Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“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.

Who can protect Malemba? Mweta, whirling about-face from Shinza only to defend himself against Tola Tola, could not offer anything better than Selufu’s policeman walking round the Gandhi Hall. Shinza had no power to offer the kind of safety he promised — after …

Malemba needs a gun, he must carry a gun these nights.

But in the morning the urgency of that flash of wakefulness that had lit up his mind between dark and dark was pale in daylight. It was Saturday; Rebecca went into “town” early on some shopping errand, and he lingered at the breakfast table under the tree until she returned with mail and newspapers she’d called for at the boma— although the offices were closed, there was always someone who cleared the mail-box. There was more in one of the overseas newspapers about the Tola Tola affair than could be gleaned from the local papers; they were reading over a fresh pot of coffee when Hjalmar appeared, somnambulistic as he was in the mornings; he obviously took strong sleeping pills. They said nothing to him about Tola Tola; let him linger in that sleep-walking state in which he went measuredly back and forth between kitchen and breakfast table — as an unconscious sign, perhaps, of the awkwardness he felt at staying on, he had developed a kind of reluctance to be waited upon.

Bray had finished his breakfast; Rebecca ate with the guest. He had dreamt all night— “That’s why I’m so tired this morning … there was a beetle on the floor, buzzing on its back.”

“In the dream?” Because Rebecca resented Hjalmar’s presence she was always particularly attentive to him.

“No … in the room, on the floor. I heard it when I turned out the light. And every time I fell asleep I woke up and heard it, still there, on its back. I kept thinking, it’s on its back, it can’t get up, I must turn it. Poor thing …” Bray smiled a moment, over the top of the paper, over the top of his glasses, and he directed himself at Bray— “And then I got up and turned on the light and found it and took the slipper and killed it.” He looked intently first at Bray, then at the girl, as if for an explanation. They hesitated, Bray laughed mildly and so did she. “Finish the rest of the scrambled egg,” she said. While they read, Hjalmar listlessly took up the review section of an English paper.

Rebecca went off to wash her hair, running her hand up through it in one of those ritual gestures connected with the care of their bodies that women have.

“So Wilhelm Reich is in fashion again with the students … I see his wife’s written a book about him. When I was young in Germany he was our prophet … but while we were discussing the sexual revolution as the break with authoritarianism in the father-dominated family, others were already kissing the feet of Father Hitler and Father Stalin. — What about our ideas of democracy, when we know the majority will has been so many times self-destructive …?”

“Of course you tend to see everything from the point of view of the place you are … so I find …” Bray said. “But what would Reich have thought of the authoritarianism of this continent, now — the sexual basis of authoritarianism according to his theory simply doesn’t exist in African societies, their sexual life has always been ordered in a way that makes satisfaction available to everyone the moment he’s physically ready?”

But Wentz’s flicker of interest damped out; he turned pages dutifully and folded the paper aside.

“Poor thing. Only when I was in bed again, I realized I’d killed it,” he said. “I squashed it under the slipper — you know those Kaefer, they have a hard case but it squashes in a minute. But I’d got out of bed just to stop the noise, to put it on its legs, to stop the useless struggle.”

Along with the newspapers and other mail was a letter from Olivia. Bray had left it there though he had seen it at once when the girl put down the bundle — it lay under their eyes a moment while he was already tearing wrappers off the newspapers. He opened it now.

“… I mean to be on your back, hour after hour on the floor.”

The large well-formed, well-educated handwriting covered thin sheets without a word crossed out-the marriage of a son of some old friends, Venetia’s new car, the Labour Party’s Brighton conference— I sat watching on TV while you were in the smoke and heat of Shinza’s battle with Mweta. Joosab’s cinema, of all places — do you remember when it was opened, just before we left, and little Indian girls garlanded all the white ladies with hibiscus full of ants, so we were scratching ourselves politely all through the speeches.…

“A sign of weakness. It’s fatal to show a sign of weakness. She accuses me of weakness. She says I had no authority over the children. But she also blames herself. D’you know why?” Hjalmar began to laugh weakly, unable to help himself. “D’you know what Margot said?”

His eye was following Olivia’s letter as he listened to Hjalmar … you are having a so much more interesting time … my poor dull news … I sometimes worry. I wonder where we’ll take up again. Of course I should have come, but the fact that I didn’t … shows that it wasn’t possible for us.