African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [58]
What happened in the hospital was a little encapsulation of various trends in Zimbabwe that year, that time–then.
THE COUNTRY HOSPITAL
It was a Saturday, and there was only a skeleton staff at the hospital. It is a country hospital, of that homely kind, liked by everyone, which we have so efficiently got rid of in Britain. Our doctor said she would wait with us until the doctor on call had arrived. She could not treat us herself. Protocol. We were admitted by two friendly black nurses, taking temperatures, filling in forms, blotting up the blood that flowed from us all. We staggered, and limped about, and laughed, because we were such an absurd sight, particularly me. I had not yet seen my face, with its Vesuvius bump and its blue-black eye. The little girls had finished crying and wailing and were every inch worthy of their stiff-upper-lip heritage. Then arrived from the scene of the crash the Coffee Farmer, who by now was evidently in bad pain, but he was not going to admit it. The black doctor arrived, driving rapidly and scattering gravel through the flowering bushes that surrounded the hospital. He skidded, and parked with an elegant swoop, while the missionary doctor sighed and said, ‘Oh look at that, hasn’t anybody got any sense?’
Then, a problem: an atmosphere of difficulty and suspense. The black nurses were afraid we would not allow a black doctor to examine us. This said everything about the problems this hospital had to deal with every day. They were tactful, charming, and relieved when the little girls were taken by their mother into the examining room. Meanwhile the white doctor was telling the black doctor that in her opinion only the man was seriously hurt, and he was–and she lowered her voice–a difficult patient. The two professionals exchanged looks, and then smiles, brows raised. She went off saying she would telephone a certain number in Mutare for us, so that we could be collected. She left us grateful. As I was taken off for antitetanus and penicillin injections, I saw a black nurse trying to get the ‘difficult’ patient to sit down and rest. ‘But I’m perfectly all right,’ he kept announcing, striding about the room.
I was in a side room with an old nurse, a fat black woman, all competence and comfort. We instantly established a woman-to-woman rapport, and as I took my clothes off, she prodded me for breaks, and we talked. Politics…at once, politics, just like everybody at that time. A young nurse came into the room, and the old woman asked her to go and attend to the others, and firmly shut the door after her. She waited a moment, opened the door again to check, shut it, lowered her voice. ‘It’s dangerous to talk in front of the young ones, they report you to the Party,’ she said. She then began a fast monologue of complaint, which I at once recognized as the one I would be likely to hear from other people, like herself. While she skilfully bandaged and injected, she said Mugabe was no good, he wanted everyone to be communists, and she was religious. Bishop Muzorewa was good, and so was Nkomo–they would not frighten the whites. She said that ‘we’–meaning the two of us–could remember when things were very good, life was sweet, but now everything was bad, the War had been terrible. The whites enjoyed the War, for it was their war. The blacks suffered in the War, but the whites didn’t care about that, and the Comrades didn’t care either.
I said, as it seemed I was already doing several times a day, that I simply could not understand why people expected things to change so quickly. We–she and I–knew at our age that nothing changed quickly…at least I did not mention the Romans. If there was one thing I had been impressed by, coming here, was this: no one seemed to remember the War had ended only two years ago, that is, they talked about how awful it had been, but not about the damage it had done. Damage to people. Here she remained silent for a while, handling yards of white bandage, and going ‘Tsk, tsk,’ when I winced. She asked,