African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [57]
In no time we were all sitting by the car, on the tarmac. Our wrecked car and the police bus that stood askew but upright across the road were the only vehicles in sight. Groups of policemen were wandering about, shocked, as we were. Then we got cautiously to our feet, dazed, behaving according to our natures. The driver, as famed for his stiff-upper-lip as for his many lucky survivals in accidents and dangerous escapades, was standing as if to attention by the car, announcing, when asked, that he was fine. In fact he was the worst damaged of us all, with a broken shoulder. The young woman, mother of the two girls, spends her life running things, cushioning tender human beings from harsh events, being attentive to everyone’s needs. She was smartly lifting suitcases to the edge of the road, getting things into order again. The little girls were crying, ‘Why me? Why me?’ as we all do the first time disaster strikes, when we have not yet learned how often life moves from expressing itself through statistics–that is, other people–to oneself. As for me, I was leaning against the car while my head swam, clutching my handbag, and thinking, ‘Well at least I don’t have to go through all that nonsense of filling in forms for passport, driving licence, cheque cards; I haven’t lost lists of addresses and telephone numbers.’ I was fine too.
A car came travelling fast from the Mutare direction. It stopped, and out jumped a woman who turned out to be a doctor. She exclaimed we were all lucky to be alive, a fact we had not yet taken in. ‘And you weren’t even wearing seatbelts,’ she deplored, unable to believe in our stupidity. She shooed us to the opposite side of the road, just in case one of the rare cars did come along. There we obediently went, and she swiftly examined us, while the thirty or so young men who had filled the festive bus came crowding around us. Now they knew none of them was hurt, they were full of concern for us. They were not drunk, as everyone assumed they must have been, when told about the accident. They had been full of high spirits, non-alcoholic. Now they clucked, and shook their heads and demanded sympathetically, were we hurt. ‘What a bloody stupid question,’ snapped the driver: by now blood streamed from us all. ‘Are you all right?’ they asked me, laying affectionate hands on shoulder, arm, back, and patting me here and there, as if trying to push back into place any dislodged bits. By this time I had a bump on my forehead like those volcanic cones you see in comic strips, with lightning flashes radiating from it. A black eye still had to reach perfection, and one foot was painful. As for ribs, bruised, they had not yet made themselves felt. ‘Of course I am not all right,’ I said irritably, ready to engage in serious discussion. Some of them were crowding around the little girls, who screamed, ‘Keep your hands off me, keep off.’ This was not because they were from South Africa, for they came from a good liberal household, but because they were bruised. But the young men’s feelings were hurt. As for their mother, by now hardly able to stand, she reasoned with them, thus: ‘But you must see that it’s a silly thing to say.’
The doctor said she would take us to the nearest hospital, and then put in a report to the police station. At this the young men looked put out, since they were the police station. It was agreed by the driver and the doctor that the police would hush it all up and the report would be ignored. As turned out to be the case. The doctor, a missionary doctor, recently had had to certify the death of one of the tourists murdered by the Koreans, or Fifth Brigade. She was wonderfully kind, but irritated, the way people are who spend their lives treating humanity for wounds so often earned by their own folly. Our driver, though in a bad way, insisted on staying at the site of the accident, to establish details for insurance. I do not remember being driven to