Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  George first. He is thin and tall. He has black eyes. His hair is black and straight. His skin is white but not like the white of white people from Europe. It is an ivory colour. In Egypt and here in Morocco there are plenty of people who look like him. It is our Indian grandparent coming out in his skin.

  Now Benjamin. He takes after Simon. He is rather heavy. He gets fat easily. He has brown hair and blue-grey eyes. His hair curls. He is always sunburned, a reddish-brown.

  Now me. I am more like George. I am not thin unfortunately. I have black hair. I have brown eyes, like Mother. My skin is olive even when I am not sunburned. In England no one notices me because I am not unusual. They think I am Spanish or Portuguese. Here no one notices me because I am not unusual. Everyone notices Benjamin.

  What happened to us children that changed everything was when George spent the year on the farm in Wales. Olga and Simon said I was wrong to ‘pine’ after George. And they made me do a lot of things in that year, two languages, French and Spanish, and taking guitar lessons. I wasn’t pining. I was lonely. And when he came back I was still lonely. He was thirteen when he went to Wales, and fourteen when he came back. He was grown up. I did not understand that, but I do now.

  During the whole of that year, Benjamin was difficult. He did not work well at school. He moped a lot. When George came back though, he tried to win Benjamin over and after a time he did. But I can see now that George had grown up, but Benjamin hadn’t. Benjamin has always done everything to get George’s attention. I don’t think our parents know how much. That isn’t because they are too busy to notice. Well, sometimes they are too busy. They spend a lot of time thinking about us and how to bring us up well. But a sister sees things that parents don’t see. I suppose they have forgotten. I think they remember the overall thing, but not the smallness of things happening every day.

  I see now that one of the reasons they wanted George away was to free Benjamin from George. Apart from George learning the cycle of the seasons. But that made things worse, the way I see it. Benjamin felt George had been given something he hadn’t been. Yet he didn’t want to go to Wales, and scorned George for being a farmer’s boy. Benjamin is a bit of a snob.

  I see there are a lot of facts I have taken no notice of at all. I wonder if you have to spend your whole life suddenly understanding facts that were perfectly obvious all the time.

  When George came back he asked me several times, What has happened? Tell me what has happened? So I told him about Spanish and French and played him my guitar.

  He was impatient, but he tried not to show it. He said, No, I don’t mean just you. So I told him about Benjamin, though he knew about Benjamin, he spent so much time with him, and then when he was quiet, and I knew that that wasn’t it, I said about our mother organizing the big new hospital, and our father helping her. That was better, but it wasn’t right. For he said, Rachel, our family isn’t everything, we aren’t all that important. So I got panicky. I do, when I know he is disappointed in me. I gabbled on about Mother and Father and what they had said, but he lost interest. He went on being kind to me, when he had time. But he was very restless just then. He could not keep still ever. He was with a group of boys at the college a lot and they were wild and noisy and I could not believe this was George. But I did understand that they talked about things I wasn’t interested in then.

  I started to listen when my parents discussed the state of the world and I enrolled in the Current Events classes at the school, and I listened a lot to the News and Information programmes.

  I see that our family is different from most others in this way. Everywhere we go, everyone is passionately for some Party or other. Or pretends to be. It is easy to see when they are pretending. Our parents often say people who pretend must not be blamed. It is surviving, and that is more important than waving flags. Sometimes when they say that people are shocked. But I know they think politics is a mistake. They think that political people are on the wrong track. All they are interested in is doing things, like reorganizing hospitals and making things work. They don’t often say this, except with us or close friends. They don’t say it so much actually, it’s what they don’t say that makes it obvious. But everywhere politics is so important, and I can see that this must have been a big problem for them, now I think about it. I mean, it must be like saying you were an atheist in the Middle Ages.

  Facts. England. The first two times we children visited it were before the Dictatorship, and there was nothing much to notice but things being inefficient. But the third time, food was short, even though it was on a farm, and Mr Jones and Mrs Jones were worried. I have been asking Simon and Olga and they say that a lot of people were in prison and people got arrested suddenly and then vanished. Well, there’s nothing new in that. And the people who couldn’t get work, particularly the young ones, were rampaging about. That was before they were put in armies and kept in camps. Wales and Scotland were the same, although they were Independent. The Dictatorship was trying to be all English, and not to have so many foreigners. When George went for his year farming, it was hard to arrange. Travel got difficult after the Dictatorship and anyway, people couldn’t afford it. Mother says that it was only because of special contacts that George was allowed in. Although we are all English. I mean, visits are all right, but difficult, but living there for a whole year was nearly impossible. I have underlined the special contacts because I see more and more how important that is.

  America. Olga and Simon say that it is so rich anyway, the crisis was masked. But I remember seeing lines of people waiting for food. And Olga says it was the same, like England, the unemployed milling about and rioting and smashing things, and when we were there the beginning of camps and uniforms and keeping them under military discipline. Nigeria was different because people had been poor anyway. Perhaps that is better than having been very rich and then getting poor. I have just had that thought. In Nigeria we saw hungry people and sick people. That was when I began to go with my mother everywhere. Into hospitals and relief camps. There was an epidemic. My first epidemic. I went with her. Of course I was inoculated against everything. But they weren’t sure what the disease was. To this day she says they don’t really know what it was. Now I think how brave she was to take me everywhere. She says when I asked her (just now) that I have to be ready for danger and emergency. And that is one of the reasons all three of us have been taken to so many places with our parents, even into camps full of illness and epidemics and famines. In Nigeria there weren’t so many unemployed, because most of them got on to the land somehow. In Kenya it wasn’t so very different – poor people, and different kinds of illness. Olga and Simon were working on a big team for six months with people who had escaped from a bad famine. They were doing hygiene in the camps. There were a lot of young people with no work and they were put into uniforms too. What big armies everyone has now. I hadn’t thought of it like that before. Simply because of no work. In Egypt it was different in some ways. Very very poor. Illness, again. Olga and Simon at it as always, camps and relief. I remember watching the kids running along the streets breaking everything and screaming and setting fire. I was afraid that our building, the one we had a flat in, would be set on fire. Two buildings in that street were. All the city was full of burning buildings. More armies! More uniforms! And now Morocco. Well, it is different again, but not so very, if you come to think of it. Different words, but the same things. Poor people. Armies. Not enough to eat.

  I see I have got away from politics. I meant to write about all the political parties. Governments. That kind of thing. But it seems to me that in each country our family has been in, the same things have happened. Are happening. But America is a Democracy. Britain is Socialist. Nigeria is a Benevolent Dictatorship. (I have just asked Olga and that is what she said.) Kenya is Free and Developing. (Mother says, Benevolent Oligarchy.) Morocco is Islamic and Free and Socialist and Developing. (Benevolent.) I don’t know if this is the sort of fact I ought to be dwelling on? I can’
t believe it matters. Well, everyone else seems to think it matters. But it seems to me to show that our education has been very peculiar to say the least. Nearly everyone is passionate about whatever political party it is. When we have visitors, they have certain things to say, and they say them, one after the other. Often I and George have had to stop ourselves giggling. And even gone out of the room. And this happens in each country, it doesn’t matter what the government is. Of course Mother and Father are never part of any political thing, but they are always Experts employed by the Government. That means, if you are in the habit of thinking like that, they must be supporters of that government. Or might be. And this means that visitors have to say certain things for the benefit of Mother and Father and for the other visitors. It is very boring. Well, that is all I am going to say about that.

  Special contacts. I see that this is important. I see that it has been important always and I didn’t understand that. Because of writing this I keep seeing things. I am trying to be careful to write down everything as I think now and not as then, but it is difficult, because I keep slipping back into that frame of mind.

  The first thing I have to think about is Hasan. Soon after George came back from the year on the farm, Hasan came to the house and George began spending time with him. If you come to think of it, it is funny how it happened. Because nothing much seemed to happen. Hasan was an ordinary kind of visitor, one of the people in the Medical Association. But he was George’s friend right from the start. And we didn’t think anything of it. Correction, I didn’t think anything of it, because it has always happened like this.

  The first time, it was New York. George must have been only seven. There was a woman who came a lot, and she used to take George out to see things and do things. Once or twice Benjamin went too but he didn’t like her. I asked George what they did and he said, We talk about things. I didn’t think much about that then, but I am now. And then on holiday in Wales, the three of us. There was a man came from Scotland. We believed he was an expert in connection with farming. Perhaps he was. Now I wonder. He took George off to camp once, and fishing too. And other things. I’ve forgotten what. I wasn’t taking much notice but now I wish I had. Benjamin went camping once. He didn’t like it much. He was always finding things boring. That was his style. I see it was not so much what he really thought but a style. To protect himself. I have been sitting here wondering if I was asked to go on these trips. Why didn’t I go too? But what I do remember is I loved the farm so much I never wanted to go a step from it, they could have invited me to do anything and I wouldn’t have left Mrs. Jones. But I do remember going for a walk with George and this man. I remember something about him. Which I could recognize now. He was called Martin. George liked him. And then there was Nigeria. When the epidemic was on and our parents so busy, we weren’t always with them. We started to have tutors then. One tutor came from Kano and he taught us mathematics and history and Arabic. Also how to notice everything. He made a great point of that. He was a tutor for all of us, but now I see that George went off with him a lot. And in Kenya we had tutors as well as the school. It was the same there. I mean, it was always George, I see that now.

  I have asked Mother about it. (Have just finished asking.) She knew exactly what I was asking from the first word I said. She had been expecting me to ask her one day and had wondered how to answer. I could see all that as soon as I asked her. She set herself carefully to answer all my questions. She has always been patient about questions. I have understood this because of watching other mothers with questions from their children. When Mother gets asked a question she makes it clear that she thinks it is important and she is taking it seriously.

  I said I was writing this. Well she knew that. I said I had to get my facts right. And then I told her that as I wrote I was understanding things. She was not at all surprised by that. She told me a lot about Martin. Who he was and that kind of thing. And about the tutors and the woman in New York. But when she had ended with saying that they were like this and like that and did this kind of work or whatever, she said to me, as if I had asked some exact question, I don’t know, Rachel. The way she answered that, framed the question I hadn’t asked.

  I will put down where this is happening. We are in a little house with a flat roof. We like it better than the big block of flats where we were first. This is in a part of the town where it is nearly all local people, i.e., Natives, So called. They are most of them lovely and we have friends among them. I mean, real friends. At night we often sleep on the roof. It is lovely. We lie out, on mattresses and look at the stars and talk. This is the best time ever for us all. I get so happy I don’t know what to do with myself. When the family is together at last. Because that isn’t often. Father for instance is away this minute, organizing hospitals with a team of doctors. Doctors ‘All-Sorts’, Benjamin calls teams like this, meaning, all races. Father is working very hard. Well, I suppose that goes without saying.

  There are some small rooms around a court. The rooms have earth floors. This is not a house ‘people like us’ live in often. Some of the white people say we are ‘eccentric’. I’d rather be eccentric and sleep on the roof and look at the stars and the moon.

  Mother is at this minute in the court, writing a report for the WHO. The court is not just for us but for several families. There is a lot of noise. She works with everything going on, kids playing etc. There are some lilies in a big terra-cotta pot, and a rather dingy little pool, dusty, but it is better than nothing.

  Mother is sitting on a cushion on the edge of the pool writing. I sat on the edge of the pool too.

  I didn’t have to prod her after she said, I don’t know, Rachel – I just sat and waited. I thought perhaps she would not say anything at all. I understand her when she doesn’t. We are together so much, we know what we are thinking. I knew that Mother knew I was in one of those times when we understand things suddenly, all at once.

  She said to me, What do you think about it?

  That surprised me, I must confess. She said it in a low voice, not frightened, not like that, but as if truly not knowing what to say, and as if she truly thought I might be able to say something she hadn’t thought of.

  I said, Well, Olga, it seems to me as if there is something very funny about it.

  She said, Yes. Yes.

  We sat there quite a long time. It wasn’t as if this was a good time to have an important talk. I mean, because of the children. The baby from the room across the court would have fallen into the pool if I hadn’t got hold of it, for instance.

  I said, It is only now I have had a sudden feeling that there was something all the time.

  Yes, it started very early. George was seven. Yes, with the woman in New York. Miriam.

  She was a Jewish woman? Yes.

  It hasn’t ever mattered what they were. No.

  Then I said to her, in the same tone of voice she had used to me, low, and in my case it was because I was a bit afraid, really, George is special in some way?

  Yes, that must be it.

  What does Simon think?

  He saw it first. I was quite frightened about it all at one point, Rachel. But he told me not to be. He told me to think about it. So I did. I have never thought about anything so hard in my life. I believe that since then that is what I have been thinking about. Yes, I can say that, Rachel.

  That was all for then. I took the baby back to its mother. There is one thing about living like this. No one could say we aren’t integrated with Moroccan life at its roots.

  I have been sitting here thinking. This room is my bedroom. It is more like a cubbyhole. But I like it. It is very cool. It is all mud. It has an earthy smell. A damp smell, because I sprinkle water in the morning before the sun gets hot. And I throw down water outside the door morning and evening, to keep the dust down, and the smell is gorgeous.

  When I look out of the door, there is blue sky. That’s all. Blue sky. Hot.

  There are two things on my mind at this moment.r />
  One is this. Benjamin. One of the reasons Benjamin is so difficult and awful and sulks so much, and tries to quarrel with George is, he is jealous because George goes with Hasan so much. But Hasan has more than once asked him to go out to a café or something but Benjamin never will. That is because he thinks he is being put off with a café or a walk in the evening. I know this because unfortunately I have only to watch myself to know. I think of George having all kinds of really deep experiences with Hasan, I don’t know what, and cafés aren’t much. But I’ve asked George at nights when we lie out on the roof and he says: We talk, that’s all.

  Now when I look back at all the places and people, and I’ve asked him, he has always said, We talk, that’s all. Or, He tells me things.

  Benjamin has refused the special contacts from the very first. From when he was seven in New York and he didn’t like Miriam. That is the truth. He has always refused it. You can think about it and think about it. I am thinking about it, and there is something so awful there I don’t know what to do with myself, because of course I am thinking. What have I refused? I have always been offered everything too, but I always had some good reason not to. Like loving Mrs Jones and wanting to be in the kitchen cooking with her and feeding the chickens.

  Benjamin. It has always been the same. What he has wanted, right from the beginning, has been something more than what he was offered. He wanted to be asked by himself with Miriam or Hasan or whoever. I bet he wouldn’t have said Miriam was boring if Miriam had asked him out by himself. And when we had tutors and George went off with one of them, Benjamin never went. He said, once, Stupid black man. The funny thing is, this isn’t what he really thinks. I mean, he doesn’t think that blacks are stupid or anything like that. He says this kind of thing as part of his style. And that is frightening when you think of it. I mean, anybody can put on an act, but then you are stuck with it. Like that mime with the mask on his face he couldn’t get off. There is something frightening about all this. Benjamin truly doesn’t like living here. He makes jokes about ‘the native quarter’. Yet he adores sleeping on the roof and he makes friends with all the local kids, and he is sweet with the little kids. But he means it too. He would like a nice boring modern flat in a nice boring modern building with nice boring people. What I think is, now I am thinking, is that Benjamin says this sort of thing simply because he isn’t treated as special. But George hasn’t been treated as special. George has always gone along with what was there. He has seen it, but Benjamin hasn’t.