A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  Vivien said, “But this was a little Volkswagen, and there was a woman in it.”

  “To asbestos miners an army staff car’s the same as any other kind. A car’s a car.” Neil spoke coldly to her. “Nobody knows anything, any more, when things get to the stage they are now. I don’t suppose Mweta knew they would machine-gun people. Burn their houses over their heads. He just put it in the hands of the Company army, left it to their good sense … that’s quite enough.”

  She offered the information, “The people who helped us knew Bray. An old man with safety-pins in the holes in his ears. He knew him from before.”

  Neil had put the brandy on the floor. His hands were interlocked between his knees, his big, bright, bearded head (river-god’s head, Bray had once called it) stared down through his legs so that the veins showed in his rosy neck. He said thickly, sternly, “Yes, they knew him. But it only takes a handful of strangers. Miners are recruited all over the country. God knows who they were. Nobody knows who the white men were. White men from somewhere. Perhaps they travel in Volkswagen cars, perhaps they cart women around with them. Putting up their road-blocks a mile from those people who’d known him for twenty years was a bunch of men who’d never seen him before. That’s all.”

  Agnes Aleke came to see her. Agnes was wearing her smooth wig, she was smartly dressed, and she cried all the time. “If only you’d come in the plane with me, if you’d come when I went.” Through Bray’s death she seemed to experience in her plump voluptuous little body all that she had feared for it. Rebecca sat with her in the garden and held her hand to comfort her; Vivien carried out tea. “Come and stay with me, Rebecca, come to my mother’s place. It’s a nice house. Oh how I hated that place, that Gala, don’t show me that place again, never—and how you must hate us—I said to my mother, she will hate us and why shouldn’t she.” They embraced, Rebecca patting her gently while she sobbed. Vivien said with firm kindness, “What do you think of our dressmaking, Mrs. Aleke? You know Rebecca and I made that dress she’s wearing, ourselves.”

  Roly Dando came. It was in the late afternoon; they all drank. Thin little Roly had about him the air—taint, portent—of one who knows what is going on in a time of confusion and upheaval, when what official information there is ceases to be trustworthy. It was known that Mweta was not at the President’s Residence; his messages to the people continued to be issued, but from some unknown retreat. His television appearances were, it was said, old films to which new taped statements were—not too well—matched. None of this was mentioned. But they talked. Dando seemed convinced that Shinza was over the border, planning a guerrilla insurrection. Dhlamini Okoi and the Minister of Health, Moses Phahle, had disappeared and were obviously with him. Goma was said to be in prison; there were so many people in prison that if someone wasn’t seen for a few days it was presumed that that was where he must be. Neil said, “Roly, is it true that Mweta has asked for British troops?”

  Roly sat there in the dusk with his sinewy shrunken neck pulled up very straight from his collar; he did not seem to hear. He rose to fetch another drink and hesitated on the way, where Rebecca sat. He put his hand on her head: “La Fille aux Yeux d’Or, La Filie aux Yeux d’Or.” He stalked awkwardly to the veranda table and poured himself something. He came back and sat on the arm of her chair, his arm round her, touching her neck as he talked, as he grew a little drunk, unable even now to resist the dismal opportunity to take advantage of his grief to fondle a woman. He was talking of Bray. “The thing is, of course, all our dear friends abroad will say he was killed by the people he loved and what else can you expect of them, and how ungrateful they are, and all that punishment-and-reward two-and-two-makes-four that passes for intelligent interpretation of events. That’s the part of it that would rile him. Or maybe amuse him. I don’t know.”

  Vivien’s beautiful controlled voice came out of the dark. “I wish we could know that James himself knew it wasn’t that, when it happened.”

  “Of course he knew!” Roly spoke with the unchallengeable authority of friendship on a plane none of the others had shared. “He’s got nothing to do with that lot of spiritual bed-wetters finding a surrogate for their fears in his death! He knew what’s meant by the forces of history, he knew how risky the energies released by social change are. But what’s the good. They’ll say ‘his blacks’ murdered him. They’ll go one further: they’ll come up with their guilts to be expiated and say, yes, he certainly died with Christian forgiveness for the people who killed him, into the bargain. Christ almighty. We’ll never get it straight. They’ll paw over everything with their sticky misconceptions.” Roly spent the night because of the curfew. She heard him snoring in the room next to the one she had been given.

  Vivien talked to her a lot about her children, about Clive and Alan and Suzi, but she herself was not thinking about them at all. She began to bleed although it was not the right time and it was then that she thought: so it never happened; there never will be a child. Vivien put small activities in her way as if driving some lost creature, out of kindness, along a track. “I think you ought to go and see Margot. If you feel like it. She’s very down. She really would like to know about Hjalmar, though of course she wouldn’t say it.” So she took Vivien’s car and drove to the Silver Rhino. It was the first time she had driven since that day. The car was the same kind—an old-model Volkswagen. Her feet and hands managed of themselves. It was only five days ago.

  It had rained all night again and the morning was beautiful. (Put on the green dress, Vivien said.) There were soldiers on guard round the post office and broadcasting studios, people were cordoned off from the area where the newspaper offices had been stoned. Outside the railway station and bus depot hundreds of women, children, and old people sat in bright heaps among household goods and livestock in the strong sun high with the stink of urine and rotting vegetables; there were no trains or buses running.

  And everywhere the rain and heat brought out flowers. The soldiers in their drab battledress stood under blossoming trees, poinsettia and hibiscus were crudely brilliant as carnival paper blooms in the driveway of the Presidential Residence that was said to be empty. In the old garden of the Silver Rhino an enormous American car was parked, with an older but scarcely lesser one behind it. There were nylon curtains in the balcony of windows round the rear of the new one, and ocelot-patterned seat covers. Some African men in pyjamas were sitting on the grass outside one of the bungalows—she did not really notice, on her way to the main building. But one of them got up and came forward with arms wide, a huge, fat man with a cigar in his mouth and a leopard—skin toque on his head: Loulou, Loulou Kamboya, Gordon’s ex-partner from the Congo. “Madame Edouard—I say I know dat girl walking! What you make here?” “Loulou—and you?” He took her by the shoulders, beaming at her, an enormous grape-black face with thick ridges of flesh that pressed back against the ears and even up the forehead from the frontal ridge. “I make everywhere business. You know Loulou. But what this fighting, eh? They mad, eh? I sit here, I come yesterday one week wid my people, nothing for do, nothing. Sometime I think I go faire une petite folie—” He laughed hugely. She knew from Gordon that “faire une petite folie” meant to find a girl and make love; Loulou and Gordon spoke French together, the Congo French spoken by semiliterate Africans, mixed with Lingala words and Belgian usage, but Loulou had always been proud of being able to speak to her in English so that she wouldn’t feel left out. “Et les bébés, they grow okay? Where Gordon? He making cash again or no? Ah Gordon, if he stay this time now with me, you have plenty dresses! I make the big time—that’s right, I say the big time, eh?—I hear in cinéma! Oh business continue to go good but now this damn war or what. What? What? Eh? I here wid my people yesterday week already.”

  “Where are you making for?”

  “I go for South. Down, down. Far for here. I have ticket but the plane don’t go. You see, I want to go for Jewburg. You remember?”

  Yes, she remembered; he had always h
ad a yearning to see Johannesburg. He had refused to be convinced that South Africa didn’t let in black men from other countries as a rule, and that if he did get in he wouldn’t be able to enjoy his habitual freedom of bars and girls.

  “You know—I got business there now. I send goods already three time—thirty thousand francs. Pay in Switzerland. Not Congo.” He roared with laughter at the old story. “But you sick, Madame Edouard? What makes this—” He drew his ringed hands dolefully down his face. “You short money?”

  “No, nothing. I’m all right. —I’ll see you again when I come out? I’ve got to go and look for Mrs. Wentz.”

  “Anytime. Anytime. Look like I stay for Christmas.”

  Her fingers felt damp and twitchy. When he had drawn that face, only succeeding in looking comic, she had felt tears coming back to her suddenly again. At the Bayleys’ she had gone dry: as you speak of a cow going dry.

  Margot Wentz had let her hair outgrow its dye. While they talked she looked all the time at that inch or two of speckled white and gilt at Margot’s hairline. It was perhaps a sign of private mourning. They sat in the little sitting-room at the round table with the fringed cloth. Coffee was set out ready, with thin silver teaspoons and a silver cream jug in the shape of a tulip. They discussed Hjalmar as if he had had an illness and had been advised to go to Gala to recuperate. Rebecca said he had been looking much better lately. The work he was doing, pottering about the garden, seemed good for him. She said, in a sort of final explanation for everything that was left unsaid: “He offered to stay to look after the house,” and a look of trapped distress came over Margot Wentz’s face because now they had come up inevitably against what had happened: to that day when Rebecca and Bray left Gala. Every time Bray’s name had occurred in Rebecca’s account of Hjalmar’s life in Gala, Margot’s left cheek had moved a little as if a string jerked inside there, but now she could not avert herself any longer. She said something about that terrible business, about what a wonderful man he was; she stared at Rebecca, unable to go on. She looked magnificent; hers (unlike Loulou’s) was a face made to express tragedy.

  They drank more coffee and Rebecca asked about the hotel and the son, Stephen. “No one knows what will happen,” Margot said, almost grandly. “I have no money to go, if I want to. And even if we want to, the airport is closed. I suppose the frontiers too. Hjalmar wouldn’t be any better off here—” and then remembered that if he had not stayed to “look after the house” he might have been dead, and had again that look of dislocation that Rebecca saw her presence brought to people’s faces. Rebecca asked about the daughter and that was better; she was settling down in London— “Of course, there are all the things Emmanuelle never had, all the concerts and recitalsmusic is her life, you know.” When she got up to leave, Margot said to her, “Rebecca, if you should need anything. I don’t know what—somewhere to stay, perhaps?” But she thanked her, there was nothing, she was staying with the Bayleys of course. “I see you’ve an old friend of ours in the hotel—the famous Loulou Kamboya.”

  “Oh him.” Margot’s voice was dry. “He’s travelling with his own prostitutes, never mind his drivers and secretaries. It’s a good thing for my licence the police’ve got other things to do, or I’d be in trouble for running a brothel.”

  Loulou was on the lookout for her and left his friends sitting drinking beer on the veranda of one of their rondavels. “You don’t want have a little drink? No? Come I show you in my limousine my business I’m making nowdays—” He had dressed in pale blue linen trousers and, despite the heat, a brown mohair sweater with a gold thread in the knit. He wore it over his bare chest, where a gold chain followed the crease of fat round the base of his neck and ended in a big medallion with a red stone. The tail of some sort of civet hung from the leopard skin hat. The great rear bay of the car was filled with specially made cases, travelling-salesman style, but with the Loulou touch—locks of scrolly gilt and red plastic crocodile covers. “From U.S., from U.S.” He was selling the same old stuff—ivory paper knives and necklaces, crude copies of the famous seated figure of King Lukengu carved for him by the dozen in some Bakuba village up in the Kasai, masks decorated with cowrie shells and copper, made not for dancing but for the walls of white people’s houses. “If I can’t go Jewburg, I think now I like go over Portuguese side myself now tomorrow. I sell this; is not so bad place there … here, I make for you petit cadeau … yes, yes you take—” and she had to find a pair to fit her out of a bundle of gold—heeled sandals with thongs made of the skin of some poor beast. “Madame Edouard, but for why you sick, eh?” He stood back and shook his head over her, well aware that presents would not help. An African xylophone was being played up and down the Silver Rhino to announce lunch and his entourage rose with a screech of chairs, chattering and arguing, the girls laughing in their special careless, loose-shouldered way, waving about pretty black hands with painted fingernails like opalescent scales, breasts bobbing, earrings swinging, little black pigtails standing out all over their heads. He called some sarcastic-sounding remark, but all that happened was more giggles and one of the girls put her hands on her hips and stamped her foot so that her bracelets jiggled and so did her round backside in her tight pagne.

  Rebecca was almost at the Bayleys’ when she turned and drove back to the Silver Rhino. They were sitting at lunch, their chairs tipped this way and that, the waiters pounding and sweating round them, beer bottles being handed up and down, Loulou at the head. Wherever he went he carried with him the atmosphere of an open—air African nightclub. “Are you really going?” “To Portuguese? Yes, I tell you—this place is enough. And the plane—nothing. I go. —I go there one time already, is not bad….”

  She said, “Could I come with you, Loulou—would you take me.”

  “For sure I take you! For sure! Demain? Sais-tu venir? You plenty bagage and biloko?”

  The Bayleys did not know what to say to her. “And when you get there? What will you do?”

  “I can get a plane.”

  Vivien said, “You’ll go to South Africa then.”

  She shook her head.

  “Where will you go Rebecca?” Vivien spoke gently.

  She told them about the money Bray had sent to Switzerland.

  “Don’t repeat that story to anyone else. Not even your friend Loulou,” Neil Bayley said. Vivien was silent.

  “I think I’ll go and take the money.”

  They did not ask any more questions.

  Vivien gave her a camel-hair coat she had brought from England: “It’s almost winter in Europe—you’ve got no warm clothes.” She had the two cotton dresses they had made, the old jeans and shirt (washed, no trace of red earth), the picnic basket and Bray’s briefcase. Neil had had to ask her to let him look in it for Bray’s passport and other papers but he had given it back to her.

  Neil came into the bedroom where she and Vivien stood with the coat. “What about the air ticket?”

  “I’ll borrow the money from Loulou.”

  Neil nodded: Loulou was her husband’s associate, the matter of the money would be easily arranged. She said at once, “He’ll be pleased to have me pay in Swiss francs.”

  When Neil had left the room, she said to Vivien, “I’ll never live with Gordon again,” and Vivien stood there, looking at the coat without seeing it, pressing her thumbnail between her front teeth.

  They gave her one of their suitcases. When she had packed, it was still half—empty. Up to the moment she left they seemed to feel both somehow responsible to stop her and yet unable to offer any reason why she should not go. “I don’t think he’ll ever get through the border,” Neil offered. “Specially him. It’s probably known he’s done some gun—running in Katanga in his time.”

  “He’ll get through all right. Gordon always says Loulou can do anything.”

  He drove a day and a night with only a short nap two or three times with the car come to rest at the roadside. It was dangerous for anyone to drive so long and fast without
rest but she knew nothing would happen. She found it was not that you don’t care if you live or die but just that you know when you can’t die. You have been left alive. He had brought with him only one of the girls, and there was plenty of room to stretch out and sleep. She and the girl had no common language, so their communication consisted of an occasional smile and a wordless accord about the times they needed to go off into the bushes together to pee. The heat was very great and with the speed produced a daze: forest, savannah, scrub, a change in motion winding down a pass. Loulou got on well with the officials at the border post and “forgot” two bottles of whisky left standing beside the air—conditioner that sweated water in the humidity. On the other side of the frontier was night, sudden bursts of cackling music as he tried to pick up some station on the car radio, confused sleep, the fuzzy bulk of him there in the sweater, the headlight beams cloudy with insects, dawn coming in as a smell of freshness before the light. They were in a near-desert, hard yellow earth funnelled into antheaps fifteen feet high, dowdy thornbush draped in tattered webs, huge baobab trees. They drove over wooden bridges above dry riverbeds. Towards midday all growing things ceased to exist and there was nothing but hard yellow cliffs, drifts of pollen-coloured dunes, more cliffs runnelled and sheered away by exposure, and then behind the yellow, a blue as bright and hard—the sea. Through the filthy villages, the escort of bicycles and chickens and overburdened buses and lorries that are the first sign of every colonial town, they came to factories with Portuguese names, cliffs clothed completely with the pink and white walls and tiled roofs, the dark trees and brilliant trails of bougainvillea of white men’s houses, and below, the pale cubes and rectangles of the commercial centre behind a curved corniche and a harbour-jumble of ships and cranes. Loulou took her to the Lisboa Hotel (“You like it—two bar for cocktail”) and gave her the equivalent of fifty pounds, partly in dollars, partly in sterling, in addition to the price in escudos of a ticket for Europe. On one of their trips to the bushes the girl had shown Rebecca packets of notes in a calico bag on either hip under her pagne—she seemed to have been brought along more as a piggybank than une petite folie. Loulou himself did not book into the hotel; he had his good friend in the harbour customs to go and see, and then he had promised to buy the girl a wig—she put her fingers on her shoulders and smiled demandingly to show that it must be long hair, really long—before they set off again to drive down south to the other seaport.