A Guest of Honour (67 page)

“If they divide into three groups, one can go back past the
boma,
another round behind the abattoir—no, no good, too near the lime works—round the old church hall, that's better, there's a path across the open ground. And then the third can follow the
boma
road about ten minutes behind the first. The great thing is to let it all fizzle out,” Bray said.

“I'll just sort of stroll up to the
boma
with the first lot—it'll look as if I'm going back there, and then I can simply carry on with them after all.”

“That's fine.”

“But you stay here,” Aleke asked of him. “Just stay put and keep your eyes on them. … I don't like the idea of this market, with all these people, eh?”

The men were beginning to disperse, eddying, become tired individuals rather than a crowd. One or two were even buying manioc to chew; it must have been many hours since they had eaten. Bray heard behind him at once the scud of tyres, yells, and turned full into a lorry-load of Young Pioneers bursting into the crowd. Something struck his shoulder savagely in passing, the old woman was leaning over her onions in protection, wailing—the Young Pioneers with their bits of black-and-red insignia flew past him like horses over an obstacle and battered their way in among the strikers. They hit out with knobbed clubs and bicycle chains. Aleke had stopped dead, thirty yards away, with the other strikers. Bray yelled at him to go on, but it was too late, the men were racing back to their mates. Vegetables rolled, a pile of fowls tied by the legs were being trampled upon, squawking horribly, feathers and blood mixed with ripped clothing and gaps of bare flesh. He saw with choking horror hands grab bright orange and green bottles from the cold drink stall, the coloured liquid pouring over the burst of broken glass, the jagged-edged necks of bottles plunged in among heads and arms. One of the strikers staggered towards him, the terrible astonishment of a blow turning to a gash of blood that opened the whole face, from forehead to chin. Blood of chickens and men was everywhere. Bray fought to hold back an arm that had raised a bottle-neck above another head; he twisted that arm and could not have let go even if he had heard the bone crack. When the bottle dropped into his other hand he thrust it deep
into his trouser pocket, struggling at the same time with someone who had grabbed him round the neck from behind. People came running from the
boma
and the turn of the road that led to the centre of town. While he fought he was filled with anguish at the awareness of more and more people pressing into the bellowing, fighting crowd. He was trying to get to Aleke without having any idea where he was; suddenly he saw Aleke, bleeding from the ear, struggling towards him. They did not speak but together heaved a way through blows and raced behind the market lavatories, through the backyard of a group of stores, and to the back of the
boma.

Rebecca's teeth showed clamped between parted lips, like someone who has been taken out of cold water. She stared at them with embarrassment. Godfrey Letanka, the elderly clerk in his neat alpaca jacket, grabbed the towel from beside the washbasin in Aleke's office and held it to the bleeding ear. “Is it from inside?” Bray asked. “Was it a knock on the head?” Aleke, his great chest heaving for breath, shook his head as if a fly were in his ear. They tried to wipe away the blood so as to see where it was coming from; and there Bray discovered a small, deep hole, right through the cartilage of the ear shell: so it was not a brain injury. Letanka found the first-aid box somewhere and Rebecca held the ear tightly between two pads of cottonwool to stop the bleeding. Aleke was no longer dazed. “Get hold of Selufu—try the phone, James—” “—The police are there,” Rebecca said. “You didn't see—they were on the edge of the crowd, two jeeps arrived from Nairobi Street, that side. Godfrey and I saw them from the roof.” “The roof?” “Yes, we found you can get up onto that little platform thing where the flag is.”

With Aleke holding a wad of cottonwool to his ear, they rushed along the empty corridors (“Those bloody fools of mine, they've all gone to get their heads broken”) and climbed through a window onto the curlicued wooden gable that had been built as a setting for the flagpole when the Union Jack had flown there. “Don't come up again, it may be too much weight,” Bray said to Rebecca, and she stood there below, waiting. A car had been overturned and was burning, obscuring everything with smoke and fumes. But they could see the two police jeeps, the shining whips of their radio antennae.

They went back inside the
boma
and Aleke tried to telephone Selufu. While he questioned the constable on duty and they watched his
face for his reaction to the replies, Rebecca whispered to Bray, “You're bleeding too.” He looked down; there was dark blood on his shoe. “Chickens were killed.” She shook her head; she pointed, not touching him before the others. “It's running, look.” His hand went to his pocket and he took out the broken neck of the lemonade bottle. He looked around for somewhere to put it. She took it from him and laid it, bloody and dirty, in Aleke's big ashtray. The inside of the trouser pocket was sliced and in his groin Bray's fingers touched a mess of wet hair and beneath it, a cut. He shook his head; it was nothing.

“He's in the township. People have been killed there. They had to fire on them. There's nobody at the police station but the man on the phone. Nobody.”

There was silence. She looked at the bloody shoe.

He said, “We could take the car and go back, if you like.”

“What can the two of us do,” said Aleke.

“You were doing fine. If only the Young Pioneers had kept out of it everything would have been all right. What you could do—we could make a quick whip round the lime works and so on—keep people inside and off the streets.”

“What about Rebecca? Think it's okay for Godfrey and her here?”

Bray said, “We'll drive them up to my house.”

“I can drive us. I'll keep away from these roads. Godfrey and I'll be all right.”

Bray and Rebecca looked at each other for a moment. “Take the track past the cemetery. Don't go near the golf course.”

Sitting beside Aleke he had a moment of deep premonitory gloom about Rebecca, as if something had already happened to her rather than that she was likely to run into trouble. The small wound hurt like a cigarette burn that produces a radius of pain out of all proportion to its surface injury. Aleke was very good down in the industrial quarter. There was some disruption of work there; rumours of what was happening in the township had made people take their bicycles and race home. He spoke to groups of men while they stared at his ear bound to his head by Rebecca with criss-crossed tape, and Bray saw them drawn to him, to the physical assurance of his person just as, at home, women, friends, children were attracted without effort on his part.

Aleke said, “D'you want to go into the township?”

It was one way of putting it. “I'll come with you.”

Aleke suddenly yawned passionately, lifted his hands from the steering wheel and slapped them down on it again. “We'll go round by your house to see if they got back all right.”

He said. “I wonder about town. There're a lot of people hurt.”

“I can't cut myself in half. The police are there. The shopkeepers will have the sense to shut up shop.”

The Tlumes were with Rebecca, Hjalmar, and Letanka at the house. The children were making a party of it; Kalimo chased them out of the kitchen and they ran squealing through the rooms. Rebecca and Kalimo were carrying round coffee. Aleke swallowed a cup in a certain aura of awkwardness—the unspoken questioning that builds up round someone in authority. Edna Tlume was on night duty and supposed to be sleeping during the day but she had gone back to the hospital and had rushed in now only to make sure Nongwaye had fetched the children from school. She offered to dress Aleke's ear but his wife, Agnes, had been telephoning Rebecca hysterically after getting no reply from his office—he dashed off to “shut her up” by showing himself to her for a moment. He had another reason, too: “Have you got a gun?” he asked Bray.

“For the birds. Six thousand miles away.”

Godfrey Letanka was worried about his mother and they were trying to persuade him not to go to the township. Bray telephoned Sampson Malemba's house. Sampson's wife answered; she didn't know where Sampson was, there was trouble, trouble, she kept repeating. She had locked herself in. Cars and lorries of “those people”—she meant the Young Pioneers, but they might have been strikers, too—were going through the streets.

“What can Aleke do about it? Whether you're the P.O. or anybody—” Nongwaye Tlume said.

“He has certain gifts, you know.”

“Rebecca says you have a leg injury, James? Let me examine it quickly.” Little Edna had acquired her fluency in English while doing her nurse's training course, and she had the vocabulary of hospital reports. She insisted, and he had to go into the bathroom and take off his trousers. He stood there in his underpants while she cut away the hair and cleaned the cut. He smiled. “Self-inflicted.” “It
really needs a stitch. You should come up to the hospital. I could do it in a minute, but I'm not supposed to.” “Oh come on. You'll do it better than the doctor.” They went hurriedly over to the Tlume house—unfamiliar with locked doors and closed windows in the middle of the day—and she brought out her curved needle and plastic gut, “like a good shoemaker,” he said. The needle stabbed quick-to-be-kind through the resistance of the tough skin, the thread was expertly drawn up, tied, and cut off. The pink palms and nails of the narrow black hands were beautiful markings. “What's going to happen, James? Why can't the President stop all this? A person doesn't know what to do. You should see the burn cases at the hospital. Rebecca is lucky she hasn't got to worry about the children.”

She left him to dress; he pulled on his blood-stained trousers heavily. And Rebecca was still there, because of him. Events carried consciousness unreflectingly from one moment to the next, but this dragged on the mind.

Back at the house Rebecca was playing with the Tlume children with the ingratiating attention of a childless adult; Kalimo and two or three friends presented a deputation, backing up each other's words with nods and deep hums: Mahlope, the young gardener, had gone off to the golf course earlier “to look” and hadn't returned. “There are a lot of rubbish-people here,” Kalimo pronounced. But his friends were trying to prevent him from going after the boy.

“If we all start looking for each other, we'll all be lost, Kalimo,” Bray said. They were speaking in Gala.

An appreciative note went up from the chests of the others.

Kalimo said, “He's just got drunk somewhere. I know that. And there are always people ready to steal someone's pay while trouble is going on.”

“You're worried about his pay?”

“Mukwayi,
you know yourself you paid him yesterday night.”

“I'll try and make inquiries about him later. You stay here. I need you, Kalimo.” An empty promise, a little flattery; the old man went off reluctantly.

Bray was listening for Aleke's car; Hjalmar kept him, describing the men who had come across the golf course. “… singing, you know—it was just like the student days in Germany, we were singing the
Internationale
like schoolkids and it didn't seem true when they
would come and beat us up.” He was excited. “It's always the same, students and workers make mincemeat for police and thugs. —They've picked it up here like V.D. and measles.… Measles kills people who've never been exposed to the virus before….”

Outside, the old fig wrinkled in its skin of dust was fixed as eternity. The midday peace of heat enclosed in the garden beneath it was unreachable indifference: Bray stood amazed for a moment—the grunts and screams and desperate scuffle, the yellow guts of crushed chickens and the miner's face splitting into blood surrounded him in delusion. Over beyond the trees, an indefinable turmoil was apprehended through all the senses, atmospherically. The clamour in the township was too far away to be sorted out. There was only the roar of a sea—shell held to the ear.

Aleke hooted in the road on the other side of the house, and he went round and got into the government car beside him.

In the old part of the township, life was so dense that violence was obscured—in the mud houses, tangled palms, lean-tos of waste material, old vehicle chassis, piles of wood, paw-paws and lianas growing out of rubbish the distinction between dwelling and ruin disappeared, the pattern of streets itself disappeared, and if doors were broken, posts uprooted, weapon-like objects littered the dust, that might easily be part of the constant course of decay and patching-up by which the place maintained its life. Only the burned-out houses were a statement of disruption; and even one or two of those had already those signs—a bit of tin over the angle of standing walls, a packing-case door propped up—of habitation creeping back. The old township smelled of disaster and hid everything; the people were not to be seen, their cooking pots and fire tins left outside the houses to be taken up in the usual activity as soon as this threat to everyday life, like every other they had known, passed and left them once again to make a fire, to cook, to wash clothes in a tin bath. It also hid their partisanships, their sudden decisions to take the threat into their own hands. Bray and Aleke heard later that down here several people had been killed in street battles that morning, but they themselves met nothing but a sullen withdrawal and the faces and hands of children behind the flaps of sacking at window-holes.

The new housing-scheme area near the hostel had no such protection.
The substance of life there was still too new and thin to withstand assault. The web was broken. The fact that there were panes in the windows was enough; shattered glass lay everywhere among bricks, twisted bicycles, wrecked food stalls, yelling clusters of people—all this naked to the red-earth clearing bulldozed from the forest. It was impossible to get into some streets. They backed up the car and zigzagged. Knots of people meant hand-to-hand fighting or someone wounded. A police van tore through filled with shouting faces behind the wire cage; a miner's helmet lying on the ground was caught and sent bowling like a severed head. A Gala woman with her dress ripped down her breasts, her turban gone, and her plaited snakes of hair standing up exposed, shrieked again and again.