Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“Festus he send me. He send me say, Colonel he coming back, one month, two month, then go to Gala. I’m greet my wife, I’m greet my sons. They say where you go? No, I’m go to Gala. Colonel him back. No, I go. I must go.”

They began to talk in Gala, which was not Kalimo’s mother tongue — since he came from the South where he had first begun to work for the Brays many years ago — but which, like Bray, he had learned when he moved with the Brays to Gala. They exchanged family news; Bray fetched the picture of Venetia’s baby. The pleasurable excitement of reunion hung over his solitary lunch, with Kalimo bringing in the food and being detained to talk.

But later in the afternoon, when he had sat for an hour or two writing up his notes on the lake communities, he came to the problem of Mahlope: what was to be done about Mahlope? Kalimo had taken over the household as of right; Bray felt the old fear of wounding someone whom circumstances put in his power. It was out of the question that he should send Kalimo away. He belonged to Kalimo; Kalimo had come more than a thousand miles, out of retirement in his village, to claim him. The thought appalled him: to cook and clean for him as if his were the definitive claim on Kalimo’s life.

He went into the kitchen where Kalimo, hearing him begin to move about, was making tea. Bray had seen Mahlope through the living-room window — put out to grass, literally: swinging at it with a home — honed scythe made of a bit of iron fencing. “Kalimo, did you talk to Mahlope about the job?” He spoke in Gala. “Mukwayi?’ ” I took on Mahlope to look after the house, you see.”

Kalimo made the deep hum with which matters were settled. He had got older; he drew out these sounds now, like an old man in the sun. “Mahlope will be for the garden, and to clean the car. I am your cook. And he has the washing to do. We always had a small boy for the outside work.”

“Yes, but I’m not the D.C. any more, you must remember. And I’m here on my own. This isn’t the big house, with a whole family. I don’t need more than one person to look after me.”

Kalimo swilled out the teapot with boiling water, measured the tea into it, poured on the water, and replaced the lid, carefully turning it so that the retaining lip was in the right place.

“One person to cook and wash and everything — just for me.”

“Does Mukwayi want cake with tea, or biscuit?”

Of course, Kalimo would have baked cakes, put the household on a proper footing, against his return. He made Bray feel the insolence of teaching a man his own business, of so much as bringing up the subject.

Kalimo carried the tray into the living-room. As he put it down he said, “I have always looked after you. Cooking, washing, outside — it’s the same for me.”

Bray said, “You are not tired?”

He had sat down at his table. Kalimo looked down at him, and smiled. “And you? You are not tired.”

“All right. I’ll explain to Mahlope. We’ll keep him until we can find him another job. You can make use of him — the garden, whatever you think.”

After dinner he wrote to Olivia. Well, you won’t have any doubts about how I’m being looked after from now on; Kalimo has turned up. He heard through the grape — vine — took him a month to get here, by bus and on foot. I’m embarrassed but suppose I’m lucky. The bad old good days come back.

Shinza. Edward Shinza. Even the occurrence of Kalimo was a reminder. He ought to go and see him; it was easy to assume to himself that he thought of it often; he did not, in fact. The work he was doing, unchecked by distraction or interruption, filled his mind. In the capital, work would have been compressed into a few hours a day, jostled by other demands and the company of friends. But now although he was often conscious of being alone — alone at night, with a Christmas bee dinning at the light, and the bare furniture taking on the waiting — room watchfulness of a solitary’s surroundings; alone in the garden, reading letters and papers at his table under the fig tree — the interviews, the paper — work, were a preoccupation that expanded to take up the days and long evenings. Dando had just written again and asked among other things, whether he had seen Shinza — Dando’s writing was so difficult to read and covered so closely the sheets of thin paper that his were the sort of letters one put aside to read more attentively another time. Roly would have gone off with a bottle to get drunk with Shinza long ago, by now. He throve on dissatisfactions, paradox and irony. He would have made himself welcome with a man at his own funeral, if that were a possible occasion for friendship and solidarity. Whenever Bray saw himself coming into Shinza’s company once again, he felt suddenly that there would be nothing to say: he was brought back by Mweta, now he was working for Mweta. It was better to concentrate on such practical matters as the possibility of resuscitating the old woodworking and shoemaking workshop in the town and expanding it to become a sort of modest trades school. He discussed this with Malemba. The Education Department had abolished these rural workshops on the principle that everyone was to get a proper education now; the black man was no longer to be trained just sufficiently to do the white man’s odd jobs for him. “But what about mechanics and plumbers, if you’re going to raise the standard of living? And you’re still going to need village carpenters and shoemakers for a long, long time in communities like this one where people haven’t yet completely made the changeover to a money economy and buying their needs in the stores. If we can train people in crafts that will give them a living, we’ll have some alternative to the drift to the towns. It’s a better idea than labour camps, eh?” Malemba, Bray saw, would be glad to have the suggestion come from him; Malemba himself thought it unrealistic for the government rural workshops to have been closed, but did not wish it to be thought, in educational circles in the capital, that he was a backward provincial when it came to demanding higher education for the people. Malemba was not a sycophant but he needed a little stiffening of confidence; it was one of the small satisfactions that Bray had set himself to find worth while, to see that through their working together, Malemba was beginning to gain it.

Yet he said to Aleke, “I’d like to look in on Edward Shinza one of these days.” He was in Aleke’s house — his own old house — on a Saturday afternoon: there was no exchange of invitations for drinks and dinners between officials as there had been when officialdom was white, but Aleke had said, “Why don’t you come over to my place?” and so clearly meant the open invitation that Bray had taken it up as casually and genuinely. The radio, as always, was playing loudly on the veranda. Some of the seven children pushed toy cars through tracks scratched in the earth of the tubs where Olivia had once grown miniature orange trees.

“The road’s very bad that way, they tell me,” Aleke said, lazily, though not exactly without interest.

Bray realized that he had brought up the subject because, although he would go and see Shinza openly, would tell Mweta so himself — indeed Mweta would expect him to seek out Shinza — he had some cautious reluctance to have Aleke reporting that he had visited Shinza. It should be established that it was not a matter of any interest to anyone except himself.

Mrs. Aleke brought tea and was sent away to fetch beer instead; she tried to clear the veranda of children, but Aleke was one of those plump, muscular men whose self — confidence, apparently made flesh, exerts a tactile attraction over women and children. His small sons and daughters ran back to press against his round spread thighs. He spoke of his wife as if she were not there. “She’s a woman who can’t get children to listen. The same with the chickens. She chases them one way, they go the other.”