Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  ‘True, true, only one eye.’

  ‘And on the farm here, this farm, which is not our land, but his land, the farmer also has only one leg.’

  ‘Ah, ah, a terrible thing, so many of them, and all wounded.’

  ‘And on the farm …’

  Special benefits had been offered to ex-soldiers who would emigrate and take over this land. And so it was that to the eyes of the black people, the white people were an army of cripples. Like an army of locusts, who, after a few hours on the ground, show themselves legless, wingless, dozens of them, unable to take off again, when the main armies leave. Locusts, eating everything, covering everything, swarming everywhere …

  ‘The locusts have eaten our food …’

  ‘Aie, aie, they have eaten our food.’

  ‘They blacken our fields with their eating mouths.’

  ‘The armies of the locusts come, they come, they come from the north, and our lives are eaten to the ground …’

  As a chant popular in the compounds had it.

  And again and again during that evening, these people dissolved into fits of laughter, putting together the white cripples of the area, the solemn lecture by the crippled farmer, and the picture of their two healthy young men, fighting briefly in the dust. They laughed and they laughed, staggering with laughter, rolling with laughter, howling with laughter …

  Meanwhile, on that same evening, up on the hill where the farmer’s house was, the man with only one leg was preparing to go to bed. His leg had been cut off halfway up the thigh. He was alive at all only because of this wound: his entire company had been wiped out in a great battle two weeks after he had suffered the good fortune of having his leg crushed because a shell burst near him. Of course he had often wondered if he might not have done better to die with his company. He had been extremely ill, and had nearly lost his reason. Previously he had been a man who lived in his body, danced, played football and cricket, gone shooting with the local farmers, walked, and ridden. This active man had had to face life with one leg. He managed well. When he got up in the morning, he tightened his mouth to an expression familiar to his family, one of patient determination. He manoeuvred himself to the edge of the bed, lifted the stump into the air, and fitted over it one, two, up to ten stump socks, according to the amount of weight he was carrying. He fitted the heavy wood and metal bucket over his stump, and pulled himself up by the edge of a table. Standing, he buckled the straps around his waist and over his shoulder.

  His day could begin. He walked. He rode. He went down mine shafts. He sat up through nights to watch the temperature in tobacco barns. He stumped around fields, along drains, contour ridges, balanced and staggered his way across fields tumbling with great newly ploughed clods. He gave out rations, standing for hours by the sacks and bins of grains.

  He was a man fighting poverty. The way he saw it.

  At night, he dragged the metal and wood limb off him and collapsed back into bed, shutting his eyes, breathing deeply. ‘My God,’ he would mutter. ‘My God, well, that’s done, for today.’

  And he would drift off to sleep, listening to the drums from the compound. ‘They are dancing down there, I expect,’ he was thinking. ‘Dancing. They dance at the drop of a hat. Got a gift. Music. A gift. Threshing beans today, they make a dance of it, they dance their work, and they make up a song to go with it.’

  ILLUSTRATIONS: The Shikastan Situation

  [This Report by Johor seems to us a useful addition to the Illustrations. Archivists.]

  Some areas of the Northwest fringes are still comparatively unaffected by technology, and these people live (as I transmit this) not very differently from the way they have done for centuries. A village in an area of extreme poverty has been set apart from others because every year there is held the Festival of the Child. This has always attracted local visitors, and during this era of tourism, tourists. The village has never had an inn for visitors, who put up in the homes of relatives, but now there is a government-maintained camping place, and mobile shops arrive for the period of the festival. A town not far away expects to benefit at this time, and makes provision of all kinds.

  The Church is at the centre of the occasion, but all the village is decorated: shops, the bar, the central square. And also the homes of the villagers, who have never relinquished their own rights in the matter.

  Since the last report by Agent 9, there is a new development. On the night before the main event there are fireworks and dancing in the square and the streets leading away from the square. The tourists are always in time for this – to them – most interesting part of the festival, contrasting sharply, in their good clothes and the avidity that is their mark, with the local people, who observe their rich guests with good humour not unmixed with irony.

  This night of dancing and drinking is conducted by the secular authorities but the priests keep it within their grasp by appearing at sundown on the steps of the church, with emitters of sweet smoke, and songs of a solemn kind. Nearly everyone is up all night, dancing and singing, but at the first sign of daylight, they are supposed to be in their places in the church, in abasement and in fawning postures, to be threatened and admonished by the priests.

  The church ‘services’ continue all morning, the people taking each other’s place in batches, for the building is too small to hold them all at once.

  Exactly at midday a troupe of priests, all decked out in every variety of finery and ornament, unlocks a door at the back of the church and brings out the Child. This is a gaudy statue without pretensions to realism, with staring eyes, highly coloured hair and skin, and smothered in laces and stuffs of all kinds. This figure is placed in a small litter covered with flowers and greenery and carried out of the building by a team of children chosen by the priests. It is carried three times around the square (which is no more than a small dusty space that has a few trees around it) by the children who are dressed no less fancifully than the image, while they, the villagers and the priests, chant and sing. The statue is put on an elevated place in the porch of the church, guarded by priests, and the singing continues all afternoon until sunset.

  Meanwhile, all the children of the village, including the bearers of the litter, are lined up by their parents under the orders of the priests, and are hustled forward two by two past the statue while the priests ‘bless’ them. When this is over they are rewarded by a feast of cakes and sweet drinks as fine as the poor village can provide.

  While even a few years ago this festival was entirely for the children, the economic pressure of the tourists has operated so that there are entertainments and food and drink for the adults as well. This year, for the first time, there were television cameras, and because of this, everything was more elaborate than usual. When the statue has been taken in and put away into its cupboard, dancing begins again, and continues until midnight.

  This is a pleasant enough festival, and offers much needed relief to people whose lives are hard indeed.

  It has not become much more elaborate since the report of Emissary 76, four hundred years ago. But we must expect that while tourism lasts, every year will show new feats of imagination.

  There is no use left in this festival from our point of view.

  I could not prevent myself wondering as I observed these lively (but well-policed) scenes, what would happen if I were able to stand forward and relate the real origins of the festival.

  ‘Over a thousand years ago, a visitor came to this village. The Northwest fringes were backward, regarded as savage by other, more developed areas – such as those on the far side of the great inland sea you call the Mediterranean. These advanced cultures often sent people northwards, in various disguises, to wander from place to place in order to impart techniques and ideas that could lighten the appalling conditions. This particular visitor came with three young pupils, who were learning from him the art of bringing more advanced ideas to backward areas. Arriving at this bitterly poor place, they discovered that there were no softer i
nfluences here at all, nothing for miles around, except for some monks who lived sequestered from the lowly concerns of the villagers.

  ‘The atmosphere of the village was appropriate, and the villagers ready to listen to tales about civilization whose whereabouts they could not really understand, since they knew as little of geography as they did of their own origins – and future.

  ‘The visitors stayed unobtrusively in the village for many weeks. They imparted information of a practical kind, about cleanliness, the usefulness of bathing to avoid illness, the necessity of clean water supplies, the care of the sick, elements of medicine, all things these poor people knew very little of. When a few of the more intelligent had taken in enough to be able to pass it on, there came information on crafts like distilling, dyeing, the preservation of foodstuffs for famines and hard times, and certain techniques of husbandry and agriculture that were new to them.

  ‘And then these visitors began to tell the villagers, in simple terms, sometimes in the form of tales, stories, songs, a little of their history, and what this meant for them – what they really were and could become.

  ‘These people whose struggle to feed themselves, to keep themselves clothed and housed, was as much as they could sustain, heard the news without resistance, and this was already a great deal, for people whose lives are so close to an edge may very often simply refuse to listen: even good news, a message of hope, may be too much for them to bear.

  ‘In the evenings as the light went and the villagers came back from their work in the fields to eat and rest, our visitors would sit in this place, the square – which was very like what it is now – and they talked, and told stories and sang.

  ‘There would be smoke rising from the huts and houses. Children played in the dust. Ribby and ravening dogs scratched or scuffled. Skinny donkeys stood about.

  ‘The villagers sat quietly in the half-dark. Women held their infants in their arms.

  ‘A woman was sitting on a stone, rocking a child and humming to it.

  ‘The older man asked if they might take the baby from her for a short while, and she assented. He sat with the baby on his knee. It was drowsy and blinking, and he hushed his voice so that it might not be roused, and all the villagers had to lean forward to listen. He asked them to regard this child, which was one they all knew, was not set apart in any way from others, a child like any other, whose life would be like everyone’s here, no different in any way, just as his children’s would be, and his children’s children …

  ‘At which the woman leaned forward to say apologetically that this child was a girl.

  ‘But this child, went on the visitor, was not what she seemed – no, it did not matter in the least if she was a girl, for a girl was as good as her brother … Ignoring the slight restlessness that occurred at this point, he went on. This child, girl or boy, was not what she seemed. No, what mattered was that she – or he – was the equal of anybody in the village, or in the villages around about, or even in the big town (which few of them had visited, though they had heard about it) or in the towns across the seas (which they had heard about, for a boy from the village had become a sailor and returned to tell them amazing and improbable tales which on the whole they thought it safer to disbelieve) or anybody, anywhere at all. They did not know it, but this village, which seemed to them so large, containing their lives and everything they knew, was only a tiny part of a great world. They must multiply this village by as many times as there were wheat grains in that field there, and the great towns by as many times as there were stones on that hillside – the light had almost gone, the moon was rising, and the hillside glimmered with white stones. The villagers were sitting silent, listening, listening … by now they trusted these people who had arrived ‘like angels’ among them, had taught them so many useful things which had already proved themselves. They all felt that amazing and wonderful things were being told to them, but it was all so difficult, so hard to understand. When the next town was the limit of their imaginations, how to believe in many such, and in cities a thousand times larger …

  ‘There were cities in the world … cities of people as many as stars in the sky. People like angels, for it must not be thought that these visitors of theirs were in any way remarkable or out of the ordinary.

  ‘The villagers listened, trying hard.

  ‘There were cities in the world where people had all they wanted to eat and more. They had clothes, enough to warm them and keep them dry. Their houses were many times the size of these houses here, in the village. Yes, all this was true. But what mattered was that there was space and time in the lives of these wonderful people to learn all kinds of things, not just cheese-making and how to keep a cow from falling ill of the stagger-disease. No, people had room in their lives to study, to think, to dream. They knew all kinds of extraordinary and true things – yes, true, true, what was being said tonight was true.

  ‘These people were able, for instance, to study the movements of the stars, which were not so far away as might be thought here, in this village, or in other poor villages. No, each star up there was a world, each one, made of substances everyone here knew as well as he, she, knew their hands, or feet, or the hair on their heads. Those stars up there, they were made of earth – like this; and of rock – like this. And of water. And of fire, yes, of fire swirling and turning.

  ‘Next evening, and the next, and the next, our visitors sat, and borrowed a child from the crowd, any child, insisting that it did not matter whose child, or whether a boy or a girl, of what age, and, holding this child before the people, they insisted that this child, if it were to be taken away – no, no, that was not the intention (because the crowd suddenly stirred and muttered), the child was sitting here on this knee, in these arms, just to remind them of something – if this child or any other was taken away and brought up in one of these fabulous cities where people did not have to spend every minute in labour, but had time to learn, to study, then this child would be just the same as those. And if he, or she, were taken off on a visit to – let us say that little star up there? Yes! That one! Or that one! – then …

  ‘The people were laughing as they looked up, their mouths falling open as they gazed at the heavens, which on this evening were floury and thick with stars.

  ‘Yes, that one. If this baby sleeping here was taken off to that star there, then he would be a star baby, would become a giant perhaps, who knew? Or grow wings, and feathers – who could tell?

  ‘They laughed. Great shouts of laughter went up. But it was a marvelling and trustful laughter.

  ‘Or become a child who could live in water, or in fire, perhaps!

  ‘And this is the point, you see, this is always the point which they must remember: that every child has the capacity to be everything. A child was a miracle, a wonder! A child held all the history of the human race, that stretched back, back, further than they could imagine. Yes, this one here, little Otilie, she had in the substance of her body and her thoughts everything that had ever happened to every person of mankind. Just as a loaf of bread holds in it all the substance of all the wheat grains that have gone into it, mingled with all the grain of that harvest, and the substance of the field that has grown it, so this child was kneaded together by, and contained, all the harvest of mankind.

  ‘These words and ideas, that were like nothing these people had ever heard or imagined, came into them, evening after evening, and always a child was held up in front of them.

  ‘Remember, remember, that after a long time, not in your time, or your children’s, or even your grandchildren’s – but it will come, this time – your labours, and your hardships, and the burden of your lives, all will be redeemed, will bear fruit, and the children of this village and of the world will become what they have it in them to be … remember this, remember this … it will be just as if men came down from that little star there, twinkling away above those dark trees, yes, that one! and suddenly filled this poor village which is so full of hardship and of
trouble, with good things and with hope. Remember this child here is not what he seems, is more, is everything, and holds within her, or within him, all the past and all the future – remember it.

  ‘One morning very early a girl came running to the hut, where the four men slept, and knocked hard on the door saying breathlessly that she worked in the monastery as a servant in the kitchen, and the monks had heard of these visitors, and they had sent a messenger to “the king himself’, and soldiers were coming. Yes, they were on their way …

  ‘When the soldiers came, there were no strangers in the village, they had gone away into the dangerous forests leaving behind them a pattern of stones on the hillside, a necklace around a child’s neck, some designs drawn with coloured clays and earth on the walls of the only stone building in the village, which happened to be a storehouse. The villagers said that it was a false rumour, the talk of a foolish girl who wanted to make herself important, for of course it was the girl herself who had talked in the monks’ kitchen, and then had become afraid of the results.

  ‘When the soldiers had gone, a band of monks arrived.

  ‘They visited the village perhaps once a year. They despised the villagers, though they were not much better themselves, being almost as poor, and not much less ignorant. This was when men, and women, might crowd together in shelters of various kinds calling themselves monks and nuns, as protection against the brutalities of the time.

  ‘The monks had been instructed by the soldiers in the king’s name to make sure undesirable vagrants did not shelter in the villages.

  ‘This the monks impressed on the villagers, and returned to their stone rabbit warrens over the mountain.

  ‘The villagers agreed with everything that was said to them.

  ‘But they were as if stars had come closer and lived in their homes, their lives, and then suddenly disappeared. They kept what had happened close and secret, treasuring the crafts they had been taught, which soon spread among the villages around them – and even more, what had been told them.