Preceded, flanked and followed by cyclists with beards, black mops, and jackboots, Mr. M. Bastians of Colombo left the airport in triumph. He sat with Patu in Patu's crawling opulent car, driven by a richly hirsute driver, waving and showing good Ceylonese teeth in a happy smile. Workers on a monthly wage had taken the afternoon off to see and greet; only the day-labourers kept to their hiding-places. Mr. Bastians was a handsome walnut- juice-coloured man in his sixties, his white hair neatly parted. He wore a well-tailored palm-beach suit of discreet grey. In its inner pocket he carried a letter from the U.N.Adviser (rubber-stamp-signed) informing him that he was permitted to stay in Dunia Town for twenty-four hours and (a bitter touch of Patu's) wishing him well, as also the cause for which he stood. He had also an application to enter the State, stamped "Approved". His passport had been read with interest (a traveller's log-book, unbelievably rich in visas) by the Immigration underlings, and they had decorated it with a square, a ring, and a lozenge, informing him that he had permission to land. His luggage had been found free from cameras, condoms, gramophone records, tape recorders, parakeets, firearms, opium, proscribed literature and scrap metal specifically forbidden under the appropriate ordinance. He was now in, breathing the warm air of an enslaved State.
The police contingent joined in the cheers of "Freedom from Tyranny!” Mr. Bishopspawn of the Special Branch sat in his roadster, chewing his underlip. With him was his secretary, Mrs. Lydia Lydgatc. "You see what they're like," said Bishopspawn. "Let you down as soon as look. No loyalty, somehow. How fast is your shorthand?"
"Fast enough."
"You'd better take it all down at tonight's meeting. It may come in useful."
“Useful?”
"Yes, yes, yes." Mr. Bishopspawn was a peevish beefy young man, easily irritated, still smarting from certain rebukes administered by a defending barrister from Kampala in a recent bribery case. "Bishopspawn," the barrister – a swarthy and clever Jew – had declared, "is a first-class liar. In charity, however, considering his evident lack of talent, one might concede to him a compensatory capacity for fictitious invention which, if he were literate, might carry him far." He had also made fun of his name (an old name, revered in one of the southern counties) and said, "Your move, Bishopspawn." Now, engaging gear, Bishopspawn said, "We want his speech for the files. He's a bad lot. They shouldn't have let him in."
Hibiscus, hibiscus all the way for Mr. Bastians, members of the party cheering like animate black bushes, clean-shaven workmen who wanted (a) the white man out, (b) the Asians out, (c) sinecures, (d) blood for blood's sake, crying "Aaaah." To Patu's house they drove in bottom gear, Mr. Bastians showing thirty-two good teeth to the world, Patu nodding and smiling in hairy satisfaction. Patu's lawn had been set with marquees and long tables: there was to be a tea-party.
Alighting, Mr. Bastians flashed happiness to the flashing cameras. To a reporter from the Times of Dunia he gave a brief message: "The workers of Dunia have common cause with the workers of Ceylon. Their struggle is our struggle. My brief visit is a gesture of solidarity. Let us strive together to the end." This appeared in curt National Language as: "Workers Ceylon like workers Dunia. Is one fight. He comes as sign it one fight. He say fight-fight not stop fight.”
Then warmish, very sweet, very milky tea was taken, while Mr. Bastians was introduced to many beards. Sickly cakes entered holes in these beards. The beards nodded and nodded, framing gold and ivory engaging green and yellow sponge. Mr. Bastians ate nothing; the cup in his left hand grew warmer. He smiled and smiled, bowed, expressed pleasure and agreement at all that was said to him. Meanwhile party members chewed up soft cakes like the soft bodies of their enemies.
"Unemployment grows steadily. Ten men of Dunia stock could do the work of one expatriate. Throw out all your expatriates and you have more than enough work for all."
"Yes, yes, indeed," smiled Mr. Bastians.
"The uranium company has stopped drilling. It is merely an excuse to throw people out of work."
"Very likely, very likely."
"They are going to start drilling just outside our borders. To evade the heavy dues they rightly pay to the State. Is that fair?"
"Far from it, very far indeed."
"It is like enticing a neighbour's chickens to crawl through the fence."
"A very, very apt image."
"And how do they know the uranium will only last another five years?" "How, indeed?"
"Geologists, they call them. Another word for liars."
"That is very good. I must remember that."
The tea-pots were drained, the crumbs collected to feed the fowls, the western sky, in green, pearl, vermilion, magenta, warned that the delicious revolutionary night was coming. Time to change and prepare for the meeting in the Chin Chin Cinema. Mr. Bastians was led off by Patu to a cool room with adjoining bath, there to rest, sluice, change, meditate. His thirty-two teeth took their leave, his benedictory arms wide in the sunset. Not his sunset.
The workers in the Mosque, languidly laying the last block of marble of the day, were determined to be present at the meeting. Moreover, they were determined that Paolo should be present. The Indian with glasses stood by the mihrab, the violet sky of Mecca at his back, and spoke with as much fervour as Mr. Bastians of the need for solidarity. Paolo, moreover, was a white man; the word of the white man always carried more weight than that of the brown or black. Let him, at question-time, speak of their grievances – the pitiable wages, the three-times rejected appeal for a rise. Was this justice, was this religion? Paolo said that he did not yet speak enough English to be eloquent. They all laughed tolerantly, their laughter rising to the heights of the squinches on which the dome was set.
"You are a white man, therefore you speak the white man's language."
"No, no, no. I speak only Italian."
"There is only one white man's language." This was not meant figuratively; it was a straight philological assertion.
"And, afterwards," said a muscular Sudu with a rat-tail reaching to his coccyx, "we shall eat and drink together. We shall pay. Obviously you, having no wages, cannot pay." In pity a cigarette was given to Paolo, other cigarettes were lighted, the smoke frailed upwards like the thin prayer of a very old imam. Motes of pulverised marble floated slowly down.
"I have no clothes to wear," said stripped Paolo, yet looking somehow overdressed with a cigarette in his mouth.
"No trouble. A tie, a shirt, trousers. Severally we can lend them."
"Better, let him go in rags. It will be more effective. Dramatic even," said the subtle Indian, leaning against the mimbar.
"My father," remembered Paolo. "There is the question of my father." Nando Tasca had taken to drinking in a shop that overlooked the great portals, or workmen's exit, of the Mosque.
"Tell him," said the Sudu, "that a woman is desirous of his company. That some lovely girl is waiting for him in a back alley."
"Disobey him," said a Potok, a cutting hand slicing the air. "Spit at him. He has no right to make you go home if you do not wish to. You owe him no more allegiance."
"But," said Paolo, "I have become so weak. It is lack of food." His face grew longer, more traguline. "And we shall eat and drink afterwards, you say?" He salivated, had to throw his cigarette down.
"Yes, yes. Afterwards."
"But the noise," said Paolo. "He will not let me sleep. Last night he thumped me on the back of the head while I was just dozing off." The singing contest, the evident preference of the Australian lady for the younger and more virile – Nando Tasca had been at his most fatherly, hitting out blindly, using harsh words, raking up the past. And every day more and more past was manufactured. Paolo drooped, sighed.
"This woman who is fat and thin in the right places at the same time," said the Potok. "The one you were talking about this morning. Say that she wants to see him."
"But she doesn't," said Paolo. "It is me she wants to see."
"Have you evidence of that?"
"The way she looked," said Paolo. "Admiration. Lust, almost. At least," he said, in the dispiritedness of malnutrition, "I thought so. I may be wrong." He drooped further.
"I can speak to him," said the Indian with glasses. "I can pass on a fictitious message. I can say – " (his glasses flashed cunning in the last light) " – that she wants him to go to her house. Has she a house?"
"Oh, yes. On the hill. She has just moved into it."
"That she wants him to go to her house and drink with her. There will be a small party. I will hint that she hints that if he will linger on when the others go – " "Imagination," said a workman who had not yet spoken, a sort of small Abyssinian. "Too much imagination."
"That will do," said the Indian. "He will believe me. He trusts me, I think. I will undertake to keep his son out of danger."
"He will be sceptical there," said the Sudu. "He remembers the night of the broken bottles. It was you who were caught with one in your hand. And you were cheering his son on. He came into the shop and caught you at it. We were all very, very lucky not to be arrested."
"As I recollect," said the Indian, "it was you who had the broken bottle. As I recollect, it was I who was telling you all not to be such idiots. The police car round the corner – "
"Your memory's bad. Boozer's memory."
"Say that again."
"Come, come, come. Solidarity."
"I will give him solidarity. Solid from the neck up, that's his trouble."
"I didn't quite like the way you said that. Say it again."
There was one other workman, a fetcher and carrier, a picker-up of dropped tools, a man low down in their scale. He was squat, wrinkled, and of doubtful race. There was a hole in what the National Language poetically called the heaven of his mouth, and he had no obturator. He said, "Hn. Hn, hn."
"He is right," said the Potok. "A timely rebuke. We must stop this wrangling. Besides, it will soon be time for the meeting."
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