Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  But have you noticed that everyone is different now? We are all much more lively and alert and don’t need to sleep all the time and we are all of a piece and not all at sixes and sevens. Do you know what I mean?

  I have lost my faithful jaguar. I was walking up and up, along a quite high narrow path, among grasslands, and there was a shepherd, quite of the old sort, with a dog and a donkey. I was worried about the jaguar. The dog I could order about but not the jaguar. The shepherd, who was a young man with a wife and two small children in a nice little house on the hillside was worried too. But my big dog made friends with his dog. And then the jaguar went and lay down a little apart from the dogs. The woman came out of her house with some milk in a basin and he drank it. I slept the night there and then went on alone because my jaguar decided to stay with the shepherd and the woman, and as I went off I saw him helping the shepherd round up some sheep, with the two dogs.

  So I was quite alone for twenty miles or more. And then I saw someone ahead of me, and thought That looks like George. And it was George.

  He told me you have had your baby, Suzannah, I am glad, and it is a boy. George said he is going to be called Benjamin so I suppose our Benjamin is dead. Benjamin and Rachel.

  For a long time in the guesthouses and walking along by myself I was thinking of questions I wanted to ask George, and I asked him first of all about the towns, and how they came to be like that, and he said they are functional.

  He said that you over there are building a town and it is like the old Star of David. I said, how did you know what it had to be and where. His reply to that was, wait a little and you will see.

  He took me first of all to one of the old towns, not a big one, it was on a branch of the Rio Negro. I hated being in it, I felt sick and uneasy from the moment I got into it. And it is a dying town. People are leaving it. Everywhere buildings are collapsing and not being rebuilt. All the centre was quite empty.

  I said, Why?

  He said, the new cities are functional.

  I could see he wasn’t going to explain, I had to work it out.

  We stayed the night in a broken-down hotel. It was awful. People are still suspicious and frightened in these places. I felt ill and I could see George didn’t feel good. All the next day we walked around the town quite aimlessly. People noticed George, and they wanted to talk to him. He talked to them. Or they would simply follow him. They all looked so desperate and needful.

  In the evening he just walked away from the town and about three hundred people followed us, though he had not said one word about their coming too. It was cold that night, and it was wet and misty, and we were all pretty miserable, but we walked on steadily with George and still not a word had been said about what was happening.

  When the sun rose it was cold, cold, cold and we were all hungry.

  George was standing on a hillside, a steep rocky one, and there was a plateau above us. The birds were wheeling about overhead as the sun came up and they shone in the sunlight. I have never been so cold.

  George remarked, in a quite ordinary sort of voice, that it would be a good idea if we made a town there.

  People said, Where? Where should we start?

  He didn’t reply. Meanwhile, we were all dying of hunger. Then there was a flock of sheep and another shepherd, and we bought some sheep and made a fire and cooked some meat, and got ourselves fed.

  Then we were roaming about over the hillside and the plateau. There were about twenty of us doing this. Suddenly we all knew quite clearly where the city should be. We knew it all at once. Then we found a spring, in the middle of the place. That was how this city was begun. It is going to be a star city, five points.

  We found the right soil for bricks nearby and for adobe. There is everything we can need. We have already started the gardens and the fields.

  Some of us go into the decaying town every day to get bread and stuff, to keep us going.

  The first houses are already up, and the central circular place is paved, and the basin of the fountain is made. As we build, wonderful patterns appear as if our hands were being taught in a way we know nothing about.

  It is high up here, very high, with marvellous tall sky over us, a pale clear crystalline blue, and the great birds circling in it.

  George left after a few days. I walked with him a little way. I said to him, What is happening, why are things so different? So he told me.

  George says he is going into Europe with a team. He says that you knew he would be going, but not that he would be going now, and that I should tell you that when his task in Europe is finished, his work will be finished. I did not understand until he had left that it meant he would die then and we would not see him again. So here we all are.

  I am writing this, sitting on a low white wall that has the patterns on it. People are all around me, working at this and that. We are in tents in the meantime, everything makeshift and even difficult but it doesn’t seem so, and everything is happening in this new way, there is no need to argue and argue and discuss and disagree and confer and accuse and fight and then kill. All that is over, it is finished, it is dead.

  How did we live then? How did we bear it? We were all stumbling about in a thick dark, a thick ugly hot darkness, full of enemies and dangers, we were blind in a heavy hot weight of suspicion and doubt and fear.

  Poor people of the past, poor poor people, so many of them, for long thousands of years, not knowing anything, fumbling and stumbling and longing for something different but not knowing what had happened to them or what they longed for.

  I can’t stop thinking of them, our ancestors, the poor animal-men, always murdering and destroying because they couldn’t help it.

  And this will go on for us, as if we were being slowly lifted and filled and washed by a soft singing wind that clears our sad muddled minds and holds us safe and heals us and feeds us with lessons we never imagined.

  And here we all are together, here we are …

  Students are directed to:

  The Shorter History of Canopus

  Relations Between Canopus and Sirius

  1. War. 2. Peace.

  The History of the Sirian Empire

  The History of Puttiora

  Shammat the Shameful

  The Memoirs of Taufiq

  Nasar, Ussell, Taufiq, Johor: Selected Material

  The Sirian Experiments on Shikasta

  The Penultimate Days

  Before the Catastrophe on Shikasta

  The Little People: Trade, Art, Metallurgy

  Envoys of the Last Days: A Concise History

  Tales of the Three Planets

  The Canopean Bond (On Shikasta, ‘SOWF’); properties of, densities of, variations in effects on different species, complete absence of. (Shammat) (Physics Section)

  About the Author

  DORIS LESSING, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of recent decades. A Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature, she has been awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award and the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature, as well as a host of other international awards. She lives in north London.

  Shikasta is the first in a series of novels with the overall title ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives‘; the second is The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980); the third The Sirian Experiments (1981); the fourth The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982); and the fifth The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983).

  By the same author

  NOVELS

  The Grass is Singing

  The Golden Notebook

  Briefing for a Descent into Hell

  The Summer Before the Dark

  Memoirs of a Survivor

  Diary of a Good Neighbour

  If the Old Could …

  The Good Terrorist

  The
Fifth Child

  Playing the Game (illustrated by Charlie Adlard)

  Love, Again

  Mara and Dann

  The Fifth Child

  Ben, in the World

  The Sweetest Dream

  The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

  The Cleft

  ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’ series

  Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

  The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five

  The Sirian Experiments

  The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

  Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

  ‘Children of Violence’ novel-sequence

  Martha Quest

  A Proper Marriage

  A Ripple from the Storm

  Landlocked

  The Four-Gated City

  OPERAS

  The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (Music by Philip Glass)

  The Making of the representative for Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)

  SHORT STORIES

  Five

  The Habit of Loving

  A Man and Two Women

  The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories

  Winter in July

  The Black Madonna

  This Was the Old Chief s Country (Collected African Stories, Vol. 1)

  The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Stories, Vol. 2)

  To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories, Vol. 1)

  The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories, Vol. 2)

  London Observed

  The Old Age of El Magnifico

  Particularly Cats

  Rufus the Survivor

  On Cats

  The Grandmothers

  POETRY

  Fourteen Poems

  DRAMA

  Each His Own Wilderness

  Play with a Tiger

  The Singing Door

  NON - FICTION

  In Pursuit of the English

  Going Home

  A Small Personal Voice

  Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

  The Wind Blows Away Our Words

  African Laughter

  Time Bites

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Under My Skin: Volume 1

  Walking in the Shade: Volume

  Read on

  Have You Read?

  A selection of other books by Doris Lessing

  The Grass is Singing

  The Golden Notebook

  The Good Terrorist

  Love, Again

  The Fifth Child

  The Grass is Singing:

  Chapter 1

  MURDER MYSTERY

  By Special Correspondent

  Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered.

  It is thought he was in search of valuables.

  The newspaper did not say much. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. When natives steal, murder or rape, that is the feeling white people have.

  And then they turned the page to something else.

  But the people in ‘the district’ who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters, or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. For they did not discuss the murder; that was the most extraordinary thing about it. It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing. The murder was simply not discussed. ‘A bad business,’ someone would remark; and the faces of the people round about would put on that reserved and guarded look. ‘A very bad business,’ came the reply – and that was the end of it. There was, it seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. Yet it was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking at once, making the most of an hour or so’s companionship before returning to their farms where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their black servants for weeks on end. Normally that murder would have been discussed for months; people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about.

  To an outsider it would seem perhaps as if the energetic Charlie Slatter had travelled from farm to farm over the district telling people to keep quiet; but that was something that would have never have occurred to him. The steps he took (and he made not one mistake) were taken apparently instinctively and without conscious planning. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was this silent, unconscious agreement. Everyone behaved like a flock of birds who communicate – or so it seems – by means of a kind of telepathy.

  Long before the murder marked them out, people spoke of the Turners in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws and the self-exiled. The Turners were disliked, though few of their neighbours had ever met them, or even seen them in the distance. Yet what was there to dislike? They simply ‘kept themselves to themselves’; that was all. They were never seen at district dances, or fêtes, or gymkhanas. They must have had something to be ashamed of; that was the feeling. It was not right to seclude themselves like that; it was a slap in the face of everyone else; what had they got to be so stuck-up about? What, indeed! Living the way they did! That little box of a house – it was forgivable as a temporary dwelling, but not to live in permanently. Why, some natives (though not many, thank heavens) had houses as good; and it would give them a bad impression to see white people living in such a way.

  And then it was that someone used the phrase ‘poor whites’. It caused disquiet. There was no great money-cleavage in those days (that was before the era of the tobacco barons), but there was certainly a race division. The small community of Afrikaners had their own lives, and the Britishers ignored them. ‘Poor whites’ were Afrikaners, never British. But the person who said the Turners were poor whites stuck to it defiantly. What was the difference? What was a poor white? It was the way one lived, a question of standards. All the Turners needed were a drove of children to make them poor whites.

  Though the arguments were unanswerable, people would still not think of them as poor whites. To do that would be letting the side down. The Turners were British, after all.

  Thus the district handled the Turners, in accordance with that esprit de corps which is the first rule of South African society, but which the Turners themselves ignored. They apparently did not recognize the need for esprit de corps; that, really, was why they were hated.

  The more one thinks about it, the more extraordinary the case becomes. Not the murder itself; but the way people felt about it, the way they pitied Dick Turner with a fine fierce indignation against Mary as if she were something unpleasant and unclean, and it served her right to get murdered. But they did not ask questions.

  For instance, they must have wondered who that ‘Special Correspondent’ was. Someone in the district sent in the news, for the paragraph was not in newspaper language. But who? Marston, the assistant, left the district immediately after the murder. Denham, the policeman, might have written to the paper in a personal capacity, but it was not likely. There remained Charlie Slatter, who knew more about the Turners than anyone else, and was there on the day of the murder. One could say that he practically controlled the handling of the case, even taking precedence over the Sergeant himself. And people felt that to be quite right and proper. Whom sho
uld it concern, if not the white farmers, that a silly woman got herself murdered by a native for reasons people might think about, but never, never mentioned? It was their livelihood, their wives and families, their way of living, at stake.

  But to the outsider it is strange that Slatter should have been allowed to take charge of the affair, to arrange that everything should pass over without more than a ripple of comment.

  For there could have been no planning: there simply wasn’t time. Why, for instance, when Dick Turner’s farm boys came to him with the news, did he sit down to write a note to the Sergeant at the police camp? He did not use the telephone.

  Everyone who has lived in the country knows what a branch telephone is like. You lift the receiver after you have turned the handle the required number of times, and then, click, click, click, you can hear the receivers coming off all over the district, and soft noises like breathing, a whisper, a subdued cough.

  Slatter lived five miles from the Turners. The farm boys came to him first, when they discovered the body. And though it was an urgent matter, he ignored the telephone, but sent a personal letter by a native bearer on a bicycle to Denham at the police camp, twelve miles away. The Sergeant sent out half a dozen native policemen at once, to the Turners’ farm, to see what they could find. He drove first to see Slatter, because the way that letter was worded roused his curiosity. That was why he arrived late on the scene of the murder. The native policemen did not have to search far for the murderer. After walking through the house, looking briefly at the body, and dispersing down the front of the little hill the house stood on, they saw Moses himself rise out of a tangled ant-heap in front of them. He walked up to them and said (or words to this effect): ‘Here I am.’ They snapped the handcuffs on him, and went back to the house to wait for the police cars to come. There they saw Dick Turner come out of the bush by the house with two whining dogs at his heels. He was off his head, talking crazily to himself, wandering in and out of the bush with his hands full of leaves and earth. They let him be, while keeping an eye on him, for he was a white man, though mad, and black men, even when policemen, do not lay hands on white flesh.