African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  She waved her arms at the birds and they scuttled off. We looked at each other and laughed, feeling too grown-up for guinea fowl now.

  Here, down on the verges of the vlei, it was a different kind of bush. The grass was thinned by cattle, and red dust spurted as we walked. There were sparse thorn trees, and everywhere the poison-apple bush, covered with small fruit like yellow plums. Patches of wild marigold filled the air with a rank, hot smell.

  Moving with exaggerated care, our bodies tensed, our eyes fixed half a mile off, we did not notice that a duiker stood watching us ten paces away. We yelled with excitement and the buck vanished. Then we ran like maniacs, screaming at the tops of our voices, while the bushes whipped our faces and the thorns tore our legs.

  Ten minutes later we came slap up against a barbed fence. “The boundary,” we whispered, awed. This was a legend; we had imagined it as a sort of Wall of China, for beyond were thousands and thousands of miles of unused Government land where there were leopards and baboons and herds of koodoo. But we were disappointed : even the famous boundary was only a bit of wire after all, and the duiker was nowhere in sight.

  Whistling casually to show we didn’t care, we marched along by the wire, twanging it so that it reverberated half a mile away down in the vlei. Around us the bush was strange; this part of the farm was quite new to us. There was still nothing but thorn trees and grass; and fat wood-pigeons cooed from every branch. We swung on the fence stanchions and wished that Father would suddenly appear and take us home to breakfast. We were hopelessly lost.

  It was then that I saw the pawpaw tree. I must have been staring at it for some minutes before it grew in on my sight; for it was such an odd place for a pawpaw tree to be. On it were three heavy yellow pawpaws.

  “There’s our breakfast,” I said.

  We shook them down, sat on the ground, and ate. The insipid, creamy flesh soon filled us, and we lay down, staring at the sky, half asleep. The sun blared down; we were melted through with heat and tiredness. But it was very hard. Turning over, staring, we saw worn bricks set into the ground. All round us were stretches of brick, stretches of cement.

  “The old Thompson house,” we whispered.

  And all at once the pigeons seemed to grow still and the bush became hostile. We sat up, frightened. How was it we hadn’t noticed it before? There was a double file of pawpaws among the thorns; a purple bougainvillaea tumbled over the bushes; a rose tree scattered white petals at our feet; and our shoes were scrunching in broken glass.

  It was desolate, lonely, despairing; and we remembered the way our parents had talked about Mr. Thompson who had lived here for years before he married. Their hushed, disapproving voices seemed to echo out of the trees; and in a violent panic we picked up the gun and fled back in the direction of the house. We had imagined we were lost; but we were back in the gully in no time, climbed up it, half sobbing with breathlessness, and fled through that barrier of bush so fast we hardly noticed it was there.

  It was not even breakfast time.

  “We found the Thompsons’ old house,” we said at last, feeling hurt that no one had noticed from our proud faces that we had found a whole new world that morning.

  “Did you?” said Father absently. “Can’t be much left of it now.”

  Our fear vanished. We hardly dared look at each other for shame. And later that day we went back and counted the pawpaws and trailed the bougainvillaea over a tree and staked the white rosebush.

  In a week we had made the place entirely our own. We were there all day, sweeping the debris from the floor and carrying away loose bricks into the bush. We were not surprised to find dozens of empty bottles scattered in the grass. We washed them in a pothole in the vlei, dried them in the wind, and marked out the rooms of the house with them, making walls of shining bottles. In our imagination the Thompson house was built again, a small brick-walled place with a thatched roof.

  We sat under a blazing sun, and said in our mother’s voice: “It is always cool under thatch, no matter how hot it is outside.” And then, when the walls and the roof had grown into our minds and we took them for granted, we played other games, taking it in turn to be Mr. Thompson.

  Whoever was Mr. Thompson had to stagger in from the bush, with a bottle in her hand, tripping over the lintel and falling on the floor. There she lay and groaned, while the other fanned her and put handkerchiefs soaked in vlei water on her head. Or she reeled about among the bottles, shouting abusive gibberish at an invisible audience of natives.

  It was while we were engaged thus, one day, that a black woman came out of the thorn trees and stood watching us. We waited for her to go, drawing together; but she came close and stared in a way that made us afraid. She was old and fat, and she wore a red print dress from the store. She said in a soft, wheedling voice: “When is Boss Thompson coming back?”

  “Go away!” we shouted. And then she began to laugh. She sauntered off into the bush, swinging her hips and looking back over her shoulder and laughing. We heard that taunting laugh away among the trees; and that was the second time we ran away from the ruined house, though we made ourselves walk slowly and with dignity until we knew she could no longer see us.

  For a few days we didn’t go back to the house. When we did we stopped playing Mr. Thompson. We no longer knew him: that laugh, that slow, insulting stare had meant something outside our knowledge and experience. The house was not ours now. It was some broken bricks on the ground marked out with bottles. We couldn’t pretend to ourselves we were not afraid of the place; and we continually glanced over our shoulders to see if the old black woman was standing silently there, watching us.

  Idling along the fence, we threw stones at the pawpaws fifteen feet over our heads till they squashed at our feet. Then we kicked them into the bush.

  “Why have you stopped going to the old house?” asked Mother cautiously, thinking that we didn’t know how pleased she was. She had instinctively disliked our being there so much.

  “Oh, I dunno . . .”

  A few days later we heard that the Thompsons were coming to see us; and we knew, without anyone saying anything, that this was no ordinary visit. It was the first time; they wouldn’t be coming after all these years without some reason. Besides, our parents didn’t like them coming. They were at odds with each other over it.

  Mr. Thompson had lived on our farm for ten years before we had it, when there was no one else near for miles and miles. Then, suddenly, he went home to England and brought a wife back with him. The wife never came to this farm. Mr. Thompson sold the farm to us and bought another one. People said:

  “Poor girl! Just out from home, too.” She was angry about the house burning down, because it meant she had to live with friends for nearly a year while Mr. Thompson built a new house on his new farm.

  The night before they came, Mother said several times in a strange, sorrowful voice, “Poor little thing; poor, poor little thing.”

  Father said: “Oh, I don’t know. After all, be just. He was here alone all those years.”

  It was no good; she disliked not only Mr. Thompson but Father too, that evening; and we were on her side. She put her arms round us, and looked accusingly at Father. “Women get all the worst of everything,” she said.

  He said angrily: “Look here, it’s not my fault these people are coming.”

  “Who said it was?” she answered.

  Next day, when the car came in sight, we vanished into the bush. We felt guilty, not because we were running away, a thing we often did when visitors came we didn’t like, but because we had made Mr. Thompson’s house our own, and because we were afraid if he saw our faces he would know we were letting Mother down by going.

  We climbed into the tree that was our refuge on these occasions, and lay along branches twenty feet from the ground, and played at Mowgli, thinking all the time about the Thompsons.

  As usual, we lost all sense of time; and when we eventually returned, thinking the coast must be clear, the car wa
s still there. Curiosity got the better of us.

  We slunk on to the verandah, smiling bashfully, while Mother gave us a reproachful look. Then, at last, we lifted our heads and looked at Mrs. Thompson. I don’t know how we had imagined her; but we had felt for her a passionate, protective pity.

  She was a large, blond, brilliantly coloured lady with a voice like a go-away bird’s. It was a horrible voice. Father, who could not stand loud voices, was holding the arms of his chair, and gazing at her with exasperated dislike.

  As for Mr. Thompson, that villain whom we had hated and feared, he was a shaggy and shambling man, who looked at the ground while his wife talked, with a small apologetic smile. He was not in the least as we had pictured him. He looked like our old dog. For a moment we were confused; then, in a rush, our allegiance shifted. The profound and dangerous pity, aroused in us earlier than we could remember by the worlds of loneliness inhabited by our parents, which they could not share with each other but which each shared with us, settled now on Mr. Thompson. Now we hated Mrs. Thompson. The outward sign of it was that we left Mother’s chair and went to Father’s.

  “Don’t fidget, there’s good kids,” he said.

  Mrs. Thompson was asking to be shown the old house. We understood, from the insistent sound of her voice, that she had been talking about nothing else all afternoon; or that, at any rate, if she had, it was only with the intention of getting round to the house as soon as she could. She kept saying, smiling ferociously at Mr. Thompson: “I have heard such interesting things about that old place. I really must see for myself where it was that my husband lived before I came out . . .” And she looked at Mother for approval.

  But Mother said dubiously: “It will soon be dark. And there is no path.”

  As for Father, he said bluntly: “There’s nothing to be seen. There’s nothing left.”

  “Yes, I heard it had been burnt down,” said Mrs. Thompson with another look at her husband.

  “It was a hurricane lamp . . .” he muttered.

  “I want to see for myself.”

  At this point my sister slipped off the arm of my Father’s chair, and said, with a bright, false smile at Mrs. Thompson, “We know where it is. We’ll take you.” She dug me in the ribs and sped off before anyone could speak.

  At last they all decided to come. I took them the hardest, longest way I knew. We had made a path of our own long ago, but that would have been too quick. I made Mrs. Thompson climb over rocks, push through grass, bend under bushes. I made her scramble down the gully so that she fell on her knees in the sharp pebbles and the dust. I walked her so fast, finally, in a wide circle through the thorn trees that I could hear her panting behind me. But she wasn’t complaining: she wanted to see the place too badly.

  When we came to where the house had been it was nearly dark and the tufts of long grass were shivering in the night breeze, and the pawpaw trees were silhouetted high and dark against a red sky. Guinea fowl were clinking softly all around us.

  My sister leaned against a tree, breathing hard, trying to look natural. Mrs. Thompson had lost her confidence. She stood quite still, looking about her, and we knew the silence and the desolation had got her, as it got us that first morning.

  “But where is the house?” she asked at last, unconsciously softening her voice, staring as if she expected to see it rise out of the ground in front of her.

  “I told you, it was burnt down. Now will you believe me?” said Mr. Thompson.

  “I know it was burnt down . . . Well, where was it then?” She sounded as if she were going to cry. This was not at all what she had expected.

  Mr. Thompson pointed at the bricks on the ground. He did not move. He stood staring over the fence down to the vlei, where the mist was gathering in long white folds. The light faded out of the sky, and it began to get cold. For a while no one spoke.

  “What a godforsaken place for a house,” said Mrs. Thompson, very irritably, at last. “Just as well it was burnt down. Do you mean to say you kids play here?”

  That was our cue. “We like it,” we said dutifully, knowing very well that the two of us standing on the bricks, hand in hand, beside the ghostly rosebush, made a picture that took all the harm out of the place for her. “We play here all day,” we lied.

  “Odd taste you’ve got,” she said, speaking at us, but meaning Mr. Thompson.

  Mr. Thompson did not hear her. He was looking around with a lost, remembering expression. “Ten years,” he said at last. “Ten years I was here.”

  “More fool you,” she snapped. And that closed the subject as far as she was concerned.

  We began to trail home. Now the two women went in front; then came Father and Mr. Thompson; we followed at the back. As we passed a small donga under a cactus tree, my sister called in a whisper, “Mr. Thompson, Mr. Thompson, look here.”

  Father and Mr. Thompson came back. “Look,” we said, pointing to the hole that was filled to the brim with empty bottles.

  “I came quickly by a way of my own and hid them,” said my sister proudly, looking at the two men like a conspirator.

  Father was very uncomfortable. “I wonder how they got down here?” he said politely at last.

  “We found them. They were at the house. We hid them for you,” said my sister, dancing with excitement.

  Mr. Thompson looked at us sharply and uneasily, “You are an odd pair of kids,” he said.

  That was all the thanks we got from him; for then we heard Mother calling from ahead: “What are you all doing there?” And at once we went forward.

  After the Thompsons had left we hung around Father, waiting for him to say something.

  At last, when Mother wasn’t there, he scratched his head in an irritable way and said: “What in the world did you do that for?”

  We were bitterly hurt. “She might have seen them,” I said.

  “Nothing would make much difference to that lady,” he said at last. “Still, I suppose you meant well.”

  We drifted off; we felt let down.

  In the corner of the verandah, in the dark, sat Mother, gazing into the dark bush. On her face was a grim look of disapproval, and distaste and unhappiness. We were included in it, we knew that.

  She looked at us crossly and said, “I don’t like you wandering over the farm the way you do. Even with a gun.”

  But she had said that so often, and it wasn’t what we were waiting for. At last it came.

  “My two little girls,” she said, “out in the bush by themselves, with no one to play with . . .”

  It wasn’t the bush she minded. We flung ourselves on her. Once again we were swung dizzily from one camp to the other. “Poor Mother,” we said. “Poor, poor Mother.”

  That was what she needed. “It’s no life for a woman, this,” she said, her voice breaking, gathering us close.

  But she sounded comforted.

  The Old Chief Mshlanga

  THEY were good, the years of ranging the bush over her father’s farm which, like every white farm, was largely unused, broken only occasionally by small patches of cultivation. In between, nothing but trees, the long sparse grass, thorn and cactus and gully, grass and outcrop and thorn. And a jutting piece of rock which had been thrust up from the warm soil of Africa unimaginable eras of time ago, washed into hollows and whorls by sun and wind that had travelled so many thousands of miles of space and bush, would hold the weight of a small girl whose eyes were sightless for anything but a pale willowed river, a pale gleaming castle—a small girl singing: “Out flew the web and floated wide, the mirror cracked from side to side . . .”

  Pushing her way through the green aisles of the mealie stalks, the leaves arching like cathedrals veined with sunlight far overhead, with the packed red earth underfoot, a fine lace of red starred witchweed would summon up a black bent figure croaking premonitions: the Northern witch, bred of cold Northern forests, would stand before her among the mealie fields, and it was the mealie fields that faded and fled, leaving her among the gn
arled roots of an oak, snow falling thick and soft and white, the woodcutter’s fire glowing red welcome through crowding tree trunks.

  A white child, opening its eyes curiously on a sun-suffused landscape, a gaunt and violent landscape, might be supposed to accept it as her own, to take the msasa trees and the thorn trees as familiars, to feel her blood running free and responsive to the swing of the seasons.

  This child could not see a msasa tree, or the thorn, for what they were. Her books held tales of alien fairies, her rivers ran slow and peaceful, and she knew the shape of the leaves of an ash or an oak, the names of the little creatures that lived in English streams, when the words “the veld” meant strangeness, though she could remember nothing else.

  Because of this, for many years, it was the veld that seemed unreal; the sun was a foreign sun, and the wind spoke a strange language.

  The black people on the farm were as remote as the trees and the rocks. They were an amorphous black mass, mingling and thinning and massing like tadpoles, faceless, who existed merely to serve, to say “Yes, Baas,” take their money and go. They changed season by season, moving from one farm to the next, according to their outlandish needs, which one did not have to understand, coming from perhaps hundreds of miles North or East, passing on after a few months—where? Perhaps even as far away as the fabled gold mines of Johannesburg, where the pay was so much better than the few shillings a month and the double handful of mealie meal twice a day which they earned in that part of Africa.

  The child was taught to take them for granted: the servants in the house would come running a hundred yards to pick up a book if she dropped it. She was called “Nkosikaas”—Chieftainess, even by the black children her own age.

  Later, when the farm grew too small to hold her curiosity, she carried a gun in the crook of her arm and wandered miles a day, from vlei to vlei, from kopje to kopje, accompanied by two dogs: the dogs and the gun were an armour against fear. Because of them she never felt fear.