Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Aleke said, “D’you want to go into the township?”

It was one way of putting it. “I’ll come with you.”

Aleke suddenly yawned passionately, lifted his hands from the steering wheel and slapped them down on it again. “We’ll go round by your house to see if they got back all right.”

He said. “I wonder about town. There’re a lot of people hurt.”

“I can’t cut myself in half. The police are there. The shopkeepers will have the sense to shut up shop.”

The Tlumes were with Rebecca, Hjalmar, and Letanka at the house. The children were making a party of it; Kalimo chased them out of the kitchen and they ran squealing through the rooms. Rebecca and Kalimo were carrying round coffee. Aleke swallowed a cup in a certain aura of awkwardness — the unspoken questioning that builds up round someone in authority. Edna Tlume was on night duty and supposed to be sleeping during the day but she had gone back to the hospital and had rushed in now only to make sure Nongwaye had fetched the children from school. She offered to dress Aleke’s ear but his wife, Agnes, had been telephoning Rebecca hysterically after getting no reply from his office — he dashed off to “shut her up” by showing himself to her for a moment. He had another reason, too: “Have you got a gun?” he asked Bray.

“For the birds. Six thousand miles away.”

Godfrey Letanka was worried about his mother and they were trying to persuade him not to go to the township. Bray telephoned Sampson Malemba’s house. Sampson’s wife answered; she didn’t know where Sampson was, there was trouble, trouble, she kept repeating. She had locked herself in. Cars and lorries of “those people”—she meant the Young Pioneers, but they might have been strikers, too — were going through the streets.

“What can Aleke do about it? Whether you’re the P.O. or anybody—” Nongwaye Tlume said.

“He has certain gifts, you know.”

“Rebecca says you have a leg injury, James? Let me examine it quickly.” Little Edna had acquired her fluency in English while doing her nurse’s training course, and she had the vocabulary of hospital reports. She insisted, and he had to go into the bathroom and take off his trousers. He stood there in his underpants while she cut away the hair and cleaned the cut. He smiled. “Self-inflicted.” “It really needs a stitch. You should come up to the hospital. I could do it in a minute, but I’m not supposed to.” “Oh come on. You’ll do it better than the doctor.” They went hurriedly over to the Tlume house — unfamiliar with locked doors and closed windows in the middle of the day — and she brought out her curved needle and plastic gut, “like a good shoemaker,” he said. The needle stabbed quick-to-be-kind through the resistance of the tough skin, the thread was expertly drawn up, tied, and cut off. The pink palms and nails of the narrow black hands were beautiful markings. “What’s going to happen, James? Why can’t the President stop all this? A person doesn’t know what to do. You should see the burn cases at the hospital. Rebecca is lucky she hasn’t got to worry about the children.”

She left him to dress; he pulled on his blood-stained trousers heavily. And Rebecca was still there, because of him. Events carried consciousness unreflectingly from one moment to the next, but this dragged on the mind.

Back at the house Rebecca was playing with the Tlume children with the ingratiating attention of a childless adult; Kalimo and two or three friends presented a deputation, backing up each other’s words with nods and deep hums: Mahlope, the young gardener, had gone off to the golf course earlier “to look” and hadn’t returned. “There are a lot of rubbish-people here,” Kalimo pronounced. But his friends were trying to prevent him from going after the boy.

“If we all start looking for each other, we’ll all be lost, Kalimo,” Bray said. They were speaking in Gala.

An appreciative note went up from the chests of the others.

Kalimo said, “He’s just got drunk somewhere. I know that. And there are always people ready to steal someone’s pay while trouble is going on.”

“You’re worried about his pay?”

“Mukwayi, you know yourself you paid him yesterday night.”

“I’ll try and make inquiries about him later. You stay here. I need you, Kalimo.” An empty promise, a little flattery; the old man went off reluctantly.

Bray was listening for Aleke’s car; Hjalmar kept him, describing the men who had come across the golf course. “… singing, you know — it was just like the student days in Germany, we were singing the Internationale like schoolkids and it didn’t seem true when they would come and beat us up.” He was excited. “It’s always the same, students and workers make mincemeat for police and thugs. — They’ve picked it up here like V.D. and measles.… Measles kills people who’ve never been exposed to the virus before….”

Outside, the old fig wrinkled in its skin of dust was fixed as eternity. The midday peace of heat enclosed in the garden beneath it was unreachable indifference: Bray stood amazed for a moment — the grunts and screams and desperate scuffle, the yellow guts of crushed chickens and the miner’s face splitting into blood surrounded him in delusion. Over beyond the trees, an indefinable turmoil was apprehended through all the senses, atmospherically. The clamour in the township was too far away to be sorted out. There was only the roar of a sea — shell held to the ear.

Aleke hooted in the road on the other side of the house, and he went round and got into the government car beside him.

In the old part of the township, life was so dense that violence was obscured — in the mud houses, tangled palms, lean-tos of waste material, old vehicle chassis, piles of wood, paw-paws and lianas growing out of rubbish the distinction between dwelling and ruin disappeared, the pattern of streets itself disappeared, and if doors were broken, posts uprooted, weapon-like objects littered the dust, that might easily be part of the constant course of decay and patching-up by which the place maintained its life. Only the burned-out houses were a statement of disruption; and even one or two of those had already those signs — a bit of tin over the angle of standing walls, a packing-case door propped up — of habitation creeping back. The old township smelled of disaster and hid everything; the people were not to be seen, their cooking pots and fire tins left outside the houses to be taken up in the usual activity as soon as this threat to everyday life, like every other they had known, passed and left them once again to make a fire, to cook, to wash clothes in a tin bath. It also hid their partisanships, their sudden decisions to take the threat into their own hands. Bray and Aleke heard later that down here several people had been killed in street battles that morning, but they themselves met nothing but a sullen withdrawal and the faces and hands of children behind the flaps of sacking at window-holes.

The new housing-scheme area near the hostel had no such protection. The substance of life there was still too new and thin to withstand assault. The web was broken. The fact that there were panes in the windows was enough; shattered glass lay everywhere among bricks, twisted bicycles, wrecked food stalls, yelling clusters of people — all this naked to the red-earth clearing bulldozed from the forest. It was impossible to get into some streets. They backed up the car and zigzagged. Knots of people meant hand-to-hand fighting or someone wounded. A police van tore through filled with shouting faces behind the wire cage; a miner’s helmet lying on the ground was caught and sent bowling like a severed head. A Gala woman with her dress ripped down her breasts, her turban gone, and her plaited snakes of hair standing up exposed, shrieked again and again.