The Sweetest Dream

by Doris Lessing

  ‘It will do us no good,’ he said. ‘Not in the long run. Did you know that Zimlia at Liberation was at the same level as France was, just before the Revolution?’

  Laughter, relieved laughter. For one thing France had been invoked, the Revolution, they were on safe ground again.

  ‘No, the Revolution was due to bad harvests, bad weather–France was basically prosperous. And this country too–or it was until some perhaps slightly unfortunate policies were adopted.’

  There was a silence that bordered on the panicky.

  ‘What are you saying?’ said Daniel, hot and offended, his face flaming under his red hair. ‘Are you telling us this country was better off under the whites?’

  ‘No,’ said Mo. ‘I did not say that. When did I say that?’ His voice was slurring: with relief they all saw that he was a little drunk. ‘I am saying that this is the most developed country in Africa, apart from South Africa.’

  ‘So, what are you saying?’ demanded Minister Franklin, polite, but concealing anger.

  ‘I am saying that you should build on your very sound foundations and stand on your own feet. Otherwise Global Money and Caring International and this Fund and that Fund–present company excepted,’ he said clumsily, raising his glass to them in a circling salute, ‘they’ll all be telling you what to do. It is not as if this country is a disaster area, like some we might mention. You have a sound economy and a good infrastructure.’

  ‘If I did not know you so well,’ said Comrade Minister Franklin, and he was actually nervously looking around to see if anyone had heard this dangerous talk, ‘I’d say you were in the pay of South Africa. That you are an agent for our great neighbour.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Comrade Mo. ‘Don’t call the thought police yet.’ Journalists had been arrested and jailed for wrong opinions, only a few days ago. ‘I am among friends. I spoke my thoughts. I am saying what I think. That is all.’

  A silence. Geoffrey was looking at his watch. Obediently Daniel looked at him. Various people were getting up, not looking at Comrade Mo, who sat on, partly out of stubbornness, partly because he was going to have trouble walking straight.

  ‘Perhaps we could have a discussion on this subject?’ he said to Franklin. He spoke easily, intimately: after all, had they not known each other for years, and discussed Africa noisily, but amicably whenever they met?

  ‘No,’ said Comrade Franklin. ‘No, Comrade, I don’t think I shall be saying any more on this subject.’ He got up. A couple of until now silent black men at a near table got up too, revealing themselves as his aides or guards. He gave the clenched fist salute, shoulder level, to Geoffrey and to Daniel, and to various other representatives of international generosity, and went out, with a heavy on either side of him.

  ‘I am going to bed,’ said Andrew. ‘I’m getting up early tomorrow.’

  ‘I think Comrade Franklin may have forgotten that he has promised us seats for tomorrow’s celebration,’ said Geoffrey sulkily. He meant this as a rebuke to Comrade Mo.

  ‘I’ll see to it,’ said Comrade Mo. ‘Just give my name. I’ll reserve you seats on the VIP stand.’

  ‘But I want a seat too,’ said MP James.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Comrade Mo, waving his hands about, as if they dispensed largesse, invitations, tickets. ‘Don’t lose any sleep. You’ll get in, you’ll see.’ His moment of truth was past, defeated by the demon, peer pressure.

  • • •

  On that morning when Andrew was expected there was trouble at the hospital. When Sylvia walked down through the again dusty shrubs she saw chickens lying gasping, their beaks wide open, and this time it was not their defence against the heat. No water in their drinking tins. No food in their trough. She found Joshua standing swaying, a knife in his hand, over a young woman who was crouching terrified, both hands held up to ward him off. He stank of dagga. He looked as if he intended to murder the woman, who had a swollen arm. Sylvia took the knife from him and said, ‘I told you that if you smoked dagga again then that would be the end. This is the end, Joshua. Do you understand?’ His angry face and reddened eyes, his powerful threatening body, loomed over her. She said, ‘And the chickens are dying. They have no water.’

  ‘That is Rebecca’s work.’

  ‘You agreed between you that you would do it.’

  ‘She must do it.’

  ‘Now, leave. Go.’

  He stalked off to a tree about twenty yards away, subsided under it, and sat, his face on his arms. Almost at once he fell over, asleep or unconscious. His little boy, Clever, was watching. He had taken to hanging around, anxious to do any little job given him. Now Sylvia said, ‘Clever, will you feed the chickens and give them water?’ ‘Yes, Doctor Sylvia.’ ‘Now watch me while I show you how.’ ‘I know how to do it.’ She watched while he fetched water, filled the tins, threw grain down. The chickens hustled to the water tins, and drank and drank but one hen was too far gone. She told him to take it up to Rebecca.

  Andrew had trouble getting the kind of car he was used to from the car hire firm. They were all old and scary. ‘Is that all you’ve got?’ He knew that any new cars being imported went straight to the new elite, but on the other hand, tourists were being beckoned in. He said to the young black woman behind the desk, ‘You’ve got to get better cars than these if you want to attract tourists.’ Her face told him she agreed with him, but he wasn’t going to criticise her superiors. He took a battered Volvo, asked if there was a spare tyre, was told there was, but it wasn’t very good, and, since time was running by, he decided to risk it. He had detailed instructions from Sylvia on the lines of, Get on to the Koodoo Dam road, go through the Black Ox Pass, then when you see a big village, take the dirt road that bends to the right, go on about five miles, turn right at the big baobab, drive ten miles, you’ll see the signpost for St Luke’s Mission on the same signpost as Pyne’s Farm.

  He found the country impressive in a grand but hostile way, so dry, and the dust lying in the air, though he knew there had been rains recently. He had visited Zimlia many times, but had never had to find any place for himself. He lost his way, but at last was driving past the Pynes’ signpost when he saw on the road in front a tall white man waving his arms. Andrew stopped, and this man said, ‘I’m Cedric Pyne. Could you take this stuff to the Mission? We heard you were on your way.’ A big sack was thrown into the back, and the farmer went sloping off, back to the house some hundreds of yards away. Andrew deduced that he, or someone, had been keeping an eye out for the dust of the car. He was still waiting to see the Mission, when he saw a low brick house, with gum trees around it, and beyond it the flat low buildings, like barracks, which he knew was a school. He parked. A smiling black woman came out on the verandah and said that Father McGuire was at the school and that Doctor Sylvia was coming just-now.

  He followed her on to the verandah and into the front room where he was invited to sit.

  Andrew’s experience had been with the Africa of presidents and governments, officials, and attractive hotels, but he had not ever descended to the Africa he was seeing now. This wretched little room offended him, and precisely because it was a challenge. When he talked Global Money, dispensed Global Money, was a fount of ever-unfailing largesse, this was what it was all about–wasn’t it? But this was a mission, for God’s sake! This was the Roman Catholic Church, wasn’t it? Weren’t they supposed to be rich? There was a rent in the cretonne curtain which was attempting to exclude the glare from a sun that had only just climbed high enough not to strike it direct. Tiny black ants crawled over the floor. The black woman brought him a glass of orange juice. Warm. No ice?

  The kitchen where the black woman was, opened to his right. Another door, standing ajar, was on his left. On the door a dressing-gown hung from a nail: he knew it was Sylvia’s, he remembered it. He went into the room. The bare red brick floor, the brick walls, the gleaming pale reed ceiling which now was to Sylvia like a second skin, seemed to him offensively meagre. So small, this room
was, so bare. On the little chest of drawers were photographs, in silver frames. There was Julia, and there, Frances. And one of him, aged about twenty-five, debonair, whimsical, smiling straight back at him. It hurt, his younger self–he turned away, unconsciously passing his hands down over his face, as if to restore that confident unmarked face, that innocent face. He thought, mocking the surroundings, so inimical to him–that little crucifix–that he had not then eaten of the fruit of good and evil. He stared conscientiously at the crucifix, which defined a Sylvia he did not know at all, trying to accept it, accept her. Her clothes were hanging on nails on the walls. Her shoes, mostly sandals, stood along a wall. He turned and saw the Leonardo on the wall. The other pictures of Virgins and infants he ignored. Well, there was one decent thing in the room.

  Now he heard that someone approached, and went to the window that opened on to the verandah, and watched Sylvia coming up the path. She wore jeans, a loose top similar to the one he had seen on the black servant, and her hair was bleached by the sun, and tied back with an elastic band. Between her eyes was a deep frowning furrow. She was burned by the sun a dry dark brown. She was as thin as he remembered ever seeing her. He went out, she saw him, rushed to him, and there was a long embrace full of love and memories.

  He wanted to see the hospital: she was reluctant, knowing he would not understand what he saw: how could he, when it had taken her long enough? But they walked together down the path, and she showed him the shed she called the dispensary, the various shelters and the big hut which it seemed she was proud of. Some black people lay about on mats, under trees. A couple of men came from the bush, lifted a woman he had thought was sleeping on to a litter made of branches, the fronds of leaves tied down over it for softness, and went off with her into the trees. ‘Dead,’ said Sylvia. ‘Childbirth. But she was ill. I know it was AIDS.’ He did not know how she wanted him to respond–if she expected a response. She sounded–what? Angry? Stoical?

  Back at the house, they found Father McGuire had come. Andrew disliked him and began talking, as was his way with difficult situations. He spent most of his life in committees or congresses or conferences, always presiding, and in control of people from a hundred countries representing conflicting interests and demands. Never has a man better deserved that technical adjective facilitator : that is what he was, and what he did, smoothing paths and opening avenues. Some facilitators use silence, sitting with unspeaking faces until at last they enter the fray with conclusive words, but others talk, and Andrew’s urbane and affable rivers of words dissolved discords, and he was used to seeing angry or suspicious faces relax into hopeful smiles.

  He was talking about the dinner last night which in his description became a mildly humorous social comedy, and would have made hearers laugh who knew something of the background. But these two–and that black woman standing there–did not smile, and Andrew was thinking, Of course, they are as good as peasants, they aren’t used to . . . and still Sylvia and the priest stood by their chairs, while he was already sitting, ready to command, and waiting for them to smile. But he was not winning them, not at all, and a glance between them suddenly enlightened him: they wanted to say grace. Anger at himself made him go red. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, and stood up.

  Father McGuire recited some Latin words which Andrew could not follow, and Sylvia said Amen in a clear little voice that Andrew remembered from that other distant life.

  The three sat. Andrew was so discommoded by what he saw as his social gaffe, that he was silent.

  The black woman, whom he knew was Rebecca, now served the lunch. There was chicken, the one that had died that morning from dehydration. It was tough. The priest said to Rebecca that there was no point in cooking a chicken just dead, but she said she wanted to cook something nice for the visitor. She had made a jelly, and Father McGuire, tucking in, said they should have visitors more often.

  Sylvia knew that Andrew was watching, and tried to eat the chicken and spooned in the jelly as if it were medicine.

  He wanted to know the history of the hospital. He had been shocked by it, and by Sylvia’s being there. How could such a wretched thing be called a hospital? His dislike of the place, his suspicion, were being communicated, being felt, by Sylvia, by the priest and by Rebecca, who stood with her back to her kitchen, hands folded, listening. He did not like Rebecca. And he thoroughly distrusted Sylvia’s looking like her–the native-style top, certain mannerisms, ways with the face and the eyes which Sylvia was unconscious of. Andrew spent most of his time with people of colour–and what could you call Sylvia, looking like that, almost as dark as Rebecca? He knew he did not suffer from race prejudice. No, but it was class prejudice, and the two are often confused. What was Sylvia doing, letting herself go like this?

  These thoughts, all visible on his face, though he smiled and was his delightful social self, were putting the three against him. The trio, two of whom he thoroughly disliked, were united in criticism of him.

  Father McGuire’s emotions came out of him thus: ‘That white suit of yours, what possessed you to put that on, to come and visit us in our dusty land?’

  And indeed Andrew knew he had been foolish. He possessed a dozen or so white or cream linen suits, which took him to the Third World looking cool and smart. But there was dust on him today, and he had caught Sylvia’s critical inspection of him, seeing the suit as a symptom.

  ‘It’s as well you didn’t see the hospital as it was when I first came,’ Sylvia said.

  ‘That’s true enough,’ said the priest. ‘If you are shocked by what you see now, what would you have said then?’

  ‘I didn’t say I was shocked.’

  ‘I think we are used to seeing certain expressions on the faces of our visitors,’ said Father McGuire. ‘but if you want to understand that hospital, then ask the people in our village what they think.’

  ‘We think Doctor Sylvia has been sent by God to us,’ said Rebecca.

  This silenced Andrew. They sat on at the table, drinking weak coffee, for which the priest apologised–decent coffee was hard to find, anything imported was so expensive, there were shortages of everything, and it was due to incompetence, that was all it was . . . He went on, a hard practised grumbling and then he heard himself, sighed and stopped. ‘And God forgive me,’ he said, ‘to complain about a thing like bad coffee.’

  The story of the hospital–it was not going to be told, Andrew saw, and knew it was his fault. He wanted to leave, but a visit to the school had been planned. They would have to go out into the dazzle of hot light that showed through the window. Father McGuire said he would get his forty winks, and off he went to his room. Sylvia and Andrew sat on, both wanting to sleep, but sticking it out. Then Rebecca came in to take the dirty plates.

  ‘Did you bring the books?’ she asked Andrew direct. The way Sylvia was keeping her eyes lowered meant that she had been wanting to ask this, but had been afraid to. She had sent him a list of books after he had telephoned to say he was coming. He had forgotten them, though she had written under the list, Please, Andrew. Please. He said to Rebecca, ‘I forgot them, I’m sorry.’ Her face stared: No–then she burst into tears and ran out of the room, leaving the tray on the table. Sylvia fitted plates and cups on to the tray and still did not look at him. ‘It means a great deal to us,’ she said. ‘I know you won’t be able to understand how much.’

  ‘I’ll send them to you.’

  ‘They would probably be stolen on the way. Never mind, forget it.’

  ‘Of course I won’t forget it.’

  Now he remembered that when he was in her room he had seen shelves on the wall, and above it a printed card: Library. ‘Wait,’ he said, and went into her room. She followed. There were two books on the shelves, one a dictionary and one, Jane Eyre. Both were falling to pieces. A sheet of paper was nailed to the brick: Library Books. Taken out: Returned. The Pilgrim’s Progress. The Lord of the Rings. Christ Stopped at Eboli. The Grapes of Wrath. Cry, the Beloved Country. The Mayor of Ca
sterbridge. The Holy Bible. The Idiot. Little Women. The Lord of the Flies. Animal Farm. Saint Teresa of Avila. These were the books that Sylvia had brought with her, a store added to when people came, the books they had brought with them, begged for and donated to these shelves.

  ‘A funny little collection,’ said Andrew humbly. He was really moved to tears.

  ‘You see,’ said Sylvia, ‘we need books. They love books and we can’t get them. And these are all the worse for wear.’

  ‘I’ll send you what you asked, I will,’ he said.

  She did not say anything. She said nothing in a way that he knew she had learned and was practising. He suspected she was praying under her breath for patience. ‘You see,’ she attempted, ‘you don’t understand what books mean. You see someone sitting in a hut at night reading by candlelight . . . you see someone barely literate struggling.’ Her voice trembled.

  ‘Oh, Sylvia, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  The list she had sent was in his briefcase, which he had brought with him: why? but he always took it with him.

  The Little Flowers of Mary. The Theory and Practice of Good Husbandry in Sub-Saharan Africa. How to Write Good English. The Tragedies of Shakespeare. The Naked and the Dead. Gawain and the Green Knight. The Secret Garden. The Centre Cannot Hold. Teach Yourself Engineering. Mowgli. The Diseases of Cattle in Southern Africa. Shaka the Zulu King. Jude the Obscure. Wuthering Heights. Tarzan. And so on.

  He went back into the dining-room and found that Father McGuire had reappeared, refreshed. The two men exited into the hot glare and Sylvia tumbled on her bed. She wept. She had promised all the people who had come up to the house and come up again, and again, asking for books, that a new stock of books was coming. She felt abandoned. In her mind Andrew stood for perfect tenderness, kindness; he was the gentle big brother to whom she could say anything, whom she could ask for anything–but he was a stranger now. That brilliant white suit! I ask you, white linen, put on to visit St Luke’s Mission! White linen that must be like rubbing thick cream between your fingers. She felt that in some subtle way that suit was an insult to her, to Father McGuire, to Rebecca. Once long ago she could have said this to him, they might have laughed about it.