A Guest of Honour by Nadine Gordimer

in Africa than Hitler ever did in Europe.”
    â€œBut you’re crazy,” said Wentz gently.
    â€œEurope’s wars, white men’s killings among themselves. What’s that to me? You’ve just said one shouldn’t burden oneself with suffering. I don’t have any feelings about Hitler.”
    â€œOh but you should,” Mrs. Wentz said, almost dreamily. “No more and no less than you do about what happened to Africans. It’s all the same thing. A slave in the hold of a ship in the eighteenth century and a Jew or a gipsy in a concentration camp in the nineteen-forties.”
    â€œWell, I had my seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays in the detention camp at Fort Howard, the guest of Her Majesty’s governor,” said Odara, “that I know.”
    â€œHer two brothers died at Auschwitz,” Hjalmar Wentz said; but his wife was talking to Jo-Ann Pettigrew, who offered blobs of toasted marshmallow on the end of a long fork.
    â€œFor God’s sake, Timothy, stop baring your teeth and sink them into something.” Evelyn Odara spoke to her husband as no local woman would dare; yet he ignored it, as if turning the tables on her with his countrymen’s assumption that what women said was not heard, anyway. He said angrily to Wentz, directing the remark at the wife through the husband, “What did
you
get in return that was worth it?”
    Margot Wentz said, looking at no one, “That one can’t say.” She waggled her fingers, sticky from the marshmallow, and her husband took his handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her.
    It was the evening when Bray, Neil, Evelyn Odara, one of the South African refugees, the Pettigrews, and a few others set off for the Sputnik Bar. While Bray was standing about in the group with the Odaras and the Wentzes, Jo-Ann Pettigrew, having failed to get him to eat her last marshmallow, put it in her mouth and signalled to everyone there was something they must hear. “Rebecca’s been to the Sputnik and she says it’s terrific now. They’ve knocked out a wall into that sort of yard thing and they have dancing. With girls laid on.”
    Neil said, “Hey? And which one of us’s been taking Rebecca to the Sputnik?”
    Laughter rose. “Well, why don’t we all go, that’s what I want t’know.” The young Pettigrew woman was always in a state of enthusiasm; her long curly hair had sprung out, diademed with raindrops, because she had done her marshmallow toasting outside over the spitfire. She was an anthropologist, and Bray accepted this as an explanation for her passion for arranging excursions, on which she carried her baby tied on her back, African style.
    â€œWho
was it? Out with it!” There was a roar again.
    â€œNo, no—well, Ras took her—”
    â€œOh Ras, was it?”
    â€œSputnik Bar, eh?” “So that’s it, now.”
    Rebecca Edwards came in from the veranda, smiling good-naturedly, inquiringly, under the remarks shied at her. She said, “There’re bulbs like you see in films round the star’s dressing-table, and they light up and spell INDEPENDENCE HURRAH.”
    In great confusion, there and then they decided to go. Dando refused and Vivien had to go home to the children, and Rebecca Edwards protested that hers were alone too. Neil insisted that Bray must come; he was one of those people who, late at night, suddenly have a desperate need of certain companions. But when Neil, Bray, Evelyn Odara and the South African got down to the second-class trading area, the others hadn’t arrived. They went into the Sputnik Bar for a moment, meeting music like a buffeting about the head, and then someone said that he thought the arrangement had been to meet at the railway crossing. There began one of those chases about in the night that, Bray saw, Neil Bayley fiercely enjoyed. They went all the way back into town to the flats where the