A Guest of Honour (69 page)

When they were drinking coffee, Bray forced himself to say, “You'd better check up that Selufu ordered to let the men go back to the stand.” The strikers had been camping out on the plank seats under the shelter of the grandstand, before the new “arrangements.”

“Yes, okay.”

“Sampson will be going up there later—”

“Yes, I'll do it, don't worry. Oh, here's a surprise for you—” Aleke
handed over a packet of letters. Because of the transport-workers' strike in the capital there was again no mail. “Someone had the bright idea of giving the bag to the chap who flew the soldiers in—but the officer only managed to remember to give it to me now.” One of the envelopes had a Swiss stamp. He opened the letter and read rapidly under the conversation. When Aleke had gone, he handed it to Rebecca. He said to Hjalmar and her, “I suppose I'd better go and see for myself. I can hardly give orders to the Commissioner of Police, can I …” Her eyes followed quickly:
Dear Colonel Bray, Your copy of
La Fille aux Yeux d'Or
has been reserved for you and we await instructions at your convenience.
She folded it and gave it back to him with a little shake of the head.

Hjalmar had a telephone message for Bray to get in touch with Mr. Joosab. He tried to ring the shop but there was no reply; boarded up, no doubt. Poor Joosab. He supposed he had better go and see him, too. Rebecca said, “Not much point in my going back to the office, if Aleke's not going to be around.”

“No, stay here.” He was thinking of the gangs and the attempted fire so near the town, in the industrial area.

“Should we get on with the job in the garden?” Hjalmar said. “If there's no use for you in one place, you have to try somewhere else.”

As he left them and was driving off, she came running out the kitchen door. He stopped and waited for her. “Was it from the Swiss bank?” He nodded. “All safe and sound.” “What was that about the girl … ? Where'd you get that from?” He kept her waiting a second, giving himself the pleasure of looking at those eyes with the fashionable black outline she had taken to giving them lately. “It means ‘the girl with the golden eyes,' it's the title of a novel. I once heard Roly call you that. So you had a code name, all ready.”

“Who wrote it?”—Though he felt the curiosity was directed more towards herself, to the way he saw her.

“—An old French novel. Balzac.”

Joosab's house backed his tailor's shop. There was a small grassless, flowerless garden with an empty bird-bath held on the head of a concrete elephant. The façade of the house was painted bright blue. The bell rang a long time before the door was opened by Ahmed, Joosab's second son; he was led in silence over the linoleum into the best room, filled with a large dining table and sideboard, both topped
with plate glass. Joosab must have been working somewhere within although the shop was closed, and appeared with silvery expanding bands holding up the sleeves of his very white shirt and his measuring tape round his neck as usual. He found it agonizing to get to the point, whatever that was to be; offered tea, a cold drink—all interspersed with flitting remarks about “things being as they are,” the heat, the drought—ready to interpret the riots and burnings as some sort of seasonal act of nature, if that would be more tactful. “You are worried, my dear Joosab. But I don't know what would reassure you. Or myself. Cynical people will please themselves by saying independence solves nothing. People like us should always have known that independence only begins to solve anything. The moment it's achieved it's no longer an end.”

“You are so right, Colonel, you are so wise. It's a pleasure to talk to someone like you. You can't imagine what I go through with some of these people. I say to them, no good comparing the old days. But they are nervous, you know? They say why attract attention. And the Gandhi Hall was built with contributions from the community. I say to them, change the name then, if you are afraid all the time something will happen to your investment. Gandhi didn't believe in investment. But they are nervous—you know what I mean?”

“Well, there aren't any classes going on there, now, of course—no one to teach, no one to come for the time being.”

“That's true. But—Colonel—they want you to take away your things. The carpentry stuff and so on … they say if someone should get the idea to come in and smash it up …”

“You want us to clear out?”

“Colonel—”

“Oh don't be upset, Joosab; I'm just thinking—”

“Our community has made regular contributions to the Party, Colonel, and then with you being a good friend of the President, we thought we wouldn't have to worry. But now these people—who are they, they don't listen to anybody—”

“I just don't see how Malemba and I can manage it with only two pairs of hands. Right away, ay?”

Joosab held up his own hands in distressed admittance.

“Can you find some young men to help us? Your son's friends?—Never mind, they'd better stay out of it. I'll get hold of someone.”

One of the anonymous females of the household appeared with ghostly shyness, placing a tea-tray so softly that not even a teaspoon clinked. “Oh have a cup, Colonel, look it's here,” Joosab said, as if it had materialized of itself. “This is a terrible time for President Mweta, terrible, terrible. What do you think it is, Colonel, is it the Communists?”

Bray, Malemba, the elder Malemba sons, Hjalmar, Mahlope, Nongwaye Tlume and Rebecca lugged the adult education centre's equipment out of the Gandhi Hall that afternoon and evening. They had a jeep from the agricultural department and a vegetable lorry that Joosab managed to borrow from one of the Indian storekeepers. The stuff was dumped in Bray's lean-to garage, in the rondavel at the Tlume house that Rebecca and her children had occupied, and even at the
boma.

In the middle of the night the telephone rang. Joosab's voice was at once faint and shrieking as if he were being borne away while he spoke. “Colonel, stop them, stop them, you must stop them. You know the President …” “Joosab, for God's sake what's happened to you?” “They're burning down the Hall—you must come and stop it—”

He dropped back the telephone and leaned there, against the wall in the dark living-room, come out of sleep to a return like nausea. His hand went wearily over his breast—Shinza's gesture. A mosquito's siren unfailingly found him out, singing round and round this daze. He telephoned Aleke. As he left the house with a pair of pants pulled over his pyjamas he was stopped by one of Major Fielding's men, who had rigged themselves out with red armbands and sporting rifles. “For God's sake don't argue—there's a fire.”

Aleke and he saw the blaze from a long way off and felt it, a huge heat coming as if from the open door of a furnace. The Young Pioneers who had looted the place and set it alight were gone and the fire engine was there, its hoses sufficient only to wet the area round the building to prevent the fire spreading—in the middle of veils of water and smoke the hall and the school to which it was attached were just at the stage when a building on fire holds its shape in pure flame rather than matter; in a moment it would begin to collapse upon itself. Joosab and a few other men stood there, wearing coats over their nightclothes despite the heat of the night and the fire. The smell of wet and burning was choking; their black eyes ran with tears
of irritation. They seemed unable to speak. They stared at Bray. The building must have been ablaze beyond remedy and the firemen already there when Joosab telephoned. Among the soaked and charred things that had been rescued Bray saw a chest neatly lettered in white, THE MAHATMA GANDHI NON—VIOLENCE STUDY KIT. One of the younger Indians said to him, “I don't suppose the insurance will pay out.”

Rebecca had been so tired she had not heard the telephone, had not heard him leave the house. When he came back she sat up alarmed. “The Gandhi Hall's burned down.” “Oh my God, all that effort for nothing.” He lay down on top of the bed next to her. He smelled of wet burned wood and burned paint. “Get in,” she said, tugging at the covers beneath him. He pushed the sandals off his feet and lay there unable to move, on his back. He heard himself giving great shuddering, snoring breaths as he was helplessly overcome by sleep.

Early in the morning, Dave the barman from the Fisheagle Inn was there to see him. Kalimo was polishing the living-room floor, all the furniture pushed to the middle, and kept his head turned away from the visitor as he showed him in. Then he went on his knees again, shifting about under Bray's and the other man's feet with the obvious intention of showing that this visitor would not be accorded a respectful withdrawal.

Rebecca was in the bathroom. He took the man into the bedroom and the presence of the unmade bed, the woman's shoes and his fire—pungent clothes lying on the floor. “Selufu's letting them have it. The ones he arrested.”

“The twenty from the showground?”

“Fifteen or twenty—I don't know how many. They're being beaten and made to stand the whole night. A very bad time. They are beaten and those Young Pioneer bastards are let off. Selufu's even afraid to arrest them. Yes, it's true. You see yourself, all this burning and fighting keeps going on because he doesn't arrest them, he arrests the people they attack. That's why he doesn't like the soldiers—they grab anybody who makes trouble. He's scared, he's scared for his job.”

“If I go to Selufu, and he asks me where I've got my information?”

The barman took his arm as if to confide a gin-inspired platitude. “Don't go near him.”

“Oh I'm one of his willing helpers.”

“Why I came, I knew you're taking the trip down. Tell Shinza. Some of them might say things that will make him change his plans. He'll know if they knew anything important. I've got the names.”

“Well, I suppose there are all sorts of rumours … I could have heard from anywhere? D'you think anyone'll have noticed you've been to this house?”

“Perhaps someone has seen me, perhaps not. Everybody looks now, where you are going, when you go.”

“Selufu can't just be left to do as he likes with people.”

The barman ignored the appeal. “You don't want the names?”

“Yes, give them to me anyway. D'you know whether Shinza is all right?”

“He will be all right.” Half reproof, half belligerent loyalty.

When the barman had gone Kalimo came into the kitchen, where Bray was fetching his freshly polished shoes from Mahlope. “I hope you didn't give that one money,
Mukwayi?”

“Why should I do that?” He was guardedly amused.

“That's the man from the bar at the hotel, ay? I know. Everyone knows him. He borrows money, money. They say he even gets it from the white men who drink there.” In English, “He
no good.”

“Don't worry, Kalimo, I didn't give him anything.”

All day he lapsed into periods when he could not think at all; when the opposing pressures exerted themselves equally, holding him in deadly balance between them. He was going to the police station at noon; and then simply stopped the car down the road under a tree and smoked a cigarette. By early in the afternoon he knew he would go at six, and if Selufu wasn't to be found, he would go to his house (Aleke had given him a pass, now, issued by the police, that allowed him out after curfew; another mark of grace and favour). If Selufu did find out that the informant was the barman at the Fisheagle, the man would probably be picked up and detained to see what
he
knew. If Selufu didn't find out, and had the ready-made advantage that Bray “admitted” the torture story had come as a rumour round Gala, Selufu would certainly deny it outright. All this was quite apart from any conclusions he might reach about himself—Bray. He thought, I could demand to see the men—again, in the name of whom, or what? Selufu was sent here by Mweta to replace Lebaliso because of the
boy with the scarred back. So if I have the crazy authority to ask it, it's in the name of Mweta.

And at the same time, there was that remark of Selufu's, when he went to see him with Sampson Malemba: “… no trouble on your trips about the countryside, Colonel …”—vaguely taken as a reference to his contacts with Shinza, or to a suspicion about them. It could have been a warning hint: don't think I don't know.

He must know.

And yet I have been so cooperative in this mess. Acting out of common humanity. Keeping the peace. (In the name of whom; what sort of peace?) And maybe Mweta hesitated even yet to “set the hand free….”

He scarcely spoke to Hjalmar or the girl when they ate together. When he and she found themselves alone he kissed her without desire. He and Malemba took the daily food supply up to the showgrounds; the men were back in the grandstand but still under heavy guard. The whole of Gala smelled burned out from the Gandhi Hall fire. There was news of riots and hut-burnings at the fish-freezing plant at the lake; roadblocks prevented the fish trucks from getting into Gala.

After dinner he sat under the fig in the dark smoking a stale cigar he had come across. He would get up and go to Selufu at any moment. He sat on. Rebecca came out and finding he did not speak, moved quiet as the bats blotching the old tree. Hjalmar brought a book and turned on the special insect-repellent light; in the garden, as well as the patriarchal fig there were jacaranda trees that one didn't notice outside their brief blooming-time—they had suddenly unfolded into it in the last few days and the light was caught in caves of lilac flowers. Mahlope was sent by Kalimo to fetch the coffee tray; the young man was singing to himself in a moth-soft voice.

He went into the house and stood a moment at the table where his unfinished report lay, some pages clipped together, some in folders, some loose sheets held down by an ashtray and even the little photograph frame with Venetia and the baby pressed into use—Kalimo's precaution against the dusty wind that often blew into the house. The paper was gritty to the touch. A hairy black fly lay dead on its back. She had sat on the floor against his legs at the fireplace—it was empty, except for the cigarette butts they all lazily threw there. It was
weeks since he had sat at the table, had written a letter, even to his wife. He took a sheet of the typing paper Rebecca had used for his report and wrote out the details about the money in Switzerland: name of bank, address, account number, code name. He folded the sheet and flattened it with his thumbnail, cigar ash falling onto it, and then carefully tore off and folded once again the half he had written on, putting it into the pocket of his bush jacket.