Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

The day the letter arrived, a fierce stab of uncertainty had come to Bray when he returned to the room in the garden with it in his pocket. If it had come only three days later, he would have been gone. It would never have brought him back.

Mweta was in Nairobi at a meeting with Kenyatta, Kaunda, and Nyerere, and he did not see him again. When he had talked to the Minister of Education, discussed the terms of reference of his job and settled that he would go to Gala within two weeks, he wrote to Olivia. He told her he “suspected” the job had been created specially in order to offer him something; he did not need to tell her that it was one that needed doing and that perhaps he might be able to do better than most people — she would know that as well as he did. He poked fun at it a little, and said that he’d promised to undertake a trial period of six months or so, long enough to have a good look around and write some sort of preliminary report. He was to get a government house — back to the old “basic furniture supplied.” By the time he’d made sure it was habitable, and that he could get on with some work there, she would come out and join him. Surely Venetia could be trusted to manage the baby by herself, by then? — The only thing he did not tell her was that he had had his seat on a flight back to England when Mweta’s letter came.

Bray bought himself a secondhand Volkswagen from someone “getting out” and drove north to take up his appointment. He left the capital on a low grey morning that would lift to a hot day; Roly Dando had gone to work but Festus in his cook’s hat and the garden boy stood by to watch him go. Vivien Bayley had brought a present of whatever Penguins she could find at the local bookshop: Diary of a Nobody, The Three Caesars, Stamboul Train, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Plague— “Well, I always think you want to read things you know when you’re living away somewhere, alone.” They were in a basket on the back seat with a bottle of whisky and some files that had come up from the Ministry of Education at the last minute. He drove out through the main street of the town and saw Mrs. Evelyn Odara trying to park her car outside the new post office and several other people whose faces were now familiar to him, going about their daily business. The vendors of wooden animals were polishing them under the flame trees; the unemployed were hawking plastic bags of tomatoes. As the town ravelled out towards the gold mines lorries swayed past him filled with concrete pipes and building materials, stiff pig carcasses from the cold storage and rattling crates from the brewery. Then there were the landscaped approaches to the mine properties themselves, all flowery traffic roundabouts, signboards, and beds of cannas and roses, and then the stretches of neat colour — washed rectangles of housing for the African miners, a geometric pattern scribbled over by the mop — heads of pawpaw trees, smoking chimneys, washing lines, creepers and maize patches, and broken up by the noise and movement of people. In twenty minutes it was all gone; he passed the Bush Hill Arms, its Tudor façade pocked with wasp nests and a “For Sale” notice up (someone else “getting out”), and then there was nothing at all — everything: the one smooth road, the trees, the bamboo, and the sudden open country of the dambos where long grasses hid water, and he saw at last, again, the single long — tailed shrike that one always seemed to see in such places, hovering with its ink — black tail — plume like the brushstroke of a Chinese ideograph.

He drove all morning and met not more than a dozen cars and the top — heavy bus that apparently still did the journey from the Tanzania border twice a week. Where there were African villages, a few bicycles and stragglers appeared on the road. Bags of charcoal leaned here and there on the edge of the silent forest. People lived deep inside this environment as if it were a house; their individual shelters were flimsy. He kept remembering — no, experiencing — things like this, that he had forgotten. In England, sometimes, over the years, he had had dreams that seemed to happen in this country, but it wasn’t this country at all; and even conscious recollection was nothing but psychological memory — something selected to match the emotions engendered in a particular place at specific times.

Dando’s house, left behind, was no more present than Wiltshire. He enjoyed a kind of freedom that he knew would last only until his recognition of his surroundings passed into unthinking acceptance, and he could no longer hold back and view them as the past revisited or a present not yet broken into.

He called at the White Fathers’ Mission at Rungwa River, but Father Benedict was away and he could see that none of the younger ones knew who he was. The swallows still twittered in and out of their mud nests in the refectory, where he was given tea. A loud clanging that he knew so well came from a length of iron suspended from a tree and beaten with a stick, announced the end of school and the hot peace was invaded by yells and the muffled stampede of bare feet. The Fathers were good enough to sell him a couple of gallons of petrol, one working the hand — pump with a grin, his rosary swinging, the other standing by with his hands folded into the sleeves of his cassock and his big, blueish, celibate’s feet placed close together in their rough sandals. The Fathers were shy as young girls. The African schoolboys scuffled and chattered at a distance, and when he called out a greeting, laughed and called back.

There were large villages near the road in this part of the country, smoking up through the forest. The cultivation of land by lopping off the branches of trees and burning them round the trunk, for potash, made druidic circles everywhere. New signs pointed into the bush: “Freedom Bar,” “New York Bar,” “Independence Bar”—crooked letters in English painted on bits of wood. But the generation that had grown up in ten years was as poor and dull — skinned as their fathers had been.

He had had the intention to spend the night at the old Pilchey’s Hotel at Matoko, the usual half — way house. He arrived there earlier than he had thought he would; he was half in mind to drive on but did not know if the government rest — house that used to be at the cattle dipping station, sixty miles north, was still open. The tarred road was long left behind and the ugly little red car looked, as he got out and smoothed his rumpled shirt into his trousers, as cars always did up here. The undersides of the mudguards were rimmed with clay and the fender was plastered with the broken bodies and strange — coloured innards of dead insects.

Heat and silence fell upon him. He tramped over the cracked veranda and looked into the dark of the hotel: a smell of beeswax and insecticide, no one in sight. He knew where the bar was and the sound of his own footsteps accompanied him there, but the door was locked and he felt sure the ship’s bell that hung beside the name “Davy Jones’ Locker” was purely decorative. Back he went to the veranda; there was no main entrance, but screen doors all over the place that gave out long — drawn, dry squeaks behind him and led to a deserted dining — room with fan — folded table napkins and dim green corridors of closed doors. A child’s cot piled with old pillows and the broken marble from an old — fashioned washstand stood where the corridor turned; there was a tray with two empty beer bottles and glasses on the floor.

He went back to the veranda and stretched out his heavy long legs from a chair. He knew this hour; everyone was asleep. If he sat for any length of time he himself would fall into an afternoon sloth. There were borders of orange lilies in the garden, and the same huge sagging aviary, like a heavy spider’s web, behind which blue cranes and guinea fowl pecked at their own feathers in some affliction induced by confinement. He could see their jerking, worrying heads. The farming land was good around here, and when the white farmers got merry in the bar it used to be the thing to bundle one of their number in with the birds. A vast sense of unreality came over him. He noticed a brass bell — push, gleamingly polished, and stuck a forefinger at it, not expecting anything in the way of response. But after a while a very young waiter appeared, with a red fez and a tin tray. He asked for a cold beer and was told Doña was sleeping; the bar would open now — now. “Is it still Doña Pilchey?” Yes, Doña Pilchey was sleeping. This was not Gala country yet, but the local language was related. He spoke to the boy in Gala and was understood; they agreed that the luggage should come out of the car even though he couldn’t have a room until Doña Pilchey woke up. Was the kitchen locked? No, it seemed the kitchen was open. The youngster would make him some tea in the meantime.