the capital—had no commitment to what might happen in Gala. If Gala were to be cut off, as it so easily could be, with its single road, no railway, and tiny airstrip, the Tlumes would be at home.

  She walked past the two men and went out of the room into the bedroom. He had a very real sense of panic, as if he had done something he could not undo.

  She was standing there between the ugly old wardrobe where her dresses hung and the bed where they had slept last night. These things had become the possessions of a stranger; he and she might never have been there before.

  “If it were not for me … you understand, my darling … ? I feel I’m behaving like a lunatic, hanging on to you.”

  “I won’t go.”

  He approached her as if they were in a hotel room, alone in a strange room. He stroked her hair and held her. “I stink. I shouldn’t have you near me.”

  They said nothing. She scratched the nail of her forefinger down his shirt. She said at last, “How many stitches?”

  “Four, I think. No, two—I was counting the four holes as a stitch each.”

  “Didn’t hurt? She’s good, isn’t she.”

  “Here.” He took her finger and showed her where to feel the little knots of plastic gut through the trousers.

  She asked, “You phone Aleke,” and he nodded. They went peacefully back to the living-room, where Hjalmar was slicing a leg of lamb. “Mahlope’s back,” Kalimo announced belligerently from the doorway.

  Chapter 21

  Aleke was often in the house; he had no one at home and all their lives were thrown together by an hour-to-hour uncertainty in which Kalimo’s hot meals—congealed, dried-up and indigestible—continued to be prepared with dogged regularity fixed as the passage of the sun, and eaten any time by whoever happened to be there. Kalimo apart, everybody else’s functions were blurred and individual purpose and conviction were passed over in simply doing the next thing.

  Harassed Selufu depended on Aleke and Aleke assumed that Bray and Sampson Malemba w
ould arrange food supplies for the men sheltered at the showground. But when he and Sampson arrived the second day with meat and porridge commandeered from the hospital kitchen, mugs and urns from Malemba’s Boy Scouts’ equipment—whatever they could beg or borrow—they found the men herded into the arena in the blazing sun, surrounded by soldiers. The soldiers were Talefa from the west and had no common language with the strikers. At the sight of Bray the hail went up: Shinza, Shinza. Malemba argued with the soldiers to let Bray in among the strikers. He stood there absolutely still, tensely wary, holding off any reaction he might precipitate. Then he was let in; the men crowded round to claim him. They wanted to go home; they would walk it. But the police would not let anybody go; the police had taken away more than twenty of them and the rest had been told they were going to be kept in this “cattle place.”

  There was nothing to do but get on and distribute the food. He and Malemba addressed themselves to that and that only. He knew that Sampson (despite his firm indignation over the “dog-kennel” issue at Congress) had no doubts about Mweta and would always support Mweta however saddened and puzzled he might be about things that happened under the regime. At the same time, Sampson trusted him; so nothing was said about the way he had been hailed in Shinza’s name. There could be no discussion between them of what they had just seen. The weight of circumstance was palpable in the burning heat that had collected in the old Volkswagen.

  He dropped off Malemba; the market was closed, the Indian shops shuttered, but the supermarket had its doors open that morning. There were few people about and wherever they drifted together, even women with baskets on their heads and babies on their backs, they attracted the attention of slumping soldiers who came to life and moved them along roughly. He saw the Gala women swaying off, sweeping their kangas round their backsides, laughing rudely and shouting abuse the soldiers couldn’t understand. Outside the boma Aleke was talking to Selufu through the window of a squad car. He signalled Bray over; the three were a conclave, representing law and order; Selufu greeted him with a businesslike smile. “Everything all right? That’s a very good job you and Malemba’re doing—I was just saying, I must keep that crowd isolated, and where can I put them?” “Nye’s been told where to get off,” Aleke said with satisfaction. And to Selufu— “You should have heard him swearing at Bray—what a character. If it’d been another time I’d have given him one on the jaw.” “Oh, the Colonel isn’t going to worry himself about a man like that one”—Selufu shaped the flattering estimate as one of a company of men who were peers.