African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [7]
THE BIG CITY
Of course the old one-horse one-storey town had gone…though everywhere bits of that town survived among the new tall buildings. What was wrong? Something was–the atmosphere? Yes, it was cold, being winter, and dry, and the skies sparkled with a thin sunshine. There were few people about, and they moved slowly, without animation. A pavement café had customers, not many, and they were all white, and seemed defensive. As I walked about, feeling more dismal every minute, I was accosted by beggars, the wounded from the War. They were aggressive and abusive, thrusting out stumps of arms and legs, and when given a little money, they shook it about in their palms, as if rejecting it, full of hatred. I went into Meikles bar. The hotel, being unique and full of character, had been pulled down and in its place was one exactly the same as many thousands of others, all over the world. That ‘they’ could have destroyed Meikles made me feel as helplessly angry as we all do when ‘they’ pull down buildings anywhere. ‘Well, it was a mistake,’ we know they will soon say airily. The old hotel appears in photographs around the walls of the bar. I felt as if I belonged in those photographs, and could easily have begun surreptitiously to examine them for faces I knew, or even myself, a young woman. I left Meikles, mourning, and went into a bookshop. The young man who came forward was so aggressive I knew at once how white people entered that shop. I asked for novels and stories written by black writers, and he found them for me, never once looking at me, or smiling. I said I was a writer whose books he might even be selling, but he did not ask the name so I told him. He was suspicious, doubtful, then was transformed into a friend. He said he had read one of my short stories. ‘Are you coming back to live? All the good white people left in the War.’ I said I was visiting.
And who was I visiting? Hard-line whites, who, if they came into this shop at all, being a black enterprise, would behave as they always had. We said goodbye with cautious goodwill, as if bombs lingered somewhere close, and might do us both in at one wrong word.
I decided to leave Harare. I had been in it for less than a morning, and everything about it chilled and dispirited me, and not only because I felt like a sad ghost.
I will say now what the matter was, though it was not that day or the next that I came to the obvious diagnosis. This was a town still recovering from the War. The country had been at war for over ten years, the War had ended two years before. It is not possible to fight this kind of war, a civil war, without the poisons going deep. When I went to Pakistan to visit Afghan refugees and the mujahideen, there was the same atmosphere. Something has been blasted or torn deep inside people, an anger has gone bad, and bitter, there is disbelief that this horror can be happening at all. A numbness, a sullenness, shows itself in a slowness of movement, of reactions.
I went to old Cecil Square, named after the Cecil family and Lord Salisbury, to buy flowers. Really, I wanted to talk to the flower sellers. They were all men, as they had been long ago, but different now, for they crowded around, thrusting the flowers just as the beggars had thrust their wounds, into my face. There were too many flower sellers, and these were hard times, with so few tourists, and they had to sell