African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [166]
We are here in the classroom because Jack has said it would be a good idea for them to interview us all, as part of learning how to be journalists. Jack himself, Ayrton R., one of the teachers, and I, we each are surrounded by a group who ask us, what is our favourite colour, do we like this school, how do we like Zimbabwe, do we think it is fair girls should always have to do so much work (the girls). But it is noticeable that the pupils writing down our replies in notebooks are every moment less assiduous, for they are looking past us at where the handsome young teacher is talking about his problems. In a moment, they are all crowding around him and we, the interviewees, are with them for we are as rapt as they are.
This teacher is the star among the staff, with two A-levels, more than any teacher has, not only at this school but at any of the others round about. He has been accepted at teachers’ training college and so he is at the foot of the ladder which may take him at last to Harare. He talks dreamily, and often, about living there ‘one of these days’. But now what he is talking about is his wife. He leans against the wall, arms loose by his sides, as if they ache with emptiness, and as he talks, he does not look at any of us: his eyes are full of tears and he addresses the wall.
‘This is my sad day,’ he says. ‘It is a too too sad day, for this morning I heard I am now a divorced man. My marriage is finished.’ He cannot go on, and pretends he is waiting for the apprentice interviewers to write it all down.
His wife has an office job in the little town about fifty miles away. It is the town with a hotel that has electric light, a bar, a dining-room, and a courtyard with coloured lights strung among the tree branches. And, often, music. She lunches at the hotel. This is permissible. But she has been seen at the same hotel in the evenings, very late. (Ten o’clock perhaps? Eleven?–everything is relative.) Friends have told him she is there having a good time with men. This means she is no better than she ought to be–as my parents used to say. He has had to divorce her.
It is occurring to more than one of his listeners that there is something here…A handsome young woman says to him (while her eyes swoon with love), ‘But when you go to teachers’ training will not your wife be…’
‘My ex-wife…’ He openly sobs.
‘But she will be left alone in Kusai and is she not alone all the time when you are here? She must be lonely.’
‘But I am lonely too.’
And now the hot silence confined in the dusty air of the classroom while outside thunder and rain lurk about hot skies announces without words–in fact positively shouts–that if he is lonely then he has only himself…
He is leaning against the wall in a limp curve, his arms dangle palms out down his sides, his head is slightly back, his eyes are shut. Thus a man might stand waiting for the final bullet…
‘And it is not my fault. I asked her to take another O-level and she could be a teacher too, but she likes the hotel in Kusai better. I said to her, It is your duty to get more qualifications and help Zimbabwe.’
A couple of the young men supported him with, ‘Shame’, ‘That was not well done.’
‘Besides,’ says he, with the fine appearance of justice that accompanies such remarks, ‘women must obey their husbands, it says so in the Bible.’
Moderately dizzying, this conversation is, switching from level to level, as is so common when–as the phrase goes–cultures are in the melting pot. Between the young man who lectures his wife on becoming qualified, and the one who says, Women must obey their husbands, lie cultural gulfs, not least because he cites scripture when it suits him.
Ayrton R. says, ‘You know, women all over the world are finding men’s claim to God’s support in these matters increasingly unconvincing.’
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