The Sweetest Dream

by Doris Lessing

  ‘What do you mean? Of course we educated them.’

  ‘There was a ceiling in the Civil Service,’ said Sylvia. ‘They couldn’t go higher than a pretty low level.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Not nonsense,’ Cedric had conceded. ‘No, we made mistakes.’

  ‘Who is we?’ said Edna. ‘We weren’t here then.’

  But if mistakes are writ into a landscape, a country, a history, then . . . A hundred years ago the whites had arrived in a country the size of Spain, with a quarter of a million black people in all that enormous territory. You’d think–the you here is the Eye of History, from the future–that there had been no need to take anyone’s land, with so much. But what that Eye, using a commonsensical view, would be discounting were the pomps and greed of Empire. Besides, if the whites wanted land to have and to hold, with tidy fences and clear-cut boundaries, while the blacks’ attitude to land was that it was their mother and could not be individually owned, then there was also the question of cheap labour. When the Pynes had come in the Fifties there were still only a million and a half blacks in all this fair land, and not even 200,000 whites. An empty landscape, according to the eyes of overcrowded Europe. When the Pynes had taken on this farm, the national movements of Zimlia had not been born. Innocent, not to say ignorant, souls, they had come from a small country town in Devon, prepared to work hard and prosper.

  Now they sat watching the birds swoop from poinsettias sparkling with raindrops to the birdbath, saw the hills standing close because of the clean-washed air, and one of them said that nothing would induce him to leave, and the other that she was fed up with being called a villain, she had had enough.

  Sylvia thanked them for their kindness, from the heart, knowing that they thought her an odd little thing with over-sentimental ideas, and she drove herself back through the darkening bush to the Mission. There she again brought up the subject, at supper, of being a South African spy, and Father McGuire said he had been accused of that himself. It had been when he was protesting to Mr Mandizi that the school was a disgrace to a civilised country, where were the textbooks?

  ‘There is a pretty advanced form of paranoia around, my child,’ he said. ‘It would be a good thing if you were not to fret your brains about it.’

  • • •

  At five next morning, the sun still a small yellow glow behind the gums, Sylvia came out on to the little verandah and saw in the dawn light a tragic figure, hands squeezed together in front of him, his head bent in pain, or in grief . . . she recognised Aaron.

  ‘What is the matter?’

  ‘Oh, Doctor Sylvia. Oh, Doctor Sylvia . . .’ he came up to her in a sideways dawdle, slowed by conflict: tears ran down his usually cheerful face. ‘I didn’t mean it. Oh I am so-so-so-sorry. Forgive me, Miss Sylvia. The devil got into me. I am sure that is the reason I did it.’

  ‘Aaron, I have no idea what you are talking about.’

  ‘I stole your picture, and that is why Father beat me.’

  ‘Aaron, please . . .’

  He collapsed on to the brick floor of the verandah, put his head against the thin pillar there and sobbed. It was too early for Rebecca to be in the kitchen. Sylvia sat beside the lad, and did not say anything, merely was there. And there a few minutes later Father McGuire found them, coming out to taste the early morning freshness.

  ‘And now what is this? I told you not to tell Doctor Sylvia.’

  ‘But I am ashamed. And please tell her to forgive me.’

  ‘Where have you been these last three days?’

  ‘I am afraid. I have been hiding in the bush.’

  That accounted for his shivering–he was cold because he was hungry: heat was already emanating from the East.

  ‘Go into the kitchen, make yourself some good strong tea with plenty of milk and sugar and cut yourself some bread and jam.’

  ‘Yes, Father. I am very sorry, Father.’

  Aaron went off, in no hurry for his restoring meal, though he must have been desperate for it: he was looking over his shoulder as he went at Sylvia.

  ‘Well, Father?’

  ‘He stole your little photograph in its pretty silver frame.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘And no, Sylvia, you must not now give it to him. It is back on your table. He said he liked the face of the old woman. He wanted to look at it. I think he has no notion of the value of the silver.’

  ‘Then it’s over and done with.’

  ‘But I beat him, and I beat him too hard. There was blood. This old man is not at his wisest and best.’ The sun was up, hot and yellow. A cicada started, then another, and a dove began its plaint. ‘I shall have extra time to do in purgatory.’

  ‘Have you been taking your vitamin pills?’

  ‘In my defence I must say that these people understand far too well that to spoil the child you must spare the rod. But–that’s no excuse. And I am supposed to be teaching Aaron to be a man of God. And he cannot be allowed to steal.’

  ‘It’s vitamin B you need, Father. For your nerves. I brought you some from London.’

  Voices in altercation from the kitchen, Rebecca’s, Aaron’s. The priest called out, ‘Rebecca, Aaron must be fed.’ The voices stilled. ‘It’s getting hot, let’s go in.’ He went in, she followed, and on the table Rebecca was setting down the tray with the early morning tea.

  ‘He has eaten all the bread I baked yesterday.’

  ‘Then, Rebecca, you must bake some more.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’ She hesitated. ‘I think he meant to put back the picture. He wanted to look at it while Sylvia was away.’

  ‘I know. I beat him too hard.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sylvia, who is that old lady?’ asked Rebecca. ‘She has a nice face.’

  ‘Julia, her name was Julia. She is dead. She was my–I think she probably saved my life when I was very young.’

  ‘Okay.’

  • • •

  A man may be austere by temperament rather than as a result of a decision to punish the flesh. The Leader was hardly one to examine his life with a view to improving his character, feeling that having been accepted by the Jesuits was enough of a guarantee for Heaven; and when it did come to his attention that frugality was supposed to be a good thing, he remembered an early childhood where he had often been short of food and everything else. In some parts of the world the virtues of abstinence come easily. His father worked on a Jesuit mission as a handyman, and was often drunk. His mother was a silent woman, usually sick, and he was the only child. When drunk his father might beat him, and his mother was beaten because of her inability to have more children. He was still not ten years old when he confronted his father, shielding his mother, and the blows meant for her reached his arms and legs, leaving scars.

  He was a clever little boy, was noticed by the Fathers, and chosen for higher education. Thin as a stray dog–Father Paul’s description of him–short, physically clumsy, he could not play games and was often a butt, and particularly of Father Paul, who disliked him. There were other Fathers, teachers and curers of souls, but it was Father Paul who was the child’s experience of the white world, a meagre little man from Liverpool, formed by a bitter childhood, with a tongue that ran contempt for the blacks. The kaffirs were savages, animals, not much better than baboons. Even more than the other teachers, he did not spare the rod. He beat Matthew for obstinacy, for insolence, for the sin of pride, for speaking his own language, and for translating a Shona proverb into English and using it in an essay. ‘Don’t quarrel with your neighbour if he is stronger than you.’

  It was a major responsibility, so Father Paul saw it, to rid his pupils of such backwardness. Matthew loathed everything about Father Paul: his smell revolted him, he sweated freely, did not wash enough, and his black robes had a sour animal odour. Matthew hated the reddish hairs that sprouted from his ears and nostrils and on the backs of his thin bony white hands. The boy’s physical dislike was s
ometimes so strong, waves of pure murder rose up in him, and he contained them, trembling, his eyes burning.

  He was a silent boy. At first he read devotional books, and then a pupil from a fellow mission came on a Retreat and Matthew fell under the spell of an ebullient joky personality, but even more, of his opinions. This boy, older than him, was political in the unformed way of that time–long before the national movements–and gave him black authors to read, from America, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and the pamphlets of a black religious sect that advocated killing all the whites as the devil’s progeny. Matthew, still brilliant, still silent, went to college, leaving Father Paul behind, and there he was described long after, when he had become the Leader, as ‘a silent observing youth, an ascetic, always reading political books, clever, not able to make friends–a loner’.

  When the national movements exploded, Matthew found his place, and quickly, as a leader of his local group. Because he did not find it easy to join in argument and discussion, because he often sat rather out of things, really longing to be like the others, so easy and companionable, he acquired a reputation for cool judgement and political nous, and, of course, for information, since he had read so much. Then he was leader of the Party, after a nasty little jostle for power. The end justifies the means: his favourite saying. The Liberation War began and he was head of one of the rebellious armies. He made promises of every kind, as politicians do, the most productive of later harm being that every black person in the country would be given enough land to farm. Minor absurdities, like saying that to dip cattle was a white man’s devilry, and to maintain contour ridges merely kowtowing to white prejudice, were trifles compared to this primal deception–that there would be land for everybody. But then, he did not know he would end up as the Leader of the whole country. When at Liberation his party came first, he secretly found it hard to believe that he could be chosen over more charismatic candidates for power: he did not believe he could be liked. Respected . . . feared . . . oh, yes, he needed that, the stray dog needed it and would for the rest of his life. When he had become converted–by, again, a strong and persuasive personality–to Marxism, he made rhetorical speeches copied from other communist leaders. He admired to the depths of his nature strong and brutal leaders. When he was head of a nation he travelled all the time, as Leaders do, always in America or Ethiopia or Ghana or Burma, seldom choosing the company of whites, for he disliked them. Because he had to put on the front of a statesman he had to conceal what he felt, but he loathed the whites, disliked even being in the same room. Abroad he gravitated by instinct to dictators, some of whom would soon be dislodged from power, like the statues of Lenin that would litter the former Soviet Union. He loved China, admired the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, had visited there more than once, taking with him in his entourage Comrade Mo who had instructed him in the necessities of power long before he had attained it.

  No sooner had he got power than he became a prisoner of his fear of people. He was meeting no one but a few cronies, and a young woman from his village, with whom he slept; he never went out of his residence without an armed escort; his car was bullet-proofed–the gift of one dictator–and he had a personal guard offered to him by the most hated despot in Asia. Every evening, as the sun went down, the street outside his residence was closed to general traffic, so that the citizens had to drive streets out of their way. Meanwhile, while he was immured as much as any victim in a story who is compelled to build the wall around himself with his own hands, there was no Leader in all of Africa more loved by his people, and from whom more was expected. He could have done anything with the populace, for good or ill: like peasants in former times they looked up to him as a king who would put right everything that was wrong; where he led, they would follow. But he didn’t lead. This frightened little man cowered in his self-made prison.

  Meanwhile, too, the ‘progressive opinion’ in the world adored him, and all the Johnny Lennoxes, all the former Stalinists, the liberals who have ever loved a strong man, would say, ‘He’s pretty sound, you know. A clever man, that’s Comrade President Matthew Mungozi.’ And people who had been deprived of the soothing rhetoric of the communist world found it again in Zimlia.

  Into this fortress buttressed by fear, it might have happened that no one could find a way, but someone did, a woman, for at a reception for the Organisation of African Unity he saw her, this handsome black Gloria, who had all the men clamouring around her while she flirted and bestowed smiles, but really she had her eyes on the man who stood well to one side, following her every movement as a hungry dog watches food being conveyed to mouths not his. She knew who he was, had known, had laid her plans, and expected it would be a walkover–as it was. Close to, she fascinated, every little thing about her enthralled him. She had a certain way of moving her lips, as if she was crushing fruit with them, and her eyes were soft and they laughed–not at him, he was making sure of that, so convinced was he that people did. And she was so at ease where he was not, in the flesh, in that magnificent body of hers, in movement and in pleasure in movement, and in food, and in her own beauty. He felt that he was being liberated simply by standing next to her. She told him he needed a woman like her, and he knew it was true. He was in awe of her too because of her sophistication. She had been in university in America and in England, she had friends everywhere among the famous because of her nature, not because of politics. She talked of politics with a laughing cynicism that shocked him, though he tried to match her. In short, it was inevitable that soon there would be a brilliant wedding, and he lived dissolved in pleasure. Everything was easy where it had been difficult–no, often impossible. She said he was sexually repressed, and cured him of that in so far as his nature permitted. She said he needed more fun, had never known how to live. When he told her of his meagre much-punished childhood she kissed him with great smacking kisses and pulled his head down into her massive breasts and cuddled it.

  She laughed at him for everything.

  Now, Matthew had at the start of his rule discouraged the comrades, his associates, the leadership, from indulging their greed. He forbade them to enrich themselves. This was the last of the influences from his childhood, and then the Jesuits, who had taught him that poverty was next to Godliness: whatever else the Fathers might have been, they were poor and did not indulge themselves. Now Gloria told him he was mad, and that she should buy this big house, that farm, then wanted another farm, and some hotels that were coming on to the market as the whites left. She told him he must have a Swiss bank account and make sure there was money in it. What money? he wanted to know, and she scorned him for his naivety. But when she talked of money he still saw in his mother’s thin hands the pitiful notes and coins put there by his father at the month’s end, and at first, when he voted himself a salary, he had been careful it should be no higher than a top civil servant’s. All this Gloria changed, brushing it away with her scorn, her laughter, her caresses and her practicality, for she had taken over his life and as the Mother of the Country could easily see to it that money flowed her way. It was she who quietly diverted big sums that flowed in from charities and benefactors into her own accounts. ‘Oh, be a fool then,’ she cried when he protested. ‘It’s in my name. It’s not your responsibility.’

  Battles for someone’s soul are seldom as clear and easy to see–and as short–as the one where the devil battled for Comrade Matthew’s. And Zimlia, ill-governed before on ill-digested Marxism and tigs and tags of dogma, or remembered sentences from textbooks on economics, now rapidly plunged into corruption. Immediately the currency began its steady, but rapid devaluation. In Senga the fat cats got fatter every day, and out in places like Kwadere money that had descended in a trickle now dried up altogether.

  Gloria grew more fascinating, more beautiful, and richer, acquiring another farm, a forest, hotels, restaurants–and wore them like necklaces. And now when Comrade President Matthew went abroad to meet his favourite people, the immensely rich
, dissolute and corrupt rulers of the new Africa and new Asia, he did not sit silent when they displayed their wealth and boasted of their avarice. Now he could boast of his and did, and when these men showed how they admired him, giving him gifts and flattery, that empty place in him where there would always be a thin stray dog with its tail between its legs was filled, at least for a time, and Gloria caressed and stroked and petted and nuzzled and licked and sucked and held him against those great breasts and kissed the old scars on his legs. ‘Poor Matthew, poor poor little boy.’

  • • •

  The evening before Sylvia had left for London she had stood on the path just where the oleanders and hibiscus and plumbago bushes ended, and looked down at the hospital with more than the forgivable amount of pride. Anyone could use the word ‘hospital’ now of that cluster of buildings. No money had come through Comrade Mandizi for a long time, but the plunging Zimlia currency meant that small sums in London became large ones here. Ten pounds, the cost of a small carrier bag of groceries in London, here built a grass hut or replenished the stock of painkillers or malaria tablets.

  There were two ‘wards’ down there now, long grass-roofed sheds, the grass close to the ground on one side where rain most often came, and high on the other. In each were a dozen pallets with good blankets and pillows. She was planning another shed, for the existing beds were filling up with the victims of this AIDS, or Slim, that the government had just decided to fully and frankly acknowledge, with appeals to foreign donors for help. Sylvia knew that in the village these were called ‘the dying huts’, and she planned to build another, for patients who were merely malarial, or in labour–more ordinary pains of the flesh. She had had built a proper little house of brick, which she called the consulting-room, and in it was a high bed, made by lads from the village, of leather thongs stretched on a frame and on that a good mattress. Here she examined people, prescribed, set arms and legs, bound up wounds. In all this she was assisted by Clever and Zebedee. She had paid for the new buildings, and for medicines–paid for everything. She knew that in the village some said, And why should she not pay? She stole it all from us in the first place. It was Joshua who inspired this grumbling. Rebecca defended her, telling everyone that without Sylvia there would be no hospital.