A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  His mind scarcely ran ahead to Shinza, because that he was being borne towards as surely as the road was the one to the capital. Haffajee’s Garage. And if Shinza had moved off to another part of the country, it did not matter. He had the list. Shinza was not a man who depended on you; it was rather that he banked on what you would have to do, driven from within yourself. He knew one doesn’t ask of a man what is not there already.

  And if Hjalmar is attacked in the house?—Why should that be, there was no anti-white feeling as such in Gala’s state of siege. But by hazard—someone with a petrol-soaked rag flaming on a stick turning down one street rather than another; one of Fielding’s vigilantes losing his nerve at a shadow? But what Hjalmar had in him was survival. Hjalmar would not escape that. It was in his instinct for staying put, there in Gala; he fears nothing so much as the situation of his marriage. —I’ll have to go and see Margot, he thought, feeling the girl give a shuddering sigh in her sleep; I can tell her quite honestly he’s not making a bad recovery. Curiously, although the nervous breakdown had had the effect of making Hjalmar lose interest in what was once his passion to talk politics, so that they had never talked of what was happening as anything more coherent than a series of sensational village events, he had the impression now that Hjalmar understood perfectly what his—Bray’s—position in Gala had been these last weeks, as if the shattering of Hjalmar’s own core had opened and laid twitching bare a heightened receptivity to the unspoken, to the inner reality that such talk itself buries. Hjalmar had made a remark, one of the nights when they had watched the township burning from the garden: “The fire’s in the minds of men, not in the roofs of houses”—it came from somewhere in Dostoevski.

  Rebecca woke up. Her cheek was marked with the folds of his bush jacket, her eyes were still dazed and darkened with sleep. He stopped the car a minute for her. She found herself a culvert and came back along the road in the sun, smiling, twirling a lily she had picked. She was wearing her old jeans and moved a little awkwardly, perhaps conscious that they showed her to be as she had always been, a bit heavy in the thigh. She looked so young when she woke up—like that every morning. Life seemed to breathe out of her skin as vapour does through the earth above a mineral spring; wherever he touched her neck or face there was a pulse beating.

  They stopped late to eat Kalimo’s lunch, sitting on the newspaper wrappings because the ground was richly damp. They felt lazy to talk about anything important, after all; it would carry away into the quiet and airy savannah forest as their voices must be doing, wandering, far. There was no sound of birds, in the middle of the day. But Rebecca did say to him, at last, pouring the coffee from the thermos, “If it’s not going to be Switzerland, well, what?”

  “I’ll know in a few days. I’ll tell you just a few facts for now, because I shouldn’t talk about this at all. Not to anyone. Not even to you.”

  “Not even here?” She lifted a hand at the forest, half-joking.

  “But when I know exactly, I’ll tell you everything. Because you must know.”

  The dappled shade made a shawl on her arms, her eyes were on him. “So far it’s just this—there may be something I can do—for Shinza. And I will do it. Whatever it is.”

  She did not say, what about me? She got up as if to begin tidying up the remains of the meal and then came over behind him where he squatted on his haunches and put her arms around his neck and pressed his head back against her belly.

  He said, “I’ll tell you everything.”

  “I know you will. This time.”

  She came and squatted in front of him and took off his glasses. She touched the skin round his eyes and played the old game, looking into the shortsighted opacity that she complained of. He said, “If I start kissing you we’ll never get there.” She picked up the thermos. “Shall I pour the rest away?”

  “Well, we might still feel like some later.”

  “It won’t be hot.”

  “Never mind, it’ll be wet.”

  As they moved back to the car two children appeared out of the forest; or they had been there, behind the trees, patiently watching for the moment to come forward. She gave into their cupped hands the remains of the bread and cheese and the last of the eggs with small fish in them. Before the car had driven off the two frail figures had disappeared once more into the forest.

  Not long after they came upon what was evidently a road-block that had been half cleared. Branches and stones had been dragged aside and there was just sufficient room for the car to pass. There was nobody about, but it was not far from the turn-off to the cattle-dipping station sixty miles from Matoko. No rain had fallen yet in this part of the country; towards three o’clock the heat and the monotonous rhythms of motion, of the hot current of air coming past the windows with the sound of someone whistling through his teeth, now made him drowsy. They changed over; Rebecca drove but he did not sleep, merely stretched himself as much as he could in the small car and rested his eyes away from the hypnotic path of the road. Now he was the one to light cigarettes for her. He had shut his eyes for a moment, when he heard her make a small sound of impatience beside him, and he roused himself and saw that up ahead, quite far, was another road-block. There was a heat—mirage that magnified the jumble of branches and green; they couldn’t make out very well whether it stretched across the whole road or not. She slowed down and they kept their eyes strained on the obstacle. But of course she could see so much better than he. “Damn it, it is right across. Now wha’d’we do?”

  “Just keep going slowly.” He put his head out the window; the grass was very high, elephant grass, very dry, last season’s grass still standing; a dead tree had been dragged into the road, roots and all, broken branches had been piled upon it. She stopped and turned off the engine.

  “Let’s have a look. You stay in, a minute.”

  He walked slowly to the barrier, climbed over to the other side, walked up and down it and climbed back. He came to the car, smiling. “How energetic are you feeling? We’ll have to do some hard labour.” She got out and they started with the easy stuff, the broken branches. But the tree trunk, with its dead roots clasping a great boulder of red earth with which it must have been uprooted in some storm, would not budge. She began to laugh helplessly at their grunting efforts. “Wait a moment, my girl. What about trying the jack? If we get it under this hollow bit here, maybe we can get a little elevation and then heave.”

  The jack wasn’t kept in the boot, in the front, but under the back seat, because the clamp that held it in its proper place had been broken ever since he bought the car. He got in and dumped the picnic basket on the front seat and jerked up the back one in a release of dust. At the same time something burst out of the grass, he felt himself grabbed by the leg, by the waist, and he was caught between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat, somehow desperately hampered by the size and strength of his body. At once there were people all round and over and in the car, there had been no sound and now there was nothing but yells and shouts and his great, his lung-bursting, muscle-tearing effort and he did not know if they were yelling, the men who were upon him, or if Rebecca was screaming. Even greater than his effort to defend himself was his terrible effort to make himself heard by her, to reach her with his voice and make her run. They had his legs out of the car and the back of his neck hit the rim of the floor and he was deafened, his voice became a silent scream to him as pain felled him for a moment, but then a brute strength burst up in him and he got to his feet, he was aware of himself staggered gigantically to his feet among men smaller than he. Then he was below them, he was looking up at them and he saw the faces, he saw the sticks and stones and bits of farm implements, and sun behind. Something fell on him again and again and he knew himself convulsed, going in and out of pitch black, of black nausea, heaving to bend double where the blows were, where the breath had gone, and he thought he rose again, he thought he heard himself screaming, he wanted to speak to them in Gala but he did not know a word, not a wo
rd of it, and then something burst in his eyes, some wet flower covered them, and he thought, he knew: I’ve been interrupted, then—

  Part Six

  Chapter 22

  She was a long time in the culvert by the road. Her nails were full of red earth. The red earth walls, staunched with tufts of dead grass, rose on either side of her. With her head pressed against them she waited for it to happen to her, too. There was earth and saliva in her mouth. She was gulping and howling like an animal. She heard the tearing of flames and saw the thick smoke.

  And then there was silence. Behind the sound of burning, nothing. The burning died away and there was only the smell and the smoke.

  She had run towards him at first when they started pulling him out of the car. He had got to his feet and looked straight at her without seeing her because of that shortsightedness. But in the same split second he was brought down beneath them and the sound of the blows on the resistance of his big body sent her crazedly hurling herself through the grass, fighting it. She was turning her ankles, running, her stumbling scramble led her off down a kind of slope cut into the ground. And she was there, deep in the ditch beyond the grass. But she was not twenty yards from them, from him, and she knew it would come to her, it was no use, she was held by the walls, waiting for them.

  She was sure they must be there in the silence.

  She did not move. The smoke no longer poured up; it was thin, hanging in stillness. She did not know how much time passed. But the silence was empty; above, in the tops of the long grasses between her and the road, scarlet weaver-birds flicked, swung, and chirped a question. More time passed. She got up and tried to climb out of the culvert but the walls were too high. She wandered along out the way she had been driven in, up the diagonal cutting made by the roads department. She pushed weakly through the heavy grass. The car was on its side, blackened, the seats still smouldering, the road full of glass.

  He was clear of it. He was in the road unharmed by the fire. Unharmed. She began to sob with joy because he was not burned, she went concentratedly but not fast—she could not move fast—towards him, towards his legs rolled apart. She walked all round him, making some sort of noise she had never heard before. Round and round him. His body—the chest, the big torso above the still narrowish male waist that he kept, for all his weight—was something staved in under the dirtied bush jacket, out of shape, but he was still there. The whole of him was there. Strange, soft-looking patches of earth and blood; but the whole bulk of him, complete. A lot of dirt and blood on the face, a sort of grimace, lips slightly drawn back as when he was trying to unscrew something tight.

  Suddenly she saw that his glasses were smashed into his cheekbones. The frame lay near his ear but glass was embedded there in the firm flesh just below that tender, slightly shiny area of skin that was always protected by his glasses. The glass was pressed in so hard that the flesh was whitened and had scarcely bled. She went down on her knees and with a shaking impatience in her fingers began to try to take out the broken glass. She was concerned only not to hurt him, it was difficult to do without hurting him.

  After a little while she went and sat on the white-washed milestone at the side of the road. His eyes were not open but the lids were not quite closed and showed a line of glint. She broke off a stalk of dry grass and cleaned the earth from beneath her nails, carefully, one by one. It was very hot. Sweat ran down the sides of her face and under the hair, on her neck. She watched him all the time. She became aware of a strange and terrifying curiosity rising in her; it was somehow connected with his body. She got up and went over to this body again and looked at it: this was the same body that she had caressed last night, that she had had inside her when she fell asleep.

  The basket and his briefcase had been flung out of the car and so were not burned. She picked them up and balanced the briefcase across the basket beside him, to keep the sun off his face.

  And more time went by. She sat on in the road. Her shirt was wet with sweat and she could smell it. Sometimes she opened her mouth and panted a little; until she heard the sound, and stopped. She was beginning to feel something. She didn’t know what it was, but it was some sort of physical inkling. And then she thought very clearly that the flask was still in the basket and got up firmly and fetched it and poured what was left of the coffee into the plastic cup. As she saw liquid there, it all came back to her with a rush, to the glands of her mouth, to her nerves, to her senses, to her flesh and bones—she was thirsty. She drank it down in one breath. Then for the first time she began to weep. She was thirsty, and had drunk, and so it had happened: she had left him. She had begun to live on. Desolation beat down red upon her eyelids with the sun and the tears streamed from her eyes and nose over her earth-stained hands.

  Some people came down the road. An old man with safety-pins in his earlobes and a loin-cloth under an old jacket stopped short, saying the same half-syllable over and over. There were little children watching and no one sent them away. All she could do before the old man was shake her head, again, again, again, again, again at what they both saw. The women sent up a great sigh. Bray lay there in the middle of them all. They brought an old grey blanket of the kind she had seen all her life drying outside their huts, and an old door and they lifted him up and carried him away. They seemed to know him; he belonged to them. The old man with the safety-pins said to her in revelation, “It is the Colonel! It is the Colonel!”

  She did not know him any more. She had left him. She was walking along the road between the cotton-covered, great soft hanging breasts of two women, she was alive.

  They took them to an hotel that was closed or deserted. The building was boarded up and there was some sort of huge aviary outside but no birds in it, the wire doors open and a lot of burst mattresses and rubbish piled there. They took him to their own quarters, to one of their mud houses, and laid him on an iron bedstead in the cool dimness. It was the old man’s bed and there was a pillow-case embroidered free-hand with yellow crosses, red birds with blue eyes, and blue flowers with red leaves. The women sat with him and clapped their hands together soundlessly and kept up a kind of archaic groan, perhaps it was praying, perhaps it was just another human sound she had never heard before. She rested her head against one of the big breasts on cloth that smelt of woodsmoke and snuff. The D.O. from the Matoko boma came and took her away in his landrover, and his little wife, looking rather like Edna Tlume, seemed afraid of her and put her to bed in what was obviously the marital bed. A white doctor in priest’s robes came and gave her an injection; they put her to sleep because she was not dead. She understood; what else could they do with her? She slept the whole night and in the morning found herself in a big bed, after all those nights in the narrow one.

  Neil and Vivien Bayley appeared to take her to the capital. She wore one of the D.O.’s wife’s dresses and she had nothing but the picnic basket and the briefcase.

  At the Bayleys’ house the children were all over her, pulling at her, chattering, asking where Clive and Alan and Suzi were. Vivien used the adult formula: “You mustn’t worry Rebecca, she’s very, very tired,” but to them she was the familiar Rebecca into whose car they used to be piled for entertainments and expeditions. All Vivien’s children went through a stage of being rudely aggressive towards their mother; Eliza yelled, “It’s not fair! Rebecca’s nicer than you!” A scene swept through the house, banging doors, raising voices.

  Neil’s way was to say whenever he came into the house, “I think we all need a brandy.” They did not seem able to talk to her without all three of them having a drink in their hands. She drank to make it possible for the Bayleys but she would not take the pills Vivien gave her because then she had to go and lie down and sleep, and when she woke there was a moment when she didn’t know it had happened and she had to discover it again. Vivien said, “I think it’d be a good idea if we made you some dresses.” The sewing machine was brought into the living-room and Vivien kept up a sort of monologue while she sewed, handin
g bits of the finishing over to her to be done. She was wearing Vivien’s clothes, which fitted her better than the D.O.’s wife’s dress had. She remembered and said to Vivien, “Did you send back the dress to Matoko?” Vivien said gently, “No, but I will when the transport starts running again, don’t worry.”

  She was turning up a hem. The material was pale green cotton. She said, “What will they do with him?”

  Vivien’s hands were taken slowly from the machine, her face had an imploring look. “They’ve cabled his wife to see if she wants his body flown back.”

  The airport was closed, they had told her. He would be kept lying somewhere, there were refrigerators for that sort of thing. No one knew when planes would leave again. She had tried to make a joke about the airport, saying, “So your riot bag’s just standing by,” but Vivien had taken it as a reminder of something unspeakable and could not answer.

  With the brandy glasses in their hands they talked about what had happened. Out of that day—yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before that: slowly the succeeding days changed position round it—another version came into double exposure over what she knew. The men who had attacked were a roving gang made up of a remnant from the terrible riots that had gone on for a week centred round the asbestos mine. A Company riot squad led by white strangers— “ You see,” Vivien interrupted her husband, “I knew they’d get round to using those men from the Congo and Mweta wouldn’t be able to stop them. I knew it would happen”—had opened machinegun fire on strikers armed with sticks and stones. The white men dealt with them out of long experience of country people who needed a lesson in the name of whoever was paying—they burned down the village. The villagers and the strikers had made an unsuccessful raid on the old Pilchey’s Hotel, where the mercenaries had quartered themselves. Someone had put up those road-blocks, probably with the idea of ambushing the white men (hopeless, they had left already, anyway). … It was said that the one who started the hut-burnings was a big German who didn’t travel in the troop transports but in his own car.