Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

He smiled, rubbed his nose, lifted his head as if for air. “The distance between the International Brigade and the mercenaries in the Congo, Biafra …!”

She began to type again, slowly. The taps were hesitant footsteps across the space that separated them.

“The trouble is, I mean — you are so — you are in it. You don’t care about anything else, do you?”

“Oh, everybody ‘loves’ Africa.”

“You live in your beautiful house stuck away in England as if your life’s over. I mean, nothing awful ever happens, you read it all in the papers, you drive away from it all in your nice car, like some old—”

“Retired colonel.”

There were almost tears in her eyes, she had not meant to say that; affection came over him as desire.

“This is the place where everything’s happened to you. Always.”

“There was the episode of the war.”

“You never talk about it,” she said.

“This’s the continent where everything’s happened to you,” he said.

“Oh well, I was born here. No choice.”

“Dear old colonel, dreaming of the days when he was busy fomenting a revolution behind the boma.”

“You’re here. You love that man, that’s the trouble,” she said with a kind of comic gloom.

“Which man?” he said, making a show of not taking her seriously by appearing to take her very seriously.

“Well, both of them, for all I know. But Mweta, I can see it. And so all that stuff about interfering and so on is counted out. You are tied to someone, it goes on working itself out, like a marriage, no matter what happens there are always things you still count on yourself to do, because after all, there it is — what you’d call your situation. Stuck with it. What can you do? You’ll forget what people say, what it looks like, what you think of yourself. You simply do what you have to do to go on living. I don’t see how it can be helped.”

He held in his mind at the same time scepticism for her “uplifting” notion of that higher, asexual love (a hangover from some Anglican priest giving the sermon at the Kenyan girls’ school?) along with a consciousness of being flattered — moved? — at her idea of him as capable of something she saw as unusual and definitive; and the presence of Mweta, Mweta getting up behind his desk.

“You’d be off like a shot to tell Mweta that Shinza does cross the border, and that what he probably does there is make contact with Somshetsi.”

She scarcely waited for him to finish. Her head cocked, her full, pale, creased lips drawn back, the line pressed together between her eyebrows— “Yes, yes of course I would. It’s natural!”

“I don’t much believe in that sort of love,” he said, as if he were talking to her small daughter.

“Oh well, that’s English. It must come out somewhere — this idea you mustn’t show your feelings.”

“My dear little Rebecca, the English have become just about the most uninhibited people in the world. You haven’t been to England for a long time; love is professed and demonstrated everywhere, all the kinds of love, all over the place. It’s quite all right to talk about it.”

“I’ve never been. — But just the same, you don’t come from that generation, Bray — ah yes, the old taboos still stick with you—” They lost what they had been talking about, in teasing and laughter.

After they had eaten, she was crouched at the fire and suddenly read aloud from her book: “ ‘People have to love each other without knowing much about it.’”

He was searching through a file and looked up, inattentive but indulgent.

She was leaning back on her elbow, watching him. “So you see.”

Then he understood that she was referring to himself — and Mweta.

They (he and she) had never used the word, the old phrase, between themselves, not even as an incantation, the abracadabra of love — making. “What’s the book?”

She smiled. “You remember the day you went to the fish — freezing plant? I took it before we left.” She held out the exhibit; it was Camus, The Plague —one of the paperbacks that Vivien had given him when he came to live in Gala.

Already a past in common.

What am I doing with this poor girl? To whom will she be handed on? And why do I take part in the relay?

He was teaching her the language — Gala. His method was a kind of game — to get her to start a sentence, a narrative, and if she didn’t know the right word for what she wanted to say, to substitute another. She would start off, “I was walking down the road — I went on until I passed a little house covered with … with …” “Come on.” “With … porridge …” They laughed and argued; if the sentences were not simply ridiculous, they might turn into bizarre comments on the local people, sometimes on themselves.

He fished for a cigarillo in his breast pocket and went to sit in the morris chair with the lumpy cushion, near her. She hitched herself over and leaned her back against his legs. He said in Gala, do you have to go home tonight? She answered quite correctly, looking pleased with herself as the words came, no, tonight I am going to — could not find the word “stay”—sleep at the house of my friend. And tomorrow? And yesterday? He tested her tenses and the terms of kinship he had been teaching her over the past few days. Yesterday I stayed at the house of my cousin, tomorrow I am going to my (mother’s brother) uncle, the day after that I am going to my brother — in-law’s, and on Friday I am going to my grandmother’s. “Very good!” he said in English, and switched back to Gala— “And after that will you come back to your friend?” She was an apt pupil; she remembered the one term she had not used: in Gala, there was no general word for “home,” children had to use the word for parents’ house, men referred to “the house of my wife,” and women referred to “the house of my husband.” “Wait a minute …” She went over the sentence in her mind— “Then I will go to the house of my husband.”

She had it right, paused a moment, smiling in triumph — and suddenly, as he was smiling back at her, an extraordinary expression of amazement took her face, a vein down her forehead actually became visibly distended as he looked at her. This time the game had produced something unsaid, with the uncanny haphazardness of a message spelled out by a glass moving round the alphabet under light fingers.

She tried to pass it off by saying, ungrammatically, in the non sequitur tradition of the game, my husband is away from home in the fields.

Then she said, in English, “I had a letter from Gordon. He might come to see the children.”

“So he’s coming.”

“I only heard a few days ago. You never know with him, I’ll believe it when he arrives. That’s why I haven’t said anything. But then this afternoon Suzi said that to you about the beans—”

“When?” he said.

Now that she had confessed she was unburdened, at ease, almost happy. “This next week. If he does.”

But he knew she knew that the man was coming — the day, the date. He said, “What will you do?”

She said, “He’ll probably stay at the Fisheagle Inn. Edna really hasn’t a bed for him.”

She would have arranged everything; after all, she sewed curtains against the arrival of Olivia.

She spent the night at “her friend’s.” She lay in the bath, her body magnified by the lens of water, and, while he gazed at her, said dreamily, “I don’t suppose Olivia will ever know about me.”

“I suppose not.”

“You wouldn’t tell her?”

“Probably not.”

“I don’t know — I would have thought you are the kind of couple who tell everything.”