African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [123]
The train stood quietly puffing. What was to stop us being here all day…another night…for ever? Time was behaving as it does when there seems no reason why a long wait should ever end. No, much better not to look at our watches, for by now not one but two groups of women were in the Bulawayo office wondering where we were.
There appeared two white officials with the look of those volunteering for martyrdom. They stopped in every compartment doorway: their task was to defuse aggression. When we asked what could conceivably be holding up this train, they said there was an electrical fault in the signalling system, because of the heavy rain. At every set of points the driver had to wait for written permission to proceed. ‘It is in your own best interests,’ they insisted, in the self-righteous and threatening manner of officials at bay. Shrieks of laughter accompanied them all down the train, like a bush fire behind an arsonist. What written instructions? From whom? Was a man running from the next station with a written message in a cleft stick from some punctilious station master who had looked in an instruction book under the section, ‘What to do in the event of rain fusing the signalling system’? Had the radio not been invented yet? Nor the telephone? No one believed in this nonsense, probably invented by the officials who, said Talent, were obviously pretty stupid.
Soon the train that had left Bulawayo that morning for Harare stopped alongside us. The windows were full of jolly faces, offering us sweets, biscuits, Fanta, even sadza. ‘Shame, better go back to Harare and try again tomorrow.’ In no time our despondent populations had cheered up and began laughing and joking back. At about two our train suddenly shot forward and soon the thorn trees and acacias of Matabeleland appeared. Trumpeting gently we arrived in Bulawayo station nine hours late. The exuberant noisy crowd poured out of the train and on to the Bulawayo platform, once proud of being the longest in the world. (It used to add a few feet to itself every time it was outdone by a platform in the Andes or Cincinnati or somewhere.) Among them pushed the young mother with all her small children in her arms. The women looked like butterflies. The cotton industry in Zimbabwe flourishes, cotton is the second crop, after tobacco, and somewhere there is a designer who fills the shop shelves and covers the women with brilliant swirling patterns that look wonderful on dark skins. At the exit I stopped, for I had heard a voice from the past. A fat bad-tempered white man was using it on a small crowd of patient blacks–the hectoring, bullying voice that…‘But why,’ I demanded, ‘is that man allowed to talk like that now?’ For I realized. I had not heard that voice, not once, since I had arrived in Zimbabwe. ‘Can’t you see he is a South African?’ said Talent. Then I did see: the characteristic belly-forward, chin-out stance which goes with the voice. But why? Was this a religious group? What was a group of black South Africans with their minder doing here? But it was a mystery that had to remain one, because we were hurrying to see if the women were still waiting.
Embassies had been sent to the station at half-hour intervals all day. They sent commiserations and good wishes. They would be waiting for us next morning.
Grey’s Inn Hotel has a sign showing sprightly coach horses, Dickensian–oh, lost England!, lamented no less in unexpected parts of Africa than in England itself. Inside, this amiable hostelry is far from English. But perhaps, so I am beginning to think, this explosive, irreverent, witty, selfish society does resemble eighteenth-century England? But then surely England is more like eighteenth-century England with