Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Coffee and a black-rich chocolate cake with a bowl of whipped cream stood on the table. Dando ate three pieces. Margot Wentz had the calm of preoccupation or exhaustion. She seemed hardly aware of Dando and Bray, beyond the necessity to feed them, and it was unlikely that she had known, earlier, that they were in the hotel. She gave a wavering smile now and then, in answer to one of the guests, but she did not seem to hear her husband although he talked on, relating anecdotes that drew upon and assumed her participation, and quoting her opinions as if she were confirming them.

“A schnapps with the coffee,” he insisted, and although Bray wanted no more to drink Roly Dando said, “Ah, lovely,” and Hjalmar, still blond and handsome in a sun-toughened, run-down way, began to shuffle about the room opening cupboards and fussing like an old man. “It’s aquavit, should be here … where now … I’m half a Dane, you know, it’s my national whad’you-call it, tipple, yes….” Good God, what only isn’t pushed in here….” Piles of torn-off envelopes with stamps fell to the floor, curled-up photographs, bank deposit slips, box-top free offers of this and that. He began to look behind the volumes of philosophical and political works that filled rickety bookshelves; there were books all over the room, Shaw and O’Neill and Dos Passos and Auden, in English, Hesse, Hauptmann and Brecht and Rilke in German, psychology in German and English — a quick glance established that this was the remnant of the once-indispensable library of people young in Europe in the Thirties who had not had the money or the space to add to it, nor the strength of mind ever to leave it behind.

“What is it that you want, Hjalmar?” Margot Wentz said suddenly in a ringing voice, patient and strong. She had her back to him.

“No, it’s all right, the aquavit, wasn’t there a bottle still from Christmas, the one Vibeke — I’m just — wait a minute—”

She got up with the determined sleep-walking gait of someone who has the plan of cupboards, nooks, niches, and their contents clear in her mind as a cross-section of an anthill under glass, and took a bottle from behind a stand of gramophone records in worn covers. “Here you are, Hjalmar.”

He went on marvelling over how he had thought it was here or there, he knew he had put it somewhere, and she continued to stand for a moment, looking at him as if waiting for the whir of some piece of clockwork to die down.

Their daughter, Emmanuelle, slipped in and cut herself a piece of cake. “Yes, I know you,” she said directly to Bray when her father began the introductions; the night at the Independence party, when she had sat like a small animal holed up against pursuit and had not so much as acknowledged the presence of the middle-aged stranger talking to Ras Asahe, was suddenly presented as a shared intimacy. She deliberately cut the cake at an angle, apparently to avoid the filling, careless of the fact that she had spoiled it for the next person. She sat nibbling little broken-off pieces, holding them in long, thin, sallow hands. Her hunched shoulders showed deep hollows above and below collar-bones on which the greenish slippery skin shone in the heat. In a way she reminded Bray of one of those pictures of Oriental famine victims — all eyes and bones; but her legs under the short shapeless dress were beautiful, the thighs slender but feminine, the kneecaps round.

Stephen was straightening the books his father had disarranged. “Oh, ma, I’ve got the name of the stuff to kill those things.”

“What things?” said his mother, not turning.

“Those things that are eating the bindings.”

“Silverfish,” she said.

“You can get it from the chemist. It’s called Eradem, you just sprinkle it on the shelves.”

She said, “He knows how to stop them being eaten up but he never opens one.”

Wentz was talking to the two guests but the interjection came from him like a voice taking over a medium. “What time has he got. You know he hardly gets through the schoolwork.”

“That’s right.”

His attention hung in the air a moment, probing her; then he took up again the discussion of the new university, disagreeing with Bray that the concentration ought to be on the sciences, in particular engineering.

“Well I don’t see how any one of these new African universities is going to find enough students of a suitable educational level to fill places in half-a-dozen different faculties,” Bray was saying. “The sensible solution would be for those countries linked by geographical, economic, and other ties to plan a kind of federation of higher education, each university concentrating on one or two faculties, and drawing upon all the territories for students. Here, I think the university should start off by offering degree courses in engineering and medicine only. The people who want to read the humanities have Makerere and Lusaka to go to. That way you could build up firstclass teaching staff and equipment, instead of spreading the jam so thin and lowering standards.”

“Then you’ll still have to have some kind of interim programme — I don’t know … something between the school and the university. For the general level of education of your youngsters — also the ones who are going to go to the universities in neighbouring countries, nnh?”

“No one’s questioning that,” Dando said. “It’s a recognized principle — a school of further study or some such.”

“But what’s against combining it with the university, then? That’s what they’re really doing, by lowering the entrance qualifications here. You just take a little longer to go through your degree course, that’s all. But if the university would specialize, Colonel, then you’ve got to have this extra school or whatever, another foundation, another administration, just for the people who are going to study law or languages somewhere outside.”

“What’s needed is technologists, mining engineers, electrical engineers, my dear Hjalmar, not a lot of patriotic idiots writing theses on African literature!” Dando exploded.

“If I want to read law, I don’t know where I’ll go,” Stephen said, pleased.

“Not law, for you,” Hjalmar said. “If you’ve got to get out, you can’t practise law in another country. That’s the way to get caught.”

“Come on, Hjalmar, you drop-out, you could do some teaching at a college preparing people for university, you could contribute something to the nation.”

Wentz poured Dando another glass of aquavit. “Kant and Hegel for the graduates of the mission schools.” Smiling at himself: “If I remember anything to teach.”

“If you can teach, you should,” Bray said. And added, turning to Margot Wentz, “Why do we say that with such certainty, always? How does one know what is right for other people to do?” She took it with a considering smile, like an apology. She said quietly to her daughter, “And how was your cocktail party?”

The girl shrugged and looked into a distance.

“The trade commissioner for the People’s Republic of China, wasn’t it?” said Hjalmar, for the guests, knowing perfectly well what it was. “Very elegant. With paper lanterns and fireworks. Yes!” He pulled a comically impressed face, as at the feat of a precocious child.

Emmanuelle suddenly grinned delightfully. “You should’ve seen Ras bowing from the waist. Everybody bowing from the waist. A eurythmics class. A man’s invited Ras and me to some youth thing in China. He had a long talk with me — through an interpreter of course. Asked me how I’d broken free of neo-colonialist influence. I didn’t know what to say.”

Her brother said to her, “Why does Ras always say ‘longwedge’ for ‘language’, he talks about African ‘longwedges’? Sounds so funny.”