A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  Bray sat down on the stool with the ox-thong seat the boys at the carpenter’s shop had made for him. There was nothing to offer but patience.

  “I told her that was exactly the way I used to feel in Austria. Funnily enough, just what I used to think. And then she went to her room with the skis and I never saw her again. I had to go down to the cold storage in town and when I got back I was told she’d left for Matinga.”

  “Didn’t see her again?”

  He began to talk excitedly. “I mean we expected her Sunday night, sometime, that’s all, we didn’t think anything.… On Sunday I’m just seeing that the chairs are put out in the beer garden, and Timon comes up, there’s a phone call. Well, you know … I said, let someone else take it, can’t you. Then he said, it’s from Dar-es-Salaam, it’s Miss Emmanuelle. I told him, Dar-es-Salaam! It’s Matinga! I wasn’t worried, I thought, she wants to stay another night.”

  “She phoned you from Dar-es-Salaam?”

  “She was on the airport. I didn’t believe her. She kept on telling me, listen, Ras and I are in Dar-es-Salaam, we are leaving for London in a few minutes. She couldn’t hear me well. I shouted to her, live with him here, Emmanuelle. You don’t have to run away. She lost her temper. She said didn’t I realize she wasn’t ‘playing the fool’—those were her exact words—she wasn’t ‘playing the fool,’ Ras was in great danger and he couldn’t have stayed. That’s what she said.”

  “And the announcement on the radio?”

  Hjalmar was sunk back in the chair. “Well, we were cut off then. I phoned, I tried to get a connection from here … by the time we got through to Dar-es-Salaam again they were gone. Margot wouldn’t believe me, I had to repeat over and over again, everything, like I’m telling you … She went hysterical, why hadn’t I called her to the phone. And then Stephen heard on the news that Asahe, with a white girl and so on—no name—had slipped out of the country. They must have been at our airport in the afternoon waiting for the plane just two miles from where we were sitting in the hotel. People say he was in some political trouble. Can you think why he should be in political trouble?”

  He was eager to turn this mind to reasonable supposition. “Hjalmar, honestly, whenever we spoke together he gave me the impression of being a staunch supporter of whatever the government might choose to do. Perhaps some pressure of personalities, at work … ? But suppose someone were trying to jostle him out of his position at the radio, he wouldn’t have to disappear out of the country, would he.”

  “I’ve been to the police.” He shrugged. “I tried to get hold of Roly but he wasn’t in town, I couldn’t … all she says, I want to know word for word … why didn’t you call me to the phone. Night and day.” He leaned forward and whispered into Bray’s face: “I don’t know any more what Emmanuelle said on the phone. I don’t know if perhaps she didn’t say something else, I don’t know if I talked to her at all.”

  Bray did what he would not have known how to do a year ago. He gripped Wentz’s two hands, pinned them a moment on the chair arms. “What about Dando …?”

  Such bewilderment came into the face, such confusion that he dropped the question. The man obviously had fled without waiting for Dando to return; somehow let go, lost hold … No wonder Rebecca was uneasy to be with him.

  “London’s a good place for them to have gone. You will hear soon from her there. One can always arrange things in London—friends, money, and so on.” Olivia. But quick on the thought, reluctance: to spin a new noose, draw this house and Wiltshire together, produce, in Emmanuelle, evidence that a life unknown to Wiltshire existed here. As if somehow the lines of the girl could be traced in Emmanuelle, so different!

  It was not possible to give Hjalmar Wentz any relief. He could not be distracted. If one did try, there was blankness; what had happened had run rank over his whole mind and personality for the time being. It was destroying him but at the same time it was all that held him together: attempt to disentangle him and he would fall apart sickeningly.

  So it was Emmanuelle; Emmanuelle and Ras Asahe; the Friday afternoon and the telephone call from Dar-es-Salaam on Sunday night. The three of them sat in the old Colonial Service chairs in Bray’s living-room for the next few evenings while Hjalmar Wentz talked. His face had taken on a perpetually querulous expression and the middle finger of each hand, inert on either arm of the worn chair, twitched so that the tendons up to the wrist trembled under the skin.

  “When she went with me to the storeroom, I wonder if she didn’t want to talk to me … eh? Perhaps I said something … I put her off without knowing …”

  “Oh I don’t think so. You and she get on so well. If she’d meant to say anything, she’d’ve, well …”

  The blue eyes continued to search inwardly. Bray took the glass away from the hand and topped up the whisky, but drink didn’t help, you couldn’t even make him drunk, he held the glass and forgot it was there. “Why say that about ‘feeling you could do anything’? I should have said, what d’you mean, ‘anything.’”

  Rebecca had remarked to Bray, “It’s better for him to drive us crazy about what he thinks he did wrong, poor soul—at least it keeps him from thinking how calculating she was—right down to the business of her skis.”

  But Bray could not help looking for some reassurance that would hold. “Hjalmar, was what she did so extraordinary to you—after all? You say she’s really very attached to the man. Perhaps you even feel responsible in a way, for the loyalty she probably feels to him? Because you and Margot—well, your children grew up in an atmosphere where Africans were regarded as people in need of championing—you know what I’m getting at?—If something terrible threatened him (we have to believe her) and she helped him to get away, well … you yourself, in Germany when Margot …”

  He didn’t know what there was in this that was so destructive to Hjalmar. He saw the face of a man falling, falling, crashing from beam to beam through glass and dust and torn lianas of the shelter that this ritual of discussion built to contain him. Into the silence lying like an irredeemable act between the two men, came the sound of Rebecca singing to herself in the shower under the impression that she could not be heard above the noise of the water. Bray found himself, appallingly, smiling. In Hjalmar’s face only the fine fair skin seemed intact, the bone structure seemed to have loosened and his mouth was always a little parted as if he lacked oxygen. Now something faintly stirred there, a kind of coordination in the eyes, an awareness of the existence of other people, as if his wild glance had fallen upon a scrap of undated newspaper picked up in the rubble.

  Bray began to carry drinks and glasses into the garden. In his present state Wentz noticed neither abrupt changes of subject nor apparently aimless activities. He picked up a stool and newspaper, stood a moment, slowly put the paper down, then picked it up and followed slowly to the fig tree. The dust in the air at the time of the year made a chiffon sky after sunset, matt grey and pink, and the atmosphere was thickened with the same colours reflected on soft, invisible suspensions of dust. Bray lit the lamp; Hjalmar said, “I’m sorry I walked in on you like this.”

  “It’s quite all right.”

  But his self—protective stiffness seemed curiously to succeed in helping Wentz as all his sympathetic responsiveness had not. “No, I shouldn’t be here. You ought’ve been left alone. I know that.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Hjalmar. In the end the only secrets one cares to keep are those one has with oneself—and even that’s a mistake.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  He smiled. “I think I mean the doubts one has about repudiating aspects of oneself one can’t live by any more.”

  “And if there’s nothing left?—wha’d’you do then, kill yourself?” But the words were lost, they could be ignored in the appearance of Rebecca, smelling of the perfume he’d bought her in the capital, calling out, “Oh good idea, yes, let’s eat outside tonight. Shall I ask Kalimo? Have you got cold beer there for me?”

  There was a
phone call next morning to Bray at the boma. Stephen Wentz— “Is my father there?—Yes, well he was seen by someone on the bus at Matoko, so we thought he must have made for your place.” “He’s all right,” Bray said, although the son didn’t ask. “My sister cabled.” “London?” “Yes, she’s staying there.” Bray phoned his house at once. Kalimo took a long time to find Wentz. What did he do with himself all day: he was apparently sitting somewhere in the garden. He spoke at last, a hesitant croak, “Hullo …?” “Emmanuelle’s safely in London. She cabled—your son’s just phoned.” “To your office?” Wentz confirmed nervously.

  “He doesn’t want to speak to any of them,” Bray reported to Rebecca, who happened to have slipped into the office while he was telephoning. She shrugged, pressing her chin back so that it doubled, half-comically, and he ran a finger along it to tease her. Lying in bed early that morning he had told her of Shinza’s suggestion about the ILO in Switzerland. She said, now, “If you go out, will you be-let in again?” It was that she had come for.

  “Why not … and if I do as he wants me to … say I’m going to England.”

  “You’ll go to England.” She was standing in the doorway.

  “I may not go anywhere at all. I don’t know how serious he is about it. I had the feeling …”

  He had not told her anything more. He had always told Olivia everything. But in the end? Now he could tell Olivia nothing at all, nothing. So what was the answer, between men and women?

  He had to go over to Malemba’s house; Sampson wanted to talk to him, privately.

  “I’ve been threatened.” Malemba waited until his wife had put down two big cups of milky tea and left their small living-room again. He looked embarrassed, as if he had to confess to an infection caught in compromising circumstances. “I’ve been told if I don’t stop the classes for the lime works people ‘I won’t come home one night.’”

  “By whom?”

  “A man, Mkade—he calls himself Commandant, the Young Pioneers. The same people who started a fight outside the Gandhi Hall while we were up in town.”—He meant at the Congress.

  “We’re going to ask Commissioner Selufu for protection. We’re going to go to him together. There must be a witness that you’ve been promised it.”

  The courses being given at present for the limeworkers were the most straightforward elementary education. “Who would want to put a stop to that?” Malemba repeated.

  “It’s the one I did earlier about workers’ rights and the trade unions, I suppose. They don’t want anything like that run again.”

  Selufu with his East Coast man’s curved nose and eyes crinkled in a professional expression of decision listened without reaction. “I don’t think you’ve got to worry about anything, Mr. Malemba, I would ignore the nonsense—”

  “These people have shown themselves to be violent, Commissioner—you yourself know the police have had to intervene many times, where they’re involved,” he heard himself saying coldly.

  “—But if you feel nervous”—a patronizing, very quick smile thrown towards Sampson Malemba— “I’ll see there’s somebody on duty around the Hall these nights. Of course, feelings run high in politics—feelings run high in our country, eh?—and if you start these lectures and clubs and then people—well, it’s natural you run into trouble, and then we … we are obliged to protect you. What can we do?” He laughed with determined pleasantness, and as they made to leave remarked, “And you, Colonel? What was your complaint?”

  “Malemba and I run the adult education scheme together, as you know, Mr. Selufu. I am concerned with whatever affects it—and him.”

  “Oh well I’m glad you are all right. No trouble in your trips around the country. You don’t run into any of these trouble-makers, eh—that’s good, that’s good. I’m glad.”

  At dinner that evening the news came over the radio that Albert Tola Tola, Minister of Foreign Affairs, had been arrested as the leader of a plot to overthrow the President. Several “prominent people in public life” as well as two members of parliament were involved, and there had been at least five other arrests. Another conspirator, the broadcasting and television personality Mr. Erasmus Nomakile “Ras” Asahe, had apparently fled the country last week. Hjalmar Wentz listened like a prisoner brought up from the cells, dazed, to hear a sentence. Rebecca stared at Bray. He felt a nervous excitement that made him want to laugh. Tola Tola! Kalimo came in to take the soup plates and clicked his tongue in annoyance because they were not emptied. Hjalmar lifted his spoon and began to eat.

  They all ate. Bray shook the bell for Kalimo. “So we know nothing, Hjalmar, we know nothing!”

  “Tola Tola,” Hjalmar said, clearing his throat. “Has he got something to do with Edward Shinza?”

  “Apparently not! It must’ve been a right—wing coup they were trying!”

  “I always found Asahe such a vain fellow,” Hjalmar said. But it was the only reference he made to the political sensation. Emmanuelle had gone; public revelations neither added to nor subtracted from that. Rebecca made a shy offering— “At least they didn’t drag her in.” And Bray added, “No, that’s good—it looks as though there won’t be any difficulty,” meaning that the Wentzes would not suffer from being suspected of implication in the Asahe affair. Surely Roly would look after that much, anyway. Hjalmar didn’t suggest that he might telephone his wife, or that he would be going home. He drank a brandy with Bray after dinner and went to bed early; from under the fig tree they saw him pulling the curtains across the light from his room.

  They walked round the garden—a thick hot night and no moon—and carried on, talking, close but scarcely able to see each other, through the bush. They found themselves in the rough of the golf course—but at night the tamed and trimmed colonialized landscape went back to the bush, was part of the blackness that made all but the centre of the small town (feeble light cupped in a huge dark hand) one with the savannah and forest that stretched away all round, closed over it with the surging din of a million insects in a million trees. Shinza, Mweta, and the two of them themselves, walking by feel among the shapes of bushes; Tola Tola, Ras Asahe.

  “D’you think she was in it with Ras?” Rebecca said.

  “Oh I doubt it.”

  “She’s so clever. She used to make me feel she knew what you were thinking.”

  “What I’d like to know is whether this was an Mso attempt or whether Tola Tola was on his own, so to speak—I mean he’s always been regarded as part of the Mso faction, Mweta gave him Foreign Affairs under the old electoral bargain with them. We’ll only find out when they publish the names of the rest … Ras’s family background’s solid Gala, old-guard PIP—but he was disdainful about old man Asahe … she was clever, all right, if she always knew what he was thinking. Come to think of it, Neil was talking about Tola Tola not being Mso by birth.”

  “There’ll be a proper old witch—hunt now. Nobody’ll be able to move without being frisked.” Sometimes her turn of phrase unconsciously echoed Gordon, the husband; somewhere away across two thousand miles of dark he was there, too, the consciously handsome little male in his silk scarf.

  “I don’t know about that. Nothing makes people feel safer than to have uncovered a plot and handed out retribution. Fear takes on a face and a name and is dealt with.”

  Maybe attention would be distracted from Shinza for a while; who knew? Moving along with her in the dark he was conscious of suppositions dissolving one into the other. They came to an eye of water, the sheen off black satin; something dived into it noisily—leguaan? The beasts persisted here, among the lost golf-balls, ungainly prehistoric survivors disguising their harmlessness in the appearance of an alligator—he had met one once, and idly remarking on it to Kalimo, Kalimo had captured the thing and eaten it.

  “You mean you’ll still go to Switzerland.”

  He felt beneath his hand the articulation of her hip as she walked. “Come with me. We’ll try another lake.”

  “How’d I get back
again.”

  Of course, they were not perfectly and secretly at large in the dark at all; if she stepped outside the accepted justification of her necessity for staying in the country, she could not return to this life. It existed only here.

  The house where he lived with her was in darkness, far below the great tree. It looked deserted, already the forest was rooted beneath it. They went in, talking again of Tola Tola. He was too preoccupied to think of love-making, but while she moved quietly about the bathroom (not to disturb Hjalmar across the passage) his whole body, flung down upon the bed, of itself made ready for her; she saw when she came in. And so he entered again the fierce pleasure that was in her, while the bats from the fig pierced pinholes of sound in the thickness of dark.

  He was clear-headedly awake for a few moments some time in the night. Why go to Selufu with Sampson? He and Sampson laid a complaint with the Commissioner of Police; the Commissioner detailed a man to the Gandhi Hall. A series of procedural gestures: what ought to be done had been done. According to what code? And if Malemba were really to be killed? He could be knifed in any of a dozen ambushes around the township; outside his own gate.… It was still something they couldn’t believe; we—I am still acting within a set of conventions that don’t apply. No more dangerous delusion than that. Selufu won’t—can’t—give the word to the Young Pioneers that will bind them. There is no word. A policeman outside the Gandhi Hall: it was the perfect symbol of a moral surety become meaningless. There was nowhere in the world now where Satyagraha—already polarized with violence the moment the term was translated as nonviolence—could find the compact of respect for human life on which its effectiveness depended.