African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [66]
This particular farm assistant was–well, of course–shy. He was handsome. He knew nothing, and yearned to know everything. ‘Tell me a book to read,’ he might demand, and, when handed one, turned it over with lanky respectful fingers. ‘Yes, I’ll give this one a try.’
He dropped in often. Dropping in, dropping over, is the style of the life of the verandahs and not only for people. Animals visited, too. The great Alsatian from the next farm, who got lonely when his people went off down to Mutare, which they often did, came over to us for company. I might wake in the night–I was sleeping on the verandah–and feel the warm muzzle on my face or arm. A soft pleading whine and he climbed on to the bed, ‘Tarka! What are you doing here, you should be at home.’ If Tarka turned up in the day, a telephone call. ‘Your dog Tarka is here again.’ A servant came to fetch him. ‘Come on, Tarka, come home.’ Tarka went off, disconsolate, with a hundred wistful glances back at the house full of people and the three dogs, his friends.
PARTINGS
The little girls and their mother departed for Cape Town, just as I soon would leave for London. Then thousands of miles would again separate us. This was when I should leave to find out about new Zimbabwe, but I could still hardly move, what with the bruised ribs and leg. I lay in a long chair on the verandah and looked out over that view of mountains and hills and rivers and lakes that no one could ever get tired of. Sometimes small puffs of smoke just over the border meant that Renamo was at it again, blowing up something or other.
My son sat with me, when not in the fields. He was still in pain. Days passed, then weeks. We were both bored. We told each other we were bored. In a small field down the hill were some sheep, put there to pasture by a neighbour. The sheep had brought flies with them. We sat on the verandah with rolled-up newspapers and swatted flies. Nine, twelve, fifteen, twenty-nine…‘I’ve killed thirty flies,’ I would boast. ‘Jolly good show. But I’ve killed thirty-five.’
‘You’re cheating!’
‘No, you’re cheating. That’s my fly, not yours.’
People came and people went. Sometimes the verandah seemed to me like a seashore, with tides rushing in, depositing sea-drift, and out again. A car full of people might turn up from Harare, and they were all fed, and slept on the living-room floor. ‘Milos! Bring tea…bring beer, make supper for ten. Make breakfast for sixteen.’
I lay on the verandah, and thought how alike in general pace and style are the lives of the blacks and the whites, the easy hospitality, the generosity. (Nor can we now say, But the whites are rich and the blacks poor.) Why then, if they are so alike…in fact my thoughts were the same as those before I left Southern Rhodesia in 1949. But in those days I had nothing to make comparisons with. My thoughts tended to be a blur of incredulity: how could people go on like this when it was obviously stupid? But now I had seen the world and knew that people went on like this everywhere.
Once I had wondered why Europeans were so obsessed with their racial superiority, and if it was a compensation for their having been so backward, so uncouth, while the civilizations of the Middle East and the East glittered and despised theirs. The European arrogance was only the boastfulness of the nouveau riche? Pride in white skin was because there was nothing much else to be proud of? But that was before I had watched an Indian girl trying all afternoon to make her dark face lighter: she was about to meet a possible bridegroom. Before I had read the poems of an Arab who was praising the pearl-white skin, the milk-white skin, of his girl, for, he said, Europeans did not know what they were talking about, when they were proud