African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [31]
‘No, I don’t, I’m afraid.’
‘You don’t remember when that wild pig with piglets chased us up the tree and we threw bits of bark and leaves at her to make her go away? But she actually tried to climb the tree after us…stood with her feet on the trunk and grunted at us? And we were laughing so hard we nearly fell out of the tree?’
A long silence.
‘I blocked all that off too, didn’t I?’
‘It looks like it.’
‘Then there must have been a reason why I blocked everything off.’
‘I think there was.’
‘But you didn’t block off, you remembered it all.’
‘But perhaps we had different ways of surviving.’
‘That’s a strong word,’ he said, his eyes hard. ‘It’s the word I use.’
He sat thinking, drinking judiciously. At last he said, ‘I’ve told you, I know a thing or two about blocking things off…’ And now he kept his eyes on my face, to make sure I wouldn’t overstep some mark or other. ‘I’ll tell you something. If you’ve blocked things off, then there’s a reason for it. If you’ve any sense you let sleeping dogs lie. That’s where these psychologist chappies are wrong. In the Bush War things from the other war kept coming back, but I couldn’t see why I felt so upset.
Why did I block them off? But I could tell there was something pretty bad there, because if there wasn’t, why did they get to me? Anyway, I haven’t told you everything, and I’m not going to. There are things you should shut up about. And don’t think I regret the Bush War…I’m not going to mind kicking the bucket when my time comes. I’ve had that, lying wrapped in a blanket looking up at the stars and listening to the owls and the nightjars–not that there are many of them around these days. No, I’m glad I’m Taking the Gap.’ He turned away, because his eyes were full of tears. He poured himself another dose, and then looked at me again. ‘I’ve visited where I am going. It’s in the Transvaal. We think it is getting pretty bad here–the bush, but down there it’s all enormous ranches with miles and miles of beaten-down dirty over-grazed grass. There’s no bush.’
‘Makes sense, you’re going there, since that’s what you care about more than anything.’
‘At least I won’t have to watch it being destroyed here, and that is what is happening.’
‘It’s a tragedy,’ I said, not knowing I was going to. ‘Do you realize who would understand you best in this country? About the bush, I mean. The Africans, that’s who, and you won’t talk to them.’
‘What do you mean, I won’t talk to them? When I was out in the bush as a boy with the cook’s son, what do you think we did? What about the builder at the school? Solomon, his name was. We used to sit and jaw for hours and hours about life and everything. What about the chap who built this house with me?’
He waits for me to challenge him with some point of my dogma, and then says, ‘Anyway, it’s not true that only the Affs would understand me. Any old Rhodie would.’
‘Nonsense. Half the old Rhodies know as much about the bush as some poor black kid in Brixton knows about the English countryside.’
‘Of course I mean the right kind of Rhodie.’
‘People like you.’
‘If you like.
‘Nine o’clock,’ he says. ‘Time for bed.’ He gets up, goes to the door, turns and sees me reaching for my notebook. ‘Are you taking down things I say to use in evidence against me? I don’t care provided you write down the bloody stupid things you say, too.’
In the morning he drove me to a road that ran past a plantation of blue gums. When he was working at his old school, Ruzawi–for he went back as manager of the place, because there he could be out of doors all day–he asked to be allowed to plant trees. We left the car well-locked, though he was unhappy about it. ‘You can’t leave a car for five minutes without some skellum stealing it. Everything has to be locked up. Everything has to be barred. It’s like living inside cages.’
We walked