Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“If it were not for me … you understand, my darling …? I feel I’m behaving like a lunatic, hanging on to you.”

“I won’t go.”

He approached her as if they were in a hotel room, alone in a strange room. He stroked her hair and held her. “I stink. I shouldn’t have you near me.”

They said nothing. She scratched the nail of her forefinger down his shirt. She said at last, “How many stitches?”

“Four, I think. No, two — I was counting the four holes as a stitch each.”

“Didn’t hurt? She’s good, isn’t she.”

“Here.” He took her finger and showed her where to feel the little knots of plastic gut through the trousers.

She asked, “You phone Aleke,” and he nodded. They went peacefully back to the living-room, where Hjalmar was slicing a leg of lamb. “Mahlope’s back,” Kalimo announced belligerently from the doorway.

Aleke was often in the house; he had no one at home and all their lives were thrown together by an hour-to-hour uncertainty in which Kalimo’s hot meals — congealed, dried-up and indigestible — continued to be prepared with dogged regularity fixed as the passage of the sun, and eaten any time by whoever happened to be there. Kalimo apart, everybody else’s functions were blurred and individual purpose and conviction were passed over in simply doing the next thing.

Harassed Selufu depended on Aleke and Aleke assumed that Bray and Sampson Malemba would arrange food supplies for the men sheltered at the showground. But when he and Sampson arrived the second day with meat and porridge commandeered from the hospital kitchen, mugs and urns from Malemba’s Boy Scouts’ equipment — whatever they could beg or borrow — they found the men herded into the arena in the blazing sun, surrounded by soldiers. The soldiers were Talefa from the west and had no common language with the strikers. At the sight of Bray the hail went up: Shinza, Shinza. Malemba argued with the soldiers to let Bray in among the strikers. He stood there absolutely still, tensely wary, holding off any reaction he might precipitate. Then he was let in; the men crowded round to claim him. They wanted to go home; they would walk it. But the police would not let anybody go; the police had taken away more than twenty of them and the rest had been told they were going to be kept in this “cattle place.”

There was nothing to do but get on and distribute the food. He and Malemba addressed themselves to that and that only. He knew that Sampson (despite his firm indignation over the “dog-kennel” issue at Congress) had no doubts about Mweta and would always support Mweta however saddened and puzzled he might be about things that happened under the regime. At the same time, Sampson trusted him; so nothing was said about the way he had been hailed in Shinza’s name. There could be no discussion between them of what they had just seen. The weight of circumstance was palpable in the burning heat that had collected in the old Volkswagen.

He dropped off Malemba; the market was closed, the Indian shops shuttered, but the supermarket had its doors open that morning. There were few people about and wherever they drifted together, even women with baskets on their heads and babies on their backs, they attracted the attention of slumping soldiers who came to life and moved them along roughly. He saw the Gala women swaying off, sweeping their kangas round their backsides, laughing rudely and shouting abuse the soldiers couldn’t understand. Outside the boma Aleke was talking to Selufu through the window of a squad car. He signalled Bray over; the three were a conclave, representing law and order; Selufu greeted him with a businesslike smile. “Everything all right? That’s a very good job you and Malemba’re doing — I was just saying, I must keep that crowd isolated, and where can I put them?” “Nye’s been told where to get off,” Aleke said with satisfaction. And to Selufu— “You should have heard him swearing at Bray — what a character. If it’d been another time I’d have given him one on the jaw.” “Oh, the Colonel isn’t going to worry himself about a man like that one”—Selufu shaped the flattering estimate as one of a company of men who were peers.

“The men’ve been rounded up in the cattle arena without shelter from the sun.”

“Now what nonsense is that — I’ll go down myself and see about it. That sergeant doesn’t know what he’s doing. — How’s the leg? It’s not worrying you, eh?” And he drove off with a word or two to Aleke.

Aleke had brought Rebecca to the boma to try and keep some sort of routine going, but the place was under guard and hardly anyone had turned up for work. Aleke himself had been called down to the industrial quarter — there was fighting going on there sporadically between the fish-factory and lime-works men and bands of Young Pioneers — he avoided naming them and always spoke of “the hooligans.” A fire had broken out— “But it was only that old tree,” he said.

“The slave tree?”

“The one the out-of-works used to sit around under — you know. But it was all right, the fire didn’t spread. The thing’s still damp inside even though the leaves went up like paper.”

“Bray’s fond of that tree — aren’t you,” Rebecca smiled on him.

“Maybe it’s an evil symbol — time it went. I just rather liked seeing people eating chips so at ease there, after all.”

Back at the house, he said to Aleke— “Look, the showground’s been made into a prison camp. What for? Those men ought to be got back to their homes. But Selufu’s arrested about twenty and he’s treating the rest as if they’re under detention — they are under detention.”

“He can’t spare police transport to take them all that way — he needs everything he’s got.”

“Let him commandeer the school buses. Good God, you did it.”

“Yes, but that was an emergency.”

“The whole thing’s an emergency! We weren’t collecting people together for the police to arrest.”

Rebecca and Hjalmar did not look up from their plates. There was a silence between Bray and Aleke.

Aleke said, “The business of coming into town like that — it wasn’t just an idea they got in their heads. Shinza’s fellows are among them; Selufu’s trying to find out more. From the ones he took inside. There’re reports that there are camps in the Bashi just this side of the border — arms hidden in the bush. People have said Somshetsi’s crowd have been filtering over.” He lifted his shoulders and let them fall. “I don’t know. We’ve got enough troubles of our own.”

When they were drinking coffee, Bray forced himself to say, “You’d better check up that Selufu ordered to let the men go back to the stand.” The strikers had been camping out on the plank seats under the shelter of the grandstand, before the new “arrangements.”

“Yes, okay.”

“Sampson will be going up there later—”

“Yes, I’ll do it, don’t worry. Oh, here’s a surprise for you—” Aleke handed over a packet of letters. Because of the transport-workers’ strike in the capital there was again no mail. “Someone had the bright idea of giving the bag to the chap who flew the soldiers in — but the officer only managed to remember to give it to me now.” One of the envelopes had a Swiss stamp. He opened the letter and read rapidly under the conversation. When Aleke had gone, he handed it to Rebecca. He said to Hjalmar and her, “I suppose I’d better go and see for myself. I can hardly give orders to the Commissioner of Police, can I …” Her eyes followed quickly: Dear Colonel Bray, Your copy of La Fille aux Yeux d’Or has been reserved for you and we await instructions at your convenience. She folded it and gave it back to him with a little shake of the head.