African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  As before, he did as she wanted. He would accompany her to the movies. He would come out of his house at her call. He went walking with her through the dark streets at night. And before parting from her he took her into his arms against the sapling that swayed and slipped under their weight and kissed her with a cold persistence that filled her with horror and with desire, so that she ran away from him, sobbing, saying she would never see him again, and returned inevitably the next evening. She never entered his house; she was afraid of the invisibly present old woman. He seemed not to mind what she did. She was driven wild because she knew that if she did not seek him out, the knowledge of loss would never enter him; he would merely return to the lithe young tree, mumbling fierce, thick, reproachful words to it in the darkness.

  As he grew to understand that she would always return no matter how she strove and protested, he would fold her against him, not hearing her cries, and as she grew still with chilled fear, she would hear through the darkness a dark sibilant whispering: “Your hair, your hair, your teeth, your bones.” His fingers pressed and probed into her flesh. “Here is the bone, under is nothing only bone,” and the long urgent fingers fought to defeat the soft envelope of flesh, fought to make it disappear, so that he could grasp the bones of her arm, the joint of her shoulder; and when he had pressed and probed and always found the flesh elastic against his hands, pain flooded along her as the teeth closed in on her neck, or while his fist suddenly drove inward, under her ribs, as if the tension of flesh were not there. In the morning she would be bruised. She avoided the eyes of her family and covered up the bruises. She was learning, through this black and savage initiation, a curious strength. She could feel the bones standing erect through her body, a branching undefeatable tree of strength; and when the hands closed in on her, stopping the blood, half-choking her, the stubborn half-conscious thought remained: You can’t do it; you can’t do it, I’m too strong.

  Because of the way people looked in at them, through the darkness, as they leaned and struggled against the tree, she made him go inside the hedge of the small neglected garden, and there they lay together on the lawn, for hour after hour, with the cold high moon standing over them, sucking the warmth from their flesh, so they embraced in a cold, lethal ecstasy of pain, knowing only the cold, greenish light, feeling the bones of their bodies cleave and knock together while he grasped her so close that she could scarcely draw each breath. One night she fainted, and she came to herself to find him still clasping her, in a cold strong clasp, his teeth bared against her throat, so that a suffocating black pressure came over her brain in wave after wave; and she fought against him, making him tighten his grip and press her into the soil, and she felt the rough grasses driving up into her flesh.

  A flame of self-preservation burned up into her brain, and she fought until he came to himself and his grip loosened. She said, “I won’t. I won’t let you. I won’t come back again.” He lay still, breathing like a deep sleeper. She did not know if he had heard her. She repeated hurriedly, already uncertain, “I won’t let you.” He got up and staggered away from her, and she was afraid because of the destructive light in the great eyes that glinted at her in the moonlight.

  She ran away and locked herself in her bedroom. For several days she did not return. She watched him from her window as he strode huntedly up and down the street, lurking around the young tree, sometimes shaking it so that the leaves came spinning down around him. She knew she must return; and one evening she drifted across the street and came on him standing under the lithe young tree that held its fine glinting leaves like a spray of tinted water upward in the moonlight over the fine slender trunk.

  This time he reached out and grasped her and carried her inside to the lawn. She murmured helplessly, in a dim panic, “You mustn’t. I won’t.”

  She saw the hazy brilliant stars surge up behind his black head, saw the greenish moonlight pour down the thin hollows of his cheeks, saw the great crazy eyes immediately above hers. The cages of their ribs ground together; and she heard: “Your hair, dead hair, bones, bones, bones.”

  The bared desperate teeth came down on her throat, and she arched back as the stars swam and went out.

  When people glanced over the hedge in the strong early sunlight of next morning they saw him half-lying over the girl, whose body was marked by blood and by soil; and he was murmuring: “Your hair, your leaves, your branches, your rivers.”

  The Sun Between Their Feet

  THE ROAD from the back of the station went to the Roman Catholic Mission, which was a dead end, being in the middle of a Native Reserve. It was a poor mission, with only one lorry, so the road was always deserted, a track of sand between long or short grasses. The station itself was busy with trains and people, and the good country in front was settled thick with white farmers, but all the country behind the station was unused because it was granite boulders, outcrops, and sand. The scrub cattle from the Reserve strayed there. There were no human beings. From the track it seemed the hills of boulders were so steep and laced with vines and weed there would be no place to go between them. But you could force your way in, and there it became clear that in the past people had made use of this wilderness. For one thing there were the remains of earth and rock defences built by the Mashona against the Matabele when they came raiding after cattle and women before Rhodes put an end to all that. For another, the undersurfaces of the great boulders were covered with Bushman paintings. After a hundred yards or so of clambering and squeezing there came a flattish sandy stretch before the boulders erupted again. In this space, at the time of the raiding, the women and the cattle would have been kept while the men held the surrounding defences. From this space, at the time of the Bushmen, small hunting men took coloured clays, and earths, and plant juices for their pictures.

  It had rained last night and the low grass was still wet around my ankles and the early sun had not dried the sand. There was a sharp upjut of rock in the middle of the space. The rock was damp, and I could feel the wet heat being dragged up past my bare legs.

  Sitting low here, the encircling piles of boulders seemed like mountains, heightening the sky on tall horizons. The rocks were dark grey, but stained with lichens. The trees between the boulders were meagre, and several were lightning-struck, no more than black skeletons. This was hungry country, growing sand and thin grass and rocks and heat. The sun came down hard between heat-conserving rocks. After an hour of sun the sand between the grasses showed a clean dry glistening surface, and a dark wet underneath.

  The Reserve cattle must have moved here since the rains last night, for there were a score of fresh cow pats laid on the grass. Big blue flies swore and tumbled over them, breaking the crust the sun had baked. The air was heavy and sweet. The buzzing of the flies, the tiny sucking sound of the heat, the cooing of the pigeons, made a morning silence.

  Hot, and silent; and save for the flies, no movement anywhere, for what winds there were blew outside this sheltered space.

  But soon there was new movement. Where the flies had broken the crust of the nearest dung clot, two beetles were at work. They were small, dusty, black, round-bodied beetles. One had set his back legs over a bit of dung and was heaving and levering at it. The other, with a fast rolling movement, the same that a hen makes settling roused feathers over eggs, was using his body to form the ball even before it was heaved clear of the main lump of matter. As soon as the piece was freed, both beetles assaulted it with legs and bodies, modelling fast, frantic with creation, seizing it between their back legs, spinning it, rolling it under them, both tugging and pushing it through the thick encumbering grass stems that rose over them like forest trees until at last the ball rolled away from them into a plain, or glade, or inch-wide space of sand. The two beetles scuttled about among the stems, looking for their property. They were on the point of starting again on the mother-pile of muck, when one of them saw the ball lying free in the open, and both ran after it.

  All over the grassy space, aro
und the cow pats, dung beetles were at work, the blowflies hustled and buzzed, and by night all the new cow-stomach-worked grass would be lifted away, rolled away, to feed flies, beetles and new earth. That is, unless it rained hard again, when everything would be scattered by rods of rain.

  But there was no sign of rain yet. The sky was the clear slow blue of African mornings after night storms. My two beetles had the sky on their side. They had all day.

  The book says that dung beetles form a ball of dung, lay their eggs in it, search for a gentle slope, roll the ball up it, and then allow it to roll down again so that in the process of rolling “the pellet becomes compacted.”

  Why must the pellet be compacted? Presumably so that the blows of sun and rain do not beat it to fragments. Why this complicated business of rolling up and rolling down?

  Well, it is not for us to criticise the processes of nature; so I sat on top of the jutting rock, and watched the beetles rolling the ball towards it. In a few minutes of work they had reached it, and had hurled themselves and the dung ball at its foot. Their momentum took them a few inches up the slope, then they slipped, and ball and beetles rolled back to the flat again.

  I got down off the rock, and sat in the grass behind them to view the ascent through their eyes.

  The rock was about four feet long and three feet high. It was a jutting slab of granite, weeded and lichened, its edges blunted by rain and by wind. The beetles, hugging their ball between legs and bellies, looked up to a savage mountain, whose first slopes were an easy foot-assisting invitation. They rolled their ball, which was now crusted with dirt, to a small ridge under the foothills, and began, this time with slow care, to hitch it up from ridge to ridge, from one crust of lichen to the next. One beetle above, one below, they cherished their ball upwards. Soon they met the obstruction that had defeated them before: a sudden upswelling in the mountain wall. This time, one remained below the ball, holding its weight on its back legs, while the other scouted off sideways to find an easier path. It returned, gripped the ball with its legs, and the two beetles resumed their difficult, sideways scrambling progress, up around the swell in the rock into a small valley which led, or so it seemed, into the second great stage of the ascent. But this valley was a snare, for there was a crevasse across it. The mountain was riven. Heat and cold had split it to its base, and the narrow crack sloped down to a mountain lake full of warm fresh water over a bed of wind-gathered leaves and grass. The dung ball slipped over the edge of the crevasse into the gulf, and rolled gently into the lake where it was supported at its edge by a small fringe of lichen. The beetles flung themselves after it. One, straddling desperate legs from a raft of reed to the shore, held the ball from plunging into the depths of the lake. The other, gripping fast with its front legs to a thick bed of weed onshore, grappled the ball with its back legs, and together they heaved and shoved that precious dung out of the water and back into the ravine. But now the mountain walls rose high on either side, and the ball lay between them. The beetles remained still a moment. The dirt had been washed from the dung, and it was smooth and slippery.

  They consulted. Again one remained on guard while the other scouted, returning to report that if they rolled the ball clear along the bottom of the ravine, this would in due course narrow, and they could, by use of legs and shoulders and backs, lift the ball up the crack to a new height on the mountain and, by crossing another dangerous shoulder, attain a gentle weed-roughed slope that led to the summit. This they tried. But on the dangerous shoulder there was a disaster. The lake-slippery ball left their grasp and plunged down the mountainside to the ground, to the point they had started from half an hour before. The two beetles flung themselves after it, and again they began their slow difficult climb. Again their dung ball fell into the crevasse, rolled down into the lake, and again they rescued it, at the cost of infinite resource and patience, again they pushed and pulled it up the ravine, again they maneuvered it up the crack, again they tried to roll it around the mountain’s sharp shoulder, and again it fell back to the foot of the mountain, and they plunged after it.

  “The dung beetle, Scarabaeus or Aleuchus sacer, lays its eggs in a ball of dung, then chooses a gentle slope, and compacts the pellet by pushing it uphill backwards with its hind legs and allowing it to roll down, eventually reaching its place of deposit.”

  I continued to sit in the low hot grass, feeling the sun first on my back, then hard down on my shoulders, and then direct from above on my head. The air was dry now, all the moisture from the night had gone up into the air. Clouds were packing the lower skies. Even the small pool in the rock was evaporating. Above it the air quivered with steam. When, for the third time, the beetles lost their ball in the mountain lake, it was no lake, but a spongy marsh, and getting it out involved no danger or difficulty. Now the ball was sticky, had lost its shape, and was crusted with bits of leaf and grass.

  At the fourth attempt, when the ball rolled down to the starting point and the beetles bundled after it, it was past midday, my head ached with heat, and I took a large leaf, slipped it under the ball of dung and the beetles, and lifted this unit away to one side, away from the impossible and destructive mountain.

  But when I slid the leaf from under them, they rested a moment in the new patch of territory, scouted this way and that among the grass stems, found their position, and at once rolled their ball back to the foot of the mountain where they prepared another ascent.

  Meanwhile, the cow pats on the grass had been dismantled by flies and other dung beetles. Nothing remained but small grassy fragments, or dusty brown stains on the lifting stems. The buzzing of the flies was silenced. The pigeons were stilled by the heat. Far away thunder rolled, and sometimes there was the shriek of a train at the station or the puffing and clanging of shunting engines.

  The beetles again got the ball up into the ravine, and this time it rolled down, not into a marsh, but into a damp bed of leaves. There they rested awhile in a steam of heat.

  Sacred beetles, these, the sacred beetles of the Egyptians, holding the symbol of the sun between their busy stupid feet. Busy, silly beetles, mothering their ball of dung again and again up a mountain when a few minutes’ march to one side would take them clear of it.

  Again I lifted them, dung and beetles, away from the precipice, to a clear place where they had the choice of a dozen suitable gentle slopes, but they rolled their ball patiently back to the mountain’s foot.

  “The slope is chosen,” says the book, “by a beautiful instinct, so that the ball of dung comes to rest in a spot suitable for the hatching of the new generation of sacred insect.”

  The sun had now rolled past midday position and was shining onto my face. Sweat scattered off me. The air snapped with heat. The sky where the sun would go down was banked high with darkening cloud. Those beetles would have to hurry not to get drowned.

  They continued to roll the dung up the mountain, rescue it from the dried bed of the mountain lake, force it up to the exposed dry shoulder, where it rolled down and they plunged after it. Again and again and again, while the ball became a ragged drying structure of fragmented grass clotted with dung. The afternoon passed. The sun was low in my eyes. I could hardly see the beetle or the dung because of the glare from a black pack of clouds which were red-rimmed from the lowering sun behind. The red streaming rays came down and the black beetles and their dung ball on the mountainside seemed dissolved in sizzling light.

  It was raining away on the far hills. The drumming of the rain and the drumming of the thunder came closer. I could see the skirmishing side lances of an army of rain pass half a mile away beyond the rocks. A few great shining drops fell here, and hissed on burning sand and on the burning mountainside. The beetles laboured on.

  The sun dropped behind the piled boulders and now this glade rested in a cool spent light, the black trees and black boulders standing around it, waiting for the rain and for the night. The beetles were again on the mountain. They had the ball tight between their legs,
they clung on to the lichens, they clung on to rock wall and their treasure with the desperation of stupidity.

  Now the hard red glare was gone it was possible to see them clearly. It was difficult to imagine the perfect shining globe the ball had been—it was now nothing more than a bit of refuse. There was a clang of thunder. The grasses hissed and swung as a bolt of wind came fast from the sky. The wind hit the ball of dung, it fell apart into a small puff of dusty grass, and the beetles ran scurrying over the surface of the rock looking for it.

  Now the rain came marching towards us, it reached the boulders in a grey envelopment of wet. The big shining drops, outrunners of the rain army, reached the beetles’ mountain and one, two! the drops hit the beetles smack, and they fell off the rock into the already seething wet grasses at its foot.

  I ran out of the glade with the rain sniping at my heels and my shoulders, thinking of the beetles lying under the precipice up which, tomorrow, after the rain had stopped, and the cattle had come grazing, and the sun had come out, they would again labour and heave a fresh ball of dung.

  A Letter from Home

  . . . Ja, but that isn’t why I’m writing this time. You asked about Dick. You’re worrying about him?—man! But he’s got a poetry scholarship from a Texas university and he’s lecturing the Texans about letters and life too in Suid Afrika, South Africa to you (forgive the hostility), and his poems are read, so they tell me, wherever the English read poetry. He’s fine, man, but I thought I’d tell you about Johannes Potgieter, remember him? Remember the young poet, The Young Poet? He was around that winter you were here. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten those big melting brown eyes and those dimples. About ten years ago (ja, times flies) he got a type of unofficial grace-gift of a job at St. University on the strength of those poems of his, and—God—they were good. Not that you or any other English-speaking domkop will ever know, because they don’t translate out of Afrikaans. Remember me telling you and everyone else (give me credit for that at least; I give the devil his due, when he’s a poet) what a poet he was, how blerry good he was—but several people tried to translate Hans’s poems, including me, and failed. Right. Goed. Meanwhile a third of the world’s population—or is it a fifth, or to put it another way, X5Y59 million people—speak English (and it’s increasing by six births a minute) but one million people speak Afrikaans, and though I say it in a whisper, man, only a fraction of them can read it, I mean to read it. But Hans is still a great poet. Right.