Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“No roast chicken?” Rebecca said.

Kalimo’s eyes were rheumy at the good old joke. “Well, Mukwayi he didn’t tell me you driving today! I don’t cook chicken for roaste’ yesterday night—”

“As long as we’ve got those eggs, Kalimo.”

Hjalmar kissed Rebecca. “Walking out on the job, eh? Where’m I going to get another bricklayer’s assistant? You’ll see when you come back, it’ll all be finished for you.”

Hjalmar and Kalimo were left, the one with hands on hips, the other’s under his apron. Mahlope, chatting outside his room with a friend, waved cheerfully. Rebecca settled herself more comfortably, lit cigarettes. “I feel as if we were going off to the lake.”

As the old Volkswagen left Gala behind they left the whole anger and disruption of the country behind there as well. The boma under guard, the smashed stalls of the market, the scars and stains where flies hung, marking the place of street battles, the dead smell of charred buildings — all this that they lived among was undertow beneath their wheels: it seemed that the light screens of forest and bamboo around the firm wet road provided no surface to reflect turmoil, to be seized by the violent charge and make it manifest; the current was earthed.

He pointed out the track leading to Tippo Tib’s Arab fort.

“We never ever managed to go—”

“I must take you one day. It’s quite impressive.”

The road ran empty for many miles. Now and then there were the usual bags of charcoal waiting for custom; a barefoot man appealed from the forest. Where rain had fallen parties of women were out with their hoes. The few villages looked lean and wispy after the drought. In patches of scrub, one night’s rain was enough to have brought the wild lilies blooming straight from the sand. They had an eye for everything; the past week became a prison from which they suddenly found themselves let out. Talk rose and died down; sometimes they let the repetition of trees and giant bouquets of bamboo flow over them dreamily. Thoughts broke up and formed like spume on a sea. They laughed at the prospect of the household consisting of Hjalmar and Kalimo quietly following their private obsessions. “But Kalimo will be in charge.” “Oh without question. He will play Margot to Hjalmar’s Hjalmar.”

“I can’t help feeling sorry for Margot,” Rebecca said. “A weak man makes you into a bitch. Even I felt like beginning to bully poor old Hjalmar a bit over that paving.”

“Even you? You’ve always been able to smell out a weak man?”

“Mmm. If I’m attracted by one, there’s still something that protects me.”

“When first I knew you — knew about you from other people — I thought you were very much the type to be exploited. Emotionally and in other ways; by everybody. And your friends gave that impression. Vivien was always anxious about you.”

“Oh well, I got into a bad way down there. They didn’t trust Gordon, any of them. Oh I mean, everybody always likes Gordon — but they didn’t think Gordon treated me properly. I knew they were sorry for me. They persisted in being sorry for me. It made me behave funnily; I can’t explain, but when they made passes at me — Neil, the others — I saw that they felt they could do it because to me they could risk showing that things weren’t so good for them, either. I felt sorry for them. I felt what did it matter …” She put a hand on his thigh. “You don’t like to hear about it.”

“Vanity, I suppose. Stupid male vanity, not much different from theirs. I ought to be ashamed of it. I’ve always believed in freedom in sex. Not that I’ve taken much of it. But on principle.”

She laughed. “I’m glad. I don’t want you to have made love to a lot of women.”

“Although you’ve made love to a lot of men?”

“I’m not like you. It doesn’t matter for me. But there’s one thing that matters a lot — I’d decided I couldn’t stay down there among my friends any longer, before it began with you and me. I came to Gala because I wanted to get away from that.”

A moment later she said, “You’re thinking about the first time, in your living-room.”

“Yes.”

“You’re right. It did seem it was like the others.”

“You wanted to show me I had a need of you before I could begin to feel sorry for you.”

“You were, already. That poor girl with her kids. And where’s the husband?”

“Yes. I ought to have offered you my house instead of letting you pay for those weeks at the Fisheagle.”

“But after you went down to see Mweta and came back again you made it right. From the day we went to the lake it was all different. I was different.”

“Were you?”

“You made me different.”

“Have I reformed you, my darling, your paunchy old lover. You don’t want other men any more.” But he knew it made her sad to hear him refer to himself as getting old.

“Living with you is different from anything else.”

“But it has been for me, too.”

“Oh don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“Not has been.”

“My darling! I just mean the time at Gala, that’s all. Kiss me.” He turned to her quickly a moment.

She rested content, against his shoulder; she waved at a solitary figure at the roadside.

“You don’t think Gordon has … well … presented you with a certain element of weakness?”

“How d’you mean?”

“Well you told me he would never dream of thinking you could be interested in men.”

She gave a small chuckle. “That’s because Gordon’s so sure of himself in everything. Gordon can cope.”

“But that’s arrogance, pride. You’ve proved it a weakness in him, haven’t you?”

“In a way. But you say you believe in sexual freedom.”

“We’re talking about Gordon — he doesn’t see it as sexual freedom, it’s quite the opposite — he doesn’t even see the possibility of sexual freedom for you.”

“Of course it wasn’t sexual freedom. Just that the whole thing didn’t mean much. Whether he thought me incapable of bothering about any man, or I thought it didn’t matter whether I did or not — it all amounted to the same thing.” Her weight was slack and warm against him. “I’m very jealous of Olivia. I suppose that’s what it is: I have a horrible feeling when I think of her.”

“Why do you think you’re so jealous, since you’re different from me, with my stupid sexual jealousy about the other men?”

“I don’t know.” She seemed to wait for the answer to come to her. “Because you don’t separate sex and love. — Do you? If you slept with her again it would be because you love her.”

What she had said did not conjure up for him Olivia, but Gordon — the red road was drawn away under his eyes through the windscreen already dirtied with insects, and it was Gordon he saw, talking away, coming across the strip of scrub between his house and the Tlumes’.

“I don’t know why — I feel so marvellously sleepy. Keep sort of dropping off.”

She slept for more than half an hour, thirty or forty miles. His mind was calm. It was not that he had no doubts about what he was doing, going to do; it seemed to him he had come to understand that one could never hope to be free of doubt, of contradictions within, that this was the state in which one lived — the state of life itself — and no action could be free of it. There was no finality, while one lived, and when one died it would always be, in a sense, an interruption. He went over and over in his mind the possibilities of raising money for Shinza quickly. Perhaps, the way things were going, Shinza would be dead before he could arrange anything; perhaps Shinza would go into exile over the border, and Mweta would hang on a while. Perhaps there would be many more burned houses, more blood running as easily as chickens’ blood in fighting in which the real cause was not understood, in which the side-reactions of little groups of people battled out apparently uselessly the passions of the real struggle to which their situation — the years of slavery, isolation, colonization — committed them. There would be waste and confusion. He was party to it, part of it. The means, as always, would be dubious. He had no others to offer with any hope of achieving the end, and as he accepted the necessity of the end, he had no choice.