Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

The jack wasn’t kept in the boot, in the front, but under the back seat, because the clamp that held it in its proper place had been broken ever since he bought the car. He got in and dumped the picnic basket on the front seat and jerked up the back one in a release of dust. At the same time something burst out of the grass, he felt himself grabbed by the leg, by the waist, and he was caught between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat, somehow desperately hampered by the size and strength of his body. At once there were people all round and over and in the car, there had been no sound and now there was nothing but yells and shouts and his great, his lung-bursting, muscle-tearing effort and he did not know if they were yelling, the men who were upon him, or if Rebecca was screaming. Even greater than his effort to defend himself was his terrible effort to make himself heard by her, to reach her with his voice and make her run. They had his legs out of the car and the back of his neck hit the rim of the floor and he was deafened, his voice became a silent scream to him as pain felled him for a moment, but then a brute strength burst up in him and he got to his feet, he was aware of himself staggered gigantically to his feet among men smaller than he. Then he was below them, he was looking up at them and he saw the faces, he saw the sticks and stones and bits of farm implements, and sun behind. Something fell on him again and again and he knew himself convulsed, going in and out of pitch black, of black nausea, heaving to bend double where the blows were, where the breath had gone, and he thought he rose again, he thought he heard himself screaming, he wanted to speak to them in Gala but he did not know a word, not a word of it, and then something burst in his eyes, some wet flower covered them, and he thought, he knew: I’ve been interrupted, then—

She was a long time in the culvert by the road. Her nails were full of red earth. The red earth walls, staunched with tufts of dead grass, rose on either side of her. With her head pressed against them she waited for it to happen to her, too. There was earth and saliva in her mouth. She was gulping and howling like an animal. She heard the tearing of flames and saw the thick smoke.

And then there was silence. Behind the sound of burning, nothing. The burning died away and there was only the smell and the smoke.

She had run towards him at first when they started pulling him out of the car. He had got to his feet and looked straight at her without seeing her because of that shortsightedness. But in the same split second he was brought down beneath them and the sound of the blows on the resistance of his big body sent her crazedly hurling herself through the grass, fighting it. She was turning her ankles, running, her stumbling scramble led her off down a kind of slope cut into the ground. And she was there, deep in the ditch beyond the grass. But she was not twenty yards from them, from him, and she knew it would come to her, it was no use, she was held by the walls, waiting for them.

She was sure they must be there in the silence.

She did not move. The smoke no longer poured up; it was thin, hanging in stillness. She did not know how much time passed. But the silence was empty; above, in the tops of the long grasses between her and the road, scarlet weaver-birds flicked, swung, and chirped a question. More time passed. She got up and tried to climb out of the culvert but the walls were too high. She wandered along out the way she had been driven in, up the diagonal cutting made by the roads department. She pushed weakly through the heavy grass. The car was on its side, blackened, the seats still smouldering, the road full of glass.

He was clear of it. He was in the road unharmed by the fire. Unharmed. She began to sob with joy because he was not burned, she went concentratedly but not fast — she could not move fast — towards him, towards his legs rolled apart. She walked all round him, making some sort of noise she had never heard before. Round and round him. His body — the chest, the big torso above the still narrowish male waist that he kept, for all his weight — was something staved in under the dirtied bush jacket, out of shape, but he was still there. The whole of him was there. Strange, soft-looking patches of earth and blood; but the whole bulk of him, complete. A lot of dirt and blood on the face, a sort of grimace, lips slightly drawn back as when he was trying to unscrew something tight.

Suddenly she saw that his glasses were smashed into his cheekbones. The frame lay near his ear but glass was embedded there in the firm flesh just below that tender, slightly shiny area of skin that was always protected by his glasses. The glass was pressed in so hard that the flesh was whitened and had scarcely bled. She went down on her knees and with a shaking impatience in her fingers began to try to take out the broken glass. She was concerned only not to hurt him, it was difficult to do without hurting him.

After a little while she went and sat on the white-washed milestone at the side of the road. His eyes were not open but the lids were not quite closed and showed a line of glint. She broke off a stalk of dry grass and cleaned the earth from beneath her nails, carefully, one by one. It was very hot. Sweat ran down the sides of her face and under the hair, on her neck. She watched him all the time. She became aware of a strange and terrifying curiosity rising in her; it was somehow connected with his body. She got up and went over to this body again and looked at it: this was the same body that she had caressed last night, that she had had inside her when she fell asleep.

The basket and his briefcase had been flung out of the car and so were not burned. She picked them up and balanced the briefcase across the basket beside him, to keep the sun off his face.

And more time went by. She sat on in the road. Her shirt was wet with sweat and she could smell it. Sometimes she opened her mouth and panted a little; until she heard the sound, and stopped. She was beginning to feel something. She didn’t know what it was, but it was some sort of physical inkling. And then she thought very clearly that the flask was still in the basket and got up firmly and fetched it and poured what was left of the coffee into the plastic cup. As she saw liquid there, it all came back to her with a rush, to the glands of her mouth, to her nerves, to her senses, to her flesh and bones — she was thirsty. She drank it down in one breath. Then for the first time she began to weep. She was thirsty, and had drunk, and so it had happened: she had left him. She had begun to live on. Desolation beat down red upon her eyelids with the sun and the tears streamed from her eyes and nose over her earth-stained hands.

Some people came down the road. An old man with safety-pins in his earlobes and a loin-cloth under an old jacket stopped short, saying the same half-syllable over and over. There were little children watching and no one sent them away. All she could do before the old man was shake her head, again, again, again, again, again at what they both saw. The women sent up a great sigh. Bray lay there in the middle of them all. They brought an old grey blanket of the kind she had seen all her life drying outside their huts, and an old door and they lifted him up and carried him away. They seemed to know him; he belonged to them. The old man with the safety-pins said to her in revelation, “It is the Colonel! It is the Colonel!”

She did not know him any more. She had left him. She was walking along the road between the cotton-covered, great soft hanging breasts of two women, she was alive.

They took them to an hotel that was closed or deserted. The building was boarded up and there was some sort of huge aviary outside but no birds in it, the wire doors open and a lot of burst mattresses and rubbish piled there. They took him to their own quarters, to one of their mud houses, and laid him on an iron bedstead in the cool dimness. It was the old man’s bed and there was a pillow-case embroidered free-hand with yellow crosses, red birds with blue eyes, and blue flowers with red leaves. The women sat with him and clapped their hands together soundlessly and kept up a kind of archaic groan, perhaps it was praying, perhaps it was just another human sound she had never heard before. She rested her head against one of the big breasts on cloth that smelt of woodsmoke and snuff. The D.O. from the Matoko boma came and took her away in his landrover, and his little wife, looking rather like Edna Tlume, seemed afraid of her and put her to bed in what was obviously the marital bed. A white doctor in priest’s robes came and gave her an injection; they put her to sleep because she was not dead. She understood; what else could they do with her? She slept the whole night and in the morning found herself in a big bed, after all those nights in the narrow one.