Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

He knew and they knew that he could promise nothing of the sort. But they believed he would try; and their purpose, unsure of its proper expression, wavered, comforted, before his command. The tension dissolved as he moved talking among the men, and the people in the market broke into discussion, peering and pointing. Bray said, “Get them back to the golf course. Out of here as quickly as possible. But it would be safer to manage it in groups. And they must avoid the main street.” There were about a hundred and fifty men; difficult not to alter by too obvious a taking over of the authority of the leaders, the atmosphere of consent rather compliance that Aleke had managed to create.

“Shall we go with them ourselves?” Aleke and he stood as if in a crowd coming out of a football match, sweat streaming down their faces, the market flies settling everywhere. Aleke wanted above all to avoid any encounter with the police. Then with a touch of old easy confidence: “I’m going to look a damn fool, stepping it out in front.”

“If they divide into three groups, one can go back past the boma, another round behind the abattoir — no, no good, too near the lime works — round the old church hall, that’s better, there’s a path across the open ground. And then the third can follow the boma road about ten minutes behind the first. The great thing is to let it all fizzle out,” Bray said.

“I’ll just sort of stroll up to the boma with the first lot — it’ll look as if I’m going back there, and then I can simply carry on with them after all.”

“That’s fine.”

“But you stay here,” Aleke asked of him. “Just stay put and keep your eyes on them. … I don’t like the idea of this market, with all these people, eh?”

The men were beginning to disperse, eddying, become tired individuals rather than a crowd. One or two were even buying manioc to chew; it must have been many hours since they had eaten. Bray heard behind him at once the scud of tyres, yells, and turned full into a lorry-load of Young Pioneers bursting into the crowd. Something struck his shoulder savagely in passing, the old woman was leaning over her onions in protection, wailing — the Young Pioneers with their bits of black-and-red insignia flew past him like horses over an obstacle and battered their way in among the strikers. They hit out with knobbed clubs and bicycle chains. Aleke had stopped dead, thirty yards away, with the other strikers. Bray yelled at him to go on, but it was too late, the men were racing back to their mates. Vegetables rolled, a pile of fowls tied by the legs were being trampled upon, squawking horribly, feathers and blood mixed with ripped clothing and gaps of bare flesh. He saw with choking horror hands grab bright orange and green bottles from the cold drink stall, the coloured liquid pouring over the burst of broken glass, the jagged-edged necks of bottles plunged in among heads and arms. One of the strikers staggered towards him, the terrible astonishment of a blow turning to a gash of blood that opened the whole face, from forehead to chin. Blood of chickens and men was everywhere. Bray fought to hold back an arm that had raised a bottle-neck above another head; he twisted that arm and could not have let go even if he had heard the bone crack. When the bottle dropped into his other hand he thrust it deep into his trouser pocket, struggling at the same time with someone who had grabbed him round the neck from behind. People came running from the boma and the turn of the road that led to the centre of town. While he fought he was filled with anguish at the awareness of more and more people pressing into the bellowing, fighting crowd. He was trying to get to Aleke without having any idea where he was; suddenly he saw Aleke, bleeding from the ear, struggling towards him. They did not speak but together heaved a way through blows and raced behind the market lavatories, through the backyard of a group of stores, and to the back of the boma.

Rebecca’s teeth showed clamped between parted lips, like someone who has been taken out of cold water. She stared at them with embarrassment. Godfrey Letanka, the elderly clerk in his neat alpaca jacket, grabbed the towel from beside the washbasin in Aleke’s office and held it to the bleeding ear. “Is it from inside?” Bray asked. “Was it a knock on the head?” Aleke, his great chest heaving for breath, shook his head as if a fly were in his ear. They tried to wipe away the blood so as to see where it was coming from; and there Bray discovered a small, deep hole, right through the cartilage of the ear shell: so it was not a brain injury. Letanka found the first-aid box somewhere and Rebecca held the ear tightly between two pads of cottonwool to stop the bleeding. Aleke was no longer dazed. “Get hold of Selufu — try the phone, James—” “—The police are there,” Rebecca said. “You didn’t see — they were on the edge of the crowd, two jeeps arrived from Nairobi Street, that side. Godfrey and I saw them from the roof.” “The roof?” “Yes, we found you can get up onto that little platform thing where the flag is.”

With Aleke holding a wad of cottonwool to his ear, they rushed along the empty corridors (“Those bloody fools of mine, they’ve all gone to get their heads broken”) and climbed through a window onto the curlicued wooden gable that had been built as a setting for the flagpole when the Union Jack had flown there. “Don’t come up again, it may be too much weight,” Bray said to Rebecca, and she stood there below, waiting. A car had been overturned and was burning, obscuring everything with smoke and fumes. But they could see the two police jeeps, the shining whips of their radio antennae.

They went back inside the boma and Aleke tried to telephone Selufu. While he questioned the constable on duty and they watched his face for his reaction to the replies, Rebecca whispered to Bray, “You’re bleeding too.” He looked down; there was dark blood on his shoe. “Chickens were killed.” She shook her head; she pointed, not touching him before the others. “It’s running, look.” His hand went to his pocket and he took out the broken neck of the lemonade bottle. He looked around for somewhere to put it. She took it from him and laid it, bloody and dirty, in Aleke’s big ashtray. The inside of the trouser pocket was sliced and in his groin Bray’s fingers touched a mess of wet hair and beneath it, a cut. He shook his head; it was nothing.

“He’s in the township. People have been killed there. They had to fire on them. There’s nobody at the police station but the man on the phone. Nobody.”

There was silence. She looked at the bloody shoe.

He said, “We could take the car and go back, if you like.”

“What can the two of us do,” said Aleke.

“You were doing fine. If only the Young Pioneers had kept out of it everything would have been all right. What you could do — we could make a quick whip round the lime works and so on — keep people inside and off the streets.”

“What about Rebecca? Think it’s okay for Godfrey and her here?”

Bray said, “We’ll drive them up to my house.”

“I can drive us. I’ll keep away from these roads. Godfrey and I’ll be all right.”

Bray and Rebecca looked at each other for a moment. “Take the track past the cemetery. Don’t go near the golf course.”

Sitting beside Aleke he had a moment of deep premonitory gloom about Rebecca, as if something had already happened to her rather than that she was likely to run into trouble. The small wound hurt like a cigarette burn that produces a radius of pain out of all proportion to its surface injury. Aleke was very good down in the industrial quarter. There was some disruption of work there; rumours of what was happening in the township had made people take their bicycles and race home. He spoke to groups of men while they stared at his ear bound to his head by Rebecca with criss-crossed tape, and Bray saw them drawn to him, to the physical assurance of his person just as, at home, women, friends, children were attracted without effort on his part.