Going Home. Doris Lessing
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Nothing at all; just the bush growing up.
One of the reasons I wanted to go home was to drive through the bush to the kopje and see where the house had been. But I could not bring myself to do it.
Supposing, having driven seven miles through the bush to the place where the road opens into the big mealie land, supposing then that I had lifted my eyes expecting to see the kopje sloping up, a slope of empty, green bush – supposing then that the house was still there after all?
For a long time I used to dream of the collapse and decay of that house, and of the fire sweeping over it; and then I set myself to dream the other way. It was urgently necessary to recover every detail of that house. For only my own room was clear in my mind. I had to remember everything, every strand of thatch and curve of wall or heave in the floor, and every tree and bush and patch of grass around it, and how the fields and slopes of country looked at different times of the day, in different strengths and tones of light. When I was working to regain that house from collapse, I used to set myself to sleep, saying, ‘Now you will dream of that room, or that tree, or that turn in the road.’ And most often I did. Over months, I recovered the memory of it all. And so what was lost and buried in my mind, I recovered from my mind; so I suppose there is no need to go back and see what exists clearly, in every detail, for so long as I live.
Similarly, at that time when I dreamed only images of destruction, there was a terrible dream about Cape Town, an exact repetition of what I once saw, awake.
It was about fifteen years ago I went to Cape Town for holiday. Or, as we put it who come down off the high hinterland, where it is all drought and small, stunted trees and sand, and the rain gets sucked into the dry air as soon as it falls – I went to the sea. At the Cape there are pine trees and hillsides full of grapes, and the sea all around, a blue, blue sea, and miles of white, glittering beaches, and mountains.
One night I stood on that hill which is a flank of Table Mountain, looking down at the city. The sky was clear and full of stars, and the sea was a dark-bluish luminosity, and on it were dark shapes clustered with lights, which were the big ships from Europe and the world. The city was a glow of light. Behind me Table Mountain, black and straight against the stars.
On the left stretched some lower hills. There appeared a small white vapour glistening in the moonlight in a gap between the peaks. Over the edge of the gap came a wisp of white cloud, a small tendril, curling down. Then the sky on that side was a whirl of moonlit mist, and instead of one curling finger, cloud came pouring down and through the gap like a flood of celestial milk. It sank as it came, covering first the flank of the mountain, then blotting out the lights of the houses on that side. The lights went out swiftly, and the mist came pouring steadily in, and soon half of the city had gone, and the sky on that side was a high bank of white and shining cloud. Then all the city was gone and the ships and the sea, and below a great white floor of moonlit cloud heaved and rose, and over on the right side the stars were dimming. Then there was cloud overhead, and cloud at my feet, rising. The fir trees just below sank in mist till only their black tops showed. As the cold dampness came up, the trees went.
It took only ten minutes, from the time that the city lay open and glittering to the time when it had gone, gone completely.
And so, when this dream began to recur, together with the dream of the heap of red, sinking earth and dead grass with the trees growing through it, I first restored the house, and then forced the mist back, rolled it back off the city and the sea and the lighted ships and back through the gap in the mountains. It took a long time, but at last the city was free and illuminated again.
On the morning after my arrival the sun was warm all about the house, the leaves of the creeper on the verandah laid a black sun-pattern on the wall, the pigeons cooed under the roof, the roses blazed on the lawn. In the next garden, the garden boy was cutting wisps of grass even with a pair of rusted old scissors, and a plump black girl was strolling up and down, looking good-naturedly bored, holding a white child by either hand. Daddy was leaving for the office in one car; Mummy was off downtown in the other.
I would now get out of bed, knowing that all the housework was done and the breakfast ready. Imagine that I lived here for so many years and took this comfort for granted! Even worse, that for a period of months before I left, due to a moral compulsion I now think misguided, I insisted on doing all my housework myself.
‘If I’ve got to live in this paradise for the petty bourgeoisie, then at least I shall take what advantages I can – if I’ve got to be bored, then I shall at least be comfortable.’ Thus a friend of mine, an old revolutionary from Central Europe, sucked into Rhodesia by some current of war. Until that moment he had been living on principle in one room, studying and absorbing statistical information about Africa against the day when he could go home to Europe and civilization and the class war. He lived in complete isolation from the white citizenry, who filled him with contempt. He then got himself a temporary job, a pleasant flat and a servant, and continued to study. Two years later he came to see me one evening. ‘Please sit there and don’t say anything. I want to talk and listen to what I am saying. I am in a moral crisis.’ So I sat and made a sounding board. He was saying that no one but a fool could help making money here if he were white; he intended to spend five years making money and beating these white savages at their own game. Then he would take the money and clear out. This brief résumé of what he said can give no idea of the prolonged and dialectical subtlety of his argument. Having proved his case to his satisfaction he became silent, frowning at me. Then, in a quite different voice, with a small, unhappy smile, he said: ‘This is a damned corrupting country. We should get out quick. We should all get out. No one with a white skin can survive it. People like us are too few to change anything. Now get out,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out by the first train.’
Three years later I met him in Bulawayo; he had made a lot of money and was about to get married. He was in a buoyant, savagely sardonic mood which I was easily able to recognize. ‘I want you to meet my fiancée,’ he said. She was a pretty, indolent girl, the daughter of a manufacturer, and on her finger was the apotheosis of all diamond rings, which my friend J. insisted on showing to me, telling me exactly how much it cost, and how much cheaper he had got it than was probable, while she sat fondly smiling at him. He spoke in a voice that was a deliberate parody of a Jewish big-time huckster.
I hoped that this time I would run into him somewhere; but it seems he is now in Johannesburg, with four children and a whole network of businesses.
At breakfast that first morning I felt myself at home because four of us were having that conversation which I have been taking part in now for fifteen years: would he, would she, they or you, be given papers, passports, permits? This time it was about whether I would get into the Union of South Africa.
I had worked out a plan to get in, not illegally, but making use of certain well-known foibles of the Afrikaner immigration officials. But sitting there at breakfast in that comfortable house, it all sounded too melodramatic; and the conversation became, as it often does, a rather enjoyable exercise in the balance of improbabilities.
And besides, it was pleasant to be back in a country where everyone knows everyone else, and therefore gossip is not merely personal, but to do with the processes of government; a country where, unlike Britain, which is ruled by the Establishment of which one is not a member, one is close to the centres of administration simply because one is white. Here, journalists get their information straight from the CID, with whom they have sundowners, and everybody has a friend who is a Member of Parliament or a Cabinet Minister. In this part of the world there are no secrets.
The information at my disposal was, then, that since Sir Percy Sillitoe of the British Intelligence had paid a helpful visit to the political CID of both Central Africa and the Union of South Africa, these departments are now closely linked and coordinated, not only with each other, but with their counterparts in Britain and America.
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