A Guest of Honour (43 page)

And so Gordon Edwards insisted, at the lake on Sunday, that he try spear—fishing with him. There were several pairs of goggles, flippers and three spear—guns. He found a strange and delightful engulfment, freed from association with anything else he had ever experienced. He caught only one small fish, while the other, of course, expertly got quite a catch, including a Nile perch weighing about fifteen pounds. Once they met underwater, the two men, coming up to face each other at the end of the gliding momentum of their web—extended feet. He met the smile behind the goggle—plate, the wet—darkened hair, the undulating body; the encounter hung a moment in that element.

“Well, how'd you like it?” She was waiting for them when they came back.

“Oh wonderful. I felt like a fish
in
water—”

Nothing would persuade Aleke or Tlume to go down. “And these're the guys who shout about other people exploiting their natural resources, ay, James?”—Gordon Edwards, cocking his head at them. Aleke said from under a hat, lying in the shade, “My country needs me. Life too valuable.”

The Frasers' rumour was borne out. While they were all at the lake that day a party of PIP thugs drove through the workers' quarters on the bald hillside at the iron-ore mine and kicked over the Sunday cooking fires that were going outside nearly every house, burned bicycles, and in one case, killed somebody's tethered goat. Aleke related all this later—when they got back from their picnic there was an urgent message for him from the new Commissioner of Police, Selufu, to come to the mine. There was a moment when Aleke half—suggested Bray should go with him but it was no sooner broached than both of them, for different reasons, let it pass, as if it had not been serious. Perhaps Aleke had been told to let it be seen that Shinza's old friend had, in fact, some quasi—official status in the interests of Mweta; perhaps he merely had been told to make Bray feel important.… On the other hand, if he had no directive from above, maybe the moment the words were out of Aleke's mouth he had wondered whether an uncertain quantity like the Colonel should
be allowed an inside view of difficulties in the district. They had never talked again about the boy Lebaliso had beaten in Gala prison.

But down at the
boma
next day Aleke, his fan turning from side to side all morning although the winter weather was pleasant, talked about Sunday's affair rather as if it had been a rowdy football match. He was critical of such behaviour but described it with gusto. “One old woman was worried as hell about her sewing machine—she ran out with it on her head, I don't know where she thought she was going—and a fellow”—he always called PIP militants “the fellows”— “made a grab at her more out of devilment than anything. A policeman grabbed
him,
so she puts down the machine and she starts punching and kicking the fellow while the policeman's holding him.… You've never heard such a carry—on. And the women are always the worst … our women! Nothing gives me a headache like one of those old mothers when she starts yelling.”

The PIP “fellows” had gone to the mine with the purpose of supporting the union officials' decision (made against the decision of the miners themselves) not to start a wildcat strike. They said they wanted to hold a meeting at the mine— “to let them know that not only the union but PIP expects them to go to work,” Bray supplied. “Exactly,” Aleke said. “The fellows say it was going to be a peaceful appeal to loyalty and so on. And nothing would have happened, man, if the moment the lorry arrived at the compound everyone hadn't started shouting, specially those old ones. …” A few heads had been broken; not enough to create an emergency at the Mission hospital. “You're lucky, Aleke, when I was doing your job, I'd have had them all up before me in court next day.”

“Don't I know it.” Aleke offered good—natured professional sympathy. Although he described the night with such laconic detachment, he and Selufu apparently acted efficiently. Selufu arrested most of the PIP fellows and they had been remanded for preparatory examination by the Gala magistrate. It was all as it should be; Bray allowed some inner tension to relax. Of course he wondered about Shinza—there in the area of the mine the week before the proposed strike. Well, Shinza would see that the PIP militants at least had been arrested.

Mweta's letter came back promptly; Bray certainly would be invited to the Congress—under what label, he didn't say. As Bray
knew, the Congress was going to be held in the capital this time. (There was already much criticism over this move; it had always been held in the small village of Yambo, on the border of Central Province and Gala, where just after the war the first successful political demonstration and the first arrests by the British administration had taken place.) Mweta ignored the fact that Bray hadn't written the letters he had wanted from him and simply said, as if there had been no silence of rebuff in this area of their relationship, he wondered what Bray thought about the dispute at the iron mine?

He wrote at once from under his fig tree that what interested him was the pattern emerging from disputes like those at the fish factory and the mine. In both cases it was the same: an issue raised by the workers was not backed by their shop stewards and other union officials, who were also PIP officials. The issue in both cases was an agreement reached between the union and the employers which apparently was not acceptable to the workers as a whole: in the fish factory, the status of so—called casual labour (and Mweta knew, he had told him himself, how those people were employed and lived); at the mine, a question of rates of pay for overtime. It seemed clear that PIP interference in the unions was in danger of defeating the function of a trade union itself—to represent the workers' interests as against those of the employer. This was what could happen where the interests of the employer and the state appeared to coincide, and the government, in turn, was the Party. It led to labour unrest without union leadership which had the confidence of the workers sufficiently to be able to control them. “If you destroy the unions, you need the police—more and more police. At the beginning. In the end, of course, it's peaceful, because the workers have no more rights to assert. State and employer, knowing what's best for the economy, decide what they need and don't need. And there's a name for that, too.” Taking his tongue out of his cheek, he remarked that he would look in on the court when the PIP militants appeared; it was a good thing for the Party that they had been arrested and committed for trial.

She came early one morning that week, but not so early that Kalimo was not about somewhere. She closed the bedroom door quietly behind her and he heard a hoarse morning voice, his own: “Lock it.”
She was dressed ready for work, with a file under her arm. The room was dim and a bit musty from the night, his clothes lying about, the private odours of his body. The sun pressing against the curtains emblazoned their emblems of fish, cowrie, cockerel and coffee—bean like flags and they threw rich garish glows across the room. He propped himself up in bed on one elbow but did not let himself become fully awake. She smelled of cold water and toothpaste, her heart beat lightly and quickly with the energy of one who is already up and about. His had still the slow heavy beat of sleep. With his abrasive beard and night body—warmth he blotted out this surface dew of morning hygiene and found her underneath. With closed eyes he took off her freshly—put-on clothes, tugging and fumbling with blunt fingers. It was not a matter of undressing her, it was a matter of baring her sexuality, as one speaks of baring one's heart. She went down into the banked—up, all—night warmth of his bed and took him in her mouth, the soft hair of her head between his legs. In an intensity that had lain sealed in him all his life (dark underground lake whose eye he had never found) barrier after barrier was passed, each farthest shore of self was gained and left behind, words were reunited with the sweet mucous membrane from which they had been torn.

She took a clean handkerchief from his drawer, dipped it in the glass of water beside his bed and wiped herself—face, armpits, sex. She didn't want to meet Kalimo or Mahlope on the way to the bathroom. She dressed.

“I'll get up and see if it's all clear.”

“I'm going the golf—course way—the car's down near the fourth hole. Said I had to go early to do some work I brought home and didn't do last night.”

“It's all right—I hear them in the kitchen.” For these practical whispers words would do.

She was gone.

She had not been with him more than half an hour. It was strangely like the very first time she had come. The very re—enactment itself was the measure of the difference: a ritual that had once been gone through in ignorance without remotely knowing what its real meaning could come to be.

He walked into town because he had to use the perfect coordination and balance in his body. Coming down into the long main road
under the splendid trees he had a vivid sense of all the things he enjoyed; riding through light and shade in Wiltshire or years ago at Moshi in Tanganyika, finning along in slow motion on the bed of the lake last week—it was all one with an awareness—every minute detail leaving a fresh pug—print—of this road, this place. Everything was immediate and verifiable on a plane of concrete existence. The precise spiciness of the dry season when the dust had not been wetted for several months; the ting of bicycle bells plucking the air behind him; two children wearing only vests and passing a mealie—cob from mouth to mouth; the crows cawing out of sight. An ordinary morning that was to him the sunny square: the last thing the condemned prisoner would ever see, and would see as long as he lived.

The courthouse was part of the old administrative building where people came to collect pensions and pay taxes. Outside a group of ancient women were smoking pipes. Their bodies, bare from the waist except for beads tangled with their dugs, rose snakelike from the coils of cloth in which they squatted. They did not speak. Clerks, hangers—on, young men in white shirts and cheap sunglasses brushed past them. He went into the room that still smelled like a schoolroom; he himself had once sat up there on the rostrum and fiddled with the carafe covered with a glass. On one of the benches among other people, he was the only white man. His two neighbours talked across to each other behind his shoulders, not rudely, but in the assumption that he couldn't understand what they were saying and therefore wasn't there. They were discussing a debt owed to one or both of them; clearly they were such close friends it didn't matter which. They had the same cowboy jeans imported by local Indian stores, the same sort of Japanese watches with a thick gilt band, the same topiary skill of the open—air barbers had shaped their dense hair into the flat—topped semblance of an
en brosse
cut. The three tribal scars on each cheekbone were worn with no more significance than a vaccination mark.

PIP Young Pioneers solidly filled the first two rows of benches. Most could scarcely be called youths any more. The adolescent force that lingers heavily beyond its season in those whose hopes have not been realized was in their postures and restlessness. They gazed and shuffled, brazen and sullen. Some wore PIP forage caps, others wore the torn sweatshirt of the family's idle son, and one had a transistor
radio with him that a court orderly with creaking boots came across to warn him not to use. He continued to hold it to his ear now and then, just not turning the knob, under the orderly's eyes.

The usual beggars and eccentrics who had nowhere else to feel themselves accepted along with other people, were deep in blank preoccupation; an old man had the worried, strainedly alert look that Bray knew so well—a kind of generalized concern in the face of the helplessness of all black people before the
boma
and the law. He wondered who the country women outside were; probably relations of men from the mine who were involved in the case. There were other, “respectably” dressed men and women from the African townships who must be relations, too. The familiar atmosphere of resignation and fear of authority that sat upon country courtrooms and made one the innocent and guilty was stirred by the arrival of the accused filing into the dock just as the slow whirling into action of the ceiling fans, set in motion at the same moment, began to slice the stale air. The court was full and faces kept peering in the windows from a gathering crowd outside. There was even the straggling boompah of a band out there—abruptly silenced. The eleven accused were too many for the small dock and like people whose seats at a theatre have been muddled up, they shifted and changed places and at last some were given chairs in the well of the court. A special detail of Selufu's men had come in with them, and ranged themselves round the visitors' gallery. The court rose; the black magistrate came in and seated himself before the carafe. He was an ex—schoolmaster and lawyer's clerk from another province and now and then he used an interpreter to translate for him into English when he was not sure that he had fully appreciated the nuance of some expression in Gala. Bray had met him at Aleke's; a cheerful, intelligent man who appeared morose on the bench.

An Indian lawyer from the capital had come down to conduct the defence. The men in the dock moved out of their stoic solidarity to get a good look at him; probably they had not seen him before. The indictment was read. He stroked back the shiny hair at his temples as he listened, as if he were still ruffled from the journey. In his quick, soft, Gujerati—accented English he asked at once for the trials to be separated: that of the nine men who were accused of trespassing and wilful damage to property to be heard independently of that of the
two accused of assault and an offence under the Riotous Assemblies Act. The request was granted; the cases were remanded until two separate dates a week or two ahead. The attorney objected that there was not sufficient time to prepare the defence; the cases were postponed still further ahead. Bail was renewed for the nine, but refused for the other two. The Young Pioneers creaked their benches and make tlok! noises in their throats like the warning notes of certain birds. More faces bobbed at the windows. One of the pair who had been refused bail was a slim young man whose bare neck had the muscular tension of a male ballet dancer; he kept twisting his head to look imperiously, frowning like Michelangelo's
David,
round at the crowd. Whenever he did so there was a surge in the two front rows, the force there shifted its weight in precarious balance between his look and the stolidity of Selufu's policemen.