A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

“Worked at the fish—meal factory.”

  Bray made a sudden, uncontrolled gesture for Shinza’s attention—and Shinza gave way, calmly: “Spoke to the other chaps about pay and conditions and so on. Told them something of how the fishing concessions with the company work. The time the government renewed the concessions for another five years—you know …”

  Mweta’s minister had renewed the contract with the British—Belgian trawling company under terms that transferred a percentage of the stock to the government, but left the wages of the workers at the level of colonial times.

  Bray sat forward clumsily, his hands dangled between his knees.

  Shinza stuck another cigarette in his mouth, spoke round it, standing up to thrust for the matches in the dressing—gown pocket. “There were a few little meetings down in the township—the men from the factory and the lime—works fellows. The trade—union steward didn’t like it. The Young Pioneers didn’t like it.”

  “They arrested the boy?”

  “I suppose you call it that. They took him away and locked him up; they had a lot of questions to ask, it took two months or so, and now you gave him a lift home.” Shinza finished it off abruptly, like a fairy story for a child.

  “More than two months.” About the time he had arrived in Gala. “I never heard a word.”

  “No,” said Shinza, biting off the end of a yawn, “not a word. From Lebaliso? From Aleke?”

  “Whose responsibility would an order like that be? Who signs? There’s no preventive detention law in this country now.”

  “Oh well, there’s the tradition, from the old days of the Emergency.” There was the growing feeling that Shinza was closing the conversation.

  “But whose orders?”

  Shinza said patiently, boredly, “Lebaliso. Aleke.”

  “I’d like to talk to the boy.”

  “He’s had enough ‘questions,’” said Shinza.

  “It’s possible that Mweta doesn’t know,” Bray said.

  Shinza laughed. Bray was standing about; he did not know where to put himself, he heard his own shoes creaking. Shinza’s legs were thrust before him under the dressing—gown, the eyes held in a disgusted, amused sympathy. Bray said, “I mustn’t take these away with me again”; he put the box of cigarillos on the washing. “Your old brand.”

  Shinza got up, the situation now on his own terms. “God, man, I love those things. I smoke these damned cigarettes nowadays, someone brings them in for me. Can you get me some more of those, James? I’d like a case, send them to me from England, eh?” When his man came in he ignored him and sauntered Bray through a kitchen and out of the house to another house, a mud—and-thatch one.

  “The beer she makes isn’t too bad,” he said by way of introduction to a young woman who scuttled behind the dirty curtain that divided the house into two rooms. He called after her and in a moment she came back with a clean dress on and her feet hobbling into shoes. “She’s just had a baby,” he said, in Gala. “Where’s your son, Talisa, show off your son,” and she laughed and answered in the spirit of the dialogue before a stranger, “Why can’t you let him sleep, why do you have to look at him all the time?” “You’re jealous. I’ve got a lot of children, one more doesn’t matter to me. —It’s her first,” he said to Bray, and went behind the curtain, where there were laughter and argument, and he came out tugging the dressing—gown straight with one hand, crimping his eyes as he blew cigarette smoke upwards to keep it away from the tiny baby he held, wearing only a little vest, in his other hand. It was pink—brown, faintly translucent, with minute hands and feet stirring, and a watch—sized, closed face. The girl took the cigarette out of Shinza’s mouth as she gazed at the baby, and with the first finger of his other hand he delicately traced the convolutions of its ear, whose lines were still compressed from the womb. It peed in a weak little arc, like the squirt from some small sea—creature disturbed in its shell. Shinza laughed, making lewd remarks, almost tossing it to the mother, while she was joyously fussed and embarrassed and bore it away behind the curtain, where it burst into surprisingly powerful yells that rivalled its father’s laughter. He moved about looking for a cloth. The mud room smelled coolly of fetid infant, beer, woodsmoke. There were clothing, cooking pots, newspapers, a radio, a brand—new perambulator of the kind you see in European parks—the decent disorder of intimacy. A trunk with labels from Southampton docks, San Francisco, and New York (Shinza was of the generation that got scholarships to attend Negro universities in America; Mweta was born too late for that and went straight into politics from school) had a lace mat and fancy coffee service set out upon it. Shinza grabbed a garment of some kind and mopped his chest, tossing the rag into a corner. A kitchen table with an old typewriter was his desk. There was a packing—case of books in disarray; behind it, the only adornment on the walls, a football—team group—Nkrumah, cross—eyed Fanon, mascot Selassie, Guevara, a face among others that was Shinza himself: a meeting of Afro—Asian countries in Cairo, the beginning of the Sixties. Shinza saw Bray looking, and said, “Rogue’s gallery.” He was smoking one of the cigars; he had the authority, pitched here in this mud tent, of a commander in the field.

  They drank home—brew and talked general politics in a distracted fashion, for Shinza was twice called out (in the sun, men waited like horses, moved away to speak with him), the girl and baby were about. None of these things was allowed to interrupt the talk, not because Shinza was giving Bray his full attention but because all that passed between them was peripheral, to Shinza.

  The second time Shinza returned to the hut, Bray stopped him as he came in: “How far did it go with the boy?”

  Shinza made a pantomime of jerking his head, blinking. “What?”

  “‘Questions,’ you said. Enough ‘questions’?”

  Shinza kept the cold butt of the cigar in his mouth. “Oh you know what questions amount to, James.”

  “Do I?”

  “And after all, Mweta’s your man, you have certain ideas about him, about us ….”

  Bray hardened in the indifference as flesh contracts in a cool breeze.

  “Questions’ve got to get answers. Somehow. If not one way then the other. You know.”

  “I want to know what happened.”

  Shinza said, explaining to a child, “James, his head wouldn’t answer, so they put their questions on his back.”

  “I see.”

  “You can see the questions on his back. You want to see them? I’ll fetch him for you.” As if to get it over with, he became whimsically determined, now, to have Bray examine the exhibit. “I don’t want you to believe any wild stories from the bush—I’ll fetch him and you can look. No, no, you stay, I’ll fetch him for you.”

  Bray was left standing alone in the presence of Shinza’s things. The girl was quiet behind the curtain—it seemed that she was listening; she did not come out.

  Quickly Shinza was in the room again, marshalling the youngster ahead. The boy gave no sign of recognition—Bray’s greeting died, irrelevant. Shinza said in Gala, “Bend over.” He lifted the boy’s shirt. The boy stood, legs apart, hands braced on his knees. He did not look round. From his waist, narrowed by the weight of his body falling away from the spine, his back broadened to the muscles under the shoulder, yellowish round the waist, powder—grey in the shallow ditch on either side of the vertebrae, stale brown over the muscles and shoulders. The pores of the skin were raised, grainy with hardened sebaceous secretion that had not been released by fresh air and sun for a long time. Skin that had lost its gloss like the coat of an animal kept in confinement; Bray knew that skin; had not seen it since the days when he was on the magistrate’s bench, as D.C., and prisoners had come before him. In the house in Wiltshire, such things—the reality of such things had no existence.

  He was so awakened by the fact of the skin that the weals that had healed across it, tender, slightly puckered strips with the satiny look of lips, scarcely gave up their meaning. Scars, yes, wounds, yes, the protest,
the long memory of the body for all that is done to it—the anger of pimples, rough patches, all recording, like messages scratched on the bark of a tree. The small depression in the rib cage, low down on the left—hand side, for instance: where did that come from? A congenital deformation? A stunting of the bone through some early nutritional deficiency?—He ran his finger over the braille of a scar—then took it away, burned with embarrassment. The boy remained bent, an object, as he must have been made to bend for the blows themselves. Some of the scars were no more than faint marks left paler than the surrounding skin, blending into it, forgetting, soon to link imperceptibly with the other skin cells. That one must have gone deep and gaped on the flesh, to have had to make such a thick ribbon of scar tissue to make it whole. Suddenly he saw the pattern of the blows, sliced regularly across the back as the cuts in a piece of larded meat. On the calf—muscle of one strong, rachitically bowed leg another pale slash showed through the sparse hairs. Bray described it in the air an inch or two away from the flesh, looking at Shinza: and that?

  “Somebody missed,” Shinza said. His lips lifted, the parenthesis of surrounding beard moved back; he showed his teeth a moment, and then the grin sank away as the lips slid down over the teeth again.

  It might have been an old scar from some innocent injury—a fall, an accident—unconnected with the prison at Gala, but Shinza had no time for such niceties of distinction. Bray saw that to him all wounds were one; and that his own.

  “What could they get from him that was worth this.”

  And now Shinza really grinned, putting his palm on the boy’s rump as on a trophy. He said with the pleasure of being proved right, “Good old James, just the same as ever.”

  Bray said in Gala, “Why doesn’t he get up—” and Shinza, recalled to something unimportant, gave the rump a friendly clap and said in English, “Okay. That’s it.”

  The boy pushed his shirt into his shorts. Bray wanted to say something to him but when he looked at him the boy at once fixed his eyes on Shinza.

  “Well then,” Bray said, “what did he have to keep to himself that would make him take this?”

  “James, James. You see a hero behind every bush, when you come back here. He told them whatever he knew as soon as they took him. Right away. Without a scratch. But they had some questions he didn’t know the answers to. It’s a method; if someone won’t talk, never mind why, you’re not expected to know why—let him have it. It’s routine.”

  “We know. Of course it’s happening all over the world. But in what sort of places.”

  Shinza said, “This place, James.” And he gave a short laugh and added, “Ay?”

  Bray said, “It’s still possible Mweta doesn’t know.”

  Shinza considered an academic question; “Not about this one, no—keep up with every little instance, you can’t expect that.” To the boy, “All right.”

  The boy looked at Bray at last, and gave him the polite form of leavetaking, in Gala. Shinza recalled him and tossed over a packet of the cigarettes he had put aside for the cigars. The boy took them without a word and left.

  Bray said, “The thing to do is to take a statement. A statement made before both of us.”

  Shinza was looking at him almost with fondness. “Those days are over.”

  “You give up too easily, Shinza.” Bray took on in mock submission the naïveté imputed to him. He waited for Shinza to accept this form of refutation, to begin to speak.

  “Oh yes,” Shinza said, “I’m just a lazy bastard, rusting away. Plotting. No, no, not plotting, rotting. Whatever they like to think, it’s up to them. A case for lung cancer. Some say liver. —Tell me, how’s old Dando? And the old crowd, in London? I hear from Cameron now and then, if you ever see him, tell him where I am we use the talking drums, that’s why I don’t write.” The girl came out with the baby, now wide awake again, and they sat, lordly, drinking more beer and talking the sort of joking nonsense between old friends that admits a third presence.

  Shinza left open no way that led to himself. But leaving, Bray said, “I’ll be back.” It hung in the air, a remark in bad taste. Of course Shinza understood that he meant to see Mweta; but Shinza was merely lingering politely at the reed fence, smiling, his attention cocked, like a dog’s ears pointed backward, elsewhere. “You making a long stay this time?” he remarked absently to Mweta’s guest.

  “If I thought I could achieve anything.”

  Shinza ignored the question implied. “What’s it again, James—schools? Wha’d’you know about schoolmastering.”

  “I’m working with Sampson Malemba on the schools, for one thing—looking at the whole educational system, really; technical schools, trades schools, that’s what’s needed, too—a modest start with adult education for the new sort of youngsters coming along with a bit of industry going, now, in Gala itself.”

  The lime works. The fish—meal factory, where his passenger came from.

  Shinza nodded.

  Bray said suddenly, “Anything you need, Edward …”

  They stood there at a distance for a moment.

  “Oh well, the cigars—you said you’d get them for me from England. That’d be fine, you know.” Shinza was smiling.

  With his hands dragging down the dressing—gown pockets so that his muscular buttocks jutted along as he walked, he disappeared into the house where Bray had waited for him. Bray did what he had to do; went to the school in the village, drove on twenty miles to the White Fathers’ Mission school, turned, at last, back along the road he had come and passed without stopping the children still making a hobby—horse out of the old mangle, the goats, the bicycles, the mud houses, and the reed stockade where Shinza was. But Bray got through it all with blind attention, holding off a mental pressure that built up, waiting for the gap through which it would burst. The wobbling of the gear—shaft in his palm over the terrible road became the expression of a trembling of his hand itself, suppressed. Two months and seventeen days. Back here only a few months and already it’s begun—the beating up, the putting away. An old story. No wonder Shinza couldn’t resist the opportunity to sneer at his reaction. He had never counted himself among those whose radical liberalism amounts to no more than an abstract distaste for coercive methods. He had never before found himself out in that particular kind of dishonesty. Over the years he had accepted—at a distance—some ugly facts if, unfortunately, they appeared unavoidable to gain the social change he believed in. He struggled to set aside the vision of the boy’s back. He’d forgive a great deal to see achieved the sort of state that Shinza and Mweta had visualized together for the country.

  But the “questioning” of the boy stood between Shinza and Mweta.

  And himself? Would he forgive himself? Perhaps this agitation of his was a matter of not wanting to get his own hands dirty. That was his kind of dishonesty. Let it be done if it must be, but not by me, let me not put my hand to it, not by even so much as a signature at the bottom of a report on education. Was that it?

  Yet he had an impulse to go straight to the capital at once; to Mweta; as if that would do away once and for all with ambiguities: his own as well as those of what had happened. —Aleke? He ought at least to talk to Aleke first, get the facts straight. Aleke must have been the one to take authority, to sign. He saw Aleke and himself, moving in and out about houses, boma, village street in Gala, entwining waving antennae when their paths crossed, senselessly as ants. But Aleke would never have shut a man away on his own initiative; then was it Aleke taking orders from Lebaliso? Aleke and Bray laughed at Lebaliso, a jerky little man who had taken over from Major Conner, whose batman he had been in the war. Lebaliso was a nonentity; Aleke certainly was not: both would do as they were told. Aleke was an efficient civil servant, independent but not politically minded or politically ambitious. If an order came from the capital, and it did not touch upon the day—to-day smooth running of his local administration, he would simply sign. Easy—going, confident, sitting on his veranda working at his pap
ers among the noise of children, he knew what he was doing and presumed the people up there at the top knew what they were doing, too. After all, the government was PIP. On the solid convictions of people like Aleke governments come to power but are never threatened; Aleke would never change his mind about Mweta, or anything else.

  Mweta had given Justice to Justin Chekwe; Bray didn’t know him well, but Roly Dando called him a Gray’s Inn pin—up boy— “Who knows what really lies under that nylon wig, I sat next him at dinner and caught him admiring himself in a soup spoon—” Dando talked so much: “Once you’ve been given Justice, you don’t have much to do with justice any more. You keep the peace the way the big boys want it kept. Same with the Attorney—General’s job—a pair of Keystone Cops, Justice and I, really, that’s all. He’ll be all right, I suppose, so long as Mweta stays on the straight and narrow.” He would phone Dando as soon as he got home; and decided as suddenly that it was not the thing to do. The house had a party line and anyway the local exchange would hear every word. He recoiled from Roly’s ventriloquist patter coming out of the distance.

  While Bray was with Shinza he had felt like an adult reluctant to believe that a favourite child has lied or cheated. He was afraid, in Shinza’s house, that Mweta did know. But now—alone to the horizon of gentle grasses with no sign from another human except the flash of a paraffin tin carried on a woman’s head—he felt there was the possibility that Mweta really did not know, that the size of this unwieldy country with its communications that dwindled out in flooded tracks and ant—eaten telephone poles made it feasible for people to take the law into their own hands while behind the red brick façade of the President’s Residence, telephones, telex, and the planes coming to the airport down the road brought Mweta closer to Addis, New York, and London than to this grass—inundated steppe, soughed down under the empty sky.

  In the pass (driving directly now, he covered in one day what had taken him three) the confidence went again, as unreasonably. Rough, dark—flanked mountains enclosed the road and himself. Shinza had another kind of confidence, one that Bray was provoked by, not just in the mind, but in the body, in the senses; Shinza moved in his immediate consciousness, in images so vivid that he felt a queer alarm. A restlessness stirred resentfully in the tamped—down ground of his being, put out a touch on some nerve that (of course) had atrophied long ago, as the vagus nerve is made obsolete by maturity and the pituitary gland ceases to function when growth is complete. Shinza’s bare strong feet, misshapen by shoes, tramped the mud floor—the flourish of a stage Othello before Cyprus. He was smoking cigarettes smuggled from over the border; friends across the border: those who had cigarettes probably had money and arms as well. And the baby; why did the baby keep cropping up?—Shinza held it out in his hand as casually as he had fathered it on that girl. He did not even boast of having a new young wife, it was nothing to him, nothing was put behind him….