A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  He instructed himself. “I’m responsible for Lebaliso’s removal, whether I want to be or not.”

  “But you think it’s a good thing he’s going? Then why does it matter?”

  “There’s a Preventive Detention Act. What he did’s been legalized, now. The principle on which he could’ve been removed seems somewhat weakened.”

  She drew up her big thighs, so that, knees under her chin, they hid her whole body. She was removing sand from between her toes. “Perhaps Mweta did it to please you,” she said. At the same moment they noticed the children had disappeared into the bush. “Where’ve they got to?” There was the rambling cadence of small voices. They both made across the heavy sand. He carried back the skinny little white boy, she had the black one, indicating in dumb show how the fat rolls round his thighs outdid the cheeks of his bottom. The child lay looking up at her with the lazy pleasure of one to whom being carried is his due. “I believe you’ve got a grandchild?”

  “Yes, a girl.” They smiled. “It seems very, very far away.”

  “You’ve never seen it,” she said.

  “Oh, photographs.” He gave a little demonstrative jerk at his burden. “This is yours—I ought to know by now, but there are so many always—” Although the boy was dark—haired, as she was, he was completely unlike her, yet with a definitive cast of face that suggested a marked heredity—black eyes under eyebrows already thick and well shaped, berry—coloured lips with a dent in the lower one: there was a man there, despite the poor little legs dangling from scabbed bony knees, and the cold small claws hoary with dirt—grained chapping. Her children were neglected—looking, stoically withdrawn in their games and gaiety as children are when they must accustom themselves to constant and unexplained changes of background and ever new sets of “aunties” and “uncles.”

  “He’s Gordon all over again,” she said, as at something that couldn’t be helped. “Not just the looks. The way he speaks, everything. It’s funny, because he’s been with me all the time, I don’t think Gordon’s lived with us for more than three or four months since he was able to walk.”

  “They were worried about you, at the Bayleys’.” He was careful how he phrased it. “Whether you’d be happy working for Aleke.”

  “Aleke’s a darling. He really is, you know. It’s all a lot of bluff, with him. He likes to think he’s driving me with a whip. Good Lord, he doesn’t know some of the people I’ve worked for. There are some bastards in this world. But I don’t think a black could ever be quite like that.”

  “Like what?” The children were playing at the water’s edge again, and he and the girl strolled along the beach.

  “Get pleasure out of making you feel about so big. I mean they’re as casual as all hell, they borrow money from you and you never get it back—things like that. But they don’t know how to humiliate that way.”

  “—Not Aleke?”

  “Oh yes—my first pay check. But that he did pay back. Last month again, and now he’s not so prompt. I don’t mind—that house is really too expensive for them, you know. There’s too much room for relations and they all have to eat, even if it’s only mealie porridge. Agnes’s bought a washing—machine, as well. They’re paying off for furniture.”

  “Still, it must put your budget out somewhat.”

  She threw away a piece of water—smoothed glass she had picked up. “Aleke! You know what he said—but quite seriously, helping me, you know—when I said that I must have the loan back this month or I couldn’t pay my share of the Tlume household? He would speak to the Tlumes for me, he would explain that with the move, and so on, and the car repairs, I’m rather short….”

  “You’d better not tell the Bayleys.”

  “Oh but Aleke’s fine. I remember once, in Rhodesia, Gordon turned up and found I couldn’t take any more of that old horror I was working for, Humphrey Temple. He wouldn’t even let me go to pick up my salary. He went up to the offices himself, walked straight into Temple’s room and demanded an apology.… Nobody in that office even had the faintest idea who this cocky man was….” She laughed. She said, returning to the Bayleys’ concern, “It’s all right here, for me. At the beginning, I thought I’d just have to pack up and give in. Go back. I felt I’d been mad.… But that was just the usual panic, when you move on.”

  “It is isolated. Won’t you be lonely?” He almost added, quite naturally, “—after I’m gone,” not in the sense of his individual person, but of the presence of someone like himself, a link between the kind of life that had existed for white people and created these remote centres, and their future, different life which had not yet cohered.

  “I didn’t think about that. You know how when you think only about getting away—that seems to solve everything, you don’t see beyond it. And then when you are—safe … it turns out to be the usual set of practical things, finding somewhere to live, looking for a school … But it’s better, for me. You know how nice they all are, down there. I love those people but”—she looked away from him, out over the lake, then took refuge in a kind of deliberate banality— “I—got—sick—of—them.” There was the pause that often follows a half—truth.

  The tempo of their communication switched again. They talked about the lake, and his journeyings round about. “You realize how hard it is to grasp change except in concrete terms. In Europe if you had been away ten years and then come back, you would see the time that had elapsed, in new buildings, landscapes covered with housing schemes, even new models of cars and new styles of clothing on people. But there’s nothing that didn’t look as it did before—the lake the same, the boats the same, the people the same—not so much as a bridge or a road where there didn’t use to be one. And yet everything has changed. The whole context in which all this exists is different from what it has ever been. And then, on top of it, I went to see an old friend … a contemporary of mine, you see, and in him you could see the ten years—grey hairs, a broken tooth, the easy signs that make you feel you know where you are. But he turned out to have a new—born son—there was a baby born the same time as I got a grandchild!”

  “Nothing so extraordinary about that,” she said, inquiringly amused.

  “But confusing,” he said, also laughing.

  “I don’t see why. Perhaps he’s a grandfather as well.”

  “Oh, I’m sure. Several times over. He had many other sons, as I remember.”

  “Oh, an African.”

  “Have you ever heard of Shinza—Edward Shinza?”

  “Can’t remember. I suppose so. A political leader? I usually know the names of the cabinet ministers but after that I give up. You’ll find I’m an ass at politics, I’m afraid. Not like Vivien.”

  “He’s an old friend. He was the founder of PIP.”

  She said, “You know everybody.”

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s the trouble.”

  “Let me paddle on the way back, will you?” she said. “My God, this lake is wonderful. It makes all the difference.”

  “To what?”

  She looked for a moment as if she did not know, herself. “To living here.” Sunburn highlighted the flanges of her nostrils and her cheekbones, and her lips looked dry—she seemed to have brought no make—up with her with which to make repairs. It was true that there was a deliberate lack of flirtatiousness in her. It was almost an affront. Her yellow, lioness gaze rested on the children.

  That evening when the whole party was back home, he walked across the vacant ground to get rid of the bits and pieces children had left in his car. She was playing chess on the veranda with Nongwaye Tlume; they had a modern gas—lamp that gave an underworld, steel—coloured light. She dumped the miscellany on a chair and walked with him through the garden which had no fence and was marked off from the scrub only by a few heads of zinnia and the shallow holes and tracks made by children. “I taught Nongwaye to play but now he beats me regularly. When I grumble he says it’s an old African custom, to beat women—but he’s so westernized he
does it at chess.” Strolling, chatting, her arms crossed over her breasts, she ended up nearer his house than the other one, and came in for a drink. “Is it too cool to sit under the fig?”

  “No, no, I’d love to sit under the famous fig.”

  He had a little candlestick with a glass mantel. It lit the fissures and naves of the great tree like a lamp held up in a cave; even at night the bark was overrun by activity, streaming with ants and borers indentured for life.

  “You seem to get on very well in the Tlume household.” It interested him that a woman who appeared to have little or nothing of the liberal principles and fervour that would make the necessity a testing virtue, should find living with an African family so unremarkable. She apparently had been brought up in the colonial way, and had lived her life in preserves on the white side of the tracks, wherever she had been.

  She said, “They just are very nice people. I was lucky. It’s a hell of a risk, to share a house.”

  “You haven’t found them rather different?—you know, in the small ways that count rather a lot when you’re living together.”

  “Well, it is another thing, of course—when you live with people. For the last year or two I’ve been working with Africans and then in our crowd at the Bayleys’ there were African friends; but I’ve never lived with them before. But as I said this afternoon … at the time, I didn’t think about anything … and I had to get out of that hotel and the chance came up. … Of course it is a bit different—there’s not much privacy in the house, we really do all live together, I mean, it’s not the arrangement of these are my quarters and those are yours, that I’d assumed. They just take it for granted; we eat together, people wander in on you all the time.… But at the same time there is a kind of privacy, another kind. They never ask questions. They simply accept everything about you.” When he came back out of the house with their beer, she said, “Of course, Gordon’s up in arms. I wrote to tell him where we were and, naturally, that brought a letter from him. I got it last week—what sort of educational background for his children and all that. He nearly had a fit. Whenever he gets all concerned he writes these sort of lawyer’s letters, so snooty and silly. He sees us sitting in the yard eating mealie porridge out of a big pot—you don’t know Gordon’s imagination.” She laughed derisively but almost proudly.

  “Where is Gordon?” he said, as if he knew him.

  “I hate to tell you.” Half confidential, half enjoying an opportunity to shock. “In the Congo, with that old bastard Loulou Kamboya”—she saw him trying to place the name— “no, not a politician, just an ordinary crook. Well, extraordinary. Gordon met him in a bar in Zambia, Loulou goes all over the place in his black Mercedes. Gordon went into the souvenir business with him. Loulou’s got a ‘factory’ making those elephant—hair bracelets. He supplies all kinds of hideous things—fake masks and horn carvings. He wanted to get down to South Africa to make contacts in the curio racket there, but of course they wouldn’t let him in. So Gordon went for him. There was going to be a fortune in it, they were going to have a network over Africa from east to west and north to south—you know. I don’t know what’s happened—it seems to have faded out. In this last letter Gordon says he’s taking a job on the Cabora Bassa thing—the dam. He worked on Kariba, of course: that was when I went to Salisbury. He’s an engineer when he has to be. —If you ever want any elephant—hair bracelets, I’ve got a surplus stock.”

  He would be like the Tlumes and never ask questions—that is, questions that were intrusive. But she had introduced the subject of this man, the husband; he seemed hardly more than an anecdote. Bray said, “Well, at least he isn’t a mercenary. When you said Congo—”

  “Oh, I’m sure Loulou’s done his share of gun—running, but that really would be too profitable to let anyone in on. Gordon Edwards wouldn’t be included in that.” It was a kind of parody of the solid suburban housewife’s plaint that her husband was always bypassed by promotion. He was entertained by this sturdy dryness that he had not seen in her before. She began to tell him anecdotes about life in the capital, involving Dando, people at the various ministries and the university, both of them laughing a good deal. They were the stories of an intelligent secretary, background observation; if there were any that were the stories of an intelligent mistress, she didn’t include them. He walked her home across the scrub again and gave her a good—night peck on the cheek, the convention between the men and women of the group to which he and she had belonged, in the capital. She was a courageous and honest girl and he had the small comfort of feeling he had put things right between them. He had a distaste for false positions. Even tidying minor ones out of the way was something. He did it as he would tidy his table when there seemed no way of tackling what he really had to do. When he met her during the week, buying icecream for the children, he offered to take them all to the lake again at the weekend—he wanted to have a talk to the people at the fish—freezing plant.

  But she telephoned on Friday night—Sampson Malemba was in the room with him, they were working—and said that the children had been asked to a party and were “mad keen” to go, so—It didn’t matter at all, he’d take them another time maybe (he had always the feeling even while he spoke of everyday plans, that he might be gone, quite suddenly, before they were realized). Then he thought he might have sounded a little too relieved at not having the bother of the outing, and added— “Of course, you come along if you want to—if you’ve nothing better to do? I have to go, anyway.” She said she’d let him know on Saturday morning, if that was time enough? He felt the reciprocal tolerance of one preoccupied person towards the preoccupations of another.

  Malemba sat waiting with his head tilted back, tapping a pencil on his big yellow teeth; it was a question of money, money, again now. There was an old police compound—a square of rooms round a courtyard—that they could acquire very cheaply and convert into classrooms at the cost of a few hundred pounds. The existing grant was already earmarked for other things; Malemba said, “If you wrote and asked for more?

  “To whom?”

  He looked at Bray and shrugged.

  Yes, he had only to ask Mweta; he said, “Suppose I were to write to my friend the American cultural attaché, down there. They’re keen on educational projects. Of course, they like the big ones that show—like the university. But lecture rooms—that’s the way to put it—it might just ring the bell for us.”

  He heard her coming through the screen door of the veranda while he was finishing breakfast. She was wearing men’s blue jeans and her rubber—thonged sandals, and was pleased to be in good time. She looked very young—he did not know how old she would be, round about thirty, he supposed. Kalimo had carefully tied up with string saved from the butcher’s parcels a package of food: “What’s inside?” Bray asked, and Kalimo counted off with a forefinger coming down on the fingers of the other hand— “Ah-h loaste’ chicken, eggs with that small fish in, ah—h tomatoes, blead, sa’t, litt’e bit pepper. No butter. You must buy butter.” It was the picnic he had always prepared, down to the stuffed eggs with anchovy, that Olivia had taught him to make, and the paper twists of salt and pepper. “Don’t bother with butter, it’ll just melt” the girl said. He stopped on the way out of the village and bought a bottle of wine instead.

  She had a small radio with her, and when he had warned her she might have quite a long wait for him at the freezing plant— “Not the most attractive place in the world to hang about in, either”—she had taken something to read out of his bookshelves, more with the air of wanting to be no trouble than anything else. It was pleasant to have company in the car; she lit cigarettes for them both and the dusty road that climbed down through the mountains was quickly covered. So far as he had taken notice of her at all, he had always felt rather sorry for the girl whose life overlapped the lives of others but was without a centre of its own. Now she seemed like one of those hitchhikers who let the world carry them, at home with anybody in having no home, secure in havi
ng no luggage, companionable in having no particular attachment. She might have flagged him down on the road, just for the ride. He left the car in what shade he could find at the fish factory; the trees between the buildings and the rough wharf had been hacked down and the dust was full of trampled fish entrails hovered over by wretched dogs and flies. He saw her at once settle down to make herself comfortable, opening the doors of the car for a draught, and hanging the little radio, aerial extended, from the window.

  There had been a dispute at the fish factory reported in the papers the week before; some sort of dissatisfaction over the employment of what were termed “occasional” workers—it was not very clear. What he had come for was additional data on the number of families and the extent of the area they were drawn from, as represented in the records of men employed on the company’s trawlers; there was some discrepancy, in his notes, between the educational needs of the population based on the number of workers who, although scattered, could be considered local, and the actual size of this population—which might be much less, if the workers in fact came largely from communities much farther up the lake and left their family units behind. Lake men had a migratory tradition that pre—dated colonial settlement; they had gone where the trade was, where the fish ran. It was sometimes difficult to find out to which community they belonged. For themselves, unlike other groups whose home ground was twice defined, once by tribal tradition and again by the colonial district system, they belonged, as they would say “to the water,” a domain whose farther side, away up in other territories of Africa, they had never seen.

  The freezing plant section had the morgue atmosphere of men in rubber aprons hosing down concrete floors, and sudden reminders of blood and guts that no hygiene could do away with entirely. He saw the white manager for a minute, a man seamed, blotched and reddened from a lifetime of jobs like this, dirty, but routine as a city office, in the wilderness, in the sun. He was handed over to a grey—eyed coloured man with uplifting texts in his office. The records were not too satisfactory; Bray asked if he could talk to one of the shop stewards—the union records might make more sense. The clerk became vague and left the room— “Just a minute, ay?” He came back with the composed face of an underling who has passed on responsibility. “The manager says we don’t know if he’s here today, they doesn’t work Saturday, only if it’s overtime.” Bray had seen that some people were working. “Yes, some are working overtime this morning, but I don’t know …” Uneasy again, the clerk took him down to the cleaning and packing floor. He seemed to have the helpless feeling that Bray would single the man out instantly; in fact, one of the section overseers, a big, very black man standing with gumboots awash where the fish were being scaled, looked up alertly and caught the clerk’s eye. He came with the matter—of-factness of one who is accustomed to being summoned. Bray introduced himself and the man said with almost military smartness, “Good morning, sir! Elias Rubadiri,” but couldn’t shake hands because his were wet as the fish themselves. Scales gleamed all over him, caught even in his moustache, like paillettes on a carnival Neptune. They went out into an open passageway to talk; oh yes, there were union records. But the man who kept them wasn’t there, they were locked up. Where? Oh at his house, that man’s house. Could one go to see him, then?—The scales dried quickly out in the open air, he was rubbing them off his hands, shedding them. “He’s not there….” There was that African pause that often precedes a more precise explanation. Bray switched to the intimacy of Gala, and the overseer said, “You know, the other day … he got hurt on the head.”