Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  Today it was announced that the All-Glorious Pan-European Socialist Democratic Communist Dictatorships for the Preservation of Peace welcome the Benevolent Tutelage of the Glorious Chinese Brothers. Well, why bother? What a joke!

  But when George heard it on the radio he was very serious. I said to him, But you knew it was going to happen, obviously? He said Yes, but not so soon. He sent a message to Benjamin by someone leaving from the Peace Café (because the telephone wasn’t working again) to come as soon as possible. He spends a lot of time with Benjamin now. Every afternoon. He goes out to the Camps, and he is with the children, and then he goes with Benjamin to have supper in the café. Benjamin has had an invitation from the Chinese to go to Europe. He is flattered. He is ashamed of being flattered.

  Every morning early before breakfast, I bring Kassim and Leila to my room and I teach them geography and Spanish. And the history of recent politics and religions. This is what George says they should learn. When I get back from teaching at college in the afternoon I teach Kassim and Leila Portuguese and geohistory. Otherwise they are with George all the time. Olga and Simon have hardly noticed the children. It is too much for them. Olga has gone back to work at the hospital. She is fighting a battle with bureaucracy. Well, what’s new! Simon is taking a week’s holiday because he had a minor heart attack. George told him he must. They talk a lot, or sit quietly together. The other day Olga said, I feel as if I have finished what I had to do.

  I said to her, Olga, do you mean, it doesn’t matter now because we three are grown up? Olga said, Something like that. I said, But I don’t think I am grown up. She was affectionate, and said, Well, hard lines! And so we laughed. This is how things are with us at the moment.

  This evening George and Benjamin were in the living room and about ten people who had come to see George. One of them was from India, and she talked about a girl called Sharma, and from Benjamin’s reaction I realized she was a girl George was interested in. There was a packet of letters from the girl to George. When the visitors left, and George went off with Kassim and Leila somewhere, Benjamin was with me. I said, Who is the girl?

  I could see that if I wasn’t careful we would slip back into the awful quarrelling way we used to be in.

  She seems to have taken George’s fancy, said Benjamin. It was he who was keeping us nice and sensible and not quarrelling and I was grateful.

  I said, Is it serious?

  I thought you were going to say, What about Suzannah!

  I was in fact thinking about Suzannah.

  At this point I saw that I would start shouting at Benjamin, if I didn’t leave the room, and that would have been unfair, because he hadn’t done anything. So I got up and left.

  I slept hardly at all thinking of this girl and George. I dreamed. It was awful, everything taken away from me. I know I am not being strong. This afternoon George came into my room when I was teaching the children Portuguese and I knew it was because he knew I wanted to talk about this girl. He nodded and the children went out. Then he sat in a chair opposite to me, and leaned forward and looked straight at me.

  He said, Rachel, what is it you want me to say?

  I want you to say I love this girl, she is the most marvellous girl in the world, she is beautiful and sensitive and intelligent and remarkable.

  All right, he said, I’ve said it. And now, Rachel?

  It goes without saying that as usual I felt lacking, and sat there with all my emotions rioting around, of no use to anyone.

  I couldn’t speak, and then he said, It is not difficult to feel love for someone, in the sense that something is called out of you by possibilities. Potentialities.

  Her qualities are not the ones you need? I asked. It sounded feebly sarcastic, but I hadn’t meant this at all. So he didn’t take it like that.

  You surely must see, Rachel, that none of us is going to have the things we want. I know that. Very well, then.

  You haven’t mentioned Suzannah, I said. I didn’t think it was Suzannah on your mind. I didn’t say anything.

  Then he said, Rachel, I want you to listen very carefully. But I do, always.

  Good. Listen now. When I and Benjamin leave, I want you to stay here, in this flat, and look after Kassim and Leila. I don’t want you to leave here. I want you to remember that I said this.

  When I heard what he said, I was engulfed in a sickness. A blackness. It was horrible. I knew that what was happening was terrible. I wanted to grasp what was happening. I felt that I should be absorbing something and I warn’t.

  I was faint and not seeing well, but I heard him say Rachel, please remember, please.

  When I had stopped being faint, he had gone out. He sent the children back in and I went on teaching them.

  I have been waiting for George to talk some more with me alone, but while I often sit with him and his visitors, he doesn’t talk with me alone.

  We heard today that Simon died in the Sudan. Of one of the new viruses. George telephoned from the college on a special permission but Simon was already buried. George and Benjamin and I sat in the living room together, by ourselves. No visitors. It is very hot tonight. We were waiting for Olga, and she came in late, but she had been told already. Then the four of us sat. Olga is so worn out, I don’t think she felt anything at all. I could see from her face that it was not that she couldn’t take it in but that she had a long time ago. The four of us went on sitting there, quietly, until Olga said, It is going to be morning soon. She has gone to bed. George and Benjamin are still sitting in the living room.

  George and Benjamin left today for Europe. With a contingent of twenty-four, all delegates from different parts of Africa. Olga and I are here, and the two children. Olga is almost invisible, she floats around. She does go to the hospital, but she comes in early at night and lies down. She has some life in her in the mornings, and she sits in the kitchen with Kassim and Leila and tells them stories about George as a child, and then as he grew up. When she forgets something she looks at me, and I fill in. I see she wants to be sure they know about George. I sit and listen to her, and what she says is quite different from what I remember. I mean, because she is so tired and gone, the things she says are halting and flavourless. I sometimes can’t believe this is George she is talking about. Then I have to wonder if the things I wrote down about George are lifeless in the same way. Sometimes what she says sounds as if it comes out af a very old dusty book. She repeats anecdotes. She tells them things about George that she knew, and I didn’t. She talks and talks and talks about George.

  Leila and Kassim sit watching her. They are very attractive children. They are thin, from too little food, wiry, with alive brown faces, straight black hair, soft dark eyes. I contrast them with the children in the Camps and I feel they are precious. Of course that isn’t fair to the children in the Camps. Every one of them needs someone to love them. Each one of them.

  Suzannah comes in every evening just about supper time. She is very quiet and humble. She is exactly like a dog that hopes it will not be sent away. Yet whenever she comes everyone is kind. Olga is particularly. She sits beside the children at the supper table. She is nice with them, simple and sensible. They like her. I look at her in her loud smart blouse and her commonplace face and her waved hair and I simply cannot believe it.

  Olga woke me in the night and said I had to take her to hospital. I rang Suzannah who came with her army car. We took Olga to hospital, and I asked Suzannah to go back and be with the children. Olga was taken to a little room off one of her own wards. There were a lot of bright lights, and doctors and nurses. She said to the chief doctor, Please don’t … meaning, don’t give me drugs. He works under her usually. He took her hand and smiled and nodded, and nodded at the other doctors and nurses and they all went out and left me with Olga. She was very tired. Her face was grey. Her lips were white. She made a movement with her hand and I held it. She was looking at me from a very long way off. I could see that it was all she could do to breathe. She said, in a l
oud sudden voice, Rachel. I waited, and waited, and waited. The bright lights battering down. Then she smiled, a real smile, so I knew she was going to die at once, and she said, Well Rachel … in a friendly sort of way. Then she stopped breathing. I closed her eyes after a bit. Before that she had been looking at me. So it seemed. I stayed with her until she was cold. I did not feel any grief because it did not seem to be indicated. Anyway, I don’t believe in death. And anyway, I wished I was with her. Then I called a nurse in, and said that if there were any documents to sign, I would have to, because now I was the only member of the family left here. They gave me a cup of coffee and brought me a form to sign. Then I walked home. It was light by then. Suzannah was asleep on the sofa in the living room. That made me like her, because there were six empty beds she could have put herself in. She did not fuss or say anything silly, but made me more coffee and then got the children up and gave them breakfast. We sat together in the kitchen, and I told them that Olga had died, and that I would look after them. And Suzannah too, they asked? And of course I said, Yes. It seemed completely the right thing to say.

  I have seen that of course George will marry Suzannah. How was it I didn’t see that before? She is a member of the family already. She has been for a long time.

  Now George and Benjamin have gone away and Mother and Father are dead, this flat is full of space. I have put Kassim in George’s room, and Leila in Benjamin’s room. This is something very important for them. Before they have felt like refugees taken in. But now you can see they feel part of the family. I have given them jobs to do, like keeping the flat tidy, and shopping, and both Leila and Kassim can cook some things. I still haven’t sent them to school. I don’t know where or how. I have even thought of trying to find Hasan to ask him. Perhaps these children are important the way George was? For all I know Hasan is dead. Over and over again, you think of someone you haven’t seen for a time, and then you hear: dead. George didn’t leave instructions for the children except that I had to look after them. I cannot possibly teach them all they should know.

  Last night Suzannah came for supper, in the way she does, her eyes saying she must be asked, but of course ready to leave in a moment if she isn’t. As we were talking at supper, the subject of school came up. Suzannah is good at math, so she will give them lessons. Then she said she would take them sometimes with her to her job. She teaches physical culture and hygiene and diet and that sort of thing at one of the Youth Camps. I said No, I didn’t want Leila and Kassim influenced by all that. I saw that both the children were looking amused in their polite way. Suzannah said, You must not overprotect these two. I always get furious, inwardly, when she says things. It is her manner. Everything she says has the same quality. Pushy. But it is a result of something I didn’t understand, because of not liking her. It is strength that makes her insist on what she thinks. She insists and is too loud because of her experiences. The usual bad ones. She has had to fight for everything. And so she does fight. She was a refugee. She has never even known her real name. The Camp administrator called her Suzannah. She has not had any name but that. She was for six years in a girls’ Camp. She taught herself all kinds of things in the Camp. She got the helpers who knew math and hygiene and diet etc. to teach her. She fought her way out.

  Suzannah was going to her job as it happens this morning and it would have been sensible to ask her to stay the night. I didn’t. I wanted to but I couldn’t make myself. I felt taken over by her. So she went home, leaving just in time for the curfew. I felt guilty. When I was helping the children to go to bed, Kassim said, Rachel, are you trying to protect me and Leila from things we have already experienced? I don’t know very much about them. I don’t ask them, because it must be painful, and if George did tell me I wasn’t listening. Perhaps they want to talk about it and I don’t let them. I will but give me time.

  People are always coming here asking for George but not nearly so much. Like a stream’s steady current suddenly reducing its flow. And that makes me wonder. For everything has always seemed so haphazard, the people coming, and how they came, it always being so difficult, but now he is not here, only a few come. I am being careful. Benjamin said I must be on the lookout for informers and spies. How do I know when a person is a spy? I have been left to manage much more than I can. I must be making bad mistakes I suppose.

  Yesterday Raymond Watts came. Of course I am careful of him. But why is he still here? George was always telling people to go here and go there, but he didn’t tell anyone to stay here. Late in the evening some boys from Holland came in. They got here in the usual crazy way, hit and miss. Suzannah was here. She made a sign at me and beckoned me outside. Of course they saw this. I suppose she imagined that they didn’t. She ‘whispered’ to me that I should be careful of them. They heard, because they left at once. I asked Suzannah how she knew. She said, When one has had certain experiences, one senses these things. So I asked her about Raymond Watts, and she said, Oh he is all right now.

  Raymond Watts came again. I have seen that he is in love with me. Well, if he wants to waste his time. He was talking about things, and I heard he was a schoolteacher in England. I asked him how long he would be here, and he said, Six months, unless fate was kind, meaning me I suppose, and so I asked him to give Leila and Kassim lessons.

  Last night Suzannah was here because she had taken the children to her Camp with her, and made them help her with her work, and then she taught them math, and then she had supper. Then I made myself ask her to stay the night. I put her in Father’s and Mother’s room. She was nearly collapsing with emotion. Well, so was I. She has a little box of a room on the edge of the town where the sand is in drifts right up to the door and mangy dogs roam about. The room is too hot for her to be in at all in the afternoons. It is quite like the little mud room I loved so much, but the house doesn’t have a court with a pool, and she doesn’t have a roof to sleep out on. This morning I said to her it would be sensible if she moved in here. I didn’t do it nicely, I am afraid, but I did it, so I suppose that is something. I know she is going to start throwing her weight around, but she won’t even see anything wrong in it, and there is nothing I can do, and I know it isn’t important.

  When I put Kassim in George’s room, I told him I would clear out the cupboards for him and today I did. I brought George’s things into my room. He never has had much in the way of clothes, so what there was left here went in with mine. Of course I could not help crying. I miss him so much I ache all day and all night. I miss Benjamin too, strange as it might seem. I don’t miss Olga and Simon much. That is because they had gone so far away before they died. What I do miss is what I can remember of them when I was little. But that is stupid. And when I think of how tired they were, that makes me want to cry. But they wouldn’t value that. Well, I don’t value it either. I have given up worrying about me being childish. I have put George’s papers in cartons. I found letters in his papers, I don’t know if I should have read them or not, but I did. One was from his great love in India. All I can say is, she doesn’t understand much about George. Also a letter from George to her, which he didn’t send. She hasn’t read it, but I have. So it seems to me, judging by results, that this letter was more for me than for her. I take it for granted that I am being dishonest.

  Letter from SHARMA PATEL to george sherban

  Dear Comrade,

  I only heard last night that the bearer is going your way, so this last letter (I have been writing to you every spare minute I get, which isn’t saying much!), it has to be short, this letter.

  When are you coming? You promised. Luis says you are to come on another all-round trip, India just one of your ports of call. I am waiting – you know how impatiently.

  But I have something concrete to put forward. At the next Pan-Europe Conference of the Youth Armies, it is on the cards India will be elected into Convenor’s position. This is what everyone is expecting. That will make your Sharma boss of Europe for that year. (Of course I am only joking, as you know!
) But I am looking forward to it, apart from the travelling to each of the countries. I talked to Luis about my idea. I asked him to think it over carefully. I told him that if you were prepared to put yourself forward for it, you would very likely represent North Africa. Are you prepared to put yourself forward? You didn’t seem wholehearted when we discussed this. You are wrong! It isn’t correct to vacillate and hang back when you know you are right for a position! Selfish ambition is one thing. I am not advocating that. I don’t think even my worst enemies could accuse me of that. But it is not modesty to refuse to undertake responsibilities you are right for! And you are the right man for the job. And you deserve it. Your style of work and your achievements are well known. And there is your Indian background, which is not unknown! I hear on all sides how highly you are thought of. So, I hope that I will hear from you that you have put yourself forward for the path that now lies open to you. Which brings me to my plan. What I asked Luis was this. It would be a step forward on the right path to link Europe and Africa. At the present these links are intermittent and tenuous. We should correct this. I propose that you, as representative of North Africa (you will, you must agree!), should be elected with me Joint Heads of the Armies for the year. And of course this year might very well become two or even more, it tends to happen! I can see your dear smile! I can hear you pointing out that this plan of mine depends on three unknowns. But I have a hunch. I have a feel for how things are likely to work out. I have been right often enough, admit it! So I am working this end for the success of this plan. We can travel together through Europe and North Africa. I don’t have to say what that would mean to me. And to you, I know. Our lives together, our love, will fuse into the great upward march of mankind, which is led by the uncorrupted youth of the world.

  Oh I can’t wait to see you again! But I have been so busy, all day and half the night as usual, I haven’t had time to be sad. I know this is what you would want to hear from me when we meet.