Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“You can have an operation, Roly.” The twigs of the thorn — trees on the close horizon ran hair thin, jet and hard as if the pink sky had cracked intricately, like a piece of fine china.

“Yes, I know, you wait and see what it’s like. I’d pack up and go off to sit on my arse somewhere, but what’s the point. All countries are the same. We’re all backward people. Might just as well stay put where I am instead of taking up a new lot.”

“Whose idea was the Detention Bill?”

Dando showed that the question was irrelevant: “Cyprian Kente’s I suppose. Has a lot of ideas. Or a gift for coming out with what others don’t want to be the first to say. Mweta has an unspoken thought, Kente brings it right out loud where it can’t be suppressed, you see.”

Kente was the Minister of the Interior. “Mweta mentioned only you and Chekwe.”

“Call in the scribes. We’ve got the right words. I was able to get in my word, anyway. There’s a clause that the Act’s got to come up for renewal every year. That’s my little clause.”

The cicadas began a chorus of doorbells that no one would ever answer. Bray said, handling both Dando and himself gently, “And it will be renewed every year. Long after everyone’s forgotten quite what it was for in the first place.”

“Well, wha’do I care. It’s my conscience clause, laddie. I put it there. The temptation of virtue, justice, if anyone should like to fall to it. Available. You see what I mean.” His cheek lifted with a twinge of inner discomfort. The Labrador got up slowly and put its snout on his knee, but was pushed away.

“And Mweta says he won’t keep the Act a day longer than he needs it.”

Dando’s restlessness produced an irritable delight at Bray. “The humanitarian at the court of King Mweta. Oh shit, James. You’re the one who said to me anyone’d be a fool if he thought he could take my job without doing things he didn’t like.”

“Any other reason you know of besides Shinza?”

“No. Not really. You can’t take Sesheka seriously. A bit of nuisance with out — of-works — not unemployed, strictly speaking, they trek in from the lands to town.… But you know how many Bashi are in industry, road — building, railways. Always have been. Nearly a third of the labour force. Shinza’s opposing the PIP unions through them, very definitely so.”

Bray said, “Preventive detention to deal with that?”

Dando put his hands on the rests of his chair and heaved himself out. “He’s no green boy like ours. It’s a small start. He’s got friends outside and maybe friends inside as well — there are people who’d perhaps be prepared to take a ride on his back. He’s been treated like dirt, mind you — Just a minute.”

He tramped off in his schoolboy sandals to the shelter of a hibiscus hedge and against the insects’ shrilling Bray heard him piddling slowly and loudly.

Festus came round from the back of the house with a bowl of fresh ice. He took the opportunity of Dando’s absence coupled with the evidence that he was also in hearing distance, to accuse. “Why Muk-wayi doesn’t stay with us this sometime?” He withheld the ice until Bray answered.

“I didn’t know I was coming, Festus, I tried to phone …”

The excuses were accepted and the ice put down, in the convention, invented by white men long ago and become, curiously, part of the old black man’s dignity, that his “master’s” concerns were his own.

“Kalimo goes all right?” he said severely. Bray had written to Dando to thank Festus, when Kalimo turned up. They chatted a moment, falling into the local tongue, which Bray spoke with some hesitancy, helped out with a word here and there supplied by Festus. Making in his throat the deep, low exclamations of pleasure and politeness, he collected an empty soda bottle or two and went off as Dando appeared.

“—Yes, poor bloody Shinza. Poor bloody Edward.” Dando looked tranquil now. He began to pour fresh drinks.

“He’s got a new young wife and a baby,” Bray said with a smile. “He’s flourishing.”

“The old devil!” Dando was delighted; he himself took new life from the thought.

And cigarettes from over the border; and a house in Mpana’s compound. But Bray didn’t say it. It was none of his business. Dando said gleamingly, “D’you tell the good news to Mweta?”

Bray said, watching him, “I told him to send for Shinza. Even now.”

“If he ever sends for Shinza now, it won’t be on a gilt — edged card.”

Bray said, after a moment, “I thought that was the one thing you’d jib at — touching Shinza.”

Dando put his drink down patiently, gave a short, sharp, instructive laugh. “I work for Mweta, my boy.”

Bray got back to the hotel very late from Dando’s; it was impossible to spend an evening there without drinking too much and he had to drive with conscious carefulness. He saw a pair of eyes, two feet above the roadside: a small buck, feeding. The cold smell of heavy dew was voluptuous through the car window.

Hjalmar Wentz was still up. In the stuffy office that had no direct access to a window or door, the odours that his wife had swept and scrubbed and banished from the public rooms of the hotel collected in unstirring layers — smoke, insect repellent, boiled cauliflower, spilt beer. Hjalmar’s head shone under a lamp; as always he was surrounded by invoices and newspaper cuttings. He had confided to Bray, once: “I know of a refugee in London who’s been able to live off his files of cuttings. People pay him to consult them. A professor from the University of Budapest, had to get out in Fifty — six.”

He said to Bray in the confidence of the night, “The other day — did Emmanuelle say anything? Margot saw her talk to you in the garden.”

Bray lied, quoting Turgenev. “ ‘An honourable man will end up by not knowing where to live’—that was more or less it.”

A look of shy, weary pleasure crossed the face like a hand. “Good God. She’s strange, that girl of mine. But you know who’d told her about Ras Asahe? Stephen. Her brother. He told Margot. Usually Emmanuelle doesn’t get on with him at all. That terrible mutual antagonism of brother and sister. Thomas Mann only dealt with the reverse side of it in his incest themes—” The lie was life — giving, and he kept Bray from bed, their voices sounding through the small — hour deadness of the hotel like the conversation in people’s dreams, the secret activity of mice, and the steady jaws of cockroaches.

The House was sitting that week; there had been no need to call an emergency session. He walked in on the second reading of the Detention Bill. It was difficult for a man his size to be unobtrusive; as he stooped quietly along the polished wooden pew — wall that divided the visitors’ gallery from the members, several faces on the floor flashed aside in recognition. The beautiful chamber, panelled in wood from the Mso forests with its watermark of faint stripes, was murmurous as a schoolroom. It smelled like a church. There were one or two in togas — among the cabinet, Dr. Moses Phahle and little Dhlamini Okoi, fine Italian shoes showing beneath the robes — but most of the members wore formal Western clothes with the well — being and assurance peculiar to black men. Roly Dando’s narrow white face barred and marked by thick — rimmed spectacles and toothbrush moustache was a fetish object set among them.

With the sudden change of atmosphere from sun and traffic outside, these impressions came to him like the tingling of blood in a limb coming to life. Through the susurrus there was the voice of Kente, Minister of the Interior, an order paper crunched in his fist. “… What ordinary, peaceful citizen has anything to fear? What is this ‘web of intimidation’ that the Honourable Member for Inhame speaks about? Where does he get his language from? It is clear to us in this House that it has nothing to do with the realities of life in this country. It is clear to us that it comes from overseas, the Honourable Member has been reading too many spy stories — this House is no place for James Bonds and Philbys—”