Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Bray thought, he’s saying all the right things to me; but then Shinza paused, and in this room that enclosed them as closely as a cell, there was the feeling, as often happened between them, that Shinza knew what he was thinking: was thinking the same of himself, and said, “I never thought I would ever do it. Now I have to.”

He said. “What will I say to you? I’ll think it over?”

Shinza gave a sympathetic snort.

“When I’ve ‘thought it over’ I’ll only know what I know already: that I didn’t think it would ever be expected of me. Not only by you. By myself.”

Shinza smiled at him almost paternally. “I suppose we didn’t know how lucky we were to get away without guns so far. Considering what we want. You don’t expect to get that for nothing.”

It will be such a very little token violence, Bray; and you won’t feel a thing. It will happen to other people, just as the tear gas and the baton charges do.

“But you expect it of yourself?” Shinza was saying, detachedly interested.

“Yes.”

“Good God, James, remember the old days when we used to come to your place starving hungry after meetings? After riding a bicycle fifteen miles in the rain from Mologushi Mission? And when the order came from the secretariat that I was to be “apprehended” and you decided it didn’t say arrested so you could “apprehend” me to tell me about it—?” They laughed.

“I’ll be back later if I can dig up a car. If I’m not here by say, eleven, don’t count on it.”

But Shinza seemed confident that he would be there. Perhaps he knows, too, that I have a woman, and that it will have to be her car because mine is too well known in this province.

He went back to the house and called to her from the bedroom so that he could speak to her alone. “You can use my car in the meantime, and we’ll say yours is in the garage for repair. Hjalmar won’t know you haven’t taken it to work in the morning because you’re always gone by the time he gets up—” “I only hope to God it goes,” she said, her eyes moving about the room in the manner of someone who is not going to ask questions.

He said, “The only thing that worries me is what happens if he’s arrested somewhere … it’s your car he’ll be driving. But with mine … if I were to be connected with him so obviously I wouldn’t be much use any more—”

“No no, not yours.” She held off any explanation, from both of them.

It was all practical as a discussion of what supplies they would take when they went on a little expedition to the lake at a weekend.

The night was big with humidity that could not find release — moisture could still be drawn up by the sun day after day, even in the drought, from the water and forests to the north-west. About half-past nine he said he had forgotten his briefcase at Malemba’s; out of sight round the back of the house, he took Rebecca’s car instead of his own. White men in shorts were playing darts among flying cockroaches on the lighted veranda of the Fisheagle; he remembered standing at the top of the steps there, when he had first come back to Gala, and thinking that he could make out the lake away over the glassy distance. If he had been able to see it, the girl was there ahead in that presence. He had the feeling that the area of uncertainty that surrounded him visually when he took off his glasses was the real circumstance in which he had lived his life; and his glasses were more than a means of correcting a physical shortcoming, they were his chosen way of rearranging the unknowable into a few outlines he had gone by.

He drove round to the backyard quarters. Shinza was lying on the bed, barefoot, smoking. There were two of the young men Bray had seen with him before. A radio was playing. Bray gave him the key, and he held out his yellow — palmed hand with its striations of dark, a fortune — teller’s map. “Someone’ll drive you back.” “No, I can walk.” “Hell, no, man. Really? I suppose it’s better.” Almost lazily. The young lieutenants sat, one on a chair, one on an upturned box, their feet planted, hunched forward in the manner of men who are used to using their hands, in the company of men who use words. Shinza flipped the key to one and told him in Gala to move the car down into the lane behind the Fisheagle property. He looked at the other with his impatient authoritative glance, rolling his beard between thumb and forefinger like a bread pellet. The man got up, stood a moment, and followed.

“You’re going back there?” Bray was talking of the capital.

“The army doesn’t worry me so much—” Shinza didn’t bother to answer. Bray grinned, and Shinza sat up on the creaking bed and put his arms round his knees, raising his eyebrows at himself. “—No, wait a minute. With the army I can get somewhere. A white man’s at the top. Mweta’s man, the state’s man. Brigadier Radcliffe works along with the Company’s army — as a matter of fact a friend of his trained them, an old Sandhurst colleague he recommended. Oh yes. But Radcliffe’s officers are Africans. At least two high — rankers don’t love him very much and they’re ambitious. And in any case he depends on all of them to carry out his orders. If one day they don’t … There are only three thousand men, and Cyrus has very hopeful contacts among the officers. He’s been working on it for some time.”

“Good God.”

Shinza swung his legs down over the side of the bed decisively. Bray couldn’t escape him. He went on as if nothing would stop him; the more Bray knew the less risk there was in telling him, the more bound over he would be.

“Cyrus has been pretty successful, I don’t mind saying, James. Dhlamini Okoi’s useful too. His brother’s in army area HQ. You can learn a lot from him. You know that the army was rejazzed a bit before Independence, decentralized so that almost every echelon is operational now. If you can take over control at almost any level, the orders you give will be obeyed at all levels below, because the various commanders aren’t used to taking their orders direct from GHQ any longer, as they did before. You’ve got a pretty good chance to be effective at all levels — except division and battalion, of course, because that’s GHQ. Brigadier Okoi went to Sandhurst too. He thinks he could count on the officers of the Sixth Brigade as well as his own, the Twenty-third. That’s two brigades, out of a rather small army. The main worry there is the Company task force — that’s what he calls it. It would depend how occupied that was … But the police, that’s another story.”

“Onabu as chief, but plenty of white officers who really run the show, under him.”

“Exactly. Those whites are the real professionals who just want to do what they’re paid. No chance of any of them being interested in us. And there are more police than soldiers.”

“Onabu’s not a fool, either. Roly wouldn’t have advised Mweta to hand over to him if he had been. He knows how to rely on his white officers when it comes to a situation like this. He’ll be thanking God for them.”

“That’s how it is, James. Too many policemen. And their organization is old-established, eh? People are used to listening to them. They were all we had for donkey’s years, when all there was in the way of an army was a few kids from the U.K. doing their military training here. The police force’s always been paramilitary. And they’ve got the Young Pioneers to do the things it wouldn’t look nice to do themselves. I know all that. But there are a few signs that are not so bad … D’you know of any coup in the last fifteen years or so where a police force has defended its political masters? It’s inclined to be essentially bureaucratic … And in a country this size, with a population still mostly agricultural, living in villages, the biggest numbers of policemen are in the country areas — can you see Selufu’s local men rushing off to the capital to protect a government they’ve never seen?”