Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Bray was able now to talk about the Bashi Flats as an issue apart from the question of Shinza — Shinza or no Shinza, there must be roads, there must be an energetic move to make the Bashi less like another country in comparison with the area round the capital and the mines. “The trouble is there’s nothing there,” Mweta said.

“No, nothing in terms of what is exploitable, what’s attractive to foreign capital. But the people, Mweta.”

“Unless there’s a mineral discovery of some kind — there’s a geological survey due out there in the next few months, Swedes — the only thing is cattle. And even then. I mean they come down on the hoof — what slaughter cattle there is.”

The Flats were one of the few parts of the country not infested with tsetse fly, the carrier of the cattle disease trypanosomiasis, but cattle were used mainly in the traditional way, as a form of wealth and capital possession within the tribes. Bray said, “You’ll have to change all that. Get beef cattle — raising going there on a commercial basis. Then you’ll be able to stop importing meat from the South. And it’ll be uneconomic to have the stuff coming down on the hoof — you’ll have a good reason for building roads.”

Mweta began to make notes of their conversation. “I want to come out there with you and have a good look round. I’ll fly to Gala next month some time and we’ll go up. And then later in the year we’ll go to the lake. Perhaps I can bring Joy and the kids, if Olivia’s there they can have a holiday for a few days while you and I — there’s that house for me, you know, I’ve never seen the place—” The fishing company had presented the President with a “lodge” on the lake, at the time of Independence. “In the meantime, James, you will write to me, ay? A letter every now and then. Let me hear. We mustn’t lose touch.”

He insisted that Bray stay in the capital for the rest of the week. “You’ll come to the dinner. The one with the white businessmen. I’ll tell Asoni.” Mweta threw back his head and his shoulders heaved loose with laughter. “You know what they wanted to know? If they must build a special lavatory for me.” Years before, when some minor royalty came to the territory, PIP had made political capital out of such unpromising material as a “comfort station” for the Royal Highness, quick to point out that this small building cost more than the type of house provided for an African family down in the native town. While they laughed Bray remembered it was Shinza’s idea; Shinza had a sure instinct for the concrete issue, however unimportant, and knew how to make his opponents look absurd as well as reprehensible.

When he got back to the Silver Rhino and went to the reception desk for his key, he stood there, the man who finds himself on stage in the middle of a play he knows nothing about: Hjalmar Wentz and his daughter were passing and repassing one another excitably in the cage formed by counter, desk, and safe. Hjalmar faltered, greeted Bray, but the girl was in a high passion: “Just wish to Christ you wouldn’t go on about the war of the generations, that’s all. Things you read in the English papers. It’s got nothing to do with the generations.” Hjalmar’s thin — skinned blond face was red along the cheekbones and under the streaks of yellow hair on the dome of his forehead. Her black eyes shone with the glitter of an oil — flare on night water, her breathing sucked hollows above her collar — bones. She shuffled a pile of letters together and walked out; Bray caught the musky whiff of anger as she lifted the flap of the counter and exposed her little shaved armpit, licked with sweat.

Emmanuelle had heard about her parents’ plan to ask Ras Asahe to intervene on their behalf with the brewery. “God knows who told her,” her father said, and Bray saw that Hjalmar must have told many people besides himself. The impossible thing was that she wasn’t angry because they’d thought of using Asahe, but because they had hesitated to do so, been afraid to suggest it to her … she was furious about that. She had raged at them for “driving everybody crazy” when they knew all along something could be done. She had said to her father, “Your scruples make me want to vomit.” He said to Bray, “Of course children must assert themselves, it’s inevitable, and in each generation the form that opposition takes is always impossible for parents to understand.”

Bray had heard the girl’s reaction to that. He said, “You’ll be able to go ahead and see what you can do through Ras Asahe, anyway,” but he was aware that the practical aspect was something Hjalmar Wentz looked at without recognition now. The red faded patchily from his head as his hands touched about the familiar objects on the desk.

The girl was doubled up in one of the sagging deck — chairs in the garden. Bray tried to walk quickly past so that she would not have to pretend not to see him, but she said, in the rough sulky voice of a child making amends for bad behaviour, at the same time unable to disguise her lack of interest in the trivial preoccupations of other people, “How was your shopping?”

He stopped, to show that everything was all right between her and the world. “Oh I wasn’t looking for anything special, you know.”

She was picking at some invisible irregularity beneath the skin of her upper arm, picking at it with her nail and then cupping her hand over the dark, smooth knob of her shoulder. She said, “They are ridiculous. Oh nice … but that doesn’t change it — ridiculous. They shouldn’t ever have come to live here — a gesture, that’s all. My father’s so romantic. Everything he’s ever done was a romance.” While she spoke she scratched at the grain of skin until whatever it was was lifted off, and a dark and brilliant eye of blood sprang against the flesh. She squinted down and put her mouth to it tenderly.

Bray said, “Even Germany?”

“Particularly Germany.” She kept sucking the blood and then looking at the place. “He can’t manage ordinary life at all, and she can’t stand that. And who blames her. What’s the point of shambling around from country to country. What’s the point of being saved from gas ovens, for that.”

He laughed at her, but she suddenly became shocked at herself, if he would not be. “We’re such bloody yahoos, my brother and me. I’m just as bad, in my way. That’s another thing. My mother wrings her hands because we’ve grown up wild in Africa, so uncultured, without the proper intellectual training of the Europeans who wanted to murder her.”

“And you think you’re wild?”

“D’you think we’d survive, if we were like them.”

There was this continual presence of people brushing against him, like so many cats weaving through his legs. And they were all so brimful of assertion and demand, eyes turned upon you, car doors banging, entrances and exits opening and closing the aperture of your attention as the pupil of an eye reacts to light and dark. The impulse to express this to someone glanced off with the flat remark to Vivien Bayley: “I hardly realized how solitary I’ve been.”

Before he could get in touch with Roly Dando, Dando telephoned. “Didn’t get a wink of sleep the night you arrived, I hear.” Bray, standing in the veranda telephone booth beneath the picture of Mweta, on which scribbled numbers had encroached, smiled at the aggressive cackle. “I gather you haven’t lost any. The President tells me you and Chekwe did a good job.” “Oh bloody hell, Bray. I can always be counted on to do a good job. Not so bad as it would be if I hadn’t been here. That’s all I ask, lad. That’s as much as I expect of myself.”

At dinner at his house, he said, “That’s how I’d define the function of the law in any country you’d like to name, today. That’s what the principle of justice has come to — you control how far the smash and grab goes. Settle for that. Better regularize it than allow the rule of law to be lopped off and carried aloft by the dancing populace, ay? So you have your immigrant quotas in Britain, so the British won’t turn on the blacks next door, and you have your censors back in the newspaper offices in Czechoslovakia, so the Russians won’t come back instead.” He drank a mixture of lemon juice, soda, and a white spirit in a bottle without a label. “Popococic gets it for me — slivovitz. The Yugoslav trade commissioner. Pure spirit’s less trying on the kidneys. That’s what’s really on my mind these days — believe me, your ideals only function when you’re healthy, they only give you any trouble when everything’s working well inside. I’ve got this damn prostate thing, getting up to pee every hour and if I’m caught out somewhere having to stand with one leg round the other to hold it in.” His face was petulant with dismay and consternation at a machine that refused to work properly. He had got thin; his voice, for the size of that shrinking head, sounded bigger than ever. The old Labrador lay panting between them on the grass. At the bottom of the garden the gardener and a friend were playing chisolo on a board scratched out of the red earth, a gramophone screeching very faintly behind the urging grunts and cries with which the stone counters were encouraged to progress from one hole to another.