Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

The lawyer was objecting to the refusal of bail; the prosecutor was adamant. The magistrate appeared not to be listening to either; he confirmed that bail would not be granted. That was all.

As the prisoners went out, making use of their numbers by making a slow progress of it, they began to sing a PIP chant and the two who were going off to the cells yelled slogans, the old slogans of pre — Independence days. Bray allowed himself to be carried and hindered by the courtroom crowd. Women in their church — going clothes opened their mouths calmly and ululated. The magistrate banged his gavel and was resigned to being ignored; he mouthed what must have been an adjournment and walked out. Another case was to be heard and the exhibits, including a bicycle with one wheel missing, were carried in while the police moved along the rows of benches and were held adrift, clumsily bobbing. It was difficult to tell whether the movement through the door was people pressing in or the court being cleared. It was not an angry but a strangely confident crowd, talking and shifting about in possession. The ululating women stood where they had risen from the benches, and swayed. It was like being caught up in a dance with them; he was taller than anybody and as he was pressed and shifted he could see everything, the PIP claque taking up the prisoners’ chant and moving their heads like hens as they urged themselves through the people, the bewildered face of the old beggar, the young men turning vividly from side to side. He wanted to grin: a bespectacled white totem, waving ridiculously about on the wake of backsides swinging their cotton skirts magnificently as bells. Slowly the whole crowd, and he with it, was drawn through the door as water circles the hole in a bathtub.

Outside, the three — man band whose evangelical beat derived from the Salvation Army was banging away falteringly. The PIP contingent went into discussion among the spectators and lingering courtroom crowd. There was a coming and going of individual PIP men, racing between the gathering and the office of the court; everyone was waiting for the nine to appear after completing bail formalities. When they did come out, rather sheepish, like people disembarking from a journey before the eyes of friends, the whole crowd was moved from the old — fashioned open verandas and yard of the building by the police. There was a momentary loss of direction when they might have dispersed; and then someone made for the piece of open ground on the other side of the road, next to the Princess Mary Library. The band tramped across, playing. The PIP Young Pioneers began an impromptu meeting; he waited a moment, beside the uneven pillars of the tiny, tin — roofed parthenon the ladies of the British Empire Service League had raised, to listen. The speaker stood on a wooden crate that had been abandoned by some shopkeeper and not yet carried off bit by bit by people looking for firewood. PIP had brought freedom and people who did not obey the orders of PIP were fools … there was nothing in the country that was not the business of PIP … PIP had not got rid of the white man to be told what to do by black men who were just as bad.… You were not allowed to talk about something that was in the courts but he would still tell everybody this — people who defied the trade unions defied the government, and PIP knew what to do with them.

He began to walk away and stepped round a scuffle that had kicked up — sudden blows between young men, and stones flying. He was in the path of one; it got him on the side of the neck: his hand went up with the involuntary movement of slapping a fly. A woman passerby gasped, “Oh sorry, sorry, Mukwayi …”

The sting drew no blood. He had caught the stone as it fell into his open collar; he pushed it into his pocket.

There were several irritable incidents in Gala that day. Not all appeared to be concerned with the trial, but were released by the roused confidence of the courtroom crowd that affected the atmosphere of the village as a heat wave affects the citizens of a cold country.

“They ought to be rounded up and put to work on the roads,” Mr. Deal at the supermarket said to him confidentially, wrapping the pound of ham that he had bought. “Lot of hooligans and no one to give them the language they understand, any more. All they’ve learnt is how to thieve better. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you my losses since I’ve converted to self — service. This place just isn’t ready for it — you’ve got to have civilized people.”

A small girl trader had ranged her few undersized tomatoes on the pavement. He was buying some when Gordon Edwards came by and at once suggested they have a beer at the Fisheagle. No black face had yet dared appear in the inside bar at the Fisheagle; the patrons were talking about golf and a European motor rally that had been shown on TV the night before.

Gordon Edwards told an amusing story about a friend of his who, after serving in the Mozambique channel on a patrol ship whose purpose was to intercept ships carrying cargoes for Rhodesia, had resigned and himself become a successful middleman in the sanctionsbreaking business, getting out tobacco and taking in machinery. While Edwards talked his eye kept wandering to Bray’s neck. “Something’s bitten you.”

His expression implied that he was unaware of it. The small stone lay among the other kind of currency in his pocket as the fact of what had happened in the early morning lay in his mind among the ready pleasantries of small talk.

The nine men were found guilty and fined. The other two never came to trial at all; on the special intervention of the President the case against them was dropped.

Almost every day, there were reports of disturbances in one or other of the provinces.

Everyone who could afford a TV set continued to watch the syndicated programmes from America and England — sport, popular science, old Westerns, and (if they were white people) the interminable serialization of The Forsyte Saga. Edna Tlume had hired a set and the full complement of the household was generally to be found in the darkened Tlume — Edwards living-room during the hours when the station in the capital was open. There was a news round — up once a day (Ras Asahe was the commentator for a while) but the station could not afford a permanent team of cameramen and reporters to film live events at home. The dim room — blaring with music and barking recorded voices, smelling of grubby children, curry powder from cheap meals, and Nongwaye’s medicated tobacco — where a football game in Madrid was being played or a trial of Vietcong refugees was flickering into focus, was more real than what was happening in the neighbouring province and the next village. The heavy green of Gala hung shutting that out.

As his bulk blackened the doorway Rebecca would get up quietly from her canvas chair and slip away from the audience; everyone else remained absorbed. He and she were seldom bothered by the children now; he sometimes thought — and at once forgot again — he ought to remind her that they shouldn’t be allowed to become addieted to the box. She sat with her children resting against her, each one in physical contact with some part of her, the littlest sometimes falling asleep in her lap; what they drew from her, then, was enough and more to counteract what passed before their eyes and skimmed their understanding. There was fellow — feeling with them; he knew that steady current of her body, its lulling and charging effect. No harm could come while one breathed in time with that flesh.

The husband, Gordon Edwards, had gone away again. He had not found out if she had slept with him — never would, he knew even as, at the moment of putting aside her legs with his knee and entering her body himself, he would think of it. It was not in her eyes, anyway, as she lay as she sometimes liked on top of him and looked into his face as only lovers do, her face open to him. She complained that because he was short — sighted his eyes were intensely blank in passion, he was concealed from her. “I can’t ever see what you’re thinking.”