Going Home - Doris May Lessing [72]
It reminded me of the big vlei on our farm, where I used to lie on an ant-heap with my rifle and pick off the doves as they settled on surrounding trees, and take them back to the house for pigeon pie.
That vlei was unlike the other big vlei at the back of our house, where my brother and I went shooting for guinea-fowl and for buck, because the road ran through it that went out to the gold mine in the Ayrshire hills, where big lorries were always passing; and because one of the main paths crossing it led from one Native Reserve to another; so it was too noisy a place for buck and guinea-fowl. But the doves and the pigeons did not seem to mind. There was a brief moment in every year when that dry, brown vlei blossomed with colour, for a variety of big white-and-pink striped lilies grew there at the moment of the first heavy rains.
The third vlei was the biggest of them all, three miles long, half a mile wide, full of thorn trees and grey rocks and heavy, long, grass. I have never met anyone there, white or black; it was always empty, drugged with heat and loneliness.
The lilies grew there, too, for about a week in every wet season.
THE LILIES
This morning it was, on the pavement,
When that smell hit me again
And set the houses reeling.
People passed like rain:
(The way rain moves and advances over the hills)
And it was hot, hot and dank,
The smell like animals, strong, but sweet too.
What was it?
Something I had forgotten.
I tried to remember, standing there,
Sniffing the air on the pavement.
Somehow I thought of flowers.
Flowers! That bad smell!
I looked: down lanes, past houses—
There, behind a hoarding,
A rubbish-heap, soft and wet and rotten.
Then I remembered:
After the rain, on the farm,
The vlei that was dry and paler than a stone
Suddenly turned wet and green and warm.
The green was a clash of music.
Dry Africa became a swamp
And swamp-birds with long beaks
Went humming and flashing over the reeds
And cicadas shrilling like a train.
I took off my clothes and waded into the water.
Under my feet first grass, then mud,
Then all squelch and water to my waist.
A faint iridescence of decay,
The heat swimming over the creeks
Where the lilies grew that I wanted:
Great lilies, white, with pink streaks
That stood to their necks in the water.
Armfuls I gathered, working there all day.
With the green scum closing round my waist,
The little frogs about my legs,
And jelly-trails of frog-spawn round the stems.
Once I saw a snake, drowsing on a stone,
Letting his coils trail into the water.
I expect he was glad of rain too
After nine months of being dry as bark.
I don’t know why I picked those lilies,
Piling them on the grass in heaps,
For after an hour they blackened, stank.
When I left at dark,
Red and sore and stupid from the heat,
Happy as if I’d built a town,
All over the grass were rank
Soft, decaying heaps of lilies
And the flies over them like black flies on meat…
A telephone call from someone I didn’t know. A South African voice. I met him in a café, a big man with the open, direct face and the blue, aggressive stare of a certain type of blond South African.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘what did you want to see me for?’—he had insisted it was very important, he could not tell me over the telephone.
He sat opposite me, sideways, poking his head around to look at me with an insistent pressure of his full eyes. I had the impression that he might easily get up and walk off.
He was silent a moment, then he took a small pill-box out of his pocket, opened it, and picked out of it a white, fluffy chicken-feather smudged with tar. He pushed the feather at me over the table, and seemed to be waiting to see what I would do.
‘What are you?’ I asked. ‘The Ku Klux Klan?’
Suddenly he got angry. He got angry as if he had been wanting an excuse to get angry. ‘I don