African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [110]
We stand in the dark looking at the black shape of the low wide house, which is spilling out yellow light, and we are thinking, or Africa thinks through us, ‘What do you need lights for, when you know the tracks so well? You don’t really need brakes, you can always use a foot. Why grips on handlebars? All you need for a pedal is a bar for your foot. Why make life so complicated? The bike goes doesn’t it? It carries you from place to place? Well, then, what’s the fuss about?’
‘Ye-e-e-yes,’ says the farmer ‘that’s how it is.’
And we go in to supper. All the food came off the farm. There was no servant, he had gone home. The family laid the table, served, cleared it and washed up.
At supper I ask about the people who used to live on the farms near here. Some names are instantly remembered. ‘Of course! So and so! He had the farm across the river. Yes, and they were there until the War. Of course we remember.’ But other names get no response at all, yet they were people who lived on farms next to the people who are remembered. ‘Who? I’ve never heard that name. Commander Knight, you say?’
‘Yes, he was a character, everyone knew him. He was one of the eccentrics–you know, the larger-than-life characters of those days.’ Here various members of the family give the farmer significant looks and smiles which he acknowledges, good-humouredly. ‘He was on the farm just four miles away. He tamed leopards. Or tried to.’
‘Never heard of him.’
After supper we lolled about over sofas and enormous chairs, arms around dogs and cats. There is an old-fashioned wind-up gramophone, restored as an antique by someone in Harare, and cases of records stand waiting for someone to wind up the gramophone and play them. Ancient tunes like ‘Paloma’, and ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’ resound tinnily and I explain to disbelieving youngsters that once on these verandahs were dances that went on until dawn, with no more music than these same wind-up gramophones, that had to be attended to hour after hour by relays of people, wallflowers or people prepared to sacrifice themselves. They murmur that they wish they had been taught to dance, in the same tones one might use to say, What a pity we don’t dance the minuet. I say that in Britain this kind of dancing is fashionable again, but their faces have that look: it is interesting to hear of the customs of far-off places.
The farmer is describing his dream: he would like this farm to become a kind of commune, though he does not use the word. The newly engaged couple are already established in the house built for them a hundred yards away. Another little house accommodates parents. A son would like to buy the farm along the road: he has all the qualifications for this kind of high-tec farming. ‘Families should stay together,’ says the farmer, using the same words used by the black agricultural expert or Extension Worker on the Jesuit farm near Harare. The two men have everything in common, not only their knowledge of farming, for one is a patriarch by tradition, the white man by chance of character. And what do the children of the patriarch think of these plans? They smile, but do not say. And what of a daughter, married to a South African who only understands streets and offices, and could not farm? ‘That will be easy,’ says the farmer, but frowning a little. He has planned it all out. The daughter can come here for she is a Zimbabwean, and bring her husband. The couple can run canoe trips and manage tourist chalets on the edge of the lake that will soon be here, only three or four miles away. The farmer has agreed to lose forty acres of his farm to the new lake, but he intends to reap the benefits.
‘Chalets and canoe trips,’ I protest, for he is talking about a particularly magnificent bit of wilderness under the hills.
Ayrton R. protests, ‘It will be just like Kariba.’
‘Not at all. These things can be done