African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [32]
‘I often come here. I come here whenever everything gets me down. At least I planted all these trees. But not long ago I began to think, what a pity I didn’t plant musasas. Indigenous trees. In those days who would have believed musasas could be under threat? You know those TV programmes they make, about animals? Every one ends with, This animal’s habitat is under threat. I can’t bear to watch them any more. If I had planted musasas they would just about be getting mature now. That would have been something, wouldn’t it…we could be walking here through musasas. A protected plantation.’ He laughed. ‘We make these wrong decisions,’ he said, and stood with his hand on the smooth creamy trunk of a blue gum. It was a diagnostic, affectionate hand, and he even patted the tree. Meanwhile Sparta and Sheba ran about among the leaves, noses down, after smells. Harry stroked the tree. ‘All the same, it’s a good place.’
He took me to where a notice, stuck on a board among rocks, said, ‘Please Remember to Bury your Rubbish.’ At the same moment we burst out laughing. ‘It’s the Scouts’ and Cubs’ camp site,’ he said. ‘That’s where they put up the tents. That’s where they build the fire. That’s where they sit in rows to eat. That’s the rubbish pit. That’s where the vans park when they bring cornflakes and sliced bread and orange squash from the supermarket.’
We laugh, staggering about in the dead leaves and the dust, while the dogs leap up to lick our faces.
GIVING LIFTS
Some miles on from my brother’s house, I drove–without so much as a premonitory catch of the breath–over the place where, a few days later, four other people and I were in a car accident so bad the only explanation for our all not being killed is that five guardian angels were on the alert.
The trip to Zimbabwe had been planned like this…I would spend two weeks with members of the family and then take off into the new Zimbabwe, allowing to happen to me what would: the only way to travel. Meanwhile I was impatient to talk to Africans, any African, to find out what lay behind the rhetoric of war. The black man in my brother’s kitchen was a friendly soul, but he was not likely to talk frankly to his employer’s sister. He had supported a lost cause, the Bishop Muzorewa, that was all I knew.
I had stopped the car to admire a particularly beautiful stretch of country. If, as a child, on the slow journeys to Marandellas I took in every turn and twist of the road, every heap of boulders, on the hurtling journeys to Macheke, as a young woman, I was always in a car full of people in emotional juxtapositions with each other, and we did not notice much outside the car. I did not remember this view. A beaten-up lorry came skidding to a stop near me, a black youth got down, and the lorry turned off on to a side road. The youth stood looking after the lorry for a long time. Then he turned, and saw me sitting there. He came slowly towards me, his face a plea. This was very different from the importunate clamour of the crowds at bus-stops. I opened the door and he got in beside me. At once he bent himself away from me, in a disconsolate curve, his hands limp between his thin knees. He was trembling in little spasms, as people do who have been cold for some time: it was a sharp, sparkling, highveld morning. He wore a suit, a white shirt, a tie, all clean and pressed, but the materials were cheap. I asked where he was going. He said it would be after Macheke.
I had hoped he would want to be set down before Macheke, called Mashopi in The Golden Notebook, because I had planned to stop, walk around, sort out memory from what I had made of it.
I asked, ‘Why are you so sad?’ and his whole body made a convulsive struggling movement, as if it were invisibly bound, and he was trying to get free. Tears welled sparkling from under his tightly pressed lids. He shook his head: it was too terrible to talk about. We drove smartly on, while I tried to recall sights and signs that belonged to the road to Macheke, but we were going too fast: