Mara and Dann

by Doris Lessing

  Ida’s eyes widened, she sat up, she leaned forward. ‘Where did you hear that? Who told you?’

  ‘Daima told me. She was from Rustam.’

  ‘Was she a Memory?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A person who has to keep in her mind everything the family knows.’

  ‘I think she was.’

  ‘There is a lot we have forgotten – a lot we’ve lost. What else did she say?’

  ‘That there is a time in the month when it is safe to – to – to…’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Mara, speak out.’

  ‘I wish I could go to school,’ said Mara passionately.

  ‘It seems to me that you know more about some things than we do. Meanwhile, something seems to have happened to our eggs; but whether it is the women’s eggs or the men’s eggs, there is no way of knowing.’

  ‘Surely it’s a good thing, not to have babies when times are bad?’

  ‘But they aren’t bad here, they aren’t,’ said Ida, distressed. Then she sighed, and she frowned, and shifted about, taking her feet down off the stool and putting them back up. ‘Mara, when you are yourself again, when you are strong, will you have a child for me?’ Then she seemed to shrink away because of Mara’s reaction. ‘Why not? I’ll look after you, and the baby – always, I promise you.’

  Mara said, ‘I’ve been watching babies and small children and even big children die. You haven’t seen babies die of hunger.’

  ‘I’ve told you, we’ve enough food and water to last.’ And Ida was stretching out her hands to Mara. ‘I long for a child. I cannot have children. I’ve been pregnant over and over but I always lose them.’ And she began to weep, bright little tears squeezing out from between thick painted lashes, and bouncing down off painted cheeks and landing on her white dress, making little smears. ‘You don’t know what it is like,’ she whispered, ‘wanting a child, wanting, then conceiving – and then – they’re gone.’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ said Mara, ‘I’m so ugly no one would look at me.’ She tried to make this sound like a joke but she was suffering, because of all these attractive smooth-fleshed women, and their bright, fresh clothes and their breasts, which they took for granted. Whereas Mara’s breasts seemed to have disappeared for ever.

  ‘Oh, Mara, just be patient. You don’t know how you’ve changed in the last few days. And I’m not going to give up. I’m going to ask you again. Meanwhile Kira’s trying for me, but so far she hasn’t got pregnant.’

  Mara thought she had never seen anyone as unhappy. Desperate faces, anxious faces, fearful ones – that is what she had been seeing, but never anything like this fretful unhappiness. And she was fiercely thinking, She has plenty to eat, she has clean water, she can wash when she likes, and she is so pretty and fine …

  ‘And now I’m going to take you to the other girls,’ said Ida. ‘Just so they can set eyes on you. They are all going mad with curiosity, because you come from down there. You don’t have to tell them everything now, because you are going to have to tell us all everything tomorrow.’

  Mara was soon sitting among other young women, each one, she thought, as fresh as a flower, making her heart ache because she was so ugly, and she was given some curds to prepare. They asked her questions but did not understand what she told them. They had grown up in Chelops, and had never known hardship. When she said, ‘Sometimes we had only one cup of water to last for days,’ they did not believe her, thought she was making it up. When she said, ‘For years we ate roots and flour made into paste with water and cooked on the stones,’ they exchanged pretty glances and little grimaces of disbelief. She said, ‘We didn’t wash at all, we couldn’t, there wasn’t any water,’ and they raised their eyebrows and shook their heads, and smiled at each other. They were being kind to her, as if she were a foolish child or a pet animal.

  That night she asked Ida if she could use the room she had rested in, instead of sleeping in one of the big rooms that had in them several girls. All those kisses and cuddles, and pattings and strokings – she couldn’t do all that, she wasn’t used to it. Besides they would soon discover what she was wearing: the coins that would buy her freedom and Dann’s. Ida said, ‘I can’t understand anyone wanting to sleep by themselves,’ but said she could use that room. There was plenty of space. As for Ida, she always asked one of the girls to sleep on another bed in her room, preferably Kira.

  Next day Mara was taken by Ida into a large room that had several people waiting for her. She knew Ida, Kira and Orphne, and then saw Juba, who had been the magistrate that day in court. He greeted her with a friendly, ironical little smile. A tall, lean, older woman, with a face that Mara seemed to remember was like her mother’s, opened with the ritual, ‘And now, what have you seen, Mara?’

  Mara knew they did not mean what had she seen here, in Chelops, and started, again, with the scene in Rustam where she and Dann were being interrogated. She began to feel embarrassed, because it was taking so long, and began to shorten the tale; but the woman like her mother, who was Candace, said, ‘No, we want to know it all – everything. We will go on tomorrow, and so there’s no hurry at all.’

  And Mara talked, remembering more and more, details she had not known she had noticed: like the way water-starved skin shrinks into a rough, ridgy dryness, or how when they were hungry the milk beasts licked earth that had bits of old grass in it, or how very hot and thirsty people will sit panting with their mouths open, like birds when they are hot. And when she told about the old ruined cities on the hills above the Rock Village she saw in her mind’s eye one of the painted people from a later layer of the cities: she had thought that she – or he, it was hard to tell – wore a headdress; but no, it was braided and woven hair – she knew because she was looking at a woman’s head whose hair was the same, a marvel of inventive arrangement. This girl was Larissa. As she talked Mara was listening for names and trying to work out relationships. Next to Juba was a comfortable, greying lady, called Dromas; the two held hands. A young man with a fine, gentle, humorous face was Meryx, and he was their son. Two middle-aged men, Jan and John, were Candace’s sons. The only young woman from that courtyard of merry and carefree females was Larissa – why she, and not the others? There were half a dozen people who sat silent and listened.

  Mara was still talking about the ruined cities. She said, ‘I was lucky – wasn’t I? – living with that story, those stories, so close to me. If I had been brought up near that horrible city up there on the ridge, I would have learned nothing about who lived there.’ A wave of the old longing gripped her and she said, ‘Please, please, can I go to school?’

  Candace said, ‘Yes, you will – but first, your story. We need to know. It isn’t often we have someone here who has seen all the changes down there in the south. You see, we make up a history of what has happened – as far as we can hear about it. And we have people who learn it all and they preserve it, and make sure it is handed on down to someone younger, and we teach it to the young people. We call these people Memories. So please, Mara, go on.’

  And Mara went on talking. It was quite late when Candace said, ‘That’s enough for tonight.’

  Mara was in the room she had chosen, by herself. She had never in her life been alone to sleep, and she felt such a freedom, such an exultation in being alone. It was not a large room, and in it was only a low bed, and a jar for water and a cup, and a little glow of light from a wick floating in oil – but she was as happy as she had ever been.

  Next day they asked her to go to the young women’s courtyard, but she begged to be with Orphne, to learn what she could of herbs and healing; and besides, she felt, when with Orphne, as if she were being fed with cheerfulness, for that young woman’s pleasure in everything she did, in her own competence, was truly infectious. Oh, if only I could be like her, Mara was thinking.

  Next evening, again, the same people assembled. Mara went on with her tale until it ended with her and Dann’s sliding down the chalky hillside, and bathing i
n the pools and washing their garments. Juba did raise his eyebrows, and allow himself a frown, but he then waved his hand as if to say, Enough, it’s forgotten. The incident had certainly not been generally forgotten: the story of how two refugees had polluted the Chelops main water source and got away with it was being told to the extent that Juba had sent out warnings that the penalty for going anywhere near the water was still a death sentence.

  ‘And now,’ said Candace, ‘what do you want to ask us?’

  Mara said, ‘When you found out I am female, and brought me here, it was because all the female slaves are checked, for breeding purposes. Then you discovered I am Kin. But Dann is Kin, too, and you left him with the other slaves.’ She sounded reproachful, more than she had meant.

  ‘He has run away,’ said Candace. ‘We can’t find him.’

  ‘Oh no, no, no,’ said Mara, remembering how, with earlier disappearances of Dann, it had been as if half of her were torn away.

  ‘We are looking for him,’ said Meryx. ‘But the other slaves say he was talking of going North.’

  Mara kept her counsel. She did not believe Dann had left without her. He was hiding somewhere. Probably somewhere in those Towers. And how was he doing? She had all this food and water and comfort and cleanness, she was being petted and favoured – but he?

  She said, ‘The Mahondis control all the food-growing and supplies?’

  ‘Yes.’ And Meryx made a little bow to her. ‘Here is the Controller of Food – in person.’

  ‘You control the guards, the police, the watchmen, and the army?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Juba.

  ‘But the Hadrons control the water?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Candace.

  ‘Or they believe they do?’ asked Mara.

  A pause. Some glances were exchanged. Then Juba leaned forward and said, ‘Exactly. And it is important they go on thinking they do.’

  ‘All right,’ said Mara.

  Now Juba said, ‘Mara, we are going to ask you to do something important for all of us. We want you to work for a while with the poppy and the ganja.’ She felt so disappointed, she felt they were rejecting her; and, seeing her face, they leaned forward, with smiles and nods, to reassure her. ‘You must have seen how important it is, when you visited the Hadrons.’

  Mara still sat silent, but she was thinking.

  ‘The difference between the Hadrons and us,’ said Meryx, ‘is that they use poppy and ganja and we don’t.’

  Mara nodded.

  The next moment was not for her, because Meryx looked hard at Ida and said, ‘Mahondis don’t use these things.’

  Ida’s smile became nervous and guilty; she shifted about, and her fan began fluttering and trembling. Everyone was looking at her.

  ‘And you set a bad example,’ said Meryx; and now they were looking at Kira, who faced them with more self-command than Ida.

  Kira said, ‘I only have a little puff sometimes.’ And she laughed her petulant, defiant laugh.

  ‘Then don’t,’ said Candace.

  Ida was in tears. She went out, her fan loose in her hand, like a broken wing. Kira sat on, refusing to be guilty.

  Next day Mara was in the courtyard with the young women, and she asked questions about the growing of poppy, and the supply of ganja, but realised they did not really think about it. Only Larissa understood, and Mara saw the answer to something that had been puzzling her: why were so few people there on the evenings when matters of importance were discussed? Larissa was there because she had come to certain conclusions by herself, and was promoted to the inner circle of the Kin. And that meant that those of the inner circle were always on the lookout for people who did ask questions, who understood, and could answer intelligently when asked, ‘And what did you see?’

  Mara knew that she was about to be tested, and so it turned out. Juba, then Meryx, and Meryx again, took her to the fields where the poppies were growing, and then to the ganja, took her to the barns where the workers, male and female, were getting milky juice from the poppies, drying it, making big sticky balls, ready to smoke, or drying the ganja and crushing it and putting it into sacks. She was given poppy to smoke. She knew this was to make sure she could refuse it, having tried it. And indeed, while her head floated with imaginings, she thought she could not live without it; but when she was herself again, she was frightened by its seductive power, and swore never to touch it again. And she was offered it again, by the workers, and then by Ida, and finally by Meryx himself, who was openly apologetic. Then she smoked the ganja, but did not find that so enticing. She was invited again, by Juba, by Candace, with whom she actually did share a little smile that said she knew she was being tested.

  Then she was told, ‘There’s no need for you to work with the ganja and poppy again.’

  During this time most evenings she spent with Orphne, or with Larissa, avoiding Ida who was always begging her to sit with her. But there were other evenings when she was invited into the room for important occasions, and questioned. One evening was spent on what Mara had learned about fertility from Daima. Everyone was present. The atmosphere was tense. They were anxious. This was the heart of the Mahondi concern for the future: that they were not reproducing. How had Daima told Mara about the cycle? – ‘No, Mara, her exact words, please.’

  Mara said, using Daima’s words, ‘Now listen, Mara. Once there was a girl, rather like you, and she loved a young man – and one day you will too. He begged her to lie with him, and she found it hard to refuse; and then one night she gave in, but it was the wrong time in her cycle, and she was at her most fertile. She was pregnant. He blamed her. He said it was the woman’s duty to know her blood cycle, and the safe days; and when the case came to court, the judge agreed, and said it was the young woman’s first duty to herself and to her society to know her cycle.’

  Juba said, ‘That court must have been in Rustam. Do you know anything about how it worked? What the laws were?’

  Dromas said, ‘Juba, she was seven years old when she left.’

  ‘But Daima might have told you, Mara – did she?’

  But Mara sat silent. She was most bitterly regretting the opportunities she had not taken. How had she seen Daima all those years? She had taken her for granted: a kind old woman – but she was not really so old – who had taken in two orphans, literally out of the dark, and loved them and looked after them. She had lived like them on roots and bits of dried weed and flour cakes; she had never complained about being thirsty and dirty and very hungry. And yet she had been an important person in the court of Mara’s parents’ predecessors, where she had lived cleanly and sweetly and gently. And she had known so much that Mara had never asked her. How much Mara would have given now to have Daima back for a week, a day, even an hour, to ask her questions. Now Daima was dead, all that knowledge, all that information, was gone, for ever.

  Mara said, ‘Once when I asked her how she knew about the old cities up on the hills, she said the Mahondis had all kinds of bits of information from the past. She did not know where it all came from.’

  ‘Not these Mahondis,’ said Candace, grim.

  ‘Why don’t you have it too?’

  ‘You forget, we have been slaves for a long time. But your family were never slaves.’

  And now Mara, who was forcing herself to ask this, said, ‘Do you know what happened to my parents?’

  ‘They were killed the night you escaped.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Gorda was here. He told us.’

  ‘What happened to him? Is he alive?’

  ‘He made a rising against the Hadrons. A foolish uprising. He was killed with his followers.’

  ‘That means he did it without asking you; you didn’t know about it – no, that’s not possible, you must have known about it, but you didn’t approve.’

  Meryx said, ‘You might have noticed that we do things more – quietly.’

  Mara was thinking of that night, the first time she had been in a rock house, an
d how he had been kind. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘We would have been killed without him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Candace.

  And now, when Mara was least expecting it, Candace asked her, ‘And what is your name?’

  It seemed to her that her real name was about to appear on her tongue and she would say it here, among these friends, the Kin – her Kin – but at the last moment she remembered Lord Gorda’s, ‘Your name is Mara. Remember that always. Mara.’

  ‘My name is Mara,’ she said. They all nodded and smiled, at each other and at her. ‘But what is my real name? Do you know it?’

  ‘It would be better for you not to know it,’ said Candace. ‘Who knows what the Hadrons know? – what they got out of Gorda, before he died.’

  ‘Perhaps one day I’ll know my real name again,’ she said.

  ‘I hope you will,’ said Candace. ‘I for one think that we Mahondis have a good chance of ruling here one day. I know that not everyone agrees with me.’

  At this, the next reply Mara had planned to give when asked, ‘And what did you see?’ – became impossible. She was thinking, I have seen the future, and they haven’t. And they wouldn’t believe me.

  Instead she said, ‘I saw a beetle up there on the ridge. Do they ever come down into Chelops?’

  ‘Yes, and we kill them,’ said Meryx. ‘But some people believe they are breeding in the tunnels – Gorda saw them: he was using the tunnels as a base for his uprising.’

  ‘How did he get water?’ asked Mara.

  ‘To the point, as always,’ said Meryx. ‘The water was cut off to the Towers long ago. But the people sympathetic to Gorda living near the Towers helped him with water.’

  Mara said, not knowing she was going to say it, surprising herself, ‘Is anyone living there now? – the Towers? Could Dann be there?’

  ‘We don’t think so,’ said Candace.

  That meant Dann had been discussed when she was not there, and they knew things she did not.