A Guest of Honour (21 page)

Kalimo arrived back and cooked him some supper. Afterwards he stood under the fig tree in the dark, smoking one of the big cigars he didn't allow himself too often. There were bats at the fruit, the most silent and unobtrusive of creatures, torn—off rags of darkness itself. He wondered with whom he could take the traditional refuge of dropping in for a drink. Not the club, the new member taking up his rights. Not Aleke. He could go to that girl, Rebecca Edwards, one of the group in the capital. But he and she would have nothing to talk about; his mind was blank of small talk. He leant against the tree and the cigar burned down to a finger of firm ash. Ants ran alerting a fine capillary tree of nerves over his back.

He went inside and wrote to his wife, suggesting that she make up her mind and fly out within the next two weeks. He had to go to the capital in any case, and this would mean that he could meet her and drive her back on the same trip. After he had signed, he wrote:
All our reasons for your not coming seem to be simply because we can't put a name to why you should come.
It was a love letter, then. He scored it out. He wrote, experimentally,
All our reasons for your coming seem to be defeated by some unknown reason for your not coming.
He felt he did not understand what he had said. He did not stick down the envelope. He put it with the pages he had covered for Mweta; about Mweta.

In the morning, he left the pages there. At least until he had spoken to Aleke. At least until then.

Aleke and his new secretary were starting the day with a cup of coffee when he arrived at the offices. It was an atmosphere he had known all his life—what he thought of as “all his life,” the years in Africa. The offices still stuffy but cool before the heat of the day, the clerks talking lingeringly over their shoulders as they slowly began their to—and-fro along the passages; the time before the satchel of mail came in. Aleke filled his pushed—back chair and questioned Rebecca Edwards with the banter of a working understanding.

“You didn't forget to stick in Paragraph B, Section Seventeen, eh, my girl.” She leaned against the windowsill, cup in one hand, cigarette in the other. “I did not.” Of course, she could be counted on to take work home over the weekend; Aleke said it himself: “You're an angel. And will you get that file up to date by Friday? Cross your heart?” He had for Bray the smile with which a busy man greets one who has been off on some pleasure—trip. “Well, how was the bush? Get through all right?” There was chatter about the condition of the road. “Mr. Scott said to Stanley Nko, ‘The best thing would be for the Bashi Flats to secede….'” (Nko had taken over from the white Provincial Manager of Public Works, Scott.) Quoting, Aleke was immensely amused at this solution to the problem, and they all laughed.

“Could I have a word with you, Aleke?” Bray asked.

“Oh sure, sure.”

Rebecca Edwards tactfully made to leave at once. “Here, here, don't forget these—” A file was waved at her.

Aleke got up, took the lavatory key from its tidy nail, and went off for the daily golden moment, saying, “Be with you right away—if you want to listen to the news—” He gestured at the transistor radio on his desk.

Aleke was washing his hands with
boma
soap, drying them on the strip of
boma
towel.

“I gave a young fellow a lift,” Bray said.

Aleke began to nod and turned smiling at a story he could guess— “Long as he didn't bash you over the head. It's getting as bad as down in town. What'd he take off you? Some of these fellows from the fish factory—I don't stop for anybody, any more, honestly.”

“Yes, from the fish factory—but he'd just come out of prison. He'd been inside more than two—and-a-half months. No trial. No charges laid. Here in Gala, in Lebaliso's jail.”

Aleke sat down at his desk and listened to something he knew instead of guessed. He put out his hand and switched on the fan; he probably did this every morning at exactly the same time, to ward off the heat as it came. His face was open to Bray. “You know about it,” Bray said.

“Lebaliso kept me in the picture.”

“So it was Lebaliso's decision?”

“We'd been keeping an eye on that fellow a long time. Shinza's chap.”

Bray said, “What d'you mean, Shinza's chap?”

“There're a lot of Bashi working here now. Shinza sees they make a nuisance of themselves now and again. In the unions and so on.”

“Aleke.” Bray made the attempt to lift the whole business out of the
matter-of-fact, where Aleke let it lie like a live bomb buried in an orderly garden. “Aleke; Lebaliso shut up a man for two months and seventeen days.”

“From what I was told, this one was a real trouble—maker. I mean, it's not my affair, except that what's good for the province concerns me. From that point of view, I'm expected to keep an eye on things. If there's likely to be any trouble, I just like to know what I'm expected”—in mid—sentence he changed his mind about what he was saying— “well, I must be kept more or less in the picture.”

“And what you see is Lebaliso taking the law into his own hands.”

Aleke was friendly, tried to invoke the amusement at Lebaliso he and Bray had shared. “Of course I said to him at the beginning, the magistrate's the man to go to with your troubles. Not me. Anyway it seems something had to be done about that fellow. They wanted to know a bit more about him.”

Bray said, “Was Onabu the one who was interested?” Aaron Onabu was Chief of Police, in the capital.

Aleke agreed rather than answered. “I suppose so.”

Bray said, bringing out each word steadily, “And I never heard a word from anyone in Gala.”

“We-ll, you've had other things to do but think about old Lebaliso up there—” The hand waved in the direction of the prison, behind the trees, behind the village. “We've all got enough on our hands. But this girl, Bray—I'm telling you, my life is different now. When I want something, it's there. If I forget something, she's remembered. And give her anything
you
want done, too. If you want your reports typed. She'll do it; she's a worker, man.”

Bray watched the fan turning its whirring head to the left, the centre, the right, and back again, the left, the centre, the right, and back again. He wanted to ask: And are there others up there—with Lebaliso? But the telephone rang and while Aleke's warm, lively voice rose and fell in cheerful Gala, he felt the pointlessness of pursuing this business through Aleke and, signalling his self—dismissal, left the room.

In his office he set himself to put some order into the files he kept there; they were constantly being moved back and forth between the
boma
and the house. The office was not exclusively for his use and Godfrey Letanka, the clerk, came carefully in and out. He gave him
some typing to be done; he couldn't bring himself to take advantage of that girl. The heat grew and filled the small room; he stood at the window and looked across the village muffled in trees. At twelve o'clock it was alive with bicycles taking people home to the African township for lunch, black legs pumping, shouts, talk, impatient ringing of bells. He went out and the sun was dull, behind cloud, on his head; he had the feeling that he was not there, in Gala, really: that he had lost external reality. Or conversely that he carried something inside him that set him apart from all these people who were innocent of it, uninfected. What was he doing among them? He dropped at Joosab's a pair of pants with a broken zip; Joosab stitching, moulding layers of interlining upon a lapel, the naked bulb over his sewing machine, Mweta on the wall. Joosab's brother—in-law and mother—in-law had just been to Mecca, and the brother—in-law was in the shop, wearing his white turban. “Home again, Colonel.” Joosab celebrated the two travellers, one from the bush, one from the pilgrimage, in vicarious pleasure. “Your tuhn will come, your tuhn will come, Ismail.” The brother—in-law was generously reassuring from the bounty of his importance. “More than fifteen year now, I been thinking next year and next year … but seriously, Colonel, I have plans to make the trip.” At the general store, where he had to pick up a cylinder of domestic gas, changes were in process: a cashier's turnstile was being set up at the new EXIT ONLY—a second door formerly blocked by rolls of linoleum and tin baths. Already men and women in the moulded plastic sandals that were now worn by all who could afford shoes were shoving and shuffling for a share of supermarket manna—a free pocketcomb with every purchase above two—and-sixpence. An old crazy woman who wandered the streets of Gala had somehow got in behind the turnstile and was singing hymns up and down the lanes of tinned food and detergents.

He took a detour past the prison instead of going home. He thought there was a track that led round the hill behind the hospital to the prison road. It was as he remembered; followed by the yapping dogs of a squatter family, he came out upon the road and saw it up ahead, like any military camp or prison in Africa, a bald place with blind low buildings exposed to the sun. He did not know what he expected: there was a new, very high fence of diamond mesh wire, barbed on top, rippling tinny light; the new flag drooped. He had
been inside many times, while he was D.C. He knew the hot, white courtyard and the smell of disinfectant and sour manioc. No political prisoner had been kept there, during the British administration; they had been sent to detention camps in the various emergencies. He had seen those, too; encampments set down in remote places where no one lived, and, inside, the weeks, months, years, passed in heat and isolation. People had been beaten in them; died of dysentery. A commission of inquiry hadn't healed them or brought them back to life. His agitation on the journey from the Bashi suddenly became something inflated. It sank out of an abnormal glare; he considered it dispassionately. He had looked on that scarred back; but was it really something so inconceivable, for Mweta, for himself—for anybody who had ever ventured out of Wiltshire? His hands had shaken—over that, a commonplace horror?

To condemn it was as much the centre of his being as the buried muscle that pumped blood in his breast. But to tremble virginally at the knowledge that it happened, here under his nose …

Part of common knowledge.
The air we breathe; I have lived my whole life with that stink in my nostrils. Why gag, now? You work with the stink of violence in your nose just as a doctor must work within the condition of disease and death.

The screw of noon turned upon everything. It held in the breathless house when he sat down to the lunch Kalimo had burned. (Kalimo was much less efficient than he had existed in memory, in Europe; or was it just that Kalimo was older, old?—Bray noticed a bluish ring like the ring around the moon demarking the brown iris from the red—veined yellow of the man's eyeballs.) The more he thought about confronting Mweta the more urgently doubtful he became about his own purpose, and beyond it the shadowy matter—like the area of darkness over a suspect organ in an X—ray plate—of his own authority. If the affair of the boy were an example of abuse by some official making free of new—found power, the conversation with Aleke in itself might be enough to put a stop to this particular incident; Aleke would pass the word to Lebaliso, and Lebaliso would be afraid to act again to please (presumably) some local PIP lordling. The intervention of Mweta might go one step further and ensure the censure of Lebaliso. But there would continue to be other such incidents about which nobody would hear, about which there would be
nobody to pass the word. The only way they could be counted upon not to happen at all would be if things were to go well enough, long enough, in the country for a code of efficiency to supersede the surrogate of petty power among administrators and officials. Then only the sort of abuses, involving profit rather than flesh, that are tacitly time—honoured in the democratic states of the West and East, would remain. And for the country to go well enough, long enough, Mweta needed the help of Shinza.

But if what happened to the boy was what Onabu ordered, from the capital?

If such things were part of the regular activities of the Special Branch, State Security—whatever name such an organization chose to go by? His mind went cold with refusal. Yet he had lived so long, and so long here, among white and black, that he half—knew it could not be otherwise. And if that were so, then more than ever what was pointed to was that the country could not afford to have Mweta make an enemy of Shinza.

Mweta was in a neighbouring state on a few days' official visit. Bray could not see him at once. He did not post the letter he had written him; the one to Olivia, either. He went about the house and the
boma
and the broad, shade—dark main street that was Gala like someone who has packed his belongings and sent them ahead to some unknown destination. He kept away from the few people—the Alekes, the Tlumes—he had got to know. One lunchtime on his way home he stopped for a beer at the “native” bar near the vendors' trees. Young men from the industries were there; the elite of Gala, with money coming in regularly every week instead of intermittently, from the occasional cash crop. Old men sat alone at dirty trestles over a mug of home brew, blear and tattered, turning coins and snuff from cotton tobacco bags in that miserly fingering—over with which the aged spin out time left to them. The young ones drank European bottled beer from the local factory and he listened to them arguing about soccer and the price of batteries for radios. Some wore PIP badges as others wore buttons given away by a soft drink company. They ignored him suspiciously; one of the old ones shifted on his seat in a gesture of respectful salute.

At the turn—off to the road where his house was he caught up with Aleke's secretary, trudging along in the heat. Above big sunglasses
her forehead shone damp and white. She said, “It's only another hundred yards,” but got into the car. “The clutch's gone on my old faithful—going to cost me fourteen pounds.” “It's madness to walk in this heat. I can always give you a lift to work.”