Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Hjalmar had a telephone message for Bray to get in touch with Mr. Joosab. He tried to ring the shop but there was no reply; boarded up, no doubt. Poor Joosab. He supposed he had better go and see him, too. Rebecca said, “Not much point in my going back to the office, if Aleke’s not going to be around.”

“No, stay here.” He was thinking of the gangs and the attempted fire so near the town, in the industrial area.

“Should we get on with the job in the garden?” Hjalmar said. “If there’s no use for you in one place, you have to try somewhere else.”

As he left them and was driving off, she came running out the kitchen door. He stopped and waited for her. “Was it from the Swiss bank?” He nodded. “All safe and sound.” “What was that about the girl …? Where’d you get that from?” He kept her waiting a second, giving himself the pleasure of looking at those eyes with the fashionable black outline she had taken to giving them lately. “It means ‘the girl with the golden eyes,’ it’s the title of a novel. I once heard Roly call you that. So you had a code name, all ready.”

“Who wrote it?”—Though he felt the curiosity was directed more towards herself, to the way he saw her.

“—An old French novel. Balzac.”

Joosab’s house backed his tailor’s shop. There was a small grassless, flowerless garden with an empty bird-bath held on the head of a concrete elephant. The façade of the house was painted bright blue. The bell rang a long time before the door was opened by Ahmed, Joosab’s second son; he was led in silence over the linoleum into the best room, filled with a large dining table and sideboard, both topped with plate glass. Joosab must have been working somewhere within although the shop was closed, and appeared with silvery expanding bands holding up the sleeves of his very white shirt and his measuring tape round his neck as usual. He found it agonizing to get to the point, whatever that was to be; offered tea, a cold drink — all interspersed with flitting remarks about “things being as they are,” the heat, the drought — ready to interpret the riots and burnings as some sort of seasonal act of nature, if that would be more tactful. “You are worried, my dear Joosab. But I don’t know what would reassure you. Or myself. Cynical people will please themselves by saying independence solves nothing. People like us should always have known that independence only begins to solve anything. The moment it’s achieved it’s no longer an end.”

“You are so right, Colonel, you are so wise. It’s a pleasure to talk to someone like you. You can’t imagine what I go through with some of these people. I say to them, no good comparing the old days. But they are nervous, you know? They say why attract attention. And the Gandhi Hall was built with contributions from the community. I say to them, change the name then, if you are afraid all the time something will happen to your investment. Gandhi didn’t believe in investment. But they are nervous — you know what I mean?”

“Well, there aren’t any classes going on there, now, of course — no one to teach, no one to come for the time being.”

“That’s true. But — Colonel — they want you to take away your things. The carpentry stuff and so on … they say if someone should get the idea to come in and smash it up …”

“You want us to clear out?”

“Colonel—”

“Oh don’t be upset, Joosab; I’m just thinking—”

“Our community has made regular contributions to the Party, Colonel, and then with you being a good friend of the President, we thought we wouldn’t have to worry. But now these people — who are they, they don’t listen to anybody—”

“I just don’t see how Malemba and I can manage it with only two pairs of hands. Right away, ay?”

Joosab held up his own hands in distressed admittance.

“Can you find some young men to help us? Your son’s friends? — Never mind, they’d better stay out of it. I’ll get hold of someone.”

One of the anonymous females of the household appeared with ghostly shyness, placing a tea-tray so softly that not even a teaspoon clinked. “Oh have a cup, Colonel, look it’s here,” Joosab said, as if it had materialized of itself. “This is a terrible time for President Mweta, terrible, terrible. What do you think it is, Colonel, is it the Communists?”

Bray, Malemba, the elder Malemba sons, Hjalmar, Mahlope, Nongwaye Tlume and Rebecca lugged the adult education centre’s equipment out of the Gandhi Hall that afternoon and evening. They had a jeep from the agricultural department and a vegetable lorry that Joosab managed to borrow from one of the Indian storekeepers. The stuff was dumped in Bray’s lean-to garage, in the rondavel at the Tlume house that Rebecca and her children had occupied, and even at the boma.

In the middle of the night the telephone rang. Joosab’s voice was at once faint and shrieking as if he were being borne away while he spoke. “Colonel, stop them, stop them, you must stop them. You know the President …” “Joosab, for God’s sake what’s happened to you?” “They’re burning down the Hall — you must come and stop it—”

He dropped back the telephone and leaned there, against the wall in the dark living-room, come out of sleep to a return like nausea. His hand went wearily over his breast — Shinza’s gesture. A mosquito’s siren unfailingly found him out, singing round and round this daze. He telephoned Aleke. As he left the house with a pair of pants pulled over his pyjamas he was stopped by one of Major Fielding’s men, who had rigged themselves out with red armbands and sporting rifles. “For God’s sake don’t argue — there’s a fire.”

Aleke and he saw the blaze from a long way off and felt it, a huge heat coming as if from the open door of a furnace. The Young Pioneers who had looted the place and set it alight were gone and the fire engine was there, its hoses sufficient only to wet the area round the building to prevent the fire spreading — in the middle of veils of water and smoke the hall and the school to which it was attached were just at the stage when a building on fire holds its shape in pure flame rather than matter; in a moment it would begin to collapse upon itself. Joosab and a few other men stood there, wearing coats over their nightclothes despite the heat of the night and the fire. The smell of wet and burning was choking; their black eyes ran with tears of irritation. They seemed unable to speak. They stared at Bray. The building must have been ablaze beyond remedy and the firemen already there when Joosab telephoned. Among the soaked and charred things that had been rescued Bray saw a chest neatly lettered in white, THE MAHATMA GANDHI NON — VIOLENCE STUDY KIT. One of the younger Indians said to him, “I don’t suppose the insurance will pay out.”

Rebecca had been so tired she had not heard the telephone, had not heard him leave the house. When he came back she sat up alarmed. “The Gandhi Hall’s burned down.” “Oh my God, all that effort for nothing.” He lay down on top of the bed next to her. He smelled of wet burned wood and burned paint. “Get in,” she said, tugging at the covers beneath him. He pushed the sandals off his feet and lay there unable to move, on his back. He heard himself giving great shuddering, snoring breaths as he was helplessly overcome by sleep.

Early in the morning, Dave the barman from the Fisheagle Inn was there to see him. Kalimo was polishing the living-room floor, all the furniture pushed to the middle, and kept his head turned away from the visitor as he showed him in. Then he went on his knees again, shifting about under Bray’s and the other man’s feet with the obvious intention of showing that this visitor would not be accorded a respectful withdrawal.