A Guest of Honour (65 page)

This dependence each day on the oracular announcements of the radio displaced the normal divisions of decisions, moods, actions by which, hand over hand, life is taken and left behind. Each midday, you waited to hear what had happened that morning; each evening you waited to hear what might have happened since then. And in the town itself, in Gala, there had opened up again those moments of hiatus when anything might rush in, anything might be the explanation—a truckful of police went shaking down the main street, past the bicycle-mender's and the barber's and the venders with their little piles of shoelaces, razor-blades and cold cream. Where were they going? The limeworkers began to gather under the slave tree in their lunch breaks; no one could find a reason to disperse them so long as they were apparently simply hanging about in the shade, but other people, trailing along the red dust road into town or out again with a loaf of bread or a bottle or paraffin, gathered round loosely—what was it all about? As if in unconscious response to an audience, one lunchtime a scuffle broke out and there was a chase through the town: torn shirts, heaving breasts, and a small boy with his little brother on his back breaking into howls outside the post office. He had been knocked down by the brawl; no, he hadn't, he was simply frightened by it—but already there was another group around him: the crazy woman who sang hymns, a few old men who lived out of dustbins and sat most of the day on the post office steps, the young messengers who gossiped there. (Rebecca, passing, bought the child an icecream; fat Mrs. Maitland from the dry cleaner's stood shaking three white chins and said to her, “It's terrible the way they neglect their children. Most of them shouldn't be allowed to have any.” Bray and Hjalmar were delighted with the story.) Someone spray—painted hang tola tola on the wall of the Princess Mary Library. A house was set fire to in the African township and neighbours said “Commandant Mkade” had told them that the people in that house were “Tola Tola men.” Albert Tola Tola, spending his time as he did in London, Washington, and West Germany, had never been anywhere near the remote north of his own country, and the Galas traditionally discounted the importance of the Msos, so it was more than unlikely he would have
had any supporters in Gala. But whoever it was they were determined to harass, the Young Pioneers set fire to three more houses and there was street-fighting in the township at night. Selufu had most of his small force concentrated on keeping peace at the iron-ore mine, a hundred and seventy miles away; Aleke imposed a curfew in Gala, like the one in the capital. “Old Major Fielding's offered to get together a group of volunteers to help out, patrolling the centre of town,” he said to Bray; a piece of information that was in fact a request for advice.

“Oh my God. What a prospect—Commandant Mkade and Major Fielding let loose among us with guns. Why can't you arrest Mkade?”

“Selufu says the trouble is the evidence is so vague. You can't prove he was behind the burnings.”

Bray found a cheap window-envelope under the lump of malachite quartz (Rebecca's gift) he kept on his desk at the
boma.
A note, on a sheet torn from an exercise book, written carefully along the lines in a mission-school hand: “Have a drink at the Fisheagle Inn tonight seven o'clock.” The full stop dug deeply into the paper, apparently in indecision about the correct form to be followed where there was to be no signature. It was felt that “Yours faithfully” was essential, anyway. He thought of Shinza; but why the Fisheagle?—Perhaps he was going to be invited to join the white vigilantes.

He had to find an excuse to slip away from Rebecca and Hjalmar; they would be astonished if at this hour when they were usually all sitting cooling off under the tree, he were to announce that he was going for a drink at the Fisheagle Inn. He remarked that he would have to see Sampson Malemba around seven; Hjalmar and Rebecca were pacing out the area under the fig, Hjalmar with a metal tape that shot forth like a chameleon's tongue, Rebecca with a notebook and pencil. Hjalmar was beginning to busy himself quietly about the house; first he had rigged up an insect-repellent yellow light so that they could read outside at night, now he was going to make a paved area under the fig tree. Rebecca had remembered the pile of bricks left lying next door in the Tlumes' garden by the government builders. Apparently, during the day, Hjalmar, Kalimo, Mahlope, and the elder Tlume children carted them over in wheelbarrows. Rebecca and Hjalmar were discussing whether they should be laid basket-weave pattern or in contrasting horizontal and vertical blocks. “Will they be
cemented?” “No, no” Hjalmar demonstrated with his hands, “If bricks are laid properly, sunk up to the face in the ground and tightly together, they don't need anything. If you like you can leave a few open spaces to put a small shrub or so—plant something, that looks quite nice, eh? After the rains are over, when it won't get washed away, you can establish small plants.” “Won't it be pretty by next year?” She turned enthusiastically to Bray.

He left them working on improvements for the house as if he, she, and Hjalmar were some sort of family making their home in a place where they expected to live undisturbed for the rest of their lives.

Dave, the black barman at the Fisheagle, was popular with the white men who went there to drink. He wore a midnight blue flunkey jacket and a bow-tie and had picked up many of their turns of phrase in his fluent English. “What'll it be, Colonel, sir?—You on your own, or you want to wait?” Grinning, flourishing a napkin across the counter, setting his little saucers of crisps scudding. Bray was thinking how ridiculously conspicuous any man of Shinza's would look here when he realized that it was the barman himself who was singling him out for attention. “Excuse me, Colonel, sir, but your car is blocking the way—could you please move it—” As he left the bar, the barman disappeared through another door and met him in the passage. “Just come this way, what a bother.” It was for the benefit of anyone who might hear; he steered Bray past crates of empty bottles: “Go round behind that hedge by the garage, my room is there, there with the tall roof, you can see it. You got my letter okay, eh? Just open the door—he's inside …” Shinza had friends in some unexpected places. But that was because little Gala remained, on the surface, a white colonial town and one could make the mistake of seeing black men in white contexts—it was merely because he did his job well that the “character” Dave seemed to be a white black man who shared his customers' interests rather than any other concern; at the end of colonial times in many African states white clubmen had been shocked to find that the man they thought of as their favourite waiter or driver was in his private life a political militant.

The yard of the hotel was dark except for a single bulb above the Men's—the one that served the bar was out there so even if he were seen there would be nothing unusual about a white man wandering about near the servants' quarters. In the outhouse room Shinza sat on
a bed raised on bricks and covered with flowered cloth. “Look—before we say another word—Selufu's got the go—ahead to pick up anyone he considers ‘undesirable,' which means that he's got plenty of informers about, so—”

Shinza was shaking his head, he pressed the point of his tongue up to the broken tooth. “I don't go near the township, no worry about that—and these people here are a hundred per cent. Basil's arrested—you know? He was picked up at Lanje, the same day as the twenty-three.”

Aleke had said that “there were a few others” in addition to the trade union leaders. Lanje was a small village near the capital. “Well”—Shinza cut himself short— “it had to be someone, I suppose. Bad it was Basil. James, I've got to have a car. Basil was using the old one, my father-in-law's.”

“You were there too?”

Shinza dismissed it. “It was all right. They missed me. But none of us can go back for the car. I need one badly, badly. I must get out of here tonight.”

“That's not easy. In Gala everyone knows everyone else's car.”

“I know. But I've got to have one.”

“All right. I'll try.”

“Don't try, James; I must have it …”

The room was so small they seemed to be pushed too near each other. He said to Shinza, “Did you know about Tola Tola?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was it unexpected?”

“Tola Tola was circling around us. Just before Congress he had a talk with me. He said he could carry the Msos with him, and of course, he knew a lot of people still believed in me …” Shinza laughed. “Eh? He thought if we could perhaps work together … he made it clear he could get the money—who for Christ's sake was prepared to give money to Tola Tola? Eh? Anyway—he offered me a junior partnership or he tried to get me to talk so he could denounce me—I don't know which it was … I told him he knew I had retired from politics. He said I was insulting him by treating him like a fool. Of course, travelling around all over, he found someone to back him, he could get his hands on things … look, James, I want you to go for us. Now.”

“To Switzerland.”

“Anywhere. Everywhere.”

Bray looked at him.

“Oh that ILO thing—well, it's too late. There's a chance now that may never come again. You know what I'm talking about. This mine strike wasn't my doing, I don't have to tell you that—but now that it's going this way, I'll have to move if I'm ever going to move at all. We must make use of it, you understand. It may still go on a long time, and if it becomes a general strike … if the whole country—James, what I want is you to go and get money for us. Quickly. Now. You know the right people in England. There are a few contacts of mine … there's Sweden, East Germany. We must take money where we can, at this stage. I've got some, already, I've had some, of course. Somshetsi must have money if he's going to help us and I need him. I need him, James. He's got trained people … you know. With a small force of trained people in the right places at the right time, you take over your radio station and telecommunications … airport … you can bring it off without … almost without a scratch. If Mweta can't hold this country together and we hang back, what're you going to get? You're going to get Tola Tola. You see that. Tola Tola or somebody like him. That's what you'll get. And the bribes'll be bigger in the capital and the prisons will be fuller, and when the rains are late, like now, people will have to scratch for roots to make a bit of porridge, just the way it's always been here.”

Bray thought, he's saying all the right things to me; but then Shinza paused, and in this room that enclosed them as closely as a cell, there was the feeling, as often happened between them, that Shinza knew what he was thinking: was thinking the same of himself, and said, “I never thought I would ever do it. Now I have to.”

He said. “What will I say to you? I'll think it over?”

Shinza gave a sympathetic snort.

“When I've ‘thought it over' I'll only know what I know already: that I didn't think it would ever be expected of me. Not only by you. By myself.”

Shinza smiled at him almost paternally. “I suppose we didn't know how lucky we were to get away without guns so far. Considering what we want. You don't expect to get that for nothing.”

It will be such a very little token violence, Bray; and you won't feel
a thing. It will happen to other people, just as the tear gas and the baton charges do.

“But you expect it of yourself?” Shinza was saying, detachedly interested.

“Yes.”

“Good God, James, remember the old days when we used to come to your place starving hungry after meetings? After riding a bicycle fifteen miles in the rain from Mologushi Mission? And when the order came from the secretariat that I was to be “apprehended” and you decided it didn't say arrested so you could “apprehend” me to tell me about it—?” They laughed.

“I'll be back later if I can dig up a car. If I'm not here by say, eleven, don't count on it.”

But Shinza seemed confident that he would be there. Perhaps he knows, too, that I have a woman, and that it will have to be her car because mine is too well known in this province.

He went back to the house and called to her from the bedroom so that he could speak to her alone. “You can use my car in the meantime, and we'll say yours is in the garage for repair. Hjalmar won't know you haven't taken it to work in the morning because you're always gone by the time he gets up—” “I only hope to God it goes,” she said, her eyes moving about the room in the manner of someone who is not going to ask questions.

He said, “The only thing that worries me is what happens if he's arrested somewhere … it's your car he'll be driving. But with mine … if I were to be connected with him so obviously I wouldn't be much use any more—”

“No no, not yours.” She held off any explanation, from both of them.

It was all practical as a discussion of what supplies they would take when they went on a little expedition to the lake at a weekend.

The night was big with humidity that could not find release—moisture could still be drawn up by the sun day after day, even in the drought, from the water and forests to the north-west. About half-past nine he said he had forgotten his briefcase at Malemba's; out of sight round the back of the house, he took Rebecca's car instead of his own. White men in shorts were playing darts among flying cockroaches on the lighted veranda of the Fisheagle; he remembered
standing at the top of the steps there, when he had first come back to Gala, and thinking that he could make out the lake away over the glassy distance. If he had been able to see it, the girl was there ahead in that presence. He had the feeling that the area of uncertainty that surrounded him visually when he took off his glasses was the real circumstance in which he had lived his life; and his glasses were more than a means of correcting a physical shortcoming, they were his chosen way of rearranging the unknowable into a few outlines he had gone by.