Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“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.