A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  “Why not have it dug out, get rid of it,” said Bray.

  Aleke looked uncertain a moment, as if he could not remember why this was unlikely. Then he came to himself and said in English, “You’re damned right. I want this place cleared.”

  “You could have mesembryanthemums—ice-plant,” Bray said. But Aleke had the tricycle, hanging by a handlebar, in his one hand, and was holding his child under the armpit with the other, urging him along while he hopped exaggeratedly, “Ow, ow!”

  You had only to leave a place once and return to it for it to become home. At the house Bray came through the kitchen and asked Mahlope to fetch his things from the car; Mahlope had a friend sitting there who rose at once. Bray acknowledged the greeting and then was suddenly aware of some extraordinary tension behind him. His passage had caused a sensation; he made an involuntary checking movement, as if there were something shocking pinned on his back. The face was staring at him, blindly expectant, flinching from anticlimax. The anticlimax hung by a hair; then it was knocked aside: “Kalimo!” The man started to laugh and gasp, saved by his name. The face was one from another life, Bray’s cook of the old time, in the D.C.’s house. The salutations went on for several minutes, and then Kalimo was in perfect possession of the occasion. He said in English, “I’m here today, yesterday, three day. No, the boy say Mukwayi go Tuesday, come back Friday. I’m ready.” Bray’s eyes followed into the labyrinth of past commonplace the strings of Kalimo’s apron, tied twice under his arms, in the way he had always affected. “How did you find me?”

  “Festus he send me. He send me say, Colonel he coming back, one month, two month, then go to Gala. I’m greet my wife, I’m greet my sons. They say where you go? No, I’m go to Gala. Colonel him back. No, I go. I must go.”

  They began to talk in Gala, which was not Kalimo’s mother tongue—since he came from the South where he had first begun to work for the Brays many years ago—but which, like Bray, he had learned when he moved with the Brays to Gala. They exchanged family news; Bray fetched the picture of Venetia’s baby. The pleasurable excitement of reunion hung over his solitary lunch, with Kalimo bringing in the food and being detained to talk.

  But later in the afternoon, when he had sat for an hour or two writing up his notes on the lake communities, he came to the problem of Mahlope: what was to be done about Mahlope? Kalimo had taken over the household as of right; Bray felt the old fear of wounding someone whom circumstances put in his power. It was out of the question that he should send Kalimo away. He belonged to Kalimo; Kalimo had come more than a thousand miles, out of retirement in his village, to claim him. The thought appalled him: to cook and clean for him as if his were the definitive claim on Kalimo’s life.

  He went into the kitchen where Kalimo, hearing him begin to move about, was making tea. Bray had seen Mahlope through the living-room window—put out to grass, literally: swinging at it with a home—honed scythe made of a bit of iron fencing. “Kalimo, did you talk to Mahlope about the job?” He spoke in Gala. “Mukwayi?’” I took on Mahlope to look after the house, you see.”

  Kalimo made the deep hum with which matters were settled. He had got older; he drew out these sounds now, like an old man in the sun. “Mahlope will be for the garden, and to clean the car. I am your cook. And he has the washing to do. We always had a small boy for the outside work.”

  “Yes, but I’m not the D.C. any more, you must remember. And I’m here on my own. This isn’t the big house, with a whole family. I don’t need more than one person to look after me.”

  Kalimo swilled out the teapot with boiling water, measured the tea into it, poured on the water, and replaced the lid, carefully turning it so that the retaining lip was in the right place.

  “One person to cook and wash and everything—just for me.”

  “Does Mukwayi want cake with tea, or biscuit?”

  Of course, Kalimo would have baked cakes, put the household on a proper footing, against his return. He made Bray feel the insolence of teaching a man his own business, of so much as bringing up the subject.

  Kalimo carried the tray into the living-room. As he put it down he said, “I have always looked after you. Cooking, washing, outside—it’s the same for me.”

  Bray said, “You are not tired?”

  He had sat down at his table. Kalimo looked down at him, and smiled. “And you? You are not tired.”

  “All right. I’ll explain to Mahlope. We’ll keep him until we can find him another job. You can make use of him—the garden, whatever you think.”

  After dinner he wrote to Olivia. Well, you won’t have any doubts about how I’m being looked after from now on; Kalimo has turned up. He heard through the grape—vine—took him a month to get here, by bus and on foot. I’m embarrassed but suppose I’m lucky. The bad old good days come back.

  Shinza. Edward Shinza. Even the occurrence of Kalimo was a reminder. He ought to go and see him; it was easy to assume to himself that he thought of it often; he did not, in fact. The work he was doing, unchecked by distraction or interruption, filled his mind. In the capital, work would have been compressed into a few hours a day, jostled by other demands and the company of friends. But now although he was often conscious of being alone—alone at night, with a Christmas bee dinning at the light, and the bare furniture taking on the waiting—room watchfulness of a solitary’s surroundings; alone in the garden, reading letters and papers at his table under the fig tree—the interviews, the paper—work, were a preoccupation that expanded to take up the days and long evenings. Dando had just written again and asked among other things, whether he had seen Shinza—Dando’s writing was so difficult to read and covered so closely the sheets of thin paper that his were the sort of letters one put aside to read more attentively another time. Roly would have gone off with a bottle to get drunk with Shinza long ago, by now. He throve on dissatisfactions, paradox and irony. He would have made himself welcome with a man at his own funeral, if that were a possible occasion for friendship and solidarity. Whenever Bray saw himself coming into Shinza’s company once again, he felt suddenly that there would be nothing to say: he was brought back by Mweta, now he was working for Mweta. It was better to concentrate on such practical matters as the possibility of resuscitating the old woodworking and shoemaking workshop in the town and expanding it to become a sort of modest trades school. He discussed this with Malemba. The Education Department had abolished these rural workshops on the principle that everyone was to get a proper education now; the black man was no longer to be trained just sufficiently to do the white man’s odd jobs for him. “But what about mechanics and plumbers, if you’re going to raise the standard of living? And you’re still going to need village carpenters and shoemakers for a long, long time in communities like this one where people haven’t yet completely made the changeover to a money economy and buying their needs in the stores. If we can train people in crafts that will give them a living, we’ll have some alternative to the drift to the towns. It’s a better idea than labour camps, eh?” Malemba, Bray saw, would be glad to have the suggestion come from him; Malemba himself thought it unrealistic for the government rural workshops to have been closed, but did not wish it to be thought, in educational circles in the capital, that he was a backward provincial when it came to demanding higher education for the people. Malemba was not a sycophant but he needed a little stiffening of confidence; it was one of the small satisfactions that Bray had set himself to find worth while, to see that through their working together, Malemba was beginning to gain it.

  Yet he said to Aleke, “I’d like to look in on Edward Shinza one of these days.” He was in Aleke’s house—his own old house—on a Saturday afternoon: there was no exchange of invitations for drinks and dinners between officials as there had been when officialdom was white, but Aleke had said, “Why don’t you come over to my place?” and so clearly meant the open invitation that Bray had taken it up as casually and genuinely. The radio, as always, was playing loudly on the veranda. Some
of the seven children pushed toy cars through tracks scratched in the earth of the tubs where Olivia had once grown miniature orange trees.

  “The road’s very bad that way, they tell me,” Aleke said, lazily, though not exactly without interest.

  Bray realized that he had brought up the subject because, although he would go and see Shinza openly, would tell Mweta so himself—indeed Mweta would expect him to seek out Shinza—he had some cautious reluctance to have Aleke reporting that he had visited Shinza. It should be established that it was not a matter of any interest to anyone except himself.

  Mrs. Aleke brought tea and was sent away to fetch beer instead; she tried to clear the veranda of children, but Aleke was one of those plump, muscular men whose self—confidence, apparently made flesh, exerts a tactile attraction over women and children. His small sons and daughters ran back to press against his round spread thighs. He spoke of his wife as if she were not there. “She’s a woman who can’t get children to listen. The same with the chickens. She chases them one way, they go the other.”

  “They’re naughty.” She looked helplessly and resentfully at the children.

  “We used to hear my mother’s voice.” He fondled the children; it was easy for him. When he had had enough he would pick them off himself like burrs. She said to Bray, “And your wife is coming here? This place’s dead. There is nothing in the shops, I wish I could get away to town, honestly.”

  But she was drawn, like the children, to her husband, though she did not quite touch him. He shooed them all away, just as easily, with a gesture of demanding air.

  Bray felt a small rankling in himself for having put his acquaintance with Aleke momentarily on a footing of caution. Why should Aleke even think of him in terms of political manoeuvre? Telling Mweta what he thought was one thing; anything that might be construed as political action was another, and something he set himself outside from the beginning of his return. This disinterest was only confirmed by the right to look up an old friend, whoever he might be.

  The unease—living alone one became too self—regarding—had the effect of making his plans turn out to take into account the Bashi Flats—Shinza’s area. He went off one morning, meaning to go through the mountains where the iron-ore mine was, on the way, and to take a week over it. He remembered that Shinza liked cheroots, and called in at the boma as he left Gala; there was a new box in the desk Aleke had allotted him. The office door opened on someone who had been about to open it from the other side—a young white woman stood with her hands, palm open, drawn back at the level of her breasts. He smiled politely and then saw that she knew him; it was Rebecca Edwards, of Vivien’s house in the capital. While he rummaged for the cigars, she explained that she had come up to work for Aleke. “Roly said he’d written to you, so I told Vivien not to bother.” Of course there had been something in Dando’s letter—an illegible name. “Was there anything I could have done for you?”

  “Oh no, you know how they are down there. The whole network has to be alerted everytime somebody moves.”

  He left a good—bye message with her, for Aleke. “He must be triumphant. He’s been threatening to storm the Ministry and carry off a secretary.”

  “I came quietly,” the girl said, with her good chap smile.

  It had rained in the night and the elephant grass was matted with brilliant dew. He could hear his tyres cutting the first tread of the day into the wet packed sand on the road; his blunted sense of smell revived to something of the animal’s keen nose. Bamboo, rocks, lichens—they stood out fresh as a rock—painting doused with water. Ten miles or so from Gala he picked up a young man who was trudging along with a cardboard suitcase. There were other people here and there on the road, women with bundles and pots, barefoot country people criss—crossing the forest and the grass in the ordinary course of their daily lives as clerks and shoppers move about the streets of a town, but this man in shirt—sleeves with new shoes spattered with mud was, at a glance, outside this activity: Bray stopped just ahead of him, and he got into the car without a word. “I’m going to the mine—that direction. How far’re you going?” “That will be all right.”

  The presence in the car changed the mood of the morning; the sensuous pleasure of it sank back. The sunlight was empty upon a heavily charged object: the man breathed quietly, his lips closed with a small sound now and then on something he had not said aloud, and Bray saw, out of the corner of his eye, curly lashes slow—blinking and a line of sickness or strain marking the coarse cheek. His trousers were very clean and had the concave and convex lines of having been folded small in a suitcase. Once he took the ball—point pen out of his shirt—pocket and clicked the point in and out in a beautiful, matt—black hand.

  Bray did not know whether the youngster was merely paralysed by the social proximity of a white man—so often the old dependencies, the unformulated resentments, the spell in which even the simplest of confrontations had been held so long, struck dumb—or whether he did not want to speak or be spoken to. Yet his presence was extraordinarily oppressive. Bray tried Gala; the young man said, without response, “I am returning home.” How long had he been in town? “Two months and seventeen days.” Bray did not want an interrogation; the man accepted a cigarette and Bray let the motion of the car and the focus of the passing road contain them dreamily.

  The iron-ore mine was a purplish—red gash in the foothills before the pass. A sandcastle mountain of the same colour had been thrown up beside it, bare of the green skin of bush and grass that hid this gory earth on the hills. A new road led to it; on a nearby slope, a settlement was drawn and small figures were set down here and there, moving thinly. As the car came nearer they became the demonic figures of miners everywhere, faces streaked with lurid dirt under helmets, gumboots clogged with clay—the dank look of men who daily come back from the grave.

  “I’m going to call in on someone who has a place about three miles on … ?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Bray had thought he would get off at the mine; that was what was understood—but it didn’t matter. “Just tell me when we get near your village.” The young man heavily waved a hand to suggest an infinite distance, or indifference. They drove to the cattle ranch that had been remote fifteen years ago, when George Boxer settled there. Now there were a mine and telephone wires, over the hill. Boxer was still there, still wearing immaculately polished leather leggings, and attended by three Afghan hounds lean and wild in locks of matted hair. Boxer was one of those men whose sole connection with the world is achieved through a struggle with nature. The affairs of men did not engage his mind. Men themselves, white or black, had a reality for him only insofar as they were engaged with him in that struggle. Whether the man who searched with him for a lost heifer or worked with him to repair a fence was black or white was not a factor: the definitive situation was that of two men, himself and another, in conflict with dry rot in a fence—post, or with the marauding leopard who, too, was after the heifer. He had not joined in the settlers’ hue and cry against Bray ten years ago for the same reason that he hadn’t joined the exodus of settlers with the coming of independence: it was not that he had no feelings about colour, but that he had no communion with human beings of any colour. Circumstances—Bray’s circumstances, then—had made Boxer look like a friend simply because he was indifferent to being an enemy, but Bray had always known that this appearance had no more meaning in its way than that other, physical, appearance of Boxer’s—he wore the clothes, maintained the manners and household conventions of his public—school background not as if these were the manifestations of a place in a highly evolved society, but as if they were the markings, habits, and lair with which, unconscious of them (like any hare or jackal), he had been born.

  Bray was directed down from the house to one of the cattle camps to find Boxer. While they were talking, looking at Boxer’s two fine bulls that he had bred himself, Bray forgot his passenger. Boxer began to walk Bray up to the house past the car: “There’s s
omeone I’m giving a lift.” Boxer glanced at the passenger, swept aside the pause— “I’ll get something sent down to him. You’ll have lunch, of course.” But Bray insisted that tea or a drink was all he could stay for. They went into the living-room-cum-library that Boxer had panelled in the local mahogany; it was dimly like a headmaster’s study, although the reference books were agricultural. The tea—tray had a silver inscription, the inherited English furniture was set about as Bray now remembered the room. They talked about the mine. “Any chance of a find on your property? I suppose you’ve had it prospected?” Boxer took a can of beer out of a cabinet filled with tarnished decanters. “I don’t have to worry. There’s nothing. The Company’s gone over every inch. At one time I had it all planned—there’d be a vein here; how much I’d be paid out; the twenty thousand acres I’d had my eye on to buy down on the Bashi Flats. Kept me amused many nights. Awake, anyway.”

  The books on cattle breeding had pushed the Mort d’Arthur, the Iliad and Churchill’s memoirs to the top shelves but there were book—club novels and The Alexandria Quartet in paperback accessible among the farming journals, and some seedpods and a giant snail—shell lying among rifle cartridges on a tray. —Bray remembered George Boxer’s wife, a black—haired woman with green eyes, pretty until she smiled on little, stained, cracked teeth. They had had a son; just entered Sandhurst, Boxer said, as if reminded of something he hadn’t thought of lately.