Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Kalimo arrived back and cooked him some supper. Afterwards he stood under the fig tree in the dark, smoking one of the big cigars he didn’t allow himself too often. There were bats at the fruit, the most silent and unobtrusive of creatures, torn — off rags of darkness itself. He wondered with whom he could take the traditional refuge of dropping in for a drink. Not the club, the new member taking up his rights. Not Aleke. He could go to that girl, Rebecca Edwards, one of the group in the capital. But he and she would have nothing to talk about; his mind was blank of small talk. He leant against the tree and the cigar burned down to a finger of firm ash. Ants ran alerting a fine capillary tree of nerves over his back.

He went inside and wrote to his wife, suggesting that she make up her mind and fly out within the next two weeks. He had to go to the capital in any case, and this would mean that he could meet her and drive her back on the same trip. After he had signed, he wrote: All our reasons for your not coming seem to be simply because we can’t put a name to why you should come. It was a love letter, then. He scored it out. He wrote, experimentally, All our reasons for your coming seem to be defeated by some unknown reason for your not coming. He felt he did not understand what he had said. He did not stick down the envelope. He put it with the pages he had covered for Mweta; about Mweta.

In the morning, he left the pages there. At least until he had spoken to Aleke. At least until then.

Aleke and his new secretary were starting the day with a cup of coffee when he arrived at the offices. It was an atmosphere he had known all his life — what he thought of as “all his life,” the years in Africa. The offices still stuffy but cool before the heat of the day, the clerks talking lingeringly over their shoulders as they slowly began their to — and-fro along the passages; the time before the satchel of mail came in. Aleke filled his pushed — back chair and questioned Rebecca Edwards with the banter of a working understanding.

“You didn’t forget to stick in Paragraph B, Section Seventeen, eh, my girl.” She leaned against the windowsill, cup in one hand, cigarette in the other. “I did not.” Of course, she could be counted on to take work home over the weekend; Aleke said it himself: “You’re an angel. And will you get that file up to date by Friday? Cross your heart?” He had for Bray the smile with which a busy man greets one who has been off on some pleasure — trip. “Well, how was the bush? Get through all right?” There was chatter about the condition of the road. “Mr. Scott said to Stanley Nko, ‘The best thing would be for the Bashi Flats to secede….’” (Nko had taken over from the white Provincial Manager of Public Works, Scott.) Quoting, Aleke was immensely amused at this solution to the problem, and they all laughed.

“Could I have a word with you, Aleke?” Bray asked.

“Oh sure, sure.”

Rebecca Edwards tactfully made to leave at once. “Here, here, don’t forget these—” A file was waved at her.

Aleke got up, took the lavatory key from its tidy nail, and went off for the daily golden moment, saying, “Be with you right away — if you want to listen to the news—” He gestured at the transistor radio on his desk.

Aleke was washing his hands with boma soap, drying them on the strip of boma towel.

“I gave a young fellow a lift,” Bray said.

Aleke began to nod and turned smiling at a story he could guess— “Long as he didn’t bash you over the head. It’s getting as bad as down in town. What’d he take off you? Some of these fellows from the fish factory — I don’t stop for anybody, any more, honestly.”

“Yes, from the fish factory — but he’d just come out of prison. He’d been inside more than two — and-a-half months. No trial. No charges laid. Here in Gala, in Lebaliso’s jail.”

Aleke sat down at his desk and listened to something he knew instead of guessed. He put out his hand and switched on the fan; he probably did this every morning at exactly the same time, to ward off the heat as it came. His face was open to Bray. “You know about it,” Bray said.

“Lebaliso kept me in the picture.”

“So it was Lebaliso’s decision?”

“We’d been keeping an eye on that fellow a long time. Shinza’s chap.”

Bray said, “What d’you mean, Shinza’s chap?”

“There’re a lot of Bashi working here now. Shinza sees they make a nuisance of themselves now and again. In the unions and so on.”

“Aleke.” Bray made the attempt to lift the whole business out of the matter-of-fact, where Aleke let it lie like a live bomb buried in an orderly garden. “Aleke; Lebaliso shut up a man for two months and seventeen days.”

“From what I was told, this one was a real trouble — maker. I mean, it’s not my affair, except that what’s good for the province concerns me. From that point of view, I’m expected to keep an eye on things. If there’s likely to be any trouble, I just like to know what I’m expected”—in mid — sentence he changed his mind about what he was saying— “well, I must be kept more or less in the picture.”

“And what you see is Lebaliso taking the law into his own hands.”

Aleke was friendly, tried to invoke the amusement at Lebaliso he and Bray had shared. “Of course I said to him at the beginning, the magistrate’s the man to go to with your troubles. Not me. Anyway it seems something had to be done about that fellow. They wanted to know a bit more about him.”

Bray said, “Was Onabu the one who was interested?” Aaron Onabu was Chief of Police, in the capital.

Aleke agreed rather than answered. “I suppose so.”

Bray said, bringing out each word steadily, “And I never heard a word from anyone in Gala.”

“We-ll, you’ve had other things to do but think about old Lebaliso up there—” The hand waved in the direction of the prison, behind the trees, behind the village. “We’ve all got enough on our hands. But this girl, Bray — I’m telling you, my life is different now. When I want something, it’s there. If I forget something, she’s remembered. And give her anything you want done, too. If you want your reports typed. She’ll do it; she’s a worker, man.”

Bray watched the fan turning its whirring head to the left, the centre, the right, and back again, the left, the centre, the right, and back again. He wanted to ask: And are there others up there — with Lebaliso? But the telephone rang and while Aleke’s warm, lively voice rose and fell in cheerful Gala, he felt the pointlessness of pursuing this business through Aleke and, signalling his self — dismissal, left the room.

In his office he set himself to put some order into the files he kept there; they were constantly being moved back and forth between the boma and the house. The office was not exclusively for his use and Godfrey Letanka, the clerk, came carefully in and out. He gave him some typing to be done; he couldn’t bring himself to take advantage of that girl. The heat grew and filled the small room; he stood at the window and looked across the village muffled in trees. At twelve o’clock it was alive with bicycles taking people home to the African township for lunch, black legs pumping, shouts, talk, impatient ringing of bells. He went out and the sun was dull, behind cloud, on his head; he had the feeling that he was not there, in Gala, really: that he had lost external reality. Or conversely that he carried something inside him that set him apart from all these people who were innocent of it, uninfected. What was he doing among them? He dropped at Joosab’s a pair of pants with a broken zip; Joosab stitching, moulding layers of interlining upon a lapel, the naked bulb over his sewing machine, Mweta on the wall. Joosab’s brother — in-law and mother — in-law had just been to Mecca, and the brother — in-law was in the shop, wearing his white turban. “Home again, Colonel.” Joosab celebrated the two travellers, one from the bush, one from the pilgrimage, in vicarious pleasure. “Your tuhn will come, your tuhn will come, Ismail.” The brother — in-law was generously reassuring from the bounty of his importance. “More than fifteen year now, I been thinking next year and next year … but seriously, Colonel, I have plans to make the trip.” At the general store, where he had to pick up a cylinder of domestic gas, changes were in process: a cashier’s turnstile was being set up at the new EXIT ONLY — a second door formerly blocked by rolls of linoleum and tin baths. Already men and women in the moulded plastic sandals that were now worn by all who could afford shoes were shoving and shuffling for a share of supermarket manna — a free pocketcomb with every purchase above two — and-sixpence. An old crazy woman who wandered the streets of Gala had somehow got in behind the turnstile and was singing hymns up and down the lanes of tinned food and detergents.