A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  She came early one morning that week, but not so early that Kalimo was not about somewhere. She closed the bedroom door quietly behind her and he heard a hoarse morning voice, his own: “Lock it.” She was dressed ready for work, with a file under her arm. The room was dim and a bit musty from the night, his clothes lying about, the private odours of his body. The sun pressing against the curtains emblazoned their emblems of fish, cowrie, cockerel and coffee—bean like flags and they threw rich garish glows across the room. He propped himself up in bed on one elbow but did not let himself become fully awake. She smelled of cold water and toothpaste, her heart beat lightly and quickly with the energy of one who is already up and about. His had still the slow heavy beat of sleep. With his abrasive beard and night body—warmth he blotted out this surface dew of morning hygiene and found her underneath. With closed eyes he took off her freshly—put-on clothes, tugging and fumbling with blunt fingers. It was not a matter of undressing her, it was a matter of baring her sexuality, as one speaks of baring one’s heart. She went down into the banked—up, all—night warmth of his bed and took him in her mouth, the soft hair of her head between his legs. In an intensity that had lain sealed in him all his life (dark underground lake whose eye he had never found) barrier after barrier was passed, each farthest shore of self was gained and left behind, words were reunited with the sweet mucous membrane from which they had been torn.

  She took a clean handkerchief from his drawer, dipped it in the glass of water beside his bed and wiped herself—face, armpits, sex. She didn’t want to meet Kalimo or Mahlope on the way to the bathroom. She dressed.

  “I’ll get up and see if it’s all clear.”

  “I’m going the golf—course way—the car’s down near the fourth hole. Said I had to go early to do some work I brought home and didn’t do last night.”

  “It’s all right—I hear them in the kitchen.” For these practical whispers words would do.

  She was gone.

  She had not been with him more than half an hour. It was strangely like the very first time she had come. The very re—enactment itself was the measure of the difference: a ritual that had once been gone through in ignorance without remotely knowing what its real meaning could come to be.

  He walked into town because he had to use the perfect coordination and balance in his body. Coming down into the long main road under the splendid trees he had a vivid sense of all the things he enjoyed; riding through light and shade in Wiltshire or years ago at Moshi in Tanganyika, finning along in slow motion on the bed of the lake last week—it was all one with an awareness—every minute detail leaving a fresh pug—print—of this road, this place. Everything was immediate and verifiable on a plane of concrete existence. The precise spiciness of the dry season when the dust had not been wetted for several months; the ting of bicycle bells plucking the air behind him; two children wearing only vests and passing a mealie—cob from mouth to mouth; the crows cawing out of sight. An ordinary morning that was to him the sunny square: the last thing the condemned prisoner would ever see, and would see as long as he lived.

  The courthouse was part of the old administrative building where people came to collect pensions and pay taxes. Outside a group of ancient women were smoking pipes. Their bodies, bare from the waist except for beads tangled with their dugs, rose snakelike from the coils of cloth in which they squatted. They did not speak. Clerks, hangers—on, young men in white shirts and cheap sunglasses brushed past them. He went into the room that still smelled like a schoolroom; he himself had once sat up there on the rostrum and fiddled with the carafe covered with a glass. On one of the benches among other people, he was the only white man. His two neighbours talked across to each other behind his shoulders, not rudely, but in the assumption that he couldn’t understand what they were saying and therefore wasn’t there. They were discussing a debt owed to one or both of them; clearly they were such close friends it didn’t matter which. They had the same cowboy jeans imported by local Indian stores, the same sort of Japanese watches with a thick gilt band, the same topiary skill of the open—air barbers had shaped their dense hair into the flat—topped semblance of an en brosse cut. The three tribal scars on each cheekbone were worn with no more significance than a vaccination mark.

  PIP Young Pioneers solidly filled the first two rows of benches. Most could scarcely be called youths any more. The adolescent force that lingers heavily beyond its season in those whose hopes have not been realized was in their postures and restlessness. They gazed and shuffled, brazen and sullen. Some wore PIP forage caps, others wore the torn sweatshirt of the family’s idle son, and one had a transistor radio with him that a court orderly with creaking boots came across to warn him not to use. He continued to hold it to his ear now and then, just not turning the knob, under the orderly’s eyes.

  The usual beggars and eccentrics who had nowhere else to feel themselves accepted along with other people, were deep in blank preoccupation; an old man had the worried, strainedly alert look that Bray knew so well—a kind of generalized concern in the face of the helplessness of all black people before the boma and the law. He wondered who the country women outside were; probably relations of men from the mine who were involved in the case. There were other, “respectably” dressed men and women from the African townships who must be relations, too. The familiar atmosphere of resignation and fear of authority that sat upon country courtrooms and made one the innocent and guilty was stirred by the arrival of the accused filing into the dock just as the slow whirling into action of the ceiling fans, set in motion at the same moment, began to slice the stale air. The court was full and faces kept peering in the windows from a gathering crowd outside. There was even the straggling boompah of a band out there—abruptly silenced. The eleven accused were too many for the small dock and like people whose seats at a theatre have been muddled up, they shifted and changed places and at last some were given chairs in the well of the court. A special detail of Selufu’s men had come in with them, and ranged themselves round the visitors’ gallery. The court rose; the black magistrate came in and seated himself before the carafe. He was an ex—schoolmaster and lawyer’s clerk from another province and now and then he used an interpreter to translate for him into English when he was not sure that he had fully appreciated the nuance of some expression in Gala. Bray had met him at Aleke’s; a cheerful, intelligent man who appeared morose on the bench.

  An Indian lawyer from the capital had come down to conduct the defence. The men in the dock moved out of their stoic solidarity to get a good look at him; probably they had not seen him before. The indictment was read. He stroked back the shiny hair at his temples as he listened, as if he were still ruffled from the journey. In his quick, soft, Gujerati—accented English he asked at once for the trials to be separated: that of the nine men who were accused of trespassing and wilful damage to property to be heard independently of that of the two accused of assault and an offence under the Riotous Assemblies Act. The request was granted; the cases were remanded until two separate dates a week or two ahead. The attorney objected that there was not sufficient time to prepare the defence; the cases were postponed still further ahead. Bail was renewed for the nine, but refused for the other two. The Young Pioneers creaked their benches and make tlok! noises in their throats like the warning notes of certain birds. More faces bobbed at the windows. One of the pair who had been refused bail was a slim young man whose bare neck had the muscular tension of a male ballet dancer; he kept twisting his head to look imperiously, frowning like Michelangelo’s David, round at the crowd. Whenever he did so there was a surge in the two front rows, the force there shifted its weight in precarious balance between his look and the stolidity of Selufu’s policemen.

  The lawyer was objecting to the refusal of bail; the prosecutor was adamant. The magistrate appeared not to be listening to either; he confirmed that bail would not be granted. That was all.

  As the prisoners went out, making use of their numbers by making
a slow progress of it, they began to sing a PIP chant and the two who were going off to the cells yelled slogans, the old slogans of pre—Independence days. Bray allowed himself to be carried and hindered by the courtroom crowd. Women in their church—going clothes opened their mouths calmly and ululated. The magistrate banged his gavel and was resigned to being ignored; he mouthed what must have been an adjournment and walked out. Another case was to be heard and the exhibits, including a bicycle with one wheel missing, were carried in while the police moved along the rows of benches and were held adrift, clumsily bobbing. It was difficult to tell whether the movement through the door was people pressing in or the court being cleared. It was not an angry but a strangely confident crowd, talking and shifting about in possession. The ululating women stood where they had risen from the benches, and swayed. It was like being caught up in a dance with them; he was taller than anybody and as he was pressed and shifted he could see everything, the PIP claque taking up the prisoners’ chant and moving their heads like hens as they urged themselves through the people, the bewildered face of the old beggar, the young men turning vividly from side to side. He wanted to grin: a bespectacled white totem, waving ridiculously about on the wake of backsides swinging their cotton skirts magnificently as bells. Slowly the whole crowd, and he with it, was drawn through the door as water circles the hole in a bathtub.

  Outside, the three—man band whose evangelical beat derived from the Salvation Army was banging away falteringly. The PIP contingent went into discussion among the spectators and lingering courtroom crowd. There was a coming and going of individual PIP men, racing between the gathering and the office of the court; everyone was waiting for the nine to appear after completing bail formalities. When they did come out, rather sheepish, like people disembarking from a journey before the eyes of friends, the whole crowd was moved from the old—fashioned open verandas and yard of the building by the police. There was a momentary loss of direction when they might have dispersed; and then someone made for the piece of open ground on the other side of the road, next to the Princess Mary Library. The band tramped across, playing. The PIP Young Pioneers began an impromptu meeting; he waited a moment, beside the uneven pillars of the tiny, tin—roofed parthenon the ladies of the British Empire Service League had raised, to listen. The speaker stood on a wooden crate that had been abandoned by some shopkeeper and not yet carried off bit by bit by people looking for firewood. PIP had brought freedom and people who did not obey the orders of PIP were fools … there was nothing in the country that was not the business of PIP … PIP had not got rid of the white man to be told what to do by black men who were just as bad.… You were not allowed to talk about something that was in the courts but he would still tell everybody this—people who defied the trade unions defied the government, and PIP knew what to do with them.

  He began to walk away and stepped round a scuffle that had kicked up—sudden blows between young men, and stones flying. He was in the path of one; it got him on the side of the neck: his hand went up with the involuntary movement of slapping a fly. A woman passerby gasped, “Oh sorry, sorry, Mukwayi …”

  The sting drew no blood. He had caught the stone as it fell into his open collar; he pushed it into his pocket.

  There were several irritable incidents in Gala that day. Not all appeared to be concerned with the trial, but were released by the roused confidence of the courtroom crowd that affected the atmosphere of the village as a heat wave affects the citizens of a cold country.

  “They ought to be rounded up and put to work on the roads,” Mr. Deal at the supermarket said to him confidentially, wrapping the pound of ham that he had bought. “Lot of hooligans and no one to give them the language they understand, any more. All they’ve learnt is how to thieve better. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you my losses since I’ve converted to self—service. This place just isn’t ready for it—you’ve got to have civilized people.”

  A small girl trader had ranged her few undersized tomatoes on the pavement. He was buying some when Gordon Edwards came by and at once suggested they have a beer at the Fisheagle. No black face had yet dared appear in the inside bar at the Fisheagle; the patrons were talking about golf and a European motor rally that had been shown on TV the night before.

  Gordon Edwards told an amusing story about a friend of his who, after serving in the Mozambique channel on a patrol ship whose purpose was to intercept ships carrying cargoes for Rhodesia, had resigned and himself become a successful middleman in the sanctionsbreaking business, getting out tobacco and taking in machinery. While Edwards talked his eye kept wandering to Bray’s neck. “Something’s bitten you.”

  His expression implied that he was unaware of it. The small stone lay among the other kind of currency in his pocket as the fact of what had happened in the early morning lay in his mind among the ready pleasantries of small talk.

  The nine men were found guilty and fined. The other two never came to trial at all; on the special intervention of the President the case against them was dropped.

  Chapter 14

  Almost every day, there were reports of disturbances in one or other of the provinces.

  Everyone who could afford a TV set continued to watch the syndicated programmes from America and England—sport, popular science, old Westerns, and (if they were white people) the interminable serialization of The Forsyte Saga. Edna Tlume had hired a set and the full complement of the household was generally to be found in the darkened Tlume—Edwards living-room during the hours when the station in the capital was open. There was a news round—up once a day (Ras Asahe was the commentator for a while) but the station could not afford a permanent team of cameramen and reporters to film live events at home. The dim room—blaring with music and barking recorded voices, smelling of grubby children, curry powder from cheap meals, and Nongwaye’s medicated tobacco—where a football game in Madrid was being played or a trial of Vietcong refugees was flickering into focus, was more real than what was happening in the neighbouring province and the next village. The heavy green of Gala hung shutting that out.

  As his bulk blackened the doorway Rebecca would get up quietly from her canvas chair and slip away from the audience; everyone else remained absorbed. He and she were seldom bothered by the children now; he sometimes thought—and at once forgot again—he ought to remind her that they shouldn’t be allowed to become addieted to the box. She sat with her children resting against her, each one in physical contact with some part of her, the littlest sometimes falling asleep in her lap; what they drew from her, then, was enough and more to counteract what passed before their eyes and skimmed their understanding. There was fellow—feeling with them; he knew that steady current of her body, its lulling and charging effect. No harm could come while one breathed in time with that flesh.

  The husband, Gordon Edwards, had gone away again. He had not found out if she had slept with him—never would, he knew even as, at the moment of putting aside her legs with his knee and entering her body himself, he would think of it. It was not in her eyes, anyway, as she lay as she sometimes liked on top of him and looked into his face as only lovers do, her face open to him. She complained that because he was short—sighted his eyes were intensely blank in passion, he was concealed from her. “I can’t ever see what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not thinking then.” But she was the one with secrets. Yet her lioness—coloured eyes (browner with the pupils dilated) were not secretive. The flirtatious animation she had put on like some curious form of reserve when the husband was there was gone, too. She had been clever to come to him that one morning, so that there was no question, once the other had left, that they would have to find a way to come together again: it was already done, they had never been anything else but together, beneath the convenient collusion of friends and circumstances. Yet there was nothing “clever” in her, in those eyes. She was simply all there, nothing withheld, nothing reserved, not even her secrets. So there was a stage you could reach where e
ven the relationships each had with other people belonged to the relationship with one another. That could contain everything, encompass everything, not resignedly but in a fine sort of greed. If I’m too old for virginity of any kind to be anything but ridiculous in me, then allow that so must she be, in her way, too. It wasn’t, after all, naïveté that enabled her to improve the curtains against the arrival of Olivia.

  He wrote to Olivia about the strikes, lock—outs, and the confused expressions of dissatisfaction that, in the bush, took the form of tribal wrangling. He did not suggest to her that this atmosphere was the reason why she should not come. But neither, in their letters, any longer wrote as if she were coming. He did not wonder why she, for her part, should have dropped the idea, because—he realized quite well—it suited him that she had done so so tacitly. He wrote her about cattle slaughtered in vengeance, huts burned, the proposed amendments to the Industrial Relations Act that would make strikes illegal for teachers and civil servants. She wrote about the beautiful officer’s chest, circa the Napoleonic wars, that she and Venetia had found in a village antique shop, and a jaunt to London to see a play about the incestuous homosexual love between two brothers that couldn’t have been shown while the Lord Chamberlain still had the right of the blue pencil. Their younger daughter Pat had been home on a visit from Canada. Venetia and her husband and baby spent a lot of time in the house in Wiltshire; photographs of the baby, laughing on flowery grass, were enclosed. He kept coming upon them in the broken ashtray in the sideboard which Kalimo had considered safe keeping, and was wedging them round the edges of the frame that already held a picture of Venetia and the infant, on an afternoon when Rebecca came in all smiles and relief to tell him that it was all right, her period had turned up after all. She had been nearly a week overdue. She took off his glasses and kissed him frantically, gratefully; “Though if it ever did happen, I could go to England. I always think that.”