Applause and dissent clashed like the two halves of a cymbal; many who applauded did so in the hunch — shouldered, half — defiant way of those who fear disapproval. Country people whose characteristics and clothes had not seemed prominent in the ranks of knees and faces suddenly emerged in a distinctive force of numbers. Faces with tribal marks, stretched ear — lobes hanging to frayed shirt — collars — they seemed to be everywhere. Bray felt oddly elated; yet for the moment he had hardly taken in what Shinza had said — he had been gauging the faces around him, the faces on the stage. Mweta kept his head turned away while Shinza was speaking; no reaction whatever, except perhaps — revealed to Bray’s nervously heightened observation — a slight lift of the chin that showed he was listening, all right, after all. The motion was very narrowly defeated, and the defeat greeted with a grumbling groan of resentment; the collective presence is a strangely emotional entity, whose combined voice has a command of expressive noises — nonsyllabic cries, warnings, keenings — that the people who comprise it have forgotten how to produce, individually. Cyrus Goma moved restlessly in the restriction of his own defeat. Shinza met nobody’s eye, looking straight ahead with what, from Bray’s distance, looked like a faint, private smile, or a delicate lifting of the lips in endurance. While Bray’s eyes were on him he suddenly scratched himself vigorously on the chest; a kind of comic signal, a sign of life.
He certainly had made an impression on Congress. If two sharply defined factions had never existed before, they did now. When those delegates hesitantly but irresistibly sounded their palms for Shinza, his support, his own popular following came into being once again for everyone present to see and hear. It existed now. Mweta must know that. He must have taken, too, the messages smoothly slipped into the speech that were meant for him; no turning away of the head could avoid them.
In the foyer Bray came out of the men’s room and into Roly Dando and Shinza at exactly the moment they couldn’t ignore each other. Dando said, “So that’s your line now, Edward,” just as if they had been meeting every day. “I have no line, Roly. I’ll support any resolution that constitutes action based on the workers’ productive role, against economic imperialism. That’s my policy. Always been the same. You know that.”
Dando’s grin at the patness of it rearranged his wrinkles. “Oh yes, the party — within-the-party.”
“Let’s have lunch and you can expand what he knows,” Bray said.
“You two can go off and enjoy your lunch. I’ve got work piling up in my bloody office. These circuses are just a waste of time for me.”
People gathered around Shinza openly, now. Goma, Ogoto, and huge young Basil Nwanga were racing about, marshalling his attention tensely here and there, with eyes that deftly selected and rejected among the crowd of delegates. Mweta, who had not appeared before outside the sessions but gone off at once in the presidential car, moved through the foyer surrounded by Central Committee people. He saw Bray and steered towards him, bringing his encirclement with him as he could not duck beneath it. Past heads and faces he called, “I’ll see you tonight?” Bray’s look questioned. “Didn’t the secretary telephone you?” “Might have, after I’d left the house.” “Dinner. About eight o’clock. After the cocktail party. All right?”
It was awkward to go back to the orbit of Shinza after this singling out. Cyrus Goma had watched accusingly. Bray had to make a determined effort to overcome his own feeling of culpability and get Shinza aside for a moment, pushed to it by a mixture of excitement and anxiety over the motion condemning Mweta’s power to appoint the Secretary — General of UTUC, that was due to come up in the afternoon session. Shinza was not too hopeful; yet it was difficult, in the rush of vigour that the evidence of real support in the people gathering round him brought, for him not to feel heady with the chance. Anyway, talking to Bray, it seemed suddenly to make him make up his mind about something. His face stiff as a drunk’s, he brought out calmly, “You remember old Zachariah Semstu? He still says the word and all five branches in the Tisolo district bleat back.… Cyrus’s been chatting him up for days, but you know how it is …no matter what he thinks, the idea of a vote against Mweta sticks in his throat … well, it’s understandable. But he knows that you — that so far as you’re concerned — I mean, he’d always trust what you’d say. If you’d just have a word with him, there’d be no trouble.” And Bray said, so quickly that he heard his own voice, “All right. Where is he?”
“He’s down in the carpark. Linus’s just passed him. Near the fence at the back of the building. Just stroll down as if you’re going to your car, and you’ll see him.”
Bray left the Luxurama unheeded and came out into the heat. He was walking over the humpy ground with the momentum of a push in the back. A hundred suns revolved at him from the cars he approached and passed; every now and then his feet crunched over patches of clinker that had been used to fill up hollows. A single tree left standing was covered with a whole dry season’s dust like a piece of furniture shrouded in an empty room. The little boys who hung about with dirty rags, pestering to clean windscreens, were gambling for pennies around its exposed roots.
He saw some men sitting half — in, half — out of an open — doored car. They were eating fish and chips and one of them crushed his paper packet in his fist and aimed it at the rest of the rubbish that had collected under the tree. The old man Zachariah Semstu was sitting neatly on an upturned fruit box, smoking a pipe with a little tin lid on a chain. As Bray came up the old man gestured at the children to point out where the packet had fallen, and, not recognizing Bray for a moment, said testily to the others, “Let them eat if you don’t want to.” Bray was greeting him formally in Gala, he called him “my old friend.”
The old man’s ears recognized what his eyes had not. A look of joyous amazement wakened his face. The business of greeting went on for five minutes. “But you have seen me in there,” Bray said, with a tilt of the head. “Well, well … I had heard you were back in the country. I had heard it. But we thought you had left us forever … you stayed away so long.”
“I had no choice. As you know, I wasn’t allowed in, all those years.”
“And I have grown an old man,” Semstu said.
The others had the look of people who have heard it all before; they were inert under his authority. He introduced two of them, both apparently office — bearers in Tisolo Party branches, but presented the less important ones collectively, with an encompassing movement of a hand whose fingers, Bray saw, had the characteristic sideways slope away from an arthritically enlarged first knuckle. Ten years is a long time; depends which stage of life you were in at the start.
Both standing, they talked about Tisolo. There were brickfields there, good deposits of clay, the best in the country. For the rest, subsistence farming of the poorest kind. “Your brickfields must be expanding? So many government building projects coming up?” Yes, but the new clay deposits were in the eastern end of the district, and a rail link was needed before they could be worked to full capacity. “The Ministry of Public Works and the radio station building are going up with bricks from Kaunda’s country,” the old man said. “I wrote to Mweta. He’s a very busy man. It’s not so easy to see him these days. — But he answered. Yes, a very good letter in answer.”