Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“Of course I don’t open wrong kind bottle. I know when is eat-e chicken, I know when is eat-e beef.”

“Well it is the wrong one, because I told you this morning I wanted the round flat bottle put in the fridge.”

“You say I cook chicken, isn’t it? I look, I see the round bottle is red wine inside—”

“Pink. It’s pink. I specially didn’t say anything about the colour because I didn’t want to muddle you up. I know how obstinate you are, Festus—”

They argued self-righteously as two old-maid sisters. Festus could be heard retailing the exchange, confidently in the right, in the kitchen; Dando, equally assured, went on talking as if without interruption. “… It’s not an exaggeration to say that what they’re having to do is introduce a so-called democratic social system in place of a paternalist discipline. You haven’t replaced the District Commissioner by appointing a district magistrate. You’ve only replaced one of his functions. You’ve still got to get country people to realize that these functions are now distributed among various agencies: it’s no good running to the magistrate if someone needs an ambulance to take him to the next town, for instance — and yet that’s what people would have done in the old days, isn’t it?”

“In bush stations there wasn’t anything we weren’t responsible for.”

“Exactly. But now people have to learn that there’s a Department of Public Health to go to.”

“A good thing! A good thing for everybody! What a hopeless business it was, hopeless for the D.C. and for the people. Dependency and resentment hand in hand. Whatever the black magistrates are like, whatever the administration’s like, it won’t be like that.”

“The magistrates are all right, don’t you worry. A damned sight better than some of our fellows. I’m not worried at that level. The Bench doesn’t change of course.”

Bray laughed at Dando’s expression; the look of weary, bottomless distaste in the wrinkled mugs of certain breeds of dogs.

“They’ll die off, I suppose. There’s that to be said for it. But God knows what we’ll get then.”

“I met Gwenzi’s brother in London one day while he was at Gray’s Inn; he told me he was going to be the first African at the bar here.”

When Dando’s opinion of someone was really low he did not seem to hear his name. “Don’t think I don’t know I’ve got some bad times coming to me,” he said, as if taking up, in private, current talk about himself. “When I said yes to Mweta I knew it and every time I walk past the title on my office door I know it. The day will come when I’ll have deportation orders to sign that I won’t want to sign. Warrants of arrest. Or worse.” He ate a mouthful of the left-over granadilla pudding, and there was the smallest tremor, passing for a moment through his head. “Poor old Dando.”

“Anyone who’s stayed on is a fool if he hasn’t thought about that,” said Bray.

“And I’ll be instructing the State Prosecutor to act when I’d rather not, too. That I can count on. What if Shinza should make a bit of trouble at the next elections, what if he were to feel himself bloody well discounted as he certainly is, and start up a real opposition with all the tricks that he taught PIP, eh? What if he brought the whole Lambala-speaking crowd out in a boycott, with all the old beatings-up at the polls, hut burnings — you think I wouldn’t find myself the one to put Shinza inside, this time?”

“Well, I know. But why on earth should it come to that?”

“I knew it when I said yes to Mweta. Poor bloody Dando. The blacks’ dirty work isn’t any cleaner than the whites’. That’s what they’ll be happy to note. But what their contented little minds will never know is that I knew it when I took the job, I knew it all along, and I’ll say it now as loud as I’d say it then—”

“Who’ll be happy?”

Dando refilled the brandy glasses again. “My colleagues! Those worthy fellows who’ve gone down South to Rhodesia and South Africa where they can feel confident they’ll never have a black man on the Bench to give a verdict as biased as a white man’s. — My colleagues, Tencher Teal and Williamson and De l’Isle!”

It was after midnight when they got to bed. Bray went to the kitchen to fill his brandy glass with water for the night. Cockroaches fled, pausing, from what they regarded as positions of safety, to twirl their antennae. A furry black band of ants led up a cupboard door to some scrap that had flicked from a plate. He stood at the sink, drinking cold water and looking at the avocado pear pip growing suspended by three matchsticks in the neck of a pickle jar of water on the sill. He was conscious of a giddy swing of weight from one foot to the other that was not of his volition; it seemed he had been standing there a long time — he was not sure.

He heard Dando, forced by the old Labrador into the garden, walking about outside the guest hut and talking reproachfully to the dog; and then it was morning and Festus’s assistant was at the door with the early tea.

A helicopter snored over the celebrations, drowning the exchange of greetings when Bray was introduced to someone in the street, expunging conversation in bars and even speeches. Nobody knew what it was for — a security measure, some were satisfied to assume, while others accepted it as vaguely appropriate, the symbol of progress inseparable from all industrial fairs and agricultural shows and therefore somehow relevant to any public display. There was a moment in the stadium at the actual Independence ceremony when he heard it on the perimeter of the sky just as Kenyatta began to speak, and he and Vivien Bayley, the young wife of the registrar of the new university, sitting beside him, collided glances of alert apprehension — but although the helicopter did not exactly go away, it did not appear overhead, and supplied to the ringing amplification of the speeches only the muted accompaniment of the snorer who has turned over, now, and merely breathes rather audibly. Later it was discovered to have been giving flips at half — a-crown a time to a section of the population who were queueing up, all through the ceremony, at the nearby soccer field; a publicity stunt for an international cigarette-making firm.

Neil Bayley was the one to find this out, because of some domestic mishap or misunderstanding that made his arrival at the distinguished-visitors’ stand very late. Bray was conscious of furious tension between the young couple at his side as he sat with the great stir of tiers of people behind, and the space in front of him, before the velvet-draped and canopied dais, filled with press photographers and radio and television crews, who all through the solemnities raced about bent double on frantic tiptoe, snaking their wires, thrusting up their contraptions, manipulating shutters and flashlights. It was as if with all made splendidly ready for a theatrical performance, a party of workmen with their gear had been left behind. This activity and the risen temper along the back of a silent quarrel beside him provided the strong distraction of another, disorderly level of being that always seemed to him to take away from planned “great moments” what they were meant to hold heady and pure. Here was the symbolic attainment of something he had believed in, willed and worked for, for a good stretch of his life: expressed in the roar that rocked back and forth from the crowd at intervals, the togas, medalled breasts and white gloves, the ululating cries of women, the soldiers at attention, and the sun striking off the clashing brass of the bands. Or in the icecream tricycles waiting at the base of each section of an amphitheatre of dark faces, the mongrel that ran out and lifted its leg on the presidential dais?