A Guest of Honour (63 page)

He smiled. “I think I mean the doubts one has about repudiating aspects of oneself one can't live by any more.”

“And if there's nothing left?—wha'd'you do then, kill yourself?” But the words were lost, they could be ignored in the appearance of Rebecca, smelling of the perfume he'd bought her in the capital, calling out, “Oh good idea, yes, let's eat outside tonight. Shall I ask Kalimo? Have you got cold beer there for me?”

There was a phone call next morning to Bray at the
boma.
Stephen Wentz— “Is my father there?—Yes, well he was seen by someone on the bus at Matoko, so we thought he must have made for your place.” “He's all right,” Bray said, although the son didn't ask. “My sister cabled.” “London?” “Yes, she's staying there.” Bray phoned his house at once. Kalimo took a long time to find Wentz. What did he do with himself all day: he was apparently sitting somewhere in the garden. He spoke at last, a hesitant croak, “Hullo …?” “Emmanuelle's safely in London. She cabled—your son's just phoned.” “To your office?” Wentz confirmed nervously.

“He doesn't want to speak to any of them,” Bray reported to Rebecca, who happened to have slipped into the office while he was telephoning. She shrugged, pressing her chin back so that it doubled, half-comically, and he ran a finger along it to tease her. Lying in bed early that morning he had told her of Shinza's suggestion about the
ILO in Switzerland. She said, now, “If you go out, will you be-let in again?” It was that she had come for.

“Why not … and if I do as he wants me to … say I'm going to England.”

“You'll go to England.” She was standing in the doorway.

“I may not go anywhere at all. I don't know how serious he is about it. I had the feeling …”

He had not told her anything more. He had always told Olivia everything. But in the end? Now he could tell Olivia nothing at all, nothing. So what was the answer, between men and women?

He had to go over to Malemba's house; Sampson wanted to talk to him, privately.

“I've been threatened.” Malemba waited until his wife had put down two big cups of milky tea and left their small living-room again. He looked embarrassed, as if he had to confess to an infection caught in compromising circumstances. “I've been told if I don't stop the classes for the lime works people ‘I won't come home one night.'”

“By whom?”

“A man, Mkade—he calls himself Commandant, the Young Pioneers. The same people who started a fight outside the Gandhi Hall while we were up in town.”—He meant at the Congress.

“We're going to ask Commissioner Selufu for protection. We're going to go to him together. There must be a witness that you've been promised it.”

The courses being given at present for the limeworkers were the most straightforward elementary education. “Who would want to put a stop to that?” Malemba repeated.

“It's the one I did earlier about workers' rights and the trade unions, I suppose. They don't want anything like that run again.”

Selufu with his East Coast man's curved nose and eyes crinkled in a professional expression of decision listened without reaction. “I don't think you've got to worry about anything, Mr. Malemba, I would ignore the nonsense—”

“These people have shown themselves to be violent, Commissioner—you yourself know the police have had to intervene many times, where they're involved,” he heard himself saying coldly.

“—But if you feel nervous”—a patronizing, very quick smile thrown towards Sampson Malemba— “I'll see there's somebody on
duty around the Hall these nights. Of course, feelings run high in politics—feelings run high in our country, eh?—and if you start these lectures and clubs and then people—well, it's natural you run into trouble, and then we … we are obliged to protect you. What can we do?” He laughed with determined pleasantness, and as they made to leave remarked, “And you, Colonel? What was your complaint?”

“Malemba and I run the adult education scheme together, as you know, Mr. Selufu. I am concerned with whatever affects it—and him.”

“Oh well I'm glad you are all right. No trouble in your trips around the country. You don't run into any of these trouble-makers, eh—that's good, that's good. I'm glad.”

At dinner that evening the news came over the radio that Albert Tola Tola, Minister of Foreign Affairs, had been arrested as the leader of a plot to overthrow the President. Several “prominent people in public life” as well as two members of parliament were involved, and there had been at least five other arrests. Another conspirator, the broadcasting and television personality Mr. Erasmus Nomakile “Ras” Asahe, had apparently fled the country last week. Hjalmar Wentz listened like a prisoner brought up from the cells, dazed, to hear a sentence. Rebecca stared at Bray. He felt a nervous excitement that made him want to laugh. Tola Tola! Kalimo came in to take the soup plates and clicked his tongue in annoyance because they were not emptied. Hjalmar lifted his spoon and began to eat.

They all ate. Bray shook the bell for Kalimo. “So we know nothing, Hjalmar, we know nothing!”

“Tola Tola,” Hjalmar said, clearing his throat. “Has he got something to do with Edward Shinza?”

“Apparently not! It must've been a right—wing coup they were trying!”

“I always found Asahe such a vain fellow,” Hjalmar said. But it was the only reference he made to the political sensation. Emmanuelle had gone; public revelations neither added to nor subtracted from that. Rebecca made a shy offering— “At least they didn't drag her in.” And Bray added, “No, that's good—it looks as though there won't be any difficulty,” meaning that the Wentzes would not suffer from being suspected of implication in the Asahe affair. Surely Roly would look after that much, anyway. Hjalmar didn't suggest that he might telephone
his wife, or that he would be going home. He drank a brandy with Bray after dinner and went to bed early; from under the fig tree they saw him pulling the curtains across the light from his room.

They walked round the garden—a thick hot night and no moon—and carried on, talking, close but scarcely able to see each other, through the bush. They found themselves in the rough of the golf course—but at night the tamed and trimmed colonialized landscape went back to the bush, was part of the blackness that made all but the centre of the small town (feeble light cupped in a huge dark hand) one with the savannah and forest that stretched away all round, closed over it with the surging din of a million insects in a million trees. Shinza, Mweta, and the two of them themselves, walking by feel among the shapes of bushes; Tola Tola, Ras Asahe.

“D'you think she was in it with Ras?” Rebecca said.

“Oh I doubt it.”

“She's so clever. She used to make me feel she knew what you were thinking.”

“What I'd like to know is whether this was an Mso attempt or whether Tola Tola was on his own, so to speak—I mean he's always been regarded as part of the Mso faction, Mweta gave him Foreign Affairs under the old electoral bargain with them. We'll only find out when they publish the names of the rest … Ras's family background's solid Gala, old-guard PIP—but he was disdainful about old man Asahe … she was clever, all right, if she always knew what
he
was thinking. Come to think of it, Neil was talking about Tola Tola not being Mso by birth.”

“There'll be a proper old witch—hunt now. Nobody'll be able to move without being frisked.” Sometimes her turn of phrase unconsciously echoed Gordon, the husband; somewhere away across two thousand miles of dark he was there, too, the consciously handsome little male in his silk scarf.

“I don't know about that. Nothing makes people feel safer than to have uncovered a plot and handed out retribution. Fear takes on a face and a name and is dealt with.”

Maybe attention would be distracted from Shinza for a while; who knew? Moving along with her in the dark he was conscious of suppositions dissolving one into the other. They came to an eye of water, the sheen off black satin; something dived into it noisily—leguaan? The beasts persisted here, among the lost golf-balls, ungainly prehistoric
survivors disguising their harmlessness in the appearance of an alligator—he had met one once, and idly remarking on it to Kalimo, Kalimo had captured the thing and eaten it.

“You mean you'll still go to Switzerland.”

He felt beneath his hand the articulation of her hip as she walked. “Come with me. We'll try another lake.”

“How'd I get back again.”

Of course, they were not perfectly and secretly at large in the dark at all; if she stepped outside the accepted justification of her necessity for staying in the country, she could not return to this life. It existed only here.

The house where he lived with her was in darkness, far below the great tree. It looked deserted, already the forest was rooted beneath it. They went in, talking again of Tola Tola. He was too preoccupied to think of love-making, but while she moved quietly about the bathroom (not to disturb Hjalmar across the passage) his whole body, flung down upon the bed, of itself made ready for her; she saw when she came in. And so he entered again the fierce pleasure that was in her, while the bats from the fig pierced pinholes of sound in the thickness of dark.

He was clear-headedly awake for a few moments some time in the night. Why go to Selufu with Sampson? He and Sampson laid a complaint with the Commissioner of Police; the Commissioner detailed a man to the Gandhi Hall. A series of procedural gestures: what ought to be done had been done. According to what code? And if Malemba were really to be killed? He could be knifed in any of a dozen ambushes around the township; outside his own gate.…
It was still something they couldn't believe;
we—I am still acting within a set of conventions that don't apply. No more dangerous delusion than that. Selufu won't—can't—give the word to the Young Pioneers that will bind them. There is no word. A policeman outside the Gandhi Hall: it was the perfect symbol of a moral surety become meaningless. There was nowhere in the world now where
Satyagraha—
already polarized with violence the moment the term was translated as nonviolence—could find the compact of respect for human life on which its effectiveness depended.

Who can protect Malemba? Mweta, whirling about-face from Shinza only to defend himself against Tola Tola, could not offer
anything better than Selufu's policeman walking round the Gandhi Hall. Shinza had no power to offer the kind of safety he promised—after …

Malemba needs a gun, he must carry a gun these nights.

But in the morning the urgency of that flash of wakefulness that had lit up his mind between dark and dark was pale in daylight. It was Saturday; Rebecca went into “town” early on some shopping errand, and he lingered at the breakfast table under the tree until she returned with mail and newspapers she'd called for at the
boma—
although the offices were closed, there was always someone who cleared the mail-box. There was more in one of the overseas newspapers about the Tola Tola affair than could be gleaned from the local papers; they were reading over a fresh pot of coffee when Hjalmar appeared, somnambulistic as he was in the mornings; he obviously took strong sleeping pills. They said nothing to him about Tola Tola; let him linger in that sleep-walking state in which he went measuredly back and forth between kitchen and breakfast table—as an unconscious sign, perhaps, of the awkwardness he felt at staying on, he had developed a kind of reluctance to be waited upon.

Bray had finished his breakfast; Rebecca ate with the guest. He had dreamt all night— “That's why I'm so tired this morning … there was a beetle on the floor, buzzing on its back.”

“In the dream?” Because Rebecca resented Hjalmar's presence she was always particularly attentive to him.

“No … in the room, on the floor. I heard it when I turned out the light. And every time I fell asleep I woke up and heard it, still there, on its back. I kept thinking, it's on its back, it can't get up, I must turn it. Poor thing …” Bray smiled a moment, over the top of the paper, over the top of his glasses, and he directed himself at Bray— “And then I got up and turned on the light and found it and took the slipper and killed it.” He looked intently first at Bray, then at the girl, as if for an explanation. They hesitated, Bray laughed mildly and so did she. “Finish the rest of the scrambled egg,” she said. While they read, Hjalmar listlessly took up the review section of an English paper.

Rebecca went off to wash her hair, running her hand up through it in one of those ritual gestures connected with the care of their bodies that women have.

“So Wilhelm Reich is in fashion again with the students … I see
his wife's written a book about him. When I was young in Germany he was our prophet … but while we were discussing the sexual revolution as the break with authoritarianism in the father-dominated family, others were already kissing the feet of Father Hitler and Father Stalin. —What about our ideas of democracy, when we know the majority will has been so many times self-destructive … ?”

“Of course you tend to see everything from the point of view of the place you are … so I find …” Bray said. “But what would Reich have thought of the authoritarianism of this continent, now—the sexual basis of authoritarianism according to his theory simply doesn't exist in African societies, their sexual life has always been ordered in a way that makes satisfaction available to everyone the moment he's physically ready?”

But Wentz's flicker of interest damped out; he turned pages dutifully and folded the paper aside.

“Poor thing. Only when I was in bed again, I realized I'd killed it,” he said. “I squashed it under the slipper—you know those
Kaefer,
they have a hard case but it squashes in a minute. But I'd got out of bed just to stop the noise, to put it on its legs, to stop the useless struggle.”