African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [61]
One young woman was a daughter-in-law, who had gone to The Republic for good, and was here on a visit to her family. Her husband had been Chief of Police. She said the moment they had decided to Take the Gap was when a black man her husband had arrested several times as a suspected sympathizer with the ‘terrs’, had put his arm around her at an official cocktail party and said, ‘And now we shall call each other Comrade and all work together for the good of Zimbabwe.’
‘I said to my husband: That’s it, now it’s time we left.’
This incident was related as if there could be no other reaction than deciding to leave at once. The same young woman described, without any self-consciousness, that traditional colonial scene: ‘When I left for The Republic I cried when I said goodbye to the cook and the houseboy and the garden boy and our nanny. They were part of the family. They said: You are our father and mother. They were crying too.’ Now it was evident she was wondering whether to come back to Zimbabwe. In The Republic they were worse off, had a small house, poor jobs, and did not have even one servant. Many people who had left, they said, were trying to come back.
In the room that night was a man who had worked for Intelligence during the War. He was asking me the carefully casual questions that are such a give-away. Not for the first time I was reflecting that it must be an enjoyable business, being a spy, for few of them seem able to let it go: power, I suppose: the agreeable illusion that one is able to control events.*
The questions he was asking might have been appropriate if I had been fighting with the Comrades in the bush, not living at ease in liberal London. And that is the other thing: all these security departments seem to create for themselves a devil figure of their opponents, and then believe in it. Look at Angleton in the CIA…they become paranoid. If, however, one is on the same side as the spy department, then one has to worry because of their incompetence, years out of date with their information, if it was ever genuine information in the first place.
That night I shared a verandah with the Coffee Farmer. He would rather have died than complain when awake, but, asleep, he groaned’ and suffered. I lay in one position all night, since it hurt to move, and I groaned freely when I had to. In the early morning he started up out of sleep, and before even conscious shouted into the void, ‘Bring tea!’ And, lo, tea was brought at once, by the cook, for both of us.
All over the big house people were bathing, showering, shaving, dressing, putting clothes on children, chatting, drinking tea. Some of the men drove off to get in some golf before breakfast. The women helped the servants get breakfast. The doctor arrived. Only the broken shoulder was serious. By now my black eye was a wonder, and children appeared from houses up and down the street to admire it. Then there was breakfast, everything the English breakfast has at its best, and, too, fresh fruit and fruit salads and bottled fruit and jugs of cream. Thirty or so people took breakfast. Easy to imagine this scene during the War, the atmosphere of lager, the unlimited hospitality.
BACK ON THE VERANDAH
After breakfast we were packed into a station-wagon and driven up the Vumba, over those roads that wound and swerved and swooped through mountains, and while my ‘nerves’ jumped and shuddered, I grew more irritated with them and with myself. All of us, the wounded, were in a much worse way than yesterday: bruises that were silent then were complaining now. On the verandah of the house in the mountains we counted our sore places, and lay about stiffly, and were waited on by the