Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

But he took it to the bank and withdrew the money from the sale of the house Rebecca’s parents had built for her when she married Gordon, the man everyone was more content without. Half the sum would have equalled the maximum amount exchange control regulations permitted to be taken out of the country, and then only by people leaving permanently. In breakfast table conversations with Roly about foreign exchange, Roly was easily led to turn his tongue on the officials who didn’t seem able to put a stop to money going out of the country illegally, just the same. He said it was well known how these things were done; there was one crowd, a South African white man and a couple of Congolese, who had agents in the capital and just plain smuggled the cash over to Lubumbashi and thence wherever the client wanted it, and there was a certain Indian down in Old Town who was known to have more reliable ways and means — a relation of the people who had taken over the garage since old Haffajee died. How was it done? Well, travel allowances for one thing; poor students going off on scholarships to study abroad; they were allowed a maximum allowance that was invariably in excess of the money they had, so they were paid a small percentage to take out someone else’s money as their own. Businessmen; the wives of white Company officials going “home” on leave; Moslems going on a pilgrimage to Mecca — lots of people one wouldn’t think it of were happy to earn their profit on the side.

He thought it might easily be that the Congolese would turn out to be Gordon’s friends. It was not too difficult, through casual inquiry at the garage, to find out where to go in Old Town. Again with the sun on his head and purpose at his back he tramped over waste ground. If the elderly gentleman in the grey persian lamb fez knew who he was he showed no surprise; and perhaps he had long ceased to be surprised at the people he recognized. It was all satisfactorily concluded. Rebecca’s name would never appear, in fact the elderly gentleman would never know it. The money, nearly four thousand pounds in English currency, twice that figure in local currency, would become Swiss francs in a numbered account. In due course Rebecca’s signature would be lodged with the Swiss bank as the one required to draw on that account. He explained that delays in the transfer of the money — a piecemeal transfer, for example — would not do. This too, was accepted as a matter of routine practice: then the commission rate would be higher, of course. The money would be deposited within two or three weeks at most.

After it was done he walked back to the empty lot where African and Indian children were playing together with hoops made of the tin strips off packing — cases. For the first time he could remember, the Volkswagen was reluctant to start, and they made a new game of helping him push it so that he could take advantage of a downward slope. As he got going and turned into the street a young man in the usual clerk’s white shirt and sunglasses greeted him. He did not feel worried that he had been seen; such a worry had no reality for him because it had never seemed it could ever apply to him, have relevance to his way of life. He felt the commonplace peace of being on one plane of existence alone, for once: his mind was entirely occupied with practical matters to be ticked off one by one through a series of actions, before he could get away. The dentist; resoled shoes to be collected; wine as a present for his host.

On the way back to Dando’s to pick up his things he was held up, as he had been once before, by the passing of the presidential car. The outriders on their motorcycles rode before and behind — the car was borne on the angry swarm of their noise.

He saw only the black profile of Mweta’s face rushing away from his focus. The next time, next time they met — it was difficult to realize that it had ended like that, this time. But human affairs didn’t come to clear — cut conclusions, a line drawn and a total added up. They appeared to resolve, dissolve, while they were only reforming, coming together in another combination. Even when we are dead, what we did goes on making these new combinations (he saw clouds, saw molecules); that’s true for private history as well as the other kind. Next time we meet — yes, Mweta may even have to deport me. And even that would be a form of meeting.

Her car parked outside the Tlumes’, Kalimo’s washing on the bushes, the fig, like the trees over the main street, under a hide of coated dust, the quality of the silence that met him in his bedroom with the thin bright curtains and in the shabby living-room — he walked through the rooms with clenched hands, suddenly. All here; not a memory; life, now. He entered into it and took possession. Kalimo’s welcome flowed over him like an expression of his own joy.

And soon she came, he heard her walking up the veranda steps and the squeak of the screen door that let her pass — in the rush of assurance that in a few seconds she would be standing there in the room, alive. There she was, herself. The self that couldn’t be stored up even in the most painstaking effort of the mind and senses, the most exact recollection, never, never, the self that was only to be enjoyed while she was there. The moment he embraced her (slight awkwardness of disbelief that it was happening, taste of the inside of her mouth coming back to him, feel of the flesh on her back between his spread fingers) the sense of that self entered him and disappeared, a transparency, into familiarity. She wanted to hear “all the stories” with the amused eagerness of one who has been content, waiting behind — she hadn’t envied him the capital or the company of her old friends. They ate their first meal: yes, that was exactly how she was, her way of considering, from under lowered eyelids, what she should help herself to next. He kept pausing to look at her and she, every now and then, reached for his hand and turned it this way and that, squeezing the bones.

“You took the phone call very calmly.”

She was hardly expectant. She said with tentative curiosity, “You were very calm yourself.”

“Don’t you want to know what I wanted the letter for? Aren’t you concerned about what I did with it? Rebecca, I’ve taken your money out of the bank.”

She searched him for the joke. “No, really.”

“I did. The money from the house. I sent it away. It will be there for you in Switzerland whenever you need it. No one else can touch it, no one will block the account. You can use it wherever you are.”

She became at once tense and helpless, an expression that flattened and widened her face across the cheekbones. “Why? I’m not going away.”

“You must be safe. You and your children. Now I feel satisfied you are.”

“I see.”

“You don’t see … you don’t see …” He had to get up from the table and come over to her, enfold her awkwardly against his side. He took her arms away from her face; it was roused, red. A vein ran like a thickness of string down her forehead. He thought she was going to cry. He chivvied, humoured— “You’re a very trusting girl, I could have run off with all your cash. You handed over without a murmur.”

She squared her jaw back against her soft full neck for self — control. “The trouble is that you never try to deceive me. I know what you will do and what you would not do. I could never change it.”

“At least I hope the money’s in a Swiss bank. We’ll know in a week or two whether it’s there or whether I’ve been a gullible ass who’s lost it for you.”

Between the “stories,” the unimportant news of friends, he talked a little of Congress: but it was massive in his mind, it could not be dealt with anecdotally, nor as an account of events, even an explanation. It broke, over the days, into the components most meaningful to him, and these took on their particular forms of expression and found their own times to emerge.