A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  Adelaide did most of the talking, as always, taking over Felicity’s sentences and finishing them for her. They were mainly concerned with Olivia—she was at home in Wiltshire, wasn’t she? She would be there?

  “Are you going over on a visit?”

  “Oh, no—we’re—”

  “You must have heard that we’re leaving,” Adelaide stated. “Surely you’ve heard.”

  It seemed necessary to apologize, as if for lack of interest.

  “There are so many things I don’t seem to hear.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose you see much of them,” Felicity said, meaning the local white residents.

  “Oh, it’s all right, everything is quite amicable, you know. —I’ve so often thought of coming to see you, and then I kept promising myself, when Olivia comes—”

  Adelaide’s old head, the thin hair kept the colour and texture of mattress coir, under a hairnet, tremored rather than was shaken. She said firmly, “Our time has run out. We are museum pieces, better put away in a cupboard somewhere.”

  He said, “I should have thought you would have been quite happy to let it run out, here. You really feel you must leave your place? I think you’d have nothing to worry about, you’d be left in peace?”

  Felicity said, “We’ve had these inspectors coming—Adelaide had to guarantee that we’d not lay anybody off, in the plantation, you know. And they have a new native inspector for the schools—he wanted to know if I was following the syllabus and he—”

  “There’s nothing the matter with that, Felicity.” Adelaide spoke to her and yet ignored her. “But we’re too old, James. You can’t stay on in a country like this just to be left in peace.”

  They chatted while Bray’s tyres were pumped and his battery topped up with water. He promised to write to Olivia and tell her the Misses Fowler were coming. He saw that Adelaide’s books were Lord Wavell’s memoirs and a Mickey Spillane.

  They went off down the street under the trees, Adelaide with her white cotton gloves and hairnet, Felicity in her baggy slacks and men’s sandals. Old Adelaide (they used to call her Lady Hester Stanhope, they used to laugh about her, he and Olivia) was not a romantic, after all. She had not been a liberal and now she was not a romantic. The old girls hadn’t wanted to sit in their drawing—room with Africans, but now they did not expect to be left in peace there. They had recognized themselves for an anachronism.

  By such encounters as this, remote from him, really, his mind was tipped. Again, the letter was mentally torn up. Thrown to the winds. What sort of priggish absurdity did he make of himself? The virginal drawing away of skirts from the dirt. I am not—this, not—that. What am I, then, for God’s sake? A boy scout? Clapping my hand over my backside? A vast impatience with himself welled up; and that was something new to him, too, another kind of violation—he had never before been sufficiently self—centred to indulge in self—disgust. There had always been too much to do. But now I refuse, I refuse to act. Because it’s not my place to do so.

  He thought again: then go away, go back to the house in Wiltshire. Finish the damned education thing. May be some use, can’t do any harm. What you set out to do.

  Yet like the gradual onset of a toothache or a headache came the recurrent tension that he was going to see Shinza, couldn’t stop himself, would one day find himself calmly making the small preparations to drive back to the Bashi. He would go to Shinza again, and he would know why when he got there.

  Chapter 11

  The Tlumes, the Edwards girl and her children, the Alekes and Bray—they drifted together and saw each other almost every day without any real intimacy of friendship. Gala was so small; the Tlumes and the Alekes, along with a few other officials’ families, were isolated from the black town; Rebecca, because she was a newcomer living under conditions new to the white community, and Bray, because of the past, both were isolated from the white town. Bray often shared the evening meal at the Malembas down in the old segregated township, but also he sometimes would be summoned by a barefoot delegation of Edwards and Tlume children to come over and eat at the Tlume house across the vacant piece of ground. And the Alekes’ house—his own old house—by virtue of its size was the sort of place where people converged. His bachelor shelter, without woman or child, remained apart, the table laid for a meal and shrouded against flies by Kalimo’s net.

  They were all going to the lake for the day, one weekend, and he found himself included in the party. An overflow of children and some picnic paraphernalia were dumped at his house as his share of the transport; the children sang school songs to him as he drove. On arrival, the company burst out of the cars like a cageful of released birds and scattered with shouts and clatter. Bray and Aleke were left to unpack; Aleke had brought a scythe in anticipation of the waist—high grass on the lake shore and took off his shirt while he cleared a space as easily as any labourer outside the boma. He had sliced a small snake in two—a harmless grass—snake. He put it aside, in schoolboy pleasure, to show the others, and, wiping the blade with a handful of grass, stood eyeing Bray amusedly. He remarked, “So we’re getting rid of Lebaliso.”

  “You’re what?”

  Aleke lowered his young bulk into the cut grass and took one of the two—week-old English newspapers Bray had brought along. “The note came yesterday. He doesn’t know yet. Transferred. To the Eastern Province. Masama district.” His interest was taken by a frontpage picture showing people in androgynous dress—boots, mandarin coats, flowing trousers, leis and necklaces, waxwork uniforms—and a few elderly faces in morning coats and top—hats, advancing like an apocalyptic army, under the caption PEER’S SON WEDS: WEDDING GUESTS JOIN VIETNAM PROTEST MARCH.

  It was Bray’s turn to watch him. “Aren’t you surprised, then?”

  Aleke smiled; it seemed to be at the picture. Then he looked up. “No, I’m not surprised.”

  “Well I am!”

  Aleke’s big face opened in a laugh; he was tolerant of power. If Bray could go to the capital and have the ear of the President, well, that must be accepted as just another fact. Of course Aleke, too, in his way, wanted to do his job and be left alone.

  Bray said, “Well, it’s a good thing, anyway.” Aleke was amiably unresponsive. He lay back on one elbow, his thick hairless chest and muscular yet sensuously fleshy male breasts moved by relaxed, even breathing. He was rather magnificent; Bray thought flittingly of old engravings of African kings, curiously at ease, their flesh a royal appurtenance. “Of course he might just as well have got promotion for his powers of foresight. Still, that youngster should have brought an action against him.”

  They fell silent, turning over the pages of the papers. Bray was reading a local daily that came up from the capital twenty—four hours late. Gwenzi, Minister of Mines, appealed to the mine workers not to aspire “irresponsibly” to the level of pay and benefits that the industry had to pay to foreign experts; the experts would “continue to be a necessity” for the development of the gold mines over the next twenty years. A trade union spokesman said that some of the whites had “grown from boys to men” in the mines; why did they have to have paid air tickets to other countries and special home leave when they “lived all their days around the corner from the mine?” The Secretary for Justice denied rumours that a ritual murder, the first incident of its kind for many years, was in fact a political murder, and that an inquiry was about to be instituted.

  Cut grass swathes glistened all round; the voices of the women, calling in children, came sharply overhead and wavered out across the water. Winter hardly altered the humidity down at the lake; the air was so heat—heavy you could almost see each sound’s trajectory, like the smoke left hanging in space by a jet plane.

  After lunch, Nongwaye Tlume got talking to some fishermen and borrowed their boat. It was too small to hold all the children safely; Bray intervened, and had to take two of the younger ones, with Rebecca in charge, in a pirogue. Aleke and his seventh child slept in an identical glaze of beer and mother�
�s milk.

  The big boat went off with cheers and waves, pushed out of the reeds by splay—footed, grunting fishermen. Bray paddled the rough craft scooped out of a tree—trunk with the careful skill of his undergraduate days. He kept close to the shore; his load seemed tilted by the great curve of the lake, rising to the horizon beyond them, glittering and contracting in mirages of distance. They had the sensation of being on the back of some shiny scaled creature, so huge that its whole shape could not be made out from any one point. The other boat danced and glided out of focus, becoming a black shape slipping in and out of the light of heat—dazzle and water. The faces of the brown and white children and the girl were lit up from underneath by reflections off the water; he had the rhythm of his paddle now, and saw them, quieted, with that private expression of being taken up by a new mode of sensation that people get when they find themselves afloat.

  The girl had half—moons of sweat under the arms of her shirt. Her trousers were rolled up to the knee and her rather coarse, stubby feet were washed, like the children’s, by the muddy ooze at the bottom of the pirogue. He realized how solemnly he had applied himself to his paddling, and the two adults grinned at each other, restfully.

  The children wanted to swim; everywhere the water was pale green, clear, and flaccid to the touch, gentle, but too deep for them where the shoreline was free of reeds and followed a low cliff, and with the danger of crocodiles when the pirogue came to the shallows. Bray struck out for a small island shaved of undergrowth six feet up from the water to prevent tsetse fly from breeding; the children were diverted, and forgot about swimming. But when he slowly gained the other side of the island, there was a real beach—perfect white sand, a baobab spreading, the boles of dead trees washed up to lean on. The girl grew as excited as the children. “Oh lovely—but there can’t be any danger here? Look, we can see to the bottom, we could see anything in the water from yards off—”

  He and the girl got out of the pirogue and lugged it onto the sand; it was quite an effort. Their voices were loud in this uninhabited place. His shorts rolled thigh—high, he waded in precaution from one end of the inlet to the other; but there were no reeds, no half—submerged logs that might suddenly come to life. “I think it’s perfectly safe.” The children were already naked. She began to climb out of her clothes with the hopping awkwardness of a woman taking off trousers—she was wearing a bathing suit underneath, a flowered affair that cut into her thighs and left white weals in the sun—browned flesh as she eased it away from her legs. She ran into the warm water, jogging softly, with a small waddling fat black child by one hand and a skinny white one gaily jerking and jumping from the other.

  He had stretched himself out on the sand but stood up and kept watch while they were in the water, his short—sighted gaze, through his glasses, patrolling the limpid pallor and shimmer in which they were immersed. The black baby was a startlingly clear shape all the time, the others would disappear in some odd elision of the light, only a shoulder, a raised hand, or the glisten of a cheek taking form. Where no one lives, time has no meaning, human concerns are irrelevant—an intense state of being takes over. For those minutes that he stood with his hand shading his eyes, the most ancient of gestures, he was purely his own existence, outside the mutations of any given stage of it. He was returned to himself, neither young nor middle—aged, neither secreting the spit of individual consciousness nor using it to paste together the mud—nest of an enclosing mode of life. He smoked a cigar. He might have been the smoke. The woman and children shrieked as a fish exploded itself out of the water, mouth to tail, and back again in one movement. He saw their faces, turned to him for laughing confirmation, as if from another shore.

  She brought the children back and stood gasping a little and pressing back from her forehead her wet hair, so that runnels poured over neck and shoulders, beading against the natural waxiness of the skin. “It’s—so—glorious—pity—you—didn’t—” She had no breath; undecided, she went in again by herself, farther out, this time. He felt he could not stand watching her alone. It would be an intrusion on her freedom, out there. He sat with his arm on one knee, vigilant without seeming so, sweeping his glance regularly across the water. That wet, femininely mobile body, tremblingly fleshy, that had stood so naturally before him just now, the sodden cloth of the bathing suit moulding into the dip of the navel and cupping over the pubis, the few little curly hairs that escaped where the cloth had ridden up at the groin—so this was what he had made love to. This was what had been there, that he had— “possessed” was a ridiculous term, he had no more possessed it than he did now by looking at it. This was what he had entered. Even “known,” that good biblical euphemism, was not appropriate. He did not know that body—he saw now with compassion as well as male criticalness, as she was coming out of the water towards him a second time, that the legs, beautiful to the knee, with slim ankles, were thick at the thigh so that the flesh “packed” and shuddered congestedly. She stretched out near him; she was sniffling, smiling with the pleasure of the water. No one was there except the two small children. He said to her as he might have said in a meeting in another life, “I’m sorry about what happened.”

  The words lay with the sun on her closed eyelids. After a moment, she said, guardedly, “Why?”

  He felt culpable of having heard her talked about in the capital. He didn’t answer at once.

  “Because it’s as if it never happened.”

  “Then that’s all right,” she said. She lay quite still; presently she sat up and asked for a cigarette, bundling the towel round herself with a complete lack of vanity.

  “It’s almost like the beaches at Lake Malawi.”

  “Is it? I never ever got to Malawi. We were going there on local leave the year I was kicked out, so it never came off. We used to picnic here with my children, years ago.”

  “This beach?” she said.

  “Oddly enough, I’ve never been to this particular beach before—didn’t know it existed, till we found it today. —Farther along, we used to go, up past Execution Rock, you know: on the main shore.”

  “What’s Execution Rock?”

  “You don’t know the legend? Well, closer to us than a legend, really. The Dolo, the tribe of the paramount chief around here, used to have a trial of endurance for their new chief—elect. Before he could take office he had to swim from the mainland to the island. If he managed it, he would be rowed back in triumph. If not, he was supposed to be carted off and executed by being thrown from Execution Rock. That part of it’s never been done in living memory, but the channel swim was still carried out until very recent times—the predecessor of the present chief did it. He was still alive when we came to live here.”

  She said, “Is your wife as attached to this place as you are?”

  He smiled, half—pleased, half—misunderstood— “Am I so attached?”

  She did not want to presume on any knowledge of him. “But you’ve come back.”

  “I can’t go explaining to everybody—but how difficult it is when people impose an idea of what one does or is.… And others take it up, so it spreads and goes ahead….” (He realized, with quick recovery, that while he was ostensibly speaking of himself he was suddenly doing so in paraphrase of thoughts about her, the image of her as presented by their friends in the capital, that he had steered away from a few minutes before.) “Coming back’s a kind of dream, a joke—we used to talk about my part after Independence like living happily ever after. Mweta was in and out of jail, I was the white man who’d become victim, along with him, of the very power I’d served. I was a sort of symbol of something that never happened in Africa: a voluntary relinquishment in friendship and light all round, of white intransigence that can only be met with black intransigence. I represented something that all Africans yearned for—even while they were talking about driving white people into the sea—a situation where they wouldn’t have had to base the dynamic of their power on bitterness. People like me stood for that
historically unattainable state—that’s all.” He thought, am I making this up as I go along? Did I always think it?—I did work with Mweta, in London, on practical things: the line delegations took, proposals and memoranda and all the rest of the tug—of-war with the Colonial Office. “But the idea persists … Aleke thinks, now, Lebaliso’s been removed at my pleasure. I can see that. He tells me this morning about Lebaliso being given the boot as if remarking on something I already know.” He gave a resigned, irritated laugh. Of course, she would be not supposed to know about Lebaliso—Aleke’s typist. But it gave him some small sense of freeing himself by refusing to respect the petty decencies of intrigue. He knew nothing about Lebaliso’s transfer, and had as little right as she to hear it before the man did himself. “There was a young man—Lebaliso beat him up, in the prison here. He was being detained without being charged. I found out by chance.”

  “I suppose Aleke thinks you told them—the President.”

  “But of course, I did. And now it’s assumed that all I had to do was ask the President to remove Lebaliso—and it’s done!”

  “Just the same, the President must have thought that you thought it would be a good thing. I mean, he’s known you a long time. Whether you asked him or not.”