Going Home - Doris May Lessing [101]
‘And what are these papers?’ he shouted at Samson, unrolling them.
‘I do not know,’ said Samson. And then, thinking he might get his friends into trouble, he said: ‘I found them lying on the ground.’
The two policemen, both tall, strong, fine fellows, spread the papers on the table, and looked at them, and then one turned to Samson and said, ‘Do you not know these papers are forbidden?’
‘No,’ said Samson. ‘I know nothing.’
And now the two policemen came towards Samson, threatening. And the old man shrank back a little and then stood his ground. A timid man he had always been, a gentle man, a man who avoided trouble, and yet here he stood, in his own house with two big policemen standing over him. And his wife was crying in the next room. He could hear her.
‘Where did you get these papers?’ asked one of the policemen, and he hit Samson with his open hand across his head. Samson fell sideways a few steps, recovered, and said:
‘I know nothing.’
And then the other policeman, grinning, moved across and hit Samson with his open hand on the other side of the head, so he staggered back to the first.
Now the wife was in the open door, wailing aloud.
The first policeman said: ‘We will put you in prison, my fine fellow, you damn fool, you Kaffir.’
‘What are you doing in my house?’ asked Samson, breathing hard. ‘This is my house.’
‘Your house—you say that to the police?’
And he hit Samson again, with his closed fist, on the side of the head, and as Samson reeled across the room the other policeman hit him with his closed fist.
And now there was a silence, for instead of staggering back, to be hit again, Samson stood, his face screwed up, eyes shut, then his mouth dropped and his head fell sideways, and he slumped to the ground.
The wife wailed again.
The two policemen looked at each other, hurriedly bent over Samson who was lying on the ground motionless, and then ran out of the house into the night.
When Dickson came in from his friends’, he found his mother sitting beside his father, swaying from side to side, moaning. His father was dead.
When the other sons and daughters came in, they talked over what to do.
Some said to go to the Superintendent. But the mother was frightened.
One said that policemen were not allowed to kill a man by hitting him, but another that the policemen would lie and there would be trouble.
At last one ran for the nurse at the hospital, and men came with a stretcher and carried Samson away. They said he had fallen down dead suddenly.
He was an old man, and none had eaten for two days.
On the next day the mother sat wailing in her kitchen, and the sons and daughters were with the crowds around the hall and the playing ground, listening to the talk about the strike, and to the men who were standing on boxes explaining about the strike. It was here that Dickson saw a policeman looking close at him. And the policeman came up to him through the crowd and stood by him and said: ‘Where’s your situpa?’ Dickson produced his papers, and the policeman said: ‘You’d better go home, you go to Nyasaland, before they catch you. I know you have those papers in your house.’ Dickson looked at him, and then around for help, but the people about him had melted away to give distance to the policeman. He said nothing. Then the policeman went away, swinging his stick, and Dickson slowly went home.
What is this about the papers?’ he asked his mother.
She raised her voice and wept. He said: ‘Mother, mother, it was those papers that killed him.’
She had put them in the back of the cupboard in the kitchen, and Dickson took them out and looked at them, and understood nothing. But he put them under his coat, and was going to find the men who had been there the night before, to ask why these papers had killed his father, when he saw the policeman again, walking slowly past his house, looking at him, and then he turned and walked slowly back, looking at him all the time.
And now for the first time he listened to the wailing of the old woman, who was saying that she was alone, she was alone, and she wanted