African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [23]
Off he went on his bicycle. He told us he was going to visit a farm where a woman had accused another of putting the evil eye on her. As a result, there had been fighting among the farmer’s workers.
‘Did you hear that? The evil eye! That’s what we have to contend with…and those silly girls won’t get work anywhere else, because there isn’t any work. They’ll be jolly sorry they played me up when they find they can’t get work. With so many of us Taking the Gap there’s less work all the time.’
‘Aren’t you pleased at the way that was sorted out?’ I enquired.
‘Let’s go and have lunch.’
An enormous meal of meat and vegetables, baked potatoes, salads, pudding, cheese, biscuits.
‘I can see I am going to eat far too much here,’ I said. ‘No one in England eats anything like this amount.’ I described the evolving food habits of the British, take-away foods, snack foods, convenience foods, freezers, microwaves. I said we ate Indian food, Chinese food, pizzas, pastas and American hamburgers. ‘The old pattern of eating, three solid meals a day and morning and afternoon tea–it’s gone.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. I believe standards should be kept up.’
After lunch he slept for exactly half an hour, and then we sat on the verandah and drank tea. The two Alsatians lay beside us, one at my brother’s feet and the bitch Sheba at mine. She has been miserable ever since her mistress died. She wants another woman to love her, and hopes this will be me. Her hunger for a woman’s affection makes her trot over to the farmhouse a mile away, where she puts her muzzle into the hand of the mistress of the house, and whines, begging for love. The woman, who understands the dog’s unhappiness, sits down on the verandah or on the lawn beside Sheba and hugs her and sweet-talks, until Sheba licks her face, and trots back home. Sheba is overshadowed by the big dog Sparta, a strong intelligent dog who, when we play with them in the garden, always reaches the thrown stick first, and can pick up in his mouth two, three, four sticks, tossing them and catching them for our applause, like a juggler. Sheba can carry only one stick. Sparta knows how to obey orders, Sit, To heel, Lie down, Fetch it, Bark once–twice–three times. My brother trained Sparta, but Sheba was not trained. She is frantic to be like Sparta, is always watching, to find out how it is done, while Sparta shows off.
My brother seemed helpless with Sheba, did not know how to gentle the dog’s pain, which is so like his. But later, when Sheba found that no woman came to live in the house, she attached herself to my brother, and bested Sparta in the way of affection, for he could not compete with her need to be one person’s dog, with her fierce devotion. She slept on my brother’s bed, was always beside him, her head near his hand, or lay with her eyes on his face. When my brother Took the Gap, the dogs went with him. Quite soon Sheba got herself coiled in some wire left loose at the end of a fence. She strangled to death, though there was a man present, with wirecutters in his pocket, the white stock manager of a local ranch. He said he wasn’t going to risk being bitten by an Alsatian.
Later a neighbour telephoned to say he had driven into Marondera for the mail, and could not buy a newspaper: they had all been sold. There had been an ‘incident’ on the Victoria Falls road from Bulawayo. Terrorists had captured tourists. ‘Of course they aren’t going to tell us the truth in our papers,’ said the neighbour. ‘Ask your sister to ring London.’ I did this and found that the Terrorists, supposed to be Joshua Nkomo’s men, had captured six tourists, but released three women. The men would be killed if Mugabe did not release some Nkomo men in prison.
‘There you are,’ says Harry, ‘you have to telephone Home to get the facts.’
Which were all on the television