Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“You’re what?”

Aleke lowered his young bulk into the cut grass and took one of the two — week-old English newspapers Bray had brought along. “The note came yesterday. He doesn’t know yet. Transferred. To the Eastern Province. Masama district.” His interest was taken by a frontpage picture showing people in androgynous dress — boots, mandarin coats, flowing trousers, leis and necklaces, waxwork uniforms — and a few elderly faces in morning coats and top — hats, advancing like an apocalyptic army, under the caption PEER’S SON WEDS: WEDDING GUESTS JOIN VIETNAM PROTEST MARCH.

It was Bray’s turn to watch him. “Aren’t you surprised, then?”

Aleke smiled; it seemed to be at the picture. Then he looked up. “No, I’m not surprised.”

“Well I am!”

Aleke’s big face opened in a laugh; he was tolerant of power. If Bray could go to the capital and have the ear of the President, well, that must be accepted as just another fact. Of course Aleke, too, in his way, wanted to do his job and be left alone.

Bray said, “Well, it’s a good thing, anyway.” Aleke was amiably unresponsive. He lay back on one elbow, his thick hairless chest and muscular yet sensuously fleshy male breasts moved by relaxed, even breathing. He was rather magnificent; Bray thought flittingly of old engravings of African kings, curiously at ease, their flesh a royal appurtenance. “Of course he might just as well have got promotion for his powers of foresight. Still, that youngster should have brought an action against him.”

They fell silent, turning over the pages of the papers. Bray was reading a local daily that came up from the capital twenty — four hours late. Gwenzi, Minister of Mines, appealed to the mine workers not to aspire “irresponsibly” to the level of pay and benefits that the industry had to pay to foreign experts; the experts would “continue to be a necessity” for the development of the gold mines over the next twenty years. A trade union spokesman said that some of the whites had “grown from boys to men” in the mines; why did they have to have paid air tickets to other countries and special home leave when they “lived all their days around the corner from the mine?” The Secretary for Justice denied rumours that a ritual murder, the first incident of its kind for many years, was in fact a political murder, and that an inquiry was about to be instituted.

Cut grass swathes glistened all round; the voices of the women, calling in children, came sharply overhead and wavered out across the water. Winter hardly altered the humidity down at the lake; the air was so heat — heavy you could almost see each sound’s trajectory, like the smoke left hanging in space by a jet plane.

After lunch, Nongwaye Tlume got talking to some fishermen and borrowed their boat. It was too small to hold all the children safely; Bray intervened, and had to take two of the younger ones, with Rebecca in charge, in a pirogue. Aleke and his seventh child slept in an identical glaze of beer and mother’s milk.

The big boat went off with cheers and waves, pushed out of the reeds by splay — footed, grunting fishermen. Bray paddled the rough craft scooped out of a tree — trunk with the careful skill of his undergraduate days. He kept close to the shore; his load seemed tilted by the great curve of the lake, rising to the horizon beyond them, glittering and contracting in mirages of distance. They had the sensation of being on the back of some shiny scaled creature, so huge that its whole shape could not be made out from any one point. The other boat danced and glided out of focus, becoming a black shape slipping in and out of the light of heat — dazzle and water. The faces of the brown and white children and the girl were lit up from underneath by reflections off the water; he had the rhythm of his paddle now, and saw them, quieted, with that private expression of being taken up by a new mode of sensation that people get when they find themselves afloat.

The girl had half — moons of sweat under the arms of her shirt. Her trousers were rolled up to the knee and her rather coarse, stubby feet were washed, like the children’s, by the muddy ooze at the bottom of the pirogue. He realized how solemnly he had applied himself to his paddling, and the two adults grinned at each other, restfully.

The children wanted to swim; everywhere the water was pale green, clear, and flaccid to the touch, gentle, but too deep for them where the shoreline was free of reeds and followed a low cliff, and with the danger of crocodiles when the pirogue came to the shallows. Bray struck out for a small island shaved of undergrowth six feet up from the water to prevent tsetse fly from breeding; the children were diverted, and forgot about swimming. But when he slowly gained the other side of the island, there was a real beach — perfect white sand, a baobab spreading, the boles of dead trees washed up to lean on. The girl grew as excited as the children. “Oh lovely — but there can’t be any danger here? Look, we can see to the bottom, we could see anything in the water from yards off—”

He and the girl got out of the pirogue and lugged it onto the sand; it was quite an effort. Their voices were loud in this uninhabited place. His shorts rolled thigh — high, he waded in precaution from one end of the inlet to the other; but there were no reeds, no half — submerged logs that might suddenly come to life. “I think it’s perfectly safe.” The children were already naked. She began to climb out of her clothes with the hopping awkwardness of a woman taking off trousers — she was wearing a bathing suit underneath, a flowered affair that cut into her thighs and left white weals in the sun — browned flesh as she eased it away from her legs. She ran into the warm water, jogging softly, with a small waddling fat black child by one hand and a skinny white one gaily jerking and jumping from the other.

He had stretched himself out on the sand but stood up and kept watch while they were in the water, his short — sighted gaze, through his glasses, patrolling the limpid pallor and shimmer in which they were immersed. The black baby was a startlingly clear shape all the time, the others would disappear in some odd elision of the light, only a shoulder, a raised hand, or the glisten of a cheek taking form. Where no one lives, time has no meaning, human concerns are irrelevant — an intense state of being takes over. For those minutes that he stood with his hand shading his eyes, the most ancient of gestures, he was purely his own existence, outside the mutations of any given stage of it. He was returned to himself, neither young nor middle — aged, neither secreting the spit of individual consciousness nor using it to paste together the mud — nest of an enclosing mode of life. He smoked a cigar. He might have been the smoke. The woman and children shrieked as a fish exploded itself out of the water, mouth to tail, and back again in one movement. He saw their faces, turned to him for laughing confirmation, as if from another shore.

She brought the children back and stood gasping a little and pressing back from her forehead her wet hair, so that runnels poured over neck and shoulders, beading against the natural waxiness of the skin. “It’s — so — glorious — pity — you — didn’t—” She had no breath; undecided, she went in again by herself, farther out, this time. He felt he could not stand watching her alone. It would be an intrusion on her freedom, out there. He sat with his arm on one knee, vigilant without seeming so, sweeping his glance regularly across the water. That wet, femininely mobile body, tremblingly fleshy, that had stood so naturally before him just now, the sodden cloth of the bathing suit moulding into the dip of the navel and cupping over the pubis, the few little curly hairs that escaped where the cloth had ridden up at the groin — so this was what he had made love to. This was what had been there, that he had— “possessed” was a ridiculous term, he had no more possessed it than he did now by looking at it. This was what he had entered. Even “known,” that good biblical euphemism, was not appropriate. He did not know that body — he saw now with compassion as well as male criticalness, as she was coming out of the water towards him a second time, that the legs, beautiful to the knee, with slim ankles, were thick at the thigh so that the flesh “packed” and shuddered congestedly. She stretched out near him; she was sniffling, smiling with the pleasure of the water. No one was there except the two small children. He said to her as he might have said in a meeting in another life, “I’m sorry about what happened.”