Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Living alone, remote from the demands of friendship for the past few months, Bray had become unaccustomed to this European intimacy, this steamy involvement in other people’s lives. All he could do was prompt with the sort of brief questions that enabled Hjalmar Wentz to unburden himself — though it was an unburdening only of the facts: Bray could sense that they construed a kind of front— “Margot and I think …” “… all we really need, then, is, say, another year to get straight”—out of a more private struggle that could not be talked about. Wentz was saying, after a pause, “The thing to do, I suppose, would be to talk to Ras Asahe….” The haggard, handsome Scandinavian face seemed to be waiting, as if for a blow. The cuts of strain slashed across the cheekbone under each eye. “He has an uncle on the board — you know.” All large white companies had a token black man on their boards. “A word from there, and everything … well. It would get us out of a hole for the meantime.”

“Yes, if the brewery were to be persuaded—”

Wentz was still waiting, ready not to flinch. He said, “But Emmanuelle is not easy to deal with. My wife — Margot — we don’t know how Emmanuelle would react. And apart from that, what would it look like, I mean to the man? Up till now, we’ve never encouraged it, this friendship with Emmanuelle.”

Now that he had delivered the slap himself, he was in some way released. “How do you think things are going?”

“I should ask you. I’m too far away from the centre.”

Wentz opened his hands at the room, interlocked them under his chin. “What? This? The black ones have got the government jobs they wanted, and the white ones are in business as usual— they are happy, nothing’s changed. He’s been very clever. You should hear them: what a marvellous chap he is, what a stable government … Oh he’s been very clever. When you think what they said about him before, eh? All that business about flight of capital is forgotten, they want to stay put and get good quick returns. Of course the honeymoon isn’t over. I only talk about what I see. The black people — after all, who are they, here? — the people who have moved up into administrative power, the white — collar people who aren’t somebody’s clerk any more, and the mine workers who are moving up into the jobs they could have done before and were kept out of because of the white man. So I say it’s going very well. He’s doing very well. What it’s like for the rest of the country — I never get farther than the vegetable farm where Margot gets the stuff for the hotel, I drive there with the van twice a week, and that’s what I know of the country!” He laughed at himself. “What’s happening up there?”

“Well, there’s a bit of industry beginning around Gala itself — but the new agreement over the fishing concessions leaves the whole lake area just as it was, and the Bashi Flats need about everything you can name before one could think of resettlement schemes there — roads, control of flood waters — everything.”

Hjalmar objected. “The royalty on the fishing rights is increased by about twenty per cent, I think. The money’s not all going out of the country any more.”

“But wages in the fish industry haven’t gone up one penny. Of course there’s the Development and Planning Commission — something may come out of that, for the lake people. And the Bashi — they need it even more. But the potential of the fishing industry is there for the taking….”

“Schemes, commissions, plans — well, poor devils — it’s their affair, isn’t it,” said Hjalmar Wentz. “It’s not for you and me, it’s not our life, they have to work it out for themselves.” He took a deep breath and held it a moment: his eyes were following the movement of someone across the room, and then he gave an anticipatory smile as his daughter came up. “Emmanuelle, you remember Colonel Bray? He’s staying with us this time—” She was saying with the inattentive correctness of one performing an errand, “Someone called Thomson — Waite is here to see you. He has a black attaché case with initials. The hair in his nose is dyed by nicotine.” “Good God, Emmanuelle.” Her father laughed, showing her off to Bray. The girl, perfectly serious and distant, bit at a hangnail on her thumb. “So you can decide whether you will see him or not. I should say he comes from a bank or a health department; he’s sniffing about after something.” “Oh God. I better go. Did you put him in the office?” Hjalmar went ahead of her with his head thrust before him anxiously. Bray saw him look round to ask her something but she had turned away through the tables.

Bray had a shower and sat in a broken deck — chair in the garden, waiting for lunch. He read in the morning paper that Mweta had returned from his state visit. Unity had been reaffirmed, useful proposals had been made, the 50-million-pound hydro — electric scheme to serve the two countries jointly had been agreed upon in principle … the leading article questioned the economics of the scheme, as opposed to its value as a demonstration of Pan — African interdependence. There is no doubt whatever that this country sees its destiny always as part of the greater destiny of the African continent … no doubt that President Mweta, the day he took up the burdens of office, has taken along with responsibilities at home the ideal of an Africa that would present an entity of international cooperation to a world that has so far signally failed to resolve national contradictions. But we must not waste our own resources in order to foster cooperation across our borders. We have, in the lake that forms our northern border, a potential source of electric power that renders unnecessary any such scheme in the South, a scheme that by its nature would place our vital industrial development ultimately at the mercy of any instability that might manifest itself in our neighbour’s house….

Hjalmar’s daughter walked right past him across the grass with Ras Asahe, deep in low — voiced conversation. They ignored the figure behind the paper; living in a hotel, the girl carried her private world about her in the constant presence of anonymous strangers. A piping scale climbed and descended; she must have a recorder. The pair settled down somewhere on the grass quite near, and he heard Emmanuelle’s clear, decisive voice: “Somebody told me it was just like a sneeze” and the man’s deep, derisive voice: “Good God, that’s how you whites prepare girls. If you’d been an African, you’d know how to make love, you’d have been taught.”

“Oh you’re so bloody superior, you’ve got the idea nobody else knows how to live.”

There was silence. Then Bach on the recorder, piercing, trilling, on and on, up and up, sustaining high notes in a gleeful, punishing scream.

At the round table in the Wentzes’ quarters the chaps of Margot Wentz’s heavy white arms hung majestically over the dishes as she served. She had powdered her face but the smell of hotel gravy clung about her. Every now and then she gazed on her son Stephen as at a gobbling pet dog at his dinner — dish, half affectionate, half repelled. He had his father’s blond handsome face, blown up to the overgrown proportions of young white men born in Africa and forced by sport and the sun, like battery chickens. Hjalmar Wentz kept arching his eyebrows and blinking, fighting off a daze of preoccupation. He gave in to laughter against himself: “The fellow who approved the plan for the servants’ rooms just stamped it without looking. He was going back to England anyway, couldn’t care a damn. The whole thing is against municipal regulations, there aren’t enough air bricks — can you imagine, the water main is connected in such a way we haven’t been paying for the water used down there?”