Going Home - Doris May Lessing [20]
Similarly, at that time when I dreamed only images of destruction, there was a terrible dream about Cape Town, an exact repetition of what I once saw, awake.
It was about fifteen years ago I went to Cape Town for holiday. Or, as we put it who come down off the high hinterland, where it is all drought and small, stunted trees and sand, and the rain gets sucked into the dry air as soon as it falls—I went to the sea. At the Cape there are pine trees and hillsides full of grapes, and the sea all around, a blue, blue sea, and miles of white, glittering beaches, and mountains.
One night I stood on that hill which is a flank of Table Mountain, looking down at the city. The sky was clear and full of stars, and the sea was a dark-bluish luminosity, and on it were dark shapes clustered with lights, which were the big ships from Europe and the world. The city was a glow of light. Behind me Table Mountain, black and straight against the stars.
On the left stretched some lower hills. There appeared a small white vapour glistening in the moonlight in a gap between the peaks. Over the edge of the gap came a wisp of white cloud, a small tendril, curling down. Then the sky on that side was a whirl of moonlit mist, and instead of one curling finger, cloud came pouring down and through the gap like a flood of celestial milk. It sank as it came, covering first the flank of the mountain, then blotting out the lights of the houses on that side. The lights went out swiftly, and the mist came pouring steadily in, and soon half of the city had gone, and the sky on that side was a high bank of white and shining cloud. Then all the city was gone and the ships and the sea, and below a great white floor of moonlit cloud heaved and rose, and over on the right side the stars were dimming. Then there was cloud overhead, and cloud at my feet, rising. The fir trees just below sank in mist till only their black tops showed. As the cold dampness came up, the trees went.
It took only ten minutes, from the time that the city lay open and glittering to the time when it had gone, gone completely.
And so, when this dream began to recur, together with the dream of the heap of red, sinking earth and dead grass with the trees growing through it, I first restored the house, and then forced the mist back, rolled it back off the city and the sea and the lighted ships and back through the gap in the mountains. It took a long time, but at last the city was free and illuminated again.
3
On the morning after my arrival the sun was warm all about the house, the leaves of the creeper on the verandah laid a black sun-pattern on the wall, the pigeons cooed under the roof, the roses blazed on the lawn. In the next garden, the garden boy was cutting wisps of grass even with a pair of rusted old scissors, and a plump black girl was strolling up and down, looking good-naturedly bored, holding a white child by either hand. Daddy was leaving for the office in one car; Mummy was off downtown in the other.
I would now get out of bed, knowing that all the housework was done and the breakfast ready. Imagine that I lived here for so many years and took this comfort for granted! Even worse, that for a period of months before I left, due to a moral compulsion I now think misguided, I insisted on doing all my housework myself.
‘If I’ve got to live in this paradise for the petty bourgeoisie, then at least I shall take what advantages I can—if I’ve got to be bored, then I shall at least be comfortable.’ Thus a friend of mine, an old revolutionary from Central Europe, sucked into Rhodesia by some current of war. Until that moment he had been living on principle in one room, studying and absorbing statistical information about Africa against the day when he could go home to Europe and civilization and the class war. He lived in complete isolation from the white citizenry, who filled him with contempt. He then got himself a temporary job, a pleasant flat and a servant, and continued to study. Two years