African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [167]
The teacher stands facing Ayrton R., being judged and sentenced.
A pretty girl saves the situation by asking, with a giggle, her pencil poised over her notebook, ‘What do you think about love?’
He replies with severity that children at school should be thinking only of their books and of learning: love is for older people. On the girls’ faces now appear properly sceptical smiles: recently two senior girls have married teachers.
‘Yes, it is today that my divorce is final.’ He made this sound as if unpleasant things like divorce are a natural result of thinking of love when you should be studying.
‘And now,’ says Jack, ‘you must ask him how much of what he has said can be written down and how much is off the record. Because a good journalist has to respect the interviewee.’
‘No, write it all,’ cries the handsome teacher, ‘I do not mind. It will warn other people not to marry for love.’
Tears well into his beautiful eyes and the pretty girls long to kiss them away, one by one.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the office fifty miles away in Kusai, a that-day divorced young woman is planning an evening with a local admirer, or even with a passing-through Harare Chef. Over a table in the restaurant that has such tactfully dimmed lights, she will say how unhappy she is, and how disappointed with a husband who neglects her and thinks only of himself.
‘Poor little thing,’ it is only too easy to imagine. ‘Never mind. What a shame. I’d never treat you like that, not a clever pretty special girl like you.’
THE LOST ANIMALS OF THE BUSH
Next morning Jack’s minute room was filled with pupils and teachers coming to say goodbye to us, and to be with people sustained by the blessed ichors and zephyrs of Harare.
The handsome teacher was there too. He remarked that what he liked best was to go for walks in the bush by himself. ‘I am a serious man,’ he said to me severely. ‘People do not understand me.’ We were standing at the door. He waved his hand at the ravaged trees and the eroded earth and it occurred to me that when he said ‘bush’ and I said ‘bush’ we did not mean the same thing. I told him that the country around here had stayed in my mind for thirty years as an ideal of what forest could be, with musasa trees perhaps hundreds of years old, and full of every kind of animal. He was silent, surprised. I was experiencing that suspension of probability that accompanies moments unforeseen when you begin a journey, a pilgrimage–moments when things slide into place: it had never, ever, entered my mind that there was a generation in Zimbabwe which did not know how their own country had been, and so recently.
‘Animals?’ he asked. ‘What animals? You mean mombies? You mean goats?’
‘When I was a girl in Banket the bush was full of koodoo, sable, eland, and all the smaller buck, particularly duiker. There were stem buck and bush buck, anteaters and porcupines and wild cats and monkeys, and baboons and wild pig. There was every kind of bird. There were still leopards in the hills. Elephants had gone. Lions had gone. But you couldn’t take one step in the bush without startling some creature.’
‘Did you live in a game park?’ he asked.
‘No. That was how the bush was then. Everywhere. In every part of the country. And the birds…the dawn chorus–it split your ears. There were flocks of birds sitting all along the telephone lines…every kind of bird. And if you looked up in the sky any time of the day you saw the hawks circling. Five, ten–or more. Then you saw that everywhere in the sky were groups of hawks spiralling in the thermals. There might be twenty or thirty groups of them. The sky used to be full of hawks and kites. The groups further away were like little black flies against the blue. Now when you look up…’ We walked away from Jack’s little house and stood on the track outside it, with the Blair toilet a few yards in front, the still derelict water tank on its rise, and sparse trees dotting the land off into the distance. We stood looking up. There was not one bird