African Laughter (17 page)

I said, as it seemed I was already doing several times a day, that I simply could not understand why people expected things to change so quickly. We–she and I–knew at our age that nothing changed quickly…at least I did not mention the Romans. If there was one thing I had been impressed by, coming here, was this: no one seemed to remember the War had ended only two years ago, that is, they talked about how awful it had been, but not about the damage it had done. Damage to people. Here she remained silent for a while, handling yards of white bandage, and going ‘Tsk, tsk,’ when I winced. She asked, ‘So you weren’t here in the War?’ ‘No, I am from England.’ Here she simply nodded, dismissing me from the possibility of understanding. We discussed family matters–husbands, children. She was shocked to hear I had been divorced, and shocked again when she heard that the mother and the two children now with the doctor were from South Africa, and the difficult patient was a coffee farmer. Yet, with these dubious associates, I talked like a supporter of Mugabe. She gave me curious looks and soon was calling me madam.

When I was taken into the X-ray room, I apologized to the young technician for spoiling his Saturday afternoon, but he said, ‘I am on call and I like to help people.’ I found this young man charming; I found the black doctor charming. The Coffee Farmer was being much too polite to be natural; his shoulder had been pronounced not too bad, like my foot, and various other bits of our anatomies.

Meanwhile, the local police had arrived. He was a young black man who, having written down my name, said he had read this and that short story of mine, and he wanted to be a writer himself, for his life had been interesting. Could I tell him how to do it?

There we sat, all bandaged up, and clutching our X-rays, waiting to be collected by the friend from Mutare who was speeding towards us, doubtless cursing us because of the waste of precious petrol. I explained to the young policeman, who had a sweet sensitive face and was quite unlike the conventional idea of a policeman, how to write a novel. He set aside the business of asking questions and filling in forms while he listened and wrote down particularly useful phrases. Every writer has to do this far too often, and it is hard to deliver the lecture as if for the first time. ‘You see, the trouble is that young writers seem to think that talent is enough; but there are plenty of people with talent. What you need is to do a lot of work. Probably because one can write stories and indeed whole novels with no more than an exercise book and a biro, people subconsciously believe that it is easy. But if you want to be a writer then you have to write–and tear up: write–and tear up. Every writer goes through that stage when what you write is almost good but not quite good enough. What takes you from this stage to the point of being good enough is the process of writing and tearing up, writing and tearing up. And, of course–reading. You cannot tell any aspiring writer how to write: only that this writing, and writing, and trying again, does it.’ And so on. This admonition was delivered while the little girls tried hard not to groan, as they lay stretched out on two wooden benches, and while their mother and their uncle, pale as their bandages, sat upright, behaving well, and while blood stained the bandages on my foot. My ribs were beginning to hurt horribly. The young policeman said he would look on me as a mother and he would take my advice.

It goes without saying that this scene outraged what the Coffee Farmer believed was correct for the occasion. He was saying loudly that what mattered was to get all the details of the accident down properly, so that the guilty bus-load of policemen would be brought to justice. He was in the right, a thousand times over. The three black nurses, who now had nothing to do, sat in a row on a bench, hands folded, listening and thinking their own thoughts. The black doctor roared off, and we could hear his car a good mile away.

NERVES

Then came the friend from Mutare. Something began that surprised us; we were all afraid, and reluctant to get into the car. Our nerves jumped and winced because every bend in the road, every bump, announced a new accident. When we saw the corpse of the car we had travelled in lying, as in a hundred other accident scenes, at the side of the road, it all got worse. We felt better when we confessed this weakness to each other. Not, however, our stiff-lipped hero who, even more because now he was sitting in the front seat with another hero from the War, was not going to admit weakness. Not for one second now, nor in the painful weeks ahead.

The long drive to Mutare in a fog of pain was the start of a psychological process that now seems as interesting as the accident itself. My mind ticked over comfortably as usual, making this or that comment, but ‘my nerves’ (what nerves? where situated?) jumped and suffered, but on a parallel track to my intelligence. Nothing I told them made any difference. It was not fear I was feeling, but the neurological results of shock. It was dark by now, and we could not see the road to Mutare, and that made it all worse. The well-known timidity of old women is because they know what can, and does, happen, but young people do not know, and therefore bounce about half-drunk in cars going at a hundred miles an hour on bad roads, and fearlessly do things their ‘nerves’, still unschooled by experience, will not allow them to do later.

My nerve-sickness continued for weeks. I know–and who does not?–how heart and mind can run on parallel tracks, heart craving what mind forbids, mind’s ordinances derided by the heart, but until this accident I had taken for granted that my physical self did more or less what I wanted. Now I was afraid of heights, to the point I could not stand on a hillside whose worst threat was that I might roll over cushions of grass into a gentle hollow: I came out in a sweat, I was paralysed, if not with fear, then with a generalized inhibition. In a car I could not drive faster than fifty miles an hour: a governor inside me I knew nothing about would not let me. If there is one thing I adore it is being taken up in a small aeroplane: given a ride in one through the mountains of the Vumba, I felt sick and silly. I could not cross a road without sweating, or descend a staircase without clutching the stair rail. My mind observed all this helplessly, and if it tried mockery, that made no difference. Then, one day, in London, I found myself dodging through traffic from one pavement to another, the way we all do, and knew I was cured. The mysterious ailment had lifted: it was not a wearing-off, but a sudden deliverance.

A WHITE LAGER

A large house in Mutare, spread about with rooms and verandahs in a large garden. A welcoming hostess. Children. Young people…a lot of people…We were at once absorbed into kindness and efficiency. A ‘proper’ doctor was summoned. Again we were examined. The X-rays at the country hospital had been misinterpreted, some were inexpert. More X-rays were ordered. The shoulder was very bad…there were cracked ribs…a damaged tendon…a hairline fracture. I might have remarked that it is not unknown for misdiagnoses to be made in the advanced hospitals of Britain. But: ‘Well, what do you expect?’ was in the air, was being said loudly, with the smugness of the righteous. In this house it was essential to prove the Africans wrong as often as possible. For all the years of the War, the house had been a lager, a central point. People from exposed farms came in to stay a night, or several, if ‘terrs’ were reported to be around, or during periods of bad fighting. Women whose husbands were doing a spell with the Security Forces came with their children. The fighters came, between spells of duty, for meals, a bath, a good sleep.

Strong in this house was the atmosphere I was brought up with: in the farmhouses of The District were men and women with unambiguous roles: there was women’s work, and there was men’s work. Coming from London where every house one goes into has a different pattern, a different balance between men and women, this colonial society was a shock. Salutary, I suppose, as a reminder: this is what I and my kind reacted against. Next morning, as we left, one of the men was barking orders at his young woman. He did this because other men were watching: he was proving he knew how to keep a woman in her place.

All the men had fought in the War. People kept whispering, ‘That man, over there, he was the best helicopter pilot in the War.’ Or, ‘He rescued such and such a family from beneath the noses of the ‘terrs’.’ Or, ‘She fought off a ‘terr’ who got inside the security fence, and he got scared and ran for it.’ The women had cooked, bandaged, nursed, and looked after others all through the War. Some had gone armed, day and night, for years. The War filled their minds still, not as a continuing vendetta or crusade, rather as a memory of when they were all stretched to the best and utmost, and when this house reached its fulfilment as a refuge, a fortress.

One young woman was a daughter-in-law, who had gone to The Republic for good, and was here on a visit to her family. Her husband had been Chief of Police. She said the moment they had decided to Take the Gap was when a black man her husband had arrested several times as a suspected sympathizer with the ‘terrs’, had put his arm around her at an official cocktail party and said, ‘And now we shall call each other Comrade and all work together for the good of Zimbabwe.’

‘I said to my husband: That’s it, now it’s time we left.’

This incident was related as if there could be no other reaction than deciding to leave at once. The same young woman described, without any self-consciousness, that traditional colonial scene: ‘When I left for The Republic I cried when I said goodbye to the cook and the houseboy and the garden boy and our nanny. They were part of the family. They said: You are our father and mother. They were crying too.’ Now it was evident she was wondering whether to come back to Zimbabwe. In The Republic they were worse off, had a small house, poor jobs, and did not have even one servant. Many people who had left, they said, were trying to come back.

In the room that night was a man who had worked for Intelligence during the War. He was asking me the carefully casual questions that are such a give-away. Not for the first time I was reflecting that it must be an enjoyable business, being a spy, for few of them seem able to let it go: power, I suppose: the agreeable illusion that one is able to control events.
*

The questions he was asking might have been appropriate if I had been fighting with the Comrades in the bush, not living at ease in liberal London. And that is the other thing: all these security departments seem to create for themselves a devil figure of their opponents, and then believe in it. Look at Angleton in the CIA…they become paranoid. If, however, one is on the same side as the spy department, then one has to worry because of their incompetence, years out of date with their information, if it was ever genuine information in the first place.

That night I shared a verandah with the Coffee Farmer. He would rather have died than complain when awake, but, asleep, he groaned’ and suffered. I lay in one position all night, since it hurt to move, and I groaned freely when I had to. In the early morning he started up out of sleep, and before even conscious shouted into the void, ‘Bring tea!’ And, lo, tea was brought at once, by the cook, for both of us.

All over the big house people were bathing, showering, shaving, dressing, putting clothes on children, chatting, drinking tea. Some of the men drove off to get in some golf before breakfast. The women helped the servants get breakfast. The doctor arrived. Only the broken shoulder was serious. By now my black eye was a wonder, and children appeared from houses up and down the street to admire it. Then there was breakfast, everything the English breakfast has at its best, and, too, fresh fruit and fruit salads and bottled fruit and jugs of cream. Thirty or so people took breakfast. Easy to imagine this scene during the War, the atmosphere of lager, the unlimited hospitality.

BACK ON THE VERANDAH

After breakfast we were packed into a station-wagon and driven up the Vumba, over those roads that wound and swerved and swooped through mountains, and while my ‘nerves’ jumped and shuddered, I grew more irritated with them and with myself. All of us, the wounded, were in a much worse way than yesterday: bruises that were silent then were complaining now. On the verandah of the house in the mountains we counted our sore places, and lay about stiffly, and were waited on by the devoted Milos, the servant, all tender solicitude, and later we moved indoors to the great fire and neighbours came and were helpful and infinitely skilled. No people on earth are more kind, more hospitable, more resourceful than the whites of Southern Africa, when it is a question of one of their own kind…and what is the point of saying it again?

And so began the convalescence. The little girls recovered first and were playing ping-pong and tennis at the Club a mile away. Their mother and I were slower. The Coffee Farmer was in a bad way, facing a difficult operation on a shoulder already damaged twice.

People appeared and disappeared on the verandah.

It is evening around the winter fire, and the room is crammed with people and with animals. The shy young assistant from the next farm, the champion parachutist of Zimbabwe, sits with his new puppy and a great white Persian cat he is looking after and does not want to leave alone. The new puppy Vicky, a clever, scheming little bitch, sits by Josh, the half-grown sweet and stupid ridgeback. The fierce guardian of the estate, Annie, the bull terrier, who is a mass of scars and wounds, puts her head on her master’s knees and groans with agonized affection. A man whose job is to settle Africans on the new farms, has brought his dog, a setter. A little black cat, who is timid, finds all this astonishing and is frightened, and slips in and out between the legs of dogs, puppies, people, until she finds a safe place on a rafter, from where she watches us all. There are two couples from the farms lower down the hill, with three labrador puppies, brought to please the little girls, by their own little girls, who are teenagers. We, the wounded, sit carefully in corners, fending off friendly animals who are a threat to our sore ribs and our bruises. Who waits on us all? Milos, and beer and tea and coffee and cakes arrive all evening. It is noisy and cordial and we all watch the animals and discuss them and their behaviour as if they are people.