A Guest of Honour (68 page)

They followed the trail of chaos to the hostel. A gang of screaming youths ran into the car, clung to it, rocked it. As if they were a swarm of flying ants Aleke kept going until they fell away. Outside the hostel Selufu and some of his men were beleaguered in two open vans. Stones and tins were lobbing out of the windows in a battle between the strikers, and the Young Pioneers, whose “stronghold” the hostel was. Selufu's men began to throw tear-gas bombs, not into the building but among the strikers. Bray opened the door of the car while it was still moving and while Aleke continued to grind on through the crowd, he hung outside, clinging to the roof and shouting in Gala for the men to fall back. He was deafened to noise and chaos by the bellow of his own voice, brutally commanding, hard and ringing, a voice dredged up from his racial past, disowning him in the name of sea—captains and slavers between whose legs his genes had been hatched. His sight became blurred by the pressure of blood in his neck. Still he bellowed; raggedly they were turning back, making for the car, turning away from the building. He thought they were shouting, “Shinza! Shinza!”—Aleke had put the car into reverse, whining and jerking backwards through the fringe of the crowd, and the men were racing after, calling at Bray, “Shinza! Shinza!” as if he had come to deliver them. When Aleke must have judged they were out of range of the tear—gas he came to a stop and leapt out. The look the faces had turned on Bray, the name that they had called, were lost in the confusion. Aleke and Bray again formed an instinctive compact of discipline and moved urgently among the men, throwing an invisible cordon round the orgiastic excitement, shepherding them in the advantage of the moment of hesitation that deflects mob will.

The immediate problem was to get the men from the iron mine out of the quarter. —Selufu couldn't arrest the lot and wouldn't have had anywhere to hold them if he had. It was obvious that every time the running battle that was going on between police, strikers and Young Pioneers died down, while the local men disappeared in their own streets, the “invaders” remained more or less collected, at least in bands, and were a target for both police and the next gang of Young Pioneers they might run into. One thing about Aleke, he was not bothered by protocol and it did not seem to occur to him that he was acting independently of the Police Commissioner. He had the idea of leading the miners away somewhere—where?— “Agricultural showground,” Bray suddenly thought of—and keeping them there until they could be transported back to the mine. Bray took the car and raced off through the littered streets to try and find Malemba and commandeer a couple of school buses. It was all absurd, as desperate measures often have to be: Sampson and Bray and Aleke with busloads of battered men, fighting off the interference of mobs who no longer knew whether the spectacle enraged or threatened them. When the operation was successfully accomplished, Bray and Malemba drove wildly between the showground and the town to pick up Bray's car, fetch food and medical supplies and help. But at the house, Bray's car was gone; Rebecca, Hjalmar, and Nongwaye had been telephoned by Edna to help bring in wounded people who were still left lying at the market. Bray and Malemba got back to the showground: there Aleke was in angry argument with two white men, Mr. George Nye and Mr. Charles Aldiss, president and secretary of the settlers' agricultural society, who were demanding that he remove his “trespassers” from private property. An old dread, from the years when a black man and a white man shouting at each other signified a break in the particular order of society he was paid to maintain, caught Bray off guard. It had no special significance now; Aleke was the man in charge and Nye was simply the uncooperative private citizen; being white was no help to him at all. But at the sight of Bray, Nye turned on him. “Of course! This is just the day you were waiting for! That's why we got rid of you once! You white bastard!”

It was a cry that mingled with all the others of the afternoon. At nightfall—two truckloads of soldiers had arrived and were patrolling the town with sten guns—they collected back at the house again, Rebecca, Hjalmar, Nongwaye, himself. He was still in his filthy trousers;
a dried bloodstain on the groin reminded him of something that might have happened days ago. Kalimo had been looking after the Tlume children the whole afternoon and the house had the roused and rumpled atmosphere of another kind of riot. Rebecca and Hjalmar shared the animation of having made themselves useful; the graining of her chin and cheeks showed coarsened by a glaze of sweat and self-forgetfulness. He said in a private voice, “Was it very bad?” and she answered breathily, vacant, “No, no. Luckily I didn't see any of the dead ones.” He squeezed her hand.

Nongwaye went home with the children and the night was suddenly very quiet around their exhaustion. They drank beer and heard over the radio that the strike had spread to the railway workshops and docks, and that in the capital transport workers, post-office workers, and teachers were out. There were “reports of disturbances in the Gala district,” the voice said with his own African accent but the BBC announcer's standard indifference. Hjalmar pulled a face and laughed silently.

Bray went out into the garden to have a look at the sky over the township but Rebecca called from behind the gauze of the veranda, “Aleke!” and he ran in to the telephone. The radio was turned up for news flashes, sending a can-can rhythm galloping through the house. Against it, covering his other ear, he heard Aleke's beguiling voice, resonant in that great body. He was talking about a plane— “What plane?” The twice-weekly service was not due for two or three days.

“Well, the thing from the department of agriculture … you know. Agnes is going down. To her mother, with the kids. I think she might as well. And she—well, you know. What about Rebecca? They can squeeze her in.”

He was looking at her while Aleke spoke.

He said, “I'll try.”

“It's the best thing for them, get them out from under our feet,” Aleke said, with the carelessness which was his way of expressing embarrassment.

“When would it be?”

“In the morning. Tell her to stick a few dresses in a suitcase and come over. They want to take off about seven.”

He stood a moment before Rebecca's and Hjalmar's expectancy. He turned down the radio. “Agnes and the children are going to her mother—getting a ride with the agricultural plane tomorrow morning.
She wants you to come along, Rebecca—” her name stuck in his mouth awkwardly, it sounded like the name of someone neither of them knew— “you can spend a few days with Vivien and Neil. I think you must go.”

Her eyes, on him, seemed to open up into her self, to force him to look there. “No.”

“Just for a few days. Aleke agrees. It would be sensible.”

She said, like a child shifting retribution, “And Edna?”

“Edna's a nurse.” And of course Edna belonged here, it was her bit of country, her home and people, while Agnes and Rebecca—even Agnes, a town girl, from the capital—had no commitment to what might happen in Gala. If Gala were to be cut off, as it so easily could be, with its single road, no railway, and tiny airstrip, the Tlumes would be at home.

She walked past the two men and went out of the room into the bedroom. He had a very real sense of panic, as if he had done something he could not undo.

She was standing there between the ugly old wardrobe where her dresses hung and the bed where they had slept last night. These things had become the possessions of a stranger; he and she might never have been there before.

“If it were not for me … you understand, my darling … ? I feel I'm behaving like a lunatic, hanging on to you.”

“I won't go.”

He approached her as if they were in a hotel room, alone in a strange room. He stroked her hair and held her. “I stink. I shouldn't have you near me.”

They said nothing. She scratched the nail of her forefinger down his shirt. She said at last, “How many stitches?”

“Four, I think. No, two—I was counting the four holes as a stitch each.”

“Didn't hurt? She's good, isn't she.”

“Here.” He took her finger and showed her where to feel the little knots of plastic gut through the trousers.

She asked, “You phone Aleke,” and he nodded. They went peacefully back to the living-room, where Hjalmar was slicing a leg of lamb. “Mahlope's back,” Kalimo announced belligerently from the doorway.

Aleke was often in the house; he had no one at home and all their lives were thrown together by an hour-to-hour uncertainty in which Kalimo's hot meals—congealed, dried-up and indigestible—continued to be prepared with dogged regularity fixed as the passage of the sun, and eaten any time by whoever happened to be there. Kalimo apart, everybody else's functions were blurred and individual purpose and conviction were passed over in simply doing the next thing.

Harassed Selufu depended on Aleke and Aleke assumed that Bray and Sampson Malemba would arrange food supplies for the men sheltered at the showground. But when he and Sampson arrived the second day with meat and porridge commandeered from the hospital kitchen, mugs and urns from Malemba's Boy Scouts' equipment—whatever they could beg or borrow—they found the men herded into the arena in the blazing sun, surrounded by soldiers. The soldiers were Talefa from the west and had no common language with the strikers. At the sight of Bray the hail went up: Shinza, Shinza. Malemba argued with the soldiers to let Bray in among the strikers. He stood there absolutely still, tensely wary, holding off any reaction he might precipitate. Then he was let in; the men crowded round to claim him. They wanted to go home; they would walk it. But the police would not let anybody go; the police had taken away more than
twenty of them and the rest had been told they were going to be kept in this “cattle place.”

There was nothing to do but get on and distribute the food. He and Malemba addressed themselves to that and that only. He knew that Sampson (despite his firm indignation over the “dog-kennel” issue at Congress) had no doubts about Mweta and would always support Mweta however saddened and puzzled he might be about things that happened under the regime. At the same time, Sampson trusted
him;
so nothing was said about the way he had been hailed in Shinza's name. There could be no discussion between them of what they had just seen. The weight of circumstance was palpable in the burning heat that had collected in the old Volkswagen.

He dropped off Malemba; the market was closed, the Indian shops shuttered, but the supermarket had its doors open that morning. There were few people about and wherever they drifted together, even women with baskets on their heads and babies on their backs, they attracted the attention of slumping soldiers who came to life and moved them along roughly. He saw the Gala women swaying off, sweeping their
kangas
round their backsides, laughing rudely and shouting abuse the soldiers couldn't understand. Outside the
boma
Aleke was talking to Selufu through the window of a squad car. He signalled Bray over; the three were a conclave, representing law and order; Selufu greeted him with a businesslike smile. “Everything all right? That's a very good job you and Malemba're doing—I was just saying, I must keep that crowd isolated, and where can I put them?” “Nye's been told where to get off,” Aleke said with satisfaction. And to Selufu— “You should have heard him swearing at Bray—what a character. If it'd been another time I'd have given him one on the jaw.” “Oh, the Colonel isn't going to worry himself about a man like that one”—Selufu shaped the flattering estimate as one of a company of men who were peers.

“The men've been rounded up in the cattle arena without shelter from the sun.”

“Now what nonsense is that—I'll go down myself and see about it. That sergeant doesn't know what he's doing. —How's the leg? It's not worrying you, eh?” And he drove off with a word or two to Aleke.

Aleke had brought Rebecca to the
boma
to try and keep some sort of routine going, but the place was under guard and hardly anyone
had turned up for work. Aleke himself had been called down to the industrial quarter—there was fighting going on there sporadically between the fish-factory and lime-works men and bands of Young Pioneers—he avoided naming them and always spoke of “the hooligans.” A fire had broken out— “But it was only that old tree,” he said.

“The slave tree?”

“The one the out-of-works used to sit around under—you know. But it was all right, the fire didn't spread. The thing's still damp inside even though the leaves went up like paper.”

“Bray's fond of that tree—aren't you,” Rebecca smiled on him.

“Maybe it's an evil symbol—time it went. I just rather liked seeing people eating chips so at ease there, after all.”

Back at the house, he said to Aleke— “Look, the showground's been made into a prison camp. What for? Those men ought to be got back to their homes. But Selufu's arrested about twenty and he's treating the rest as if they're under detention—they
are
under detention.”

“He can't spare police transport to take them all that way—he needs everything he's got.”

“Let him commandeer the school buses. Good God, you did it.”

“Yes, but that was an emergency.”

“The whole thing's an emergency! We weren't collecting people together for the police to arrest.”

Rebecca and Hjalmar did not look up from their plates. There was a silence between Bray and Aleke.

Aleke said, “The business of coming into town like that—it wasn't just an idea they got in their heads. Shinza's fellows are among them; Selufu's trying to find out more. From the ones he took inside. There're reports that there are camps in the Bashi just this side of the border—arms hidden in the bush. People have said Somshetsi's crowd have been filtering over.” He lifted his shoulders and let them fall. “I don't know. We've got enough troubles of our own.”