Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“Yes, I suppose I won’t know my way around when I get into town.”

“Oh, it’s still not New York or London, don’t worry.” The man spoke with an accent, and a certain European kind of resignation. They laughed. “Well, in that case, we’ll probably bump into each other in Great Lakes Road.”

“Please! Nkrumah Road.”

“I said I should have to learn my way round all over again.”

The man looked about quickly and lowered his voice. “This country can do with a few more white people like you, take it from me. People with some faith. Sometimes I even think I’m down South again, that’s a fact. I’ve said it to my wife.”

A young black man with sunglasses and a thick, springy mat of hair shaped to a crew-cut by topiary rather than barbering had cut through the crowd with the encircling movement of authority. “This way, Colonel, sir. Your luggage will be brought to the entrance, if you’ll just give me the tickets—”

The other man, bobbing in the wash of this activity yet smiling at it in hostly assumption of his own established residence in the country, was talking across the black man and the exchange of pleasantries, tickets, thanks: “—at the Silver Rhino, of course, you remember the place. Any time — we’d be very pleased—”

He thanked him, listening to the two men at once and hearing neither, and followed the firm rump in white shorts past barriers and through the reception hall. “That’s all right, officer, this is Colonel Bray.” “I’m looking after Colonel Bray, no need to bother him.” A youthful black official at passport control said uncertainly, “Just a minute. I don’t know about this—” but the pale Cockney who was teaching him to take over his job said, “That’s okay, chum, it’s our ole friend Mr. Kabata.” The luggage was not waiting at the flag-draped and bunting-swathed entrance, where a picture of a huge Roman emperor Mweta, in a toga, smiled as he did in the old photograph of the Gala village football team. Mr. Kabata said, “What’s the matter with these people. Excuse me, I’ll get a boy,” and returned with the cases on the head of one of the stringy, splay-footed peasants who had always constituted the portering personnel. The porter addressed both men as Mukwayi, the respectful term become servile during the long time when it was used indiscriminately for any white man.

There was an official pennant on the Volkswagen. Beside him, Kabata’s strong thighs filled the seat. “It’s not too comfortable for a man your height, Colonel. The President will be expecting me to have come for you with the Mercedes, but, honestly, if I’d have waited to get it I would have turned up I don’t know when. You know how it is just at the moment. Mrs. Indira Gandhi arrives this afternoon and yesterday it was United Nations and Sékou Touré.” There were gilded arches over the old airport road to town; several men on bicycles wore shirts with Mweta’s face printed in yellow and puce on their backs. He said, “All very festive,” but it was distraction; he had the feeling of listening inwardly, watching for something else. The young man said, “You are from Gala district.” “I was. Why, are you from there?” “From Umsalongwe. But my mother is a Gala. I have visited that place.” “Oh have you? Recently or when you were a child? Perhaps I was still there then?” “I think they’ll be very pleased to see you back there.” He laughed. “I wonder if I’ll get that far.”

“Oh, you must make trip” the young man said proudly. “I do it to Umsalongwe in ten hours. The road is much improved, much improved. You’ll see. You could make it to Matoko in, say, six or seven. My car is a little tiny thing, a second-hand crock.” Near the bridge the women were going for water with paraffin tins on their heads. Advertisement hoardings had gone up, there was a cement works, smart factories put together out of jutting glassy sections and, in between, the patches scratched in the bush where women and children were hoeing crooked rows of beans and maize. The children (an excuse to dawdle, of course) stopped and waved. He found himself waving back urgently, bending his head under the low roof of the car, smiling and craning to hold their faces when they were already out of sight. The car was approaching, was carrrying him through the market quarter of the town. Under the mango trees, barbers’ mirrors set up a flash in the shade, and live chickens lay in heaps with their legs tied. It was the mango season, and there were the saffron-yellow sabres of the pips, sucked hairy, everywhere where people passed.

The bird was on the roof of the round, thatched guest room in the garden of his old friend Roland Dando — a Welshman — newly appointed as Attorney — General. When Bray was delivered to the house there was no one at home but servants well primed to welcome him. They gave him the African cook’s special lunch that he remembered so well: slightly burned meat soup with lots of barley, overdone steak with fried onions, a pudding frothy on top and gelatinous underneath, tasting of eggs and granadilla juice. Roly rang up to see if he had arrived, and explained again — he had done so in advance by letter — that he had an official lunch to attend. Bray’s ears were filled with the strange echoes of exhaustion and, stoked up by the hot lunch, his body threatened to suffocate him with waves of heat. He went into the room kept darkened by drawn curtains and slept.

There was no ceiling and he looked up into the pattern of a spider’s web made by the supporting beams of the roof. The underside of thatch that rested on it was smooth and straight, grey where it was old, blond where it had been replaced, and, like a tidy head, here and there showed a single stray strand out of place. The bird was probably balancing on the little porcelain conductor through which the electricity wire led to the light dangling above him. The bird was gone; he knew, almost as if the breath’s weight of claws had pressed down the roof and now the pressure was released.

The sun had come round and the curtains glowed like the sky above a fire. The stale cool air of the room had heated; yet weariness receded, his head was left high and dry of it. There was silence and then he heard that there were voices in the silence droning somewhere, breaking off for breath, laughing — not softly, but softened by being almost out of earshot. Not quite. A voice separated, wound nearer, there was the starting up of a hiss (a hose, he thought) and he made out a word: not just as a particular combination of articulated sounds, but a meaning: “later on,” the compound word for this phrase, in the language that was spoken round the capital, and that he had never really known well.

He got up and went over to the main house for a bath. The sun in the garden was burning, dazzling, seizing. In the bathroom flies were buzzing themselves to death against the windowpanes. Roly was a bachelor and his house was the particular mixture of tranquil luxury and unchangeable dreariness that is a condition of households where white men live indulged in the sole charge of black male servants. The cistern of the lavatory drizzled into the pan constantly and couldn’t be flushed properly, and the towels were stiff as a dress-shirt (Olivia had taken years to get people to learn to rinse the soap out of the washing), but an old fellow in a cook’s hat put tea under the trees for him and carried off his crumpled suit to be pressed without being asked. A youth was cutting the tough grass with a length of iron bent at the end. Coarse and florid shrubs, hibiscus with its big flowers sluttish with pollen and ants and poinsettia oozing milky secretion, bloomed, giving a show of fecundity to the red, poor soil running baked bald under the grass, beaten slimy by the rains under the trees, and friable only where ants had digested it and made little crusty tunnels. A rich stink of dead animal rose self-dispersed, like a gas, every now and then as he drank his tea, and he got up and looked around, as he had done so many times before, and with as little success, to see if a rat or mole were rotting somewhere. Whatever it was could never be found; it was the smell of growth, they had long ago decided, at Gala, the process of decay and regeneration so accelerated, brought so close together that it produced the reek of death-and-life, all at once. He strolled to the limits of the garden and climbed through the barbed-wire fence, but the grasses and thornbush on the other side (Dando’s place was eight miles out of town) were too entangled for walking where there was no path. He listened to the bush and had the old feeling, in the bush, of being listened for. There were — or used to be — leopards on the outskirts of the town; Dando had once had his dog taken. He walked a hundred yards or so up the road, and, meeting a man on a bicycle, greeted him in the language that had come back to him as he lay in the room.