“Maybe.” Shinza made the concession of one who does not agree. “Maybe I should blame myself. I should have seen.”
“What could you have done, with things as they were?”
“I should have seen what he was.”
Bray gave a little snort of a laugh. “I always say the same thing. It always comes round to the same thing. It should have been both of you. It was the two of you. One didn’t know what originated with which one — of course always granting the influence of your trade union experience. One couldn’t foresee how he would develop after a split. Or how you would, for that matter.”
“I’ve always known what we were going to do. Nothing’s changed at all with me. I was just too damned lazy, I suppose … you’ve got to give yourself a kick in the backside sometime.” He put his hands behind his head, smiling, making his words ambiguous by the easy gesture.
“You definitely don’t consider starting a new party?”
Shinza was shaking his head before the words were out. “I’ve told you. PIP is this country — just as he says, PIP made it. Everything must come from PIP. He would like a purified party, of course, degutted like the bloody fishing concession. PIP is the party I started.”
“It was meant as a leading question,” Bray said.
“I don’t hide from you. You see it all exactly as I do, you haven’t changed either, it’s just you’ve got the same polite nice way of speaking you always had, really nice, covering it up … James! But if you had to choose between Mweta and what happens to this country — Good God!”
“He said more or less the same to me.” It was dryly, gently set aside; he smiled.
“With one essential difference, of course, whatever he decides for this country must be right.” Shinza stretched his toes like fingers and clenched the leather button that held each sandal.
“No, no — just the implication that I would do what is usually known as ‘anything’—in other words, something that went against my grain — because it might help.” Still the old maid, setting the mats straight, he thought.
“Help? What?” said Shinza. “To hold the country together almost exactly as it was before? To keep the sort of status quo the Europeans call stability — the stability of overseas investment, the stability of being so poor your feast comes once a year when the caterpillars hatch on the mopane? But we want an instability, James, we want an instability in the poverty and backwardness of this country, we want the people at the top to be a bit poorer for a few years now, so that the real, traditional, rock — bottom poverty, the good old kind that ‘never changes’ in Africa, can be broken up out of its famous stability at last, at long, long last, dragged up from the shit—”
How demandingly, alive, they both reached out — he and Mweta. Bray said, “I must tell you, he may have some idea about your going over the border. He mentioned something — before I came to see you again. I didn’t take much notice at the time.”
“Borders! Doesn’t mean anything in the Bashi,” Shinza said. “People are wandering over after their goats, every day. You forget we’re the same people on both sides.”
“If I can imagine what you’re doing there, it’s reasonable that he may.”
Shinza was drawing and swallowing smoke with absent appetite. Once a cigarette was lit it remained in the side of his mouth until it burned down to his lips.
Bray said, “What’s it all about — Somshetsi and Nyanza?”
“The usual thing, in exile.” The glance held, direct, as if to prevent Bray’s mind from venturing off this chosen interpretation of the question. “They haven’t been getting on too well.… Nyanza’s always been a pretty easy — going chap, sitting back and waiting for the fruit to fall. When Mweta said go, he just went straight to Somshetsi”—he jerked his bearded chin—” ‘pack up’; never occurred to him to make a bit of fuss, to let a few friends know.… I mean they could have played for time, there could have been denials, protests to the High Commissioner for refugees at U.N. —”
They grinned. “Considering the way they were scrupulously observing the conditions of hospitality,” Bray said; and waved his own provision aside.
Shinza said matter — of-factly, “Well, that’s about it. Somshetsi thinks Nyanza will just make himself comfortable wherever he gets pushed off to next. Somshetsi wants to get going. He doesn’t see himself dying in bed with the grandchildren round. Of course there’s help to be found if you show you’re moving.”
“Not much you can do if you’re the width of a whole country away.”
“No, that’s true.” Shinza agreed with detachment.
“I can see what you can offer — promise — Somshetsi, but I don’t quite see what he has worth offering you.”
There was the understanding between them of people who are both lying; Shinza’s flexed bare yellow toes with their thick, uncut nails; the silence, strangely easy. With tremendous effort to break free: “Unless you’re thinking of going in for a guerrilla war.”
“And then?”
It was being drawn out of him; Shinza wouldn’t say it for himself. “I suppose — you could give him a leg up over the border, he could bring the arms from outside, you could do things together. Just as the South African and the Rhodesian guerrillas do, through Zambia. Only more successfully, I should think. It would depend whether you’re prepared to use violence.”
Shinza’s head nodded, hearing a lesson by rote. Then he said, “I like to know I have a chance to win.”
Perhaps he referred to the hopelessness of starting a new party, perhaps — he gave a half — comic shudder — he implied that he couldn’t win a guerrilla war if he were so unwise as to start one.
“You’re going to turn up at the Party Congress?”
“Turn up? It sounds like a dance hall.” He rose from the base of the spine, straight — backed. “I’m on the Executive. Still. I’m going to be there.”
“Bravo!”—How easily I fall whichever way he aims.
“And you’re going to be there?”
The answer came pat, in the same mood. “I’m a Party member. I suppose I still am? But of course I don’t belong to any delegation I know of.”
“Oh he’ll see to that. You remind him.” Shinza said in a satisfied way that made Bray uneasy, “Good God, I wanted to talk to you, you know, James? It’s all right, all right. I knew it would be all right. You can’t be fooled.”
“Shinza, I just have a — well — mad hope. About the Congress. You may be able to do something about the — direction. That’s the place.”
“Well, come and see. Come and give us a hand.” Shinza was not good at being hearty; he gave his smoker’s wheezy laugh at himself. “Come and be frog — marched out with me, it’ll be like the old days.”
The dog had got up and stood swaying its plumes in the veranda doorway. Boxer appeared, making his approach exaggeratedly forewarned by grunting as he mounted the steps, sighing and whew — ing; the dog was puzzled. Boxer spoke to the black man sitting in his living-room with the offhand, demonstrable ease of one whose forms of intimacy, if they exist, are thereby defined as something far removed from this. “You flourishing, Shinza? Of course. What’s the grass been like this year? Of course, you’re bored by cattle, I know. But your father — in-law — he must have a nice five or six hundred head, eh? One never can get at the figure. But those chaps down there have got sizeable herds, all right. I wouldn’t mind a share. Was there much redwater this year? It’s been a bugger, here. I’ve lost fifteen or sixteen of my beasts.”