A Guest of Honour

Chapter 18

Her car parked outside the Tlumes’, Kalimo’s washing on the bushes, the fig, like the trees over the main street, under a hide of coated dust, the quality of the silence that met him in his bedroom with the thin bright curtains and in the shabby living-room — he walked through the rooms with clenched hands, suddenly. All here; not a memory; life, now. He entered into it and took possession. Kalimo’s welcome flowed over him like an expression of his own joy.

And soon she came, he heard her walking up the veranda steps and the squeak of the screen door that let her pass — in the rush of assurance that in a few seconds she would be standing there in the room, alive. There she was, herself. The self that couldn’t be stored up even in the most painstaking effort of the mind and senses, the most exact recollection, never, never, the self that was only to be enjoyed while she was there. The moment he embraced her (slight awkwardness of disbelief that it was happening, taste of the inside of her mouth coming back to him, feel of the flesh on her back between his spread fingers) the sense of that self entered him and disappeared, a transparency, into familiarity. She wanted to hear “all the stories” with the amused eagerness of one who has been content, waiting behind — she hadn’t envied him the capital or the company of her old friends. They ate their first meal: yes, that was exactly how she was, her way of considering, from under lowered eyelids, what she should help herself to next. He kept pausing to look at her and she, every now and then, reached for his hand and turned it this way and that, squeezing the bones.

“You took the phone call very calmly.”

She was hardly expectant. She said with tentative curiosity, “You were very calm yourself.”

“Don’t you want to know what I wanted the letter for? Aren’t you concerned about what I did with it? Rebecca, I’ve taken your money out of the bank.”

She searched him for the joke. “No, really.”

“I did. The money from the house. I sent it away. It will be there for you in Switzerland whenever you need it. No one else can touch it, no one will block the account. You can use it wherever you are.”

She became at once tense and helpless, an expression that flattened and widened her face across the cheekbones. “Why? I’m not going away.”

“You must be safe. You and your children. Now I feel satisfied you are.”

“I see.”

“You don’t see … you don’t see …” He had to get up from the table and come over to her, enfold her awkwardly against his side. He took her arms away from her face; it was roused, red. A vein ran like a thickness of string down her forehead. He thought she was going to cry. He chivvied, humoured— “You’re a very trusting girl, I could have run off with all your cash. You handed over without a murmur.”

She squared her jaw back against her soft full neck for self — control. “The trouble is that you never try to deceive me. I know what you will do and what you would not do. I could never change it.”

“At least I hope the money’s in a Swiss bank. We’ll know in a week or two whether it’s there or whether I’ve been a gullible ass who’s lost it for you.”

Between the “stories,” the unimportant news of friends, he talked a little of Congress: but it was massive in his mind, it could not be dealt with anecdotally, nor as an account of events, even an explanation. It broke, over the days, into the components most meaningful to him, and these took on their particular forms of expression and found their own times to emerge.

She said that night, “What you did — the money from the house — it’s not allowed, is it?”

He had been asleep for a blank second and her voice brought him back. “No, it’s illegal.” He found his hand had opened away, slack, from her breast; in sleep you were returned to yourself, what you dreamed you held fast to was nothing, rictus on a dead man’s face. She said, “It’s more in Gordon’s line. And if they find out?”

“What’s left of the settlers who had me deported will say they knew all along what kind I was.”

“And Mweta?”

Her nipple was slack for sleep, too. His hand could hardly make out the differentiation in texture between that area and the other surface of the breast; he dented the soft aureole with his forefinger until it nosed back. She shifted gently in protest at this preoccupation, evasion.

He was suddenly fully awake and his hand left her and went in the dark to feel for a cigarette on the one — legged Congo stool that was his bedside table. He smoked and began to talk about the day of the debate on the UTUC Secretary-General, told her how he had gone down to the carpark to persuade Semstu to support Shinza.

“You knew Semstu from before?”

“Oh yes, an old friend. That’s how I could do it. I’ve known him as long as Mweta and Shinza.”

“And Mweta?” she said again, at last.

“I had every intention of telling him. He knew anyway what I thought about the Secretary-General, so I don’t suppose it would have been much of a surprise.… But it seemed to me after all it was my own affair.”

“How d’you mean? You did it for Shinza.”

“For myself, I’m beginning to think. Shinza’s trying to do what I believe should be done here.”

She said, “I’m afraid you’ll get into trouble, Bray.”

“You’re the one who told me once that playing safe was impossible, to live one must go on and do the next thing. You proposed the paradox that playing safe was dangerous. I was very impressed. Very.”

“I didn’t know you then”—she always avoided the word “love,” like a schoolboy who regards it fearfully, as something heard among jeers.

“He will think you’re siding with Shinza,” she said, out of her own silence. “—Won’t he? What’ll he do about that?”

“I don’t think I can be regarded as a very dangerous opponent. Mweta’s the President; he can always get rid of me.”

“That’s what I mean. You may not be dangerous, but his feelings will be hurt … that’s dangerous.”

“Then for his part he’ll be able to say he threw me out because I was smuggling currency.”

She sat upright in the narrow bed. In the dark he saw the denser dark of her black hair, grown to her shoulders by now. “Oh my God. You see! I wish you hadn’t done it. It’s all right for someone like Gordon—”

“My darling … just a joke! … nothing will happen.” He drew her down, made a place for them again, told her all the things that neither of them, for different reasons, believed, but that both accepted for the lull before sleep. “I could see from the way it was managed, it’s perfectly safe.… Everybody considers currency laws, like income tax laws, fair game—”

“You are not everybody.”

They were overcome by the reassurance of being (in the sense of a state of being) so close together; something perfect and unreasonable, hopelessly transitory in its absolute security.

Aleke, to save himself the bother of deciding how to deal with any other situation, behaved as though of course everyone — Bray included — was satisfied to see Shinza put in his place. He asked questions about the “fireworks” with the knowing grin of a man who expects boys to be boys and politicians to be politicians. As he sent one of his children running to fetch cold beer and wrestled fondly with another who persistently climbed over the back of his chair onto his head, he kept prompting, “They let him have it, all right … he didn’t get away with it….” Bray was giving a matter-of-fact account of some of the main debates, summing up the different arguments and the points that emerged. He said, when the beer had arrived and they were drinking, “Your cynicism amazes me, Aleke.”

“Well, that’s the first time I’ve ever been called that.”

“Exactly. That’s why I’m surprised. You don’t seem interested at all in the issues … they might just as well not exist. You see it as a contest.… They’re not concrete to you, then?”

If it were possible for someone of Aleke’s confidence to be embarrassed, he was. It took the form of a quick understanding that to accept the charge would be to decry his own intelligence, since he’d already refuted cynicism as an explanation, but to deny would bring the necessity to discuss the issues themselves — and overcome a disinclination, half-laziness, half-apprehension, to find himself and Bray in disagreement. He smiled. “… such a lot of talk. It’s only when it comes down to getting busy with administration that you c’n see how things are really going to work out. Didn’t you always find that? — You get some decision to cull all cows with a crooked left horn because that’s going to improve the stock in some way the brains up in the veterinary department’ve discovered, but the result is some people won’t pay taxes because it turns out that in Chief So — and-so’s area, all the cows’ve got damned corkscrew left horns—”

But the sidestep in itself was, Bray saw, a recognition of himself as an opponent.

“Anyway, perhaps we’ll get some peace and quiet now,” Aleke said sociably, to include his wife in the talk as she appeared shaking a packet of peanuts onto a saucer.

“Then take a week off, please, let’s have a holiday.”

“I didn’t say anything about a holiday — just that Edward Shinza will be out of the way, that’s all. — I’ve told you, you can go off to your mother if you want to, I’ll join James as a bachelor again—”

“I just hope he stays out of the way, then. I don’t like these night trips up to the iron mine and God knows where in the bush — and I’m alone here with the children.” She turned with her slightly sulky, flirtatious manner to Bray. “I’m scared.”

“I heard the same complaint from a young woman when I was up at the Congress. Only she’s scared of the Company’s private army. She’s afraid they’ve recruited Schramme and his out-of-work mercenaries.”

“Oh town. What’s there to be afraid of in town. It’s not like here with those bush — people from the lime works shouting in the streets, poor Rebecca, you remember in the car that time—”

“Yes, yes — but now Shinza’s back in the Bashi with his tail between his legs, the Party Congress is over, all that nonsense will stop

“Not only cynical; also very optimistic, Aleke.” For Agnes Aleke’s sake, he changed the subject. “Have you seen the Malembas since he’s been back? Sampson was a triumph with his resolution about the club, I’d no idea he was even contemplating it—”

“Malemba? Really?” Aleke murmured amusedly; and once he said as he drank his beer and gazed round with the preoccupied contemplative criticism of a man too busy to do what he felt he should, “Agnes, either fix up that place like you said or chop it down for firewood.”

His wife and Bray looked up uncomprehendingly a moment, and saw that he meant the old summerhouse in the garden. She said, for Bray’s benefit, “Oh no, we won’t pull it down. I want to make it nice again.”

Olivia had built it — or rather had it built, the prisoners coming over under guard to put up the mud-and-wattle walls and tie the thatch (tea and bread sent out to them from the D.C.’s kitchen). It had been for the children, the little girls, dressing up in their mother’s clothes and playing in there with their English governess, that girl with hefty freckled calves luminous with ginger hairs who (Olivia said) had been in love with him. But to him now it was Aleke’s house; as he walked up the fan of steep, uneven veranda steps or entered the rooms, he hardly remembered he had lived there.

Barely a month went by peacefully for Mweta. If he thought the rebels in the unions had been dealt with at the Congress, the most favoured workers, who had not made common cause with them, had received no such chastening. The “loyal” mineworkers began to renew the pay demands for parity with expatriate white miners that he had refused with his famous “empty hand” argument before. For the time being, he kept out of the dispute publicly, while first Ndisi Shunungwa — his “coming man”—then the Labour Minister’s secretary, and finally Talisman Gwenzi, the Minister of Mines himself, intervened. Yesterday’s newspaper arrived on Bray’s and Aleke’s desks each morning with the daily report of meetings and talks whose outcome — failure — was “not disclosed.” Aleke remarked, “Mweta should tell them where to get off — he’s the only one they’ll listen to.” Bray did not say, he can hardly show the necessity to do that, now. “That’s what he’s got Gwenzi for.” But it was hard, for people who had long been ruled by a faceless power across the seas not to see authority solely in the face of the individual from among themselves who had taken over in their name. “The government” was so long the alien, abstract puissance; “the leader” their own flesh-and-blood man.

He wondered whether perhaps — for Shinza — one of those strange lulls would now come about; one of those apparently inexplicable breaks in African political life when someone turns away just as he seems about to close his grasp. He had contemplated (with strong unease) Shinza disappearing into the hiatus of that hut smelling of woodsmoke and sour baby, talking, smoking, while an old body slept in a bundle of rags outside in the yard waiting to die as Shinza waited — for what, sign or time, Bray did not know. But Shinza sent for him to come to Boxer’s ranch. They had just spent the day at the lake, on their island — he and the girl. It was much too hot and she was in full war-paint of the sun; streaks of scarlet down her shins and calves, across nose, cheekbones and round high forehead. “I hope you’re not in for heat stroke”; but she kissed him with burning swollen lips that suggested she was ready to make love. They were both rather exhausted and this seemed to put a fine edge of enervation on their nerves; since he had been back the urgency between them had been constant — sometimes he had to seize her hand and press it on his sex.

Under the rusty old shower she said between gasps and gulps, “I forgot to tell you — old Boxer turned up while you were away. Came to look for you at the boma.”

“—Stay a bit longer, you may have a slight temperature.”

Her hair conducted streams over her face, she pressed her thighs together and stood pigeon-toed in the cold water. She shouted, “He won’t be at the ranch.”

“How d’you know?” It was a good thing her eyes were closed; the shower belched forth a dead insect with long filaments of drenched legs, and he flicked it unnoticed off her belly. “Oh how could I forget — just let me tell you—” She stepped out blindly onto the soggy mat and felt to turn off the tap, forcing him to come out of the bath too— “That’s enough hydrotherapy now, Bray. — Because he’s in England. He’s gone back to England! His wife died. So now he’s gone back to England!” They both began to giggle. “Well what’s so funny? I told you, his wife died!” But they laughed more than ever. “Is he coming back? Did he say for good?” “Of course not. He’s coming back. He’s just gone because she died … to see if she did, really, I suppose … I don’t know …”

He made to kiss her on her sunburned eyelids, her neck, but suddenly she resisted with a kind of exasperated embarrassment even while she laughed. In just exactly that way her son, the little one, clenched his face, laughing or crying, and kicked to be free of her sometimes when she snatched him up. Bray fought her but her eyes flew open and he saw — accusation, complicity; an absent wife, a dead wife. “Come on. Pat yourself dry. I’m going to put some cream on your shoulders.” They went quiet and purposeful over the small task.

In the morning she rested her face against his back while he was shaving, her sleep-slack arms round his middle. So pleasantly hampered, he cleared away in swathes of the razor the snowman’s face in the mirror, and freed his own to meet him, talking at himself, while they gossiped about the capital. He told how Vivien had said it was surprising none of them had taken Shinza as a lover. “Was that what she said—‘taken,’ I mean? That’s her upbringing coming out, dear old Vivien, when it comes to things like that she thinks she’s back in one of the stories of her grandmother — or perhaps it’s her great — grandmother? — she was a famous Edwardian beauty with a lord for a husband and she would decide on this man or that. Never mind what he thought about it.”

“Have you told Vivien?”

He felt a wet felt tip draw a line up the groove of his spine: her tongue. “Not directly. But when I write of course it’s always ‘we did this, we did that.’”

“Because I had the impression she knows about us.”

“She always knows about these things, Vivien. She knows but she never talks.”

Of course Vivien has been discreet before; perhaps even when it came to her own husband and her friend. “And she’s never wrong about people — her judgement,” the mouth behind him was saying.

He wanted to say, “She doesn’t like Gordon,” but his half — closed eyes, directing the shaving of his neck in the mirror, shamed him out of it amusedly. Without glasses, with the blood drawn freshly to the surface of the skin, the younger man whom for some not very convincing reason every man thinks of as his definitive self was almost present in the heavy, strongly planed flesh of the face that he supposed represented him. He saw that face with calm equanimity, feeling her at his back.

When she left for the boma he promised to try and return that same night; gave a gentle, reassuring smile to reassert a certain perspective: “—And I’ll find out whether Madame Boxer was dead or only shamming,” but she busied herself with the heel of her shoe, which she said was loose, and rushed back to the house to change into a pair of red sandals. Red shoes Oriane de Guermantes had preoccupied herself with in order to evade the news that Swann was dying: but Rebecca wouldn’t know who Oriane and Swann were, it was with Olivia that he had reread Proust one winter in Wiltshire. Exactly the sort of treat retirement promises to compatibility beyond passion. One (final?) kick of the prostate and so much for that.

Boxer’s house appeared shut up; the servants’ children were taking advantage of the luxury of playing on the veranda. Round the back, the kitchen was sociably full, with the cook and his friends among pap-encrusted pots soaking in water, jars of milk set to sour, the smell of meat burning on the stove and beer being drunk from jam tins. The cook gave Bray an hospitable tot of the sour thin stuff — in a white man’s glass — and sent a young boy to direct him to Shinza. The heat shimmered up from the cattle camps all around but Bray, out in the bush without the crevices of evasion which the shelter of the town offered, had taken it into his lungs, now, his body learnt again to exist within it, drawing it in and sweating it out without resistance like some perfectly adapted organism that maintains the exact temperature of the environment it enters, at one with it.

Shinza and Basil Nwanga were in a little home-made house in European style that belonged to the teacher at the farm school. Shinza pressed upon him a leg of boiled fowl he had in his hand— “No, go on, go on.” “But I can have something else — I’ll help myself—” “Take it, man”—Nwanga grinned— “he’s already helped himself to everything there was—” “Who ate the other leg?” Shinza challenged him.

“You man, there, look on the plate, what’s that bone—”

Shinza held the bone up for the world to see: “What d’you mean, bone? That’s the wing bone, eh?” Nwanga dug a big greasy finger at Shinza’s plate. “There, there, what’s that big one — don’t show me any rubbish, just be straight, you hear — you take that leg, Colonel, take it, take it, you won’t get it for nothing, don’t worry—” Laughing, Shinza snatched up the bone the young man had singled out and threw it to a pale mongrel who caught it in midair. “He’s destroyed the evidence against him!” Basil Nwanga yelled, beating his palms on the table.

“Send the boy up to the house for more beer.” And to Bray, “Just mention booze, Nwanga drops everything. — And say we want a big pot this time, no bloody lemonade bottles — They make good beer at this place, the best I’ve had for years, since that very good beer—very good, eh? — my wife used to make, you know, my first wife, the tall one. A big pot, Nwanga—”

Making a pantomime of haste, fat Nwanga went over to the door to yell for a volunteer from among the children in the yard.

“You seem to be well established here.”

“Oh sure. These are all my father — in-law’s brethren. Their beer is mine to command.”

Bray gestured round. “Not only their beer.”

Shinza smiled at the unimportance of the place. “They’ll do anything for me. You want to stay up at the house tonight?” He had forgotten that Bray was, anyway, a friend of the owner.

“Look, when you send a message, Edward, why the hell don’t you make it a bit more precise. This is a huge estate. — Oh I realize everyone on it knows where you hide out — but then there’s the matter of time as well as place. I never know if you’re going to be here three days or one, I don’t know how long it’s safe to wait without missing you, and suppose for some reason I can’t drop everything and come right away …”

“I’m here until you come, of course.”

They laughed. Nwanga said, “What was the Sunday school treat like?” He was talking of the Party rally. “We heard you were there,” Shinza said. “Asahe is the man who wants to have me arrested.”

“Yes, I went with some friends — the daughter works with him.”

“Oh everyone knows about Asahe’s white girl. She pretty?” Nwanga was amiably disbelieving.

“Rather pretty.”

“He should have seen the girls I used to have in London, ay, Bray? And my American — you remember how she brought me those pyjamas when I was in prison at Lembe — silk, man, Nwanga, with a red belt with a wha’d’you call it, a tassel.”

“I’ve come into the political game too late, that’s the trouble.”

“Is Mweta happy?” Shinza said.

“Confident, yes, I should say, and that’s usually a sign one has no doubts. Or has stifled them successfully. He doesn’t seek any reassurance that he’s right.”

Shinza held a cigarette ready to draw but did not put it to his mouth while he listened; then said, “I see,” and took a pull.

Bray saw that the “he doesn’t seek any reassurance” gave itself away as admittance that Mweta had released him. Mweta has broken with my approval. He’s cut loose; I’m free. So many different bonds, so many kinds of freedom. And each relative to another bond: the freedom to commit yourself to it. Free to make love with her and so become a petty currency swindler. Freed of Mweta — for Shinza.

He said, almost impatiently, “Well, what’s happening?”

“Oh there are plenty of things to talk about … I want to discuss with you, quietly, you know? I wanted a chance to talk….” Nwanga at once became studiedly attentive as Shinza began to speak; they must have settled it all beforehand. “There’s no good to go over that whole business at Congress — a waste of breath, eh … I think along other lines now.”

“Yes?”

Shinza looked at him almost exaggeratedly anxiously, perhaps, being Shinza, a hint of parody of the seeking for reassurance that Mweta no longer showed. His half-smile admitted it. “There’s going to be all hell in the unions. And even if I were to die tomorrow, I’m telling you, it wouldn’t make any difference, there’d still be hell — I mean some of what he’s got coming to him I wouldn’t have anything to do with, it’s absolutely contrary to our policy.… The miners, now. Already they’re better paid than anyone else in the country. But there you are. You’ll see, by the end of the month they’ll come out, there’ll be the biggest row ever, and we’ll see what he’ll do then. That’s the one crowd everyone’s afraid of. He won’t hold them down so easily this time. The authority of the unions is broken, the government begins to run them itself, and then it turns out even government stooges ask the price for keeping quiet the one industry they’re scared to manhandle. What’s he going to do? If the miners get more there’ll be new demands everywhere. If he gets tough, it’ll run like wildfire, there’ll be a solidarity between those who’ve followed the government yes — men and been let down, and those who’ve refused to follow and are put down.”

“And the rebels will have to be blamed for the whole thing.”

“Of course. -So-called rebels,” Shinza corrected automatically, with the politician’s alertness never to be caught out in any semantic slip that could be construed to bely the legitimacy of one’s position. “Agitators! Shinza and Goma and Nwanga were there!”

“A good excuse to put us all in jail.” Nwanga had never been in one; spoken aloud casually, the subject of fear loses some of its potency.

Shinza had, many times; for him it was irrelevant to waste time contemplating eventualities in which one would be out of action. “The basis for whatever happens is the corruption in the unions, eh—?”

“Corruption?”

“Government interference. Same thing. That’s why I’ve been thinking, why not bring someone — some authority — who can show this up? Without taking sides in the political sense. Some opinion that no one can turn round and say … Well, I thought, while we’re going ahead here, you could take a little trip, James, go and see the family”—he stretched himself, gestured ‘something like that’— “you could go by way of Switzerland, say; lots of planes make a stop there, don’t they?”

For an idiotic moment to him the reference was to the money in a bank.

“Go on.”

“Oh nothing very terrible, nothing very difficult … you could go to the ILO and see if they would send someone — an observer, commission of inquiry — someone to look into the state of the unions here … what d’you think?”

It was his way to look at practical aspects first, to withhold other reactions until these were considered. “If the ILO did agree, don’t forget there’s no guarantee such a delegation would be let in. If I remember, there was the same sort of thing — in Tunisia, wasn’t it? — and the government refused. Of course it would be awkward for Mweta to say no, a man of his reputation for reasonableness, but … Then there would have to be a proper report to present to the ILO

“Oh Goma’s got all the stuff for that,” Basil Nwanga said, and Shinza added, “We’ll knock that out, no problem.”

“—And what would my authority be?” Logical considerations were nothing but playing for time; they were overtaken by others. “Ex-civil-servant busybody? Black Man’s Best Friend?” And as they all laughed. — “Political mercenary?” Basil Nwanga’s laugh became a deep delighted cluck and he hit his thighs. “—Yes, that’s it, that’s about the nearest definition we’d get for me—”

“Oh you’ll be properly fitted out,” Shinza said airily, sweepingly.

“I’d have to have credentials. At least show I’d come at the request of a pretty representative string of unions — even then, it’d be going over the head of UTUC—”

“It’ll all be fixed up, we’ll get to work on it,” Shinza overrode. “That’s nothing. That’s easy. Nothing at all.”

He had the curious impression that this was the thoughtless insistence of assurance on a matter that has served its purpose and is no longer of much interest or validity. He said to Shinza, rather hard, “You say you’re going ahead here.”

“Well, I want to talk to you about that.” Shinza clapped at the flies that kept settling on his dainty African ears; caught one and looked at the spot of blood and mess on his hand with disgust. He tore a strip off the morning paper Bray had brought and wiped his palm clean as he spoke. “We know who our friends are in the Party as well as the unions now. We’ve got to keep up the contact and work together.”

“Openly?”

Shinza slowly unbuttoned his shirt. “As far as you can expect.”

“Which isn’t very far, is it.”

The creases under Shinza’s breast were shiny lines of sweat, he passed one hand over the hair and nipples. “Oh I don’t know. You can put a few union men in jail, you can’t arrest the whole labour force.” Again and again, the hand skimmed the flesh.

“But you and Goma and Nwanga won’t last long.”

Shinza caressed his bared, vulnerable chest. “Goma and Basil’ve got their seats in parliament to protect them a bit — I’ll have to make myself hard to find.”

“Until you surfaced at Congress, you were rather that way already weren’t you. But no one was looking for you all that hard. I have the feeling it’s all going to be different now. You’ll be arrested the moment you move.”

Shinza looked at the ceiling and smiled; turned to Bray. “Because he won’t have to explain it to anyone any more?”

A small boy with the beer arrived skittering barefoot onto the veranda and stopped, dead-shy, panting in the doorway. Shinza got up and took from him the plastic container that had once held detergent for washing Boxer’s dishes. He gave him a coin and teased him about the strength of his dusty little arms. “Why isn’t he at school, James? You know that there’s no place for him in the school? Put it in your report.”

“It’s all there, don’t worry.”

“Your last word,” Shinza said.

“Possibly.”

“I mean on the subject — there won’t be anything left to say.” Shinza was pouring the beer. “Which was yours, Basil?”

“Thanks I won’t — I don’t know, my bowels are not right today—”

“Come on. It’s good stuff, this!”

Shinza filled Bray’s glass. “Of course — needs money, to keep going. I don’t suppose any of my old friends at the ILO would do anything about that, though …? I’ll have to see what I can find. Goma wants to print a paper … we need a couple of cars … everything takes money.”

“Who’s been providing it so far?” Bray said.

Shinza was eager to be frank. “We’ve been depending on my pain-law, Mpana. But that’s a nothing. That old car of his is just about a write-off, ay, Basil?”

“Needs a new engine, to start with.”

“It depends how far you want to go,” Bray said. “ ‘Openly’—that mayn’t take you there.”

“You heard me.” Shinza meant at Congress. “That’s where I’m going. To see this country given back to our people. You know me. I’ve never wanted anything else. Yes, I think I know what’s good for us”—his fingers knocked a response from his own breastbone, angrily— “just as he’s decided what’s good enough for ‘them.’ That’s the big difference between him and me. I hope I’m stinking in the ground before I come to what he’s settled for. Stinking in the ground. Only I was cunt enough to believe all those years that we’d taught him what independence was — cunt enough.” Nwanga sat dead still. Bray saw with amazement Shinza’s tears shining at him, holding him. “If this bloody country ends up belonging to the Company, the cabinet ministers, the blacks who sit on white men’s boards, after all the years we’ve eaten manioc and presented our arses for the kicking and asked and begged and had our heads cracked open and sat it out in jail”—his voice reeled, saliva flew from his teeth— “then I blame myself — myself. And you, Bray. I blame you, and you’ll never get out of it, never! So long as I’m alive, you’ll know it, I don’t care whether you sit in England or the end of the world, I don’t care if you’re white. So long as I’m alive!”

The room was a vacuum for a moment. Outside children must have been playing with Chief Mpana’s car; there was a blast on the hooter, then shocked silence. Shinza stalked out. He could be heard chasing the children. He came in again with his walk of an embattled tomcat.

Shinza was looking at him and slowly buttoning his shirt.

He said, “Shinza, what would you do with him?” There was the strong feeling between them that Nwanga had no place in their presence; huge Nwanga, caught in this very current, was unable to leave.

“But I could not kill him,” Shinza said.

“You will lock him up somewhere for years, or give him over to some other state so that he can waste his life plotting to oust you.”

“… Oh God knows.”

“But the others around him — they’d have to go?”

“They’d have to be locked up, certainly.”

A feeling of distance, like faintness, came over him. Without pause, he said matter-of-factly, “You are still seeing Somshetsi and the others. Am I right in thinking you have a deal — they would help you with men and arms in return for some promise that, afterwards, you would give them a base?”

“Along those lines. It need not be too — not cause too much—” Shinza struggled, suddenly flashed, “Not much more damage than he’ll do whenever he lets his Company guerrillas loose among the workers. It need not — if the time’s right.”

“You’re going to try to make the time right.”

Nwanga’s presence had slowly become accepted again. Shinza was silent while the young man, looking to Bray, nodded heavily.

“If I come through Gala one night and want to see you, that’s all right — you’re alone at your house, h’m?” Shinza remarked.

“I’m not alone.”

Shinza said, “Oh then I’d send a message, okay? Come let’s move — I want to take you to this fellow Phiti, disappeared after the ironmine case was dropped, been in detention all this time while those bastards from PIP went scot free. — That’s Chekwe and our old friend Dando.”

The tall, protruding — eyed man’s nose had been broken while he was under interrogation. He was at once listless and yet loose — tongued, the real misery he had suffered came out mixed with the obvious lies of self-dramatization. There were two hundred men in the prison camp-three hundred-five hundred. He had been kept in solitary confinement; he had been locked in a shed with fifteen, twenty others. They were half-starved, they had lived on cane rats from the sugar fields, their shoes were taken away. “Why the shoes?” said Shinza, cold at this poor showing before Bray. “Why? Why? — Look at this, they hit me with the leg of the chair that was broken.” The man kept feeling the crooked saddle of his nose and looking round at them all to see if they were reacting properly.

Shinza need not have been embarrassed before Bray; as a magistrate he had come to know that suffering was not the noble thing that those who had never seen it thought it ought to be, but often something disgusting, from which one’s instinct was to turn away. The man sat in a hut full of relations who had come to be there as if at a sick bed; more squatted among the chickens and dogs outside, the old and the children. A tiny girl crawled into the doorway in a rag of a garment that showed her plump little pubis with its divide; every time Phiti touched his nose her small hand went up with his and felt her own face.

Compassion was too soft a thing anyway. Anger came of disgust, and was of more use, most of the time.

The camp where Phiti was held was at Ford Howard; the old “place of safety” where the colonial government had “confined” Mweta. Shinza was alert to Bray all the time, intent to be one jump ahead of his mind. He said dramatically, “We’ll plough that place over and plant it. It just mustn’t be there, any more.”

A tremendous dust-storm blew up on Boxer’s ranch, coming through the pass from the Bashi Flats. Feathers, leaves, maize-husks, ash and rubbish from people’s fires danced in the vortex of dust-devils that swayed toppling columns up into the sky. The wind was hot. In place of the sun an apocalyptic red intensity moved down the haze; people sniffed for rain in the turbulence, although it might not come for weeks yet. They sat tight in their huts. Bray stayed the night after all, sleeping naked in a stifling room closed against the wind with Shinza, Nwanga, and the schoolmaster. He could just as easily have driven home through the night, but he had a strange reluctance to step outside the concreteness of the atmosphere between himself and Shinza; these men. They talked until very late: the unions, Vietnam, the Nigerian war, the Arabs as Africans, Wilson’s failures in Africa, and Nixon’s cooling towards its white-dominated states; about the unions again. He had allowed himself to forget, for years, the superiority of Shinza’s intellect. Lying there in the room that smelled of the sweat of all their bodies, the dregs of their beer, and the bitterness of cigarette ends, hearing the man snort, turn on the cheap iron bed uninhibited in acceptance of himself in sleep, as he was always, Bray thought how it was a remarkable man, there — like many of the other remarkable men on this continent who had ended up dead in a ditch. Then the blacks blamed the white men for manipulating power in a continent they had never really left; the whites blamed tribalism and the interference of the East (if they themselves were of the West) or the West (if they themselves were of the East). The remarkable men talked of socialism and the common man, or of glory and Messianic greatness, and died for copper, uranium, or oil. Mweta was one of them, too. Mweta and Shinza. For him-Bray-the killing had been made, for Mweta, already. The phrase in political jargon was “yielding to pressure”; it’s finished him off, as I knew him. Couldn’t say how Shinza would go, yielding to another kind of pressure (but I couldn’t kill him, he lied; and I lied, accepting it?).

Neither away in England, nor the other end of the world …

He thought he didn’t sleep but he must have, because the words hung there.

Chapter 19

A man was sitting with Rebecca in the living-room. The room was dimmed against the heat.

But Hjalmar Wentz was in the Silver Rhino; in the capital!

Wentz and Rebecca sat deep in the sagging old morris chairs on either side of the empty fireplace, sunk in the silence of each being unable to explain his presence to the other. So great was the awkwardness that neither could get up.

“Well Hjalmar! What are you doing here!” He released them, Rebecca’s eyes signalling a complicated anguish, warning, heaven knows what, Hjalmar saying with a painful smile, “Well, you did ask me, perhaps you remember …?”

The fact that his platitude of greeting had been taken as a protest warned him more explicitly than Rebecca’s eyes. “I just never thought I could get you up here no matter how hard I tried … this is splendid … when did you arrive … are you”—but the eyes, absolutely yellow now with intensity, signalled—”… you drove up all the way?”

A shaky gesture — a smile that twitched faultily and an attempt at humour: “Don’t ask — I got here. And Rebecca gave me a nice lunch.”

“That’s splendid. I simply gawked … couldn’t believe it. I’ve been off trudging round some schools … just eating dust all day. I must have a shower — was there a terrible wind, here, last night?” They talked about the weather; “Well, some tea first and a bath later. Wash the dust down instead of off … have you got your things in, did Kalimo look after you all right?”

“Yes, yes — Rebecca gave me a very good lunch, avocados fresh from the tree, everything, the service was first class!” The voice seemed to wind automatically out of the stiff blond face. Bray and the girl were standing round him as if at the scene of an accident. She said, “I must dash.” “My best to Aleke,” Bray said, but followed her to the garden by way of the kitchen on the pretext of ordering tea.

She was waiting for him. “Something ghastly — you didn’t hear the radio? — Ras Asahe’s fled the country. Emmanuelle went with him.”

“Why should Asahe do that? Are you sure? Has he—”

“Only mentioned Emmanuelle. ‘I suppose you know Emmanuelle’s gone away,’ he said to me, but I was afraid to ask, I was afraid he wouldn’t stay calm. Oh my God, I thought you’d never come. I phoned the boma and said I couldn’t come back, I was feeling ill or something. I couldn’t leave him alone. I don’t know what’s happened … with them. He doesn’t mention Margot. ‘Emmanuelle’s gone’—that’s all. And then we just sat with nothing to say. I don’t know what he thinks about finding me in the house as if I owned the place. Well — I don’t think he notices anything at the moment. But why come here? Why to you?”

“Oh my darling … I’m sorry … don’t worry.” He looped her hair behind her ears — she was so pretty, now, with her hair grown. He wanted to kiss her, and doing so, not caring that Kalimo had come out to throw tea-leaves on the compost, felt the whole warm body fill the shape it had made for itself within him.

“How long will he stay?”

“My love, don’t worry.”

“Now I won’t be able to come here tonight.” She suddenly pressed her pelvis up against him in misery.

“Bloody hell. Oh come, why shouldn’t you. We simply won’t offer any explanation, that’s all.”

“Yes. Yes. — Oh why choose here, why couldn’t he have gone somewhere else.”

“It’s all right, it’s all right.” He stroked her hair as if it were some delightful new texture he had never had in his fingers before.

“Would you like to make love to me now?”

“Of course.”

“Damn him,” she said. They nursed each other against their resentment.

He went with her to her car, touching her hair. As she started the engine she turned to him a smile of pure happiness. “So I’m coming.” He nodded vociferously. She lingered over him a moment longer: “You’ve got dust in every line of your face.” He understood what she was saying. “I know, my darling.”

And there was the man and his misery waiting.

Bray went in, to him.

He felt conscious of his own height, his heavy, healthy muscular bulk — his wholeness — as he stood there; it seemed to owe an apology, to be an affront. He took a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his bush jacket and gestured it to Hjalmar before taking one.

“Anyone have any idea why Asahe should have done it?” he said.

The haggard blond face winced into life. “He was at the hotel on Wednesday evening — she rushed in and said she was going out for an hour. She came back very late — must have, I had already tidied up and gone to bed, and she wasn’t home yet. Then on Thursday I understand she took some clothes to the cleaner and insisted they must be done the same day. Apparently she begged Timon — the head — waiter — you know — it was his day off and she asked him to pick them up when he came from town. She didn’t want her mother to know about it, you see — so she must have already decided then.… Friday she was quite normal, quite normal, nothing … and in the afternoon she said she was going with a few friends for the weekend at Matinga, to the dam. She even, came into the office and asked me to get her water skis out of the storeroom. Can you believe it?” The face went blank again. He got up suddenly, struggling slowly out of the chair so that Bray had to hold back the urge to put out his hands to help him, as from interference in a private act that should not be observed. The man walked across the room, his jacket peaked up crushed over his shoulders; faltered in sudden loss of purpose. “She was with me in the storeroom and we looked among the rubbish for the water skis. She said to me had I never tried, and I told her we didn’t do it when I was a youngster, and she said but you used to ski properly in the snow and you use the same muscles — she said I must come one day and try. She said, you feel powerful, don’t you, when everything is rushing past — you feel you can do anything you want.” He began to shake his head very hard in order to be able to go on. “She actually went with me to get the water skis.”

Bray sat down on the stool with the ox-thong seat the boys at the carpenter’s shop had made for him. There was nothing to offer but patience.

“I told her that was exactly the way I used to feel in Austria. Funnily enough, just what I used to think. And then she went to her room with the skis and I never saw her again. I had to go down to the cold storage in town and when I got back I was told she’d left for Matinga.”

“Didn’t see her again?”

He began to talk excitedly. “I mean we expected her Sunday night, sometime, that’s all, we didn’t think anything.… On Sunday I’m just seeing that the chairs are put out in the beer garden, and Timon comes up, there’s a phone call. Well, you know … I said, let someone else take it, can’t you. Then he said, it’s from Dar-es-Salaam, it’s Miss Emmanuelle. I told him, Dar-es-Salaam! It’s Matinga! I wasn’t worried, I thought, she wants to stay another night.”

“She phoned you from Dar-es-Salaam?”

“She was on the airport. I didn’t believe her. She kept on telling me, listen, Ras and I are in Dar-es-Salaam, we are leaving for London in a few minutes. She couldn’t hear me well. I shouted to her, live with him here, Emmanuelle. You don’t have to run away. She lost her temper. She said didn’t I realize she wasn’t ‘playing the fool’—those were her exact words — she wasn’t ‘playing the fool,’ Ras was in great danger and he couldn’t have stayed. That’s what she said.”

“And the announcement on the radio?”

Hjalmar was sunk back in the chair. “Well, we were cut off then. I phoned, I tried to get a connection from here … by the time we got through to Dar-es-Salaam again they were gone. Margot wouldn’t believe me, I had to repeat over and over again, everything, like I’m telling you … She went hysterical, why hadn’t I called her to the phone. And then Stephen heard on the news that Asahe, with a white girl and so on — no name — had slipped out of the country. They must have been at our airport in the afternoon waiting for the plane just two miles from where we were sitting in the hotel. People say he was in some political trouble. Can you think why he should be in political trouble?”

He was eager to turn this mind to reasonable supposition. “Hjalmar, honestly, whenever we spoke together he gave me the impression of being a staunch supporter of whatever the government might choose to do. Perhaps some pressure of personalities, at work …? But suppose someone were trying to jostle him out of his position at the radio, he wouldn’t have to disappear out of the country, would he.”

“I’ve been to the police.” He shrugged. “I tried to get hold of Roly but he wasn’t in town, I couldn’t … all she says, I want to know word for word … why didn’t you call me to the phone. Night and day.” He leaned forward and whispered into Bray’s face: “I don’t know any more what Emmanuelle said on the phone. I don’t know if perhaps she didn’t say something else, I don’t know if I talked to her at all.”

Bray did what he would not have known how to do a year ago. He gripped Wentz’s two hands, pinned them a moment on the chair arms. “What about Dando …?”

Such bewilderment came into the face, such confusion that he dropped the question. The man obviously had fled without waiting for Dando to return; somehow let go, lost hold … No wonder Rebecca was uneasy to be with him.

“London’s a good place for them to have gone. You will hear soon from her there. One can always arrange things in London — friends, money, and so on.” Olivia. But quick on the thought, reluctance: to spin a new noose, draw this house and Wiltshire together, produce, in Emmanuelle, evidence that a life unknown to Wiltshire existed here. As if somehow the lines of the girl could be traced in Emmanuelle, so different!

It was not possible to give Hjalmar Wentz any relief. He could not be distracted. If one did try, there was blankness; what had happened had run rank over his whole mind and personality for the time being. It was destroying him but at the same time it was all that held him together: attempt to disentangle him and he would fall apart sickeningly.

So it was Emmanuelle; Emmanuelle and Ras Asahe; the Friday afternoon and the telephone call from Dar-es-Salaam on Sunday night. The three of them sat in the old Colonial Service chairs in Bray’s living-room for the next few evenings while Hjalmar Wentz talked. His face had taken on a perpetually querulous expression and the middle finger of each hand, inert on either arm of the worn chair, twitched so that the tendons up to the wrist trembled under the skin.

“When she went with me to the storeroom, I wonder if she didn’t want to talk to me … eh? Perhaps I said something … I put her off without knowing …”

“Oh I don’t think so. You and she get on so well. If she’d meant to say anything, she’d’ve, well …”

The blue eyes continued to search inwardly. Bray took the glass away from the hand and topped up the whisky, but drink didn’t help, you couldn’t even make him drunk, he held the glass and forgot it was there. “Why say that about ‘feeling you could do anything’? I should have said, what d’you mean, ‘anything.’”

Rebecca had remarked to Bray, “It’s better for him to drive us crazy about what he thinks he did wrong, poor soul — at least it keeps him from thinking how calculating she was — right down to the business of her skis.”

But Bray could not help looking for some reassurance that would hold. “Hjalmar, was what she did so extraordinary to you — after all? You say she’s really very attached to the man. Perhaps you even feel responsible in a way, for the loyalty she probably feels to him? Because you and Margot — well, your children grew up in an atmosphere where Africans were regarded as people in need of championing — you know what I’m getting at? — If something terrible threatened him (we have to believe her) and she helped him to get away, well … you yourself, in Germany when Margot …”

He didn’t know what there was in this that was so destructive to Hjalmar. He saw the face of a man falling, falling, crashing from beam to beam through glass and dust and torn lianas of the shelter that this ritual of discussion built to contain him. Into the silence lying like an irredeemable act between the two men, came the sound of Rebecca singing to herself in the shower under the impression that she could not be heard above the noise of the water. Bray found himself, appallingly, smiling. In Hjalmar’s face only the fine fair skin seemed intact, the bone structure seemed to have loosened and his mouth was always a little parted as if he lacked oxygen. Now something faintly stirred there, a kind of coordination in the eyes, an awareness of the existence of other people, as if his wild glance had fallen upon a scrap of undated newspaper picked up in the rubble.

Bray began to carry drinks and glasses into the garden. In his present state Wentz noticed neither abrupt changes of subject nor apparently aimless activities. He picked up a stool and newspaper, stood a moment, slowly put the paper down, then picked it up and followed slowly to the fig tree. The dust in the air at the time of the year made a chiffon sky after sunset, matt grey and pink, and the atmosphere was thickened with the same colours reflected on soft, invisible suspensions of dust. Bray lit the lamp; Hjalmar said, “I’m sorry I walked in on you like this.”

“It’s quite all right.”

But his self — protective stiffness seemed curiously to succeed in helping Wentz as all his sympathetic responsiveness had not. “No, I shouldn’t be here. You ought’ve been left alone. I know that.”

“It doesn’t matter, Hjalmar. In the end the only secrets one cares to keep are those one has with oneself — and even that’s a mistake.”

“I don’t follow you.”

He smiled. “I think I mean the doubts one has about repudiating aspects of oneself one can’t live by any more.”

“And if there’s nothing left? — wha’d’you do then, kill yourself?” But the words were lost, they could be ignored in the appearance of Rebecca, smelling of the perfume he’d bought her in the capital, calling out, “Oh good idea, yes, let’s eat outside tonight. Shall I ask Kalimo? Have you got cold beer there for me?”

There was a phone call next morning to Bray at the boma. Stephen Wentz— “Is my father there? — Yes, well he was seen by someone on the bus at Matoko, so we thought he must have made for your place.” “He’s all right,” Bray said, although the son didn’t ask. “My sister cabled.” “London?” “Yes, she’s staying there.” Bray phoned his house at once. Kalimo took a long time to find Wentz. What did he do with himself all day: he was apparently sitting somewhere in the garden. He spoke at last, a hesitant croak, “Hullo …?” “Emmanuelle’s safely in London. She cabled — your son’s just phoned.” “To your office?” Wentz confirmed nervously.

“He doesn’t want to speak to any of them,” Bray reported to Rebecca, who happened to have slipped into the office while he was telephoning. She shrugged, pressing her chin back so that it doubled, half-comically, and he ran a finger along it to tease her. Lying in bed early that morning he had told her of Shinza’s suggestion about the ILO in Switzerland. She said, now, “If you go out, will you be-let in again?” It was that she had come for.

“Why not … and if I do as he wants me to … say I’m going to England.”

“You’ll go to England.” She was standing in the doorway.

“I may not go anywhere at all. I don’t know how serious he is about it. I had the feeling …”

He had not told her anything more. He had always told Olivia everything. But in the end? Now he could tell Olivia nothing at all, nothing. So what was the answer, between men and women?

He had to go over to Malemba’s house; Sampson wanted to talk to him, privately.

“I’ve been threatened.” Malemba waited until his wife had put down two big cups of milky tea and left their small living-room again. He looked embarrassed, as if he had to confess to an infection caught in compromising circumstances. “I’ve been told if I don’t stop the classes for the lime works people ‘I won’t come home one night.’”

“By whom?”

“A man, Mkade — he calls himself Commandant, the Young Pioneers. The same people who started a fight outside the Gandhi Hall while we were up in town.”—He meant at the Congress.

“We’re going to ask Commissioner Selufu for protection. We’re going to go to him together. There must be a witness that you’ve been promised it.”

The courses being given at present for the limeworkers were the most straightforward elementary education. “Who would want to put a stop to that?” Malemba repeated.

“It’s the one I did earlier about workers’ rights and the trade unions, I suppose. They don’t want anything like that run again.”

Selufu with his East Coast man’s curved nose and eyes crinkled in a professional expression of decision listened without reaction. “I don’t think you’ve got to worry about anything, Mr. Malemba, I would ignore the nonsense—”

“These people have shown themselves to be violent, Commissioner — you yourself know the police have had to intervene many times, where they’re involved,” he heard himself saying coldly.

“—But if you feel nervous”—a patronizing, very quick smile thrown towards Sampson Malemba— “I’ll see there’s somebody on duty around the Hall these nights. Of course, feelings run high in politics — feelings run high in our country, eh? — and if you start these lectures and clubs and then people — well, it’s natural you run into trouble, and then we … we are obliged to protect you. What can we do?” He laughed with determined pleasantness, and as they made to leave remarked, “And you, Colonel? What was your complaint?”

“Malemba and I run the adult education scheme together, as you know, Mr. Selufu. I am concerned with whatever affects it — and him.”

“Oh well I’m glad you are all right. No trouble in your trips around the country. You don’t run into any of these trouble-makers, eh — that’s good, that’s good. I’m glad.”

At dinner that evening the news came over the radio that Albert Tola Tola, Minister of Foreign Affairs, had been arrested as the leader of a plot to overthrow the President. Several “prominent people in public life” as well as two members of parliament were involved, and there had been at least five other arrests. Another conspirator, the broadcasting and television personality Mr. Erasmus Nomakile “Ras” Asahe, had apparently fled the country last week. Hjalmar Wentz listened like a prisoner brought up from the cells, dazed, to hear a sentence. Rebecca stared at Bray. He felt a nervous excitement that made him want to laugh. Tola Tola! Kalimo came in to take the soup plates and clicked his tongue in annoyance because they were not emptied. Hjalmar lifted his spoon and began to eat.

They all ate. Bray shook the bell for Kalimo. “So we know nothing, Hjalmar, we know nothing!”

“Tola Tola,” Hjalmar said, clearing his throat. “Has he got something to do with Edward Shinza?”

“Apparently not! It must’ve been a right — wing coup they were trying!”

“I always found Asahe such a vain fellow,” Hjalmar said. But it was the only reference he made to the political sensation. Emmanuelle had gone; public revelations neither added to nor subtracted from that. Rebecca made a shy offering— “At least they didn’t drag her in.” And Bray added, “No, that’s good — it looks as though there won’t be any difficulty,” meaning that the Wentzes would not suffer from being suspected of implication in the Asahe affair. Surely Roly would look after that much, anyway. Hjalmar didn’t suggest that he might telephone his wife, or that he would be going home. He drank a brandy with Bray after dinner and went to bed early; from under the fig tree they saw him pulling the curtains across the light from his room.

They walked round the garden — a thick hot night and no moon — and carried on, talking, close but scarcely able to see each other, through the bush. They found themselves in the rough of the golf course — but at night the tamed and trimmed colonialized landscape went back to the bush, was part of the blackness that made all but the centre of the small town (feeble light cupped in a huge dark hand) one with the savannah and forest that stretched away all round, closed over it with the surging din of a million insects in a million trees. Shinza, Mweta, and the two of them themselves, walking by feel among the shapes of bushes; Tola Tola, Ras Asahe.

“D’you think she was in it with Ras?” Rebecca said.

“Oh I doubt it.”

“She’s so clever. She used to make me feel she knew what you were thinking.”

“What I’d like to know is whether this was an Mso attempt or whether Tola Tola was on his own, so to speak — I mean he’s always been regarded as part of the Mso faction, Mweta gave him Foreign Affairs under the old electoral bargain with them. We’ll only find out when they publish the names of the rest … Ras’s family background’s solid Gala, old-guard PIP — but he was disdainful about old man Asahe … she was clever, all right, if she always knew what he was thinking. Come to think of it, Neil was talking about Tola Tola not being Mso by birth.”

“There’ll be a proper old witch — hunt now. Nobody’ll be able to move without being frisked.” Sometimes her turn of phrase unconsciously echoed Gordon, the husband; somewhere away across two thousand miles of dark he was there, too, the consciously handsome little male in his silk scarf.

“I don’t know about that. Nothing makes people feel safer than to have uncovered a plot and handed out retribution. Fear takes on a face and a name and is dealt with.”

Maybe attention would be distracted from Shinza for a while; who knew? Moving along with her in the dark he was conscious of suppositions dissolving one into the other. They came to an eye of water, the sheen off black satin; something dived into it noisily — leguaan? The beasts persisted here, among the lost golf-balls, ungainly prehistoric survivors disguising their harmlessness in the appearance of an alligator — he had met one once, and idly remarking on it to Kalimo, Kalimo had captured the thing and eaten it.

“You mean you’ll still go to Switzerland.”

He felt beneath his hand the articulation of her hip as she walked. “Come with me. We’ll try another lake.”

“How’d I get back again.”

Of course, they were not perfectly and secretly at large in the dark at all; if she stepped outside the accepted justification of her necessity for staying in the country, she could not return to this life. It existed only here.

The house where he lived with her was in darkness, far below the great tree. It looked deserted, already the forest was rooted beneath it. They went in, talking again of Tola Tola. He was too preoccupied to think of love-making, but while she moved quietly about the bathroom (not to disturb Hjalmar across the passage) his whole body, flung down upon the bed, of itself made ready for her; she saw when she came in. And so he entered again the fierce pleasure that was in her, while the bats from the fig pierced pinholes of sound in the thickness of dark.

He was clear-headedly awake for a few moments some time in the night. Why go to Selufu with Sampson? He and Sampson laid a complaint with the Commissioner of Police; the Commissioner detailed a man to the Gandhi Hall. A series of procedural gestures: what ought to be done had been done. According to what code? And if Malemba were really to be killed? He could be knifed in any of a dozen ambushes around the township; outside his own gate.… It was still something they couldn’t believe; we — I am still acting within a set of conventions that don’t apply. No more dangerous delusion than that. Selufu won’t — can’t — give the word to the Young Pioneers that will bind them. There is no word. A policeman outside the Gandhi Hall: it was the perfect symbol of a moral surety become meaningless. There was nowhere in the world now where Satyagraha—already polarized with violence the moment the term was translated as nonviolence — could find the compact of respect for human life on which its effectiveness depended.

Who can protect Malemba? Mweta, whirling about-face from Shinza only to defend himself against Tola Tola, could not offer anything better than Selufu’s policeman walking round the Gandhi Hall. Shinza had no power to offer the kind of safety he promised — after …

Malemba needs a gun, he must carry a gun these nights.

But in the morning the urgency of that flash of wakefulness that had lit up his mind between dark and dark was pale in daylight. It was Saturday; Rebecca went into “town” early on some shopping errand, and he lingered at the breakfast table under the tree until she returned with mail and newspapers she’d called for at the boma—although the offices were closed, there was always someone who cleared the mail-box. There was more in one of the overseas newspapers about the Tola Tola affair than could be gleaned from the local papers; they were reading over a fresh pot of coffee when Hjalmar appeared, somnambulistic as he was in the mornings; he obviously took strong sleeping pills. They said nothing to him about Tola Tola; let him linger in that sleep-walking state in which he went measuredly back and forth between kitchen and breakfast table — as an unconscious sign, perhaps, of the awkwardness he felt at staying on, he had developed a kind of reluctance to be waited upon.

Bray had finished his breakfast; Rebecca ate with the guest. He had dreamt all night— “That’s why I’m so tired this morning … there was a beetle on the floor, buzzing on its back.”

“In the dream?” Because Rebecca resented Hjalmar’s presence she was always particularly attentive to him.

“No … in the room, on the floor. I heard it when I turned out the light. And every time I fell asleep I woke up and heard it, still there, on its back. I kept thinking, it’s on its back, it can’t get up, I must turn it. Poor thing …” Bray smiled a moment, over the top of the paper, over the top of his glasses, and he directed himself at Bray— “And then I got up and turned on the light and found it and took the slipper and killed it.” He looked intently first at Bray, then at the girl, as if for an explanation. They hesitated, Bray laughed mildly and so did she. “Finish the rest of the scrambled egg,” she said. While they read, Hjalmar listlessly took up the review section of an English paper.

Rebecca went off to wash her hair, running her hand up through it in one of those ritual gestures connected with the care of their bodies that women have.

“So Wilhelm Reich is in fashion again with the students … I see his wife’s written a book about him. When I was young in Germany he was our prophet … but while we were discussing the sexual revolution as the break with authoritarianism in the father-dominated family, others were already kissing the feet of Father Hitler and Father Stalin. — What about our ideas of democracy, when we know the majority will has been so many times self-destructive …?”

“Of course you tend to see everything from the point of view of the place you are … so I find …” Bray said. “But what would Reich have thought of the authoritarianism of this continent, now — the sexual basis of authoritarianism according to his theory simply doesn’t exist in African societies, their sexual life has always been ordered in a way that makes satisfaction available to everyone the moment he’s physically ready?”

But Wentz’s flicker of interest damped out; he turned pages dutifully and folded the paper aside.

“Poor thing. Only when I was in bed again, I realized I’d killed it,” he said. “I squashed it under the slipper — you know those Kaefer, they have a hard case but it squashes in a minute. But I’d got out of bed just to stop the noise, to put it on its legs, to stop the useless struggle.”

Along with the newspapers and other mail was a letter from Olivia. Bray had left it there though he had seen it at once when the girl put down the bundle — it lay under their eyes a moment while he was already tearing wrappers off the newspapers. He opened it now.

“… I mean to be on your back, hour after hour on the floor.”

The large well-formed, well-educated handwriting covered thin sheets without a word crossed out-the marriage of a son of some old friends, Venetia’s new car, the Labour Party’s Brighton conference— I sat watching on TV while you were in the smoke and heat of Shinza’s battle with Mweta. Joosab’s cinema, of all places — do you remember when it was opened, just before we left, and little Indian girls garlanded all the white ladies with hibiscus full of ants, so we were scratching ourselves politely all through the speeches.…

“A sign of weakness. It’s fatal to show a sign of weakness. She accuses me of weakness. She says I had no authority over the children. But she also blames herself. D’you know why?” Hjalmar began to laugh weakly, unable to help himself. “D’you know what Margot said?”

His eye was following Olivia’s letter as he listened to Hjalmar … you are having a so much more interesting time … my poor dull news … I sometimes worry. I wonder where we’ll take up again. Of course I should have come, but the fact that I didn’t … shows that it wasn’t possible for us.

“She said, I blame myself. A Jewish father would have had some authority over his daughter. He would have seen that she was provided with a proper musical education. He would have found somewhere better for his children to live than buried in this place. A Jew would have done better.”

In the appalled silence the weak giggle spilt over, again. “I know I’m not well. But that’s true — she said it.” The terrible weak laughter was suddenly a fiercely embarrassed apology — not for himself, but for his wife.

“Poor Margot,” Bray said.

“I left all the keys, I left the van outside the bar, and I walked to the main road with my things. She was carrying a vase of flowers into the entrance and she saw me putting the keys down.”

I sometimes worry — he skipped the lines he had read before—You may be bored, now, in Wiltshire. And the place is looking so beautiful. I have come to love it more and more. It seems to me the only home I ever had, not excepting Dargler’s End. — Her father’s house. Olivia was one of those people who have had so happy a childhood that they cannot be thrown back into a state of insecurity, whatever else they may suffer.

“So you don’t get rid of me.”

“You stay, Hjalmar.”

“You don’t come out with a thing like that — just on the moment,” Wentz said. “She had been thinking it for years, eh?”

Rebecca appeared with her wet hair combed as it had been the first day she had come to the house, only now it was long. He got up oddly ceremoniously, his wife’s letter in his hand, and for the first time touched Rebecca in Hjalmar Wentz’s presence, lifting the wet hair and kissing her on the cheek. “I’m going to Malemba’s.” She sat down in the sun near Hjalmar with a bit of sewing; it was a dress for her little daughter and it lay in her lap for a moment under her eyes and Bray’s as the letter had done.

Rebecca and Hjalmar waved; he drove off down the road. The eldest Malemba boy was cementing the cracks in the concrete veranda of the Malemba house, and the younger children were standing about waiting for an opportunity to dabble in the mess. Sampson was still waiting for the house he had been promised when he became Provincial Education Officer; Bray had often remarked that the Malembas ought to have the house he had been given, but Sampson, in whom courtliness always took precedence over right, refused to hear of it. Sampson took him into the little living-room with its framed school certificates and palette-shaped, plastic-topped coffee table before the sofa. He said, “Sampson, I think you ought to have a gun with you at night. Something to frighten anyone off with.”

Malemba said, “It’s all right. I’ve got my cousin coming with me all the time now.”

“I’m glad. D’you think you can look after yourselves?”

“He’s a man who carries a knife.” Sampson sat with his hands dangling between his knees heavily, as if already he disowned them for what they might do.

The streets of the township were lively as a market, on a Saturday morning. Children, bicycles, slow-moving sociable people-the car was carried along through this, rather than progressed. Bray bought a newspaper-cornet filled with peanuts (for the Tlume children; he and Rebecca were going there for lunch) and while he and the vender completed the transaction a head popped in the car window on the other side — a young man, Tojo Wanje, who had been attentive and argumentative at Bray’s night classes. They went to the King Cole Bar on the corner. Tojo wore transparent moulded plastic sandals with broken straps, azure sunglasses shaped like a car windscreen, and used a folded newspaper to emphasize what he said. “This Tola Tola, what’s he want? What’s he want?” He had a way of laughing, head up, open-mouthed, vivacious. “I don’t know — you think it’s the Msos?” “This paper! I don’t learn nothing!” “No, well I think they’re not being given much information. Or they’re told not to use what they’ve got.” “Then why must I pay sixpence? I’ll rather buy myself a beer.” Bray bought two more bottles and the young man, who was a foreman at the lime works, told him there had been a fight the day before, pay-day. “These men, we call them the Big Backs-you know, they work putting the bags on the trucks, and they’re strong. Two new men were just taken on this week and when we were waiting at the pay office the Big Backs started kicking up a trouble, they told the new men to show their cards. So they show their union cards but they haven’t got party cards. Well, they were beaten up. I don’t know. Their money was gone, they were kicked on the ground. Then we made a complaint to the union — I myself, I said to them, who are these bulls, these shoulders without brains — oh, I think I better not open so wide in future!” And delighted, he roared with laughter. “But there is fighting, fighting all the time. — They don’t care to raise production,” he added, to show his tuition had not been wasted.

At first it looked as if Tola Tola would not be brought to trial immediately; he was, after all, being held under the Preventive Detention Act and in theory could be detained indefinitely — at least until the Act came up for yearly review as Dando had provided when it was framed. The pay dispute on the mines was not settled, and a two-week “cool-off” period which the unions managed to get the miners to agree to was broken by a wildcat strike. It was supposed to be a token one-day affair and restricted to the mine with the biggest production, but some categories of workers did not return to work the following day, and it dragged on sporadically, complicated by internal disputes not only between the mineworkers’ unions and the miners, but also among groups of the miners themselves. “It’s deteriorating into gang warfare,” Bray remarked one night at the Tlumes’. “Another chance for the whites down South to say how blacks don’t understand anything but tribalism.”

“Well it’s our own fault,” Nongwaye said, frowning with reasonableness. “It is the Galas and Msos who are beating each other up.”

“They’re turning on themselves in frustration because the unions’ve lost control. The unions are strung up between the government and the miners. They’ve made promises to both they can’t fulfil for either.”

“So those idiot Galas take it out on the Msos.” Nongwaye was Gala himself, and spoke as if of a family failing.

“Nobody understands anything but tribalism,” said Hjalmar. He, Bray and the girl had become so close, in a parenthetic way, that she was able to fling out her bare arm half-comically, half-consolingly, and give his shoulder a squeeze. And wan though it was, the remark almost succeeded in being a joke against himself.

It was probably because of the strike position that Mweta and Justin Chekwe were in no hurry to have a political trial. If people were in a quarrelsome mood, a trial would bring out more dissension for them to identify themselves with, or the confirmation of other grievances, perhaps opposed to their own, that would nevertheless widen the reference of dissatisfaction and rebelliousness in general. But the strike grew and spread anyway, its two aspects somehow coexisting in a third: that whatever the miners did in place of work — strike or quarrel among themselves over it — the mines could not run without them. Hardly later than Shinza had said, all the gold mines were out, and the coal, iron-ore, and bauxite ones followed. At the gold mines near the capital the Company army used tear gas and baton charges to disperse a huge march of miners making for the President Residence. The mine and capital hospitals were full of people suffering temporary blindness from tear gas, Vivien Bayley wrote; “bloody Albert Tola Tola can be thanked for all this. We know that he whipped up his little flop on the battle-cry that Mweta didn’t have the strong arm to hold down the unions and Shinza. Now Mweta’s showing the beastly kind of muscle they want. Why didn’t he stand out on that balcony of his and talk to them? They didn’t have so much as a stone. Even Neil says it was the last chance. They didn’t come to kill him, they came to talk to him because they won’t talk to Chekwe and his crowd. Hjalmar was right to flee from the wrath of Margot without waiting for the wrath of the Big Boss and the Company to fall upon this place (don’t tell him I said so). My riot bag stands packed.”

It was true that the day before the trial of Tola Tola and his co-accused opened (it was suddenly announced: Dando, perhaps, getting tough, standing out obstinately against Chekwe for his inch of the rule of law?) Mweta arrested twenty — three trade unionists. “That’s the way to do it,” Aleke sat back in his big office chair and dropped his chin to his chest with a grin. “Selufu says there were others, too. And now he expects he’ll get the okay to put away a few people here we can do without at the moment.”

“What was there to stop him? If there’d been any rioting at the iron mine, he’d have made arrests — but the strikers seem to be keeping their heads there better than most.”

“These aren’t actually strikers he’s thinking of — some of the wise guys here in town. Prevention is better than cure. But ever since you caught Lebaliso on the wrong foot that time, everyone here is v-e-r-y careful.” He laughed good-naturedly at Selufu’s difficulty.

“Oh that.”

“You’ve forgotten?” Aleke’s was a reminder of the graceful removal of Lebaliso from the scene rather than of the boy whose back was scarred.

“No. But everyone else has. Selufu has nothing to worry about.”

“Oh he’s ambitious, Selufu. He’s a bright fellow. No flies on that nose of his.”

“I hope he’ll use his zeal to deal with the people who’ve threatened Sampson.”

At least Selufu was managing so far to prevent the Young Pioneers from Gala from “settling” in their own way, this time, the strike at the iron-ore mine; apparently he had set up police check-points that investigated all vehicles and people on foot approaching the mine or compound. Of course this would also make things difficult for Shinza — for any of his people from outside who were working with the strikers; but Shinza’s men were obviously so well established in leadership among the workers themselves that this might not be important. And Shinza? His “headquarters” at Boxer’s ranch were very near the mine. — Shinza was probably miles away in some other part of the country, if not over the border. Yet if he wanted to see Shinza now, their old agreed meeting place was out of the question.

Mweta made a vengeful speech on television; a fly crawled and lingered, bloated hairily out of focus by the cameras, round the marvellous smile become an aggressive mouth. In the Tlumes’ hot dark living-room the sound failed a moment and the white teeth seemed to be snapping at the fly.… The voice came back: he was “finished with patience,” he would “rub out the vermin,” “burn the dirty rags that carry filthy subversion.” He spoke of the Tola Tola affair openly although it was sub judice. A state of emergency was proclaimed over the whole country; there was a curfew in the capital. An interview with the Chairman of the Company — obviously a statement prepared in consultation between the Company and the government — was given a full page in the newspapers. The strike crisis had already “done untold damage” to the country’s prospects of foreign aid and investment. The country should not be “misled into the belief that it was only private investment — which people were comfortingly told was ‘economic imperialism,’ ‘exploitation,’ and other catchwords of Communist propaganda — that would be lost.” International financial aid organizations, without which he would emphasize none—none—of the major development projects could be achieved, depended heavily on reports from industry for “stability collateral” when allotting funds. (His voice in the ear of the World Bank?) … The Company, which had played a major part in making the country’s economy one of the healthiest in Africa, would cooperate in every possible way (recruiting more men for their private army, buying more guns?) with President Mweta to restore industrial peace and prosperity.

They listened to every news broadcast in silent concentration. At meals, not the clink of a spoon. In the stifling nights under the fig, Bray and Hjalmar with their shirts off, only the pale blurs of their chests giving away their presence with the girl. In the bathroom, with the little transistor radio on the windowsill while he shaved and she lay still in the bath (under-lake landscape, white rock of flesh, garden of dark weed, clinging snails of nipples; he had floated up, face to face with another man there); even in the bar of the Fisheagle Inn, once, among the white men who cut off their talk and stared ahead while the fan sent currents shivering across their sweating foreheads, hearing the voice and waiting for it to be over. Waiting for it to be over. In the white shops of the main street the shopkeepers and white residents had this same air; a habit of mind saw what was happening in the country in terms of “trouble among the natives” that, while it made one uneasy, would be put down, dealt with, pass incomprehensibly as it had come (“they” didn’t know themselves what it was all about, never knew what they wanted). Be dealt with by whom? Pass into what? Their long isolation as settlers in this remote place under the mahogany trees had not prepared them to take the proposition further. With their reason they knew this was a foreign country now (a colonial country belongs to the colonizers, not the colonized who serve them), but their emotions refused to ratify reason. Someone in the bar at the Fisheagle remarked of Mweta, “Sir Reginald’ll have to clear up the mess for him, as usual,” and then they all went back to their gin and cold beer and weekend golf scores. Bray, swallowing his own beer, alone after a nod from one or two faces, felt no resentment or real dislike; but rather the sort of half-interested disbelief, undeniable inner recognition, with which one goes back to an institution — school, barracks — and smells again the smell of the corridors and sees again the same curling notices on the baize. He had been here; he was one of these people in the colour of his skin and the cast of his face.

This dependence each day on the oracular announcements of the radio displaced the normal divisions of decisions, moods, actions by which, hand over hand, life is taken and left behind. Each midday, you waited to hear what had happened that morning; each evening you waited to hear what might have happened since then. And in the town itself, in Gala, there had opened up again those moments of hiatus when anything might rush in, anything might be the explanation — a truckful of police went shaking down the main street, past the bicycle-mender’s and the barber’s and the venders with their little piles of shoelaces, razor-blades and cold cream. Where were they going? The limeworkers began to gather under the slave tree in their lunch breaks; no one could find a reason to disperse them so long as they were apparently simply hanging about in the shade, but other people, trailing along the red dust road into town or out again with a loaf of bread or a bottle or paraffin, gathered round loosely — what was it all about? As if in unconscious response to an audience, one lunchtime a scuffle broke out and there was a chase through the town: torn shirts, heaving breasts, and a small boy with his little brother on his back breaking into howls outside the post office. He had been knocked down by the brawl; no, he hadn’t, he was simply frightened by it — but already there was another group around him: the crazy woman who sang hymns, a few old men who lived out of dustbins and sat most of the day on the post office steps, the young messengers who gossiped there. (Rebecca, passing, bought the child an icecream; fat Mrs. Maitland from the dry cleaner’s stood shaking three white chins and said to her, “It’s terrible the way they neglect their children. Most of them shouldn’t be allowed to have any.” Bray and Hjalmar were delighted with the story.) Someone spray — painted hang tola tola on the wall of the Princess Mary Library. A house was set fire to in the African township and neighbours said “Commandant Mkade” had told them that the people in that house were “Tola Tola men.” Albert Tola Tola, spending his time as he did in London, Washington, and West Germany, had never been anywhere near the remote north of his own country, and the Galas traditionally discounted the importance of the Msos, so it was more than unlikely he would have had any supporters in Gala. But whoever it was they were determined to harass, the Young Pioneers set fire to three more houses and there was street-fighting in the township at night. Selufu had most of his small force concentrated on keeping peace at the iron-ore mine, a hundred and seventy miles away; Aleke imposed a curfew in Gala, like the one in the capital. “Old Major Fielding’s offered to get together a group of volunteers to help out, patrolling the centre of town,” he said to Bray; a piece of information that was in fact a request for advice.

“Oh my God. What a prospect — Commandant Mkade and Major Fielding let loose among us with guns. Why can’t you arrest Mkade?”

“Selufu says the trouble is the evidence is so vague. You can’t prove he was behind the burnings.”

Bray found a cheap window-envelope under the lump of malachite quartz (Rebecca’s gift) he kept on his desk at the boma. A note, on a sheet torn from an exercise book, written carefully along the lines in a mission-school hand: “Have a drink at the Fisheagle Inn tonight seven o’clock.” The full stop dug deeply into the paper, apparently in indecision about the correct form to be followed where there was to be no signature. It was felt that “Yours faithfully” was essential, anyway. He thought of Shinza; but why the Fisheagle? — Perhaps he was going to be invited to join the white vigilantes.

He had to find an excuse to slip away from Rebecca and Hjalmar; they would be astonished if at this hour when they were usually all sitting cooling off under the tree, he were to announce that he was going for a drink at the Fisheagle Inn. He remarked that he would have to see Sampson Malemba around seven; Hjalmar and Rebecca were pacing out the area under the fig, Hjalmar with a metal tape that shot forth like a chameleon’s tongue, Rebecca with a notebook and pencil. Hjalmar was beginning to busy himself quietly about the house; first he had rigged up an insect-repellent yellow light so that they could read outside at night, now he was going to make a paved area under the fig tree. Rebecca had remembered the pile of bricks left lying next door in the Tlumes’ garden by the government builders. Apparently, during the day, Hjalmar, Kalimo, Mahlope, and the elder Tlume children carted them over in wheelbarrows. Rebecca and Hjalmar were discussing whether they should be laid basket-weave pattern or in contrasting horizontal and vertical blocks. “Will they be cemented?” “No, no” Hjalmar demonstrated with his hands, “If bricks are laid properly, sunk up to the face in the ground and tightly together, they don’t need anything. If you like you can leave a few open spaces to put a small shrub or so — plant something, that looks quite nice, eh? After the rains are over, when it won’t get washed away, you can establish small plants.” “Won’t it be pretty by next year?” She turned enthusiastically to Bray.

He left them working on improvements for the house as if he, she, and Hjalmar were some sort of family making their home in a place where they expected to live undisturbed for the rest of their lives.

Dave, the black barman at the Fisheagle, was popular with the white men who went there to drink. He wore a midnight blue flunkey jacket and a bow-tie and had picked up many of their turns of phrase in his fluent English. “What’ll it be, Colonel, sir? — You on your own, or you want to wait?” Grinning, flourishing a napkin across the counter, setting his little saucers of crisps scudding. Bray was thinking how ridiculously conspicuous any man of Shinza’s would look here when he realized that it was the barman himself who was singling him out for attention. “Excuse me, Colonel, sir, but your car is blocking the way — could you please move it—” As he left the bar, the barman disappeared through another door and met him in the passage. “Just come this way, what a bother.” It was for the benefit of anyone who might hear; he steered Bray past crates of empty bottles: “Go round behind that hedge by the garage, my room is there, there with the tall roof, you can see it. You got my letter okay, eh? Just open the door — he’s inside …” Shinza had friends in some unexpected places. But that was because little Gala remained, on the surface, a white colonial town and one could make the mistake of seeing black men in white contexts — it was merely because he did his job well that the “character” Dave seemed to be a white black man who shared his customers’ interests rather than any other concern; at the end of colonial times in many African states white clubmen had been shocked to find that the man they thought of as their favourite waiter or driver was in his private life a political militant.

The yard of the hotel was dark except for a single bulb above the Men’s — the one that served the bar was out there so even if he were seen there would be nothing unusual about a white man wandering about near the servants’ quarters. In the outhouse room Shinza sat on a bed raised on bricks and covered with flowered cloth. “Look — before we say another word — Selufu’s got the go — ahead to pick up anyone he considers ‘undesirable,’ which means that he’s got plenty of informers about, so—”

Shinza was shaking his head, he pressed the point of his tongue up to the broken tooth. “I don’t go near the township, no worry about that — and these people here are a hundred per cent. Basil’s arrested — you know? He was picked up at Lanje, the same day as the twenty-three.”

Aleke had said that “there were a few others” in addition to the trade union leaders. Lanje was a small village near the capital. “Well”—Shinza cut himself short— “it had to be someone, I suppose. Bad it was Basil. James, I’ve got to have a car. Basil was using the old one, my father-in-law’s.”

“You were there too?”

Shinza dismissed it. “It was all right. They missed me. But none of us can go back for the car. I need one badly, badly. I must get out of here tonight.”

“That’s not easy. In Gala everyone knows everyone else’s car.”

“I know. But I’ve got to have one.”

“All right. I’ll try.”

“Don’t try, James; I must have it …”

The room was so small they seemed to be pushed too near each other. He said to Shinza, “Did you know about Tola Tola?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was it unexpected?”

“Tola Tola was circling around us. Just before Congress he had a talk with me. He said he could carry the Msos with him, and of course, he knew a lot of people still believed in me …” Shinza laughed. “Eh? He thought if we could perhaps work together … he made it clear he could get the money — who for Christ’s sake was prepared to give money to Tola Tola? Eh? Anyway — he offered me a junior partnership or he tried to get me to talk so he could denounce me — I don’t know which it was … I told him he knew I had retired from politics. He said I was insulting him by treating him like a fool. Of course, travelling around all over, he found someone to back him, he could get his hands on things … look, James, I want you to go for us. Now.”

“To Switzerland.”

“Anywhere. Everywhere.”

Bray looked at him.

“Oh that ILO thing — well, it’s too late. There’s a chance now that may never come again. You know what I’m talking about. This mine strike wasn’t my doing, I don’t have to tell you that — but now that it’s going this way, I’ll have to move if I’m ever going to move at all. We must make use of it, you understand. It may still go on a long time, and if it becomes a general strike … if the whole country — James, what I want is you to go and get money for us. Quickly. Now. You know the right people in England. There are a few contacts of mine … there’s Sweden, East Germany. We must take money where we can, at this stage. I’ve got some, already, I’ve had some, of course. Somshetsi must have money if he’s going to help us and I need him. I need him, James. He’s got trained people … you know. With a small force of trained people in the right places at the right time, you take over your radio station and telecommunications … airport … you can bring it off without … almost without a scratch. If Mweta can’t hold this country together and we hang back, what’re you going to get? You’re going to get Tola Tola. You see that. Tola Tola or somebody like him. That’s what you’ll get. And the bribes’ll be bigger in the capital and the prisons will be fuller, and when the rains are late, like now, people will have to scratch for roots to make a bit of porridge, just the way it’s always been here.”

Bray thought, he’s saying all the right things to me; but then Shinza paused, and in this room that enclosed them as closely as a cell, there was the feeling, as often happened between them, that Shinza knew what he was thinking: was thinking the same of himself, and said, “I never thought I would ever do it. Now I have to.”

He said. “What will I say to you? I’ll think it over?”

Shinza gave a sympathetic snort.

“When I’ve ‘thought it over’ I’ll only know what I know already: that I didn’t think it would ever be expected of me. Not only by you. By myself.”

Shinza smiled at him almost paternally. “I suppose we didn’t know how lucky we were to get away without guns so far. Considering what we want. You don’t expect to get that for nothing.”

It will be such a very little token violence, Bray; and you won’t feel a thing. It will happen to other people, just as the tear gas and the baton charges do.

“But you expect it of yourself?” Shinza was saying, detachedly interested.

“Yes.”

“Good God, James, remember the old days when we used to come to your place starving hungry after meetings? After riding a bicycle fifteen miles in the rain from Mologushi Mission? And when the order came from the secretariat that I was to be “apprehended” and you decided it didn’t say arrested so you could “apprehend” me to tell me about it—?” They laughed.

“I’ll be back later if I can dig up a car. If I’m not here by say, eleven, don’t count on it.”

But Shinza seemed confident that he would be there. Perhaps he knows, too, that I have a woman, and that it will have to be her car because mine is too well known in this province.

He went back to the house and called to her from the bedroom so that he could speak to her alone. “You can use my car in the meantime, and we’ll say yours is in the garage for repair. Hjalmar won’t know you haven’t taken it to work in the morning because you’re always gone by the time he gets up—” “I only hope to God it goes,” she said, her eyes moving about the room in the manner of someone who is not going to ask questions.

He said, “The only thing that worries me is what happens if he’s arrested somewhere … it’s your car he’ll be driving. But with mine … if I were to be connected with him so obviously I wouldn’t be much use any more—”

“No no, not yours.” She held off any explanation, from both of them.

It was all practical as a discussion of what supplies they would take when they went on a little expedition to the lake at a weekend.

The night was big with humidity that could not find release — moisture could still be drawn up by the sun day after day, even in the drought, from the water and forests to the north-west. About half-past nine he said he had forgotten his briefcase at Malemba’s; out of sight round the back of the house, he took Rebecca’s car instead of his own. White men in shorts were playing darts among flying cockroaches on the lighted veranda of the Fisheagle; he remembered standing at the top of the steps there, when he had first come back to Gala, and thinking that he could make out the lake away over the glassy distance. If he had been able to see it, the girl was there ahead in that presence. He had the feeling that the area of uncertainty that surrounded him visually when he took off his glasses was the real circumstance in which he had lived his life; and his glasses were more than a means of correcting a physical shortcoming, they were his chosen way of rearranging the unknowable into a few outlines he had gone by.

He drove round to the backyard quarters. Shinza was lying on the bed, barefoot, smoking. There were two of the young men Bray had seen with him before. A radio was playing. Bray gave him the key, and he held out his yellow — palmed hand with its striations of dark, a fortune — teller’s map. “Someone’ll drive you back.” “No, I can walk.” “Hell, no, man. Really? I suppose it’s better.” Almost lazily. The young lieutenants sat, one on a chair, one on an upturned box, their feet planted, hunched forward in the manner of men who are used to using their hands, in the company of men who use words. Shinza flipped the key to one and told him in Gala to move the car down into the lane behind the Fisheagle property. He looked at the other with his impatient authoritative glance, rolling his beard between thumb and forefinger like a bread pellet. The man got up, stood a moment, and followed.

“You’re going back there?” Bray was talking of the capital.

“The army doesn’t worry me so much—” Shinza didn’t bother to answer. Bray grinned, and Shinza sat up on the creaking bed and put his arms round his knees, raising his eyebrows at himself. “—No, wait a minute. With the army I can get somewhere. A white man’s at the top. Mweta’s man, the state’s man. Brigadier Radcliffe works along with the Company’s army — as a matter of fact a friend of his trained them, an old Sandhurst colleague he recommended. Oh yes. But Radcliffe’s officers are Africans. At least two high — rankers don’t love him very much and they’re ambitious. And in any case he depends on all of them to carry out his orders. If one day they don’t … There are only three thousand men, and Cyrus has very hopeful contacts among the officers. He’s been working on it for some time.”

“Good God.”

Shinza swung his legs down over the side of the bed decisively. Bray couldn’t escape him. He went on as if nothing would stop him; the more Bray knew the less risk there was in telling him, the more bound over he would be.

“Cyrus has been pretty successful, I don’t mind saying, James. Dhlamini Okoi’s useful too. His brother’s in army area HQ. You can learn a lot from him. You know that the army was rejazzed a bit before Independence, decentralized so that almost every echelon is operational now. If you can take over control at almost any level, the orders you give will be obeyed at all levels below, because the various commanders aren’t used to taking their orders direct from GHQ any longer, as they did before. You’ve got a pretty good chance to be effective at all levels — except division and battalion, of course, because that’s GHQ. Brigadier Okoi went to Sandhurst too. He thinks he could count on the officers of the Sixth Brigade as well as his own, the Twenty-third. That’s two brigades, out of a rather small army. The main worry there is the Company task force — that’s what he calls it. It would depend how occupied that was … But the police, that’s another story.”

“Onabu as chief, but plenty of white officers who really run the show, under him.”

“Exactly. Those whites are the real professionals who just want to do what they’re paid. No chance of any of them being interested in us. And there are more police than soldiers.”

“Onabu’s not a fool, either. Roly wouldn’t have advised Mweta to hand over to him if he had been. He knows how to rely on his white officers when it comes to a situation like this. He’ll be thanking God for them.”

“That’s how it is, James. Too many policemen. And their organization is old-established, eh? People are used to listening to them. They were all we had for donkey’s years, when all there was in the way of an army was a few kids from the U.K. doing their military training here. The police force’s always been paramilitary. And they’ve got the Young Pioneers to do the things it wouldn’t look nice to do themselves. I know all that. But there are a few signs that are not so bad … D’you know of any coup in the last fifteen years or so where a police force has defended its political masters? It’s inclined to be essentially bureaucratic … And in a country this size, with a population still mostly agricultural, living in villages, the biggest numbers of policemen are in the country areas — can you see Selufu’s local men rushing off to the capital to protect a government they’ve never seen?”

He listened but would not answer.

“We’ve got other friends, too. In a good place. The Special Branch. It isn’t only a help to get information, it’s also important sometimes to be able to do something about what’s leaked. I mean, to have Tola Tola out of the way, that’s something, you know?”

“So it’s all very professional,” Bray said.

Shinza looked at him appraisingly a moment. “Yes! If it’s done properly, there should be no heads broken. Not a drop, not a scratch.”

“What about Somshetsi?”

“He’s been thinking about nothing but this sort of thing for years. We need portable equipment for communications, man — things like that. We go for the organizational centre, we don’t look for battles in the street.”

“When would you want me to go, Edward?”

“Now. As soon as you can. You’ll get back the fare at the other end. I’m going to tell you the addresses because we don’t write down anything, eh? I don’t want you to be ‘apprehended’ …”

“I don’t know how soon I can go. I’m not still playing for time. There are personal things to be arranged — thought out. I have to decide how best to do it.”

“Fine. Fine. But I won’t be here. People are always coming up and down, you can leave a message here at the bar, but it might not reach me right away. Best thing would be to make contact when you come down to get your plane. Go to Haffajee’s Garage — you know? — ask for the panel beater, Thomas Pathlo.”

“Haffajee’s Garage again.”

“Mmmh? Pathlo knows where I am. Or Goma, if I’m not there. — Well, so you’ll see the family again in England, anyway. At least I’m doing Olivia a good turn.”

“I may not be able to come back,” Bray said. “Mweta may not let me in. He must know we are in touch. And if he let me in again he would have to arrest me.”

Shinza suddenly spoke in Gala. “Perhaps he needs you to set his hand free for that, even now.” The phrase ‘to set the hand free’ meant the lifting of the taboo against harming a member of the tribe, one of one’s own.

“It’s been done,” said Bray.

They discussed exactly where he should go and what sort of support he should try to find; they arranged the contacts he should use to inform Shinza, both at home and through Somshetsi over the border. It was long after the curfew time when he began to walk home. The Fisheagle was in darkness, the main street still and shrill with crickets and the tiny anvil — ring of the tree frogs. He met only one police patrol and did not try to dodge it: a white man coming from the direction of the Fisheagle bar would hardly be regarded as a security risk. The policeman mumbled a hoarse good night in Gala and he mumbled back. Of course, in England too, he would be breaking the law; wasn’t it an offence to plan the overthrow of a friendly state? Winter was beginning there, as it was last year, almost a year ago, when he left. Cold damp leaves deadening the pavements and the sweet mouldering grave — smell muffling up against the face. England. A deep reluctance spread through him, actually slowing his steps. England.

Hjalmar and Rebecca were still outside under the fig tree when he got back to the house. Mechanically, he had taken care to open and bang shut the door of his car, so that it would seem he had driven home in it; he could smell his own sweat as he flopped down into a chair and hoped Hjalmar wouldn’t notice he’d obviously been walking. It was so hot that no one felt like going to bed. The moon had dispelled some of the haze, high in the sky, and seemed to give off reflected warmth as it did light. The strange domestic peace that had made its place among them these days, as if it could grow only in the shelter of all that made it impossible and absurd, contained them.

Later Rebecca said, “I can smell burning.” Over towards the township, the sky showed a midnight sunrise.

Chapter 20

Houses were fired that night, and fifteen people died.

“Holy” burnings began all over the country; Mweta’s “burn the dirty rags” metaphor had been seized upon by the Young Pioneers for their text. Nothing he said now, angry or desperate, threat or appeal, was able to reach them in their fierce evangelism.

Many of the strikers from the iron-ore mine had families living in Gala. On the day of the joint funeral while the police were diverted from the mine back to town to deal with the arsonists (and people whose houses had been burned began to band together to retaliate with further burnings), these strikers suddenly swarmed upon Gala. They overpowered the small contingent of police left guarding the mine and commandeered mine trucks, travelling at night, and in the confusion managed to get to the town in the morning before the police could stop them. There they somehow split into two factions, the one making across the golf course for the African township, the other ending up in the streets of Gala itself. Bray and Rebecca watched from the boma; the men had been up all night and came singing, plodding along with big, dreamlike steps, a slow prance, some of them in their mine helmets, some carrying sticks more like staffs than weapons. Rebecca had tears in her eyes; he thought it was fear. She said, “Poor things.”

Aleke sought him out, standing legs apart, holding a deep breath. “Does he think parachutes are going to drop from the sky? He’s mad. How can I get troops here now, this minute?” Selufu had knocked him up out of sleep early in the morning, and kept telephoning.

“Well, he’s a worried man.”

“Everyone’s a worried man. I’ve spoken to Matoko, I’ve put through a call to the Ministry, I’ve asked for the Minister himself. Now what does he want? To hell with it.”

He stood there looking out at the procession with a curious expression of sulky indecision. All his confident good nature seemed balanced like an avalanche that so much as a shout could cause to fall.

“Any help from Matoko?”

“Are you crazy too. There’s all hell at the asbestos mine since last week. The Company’s had to send riot breakers. They fired on the strikers yesterday, killed a woman who was somehow mixed up in it. God knows what’s going on up there.”

The singing grew cello-loud and wavering, bringing close under the windows the peculiar awe the human voice has in its power to produce. Boma clerks and messengers appeared on the patch of grass and flowers. Old Moses the gardener snaked the jet of his hose in the air and shouted in Gala, are you thirsty! The boma people laughed discreetly, expecting to be called back to work; one held a brown government folder to protect his eyes from the sun.

The strikers’ destination was not clear; it existed within, where they knew themselves threatened over months now by many things: lack of trust in the people who spoke for them at the mine, the puzzling power of men who bullied them in the name of the President’s Party, the failure of authority to protect them. They moved past the boma towards the market.

Aleke suddenly said, “Come on” and urged by an apprehension rather than clear about what they could do, Bray found himself with him, down the old wooden-balustraded stairs of the boma, out past the clerks, who, although Aleke didn’t so much as look at them, were afraid to follow, and striding up the road after the men. Aleke’s big muscular buttocks in well-pressed terylene shorts worked like an athlete’s. He managed with superb instinct to turn to advantage the undignified aspect of the chase — instead of hurrying alongside the strikers he cut a swathe for his presence right in among them. He and Bray moved up with the will of sheep-dogs swiftly through a flock. Bray felt the jogging bodies all round him and smelled the sweat and dust; more of the men recognized him than knew Aleke. Eyes on him: a contraction of inevitability, flash of exposure — as if his commitment to Shinza, his real place in all this instead of the image of himself as the neutral support of Aleke, were bared a moment for those who could see. But the habit of authority was instinctive. He and Aleke broke through the front ranks of the men just at the market and strode backwards a few paces, their hands raised in perfect accord. The singing died; the men in front stood, and those behind came on, closing. They spilled so that Aleke and Bray were surrounded, but in a clear space, among small piles of drought — wizened vegetables and dried fish. One old woman was trapped there with them at her pitch and sat without moving, horny legs drawn up under her cloth. Aleke began to speak. His arms were folded across his big chest. When the men pressed forward to hear he broke through them again and jumped on a home-made stall, standing among peanuts and manioc. It creaked but held; his strong good-humoured voice neither bullied nor pleaded. He said he knew why they had come: they were worried about their relations. But he promised that everything was being done to stop the burning and fighting. If they took it on themselves to try and stop it they would make things worse for their relations. If they would go back the way they came he would personally guarantee that they would not be arrested or molested….

He knew and they knew that he could promise nothing of the sort. But they believed he would try; and their purpose, unsure of its proper expression, wavered, comforted, before his command. The tension dissolved as he moved talking among the men, and the people in the market broke into discussion, peering and pointing. Bray said, “Get them back to the golf course. Out of here as quickly as possible. But it would be safer to manage it in groups. And they must avoid the main street.” There were about a hundred and fifty men; difficult not to alter by too obvious a taking over of the authority of the leaders, the atmosphere of consent rather compliance that Aleke had managed to create.

“Shall we go with them ourselves?” Aleke and he stood as if in a crowd coming out of a football match, sweat streaming down their faces, the market flies settling everywhere. Aleke wanted above all to avoid any encounter with the police. Then with a touch of old easy confidence: “I’m going to look a damn fool, stepping it out in front.”

“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.

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.

Chapter 21

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.”

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.

He got up and called her from the dark veranda.

She found him in the bedroom, where they would be safe from Hjalmar. He was sitting on the bed. He said, “We’re leaving tomorrow. We’ll pack up tonight and go in the morning.”

She came no farther into the room. “Why don’t you believe me. I’m not going.”

He put out his hand to her. “Come here. My darling, we’re going together.”

“You are taking me because I wouldn’t go the other day.”

“No, no. I’m not going to dump you anywhere. We’re going. I can’t stay here acting vigilante for Aleke, can I? How can I?”

She stood in front him where he sat, looking down at him, slightly drawn back. He slowly put out his hands and rested a palm on the shape of each hip.

“You are coming with me?”

“We’ll go together.”

“And then?”

“I’m not sure. We’ll go to the hotel so’s I won’t compromise anybody by anything I do … we’ll say I’ve had to come to bring you down because it was unsafe here. — It is unsafe.”

“I was only afraid of one thing — not getting back.”

“I know. But I’ll be there.”

“You won’t come back here?”

He shook his head.

“Not at all?”

“Perhaps not.”

“This funny house of yours,” she said. She sat down on the bed beside him and took his hand.

She asked, “You mean you’ll go to Switzerland?”

There was a ringing closeness in the room around them. Inside him was an experience exactly the reverse of the emptiness, the sense of all forces disengaged and fallen apart, that he had been having all day.

“Maybe. But it’s too late for that. There’s something else I have to do in Europe. I’ll tell you tomorrow when we’re out of here. But so far as everyone else is concerned, I’m just in town because of bringing you, hmm?”

“How can we go together. Overseas,” she said slowly, using the colonial’s term, loaded with distance and unattainableness.

“We’ll see. Perhaps we can manage. We’ll decide what to do. I can’t stay here, my darling.” He stroked her hair, it had grown, it was growing very long. She said, “What are you thinking?”

He smiled at her. “—What a pity, in a way.”

It was she who thought of Hjalmar. They agreed, of course he would go down to the capital with them. “And it’ll make it easy for him to make it up with the family. I mean it won’t look as if he’s come crawling back.” He went to the garden to tell Hjalmar; the good-looking blond head was bent, skull asserting itself gradually now through the thinning hair and drawn bright skin, reading George Orwell’s letters over the top of rather than through rimless lenses. Hjalmar took the glasses off and listened with detached reasonableness. Then he got up, closing the book, nodding in understanding. He asked a few factual questions about the journey — there were no roadblocks, no difficulty on that stretch of road, eh? Bray said he’d heard nothing like that. Hjalmar went purposefully indoors; there was his voice remarking something to Rebecca, and her laugh.

Bray turned off the light so that the colour shrank away into darkness as a piece of paper, swollen with the glow of flame, suddenly turns black and shrivels. In the dark he felt one or two of the big ants that journeyed ceaselessly over the fig crawl blunderingly over his foot. The multiple trunks of the tree, twisted together forty feet up, made the shape of a huge wigwam under the spread of its enormous, half-bald branches. How old was it? As old as the slave-tree? He had found thickened scars where at some point or other in its life there had been an attempt to hack it down. A reassuring object, supporting life even in the teeming parasites whose purpose of existence was to eat it out from within; an organism whose heart couldn’t be got at because it was many trees, each great arterial trunk rotting away in the embrace of another that held still the form of sap and fibre; a thing at once gigantic and stunted, in senile fecundity endlessly putting out useless fruit on stumps and in crotches. But only for trees is it enough simply to endure; not for human beings. The black heat was stirred by small whirls of air currents, somewhere in its density the tree frogs clinked ceaselessly. He had known this night a thousand times.

He went into the house, stood looking at the table of papers, left it and went into the bedroom where Rebecca was already emptying drawers. The spear-fishing goggles and guns were dumped in a corner. “We can stick them in one of those big laundry baskets of Kalimo’s. I would have liked to go one last time to the lake.” He said, “They say the spear-fishing’s wonderful in Sardinia.” “Sardinia, here we come.” She waved a blue snorkel. She stood as if she were momentarily giddy: “It doesn’t seem real, does it?”

“No. It never does.” Very far back in his mind, he had been putting these clothes in this suitcase in Wiltshire. A sentence came to him idiotically, like the line of a popular song: Your waist measurement hasn’t changed for ten years. Now, as then, a decision became the progression of small practical tasks. He found a basket for the spear — fishing gear; in the end he did shuffle together all the papers and files from his table and look around for something to pack them in. There was a thin plywood box of the tea-chest kind that he thought would do, if he could clean it out a bit. He had turned it upside-down and was banging at the base; Hjalmar appeared and watched a moment with the tentative air of someone who doesn’t know whether or not to help or give advice. “And how’re you getting on? Finished already?”

Hjalmar sat down on the edge of an old veranda chair whose legs splayed under weight. He said shyly, “I think I’ll stay and keep an eye on things in the house.”

Bray was picking an old label off the box. A small cockroach flashed from beneath, fell to the floor and was caught by his sole. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, you know.”

“That’s okay. Maybe I’ll come down soon. If I get lonely or so. Do you want to take the Orwell?”

“Good lord, keep the books. There’s nowhere to put them.”

Rebecca appeared with an armful of children’s worn-out sandals. “What’s this about?”

“Hjalmar’s decided to hang on a bit.”

“Oh. Have you?” she said, friendly, awkward, to make it seem neither unreasonable nor unexpected.

Hjalmar gave a short laugh— “It may sound crazy, but you know I want to finish the paving out there under the tree. I hate to leave it half-finished — you know? Then I’ll be able to decide the … the next thing. Only I must do it first. It’s such a mess there with the fruit dropping and the leaves on that uneven ground. When it’s paved all you need to do is just sweep it off.”

“That reminds me — money for Mahlope and Kalimo. If I give you a cheque could you pay them? And please — phone Aleke for me, tomorrow — tell him I decided to get Rebecca out.” He wrote the cheque to the amount of three months’ wages for each servant and enough left over to keep the house running for a while, but Hjalmar put it in his wallet without glancing at it. Bray looked at the chest with a sudden infirmity of purpose. “Hjalmar — if I leave this stuff, could you pack it away for me sometime? And then if you come down, either you could bring it or—?”

“Of course, no trouble. I’ll see to everything.”

While they fetched and carried and threw away, turning out the life of Bray’s house as one turns out a drawer, Hjalmar busied himself making tea.

He said to the girl as the three of them drank it, “I like this house. I’m going through a bad time but just the same I like this house.” She stood there strangely with the cup in her hand and Bray saw her looking, looking, eyes averted, round the ugly, shabby, impersonal furniture, the chairs they had talked in, the table they had eaten at. There was a moment’s embarrassment, as if something too intimate had been spoken aloud. But most of that night she struck him as vividly animated — suppressing animation. The thought even crossed his mind once: perhaps she is elated without knowing it at moving towards her children again.

They went to the narrow bed in which somehow or other they had slept many nights, folded together or rolled away to the edges in the heat, always touching at some point, at shoulder or foot, or hair to hand, as if one sympathetic nervous system took over and controlled two bodies in a special tolerance. They had both had a shower and lay naked without covering and without having dried themselves properly — evaporation at least gave the sensation of coolness. She said, “I want to feel you in me but we won’t make love.”

“We’ll have a big bed at the Great Lakes. They must have big beds.”

“Will we get there in one day?”

“We’ll just keep on driving, mmh?” He had his hand on her face and he felt her smile.

Sometime later the rain came. Thunder bore down grandly upon the roof, he half-woke and saw his foot coming down on the quick cockroach, a shiny almond. He had softened and fallen away from the warm tunnel of her. The forest of heavy rain hid them, and they slept.

In the morning there was a world that had cast its skin. All the green glistened like dragonfly wings drying in the sun. The jacarandas had shed their shape in fallen flowers on the ground. Glossy starlings flashed about; Hjalmar was out there, seeing how his brick mosaic had stood up to the wet.

Mahlope put the three suitcases and the basket with Gordon Edwards’ spear-fishing equipment into the car. Kalimo trotted back and forth with his hands under his apron, watching. Bray had told him Doña was going to her friends in the capital. To him the capital was the two Poles and all the great cities and places of the earth: if you got there, you were near everywhere. “And bring my greetings to the children, please,” he said in English to Rebecca, smiling and repeating in a comforting rumble, “Yes … yes … mm’h …” When they said good — bye he handed over the basket they always took with them for picnics at the lake. “Is it eggs with small fish in, as well?” Bray said. The old man hunched with laughter— “Those eggs you like it, blead, litt’e bit cheese—”

“No roast chicken?” Rebecca said.

Kalimo’s eyes were rheumy at the good old joke. “Well, Mukwayi he didn’t tell me you driving today! I don’t cook chicken for roaste’ yesterday night—”

“As long as we’ve got those eggs, Kalimo.”

Hjalmar kissed Rebecca. “Walking out on the job, eh? Where’m I going to get another bricklayer’s assistant? You’ll see when you come back, it’ll all be finished for you.”

Hjalmar and Kalimo were left, the one with hands on hips, the other’s under his apron. Mahlope, chatting outside his room with a friend, waved cheerfully. Rebecca settled herself more comfortably, lit cigarettes. “I feel as if we were going off to the lake.”

As the old Volkswagen left Gala behind they left the whole anger and disruption of the country behind there as well. The boma under guard, the smashed stalls of the market, the scars and stains where flies hung, marking the place of street battles, the dead smell of charred buildings — all this that they lived among was undertow beneath their wheels: it seemed that the light screens of forest and bamboo around the firm wet road provided no surface to reflect turmoil, to be seized by the violent charge and make it manifest; the current was earthed.

He pointed out the track leading to Tippo Tib’s Arab fort.

“We never ever managed to go—”

“I must take you one day. It’s quite impressive.”

The road ran empty for many miles. Now and then there were the usual bags of charcoal waiting for custom; a barefoot man appealed from the forest. Where rain had fallen parties of women were out with their hoes. The few villages looked lean and wispy after the drought. In patches of scrub, one night’s rain was enough to have brought the wild lilies blooming straight from the sand. They had an eye for everything; the past week became a prison from which they suddenly found themselves let out. Talk rose and died down; sometimes they let the repetition of trees and giant bouquets of bamboo flow over them dreamily. Thoughts broke up and formed like spume on a sea. They laughed at the prospect of the household consisting of Hjalmar and Kalimo quietly following their private obsessions. “But Kalimo will be in charge.” “Oh without question. He will play Margot to Hjalmar’s Hjalmar.”

“I can’t help feeling sorry for Margot,” Rebecca said. “A weak man makes you into a bitch. Even I felt like beginning to bully poor old Hjalmar a bit over that paving.”

“Even you? You’ve always been able to smell out a weak man?”

“Mmm. If I’m attracted by one, there’s still something that protects me.”

“When first I knew you — knew about you from other people — I thought you were very much the type to be exploited. Emotionally and in other ways; by everybody. And your friends gave that impression. Vivien was always anxious about you.”

“Oh well, I got into a bad way down there. They didn’t trust Gordon, any of them. Oh I mean, everybody always likes Gordon — but they didn’t think Gordon treated me properly. I knew they were sorry for me. They persisted in being sorry for me. It made me behave funnily; I can’t explain, but when they made passes at me — Neil, the others — I saw that they felt they could do it because to me they could risk showing that things weren’t so good for them, either. I felt sorry for them. I felt what did it matter …” She put a hand on his thigh. “You don’t like to hear about it.”

“Vanity, I suppose. Stupid male vanity, not much different from theirs. I ought to be ashamed of it. I’ve always believed in freedom in sex. Not that I’ve taken much of it. But on principle.”

She laughed. “I’m glad. I don’t want you to have made love to a lot of women.”

“Although you’ve made love to a lot of men?”

“I’m not like you. It doesn’t matter for me. But there’s one thing that matters a lot — I’d decided I couldn’t stay down there among my friends any longer, before it began with you and me. I came to Gala because I wanted to get away from that.”

A moment later she said, “You’re thinking about the first time, in your living-room.”

“Yes.”

“You’re right. It did seem it was like the others.”

“You wanted to show me I had a need of you before I could begin to feel sorry for you.”

“You were, already. That poor girl with her kids. And where’s the husband?”

“Yes. I ought to have offered you my house instead of letting you pay for those weeks at the Fisheagle.”

“But after you went down to see Mweta and came back again you made it right. From the day we went to the lake it was all different. I was different.”

“Were you?”

“You made me different.”

“Have I reformed you, my darling, your paunchy old lover. You don’t want other men any more.” But he knew it made her sad to hear him refer to himself as getting old.

“Living with you is different from anything else.”

“But it has been for me, too.”

“Oh don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“Not has been.”

“My darling! I just mean the time at Gala, that’s all. Kiss me.” He turned to her quickly a moment.

She rested content, against his shoulder; she waved at a solitary figure at the roadside.

“You don’t think Gordon has … well … presented you with a certain element of weakness?”

“How d’you mean?”

“Well you told me he would never dream of thinking you could be interested in men.”

She gave a small chuckle. “That’s because Gordon’s so sure of himself in everything. Gordon can cope.”

“But that’s arrogance, pride. You’ve proved it a weakness in him, haven’t you?”

“In a way. But you say you believe in sexual freedom.”

“We’re talking about Gordon — he doesn’t see it as sexual freedom, it’s quite the opposite — he doesn’t even see the possibility of sexual freedom for you.”

“Of course it wasn’t sexual freedom. Just that the whole thing didn’t mean much. Whether he thought me incapable of bothering about any man, or I thought it didn’t matter whether I did or not — it all amounted to the same thing.” Her weight was slack and warm against him. “I’m very jealous of Olivia. I suppose that’s what it is: I have a horrible feeling when I think of her.”

“Why do you think you’re so jealous, since you’re different from me, with my stupid sexual jealousy about the other men?”

“I don’t know.” She seemed to wait for the answer to come to her. “Because you don’t separate sex and love. — Do you? If you slept with her again it would be because you love her.”

What she had said did not conjure up for him Olivia, but Gordon — the red road was drawn away under his eyes through the windscreen already dirtied with insects, and it was Gordon he saw, talking away, coming across the strip of scrub between his house and the Tlumes’.

“I don’t know why — I feel so marvellously sleepy. Keep sort of dropping off.”

She slept for more than half an hour, thirty or forty miles. His mind was calm. It was not that he had no doubts about what he was doing, going to do; it seemed to him he had come to understand that one could never hope to be free of doubt, of contradictions within, that this was the state in which one lived — the state of life itself — and no action could be free of it. There was no finality, while one lived, and when one died it would always be, in a sense, an interruption. He went over and over in his mind the possibilities of raising money for Shinza quickly. Perhaps, the way things were going, Shinza would be dead before he could arrange anything; perhaps Shinza would go into exile over the border, and Mweta would hang on a while. Perhaps there would be many more burned houses, more blood running as easily as chickens’ blood in fighting in which the real cause was not understood, in which the side-reactions of little groups of people battled out apparently uselessly the passions of the real struggle to which their situation — the years of slavery, isolation, colonization — committed them. There would be waste and confusion. He was party to it, part of it. The means, as always, would be dubious. He had no others to offer with any hope of achieving the end, and as he accepted the necessity of the end, he had no choice.

The instincts in himself that he had unconsciously regarded as the most civilized, unwilling to risk — as a fatal contradiction in terms — his own skin or that of others for the values of civilization, were outraged. He was aware (driving between the swish of tall grass stroked by the car’s speed) of going against his own nature: something may be worth suffering for as a matter of individual conviction, but nothing is worth bringing about the suffering of others. If people kill in a cause that isn’t mine, there’s no blood on my shoes; therefore stand aside. But he had put aside instead this “own nature.” It was either a tragic mistake or his salvation. He thought, I’ll never know, although other people will tell me for the rest of my life. Rebecca’s hair fluttered against his shoulder in the draught from the window. He passed a swampy dambo and there were the widow-birds hovering their long black tails. A snake lay coiled in the road and he avoided it; the next car would kill it. There was also in his mind the possibility that he would go and see Mweta one last time, in the capital. The preposterousness of the thing lay like a jewel that has fallen into a pool and rolled among the stones like any other pebble. If one could pick it out … and even now, since only audacity was possible, Mweta might seize upon Shinza, not the enemy but the only chance. … He saw himself actually walking up the steps to the red brick façade of that huge house; he supposed the image would fade out as the shape of an hallucination born of obsession fades, with health, into an empty wall.

His mind scarcely ran ahead to Shinza, because that he was being borne towards as surely as the road was the one to the capital. Haffajee’s Garage. And if Shinza had moved off to another part of the country, it did not matter. He had the list. Shinza was not a man who depended on you; it was rather that he banked on what you would have to do, driven from within yourself. He knew one doesn’t ask of a man what is not there already.

And if Hjalmar is attacked in the house? — Why should that be, there was no anti-white feeling as such in Gala’s state of siege. But by hazard — someone with a petrol-soaked rag flaming on a stick turning down one street rather than another; one of Fielding’s vigilantes losing his nerve at a shadow? But what Hjalmar had in him was survival. Hjalmar would not escape that. It was in his instinct for staying put, there in Gala; he fears nothing so much as the situation of his marriage. — I’ll have to go and see Margot, he thought, feeling the girl give a shuddering sigh in her sleep; I can tell her quite honestly he’s not making a bad recovery. Curiously, although the nervous breakdown had had the effect of making Hjalmar lose interest in what was once his passion to talk politics, so that they had never talked of what was happening as anything more coherent than a series of sensational village events, he had the impression now that Hjalmar understood perfectly what his — Bray’s — position in Gala had been these last weeks, as if the shattering of Hjalmar’s own core had opened and laid twitching bare a heightened receptivity to the unspoken, to the inner reality that such talk itself buries. Hjalmar had made a remark, one of the nights when they had watched the township burning from the garden: “The fire’s in the minds of men, not in the roofs of houses”—it came from somewhere in Dostoevski.

Rebecca woke up. Her cheek was marked with the folds of his bush jacket, her eyes were still dazed and darkened with sleep. He stopped the car a minute for her. She found herself a culvert and came back along the road in the sun, smiling, twirling a lily she had picked. She was wearing her old jeans and moved a little awkwardly, perhaps conscious that they showed her to be as she had always been, a bit heavy in the thigh. She looked so young when she woke up — like that every morning. Life seemed to breathe out of her skin as vapour does through the earth above a mineral spring; wherever he touched her neck or face there was a pulse beating.

They stopped late to eat Kalimo’s lunch, sitting on the newspaper wrappings because the ground was richly damp. They felt lazy to talk about anything important, after all; it would carry away into the quiet and airy savannah forest as their voices must be doing, wandering, far. There was no sound of birds, in the middle of the day. But Rebecca did say to him, at last, pouring the coffee from the thermos, “If it’s not going to be Switzerland, well, what?”

“I’ll know in a few days. I’ll tell you just a few facts for now, because I shouldn’t talk about this at all. Not to anyone. Not even to you.”

“Not even here?” She lifted a hand at the forest, half-joking.

“But when I know exactly, I’ll tell you everything. Because you must know.”

The dappled shade made a shawl on her arms, her eyes were on him. “So far it’s just this — there may be something I can do — for Shinza. And I will do it. Whatever it is.”

She did not say, what about me? She got up as if to begin tidying up the remains of the meal and then came over behind him where he squatted on his haunches and put her arms around his neck and pressed his head back against her belly.

He said, “I’ll tell you everything.”

“I know you will. This time.”

She came and squatted in front of him and took off his glasses. She touched the skin round his eyes and played the old game, looking into the shortsighted opacity that she complained of. He said, “If I start kissing you we’ll never get there.” She picked up the thermos. “Shall I pour the rest away?”

“Well, we might still feel like some later.”

“It won’t be hot.”

“Never mind, it’ll be wet.”

As they moved back to the car two children appeared out of the forest; or they had been there, behind the trees, patiently watching for the moment to come forward. She gave into their cupped hands the remains of the bread and cheese and the last of the eggs with small fish in them. Before the car had driven off the two frail figures had disappeared once more into the forest.

Not long after they came upon what was evidently a road-block that had been half cleared. Branches and stones had been dragged aside and there was just sufficient room for the car to pass. There was nobody about, but it was not far from the turn-off to the cattle-dipping station sixty miles from Matoko. No rain had fallen yet in this part of the country; towards three o’clock the heat and the monotonous rhythms of motion, of the hot current of air coming past the windows with the sound of someone whistling through his teeth, now made him drowsy. They changed over; Rebecca drove but he did not sleep, merely stretched himself as much as he could in the small car and rested his eyes away from the hypnotic path of the road. Now he was the one to light cigarettes for her. He had shut his eyes for a moment, when he heard her make a small sound of impatience beside him, and he roused himself and saw that up ahead, quite far, was another road-block. There was a heat — mirage that magnified the jumble of branches and green; they couldn’t make out very well whether it stretched across the whole road or not. She slowed down and they kept their eyes strained on the obstacle. But of course she could see so much better than he. “Damn it, it is right across. Now wha’d’we do?”

“Just keep going slowly.” He put his head out the window; the grass was very high, elephant grass, very dry, last season’s grass still standing; a dead tree had been dragged into the road, roots and all, broken branches had been piled upon it. She stopped and turned off the engine.

“Let’s have a look. You stay in, a minute.”

He walked slowly to the barrier, climbed over to the other side, walked up and down it and climbed back. He came to the car, smiling. “How energetic are you feeling? We’ll have to do some hard labour.” She got out and they started with the easy stuff, the broken branches. But the tree trunk, with its dead roots clasping a great boulder of red earth with which it must have been uprooted in some storm, would not budge. She began to laugh helplessly at their grunting efforts. “Wait a moment, my girl. What about trying the jack? If we get it under this hollow bit here, maybe we can get a little elevation and then heave.”

The jack wasn’t kept in the boot, in the front, but under the back seat, because the clamp that held it in its proper place had been broken ever since he bought the car. He got in and dumped the picnic basket on the front seat and jerked up the back one in a release of dust. At the same time something burst out of the grass, he felt himself grabbed by the leg, by the waist, and he was caught between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat, somehow desperately hampered by the size and strength of his body. At once there were people all round and over and in the car, there had been no sound and now there was nothing but yells and shouts and his great, his lung-bursting, muscle-tearing effort and he did not know if they were yelling, the men who were upon him, or if Rebecca was screaming. Even greater than his effort to defend himself was his terrible effort to make himself heard by her, to reach her with his voice and make her run. They had his legs out of the car and the back of his neck hit the rim of the floor and he was deafened, his voice became a silent scream to him as pain felled him for a moment, but then a brute strength burst up in him and he got to his feet, he was aware of himself staggered gigantically to his feet among men smaller than he. Then he was below them, he was looking up at them and he saw the faces, he saw the sticks and stones and bits of farm implements, and sun behind. Something fell on him again and again and he knew himself convulsed, going in and out of pitch black, of black nausea, heaving to bend double where the blows were, where the breath had gone, and he thought he rose again, he thought he heard himself screaming, he wanted to speak to them in Gala but he did not know a word, not a word of it, and then something burst in his eyes, some wet flower covered them, and he thought, he knew: I’ve been interrupted, then—