Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

To get to the fishing communities farther up the lake he left his car at the fish — freezing plant at the southern tip and went by water, hitch-hiking, more or less, on the cumbersome, home — made boats of the independent fishermen. Some of them were traders rather than fishermen, really; they went where the kapenta were running, and then sold them by the eighty — pound sack wherever on the lake they were scarce. Boundaries were ignored by these boats; they put in wherever there was a likely village, and the men aboard spoke Swahili as well as Gala — Swahili had come down, hundreds of years ago, from the East Coast and was the lingua franca of the lake, even though the inland people, so far south, did not speak it. Locked in the middle of the continent, the lake villagers had something of the natural worldliness of seaport inhabitants, and the sense of individualistic independence of those whose range takes in the tilting, glittering horizon forever receding before the boat. They laughed and joked and talked fish prices around Bray; his Gala was so good again, now that he was speaking it every day, that he could take part in the talk and even pick up the Swahilisms that crept into it. Hour after hour he sat on his berth of sacks of dried kapenta, exchanging his Karel l’s for their pipe tobacco, the boat dipping and lifting over the immense glare of the lake. His English face turned stiff and red and then, as if some secretion of pigment, that had ceased functioning in the years he had been away, began to be produced by his body again, his arms and hands and face became richly burnished and the face in the shaving mirror was a holiday face. No matter how animated the talk was, the voices were lost out on the lake as completely as a dropped coin ingested by the waters. To him the scape — radiance of water and sky, a kind of explosion of the two elements in an endless flash — was beautiful, with the strange grip of sensuosity of place, of something he had never expected to see again. This was it. One couldn’t remember anything so physical. It couldn’t be recaptured by cerebration; it had to be experienced afresh. The fish eagles gave their banshee whistles, a sound from the dark side of the sun. Now and then the water boiled with the tails of churning shoals, rock — bream feeding on kapenta, tiger fish snapping at rock — bream, fish eagles and gulls hovering, swooping and snatching. To his companions, the place was a condition — weather, luck (with the fish), distance to the next objective. His mind idled; did this add another meaning to the theory of aesthetics that held that beauty was an incidental product of function? Beauty could also be another way of reading circumstances in which a function — in this case fishing for a living — took place. One of the men put a finger to the right side of his nose and cleared the left with a sharp snort, into the lake. The water that same exquisite pale element through which the fish shone, bore the snot flushed efficiently away.

On shore, there were whole communities of several thousand people where the children didn’t go to school, just as (Aleke complained when Bray got back to Gala) the men didn’t pay taxes. “While you’re about it, up there, perhaps you could think of something we can do about that.” Aleke spoke in the dreamy humour of a man slightly dazed with problems. “The government tells me that after the miners, those fellows are the biggest money — earners in the country, but they don’t want to know about income tax. All you can get out of them is that they’ve always paid hut tax. Income tax is something for white men to pay. Must they become white men just because we’ve got our own government? Good God, man, what sort of thing is this independence!” Thinking of the fishermen, Bray laughed rather admiringly. “Well, they’re self — employed, illiterate, and extremely shrewd — quite a combination for an administration to beat.” “I mean, how can you assess their earnings? It’s not a matter of keeping two sets of books. It’s all in here”—Aleke poked a finger at his temple— “what auditor can get at that?” “Organize them in cooperatives,” Bray said, still amused.

“Well, there is the big trawler company.”

“Yes, but that’s a foreign company, the men who work on the trawlers are just employees. I mean the people who fish and trade for themselves. Oh, it’ll come, I suppose.”

“Those people? They don’t want to hear from us what’s good for them!”

“Never mind, Aleke, the president favours free enterprise.” They both smiled; this was the way in which Mweta gave poker — faced reassurance to the mining companies, without offering direct affront to members of the government who feared economic colonialism.

“D’you bring any fish?” Aleke asked, shoving papers into drawers; Bray had walked in as he was going home for lunch.

“Didn’t think about it! But I’ll remember next time. What does your wife like? I saw a magnificent perch.”

“Oh she’s from town, she wouldn’t touch anything out of the lake. But I won’t have the kids the same. I told her, they must eat the food that’s available, there where they live. So she says what’s wrong with meat from the supermarket?”

“I’ll bring you a perch, next time.”

“Yes, a nice fish stew, with peppers, I like that.” He had taken up a nailfile and was running the point under the pale nails of his black hands as if he were paring a fruit. “I’m full of carbon. I have to do my own stencils, even. I shouldn’t really go home to eat today, the work’s up over my head, man. Honestly, I just feel like driving all the way and kidnapping a decent secretary from the Ministry.” Grumbling relaxedly, he left the offices with Bray; one of his small sons had come down on a tricycle to meet him and was waiting outside, nursing a toe that had sprung a bright teardrop of blood: while they examined the hurt the drop rolled off the dusty little foot like a bead of mercury. The boy had ridden against the low box — hedge of Christ — thorn that neatly bordered the bomas entrance. All bomas in the territory had Christ — thorn hedges, just as they had a morris chair to each office and a standard issue of inkpots. “Look at that,” Aleke said in Gala. “It’s gone deep. What a plant.”

“Why not have it dug out, get rid of it,” said Bray.

Aleke looked uncertain a moment, as if he could not remember why this was unlikely. Then he came to himself and said in English, “You’re damned right. I want this place cleared.”

“You could have mesembryanthemums — ice-plant,” Bray said. But Aleke had the tricycle, hanging by a handlebar, in his one hand, and was holding his child under the armpit with the other, urging him along while he hopped exaggeratedly, “Ow, ow!”

You had only to leave a place once and return to it for it to become home. At the house Bray came through the kitchen and asked Mahlope to fetch his things from the car; Mahlope had a friend sitting there who rose at once. Bray acknowledged the greeting and then was suddenly aware of some extraordinary tension behind him. His passage had caused a sensation; he made an involuntary checking movement, as if there were something shocking pinned on his back. The face was staring at him, blindly expectant, flinching from anticlimax. The anticlimax hung by a hair; then it was knocked aside: “Kalimo!” The man started to laugh and gasp, saved by his name. The face was one from another life, Bray’s cook of the old time, in the D.C.’s house. The salutations went on for several minutes, and then Kalimo was in perfect possession of the occasion. He said in English, “I’m here today, yesterday, three day. No, the boy say Mukwayi go Tuesday, come back Friday. I’m ready.” Bray’s eyes followed into the labyrinth of past commonplace the strings of Kalimo’s apron, tied twice under his arms, in the way he had always affected. “How did you find me?”