African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [19]
There is a large meal, soup, meat and vegetables, pudding, cheese. Now, as we talk, Do you remember, Do you remember, we both avoid a subject that we are afraid will put an end to this good feeling.
‘Do you remember that ridiculous time when you were thinking of working for a bank?’
‘I work in a bank!’
‘Just after the War. And you even had a spell of thinking you would sell insurance.’
‘I sell…never.’
‘Don’t you remember you came to see me and said you’d rather die than live your life inside four walls?’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘Funny thing, that I don’t remember. I think there’s a lot I’ve forgotten. Someone came to see me the other day and got quite angry with me when I didn’t remember…it was Jeremy. Do you remember him? He went on a holiday to Madagascar. He came to see me and said he had left the hotel and gone wandering into the bush and then found he was crying. It was because of the bird songs, the butterflies. The insects. He said to me, “It was like old Southern Rhodesia, when we were children. Full of wild life.” He hadn’t realized how badly everything has changed. And it is getting worse all the time. Suddenly you think, I haven’t seen such and such a bird for some time and then you realize, it’s gone. Extinct, probably. Butterflies,’ says my brother miserably. ‘Bees. Insects. Chameleons. Lizards. We do them all in with our spraying. We destroy everything, you see.’
‘Do you remember how we used to shoot when we were children? With the old .22? They gave you the .22 and you went out and shot everything you saw.’
‘I would never have done a thing like that.’
‘When they gave you your first air-gun you went out to the banks of the river–that was on Chappell’s farm, and you came back with a pillow case full of birds.’
‘I couldn’t ever have done that…are you sure?’
‘If we saw a porcupine, we killed it. If we saw a wild cat, we shot it. Whatever we saw.’ He is most dreadfully distressed. ‘That is how all us children learned to shoot. We shot everything.’
‘But we used to go through the bush pulling out the bird traps the natives put down, and breaking up the game traps.’
‘That was later. When we became reformed criminals. That was when we shot for the pot, just shooting what we needed.’
‘Why didn’t they stop us–Mother and Father?’
‘Because it was that time–it was the end of the Raj. The upper classes used to shoot everything they saw and the middle classes copied them.’
‘Well, the Affs killed animals and birds.’
‘They killed to eat.’
‘Look at all the black kids now, out with their catapults, killing everything.’
‘Just as we did.’
His look at me says if he is not challenging me about equating black and white children, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t noticed.
‘What I remember best is going through the bush taking photographs.’
‘But how old were you then?’
‘Oh…well yes…I don’t remember things the way you do; not the same things. Are you absolutely sure?’
‘I don’t understand why you don’t remember. I remember everything about then. I know I’ve forgotten a lot of things about my life, because people say to me, Do you remember and I don’t. They get angry.’
‘Yes, they do, don’t they.’
‘But not about then.’
We are silent, for quite a bit. Harry is drinking steadily and carefully. Brandy. I could never enjoy drinking like that. I have a friend who researches patterns of drinking for a university. Would she be interested to hear about a man who drinks as if taking doses of medicine? My father, before he got diabetes, used to drink a whisky, perhaps two, as if a mentor invisible to us stood by him saying, Thus far and no further.
‘If we had really been like brother and sister, grown up together all the way, we would have a sort of–shared landscape. You know, one says, Do you remember and the other does remember, and if not soon thinks he does.’
‘I suppose we haven’t been brother and sister, not really.’
‘No.’
‘Well,’ he says, carefully and humorously, ‘I haven’t been all that keen on seeing you the