African Laughter

by Doris Lessing

  ‘Let’s go for a walk now,’ I say.

  And so we go walking, through bush, but now the bush is something that fills spaces between farms and homesteads. It is a suburban bush.

  ‘Do you ever think how bloody lucky we were?’ he asks. ‘We lived in Eden and didn’t know it.’

  ‘It’s gone for ever.’

  ‘Gone,’ and I hear my own voice, like a Messenger come to announce defeat in battle.

  ‘Gone. But sometimes I see my python in those rocks over there. It’s the first I’ve seen in years. There are so many dogs around here and they give the snakes a bad time. They have all gone. But my python is there. And there are a couple of duiker, too. Sometimes they come around at sundown. And you can see them in the early morning grazing. One night I saw them grazing in the moonlight. Two duikers! Do you remember? We might see a dozen duiker in a mile’s walk?’

  We stand looking at the pile of rocks where the python lives, but the creature decides to remain out of sight.

  Then we walk disconsolately home, while the dogs run around us, coming to put their noses into our hands.

  ‘Time for a drink,’ he says, back on the verandah. But it is too cold there, and we go in to a big fire. He pours himself an exact measure of brandy, with an exact allowance of water. His mouth is compressed as he watches his hands at work. His movements are slow, deliberate. Like my father’s. Everything in slow motion.

  There is a large meal, soup, meat and vegetables, pudding, cheese. Now, as we talk, Do you remember, Do you remember, we both avoid a subject that we are afraid will put an end to this good feeling.

  ‘Do you remember that ridiculous time when you were thinking of working for a bank?’

  ‘I work in a bank!’

  ‘Just after the War. And you even had a spell of thinking you would sell insurance.’

  ‘I sell…never.’

  ‘Don’t you remember you came to see me and said you’d rather die than live your life inside four walls?’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘Funny thing, that I don’t remember. I think there’s a lot I’ve forgotten. Someone came to see me the other day and got quite angry with me when I didn’t remember…it was Jeremy. Do you remember him? He went on a holiday to Madagascar. He came to see me and said he had left the hotel and gone wandering into the bush and then found he was crying. It was because of the bird songs, the butterflies. The insects. He said to me, “It was like old Southern Rhodesia, when we were children. Full of wild life.” He hadn’t realized how badly everything has changed. And it is getting worse all the time. Suddenly you think, I haven’t seen such and such a bird for some time and then you realize, it’s gone. Extinct, probably. Butterflies,’ says my brother miserably. ‘Bees. Insects. Chameleons. Lizards. We do them all in with our spraying. We destroy everything, you see.’

  ‘Do you remember how we used to shoot when we were children? With the old .22? They gave you the .22 and you went out and shot everything you saw.’

  ‘I would never have done a thing like that.’

  ‘When they gave you your first air-gun you went out to the banks of the river–that was on Chappell’s farm, and you came back with a pillow case full of birds.’

  ‘I couldn’t ever have done that…are you sure?’

  ‘If we saw a porcupine, we killed it. If we saw a wild cat, we shot it. Whatever we saw.’ He is most dreadfully distressed. ‘That is how all us children learned to shoot. We shot everything.’

  ‘But we used to go through the bush pulling out the bird traps the natives put down, and breaking up the game traps.’

  ‘That was later. When we became reformed criminals. That was when we shot for the pot, just shooting what we needed.’

  ‘Why didn’t they stop us–Mother and Father?’

  ‘Because it was that time–it was the end of the Raj. The upper classes used to shoot everything they saw and the middle classes copied them.’

  ‘Well, the Affs killed animals and birds.’

  ‘They killed to eat.’

  ‘Look at all the black kids now, out with their catapults, killing everything.’

  ‘Just as we did.’

  His look at me says if he is not challenging me about equating black and white children, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t noticed.

  ‘What I remember best is going through the bush taking photographs.’

  ‘But how old were you then?’

  ‘Oh…well yes…I don’t remember things the way you do; not the same things. Are you absolutely sure?’

  ‘I don’t understand why you don’t remember. I remember everything about then. I know I’ve forgotten a lot of things about my life, because people say to me, Do you remember and I don’t. They get angry.’

  ‘Yes, they do, don’t they.’

  ‘But not about then.’

  We are silent, for quite a bit. Harry is drinking steadily and carefully. Brandy. I could never enjoy drinking like that. I have a friend who researches patterns of drinking for a university. Would she be interested to hear about a man who drinks as if taking doses of medicine? My father, before he got diabetes, used to drink a whisky, perhaps two, as if a mentor invisible to us stood by him saying, Thus far and no further.

  ‘If we had really been like brother and sister, grown up together all the way, we would have a sort of–shared landscape. You know, one says, Do you remember and the other does remember, and if not soon thinks he does.’

  ‘I suppose we haven’t been brother and sister, not really.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well,’ he says, carefully and humorously, ‘I haven’t been all that keen on seeing you the last few years.’

  ‘And the same to you,’ I say. Humorously.

  ‘But you aren’t so bad, I suppose. Funny thing, if you don’t see somebody for a long time, you start imagining all kinds of things about them and it’s quite a shock when…but I suppose you do still have those funny ideas about–well, about everything.’

  ‘You could say that I have my funny ideas. You could say they’ve turned out not to be so funny in the end.’

  At this he goes red, he is really angry. This is the moment when we could explode into argument. I say hastily, ‘Today when I came past Marandellas, I remembered how we used to camp out there, near the school.’

  He smiles, and nods, meaning, Yes, you’re right, let’s not…And says, ‘Who camped out? When?’

  Now I am really astonished, and upset. ‘You don’t remember how we used to come down, and camp? Sometimes for a week or even ten days? When you had Sports Days and things.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘How can you not remember that? The best times of my childhood…we couldn’t afford the hotel for a night, let alone a week…’

  ‘Wait a minute, yes, it’s coming back. Yes, you’re right.’

  ‘And the school always let you come and camp with us for a night or two.’

  He rubs his hands over the back of his head, with a quizzical but frustrated look. I remembered the movement: father, brother.

  ‘We used to cut down branches or young trees and make an enclosure to steep in.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘To keep out the leopards.’

  He puts his head back and laughs most heartily. It is a young fresh laugh, from quite another layer of his life. Then, soberly, ‘Shouldn’t have done that. Couldn’t have done the bush much good.’

  ‘We used to leave a trampled-down place inside the circle of dead branches, and the burned leaves hanging down where the fire was.’

  ‘But how could we? What did we want to do a thing like that for?’

  ‘That’s how we all were in those days.’

  ‘Well, we are all paying for it now.’ Many conversations with my brother end like this: I, we, she, he, they, you, are paying for it. Crime and punishment. Invisible walls have always surrounded my brother, signposted, Forbidden…No…Keep out. Verboten. Me, too, of course, bu
t different walls, different forbidden places.

  ‘Do you remember how we hated to go to sleep because it was so marvellous sleeping out?’

  ‘No. But it is marvellous sleeping out. In the Bush War, that was the best thing. Of course I was too old to fight properly, but when we were out on patrol, we often stayed the night in the bush.’

  ‘Do you remember the old prospectors that used to come to the farm? They lived out in the bush all the time.’

  ‘Of course I remember. You don’t forget a thing like that. Perhaps that’s what I should have done. I often wonder if I’ve lived my life right. I should have been in the bush.’

  ‘But you have been in the bush.’

  ‘No, I mean really. They had a pan for gold, a rifle and a blanket. They lived off the bush.’

  ‘And most of them died of malaria or blackwater fever.’

  ‘That’s all right. Who cares about dying? I don’t.’

  ‘Do you remember many of them weren’t ordinary prospectors? Some were men who had lost their jobs in the Slump, and they put their wives into some job in the town where they could have the children, usually matrons or housekeepers or something, and they went off to live in the bush till things got better.’

  ‘No. But it makes sense. Good for them.’

  ‘I’m sure Daddy would have been happy living off the bush. If he hadn’t been so ill all the time. Do you remember how he used to get fed up with socializing at Sports Days and he lay down under the blue gums and looked up at the sky, and Mother was quite frantic, and said he was letting the side down. And you were embarrassed too.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I couldn’t have been. I always do that in the bush. I lie on my back looking at the sky. After a few minutes the birds and the animals–well, what birds and animals are still left–they forget all about you. You could be a stone or a bush. Once a yellow cobra went past about five feet away. He didn’t care about me.’

  ‘Do you remember…?’

  ‘No. And you don’t remember how…?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you really don’t remember when…’

  ‘No I don’t, I’m afraid.’

  At nine o’clock Harry said he was off to bed. He had drunk the exact amount to make him sleep. He didn’t sleep easily these days, he said. He wasn’t going to lie awake thinking all those thoughts…the doctor had given him a prescription, but he wasn’t going to take all that chemical rubbish. Brandy was much better for you.

  I said I never slept before twelve or one. He said, ‘You will here. You can watch the television if you like…but the Affs, they can’t run anything, let alone television.’ He glared at me, standing in the doorway, a glass in his hand, his thumb just above the level of the brandy, like a reminder to himself. He couldn’t bear to put off what had been at the back of his mind while we talked, just as it had at mine, and now he delivered a monologue, in a hot, angry, frustrated bitter voice, and it was exactly the same as the one I had listened to only last night, on the plane, from the race-horse breeder.

  ‘Your precious Africans, what is the first thing they do? They take over our Government House, and install President Banana, Banana, what a name, and he hasn’t been in it a week before he has chickens running all over the gardens, our gardens, and all his friends and relations are camped in the place, like a kraal. The next thing is, the place is surrounded by a high fence. Young Jack, from the next farm, but he’s Taken the Gap now, went and threw in some chicken feed through the wire, and shouted Cluck, cluck, cluck, bloody peasants, peasants in Government House. And Mugabe, Comrade Mugabe, he goes around in a motorcade with armed guards, and if someone doesn’t get out of the way quick enough, they get shot. Our Prime Ministers didn’t need to go around in a motorcade with armed escorts, they didn’t have anything to be afraid of. And inefficient…they can’t get anything right…let me tell you…and let me tell you another thing…yes, and that’s not all.’ It goes on and on, and ends: ‘They’re inferior to us, and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘It might strike some people as rather touching and even wonderful that the first black President when he moves into Government House, that is, into the symbol of the old regime, makes it clear he is not going to set himself above the people. Peasant people. He lets it be known he is keeping chickens and anyone can drop in, African style…’

  ‘No one is going to drop in now. He’s surrounded by security fences and guards armed with kalashnikovs.’

  ‘You don’t think there might be some connection between putting up security fences and white louts turning up to jeer and shout threats? You don’t think Mugabe goes around in a motorcade because you people would cut his throat as soon as look at him?’

  ‘Louts?’

  ‘Louts.’

  He glares at me.

  I glare back.

  He went to bed. I went out into the cold dark of the garden and stood there for a long time, hoping that beyond the security fence I would see the dim shape of a duiker moving about in the starlight. But the dogs stood quietly by me, looking straight out, so there was nothing there.

  We were up by five-thirty, awakened with that long forgotten amenity, the early morning cup of tea. At seven we sat down to an old-fashioned English breakfast, laid before us by Joseph, a smiling friendly young man who had already asked how he could come to London and work in my house as my servant. I said we didn’t have servants: that is, only a few rich people had them. He stared at me, unhappy, because he wanted to live in London where the streets are paved with gold. Then, ‘Who does your work for you? Who cleans your house? Who cooks your food?’ When I said most people cleaned their own houses and cooked their food, he shook his head, disapproving.

  During breakfast Harry was angry, and I listened to The Monologue again. I knew by now I was going to hear it over and over again, during this trip. At any given time, all the people of the same kind will be saying the same things, often using the same phrases. It is this mechanism that journalists rely on: interview two or three people and you know what everyone is saying. (Similarly, if you want to know what the literary world is thinking, in London, you need only to spend half an hour with a representative of it to know what writers are in, what writers are out, and exactly the words used for these pronouncements of the communal mind.)

  Harry was angry because of problems with his business, which made pictures from feathers and articles like buttons and key-rings from ox horn. It had been successful before Independence, but now, with so many of the customers gone–they had Taken the Gap–it was struggling. Black girls came from a nearby farm village to work. It seemed there was a troublemaker among the girls, she set all the others off, yet the girls had been given everything they asked for. They brought their babies and small children with them to work, they came and went as they felt inclined…no, it was all impossible, he was glad he was Taking the Gap.

  Where did the phrase originate? White people who left Southern Rhodesia, and then Zimbabwe, for The Republic,* ‘Took the Gap’.

  My brother was prepared to leave this pleasant house, built by himself and a black builder whom he said was a good chap–working with him was a pleasure–leave this great garden, laid out by his dead wife, leave this district, where he had lived most of his life, for a lower standard of living in The Republic not only because he had a daughter in The Republic, but because it stuck in his craw to live under a black government.

  ‘And now I’ve got to put up with their bloody Labour Officer telling me what to do. I have to abide by whatever decision he sees fit to come up with. I have to do what he says.’

  After breakfast the Labour Officer arrived. He was on a bicycle. My brother invited him, with cold formality, to sit down. This of course could not have happened in the old days. We three sat on the verandah and Joseph brought out tea. He and the Labour Officer exchanged greetings in the Shona style.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Have you slept well?’

  �
��I have slept well if you have slept well.’

  ‘I have slept well.’

  ‘Then I have slept well.’

  The Labour Officer was a man of about thirty-five, a strong, healthy, sane, individual with a humorous look imposed on him by this job, which was mostly having to manage difficult, unreasonable, unfair and sometimes abusive whites.

  My brother grumbled on and on about the girls who understood nothing about the obligation to give a day’s work in return for a day’s pay, and about the troublemaker who had all the others dancing to her tune.

  The officer sat listening. When my brother had to go in to answer the telephone, I asked him about his work. He had been trained in agriculture under the whites, together with hundreds of others: there had been a policy to train black experts to work in the Native Purchase Areas and the Reserves–no, that is what they were called then, they had different names now–luckily for this government, because he was worked off his feet, all the cultural advisers and Extension workers were worked off their feet, there was not enough of them. It would take two to three years, he said, to train the experts Zimbabwe needed. ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘no one’s going to blame you if it takes longer?’ Suddenly a direct look, acknowledging me as a friend, and not an enemy. He grimaced, shook his head, and laughed. ‘They blame us in any case,’ he said, which was his real answer to my question, ‘Do you find this work difficult?’ To which he formally replied, ‘I try to do my best, madam.’

  He bicycled off to the village to talk to the girls. Meanwhile my brother grumbled that this Labour Officer ‘or whatever he calls himself’ of course would be on the side of the girls. After a couple of hours the man came back. The tea tray appeared again. He thought he had sorted everything out, but first of all he would like to see the pay books. Tight-lipped, Harry brought out the pay books. For about half an hour the man worked through them, then snapped them shut, and delivered his verdict. ‘The girls told me you hadn’t paid them, but I see you have, sir. My recommendation is you should dismiss Mary…’ (the troublemaker) ‘but you should dismiss Sarah too. She’s the real trouble. You have got it wrong, sir. Mary does what Sarah tells her. I’ve told them that when they get work somewhere else, I’ll be keeping my eye on them.’