A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  So that was starting all over again; he was half—amused, half self—contemptuous. The man was so desperately poor in everything—what was there that he didn’t need? Olivia said, “Kindness is ridiculous.” She had meant here; then. She had had to organize jumble sales so that the charitable white wives could provide a clinic for African children, while the mines were paying dividends of millions a year to shareholders in England. She had had to put on white gloves for opening charity bazaars; out of the newspaper pictures taken when they arrived in London in the sensation of their recall from the territory, had looked a civil servant and his lady disconcertingly like the class and kind of couple on whom white settlers had depended so long.

  After dinner he went off to his room past Davy Jones’ Locker and the flushed faces there—a large Englishman with the administrator’s gait of a man eternally carrying papers under his arm.

  He lay in a bed that, like nearly all hotel beds, was too small for him, and read. Mrs. Pilchey’s clip—on bed lamp had a broken neck and he turned on the bulb in the ceiling. It shone at a point just between his eyes. He read through everything there was in the Education Department’s file; very little, in terms of something to go on. In most places figures were not analysed properly, and the frequent “unforeseen circumstances” that caused a high percentage of failures, or the abandonment of modest experimental schemes, were never explained. When he turned out the light the silence was deep, deeper; as if the night measured the distance he already had come.

  Chapter 6

  He spent his first week in Gala occupied with what he described in letters to England as housewifery. The house, vacated by an accountant declared redundant under the new system of administration, had no cook and no curtains. He stayed in the local hotel while word—of-mouth brought applicants for the post, and the Indian tailor consented to make the curtains. Mr. Joosab was distressed at Bray’s choice of material, but Bray and Olivia had always liked the maroons and blacks, the oranges and browns, and the gnomic texts in Swahili or Gala printed on the cloth local women wrapped round themselves and their babies—he didn’t have to bother with considerations of what was or was not considered suitable for a D.C.’s house, this time.

  The broad main street that was Gala had been tarred along its high—cambered middle but the rose—tan earth remained in a wide border down either side, splotched, pocked, and sometimes blotted out in deep shadow from the mahogany trees that hung above it. Gala was an old place as colonial settlements go; and even before it became a British outpost, Tippo Tib had established one of his most southerly slave depots there—to the north of the village there was the site of his Arab fort. Walls had fallen down in the village but trees remained; too big to be hacked out of the way of the slave—caravan trail; too strong to be destroyed by fire when British troops were in the process of subduing the population; revered by several generations of colonial ladies, who succeeded in having a local by—law promulgated to forbid anyone chopping them down. Their huge grey outcrops of root provided stands for bicycles and booths for traders and craftsmen; the shoemaker worked there, and the bicycle and sewing—machine repairer. There was a slave tree (the trade had been conducted under it as lately as a hundred years before) that the same English ladies had had enclosed in a small paved area and railing, with a plaque quoting Wilberforce. It was down in the part of the village where, Bray found, the beginnings of industry had started up since he last saw the place. Young workers from the fish—meal plant and lime works hung about there, now, playing dice and shedding a litter of potato crisp packets.

  His big figure in the grey linen bush jacket and trousers he had found for himself in the capital moved busily back and forth across the road from sun and shade in and out of the interior of the shops. The familiar smells assailed him—calico, paraffin, millet, sacks of dried kapenta with the tin scoop stuck among the musty little fish; the old feel of grains of spilt sugar and maize meal gritted between the soles of shoes and the cracked concrete floors. In the tailor’s shop, sweetness of cardamoms hanging about the bolts of cloth and shiny off—cuts of lining. The same framed pictures of Edwardians with long cigarette holders and shooting sticks; a photograph of Mweta in his toga beside the old one of the Queen. Mr. Joosab and his son, Ahmed, were almost the first people from the old days whom Bray spoke to. (The hotel had changed hands; there were black clerks in the post office, now.) Joosab was a pale fat man in shirtsleeves, with a tape measure worn like an order over his waistcoat. His soft laugh was nearly soundless; he stood there with Ahmed, who was thin, dark, and had grown up—as Bray remembered the mother—with that obsessed, slightly mad look that comes of having very black eyes with a cast.

  “The Colonel, it’s the Colonel, you have come back to us ….” Joosab’s bright gaze darted, brimmed and danced like an embarrassed girl’s. “My second son, Ahmed … you don’t remember the Colonel (he was a small child, eh, Colonel) … Colonel Bray? Of course you remember! The District Commissioner, and Mrs. Bray—oh what a nice lady!”

  The thick glossy straight hair seemed to rise and sink on the boy’s head in a speechless response of embarrassment.

  “Well, the Colonel … my, we’ll be glad to have you back. I’ve often said to my wife, we don’t have a gentlemen like the Colonel, again! Oh Mr. Maitland, he came when you left, he was a nice gentlemen, oh yes. And then Mr. Carter, and then there was Mr. Welwyn—Jones. But not a long time, I think he was only here about fifteen month … oh the Colonel …”

  “And how’ve you been, Mr. Joosab, how are things going?”

  He was still laughing soundlessly, spreading his smooth hands like a member of a welcoming committee. “Oh all right, yes, I can say all right”—he suppressed a coquettish little shrug, as if he had almost let slip a secret— “of course things are a bit unsettled, business has dropped off a bit, oh that’s only natural, of course, Colonel. I’m not complaining—you understand? Our community supports the government a hundred per cent. We are contributing to Party funds—last year more than five hundred pounds. And we have the assurance of the President—oh yes, we have had that. Of course a lot of people have gone—you know, the old Government people, all gone. Oh I know how they feel, I can imagine. Dr. Pirie and Mrs. Pirie, gone back to England, sold their place. He built a lovely house a few years ago, on the lake, when he retired, you know. But of course they don’t want to stay now, naturally .… Why should they … Up in your house”—he meant the D.C.’s residence—” there’s Mr. Aleke now, with his wife and seven or eight little children. Yes. The place looked perfect when you and Mrs. Bray were there, Colonel—the garden, it was wonderful! Mrs. Bray’s garden. And what was the other lady—Mrs. Butterworth? Oh yes, what a nice lady. You know I made the first pair of ladies’ slacks for her? I said, but Mrs. Butterworth, madam, I never made for ladies. But she was a lady who like to get what she want, you know. You can do it, she say, you can do it! And Mr. Playfair. He won the golf championship again this year. He’s still here, and Mr. Le Roy, and the Andersons up at the club—Mr. Anderson’s still the chairman of the committee, they’re putting on a show there, this month. I think it’s Mr. Parsifal again who arrange it, you know he’s a very clever man—” He related all the details of the activities of the white community in which he had never had any part. “Oh there’s quite a lot from the old days,” he promised. “You’ll see, Colonel—” It was not that he had forgotten that these were the people who had demanded that the Colonial Office have Bray removed, but that he remembered only too well—it was his way of dealing with events, to shield himself and others from danger by bowing in all directions at once.

  Most of the white tradespeople in the village greeted Bray with professional cheerfulness overlaying a certain stony—facedness. They had not forgotten either; but someone would be getting his custom. He had no particular awareness of his “position” among them; the past in relation to Mweta and Edward Shinza and the country’s future meant something to him, but the past in relation to his difficulti
es with the Colonial Service and the settlers was simply an outdated conflict in which each side had acted—fair enough—according to the convictions in a particular historical situation, a situation that no longer existed. Not objectively, and not for him; he had been away, and come back clear of it. The fact that he was sent to his old district did not seem of any particular significance to him except that it sensibly took advantage of the fact that here he knew the language and the people; he did not see himself as coming back to a place from which he had been driven out—of what relevance to the present was that sort of petty triumph?

  But for the residents who had stayed behind, he had not come anew, but returned; he, about whom ten years ago they had held a public meeting in that same hotel where he was now staying, he, whom they had petitioned the Governor to remove from office. On the first Saturday morning in the village, he realized this; a bother, more than anything else. They came into town to do their shopping as they had always done and he moved, alone, among them. They greeted him, even stopped to talk, women with their baskets, or men with carriers of tinned beer hooked between thumb and forefinger, making use of the conversational conventions of the English background they shared with him, so that the first pause became the opportunity to say, “Well, Alcocks’ won’t keep a chicken for me if I don’t hurry up and fetch it” or “Robert’ll be cooling his heels outside the post office—I’d better be getting along,” but they made him (not vain and therefore the least self—conscious of men) aware that they were confronted with him. He bore them no grudge whatever. Which, he realized with slightly exasperated amusement at himself and them, was insufferable, if it should be found out.

  In a first letter to Gala, Olivia had written, “I suppose it was strange to see the old house!”—but he had not even gone so far as to take a walk up the road to the ugly residence that existed in his mind not as a place so much as an interior life hollowed out by experiences that had been dealt with there. One day he would go and see Mr. Aleke’s “seven or eight” children playing in the garden, and tell Olivia about it.

  As he went in and out of the Fisheagle Inn he was sometimes arrested, from the veranda, by the sight of the lake. The sign of the lake: a blinding strip of shimmer, far away beyond the trees, or on less clear days, a different quality in the haze. For a moment his mind emptied; the restless glitter of the lake, the line of a glance below a lowered eyelid—for it was not really the lake at all that one saw, but a trick of the distance, the lake’s own bright glare cast up upon the heated atmosphere, just as the vast opening out of pacing water to the horizon, once you got to its bush—hairy shores, was not really the open lake itself at all, but (as the map showed) only the southernmost tip of the great waters that spread up the continent for six hundred miles and through four or five countries. It was then, just for a moment, that this symbol of the infinity of distance, carrying the infinity of time with which it was one, released his mind from the time of day and he was at once himself ten years ago and himself now, one and the same. It was a pause not taken account of. He went on down the veranda steps, intent on buying some bit of equipment for his house.

  He was able to move in by the second weekend. Of course he had presented himself to the people at the boma. He’d had a talk with Aleke, the first African District Commissioner—but they didn’t call them D.C.s any more, they were known as Provincial Officers. And he’d seen Sampson Malemba, the local Education Officer, who happened to be an old friend, principal of the African school when Bray was in office. Aleke was just the sort of “new African” the settlers would dislike most: fat, charming, his Mweta tunic hitched up by solid buttocks, he spoke fluent informal English, lolled behind his desk like a schoolboy, and was seen chewing a piece of sugar—cane while having his shoes shined under the trees. The settlers were at home with the conventional pompousness of half—educated Africans—men in undertaker’s suits, bespectacled, throat—clearing; they recognized the acceptable marks of civilization in this caricature of an image of themselves, even if they were beer—drinking farmers in crumpled shorts. It remained to be seen if Aleke were to be efficient, into the bargain; from the little Bray had heard, it was likely. He said cheerfully he didn’t know what he could do for Bray—he had been asked to “do everything necessary to facilitate,” etc., and it was up to Bray to tell him what that might be. “Could I have somewhere to work—that’s the main thing.” Aleke found this very funny. “I mean can you spare me an office and a share in a typist—I’m sure you’re short—staffed.” “An office! Naturally! But the typist isn’t very pretty, I’m afraid. I’ll introduce you.” He rang a bell and in came a typical second—grade male clerk with an old man’s bony back and an adolescent face drained of vitality by home—study courses. “Mr. Letanka. He will be helping you all he can.” When the clerk had gone, Aleke was still amused: “So there you are. But I have applied for a really efficient and beautiful secretary, first priority, so maybe our standard will improve.”

  Aleke urged him to get settled into his house before “we get down to anything serious”; it was an amiable enough way of postponing the problem of not knowing what to do with him.

  The moving in didn’t amount to much. The various purchases he had made during the week stood dumped about in the living-room. Mr. Joosab had been good enough to send his son and one of his daughters over to put up the curtains. Stretched across the windows they looked like tablecloths; they didn’t meet. And when they were drawn back they sagged skimpily. He didn’t know what exactly was wrong; he thought of Olivia and smiled. He had a young servant called Mahlope, which meant in Gala, “the last one of all,” who was already wearing the long white apron to buy which he had at once requested money the moment he was engaged. He had covered the concrete floors of the house with the inevitable thick layer of red polish in preparation for Bray’s arrival and the two men spent the Saturday afternoon arranging—with sure instinct for the placing of one of the government issue morris chairs, the utilization of an old brass picture hanger to hold the bathroom mirror high enough for Bray to see himself shave—the unchanging white—bachelor household that was as old as settlement itself. Mahlope put a tattered embroidered doily under the leather frame that held a picture of Venetia with a blurred little mummy, her new baby; and set down the whisky, gin, a bent opener and glasses in their permanent position on what was listed in the house inventory as the “occasional” table. Already the kitchen smelled of paraffin, on which the refrigerator ran, and the living-room of flea powder, for a house that stood empty for more than a few days always became a playground for fleas, and Bray had had his ankles bitten through his socks while simply visiting the house.

  He had begun to wake up early again, as he used to do in Africa. The servant was about, chanting under his breath, from half—past five. Bray ate his first Sunday breakfast in the garden on a morning scented with woodsmoke. It came back to him—all, immediate, as with the scent of a woman with whom one has made love. The minute sun—birds whirred in the coarse trumpets of flowers. Delicate wild pigeons called lullingly, slender in flight and soft of voice, unrecognizable as the same species as the bloated hoarse creatures who waddle in European cities. In perfect stillness, small dead leaves hung from single threads of web, winking light. A tremendous fig tree was perhaps several trees, twisted together in a multiple trunk twenty feet up and then spreading wide and down again in a radius of interlaced branches. Little knobbly figs fruited all over it, borne directly on the old, hard wood of the trunk. Skinny wasps left them and fell into the jam. He felt an irrational happiness, like faint danger. He dragged a rickety trestle table ringed with the marks of potted plants, under his tree, and wrote letters and read the papers Olivia had sent, sybaritic in the luxury of being alone.

  But the afternoon was long. In the air were the echoes of other people’s activity; the distant plock of tennis, the swirl of arriving and departing cars at the other houses in the road, the sky ringing like a glass with the strike of church bells distorted aurally
as the lake, from the hotel veranda, was distorted visually. There was a kind of thickening of the background silence, a vague uproar of Sunday enjoyment from the direction of the African township away over to the east. He thought he would look around there; he hadn’t, yet. Of course, he had known it very well when he was D.C., he had spent a lot of time down there; too much, for some people’s liking. But he knew that it had changed since then, grown; and there was a whole new housing scheme and a hostel for the industrial workers.

  Raw red roads led off through the trees. People were strolling, pushing their bicycles as they talked; women held their children against their skirts as he passed, boys laughed and threw mango pits at each other, there were little groups of religious sects holding meetings under the trees, young couples in their best clothes and old men hauling wood or charcoal on sleds, Sunday no different from any other day, for them. The bright little new houses looked stranded in the mud; the forest had been cleared for them. There were some trampled—looking patches of cassava and taro and a beached, derelict car or two. The houses had electric light and children were playing a game that seemed to consist of hitting the telephone poles with sticks. They yelled defiantly and gaily at the white man in the car.

  He saw the hostel on the rise that had been a kind of buffer, hiding the black village from the white; a modern, institutional building around which stalls and hawkers’ carts had collected like hovels without the palace walls. But he turned instead down into the old town that he remembered, and plunged along the unmade streets among close shacks, donkeys, dogs, and people. The old town was filthy and beautiful; in this low—lying ground palms grew, giving their soaring proportion to the huddle, and lifting the skyline to their pure and lazy silhouette. The place stank of beer, ordure, and smoke. The most wretched hovel had its setting of sheeny banana leaves, with a show of plenty in the green candelabra of pendant fruit, and its pawpaw trees as full of ripening dugs as some Indian goddess. Green grew and tangled everywhere out of the muck, rippled and draped over rotting wood and rusted iron. Romantic poverty; he would rather live here, with the rats under the palm trees, than up on the rise in those mean, decent cubes already stained with bare earth: that was because he would never have to live in either. A little naked boy waved with one hand, clutching his genitals with the other. An old man took off his hat in greeting. Bray knew no one and knew them all. There was an anonymity of mutual acceptance that came to him not at all in England and hardly ever in Europe—in Spain, perhaps, one market morning among the butting bodies and smiles of busy people whose language he didn’t speak. It wasn’t losing oneself, it was finding one’s presence so simply acknowledged that one forgot that outwardly one moved as a large, pink—faced Englishman, light—eyed and thick—eyebrowed behind the magnification of glasses, encased yet again, as in a bubble of another atmosphere, in the car. He drove slowly round with unself—conscious pleasure, not quite sure where he was going yet feeling that the turns he took were familiar ones, the way past the houses of people he once visited or knew. And then he came out at the nameless stretch of communal ground where the bus sheds were, and goats sought discarded mango skins, and women and children sat contentedly under the trees.