A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  Then they began to talk. Rubadiri was one of those half—educated men of sharp intelligence, touchy with whites yet self—assured, and capable of a high—handed attitude towards his own people, who appear in authority all over the place after independence is achieved. PIP was kept alive by such people, now that the old brazier—warmth of interdependency that was all there was to huddle round had been replaced by the furnace blast of power. There was no sense in the dispute—that was how he presented it to Bray. The old men and women who were employed by the fish—drying “factory”— “those sticks in the sand with a few fish—you’ll see out there”—were not capable of any other work. They did not keep regular hours of employment, they were sick one day, they started only in the afternoon the next, they had pains in the legs—he laughed tolerantly. “It gives them something to do, the money for tobacco.” Of course, the company did own the fish—drying, it had been there, a small private concession that they had bought up along with some boats and the use of this landing stage when the factory was started. It produced a few thousand bags of dried fish a year, that went to the mines—but that demand was dwindling because even before Independence the mines had almost abandoned migratory labour and workers who lived with their families were not given rations as compound workers had been. For the rest of the market, the company had the fish—drying and fish—meal factory in Gala, as Bray must know, where the whole thing was done by machinery. So these people here—his hand waved them away— “the company just lets them stay.” The union that had been formed when the factory started didn’t recognize them.

  When he began to talk about the “trouble” of the previous week he took on a closed—minded look, the look of a man who has stated all this before a gathering, repeated it, perhaps, many times, with a hardening elimination of any doubt or alternative interpretation.

  “Now some people come along and say, the fish—dryers work here, they work for the same company, why aren’t they in the union? They say, they are paid too little, it’s bad for us if somebody accepts very low pay. How do we know, if there’s trouble, if one day we strike, they won’t be brought in to do our work?” He lifted his lip derisively and expelled a breath, as if it were not worth a laugh. “Of course they know, the same time, that’s all rubbish. How can women and old men do our work? All they could do is wash the floors! They don’t understand the packing, and the freezing plant machinery.”

  “Why do these others bother about them, then?”

  “Why? Sir, I’ll tell you. These are people who say they are PIP, but they are not PIP. They want to make trouble in the union for PIP. They want to make strikes here. I know them. They only want trouble.”

  “They’re not lake people?”

  He looked surly. “They are from here. But they have got friends—there”—he stabbed a finger in the air— “in the factory in Gala, there in town—I know.”

  “So there was a row,” Bray said.

  “Trouble, trouble, at the meeting. Some of our people want to expel them from the union. Then there was fighting afterwards … trouble.”

  “And you—do you want them expelled?”

  He smiled under his ragged moustache at Bray, professionally. “PIP doesn’t have to be told to look after the workers here. They must change their ideas and see sense.”

  Bray talked to him a little longer, getting some useful information about the origins of the trawler and factory workers; it turned out that Rubadiri himself had his wife and family not in the immediate area, but in one of the villages farther up the lake.

  Bray knew that he had kept the girl sitting in the car nearly an hour, but when he made out the racks of drying fish looking like some agricultural crop stacked in the sun away over the far side of the jetty, he went up quickly to have a look. It was true that it was more like some local fishermen’s enterprise than part of a large, white company’s activities. Just a bit larger—not more elaborate—than any of the home—made fish—drying equipment you saw wherever there were huts, as you went up the lake shore. The usual racks made of reeds and bound with grass, on which split Nile perch and barbel were draped stiff as hides, yellowish, rimed with salt, and high—smelling. The ground was bare, the verge of the lake was awash with tins and litter, and certainly no one was working. But of course it was Saturday. Naked children and scavenging dogs were about; then he noticed that a series of derelict sheds under one rotting tin roof were not storage sheds at all, although they stank like them, but were inhabited. There were no windows, only the dark holes of doorways. Faces loomed in the darkness; now he saw that what he had taken for rubbish lying about were the household possessions of these people. There were no traditional utensils, of clay or wood; and no store—bought ones, either—only the same sort of detritus as scummed the edge of the lake, put into use, as if these people lived from the dirt cast off by a community that was already humble enough in itself, using the cheapest and shoddiest of the white man’s goods. There were no doors to the sheds. He felt ashamed to walk up and stare at the people but he walked rapidly past, a few feet away, in the peculiar awe that the sight of acquiescent degradation produces in the well—fed. The malarial old lay about on the ground outside, legs drawn up as if assuming an attitude for traditional burial. Vague grins of senility or malnutrition acknowledged him from those black holes of doorways, gaping like foul mouths. He saw that there were no possessions within, only humans, inert, supine, crawled in out of the sun. A girl with the lurch of a congenitally dislocated hip came out with the cripple’s angry look that comes from effort and not ill—temper, and put on a beggar’s anticipation. A crone looked up conversationally but found it too much effort to speak.

  He went back round the freezing plant to the car and said to Rebecca, “Come here a minute. I want to show you something.”

  They walked rapidly, she subdued yet curious, glancing at him. “Christ, what a smell—” They passed the racks. He took her by the arm and steered her along the line of sheds. His grip seemed to prevent her from speaking. She said, “But it’s horrible.” “I had to show you.” They spoke under their breath, not turning to each other. The crippled girl, the crone, the quiet children watched them go.

  Back at the car she burst out. “Why doesn’t someone do something about them? Who are they?”

  He nodded. “I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t somehow exaggerating. I mean, this is still a poor country. Life in the villages isn’t all that rosy.”

  “But this! In tribal villages they may not have the things they have in town, but they do have their own things, you can see they are living. In that place they have nothing, Bray, nothing. No necessities for any kind of life.”

  “Just what struck me. They’re somehow stripped.”

  “How do they keep alive at all?”

  “They’re fish—dryers.” He began to tell her the story while they drove away and left the place behind them.

  At last he said, “Well—let’s find somewhere to eat,” and slowed down to consider. She gave a little shudder: “Somewhere beautiful.”

  “Where we were the other day?”

  “Oh, lovely.” But when he stopped along the lake shore track and prepared to settle, she looked uncertain.

  “Isn’t this the place?”

  She said, “I thought you meant the island—”

  “All the way over to the island?”

  “Never mind, this’s fine—”

  “Well, if you’re in no hurry to get back, I’m certainly not. Waitlet’s see if I can find a boat—”

  She kept protesting, but she couldn’t disguise her hope. There were two pirogues, much patched with tin, dragged up among the reeds. A fisherman was picking over a net. There was a short exchange of cheerful greetings in Gala and then they were given the choice of craft. They took the one that seemed to ship the least water, and they had two paddles this time. Their progress was erratic but she was determined to do her part, flushed and self—forgetful in a way that was unusual in an attractive woman
. Once they were past fourteen they were never free of a nervous awareness of how they must be appearing; he had seen it in his daughters.

  She was right. The island, the beach, were worth the trouble. She was proprietorial with pleasure. “Have you ever seen such perfect sand? And look—a back—rest, and you can face the water—” They had a swim first, undressing and dressing again without false modesty, each not looking the other’s way. Then Kalimo’s lunch was unpacked. “Have one of the eggs with little fishes in it, come on.” They ate greedily, and drank the warm red wine. She really was too fat—thighed for those old trousers, now that she had eaten they were drum—tight over the belly, as well. What did one mean by an “attractive” girl, then? Was her face pretty? It was a square, ruddy brown—skinned face, he did not like such broad jaws, when she became middle—aged she would be handsome and jowly. She had a good forehead, in profile, under the straight black hair—her hair was very black. And, of course, lovely eyes, those yellowy, lioness eyes. No, “attractive” meant just that—a drawing power that had nothing to do with the beauties and the blemishes, the disproportions and symmetries existing together in the one woman. She used no perfume but the warm look of the tiny cup formed by the bones at the base of her full neck made you want to bury your face there where the body seemed to breathe out, to smoke faintly with life.

  They lay down on the sand, side by side; she had taken one of his cigars and was enjoying it. Every now and then, to ask a question or make a point, she raised herself sideways on one elbow, a hand thrust up into her untidy hair, the other hand half beneath her body, covering the falling together of her breasts in the neck of her shirt. Whatever she was, she was not a coquette.

  “How long is your contract—with Aleke?”

  “Eighteen months.”

  “And after that—you’ll go back?”

  “Where?” she said. He was thinking of the capital, it was a habit of mind for him to think in terms of some base. “I don’t know what it’ll be. Maybe we’ll go to South Africa. Because of Cabora Bassa.”

  “It’s in Mozambique, miles from anywhere.”

  “But he’ll be working for South Africans. He’ll be paid in South African currency. But perhaps I’ll just renew—another eighteen months here. We’ll see. Anyway I want to put Alan and Suzi into a boarding school.”

  “But not in South Africa.”

  “Well, yes. I don’t fancy the idea of Rhodesia. And they can’t stay here much longer—” She was anxious not to hurt his feelings—she saw all occupations in personal terms—by suggesting that his great plans for education in the country were not good enough. “It’s just that, with the schools newly integrated, the standard has dropped like hell, and, you know, one can’t let one’s children come out of school half—baked.”

  “Of course. For the time being only the African children benefit, while the white ones are at a bit of a disadvantage. But you wouldn’t really consider sending them to South Africa?”

  She said again, “Oh I don’t know, they say the schools are good.”

  He saw that she was thinking of the money; there was a chance that there would be money in South Africa, to pay for them. Under the surface, her life was laid on bedrock necessities like this, that made luxuries out of scruples as well as emotions. But he said, gently, “Here you are all living happily with the Tlumes. And you’ll send them there, to be brought up in the antiquated colonial way, to consider that their white skin sets them above other people.”

  She smiled, slightly embarrassed and defiant. “Well, what about me? It was like that in Kenya. It’s only while they’re at school; they’ll grow out of it again.”

  “Not everyone can be as natural as you,” he said.

  She turned on her elbow again. “I don’t quite understand how you mean that.”

  “You cling to reality,” he said. “They couldn’t condition you into the good old colonial abstractions—a nigger’s a nigger and a white man’s an English gentleman. You obstinately stick to other criteria—I don’t know what they are, but they certainly aren’t based on colour.”

  “It’s a big fuss about nothing. If that was all you had to worry about …” She dropped her head, rolled back. Perhaps she was thinking about her “other criteria”—what they were. Perhaps she was dissatisfied with them—with herself. It was easy to decide for her that necessity ruled her life with beautiful simplicity, even where it was makeshift and compromised. What criterion was there for this invisible man to whom she was married but with whom she never seemed to live? And the obliging reputation she had among husbands of the little group left behind in the capital? He felt again as he had the first time they had been on the island beach, only this time she, this young woman, was present as he was in the state of immediate existence, curiously quiet and vivid, unmediated by what they both were in relation to other people and other times.

  The fish eagles hunched indifferently on a dead tree out in the lake. If he tried to follow their gaze over the water, his own faltered out, dropped in distance; theirs was beyond the capacity of the human eye as certain sounds go beyond the register of the ear. She said, “Not as if they were ever going to be South Africans.”

  “It’s a contradiction of your realism, you know. You can’t be realistic without principles—that’s just the convenient interpretation, that the realist accepts things as they are, even if those things express an unreal situation, a false one. You’re the one who should see over the head of that situation, and instinctively reject it even as a temporary one, for your children. That’s the practical application of principle.”

  She mumbled into her crossed forearms, “I’ll remember that.”—He saw from the movement of her half—concealed cheek that she was smiling.

  Ah yes, how nice to set oneself up as the mentor of a rather lonely young woman, to explain her to herself. “We’d better move, soon.”

  She said, preoccupied, “And how long have you still got?”

  “That’s up to me.”

  “Your contract’s with yourself.” She was generously envious.

  “Very convenient. And only I know what the terms are. Or I ought to.”

  “Then you probably do.”

  “Do I?”

  “Oh yes. People do. We know all about ourselves. Al—ll about it.” She was scratching her scalp and paring the collected road—dust from beneath her nails, concentratedly, as if she were alone. He thought defensively, how very natural she was; he had always liked so much Olivia’s fastidiousness, her almost awesome lack of little disgusting personal habits. Olivia could never have gone to bed with someone who picked his nose….

  They lingered on the island, and on the shore when they returned and paid for the use of the leaky pirogue, chaffing with the bandylegged fisherman in his athletic vest and torn pants. He seemed surprised at being paid at all; so far as he was concerned, he was busy with his net and they were welcome to his boat in the meantime.

  But once he saw the money in his hand, he must suddenly have thought of something he wanted to buy, for he looked at it smiling, as if to say, what use is this to me? He said to Bray, in Gala, can’t you give me two—and-nine more? Bray didn’t have the change but the girl did, and they paid up, amused. So the drive back was started well on in the afternoon, and it was slower going, climbing the pass instead of descending it. They had just come out onto the savannah when Bray felt that there was a puncture. They changed the tyre without much trouble but did not get back home till well after dark. “This’s one of the times when one would like a good little restaurant to appear magically in Main Road, Gala.” She said something about having to get back to the children, anyway; but when they drove along under the weak, far—apart street—lights of the road where they lived, she seemed to forget her concern, and came into the house with him. Kalimo had the fire lit; the ugly room was perfumed with the soft, dry incense—smell of mukwa wood. They had bought a couple of bream at the lake, and wanted to cook them over the wood—ashes, but Kalimo carri
ed them off. “Don’t fry them Kalimo, for heaven’s sake—grilled not fried—”

  She laughed to see him trying to prevail. “If you are worried about the children …? You could dash over now? Kalimo won’t be ready for an hour if I know him.”

  She went as if she had been intending to do so, but he saw that she wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t said anything; and she was back within ten minutes. She had put on lipstick and her hair was brushed back, lank from the lake. She herself had the look of a child fresh from the bath. “Everything all right?”