The Sweetest Dream

by Doris Lessing

  The two women went together into the office, whose waiting-room already had a dozen people in it, and sat together at the end of a bench. Sylvia was the only white person there, but with her burned skin, and in her headscarf, for the dust, she and Rebecca were like each other, two small thin women, both with worried faces, in the timeless scene, petitioners waiting, lulled by boredom. From inside, beyond a door that had on it, Mr M. Mandizi, faded white paint on brown, came a loud hectoring voice. Sylvia grimaced at Rebecca who grimaced back. Time passed. The door suddenly opened and there appeared a young black girl, in tears.

  ‘Shame,’ said an old black man, who was well down in the queue. He clicked his tongue and shook his head, and said, ‘Shame’ loudly, as a large and imposing black man, in the obligatory three-piece suit, stood there and impressed them all. He said, ‘Next’, and stood back, shutting the door, so that the next petitioner had to knock, and hear, ‘Come in’.

  Time passed. This one came out successful: at least, he was not crying. And he clapped his hands together gently, not looking at anyone, so that the salutation or applause was for himself.

  The loud voice from inside: ‘Next.’

  Sylvia sent Rebecca with some money to buy the children some lunch and a drink, and to make sure they were there. They were, asleep. Rebecca brought a Fanta back, which the two women shared.

  A couple of hours passed.

  Then, it was their turn, and the official, seeing that this was a white woman, was about to summon the man next on the bench when the old man said, ‘Shame. The white woman is waiting like the rest of us.’

  ‘It is for me to say who comes next,’ said Mr Mandizi.

  ‘Okay,’ said the old man, ‘but it is not right, what you are doing. We don’t like what you are doing.’

  Mr Mandizi hesitated, but then pointed at Sylvia and went back in.

  Sylvia smiled thanks at the old man, and Rebecca spoke softly to him in their language. Laughter all around. What was the joke? Again, Sylvia was thinking she would never know. But Rebecca whispered to her as they went in to the office, ‘I told him he was like an old bull who knows how to keep the young ones in order.’

  They arrived in front of Mr Mandizi still smiling. He glanced up from papers, frowned, saw Rebecca was there, and was about to speak sharply to her when she began on the ritual greeting.

  ‘Good morning–no, I see it is already afternoon. So, good afternoon.’

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he replied

  ‘I hope you are well.’

  ‘I am well if you are well . . .’ and so on, and even truncated it was an impressive reminder of good manners.

  Then, to Sylvia: ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Mr Mandizi, I am from St Luke’s Mission, and I have come to ask why the supply of condoms has not been sent. It was due from you last month.’

  Mr Mandizi seemed to swell, and he half rose from his desk, and his startled look became offended. He subsided and said, ‘And why am I expected to talk to a woman about condoms? It is not what I expect to hear?’

  ‘I am the doctor at the Mission hospital. The government last year said that condoms were being made available for all bush hospitals.’

  Clearly Mr Mandizi had not heard of this ukase, but now he gave himself time by dabbing at his forehead, bright with sweat, with a very large white handkerchief. His was the kind of face that has to labour for authority. It was by nature amiable, and wanting to please: the frown he imposed on it didn’t suit him. ‘And what may I ask are you going to do with all these condoms?’

  ‘Mr Mandizi, you must have heard that there is a bad disease . . . it is a new very bad disease and it is transmitted by sexual intercourse.’

  His face was that of a man being forced to swallow unpleasantness.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘but we know that this disease is an invention of the whites. It is to make us wear condoms, so that we do not have children and our people become weakened.’

  ‘Forgive me, Mr Mandizi, but you are out of date. It is true that your government was saying that AIDS does not exist but now they say that perhaps it may exist, and so men should wear condoms.’

  Ghosts of derision chased themselves across his large, black pleasant face, displacing the frown. And now Rebecca spoke, direct to him, in their language, and it seemed well, for Mr Mandizi was listening, his face turned towards her, towards this woman to whom in his culture, he would not have to listen on such subjects, at least not in public.

  He addressed Sylvia: ‘You think this sickness is here, in this district, with us? Slim is here?’

  ‘Yes, I know it is. I know it is, Mr Mandizi. People are dying from it. You see, the problem is diagnosis. People may be dying of pneumonia or TB or diarrhoea or skin lesions–sores–but the real reason is AIDS. It is Slim. And there are a lot of sick people. Many more than when I first came to the hospital.’

  Now Rebecca spoke again, and Mr Mandizi was listening, not looking at her, but nodding.

  ‘And so you want me to telephone the head office and tell them to send me the condoms?’

  ‘And we have not had the malaria tablets. We haven’t had any medicines.’

  ‘Doctor Sylvia has been buying medicines for us with her own money,’ said Rebecca.

  Mr Mandizi nodded, sat thinking. Then, a different man, a petitioner in his turn, he leaned forward and asked, ‘Can you tell by looking if someone has Slim?’

  ‘No. There are tests for it.’

  ‘My wife is not well. She coughs all the time.’

  ‘That needn’t be AIDS. Has she lost weight?’

  ‘She is thin. She is too too thin.’

  ‘You should take her to the big hospital.’

  ‘I did. They gave her muti but she is still sick.’

  ‘Sometimes I send samples to Senga–if someone isn’t too sick.’

  ‘You are saying that if someone is very ill you don’t send samples?’

  ‘Some people come in to me when they are so ill I know they are going to die. And there is no point in wasting money on tests.’

  ‘In our culture,’ said Mr Mandizi, regaining his authority because of this so often used formula, ‘in our culture, we have good medicine, but I know you whites despise it.’

  ‘I don’t despise it. I am friends with our local n’ganga. Sometimes I ask him for help. But he says himself he cannot do anything for AIDS.’

  ‘Perhaps that is why his medicine didn’t help her?’

  But hearing what he had said, his whole body seemed to freeze up in panic and he sat rigid, staring, then jumped up and said, ‘You must come with me now–yes, now-now–she is here, in my house, it is five minutes.’

  He swept the two women before him out of the office and through the silent petitioners, saying, ‘I will be back in my office in ten minutes. Wait.’

  Sylvia and Rebecca were directed through the hot dusty glare to one of the new houses, ten of them in a row, like boxes sitting in the dust, but identical to the big new houses going up in Senga, scaled down to the importance of Kwadere Growth Point. Over them scarlet, purple and magenta bougainvillaeas marked them for distinction: here lived all the local officials.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Mr Mandizi urged, and they were in a small room stuffed with a three-piece suite, a sideboard, refrigerator, pouffe, and then in a bedroom filled with a big bed where lay someone ill, and beside her a pretty plump black woman fanning the sleeper with a bunch of eucalyptus leaves, whose smell was trying to overcome the sickroom odours. But was the invalid asleep? Sylvia stood over her, saw with shock that this woman was ill, very ill–she was dying. She should have been a glossy healthy black, but she was grey, sores covered her face, and she was thin, the head on the pillow showed the skull. There was hardly any pulse. Her breath barely moved. Her eyes were half open. Touching her left Sylvia’s fingers cold. Sylvia turned her face to the desperate husband, unable to speak, and Rebecca beside her began to wail softly. The plump young woman stared straight ahead, and went on w
ith her fanning.

  Sylvia stumbled out to the other room and leaned against the wall.

  ‘Mr Mandizi,’ she said, ‘Mr Mandizi.’ He came up to her, took her hand, leaned to stare into her face, and whispered, ‘Is she very ill? My wife . . .’ ‘Mr Mandizi . . .’ He let his body fall forward so that his face lay on his arm on the wall. He was so close to Sylvia she put her arm around his shoulders and held him as he sobbed.

  ‘I’m afraid she will die,’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes. I am sorry, I think she is dying.’

  ‘What shall I do? What shall I do?’

  ‘Mr Mandizi, do you have children?’

  ‘We had a little girl but she died.’

  Tears were splashing on to the cement floor.

  ‘Mr Mandizi,’ she whispered–she was thinking of that plump healthy woman next door, ‘you must listen to me, you must, please do not have sex without a condom.’

  It was such a terrible thing to say at that moment, it was ridiculous, but the dreadful urgency of his situation compelled her. ‘Please, I know how this must sound, and don’t be angry with me.’ She was still whispering.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, I heard what you said. I am not angry.’

  ‘If you want me to come back later, when you are . . . I can come back and explain it to you.’

  ‘No, I understand. But you don’t understand something.’ He pulled himself off the support of the wall and stood upright. He spoke normally now. ‘My wife is dying. My child is dead. And I know who is responsible. I shall consult our good n’ganga again.’

  ‘Mr Mandizi, you simply can’t be saying . . .’

  ‘Yes, I am saying it. That is what I am saying. Some enemy has put a curse on me. This is the work of a witch.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Mandizi, and you are an educated man . . .’

  ‘I know what you are thinking. I know how you people think.’

  He stood there before her, his face contorted with anger and with suspicion. ‘I will get to the bottom of this.’ Then he commanded. ‘Tell them at the office I will be returning in half an hour.’

  Sylvia and Rebecca began to walk away towards the lorry.

  They heard, ‘And that so-called hospital at the Mission. We know about it. It is a good thing that our new hospital will soon be built and we shall have some real medicine in our district.’

  Sylvia said, ‘Rebecca, please don’t tell me that you agree with what he is saying. It is ridiculous.’

  Rebecca was first silent and then said, ‘Sylvia, you see, in our culture it is not ridiculous.’

  ‘But it is a disease. Every day we understand more about it. It is a terrible disease.’

  ‘But why do some people get it but other people don’t get it? Can you explain that? And that is the point, do you understand what I am saying? Perhaps there is some person who wanted to harm Mr Mandizi, or who wanted to get rid of his wife? Did you see that young woman in the bedroom with Mrs Mandizi? Perhaps she would like to be Mrs Mandizi herself?’

  ‘Well, Rebecca, we are not going to agree.’

  ‘No, Sylvia, we are not going to agree.’

  At the lorry people were already waiting to clamber in but Sylvia said, ‘I am not driving home yet. And I will let six people come, only six. We are going to the new hospital and it is bad road.’ She could see the beginnings of it, a rough track through the bush.

  Rebecca issued urgent commands. Six women got in the back.

  ‘I’ll pick you up in half an hour,’ Sylvia said, and the lorry lumbered and lurched over roots, stones, potholes, for another mile or so, and they arrived where the outlines of a building had been laid down in a clearing among trees. These were big old trees; this was old bush, a bit dusty, but full and green.

  The two women and the children got out of the cabin of the lorry, and the six women followed them. The women stood staring at what was described as the new hospital.

  Swedes? Danes? Americans? Germans?–some country’s government, devoted to the sorrows of Africa, had caused a lot of money to be directed here, to this clearing, and in front of them were the results. As with an architect’s plan, these observers had to use their minds to work out the shape of things to come from these foundations, and walls begun and not finished, for the trouble was, it had been a good while arriving, the next instalment of aid money, and the rooms, wards, corridors, operating theatres and dispensaries were filling with pale dust. Some walls stood waist high, some were at knee level, blocks of concrete had holes in them filled with water. The women from the village, seeing the hope of something useful, went forward and retrieved a couple of bottles, and half a dozen tin cans, which they shook, getting rid of dust, and then put them carefully into big hold-alls. Someone had had a picnic here or a wanderer had built a fire for the night to keep off animals. The faces of these visitors had on them the expressions seen so often in our time: we are not going to comment, but someone has blundered. And who had? And why? Rumour said that the money earmarked for this hospital had been stolen on the way; some said that the government in question had simply run out of funds.

  On the other side of the clearing, under the trees, large wooden cases lay about. The six women went over to look and Sylvia and Rebecca followed. A case had split open. Inside was dental equipment: a dentist’s chair.

  ‘Pity I am not a dentist,’ said Sylvia. ‘We could certainly do with one.’

  Another case, split at the sides, showed that inside was a wheelchair.

  ‘Oh, doctor,’ said one of the women, ‘we must not take this chair. Perhaps one day the hospital will be built.’ She was pulling the chair out.

  ‘We need a wheelchair,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘But they’ll want to know where it came from and our hospital doesn’t run to a wheelchair.’

  ‘We should take it,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘It’s broken,’ said the woman. Someone had tried to pull the chair out of its wooden shelter and a wheel had come loose.

  Four more cases lay about. Two of the women went to one and began wrenching at the rotten wood. Inside were bedpans. Rebecca, without looking at Sylvia, took half a dozen bedpans to the lorry and came back. Another woman found blankets, but these were eaten by insects, and mice were nesting in them, and birds had pulled out threads to line their nests.

  ‘It will be a good hospital,’ said one woman, laughing.

  ‘We shall have a fine new hospital in Kwadere,’ said another.

  The village women laughed, enjoying themselves, and then Sylvia and Rebecca joined in. In the middle of the bush, miles from the philanthropists in Senga (or, for that matter, London, Berlin, New York), the women stood and laughed.

  They drove back to the Growth Point, picked up the waiting people, and proceeded slowly to the Mission, all listening for a burst tyre. Their luck held. Rebecca and Sylvia took the bedpans down to the hospital. The seriously ill people, in the big new hut built by Sylvia when she first came, had been using old bottles, cans, discarded kitchen utensils. ‘What are those things?’ asked Joshua’s brother’s little boys, and when they understood, they were delighted and ran about showing them to anyone well enough to care.

  • • •

  Colin opened the door to a timid ring, and saw what he thought was a mendicant child or a gipsy and then, with a roar of ‘It’s Sylvia, it’s little Sylvia,’ lifted her inside. There he hugged her, and she shed tears on his cheeks, bent down to rub hers, like a cat’s greeting.

  In the kitchen he sat her at the table, the table, again extended to its full length. He poured a river of wine into a big glass and sat opposite her, full of welcome and pleasure.

  ‘Why didn’t you say you were coming? But it doesn’t matter. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you.’

  Sylvia was trying to lift her mood to his height, because she was dispirited, London sometimes having this effect on Londoners who have been away from it and who, while living in it, have had so little idea of its weight, its multitudinous gifts and capacities. London,
after the Mission, was hitting her a blow somewhere in the stomach region. It is a mistake to come too fast from, let’s say, Kwadere, to London: one needs something like the equivalent of a decompression chamber.

  She sat smiling, taking little sips of wine, afraid to do more, for she was not used to wine these days, feeling the house like a creature all around her and above her and below her, her house, the one she had known best as home when she had been conscious of what was going on in it, the atmospheres and airs of every room and stretches of the staircase. Now the house was populous, she could feel that, it was full of people, but they were alien presences, not her familiars and she was grateful for Colin, sitting there smiling at her. It was ten in the evening. Upstairs someone was playing a tune she ought to know, probably something famous, like ‘Blue Suede Shoes’–it had that claim on her–but she couldn’t name it.

  ‘Little Sylvia. And it looks to me that you need a bit of feeding up, as always. Can I give you something to eat?’

  ‘I ate on the plane.’

  But he was up, opening the refrigerator door, peering at its shelves, and again Sylvia felt a blow to her heart, yes it was her heart, it hurt, for she was thinking of Rebecca, in her kitchen, with her little fridge, and her little cupboard which to her family down in the village represented some extreme of good fortune, generous provisioning: she was looking at the eggs filling half the door of the fridge, at the gleaming clean milk, the crammed containers, the plenitudes . . .

  ‘This is not really my territory, it’s Frances’s, but I’m sure . . .’ he fetched out a loaf of bread, a plate of cold chicken. Sylvia was tempted: Frances had cooked it, Frances had fed her; with Frances on one side and Andrew on the other, she had survived her childhood.

  ‘What is your territory, then?’ she asked, tucking in to a chicken sandwich.

  ‘I am upstairs, at the top of the house.’

  ‘In Julia’s place?’

  ‘I, and Sophie.’

  This surprised her into putting down her bit of sandwich, as if relinquishing safety for the time being.

  ‘You and Sophie!’

  ‘Of course, you didn’t know. She came here to recuperate, and then . . . she was ill, you see.’