Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“Who was it? Out with it!” There was a roar again.

“No, no — well, Ras took her—”

“Oh Ras, was it?”

“Sputnik Bar, eh?” “So that’s it, now.”

Rebecca Edwards came in from the veranda, smiling good-naturedly, inquiringly, under the remarks shied at her. She said, “There’re bulbs like you see in films round the star’s dressing-table, and they light up and spell INDEPENDENCE HURRAH.”

In great confusion, there and then they decided to go. Dando refused and Vivien had to go home to the children, and Rebecca Edwards protested that hers were alone too. Neil insisted that Bray must come; he was one of those people who, late at night, suddenly have a desperate need of certain companions. But when Neil, Bray, Evelyn Odara and the South African got down to the second-class trading area, the others hadn’t arrived. They went into the Sputnik Bar for a moment, meeting music like a buffeting about the head, and then someone said that he thought the arrangement had been to meet at the railway crossing. There began one of those chases about in the night that, Bray saw, Neil Bayley fiercely enjoyed. They went all the way back into town to the flats where the Edwards girl lived — Neil stood on the moonlit patch of earth in front of the dark building and called up, but there was no response. They stopped somewhere to give a man a lift; he was caught in the lights, hat in hand; only his clean white shirt had shown on the dark road. He answered Neil with a liberal use of Bwana, as a white man would expect if he were to do such a thing as stop for a black one on the road, and when he got into the car beside Bray and the South African, sat among these black and white city people like a hedgehog rolled into itself at a touch. Bray, back in this country once more, again aware of his own height and size and pinkness almost like some form of aggression he wasn’t responsible for, knew that the fellow was holding himself away from contact with him. The voices of Evelyn, Neil, and the South African flew about the car; they passed the shadows of the mango trees in the bright moonlight, lying beneath the trees like sleeping beasts; a donkey cropping among broken china on a refuse mound; the colours on the mosque almost visible, the silvered burglar grilles on the elaborate houses of the Indian sector. The second-class trading area had been laid out long ago and haphazardly; shops cropped up suddenly, streets met, the car plunged and rolled. All was shuttered under already bedraggled flags and bunting, black and deserted except for the bars-little shops crudely blurred with light, juke-box music and the vibrancy of human movement and noise.

Bray offered to be left outside the Sputnik in case the other members of the party turned up. For ten or fifteen minutes he strolled in the street whose vague boundaries were made by feet and bicycle tyres rather than the strip of tar considered sufficient by the white city council of the old days. The cement verandas of the Indian shops were quays in the dust; snippets of cloth had been swept off them everywhere — that was where the African men employed by the Indians sat at their sewing machines during the day. The shutters and chipped pillars were plastered with stickers of the flag and Mweta in a toga. Young boys peering above the paint that blacked out the shop-front entrance of the Sputnik picked at the stickers on the breath-gummy, manhandled glass and giggled at Bray. The doorway was constantly blocked by befuddled men making to get out and undecided men looking in.

How confused our pleasures are, he thought, and walked slowly up the street again, past a man who had got as far as the clustered bicycles and lay sprawled in the warm dust. The unmade road level had worn so deeply away from a shop veranda that the cement platform was the right height for sitting on. The din from the bar was companionable, like a reassurance that there was life going on in the house, and he smoked a cigar, releasing the fragrant, woody scent in the air stained with those old smells brought out by dampness — urine and decaying fruit. After ten years, the light of the town was still not big enough to dim the sky; there was no town for thousands of miles big enough for that. Ropes and blobs of stars ran burningly together; he let himself grow dizzy looking. Then Bayley’s car came back, and they decided to give up hope of the rest of the party and have a quick beer before going home to bed. The old part of the bar, a shop furnished with benches and rough eating-house tables, was full of the local regulars sitting over native beer and taking no notice of the band pressed deafeningly into a corner. In the new beer-garden — a yard more or less cleared (the dustbins still stood overflowing) and set out with a few coloured tables with umbrellas over them — there were some bourgeois Africans with women, and a couple or two dancing; Evelyn Odara waved at someone she knew. Bottled European beer was being drunk here. Neil had friends everywhere, and went in search of the proprietor, a handsome, greedy-faced young black man, ebullient with plans for making money. He settled down with them and brought, in answer to Neil’s insistence and insisting, for his part, laughingly, that they didn’t exist — three of his “girls” to join them. “You’ll do the kids a favour. Just about this time the police comes along on a round, and they’re not supposed to be here alone, you see — this town’s backward, man.” Beer arrived with the girls— “No, no, its a pleasure to have you and your friends in my little place. Of course, it’s not nicely fixed up yet … we wanted to have some night life for the celebrations. I’m paying the band alone twenty pounds a night, I’m gonna have a posh bar out here with whisky and ice for the drinks, everything nice … for high-class trade from town, you understand.”

The three women were cheaply smart, with the shine of nylon tightly stretched over plenty of sturdy black leg. They had the rather appealing giggling pleasure in being dressed up for the part, of those who haven’t been in the business long. They were pretty, with straightened hair, painted eyes, and purplish-painted lips. But the coloured bulbs that spelled out INDEPENDENCE HURRAH had been fused by the rain, and were not working.

It was true that Edward Shinza was not in the capital; given the past, this absence could not have been more pointed. For Bray himself, it was an absence somehow always present.

The drives home at night on the dirt road to Dando’s were punctuated by the death-thump of nightjars who sat stupidly in the path of the car and then rose too late to escape, just as they used to on the roads at Gala. In daylight their broken bodies were slowly ironed into the dust by tyres passing and repassing over them. He and Olivia had kept a log-book of bird life in and around Gala; it had bothered them to think how, since there was no way to avoid killing these birds in the dark, one gradually got accustomed to it, so that the thump of their bodies against the car went unremarked as the shot of hard-back beetles striking the windscreen. One didn’t even notice, any more, that the dead birds were beautiful with their russet and black markings. They had tried to make a study of the nightjars’ habits, one summer, to determine what it was that made them partial to the roads; came to the conclusion that lice under their wings caused them to try repeated dustbaths. Yes, Africa was a kind of study, then, with detached pleasures and interests, despite his involvement in politics.

During the week of the celebrations it was difficult to get into town without being held up somewhere by a right of way cleared for some dignitary or other. Traffic officers in white gauntlets zoomed arabesques on their motorcycles, soldiers in well-ironed khaki blocked the road and held back children, women, idlers and bicycles; sometimes a band came tootling and mildly blaring in the vanguard, and there were always flags. Then came the Daimler or Mercedes with the President of this or the Prime Minister of that, deep inside; often it was only after his car had gone by that one realized who it must have been, the kernel of so many supernumerary, black, bespectacled faces emerging from the identical perfect grooming of dark suits and snow-white shirt collars. Once it was the English royalty with her grey-permed lady-in-waiting, and once Mrs. Gandhi; and, while in the car with Vivien Bayley, Bray was even held up by Mweta himself. The Bayley children climbed out onto the roof and bonnet of the car to cheer, Mweta was in his orange toga in his open car, he was borne past with the unseeing smile that already, in a few days, he had learnt to sweep across faces become all one, to him. Vivien said sadly, “Magnificent, isn’t he? Ours is the best-looking of the lot.”