African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [156]
What I was looking at was not only the scene of our old life, that had left no traces, nothing, for the ants and borers and termites had demolished it all, but at the remains of another later effort, which had failed. Everything here spoke of failure.
They have planted fruit trees, my brother had complained–fruit trees!
And there they were, lacking water and in bad shape, orchards too big for a family, a homestead, but not large enough to be commercial. From these trees they could have picked enough peaches to take into the Station for resale to farmers coming in for their mail–and who almost certainly had their own peaches–but no one could have made a living from them. No, what we were looking at, I was sure, was just such another effort as my parents’–who were always trying a little bit of this and a little bit of that. One might believe that their spirit had infected the people who came after them.
Did they too dream about finding gold? We searched in the scrub for my father’s old prospecting trenches, and there they were, though the shafts he had dug everywhere so he could inspect a promising reef were all filled in. If our successors carried a prospector’s hammer so they could chip a bit of a rock off an outcrop then it was no more than most farmers did, in The District, which was named Banket after a gold-bearing reef on the Rand.
We walked back to the new house. There was a little strip of newly watered marigolds. My mother’s passionate, knowledgeable gardening, that always had to fight with the rocky crown of the hill, was being continued here, in this brave little display.
Again we tried to communicate with the children. Were these Squatters? Was the farm being run as an annexe to one of the enormous high-tec farms of The District? Was this the black manager’s house, and in it his many children, relatives, friends’ children?
Strongly present were the ghosts of my parents. My father, I knew, was laughing, for this scene, so admirably contrived by the Grand Storyteller confirmed everything he had always known about the vanity of human wishes. My mother’s face was brave. ‘It’s just as well, I could imagine her saying, in her sprightly social voice, looking at the awful suburban bungalow, at the crowding black faces in the windows where the panes were cracked, where torn curtains hung–‘It’s just as well we don’t know what is going to happen, isn’t it?’ And then, taking firm hold of the situation, ‘I wonder if they’ve tried growing pelargoniums? They do well up here. Perhaps I’ll just have a word…’
As for me, I stood trying to see into that dark room, past the many faces, and thought that these children were no more remote from civilization than I was, as a girl, with the wonders of the world in books and even the cities of South Africa far off because of our poverty.
But there was a difference. In the living-room of our house were bookcases, and newspapers and magazines came from London.
No books here. Nothing in that room for those children, not a book, a toy, a magazine, an exercise book, a pencil, a picture.
Then we stood looking out, over the fields and the bush, just as we used to do then, first at this range of mountains, then that, for if your eyes stayed too long on one group of hills, where the light was changing, then you might miss the drama of the Umvukwes (or the Dyke) where a peak was being touched by sunlight while its fellows were still defined by shadow.
And here, but above our heads–well above–was where we sat every night it didn’t storm or rain to watch the stars and the comets raining