Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

The instincts in himself that he had unconsciously regarded as the most civilized, unwilling to risk — as a fatal contradiction in terms — his own skin or that of others for the values of civilization, were outraged. He was aware (driving between the swish of tall grass stroked by the car’s speed) of going against his own nature: something may be worth suffering for as a matter of individual conviction, but nothing is worth bringing about the suffering of others. If people kill in a cause that isn’t mine, there’s no blood on my shoes; therefore stand aside. But he had put aside instead this “own nature.” It was either a tragic mistake or his salvation. He thought, I’ll never know, although other people will tell me for the rest of my life. Rebecca’s hair fluttered against his shoulder in the draught from the window. He passed a swampy dambo and there were the widow-birds hovering their long black tails. A snake lay coiled in the road and he avoided it; the next car would kill it. There was also in his mind the possibility that he would go and see Mweta one last time, in the capital. The preposterousness of the thing lay like a jewel that has fallen into a pool and rolled among the stones like any other pebble. If one could pick it out … and even now, since only audacity was possible, Mweta might seize upon Shinza, not the enemy but the only chance. … He saw himself actually walking up the steps to the red brick façade of that huge house; he supposed the image would fade out as the shape of an hallucination born of obsession fades, with health, into an empty wall.

His mind scarcely ran ahead to Shinza, because that he was being borne towards as surely as the road was the one to the capital. Haffajee’s Garage. And if Shinza had moved off to another part of the country, it did not matter. He had the list. Shinza was not a man who depended on you; it was rather that he banked on what you would have to do, driven from within yourself. He knew one doesn’t ask of a man what is not there already.

And if Hjalmar is attacked in the house? — Why should that be, there was no anti-white feeling as such in Gala’s state of siege. But by hazard — someone with a petrol-soaked rag flaming on a stick turning down one street rather than another; one of Fielding’s vigilantes losing his nerve at a shadow? But what Hjalmar had in him was survival. Hjalmar would not escape that. It was in his instinct for staying put, there in Gala; he fears nothing so much as the situation of his marriage. — I’ll have to go and see Margot, he thought, feeling the girl give a shuddering sigh in her sleep; I can tell her quite honestly he’s not making a bad recovery. Curiously, although the nervous breakdown had had the effect of making Hjalmar lose interest in what was once his passion to talk politics, so that they had never talked of what was happening as anything more coherent than a series of sensational village events, he had the impression now that Hjalmar understood perfectly what his — Bray’s — position in Gala had been these last weeks, as if the shattering of Hjalmar’s own core had opened and laid twitching bare a heightened receptivity to the unspoken, to the inner reality that such talk itself buries. Hjalmar had made a remark, one of the nights when they had watched the township burning from the garden: “The fire’s in the minds of men, not in the roofs of houses”—it came from somewhere in Dostoevski.

Rebecca woke up. Her cheek was marked with the folds of his bush jacket, her eyes were still dazed and darkened with sleep. He stopped the car a minute for her. She found herself a culvert and came back along the road in the sun, smiling, twirling a lily she had picked. She was wearing her old jeans and moved a little awkwardly, perhaps conscious that they showed her to be as she had always been, a bit heavy in the thigh. She looked so young when she woke up — like that every morning. Life seemed to breathe out of her skin as vapour does through the earth above a mineral spring; wherever he touched her neck or face there was a pulse beating.

They stopped late to eat Kalimo’s lunch, sitting on the newspaper wrappings because the ground was richly damp. They felt lazy to talk about anything important, after all; it would carry away into the quiet and airy savannah forest as their voices must be doing, wandering, far. There was no sound of birds, in the middle of the day. But Rebecca did say to him, at last, pouring the coffee from the thermos, “If it’s not going to be Switzerland, well, what?”

“I’ll know in a few days. I’ll tell you just a few facts for now, because I shouldn’t talk about this at all. Not to anyone. Not even to you.”

“Not even here?” She lifted a hand at the forest, half-joking.

“But when I know exactly, I’ll tell you everything. Because you must know.”

The dappled shade made a shawl on her arms, her eyes were on him. “So far it’s just this — there may be something I can do — for Shinza. And I will do it. Whatever it is.”

She did not say, what about me? She got up as if to begin tidying up the remains of the meal and then came over behind him where he squatted on his haunches and put her arms around his neck and pressed his head back against her belly.

He said, “I’ll tell you everything.”

“I know you will. This time.”

She came and squatted in front of him and took off his glasses. She touched the skin round his eyes and played the old game, looking into the shortsighted opacity that she complained of. He said, “If I start kissing you we’ll never get there.” She picked up the thermos. “Shall I pour the rest away?”

“Well, we might still feel like some later.”

“It won’t be hot.”

“Never mind, it’ll be wet.”

As they moved back to the car two children appeared out of the forest; or they had been there, behind the trees, patiently watching for the moment to come forward. She gave into their cupped hands the remains of the bread and cheese and the last of the eggs with small fish in them. Before the car had driven off the two frail figures had disappeared once more into the forest.

Not long after they came upon what was evidently a road-block that had been half cleared. Branches and stones had been dragged aside and there was just sufficient room for the car to pass. There was nobody about, but it was not far from the turn-off to the cattle-dipping station sixty miles from Matoko. No rain had fallen yet in this part of the country; towards three o’clock the heat and the monotonous rhythms of motion, of the hot current of air coming past the windows with the sound of someone whistling through his teeth, now made him drowsy. They changed over; Rebecca drove but he did not sleep, merely stretched himself as much as he could in the small car and rested his eyes away from the hypnotic path of the road. Now he was the one to light cigarettes for her. He had shut his eyes for a moment, when he heard her make a small sound of impatience beside him, and he roused himself and saw that up ahead, quite far, was another road-block. There was a heat — mirage that magnified the jumble of branches and green; they couldn’t make out very well whether it stretched across the whole road or not. She slowed down and they kept their eyes strained on the obstacle. But of course she could see so much better than he. “Damn it, it is right across. Now wha’d’we do?”

“Just keep going slowly.” He put his head out the window; the grass was very high, elephant grass, very dry, last season’s grass still standing; a dead tree had been dragged into the road, roots and all, broken branches had been piled upon it. She stopped and turned off the engine.

“Let’s have a look. You stay in, a minute.”

He walked slowly to the barrier, climbed over to the other side, walked up and down it and climbed back. He came to the car, smiling. “How energetic are you feeling? We’ll have to do some hard labour.” She got out and they started with the easy stuff, the broken branches. But the tree trunk, with its dead roots clasping a great boulder of red earth with which it must have been uprooted in some storm, would not budge. She began to laugh helplessly at their grunting efforts. “Wait a moment, my girl. What about trying the jack? If we get it under this hollow bit here, maybe we can get a little elevation and then heave.”