Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

“Not much you can do if you’re the width of a whole country away.”

“No, that’s true.” Shinza agreed with detachment.

“I can see what you can offer — promise — Somshetsi, but I don’t quite see what he has worth offering you.”

There was the understanding between them of people who are both lying; Shinza’s flexed bare yellow toes with their thick, uncut nails; the silence, strangely easy. With tremendous effort to break free: “Unless you’re thinking of going in for a guerrilla war.”

“And then?”

It was being drawn out of him; Shinza wouldn’t say it for himself. “I suppose — you could give him a leg up over the border, he could bring the arms from outside, you could do things together. Just as the South African and the Rhodesian guerrillas do, through Zambia. Only more successfully, I should think. It would depend whether you’re prepared to use violence.”

Shinza’s head nodded, hearing a lesson by rote. Then he said, “I like to know I have a chance to win.”

Perhaps he referred to the hopelessness of starting a new party, perhaps — he gave a half — comic shudder — he implied that he couldn’t win a guerrilla war if he were so unwise as to start one.

“You’re going to turn up at the Party Congress?”

“Turn up? It sounds like a dance hall.” He rose from the base of the spine, straight — backed. “I’m on the Executive. Still. I’m going to be there.”

“Bravo!”—How easily I fall whichever way he aims.

“And you’re going to be there?”

The answer came pat, in the same mood. “I’m a Party member. I suppose I still am? But of course I don’t belong to any delegation I know of.”

“Oh he’ll see to that. You remind him.” Shinza said in a satisfied way that made Bray uneasy, “Good God, I wanted to talk to you, you know, James? It’s all right, all right. I knew it would be all right. You can’t be fooled.”

“Shinza, I just have a — well — mad hope. About the Congress. You may be able to do something about the — direction. That’s the place.”

“Well, come and see. Come and give us a hand.” Shinza was not good at being hearty; he gave his smoker’s wheezy laugh at himself. “Come and be frog — marched out with me, it’ll be like the old days.”

The dog had got up and stood swaying its plumes in the veranda doorway. Boxer appeared, making his approach exaggeratedly forewarned by grunting as he mounted the steps, sighing and whew — ing; the dog was puzzled. Boxer spoke to the black man sitting in his living-room with the offhand, demonstrable ease of one whose forms of intimacy, if they exist, are thereby defined as something far removed from this. “You flourishing, Shinza? Of course. What’s the grass been like this year? Of course, you’re bored by cattle, I know. But your father — in-law — he must have a nice five or six hundred head, eh? One never can get at the figure. But those chaps down there have got sizeable herds, all right. I wouldn’t mind a share. Was there much redwater this year? It’s been a bugger, here. I’ve lost fifteen or sixteen of my beasts.”

Shinza didn’t rise; challengingly casual, by white men’s standards — but he made a real effort to talk to Boxer about the things that interested him. Shinza, unexpectedly, knew quite a lot about cattle; as he did about everything one doubted in him. His attitude towards Boxer reminded Bray of that of a grown man visiting one of his old housemasters; a combination of kindliness and slightly resentful pity, with the consciousness of having outdistanced the teacher beyond even his understanding. When Shinza had gone off in Mpana’s old car, Boxer said innocently, “Now let’s settle down and have a drink. I hope to Christ you didn’t give him anything. He’s much too grand to pay back.”

“But I thought you’d refused him a loan.”

“You’re damn right I refused. Donkey’s years ago. He wanted money to start the political business — their party— you know. But Mpana, that other old devil, he once asked a bull off me, for studno wonder his herd’s so flourishing. Never saw a penny. I’ll go down there one day and look over his heifers and say, look, old man, I recognize my daughters in your house — you know the sort of thing, he’d appreciate it.”

He had to spend the evening with Boxer. A long — interred loneliness — born not so much of solitude as of single — mindedness — stirred to weak impulse in the man. Cloudy bottles of wine bought from the Lebanese importer on some rare visit to the capital were brought out and opened without comment (Boxer, like Shinza, had a certain delicacy) but in a sense of occasion. Boxer talked incessantly as usual, with lucid precision and even with style, of his animal husbandry, pasture ecology, and his extraordinary observation of the strange form of life manifested in ticks — a description of the sub — life of the silence and patience of parasitism. He was oddly changed without his hat; his forehead, half — way up where the hat rested day in and day out, was white and damp — looking, creased as a washerwoman’s palm. Real nakedness belongs to different parts of the body in different people; here was where his nakedness was, in this exposed cranium, luminous as the wine went down and produced a sweat. Never mind the ticks — he himself appeared to Bray as some strange form of life. Bray listened with the bored fascination with which once, just before he left England, he had sat with Olivia through a space film, his own sense of life lying strongly elsewhere.

He was writing to Mweta when he looked up just as the yellow dress that he knew so well became visible, approaching through the scrub. She was hidden and appeared again, nearer; he stood up to wait. Just this way sometimes, in the early mornings or evenings, he kept dead still while a female buck that probably fed on the golf — course during the night moved silently, quite near. But his body had associations of its own with the yellow dress, robust but no less tender; there was a surge of pleasure that he would press against her in a moment, when they met. And then she came hurrying out onto the garden grass and there was a check — something different about her — as if she had sent someone else, smiling, in her place. As she reached him he saw that, of course, her hair was pulled up and tied back. He said, “Darling, I was hoping you’d notice the car was back, as soon as you got up—” and as he put his hand out behind her head he was suddenly checked again, and this time of her volition as she stopped dead a foot away from him, her palms raised for silence or to hold him off, her face bright, conspiratorial, pained and yet half — giggling. “They’re just behind me — the children, Gordon. We’re coming to invite you to drinks for him tonight. I’ve told him I’ve been doing typing for you in the evenings. It’s all right.”

His body died back first, before his mind. He said, “Why bring him here, Rebecca?”

She was gazing at him, passionately, flirtatious, giggling, ablaze. He had never seen her like that. “The children, you ass. They keep on talking about you. It’s obvious we’re running in and out your house all the time. It’d look funny if we didn’t come now.”

“My God, why didn’t you say when he was coming. I could have stayed away for a few days.” He withdrew into what she had called his “elderly” voice, meaning, he knew, in her generous and unresentful way, that it put the distance of social background, education and assurance, rather than age, between them.

“Oh don’t be idiotic.” She pleaded, tears like tears of laughter standing hot in her eyes. “It’s perfectly all right. You don’t know him. He’d never think anything. He’s not like that. He’s very attractive to women. It never occurs to him that I could ever look at anybody else. I’ve told you. He’ll go away again soon. It’s quite all right.”