Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“He managed to get them to imagine themselves shut up in Bashi and Fort Howard again, this time by their own people … in one sentence … and the pause was just calculated.… Then before anyone could put a finger on what he was saying he brought up Mweta’s seventeen months, the great example of sacrifice … a paragon of loyalty!” Bray laughed with admiration.

“Oh he slips the knife between the ribs while appearing to give a pat on the back.”

“It was a good piece of cape — work. Quite something to watch.”

Neil Bayley presented a handsome, chin — lifted profile to the room, waving the carafe for more wine. “Tastes a bit metallic, ay? Matured in genuine old paraffin tins. — Oh he’ll have a long life in politics, that boy.”

“He’s had a long one, already. He was national organizer for a while, when Shinza was Secretary — General.”

“Is that so? I didn’t realize. James, you’re a walking archive — archives? How would you say it? Have some more. But Mweta can wrap them all up in a neat little parcel.”

“Yes, he did that,” said Bray.

“He’s convinced you he needs preventive detention,” Bayley said, his splendid pink face gleaming with wine — half a question, half a determination.

“Mweta’s a strange man.”

“How d’you mean, James?” Bayley had a passion for springing the lock of confidence; it was part of his “technique” with women — they became fascinated by the man who had made them give themselves away — but he enjoyed exercising his persuasive, bullying, blackmail skill with anyone.

Bray arranged the olive pits on his plate: first in a row of nine, then in two rows, one of five and one of four. He smiled.

“What d’you mean? You believe him and you don’t want to? You don’t believe him and you do want to? Come on. You must have all the facts. Come on, now, James.”

He gave Neil Bayley the look of an older man, smiling, keeping a younger man waiting. Bayley looked sceptical.

“He calls for an act of faith.”

Neil Bayley raised his golden eyebrows. He decided it was meant satirically; so that was what it became. Bray slipped out of his hands under cover of the exchange: “Interesting. Interesting. His early training with the White Fathers.” “It was the Presbyterians. He’s not a Catholic.” “Oh of course. This wine has a touch of carbide … Nepenthe. Lethe. I’m gone. I swoon.”

Roly Dando and a man with a white crew — cut, young face, and frowning smile, appeared peering over the crowded tables and their low — lying smoke. “Come on, mop up the vino on your chins and let us take over.” Dando introduced his companion, an American jurist who was on his way home from South Africa and Rhodesia, where he had been an observer at political trials. He had the conscious naturalness of the distinguished in unsuitable surroundings; anyone but Roly would have given him frozen Dublin Bay prawns and Chablis at the Great Lakes Hotel. “What’re you doing here with old Bray? Run out of popsies?” Dando and Neil Bayley genuinely bristled towards each other, although Dando was the old seal, long outcast from lordship of the harem by the young bull smiling down at him with strong white teeth and shining lips. Bayley found the war — time sexual slang quaint: “bint,” “popsie”; he had been a small boy evacuated to the country with a label round his neck, while dapper Captain Dando (there was a photograph Festus kept dusted on Dando’s mantelpiece) carried his cane under an arm through the streets of Cairo. “Just showing James the field, Roly. Of course you’ve played it, no interest to you.” Dando disapproved of American usage, the American idiom, especially in the mouth of the registrar of a university. But the visiting jurist gave a concupiscent chuckle, anxious to be simple and human.

“And how did you find South African justice, Mr. Graspointner?” The river — god was not only handsome and amusing, he also knew who Edward Graspointner was (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, author of standard works on international law) and he knew how to introduce a subject on which he himself was prepared to expand eloquently.

“Well, I must say that I found the conduct of the court unexceptionable. It was something of a surprise. It was an open court. It was an impartial court — although, as you know, some of the accused were white, some coloured. The judge was an Afrikaner. But the conduct of the court was equal to the highest standards of jurisprudence as we know it anywhere in the free world. Justice was done according to the law.”

“According to the law. Ah yes. But what of the law, Mr. Graspointner? The laws of the Republic of South Africa are unique in the world for their equation of the legitimate aspirations of the majority of the population with crime, with treason. Legitimate aspirations as defined in the U.N. Bill of Rights. Would you agree?”

“Broadly, yes. That is so.”

“Then was what you saw justice, or a going through the motions of justice? A lot of wigged heads jumping through the hoop. Is justice a piece of machinery or an ethical concept? Does the promulgation of a law make that law just? Can justice be done through it? I thought the answer to that question had been given at Nuremberg.”

“It was not given at Nuremberg. It has never been given anywhere,” Dando said, with testy patience. “For the simple reason that there is no such thing as international law in the sense of an international standard of justice. International law is a code for Interpol, for refugee — swopping and spy exchange, for boundary blood — feuds and squabbles over airspace and the three — mile limit for herring fleets. Justice is an empirical affair arranged by each country in order to perpetuate a particular social system. You should know that. Bill of Human Rights! Why not the Sermon on the Mount? Good ringing phrases, man.”

“Of course I met a lot of troubled people down there. Very, very troubled about just that issue, Professor Bayley—”

“What a human climate to exist in! Could you live in a place like that?” Neil Bayley’s thighs rolled apart, his arms fell wide, he seemed to make free of the whole black continent, the muddy banks of the Niger and the Congo, the forests and the deserts, the shy Batwa and shrivelled Bushmen, the lovely prostitutes of Brazzaville and the eager schoolchildren of Gala. “Could you, Graspointner?”

“Well, I don’t know. One mustn’t be too hasty about this. One person told me his raison d’être was to stay there in opposition, just be there, obstinately, even if he couldn’t do much to change things. I’m not a revolutionary, he said. I haven’t the courage to risk prison. But I can’t let them get away with it unwitnessed. I have to stay and oppose in my mind. It’s my situation; I haven’t any other that means anything.”

“Disgusting!”

“Of course, in daily life, he admitted … you develop a certain in — sensitivity … you let things pass that … eh?” The American turned to draw in Bray.

Bray offered, “I read something the other day — every nation has its own private violence … after a while one can feel at home and sheltered between almost any borders — you grow accustomed to anything.” And he thought, where did I get that from? Somewhere in Graham Greene? Why do I keep turning to other people’s opinions, lately, leaving myself out.

Neil Bayley stood up, blocking the waiter’s path. “Yes, thank you very much. At least one can choose one’s own violence. They’re not all equally vile, that’s the point. And I won’t have it that we’re all equally culpable. Flabby sentiment. So you could live there, James, a white man, and ‘oppose in your mind’?”

Dando said, “Don’t be more of an academic idiot than you have to, Neil. Of course he couldn’t live there. Christ, he was being run out of this country by the British while you were still—”