Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

They were gone. For ten minutes she had felt a deep interest in those two human beings. One of the birds opened its wings — she had not seen them move before — and flapped slowly away over the bay.

The plane came in late from stops farther south in Africa and by the time it took off the town was a scimitar of sparkle along the bay, a bowl of greenish light that was the sports stadium, a tilting stage — set that was the fort, and then a few glows dying out like matches on the ground. She saw nothing of the forests and deserts of the continent she was leaving for the first time, although the man in the seat beside her kept turning on his reading-light to look at the map stuffed in along with the sick-bag in the seat-pocket. Brownish shaded areas, green areas: drops of moisture shimmied outside the double window and she could not even see the darkness — only her own face. The hostess brought along a trolley of papers and there was the cover of that same number of the magazine there, and when the trolley was steered back, it was gone: somewhere along the rows of seat-backs, someone was reading it. The man who was her neighbour drank individual bottles of champagne with the air of doing so on principle rather than with any enjoyment and at an hour when at last there was no food being served and the lights had been dimmed he pressed the red button for the hostess and asked for seltzer. Since he was awake she took out of the briefcase (beside her, between her legs and the wall of the plane) the half-sheet of typing paper on which, in Bray’s handwriting, there was the name of the bank, the number of the account, and La Fille aux Yeux d’Or. She had looked at it a number of times since she had got into the plane. It was probably the last thing he had written. The cheque for Hjalmar? No, that must have been before. But she could not be sure; she did not know when he had decided to put down on that piece of paper the particulars about the account. She wouldn’t ever know if it really was the last time he was to write when he wrote: La Fille aux Yeux d’Or. There was nothing but the facts, the address, the code name. What could one find in the shape of the letters, the spacing? She searched it as the child had searched the man’s drawing.

She put the paper away in the briefcase again. Beside her there were suppressed belches.

If he had copied out (from some notebook? from memory?) the details of the account, of course, it must have been to give to her. So that she would know where to go. But if they were to be together there would be no need for her to have the piece of paper. He had put it in the briefcase, he had not given it to her. When was he going to give it to her?

But perhaps it had been in the briefcase a long time. No notebook, no commitment to memory: kept in the briefcase for the record, and automatically taken along with them when they left as part of the personal papers, his and hers, they would need together. The man at her side fell asleep and she felt her mind begin to slide, too; there was a jerky snatch of dream with Bray walking about in it, but she drew back fearfully into wakefulness. And in hours or a little while, looking out into the blue — black that was clear now, she saw a burning crust along the edge of a darker mass. She thought of a veld fire but then was aware of a narrow reflection of the fire mirrored along its shape. It was a coastline down there — the seashore and little harbours lit up all night into the early dawn while the land mass behind was asleep. Now she saw blackly glittering swells of darkness: the sea.

The man beside her was craning his neck at a polite distance over her shoulder. He said, “The coast of Italy.”

She had never been out of Africa before. A feeling of intense strangeness came over her. It was day, up in the air. Down below, the people of Europe slept on. Soon there were the Alps in the cold sun, shining and elegant. Passengers revived to look at them, spread like a display for watches in a jeweller’s window.

A black Mercedes taxi took her from the glass and black airport into the city. Gentle humps of fields were still green, or stubbled after harvest. A chill breath misted them over. All the new buildings were the same heavy black frames squaring-off glass that was the same sheeny grey as the lake reflecting the sky. A high jet spouted out of the lake as if a whale were kept in captivity there. The hotel the girl at the airport information desk sent her to was an old villa above the lake and she had to walk down the street to get a tramcar into town. The houses had little spires, balconies, towers, and were closed away behind double windows; along a wall, an espaliered pear tree held still a single pear, ruddy and wizened. She wore the camel-hair coat and her legs were cold. The tram faltered and teetered steeply down and she got off with everyone else at a terminus in the main street. She had, not in her bag but in her hand clenched in the pocket of the coat, the piece of paper: apparently the bank was in this main street. She began to walk along looking at the way the numbers ran, and she crossed because the evens were on the other side, and walked on and on, gaining the impression that everyone was making straight for her as if she were not there. Then she realized that here people kept to the right, not the left. The street was very long and wide and busy but she was not conscious of shops or people, only of numbers. There was a bank with a satiny façade with tiny show-cases where a beaming puppet in a blonde wig held up her savings, but that was not the one. She showed someone the name on the piece of paper and was directed a few yards on to a pillared portico and huge double doors. Inside she was in an echoing hall with a black-and-white tiled floor and a few mahogany and brass-railed booths pushed far back round the walls. A porter intercepted her on the way to one of them. He couldn’t understand her and took her to a pale clerk who spoke perfect English. They sent her in a mahogany lift up through the great vault of the building. The feeling of strangeness that had begun in the plane grew stronger and stronger.

There was another echoing hall in which footsteps were a long-drawn-out approach or retreat. But here there was a corner with a thick carpet and leather-and-velvet chairs. She sat and looked at banking journals in French and German full of pictures of black frame-and-glass factory buildings and people skiing with wings of snow. An Indian man and woman were waiting, too — the woman in a gauzy sari with a cardigan over it — a stranger from another climate, like herself.

She did not believe, now, that anyone in this place would know about the account, or that the account or the money, spoken about so far away, existed at all. An impostor in bare legs and borrowed coat went along corridors, past troughs of plants, a wooden bear with hats and umbrellas on its arms, into a large stuffy, muffled room unlike any office she had ever been in. Another wooden bear. A glassfronted bookcase. Table held up by a satyr caryatid. A desk too, but with its functional aspect so softened by tooled leather, photographs, and a pot of African violets in a gilt basket that it was just another piece of furniture.

Herr Weber introduced himself like a doctor ready to hear any intimacy as blandly as he might ask about regular bowel action. He had a neat kind face and an old-fashioned paunch with a watchchain. La Fille aux Yeux d’Or might have been Schmidt or Jones; he wrote something with his silver pencil, rang a bell, sent for some papers. While they waited he made conversation. Bray had teased her that Goebbels and Goering as well as Tshombe had put away their millions in Swiss banks. Herr Weber was an old man— “Already forty years in this bank,” he told her, smiling. Where did she live? “Oh Africa must be interesting, yes? I have always wanted to visit — but that is so far. My wife likes to go to Italy. It is beautiful. And we have been once in Greece. That is beautiful. But Africa is beautiful too, neh?” Perhaps he had had this same conversation with Tshombe and would have it with the woman in the cardigan and sari— “Oh India must be interesting, yes?”—while all through the years he had sat safe among his family photographs.