Kalimo arrived back and cooked him some supper. Afterwards he stood under the fig tree in the dark, smoking one of the big cigars he didn’t allow himself too often. There were bats at the fruit, the most silent and unobtrusive of creatures, torn — off rags of darkness itself. He wondered with whom he could take the traditional refuge of dropping in for a drink. Not the club, the new member taking up his rights. Not Aleke. He could go to that girl, Rebecca Edwards, one of the group in the capital. But he and she would have nothing to talk about; his mind was blank of small talk. He leant against the tree and the cigar burned down to a finger of firm ash. Ants ran alerting a fine capillary tree of nerves over his back.
He went inside and wrote to his wife, suggesting that she make up her mind and fly out within the next two weeks. He had to go to the capital in any case, and this would mean that he could meet her and drive her back on the same trip. After he had signed, he wrote: All our reasons for your not coming seem to be simply because we can’t put a name to why you should come. It was a love letter, then. He scored it out. He wrote, experimentally, All our reasons for your coming seem to be defeated by some unknown reason for your not coming. He felt he did not understand what he had said. He did not stick down the envelope. He put it with the pages he had covered for Mweta; about Mweta.
In the morning, he left the pages there. At least until he had spoken to Aleke. At least until then.
Aleke and his new secretary were starting the day with a cup of coffee when he arrived at the offices. It was an atmosphere he had known all his life — what he thought of as “all his life,” the years in Africa. The offices still stuffy but cool before the heat of the day, the clerks talking lingeringly over their shoulders as they slowly began their to — and-fro along the passages; the time before the satchel of mail came in. Aleke filled his pushed — back chair and questioned Rebecca Edwards with the banter of a working understanding.
“You didn’t forget to stick in Paragraph B, Section Seventeen, eh, my girl.” She leaned against the windowsill, cup in one hand, cigarette in the other. “I did not.” Of course, she could be counted on to take work home over the weekend; Aleke said it himself: “You’re an angel. And will you get that file up to date by Friday? Cross your heart?” He had for Bray the smile with which a busy man greets one who has been off on some pleasure — trip. “Well, how was the bush? Get through all right?” There was chatter about the condition of the road. “Mr. Scott said to Stanley Nko, ‘The best thing would be for the Bashi Flats to secede….’” (Nko had taken over from the white Provincial Manager of Public Works, Scott.) Quoting, Aleke was immensely amused at this solution to the problem, and they all laughed.
“Could I have a word with you, Aleke?” Bray asked.
“Oh sure, sure.”
Rebecca Edwards tactfully made to leave at once. “Here, here, don’t forget these—” A file was waved at her.
Aleke got up, took the lavatory key from its tidy nail, and went off for the daily golden moment, saying, “Be with you right away — if you want to listen to the news—” He gestured at the transistor radio on his desk.
Chapter 8
Aleke was washing his hands with boma soap, drying them on the strip of boma towel.
“I gave a young fellow a lift,” Bray said.
Aleke began to nod and turned smiling at a story he could guess— “Long as he didn’t bash you over the head. It’s getting as bad as down in town. What’d he take off you? Some of these fellows from the fish factory — I don’t stop for anybody, any more, honestly.”
“Yes, from the fish factory — but he’d just come out of prison. He’d been inside more than two — and-a-half months. No trial. No charges laid. Here in Gala, in Lebaliso’s jail.”
Aleke sat down at his desk and listened to something he knew instead of guessed. He put out his hand and switched on the fan; he probably did this every morning at exactly the same time, to ward off the heat as it came. His face was open to Bray. “You know about it,” Bray said.
“Lebaliso kept me in the picture.”
“So it was Lebaliso’s decision?”
“We’d been keeping an eye on that fellow a long time. Shinza’s chap.”
Bray said, “What d’you mean, Shinza’s chap?”
“There’re a lot of Bashi working here now. Shinza sees they make a nuisance of themselves now and again. In the unions and so on.”
“Aleke.” Bray made the attempt to lift the whole business out of the matter-of-fact, where Aleke let it lie like a live bomb buried in an orderly garden. “Aleke; Lebaliso shut up a man for two months and seventeen days.”
“From what I was told, this one was a real trouble — maker. I mean, it’s not my affair, except that what’s good for the province concerns me. From that point of view, I’m expected to keep an eye on things. If there’s likely to be any trouble, I just like to know what I’m expected”—in mid — sentence he changed his mind about what he was saying— “well, I must be kept more or less in the picture.”
“And what you see is Lebaliso taking the law into his own hands.”
Aleke was friendly, tried to invoke the amusement at Lebaliso he and Bray had shared. “Of course I said to him at the beginning, the magistrate’s the man to go to with your troubles. Not me. Anyway it seems something had to be done about that fellow. They wanted to know a bit more about him.”
Bray said, “Was Onabu the one who was interested?” Aaron Onabu was Chief of Police, in the capital.
Aleke agreed rather than answered. “I suppose so.”
Bray said, bringing out each word steadily, “And I never heard a word from anyone in Gala.”
“We-ll, you’ve had other things to do but think about old Lebaliso up there—” The hand waved in the direction of the prison, behind the trees, behind the village. “We’ve all got enough on our hands. But this girl, Bray — I’m telling you, my life is different now. When I want something, it’s there. If I forget something, she’s remembered. And give her anything you want done, too. If you want your reports typed. She’ll do it; she’s a worker, man.”