Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

There were so many ways by which they could have arrived at this point. Bray had been aware of it as to be approached through layer by layer of past associations, present preoccupations, the half — intimate trivia with which one mind circles another before establishing on what level they are to be open to one another, this time. But they had fallen through tentativeness at once; nothing stood between them, no protection. They might have opened their mouths and begun to speak out of the unsaid, as a man addresses a dark room. Bray said, “From the day I arrived, I tried to talk to him. I’d thought — if you and he weren’t hitting it off — you might go to United Nations for a time.”

Shinza watched him, lolling in a kind of faint, distantly bitter amusement at a spectacle that ceased to concern, a mouthing figure in an action from which the sound has been cut off. “Oh yes, United Nations,” he said kindly.

Bray sat down on the sofa.

Shinza continued to bear with him, smiling.

It was a powerful indifference, not listless. A lion fixes its gaze on no object, does not snap at flies. Old Shinza. But he’s not old at all, fifty — four or — five, about a year older than I am. Bray was aware of the vigour of Shinza’s breast, rising and falling, the strong neck shining a little with warmth — a body still a man’s body and not an old man’s, although the face for years had had the coded complexity of experience and drink.

“I got the impression that there were things between you I wasn’t supposed to know about.”

“Of course, James, of course. How else could Mweta explain? Of course; terrible things—” He began to laugh and put his hand on Bray’s knee. “He didn’t want to have me around. That’s all it is. It sounds so silly, ay, how could he say to you, I don’t want Shinza. I — don’t-want-Shinza. Shinza’s big black face in the papers. Shinza’s big mouth open in the cabinet. Shinza asking questions when I make my deals with the mining companies. The British. The Americans. The French. Why. How. How much. And who for. Better have that mister what’sisname, the young Englishman who jumps about licking, a nice, friendly dog, you pay him and he makes bow — wow, that’s all. No Shinza asking damn questions. Before, he used to ask me what questions to ask. Now he’s the one who has to give answers.”

“Shut people up?” Another meaning to the phrase that had fallen casually, earlier, suddenly opened. “You said something just now — what did you mean exactly?”

Shinza was stroking his neck under his unshaven, lifted chin, smiling, giving him one ear. He righted himself and smiled at Bray. Then all expression died. He said, “Oh, bush stories, like the chap you had in your car.”

“That youngster? The one I picked up?”

Shinza kept the moment suspended, watching without much interest, from an inner distance.

Bray was rushed by unmatched thoughts; had he mentioned the boy to Shinza? He said, at once conscious of the idiocy of it, “But he hardly had a word to say for himself.”

“Yes, shut up. He’d been shut up.” Shinza made a point of the broken — toothed smile at his smart play on words.

Two months and seventeen days.

He’s probably just out of clink.

“Where?”

“Oh Gala, of course. You know District Chief of Police Lebaliso. And the Provincial Officer, Aleke. Of course you know them.”

“What was the charge?”

“Charge? What charge? No charge; no trial. Just taken inside.”

“And what’d he done?”

“Worked at the fish — meal factory.”

Bray made a sudden, uncontrolled gesture for Shinza’s attention — and Shinza gave way, calmly: “Spoke to the other chaps about pay and conditions and so on. Told them something of how the fishing concessions with the company work. The time the government renewed the concessions for another five years — you know …”

Mweta’s minister had renewed the contract with the British — Belgian trawling company under terms that transferred a percentage of the stock to the government, but left the wages of the workers at the level of colonial times.

Bray sat forward clumsily, his hands dangled between his knees.

Shinza stuck another cigarette in his mouth, spoke round it, standing up to thrust for the matches in the dressing — gown pocket. “There were a few little meetings down in the township — the men from the factory and the lime — works fellows. The trade — union steward didn’t like it. The Young Pioneers didn’t like it.”

“They arrested the boy?”

“I suppose you call it that. They took him away and locked him up; they had a lot of questions to ask, it took two months or so, and now you gave him a lift home.” Shinza finished it off abruptly, like a fairy story for a child.

“More than two months.” About the time he had arrived in Gala. “I never heard a word.”

“No,” said Shinza, biting off the end of a yawn, “not a word. From Lebaliso? From Aleke?”

“Whose responsibility would an order like that be? Who signs? There’s no preventive detention law in this country now.”

“Oh well, there’s the tradition, from the old days of the Emergency.” There was the growing feeling that Shinza was closing the conversation.

“But whose orders?”

Shinza said patiently, boredly, “Lebaliso. Aleke.”

“I’d like to talk to the boy.”

“He’s had enough ‘questions,’” said Shinza.

“It’s possible that Mweta doesn’t know,” Bray said.

Shinza laughed. Bray was standing about; he did not know where to put himself, he heard his own shoes creaking. Shinza’s legs were thrust before him under the dressing — gown, the eyes held in a disgusted, amused sympathy. Bray said, “I mustn’t take these away with me again”; he put the box of cigarillos on the washing. “Your old brand.”

Shinza got up, the situation now on his own terms. “God, man, I love those things. I smoke these damned cigarettes nowadays, someone brings them in for me. Can you get me some more of those, James? I’d like a case, send them to me from England, eh?” When his man came in he ignored him and sauntered Bray through a kitchen and out of the house to another house, a mud — and-thatch one.

“The beer she makes isn’t too bad,” he said by way of introduction to a young woman who scuttled behind the dirty curtain that divided the house into two rooms. He called after her and in a moment she came back with a clean dress on and her feet hobbling into shoes. “She’s just had a baby,” he said, in Gala. “Where’s your son, Talisa, show off your son,” and she laughed and answered in the spirit of the dialogue before a stranger, “Why can’t you let him sleep, why do you have to look at him all the time?” “You’re jealous. I’ve got a lot of children, one more doesn’t matter to me. — It’s her first,” he said to Bray, and went behind the curtain, where there were laughter and argument, and he came out tugging the dressing — gown straight with one hand, crimping his eyes as he blew cigarette smoke upwards to keep it away from the tiny baby he held, wearing only a little vest, in his other hand. It was pink — brown, faintly translucent, with minute hands and feet stirring, and a watch — sized, closed face. The girl took the cigarette out of Shinza’s mouth as she gazed at the baby, and with the first finger of his other hand he delicately traced the convolutions of its ear, whose lines were still compressed from the womb. It peed in a weak little arc, like the squirt from some small sea — creature disturbed in its shell. Shinza laughed, making lewd remarks, almost tossing it to the mother, while she was joyously fussed and embarrassed and bore it away behind the curtain, where it burst into surprisingly powerful yells that rivalled its father’s laughter. He moved about looking for a cloth. The mud room smelled coolly of fetid infant, beer, woodsmoke. There were clothing, cooking pots, newspapers, a radio, a brand — new perambulator of the kind you see in European parks — the decent disorder of intimacy. A trunk with labels from Southampton docks, San Francisco, and New York (Shinza was of the generation that got scholarships to attend Negro universities in America; Mweta was born too late for that and went straight into politics from school) had a lace mat and fancy coffee service set out upon it. Shinza grabbed a garment of some kind and mopped his chest, tossing the rag into a corner. A kitchen table with an old typewriter was his desk. There was a packing — case of books in disarray; behind it, the only adornment on the walls, a football — team group — Nkrumah, cross — eyed Fanon, mascot Selassie, Guevara, a face among others that was Shinza himself: a meeting of Afro — Asian countries in Cairo, the beginning of the Sixties. Shinza saw Bray looking, and said, “Rogue’s gallery.” He was smoking one of the cigars; he had the authority, pitched here in this mud tent, of a commander in the field.