African Laughter (9 page)

‘Well, that wasn’t very jolly, was it,’ I said, falling from long practice into the mode, or tone.

‘No,’ he said, looking carefully at me to see what I was saying. ‘No. A lot of my friends were drowned, you see.’

‘Yes.’

‘And it was just luck it wasn’t me. If that chap hadn’t said, you’d better get a move on, Tayler…’

‘Yes. And then?’

‘Oh, and then they patched me up and rehabilitated me. In Ceylon, that was. They gave us a good time in Ceylon. So I believe. I met someone not long ago, and he said, They gave us a good time in Ceylon. I pretended I could remember, but I couldn’t. Ceylon is a blank. I was there for weeks. It’s a total blank. It really is a funny thing what we remember…you saying things…I’ve been thinking hard the last few days…and then after Ceylon was the Med.’

‘And you were there quite a time.’

‘Yes, the
Aurora
. A good ship, that. A good lot of chaps.’

‘And there was that gunfire and you got very deaf.’

‘That was nothing, being deaf I mean. They gave me an operation, and then they gave me this hearing-aid. It’s a miracle, this hearing-aid. Sometimes I forget I was ever deaf…’

A long silence. The fire burned in the wall, and the dogs lay stretched out, firelight moving on their soft fur.

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘That wasn’t the point, you see…’ A pause. ‘It wasn’t till the Bush War I understood something about myself. I suddenly understood I had been numbed for years and years. Only just the other day I said to myself, you’ve spent the best part of your life numbed. Frozen…’ A pause. ‘That wasn’t a very nice thing, suddenly knowing that.’

‘What made you understand, then? Was it something that happened in the Bush War?’

‘Something on those lines, yes. It wasn’t a picnic, the Bush War.’

‘So I’ve gathered.’

‘No. I was watching some of the younger men, the ones who did the bad fighting, you know. I knew when they were switching off–you could see them doing it. I knew, you see, because I’d done it. I wanted to say, No, don’t do it, don’t do that, you don’t want to spend your life as I’ve done. You know, it’s like living inside a sort of glass jar. But they had to switch off. You can’t see your best friends being blown to pieces and then just go on as if nothing had happened. So now when I look at someone I can tell–I think, you’ve switched off: and a lot of the ‘terrs’ too, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Harry, does it strike you as odd that it’s only now you are saying you had a bad time in that war?’

‘I never said that,’ he protested at once. ‘A lot of people had it much worse than I did.’

‘I don’t think anyone would criticize you for exaggerating if you happened to remark you had a bad war.’

He was silent, looking humorous, rueful, deprecating.

‘This bloody stiff-upper-lip business of yours–you pay a pretty heavy price for it.’

He looked genuinely surprised.

‘I don’t know, I don’t think one should make a fuss, that sort of thing.’

‘Why not? Do you realize, when I asked you after the War, how was it when the
Repulse
went down, you said, Oh it wasn’t too bad.’

He was silent and then he began to talk about his son. My brother’s son, whom I have not met since he was seven or so, was in the Selous Scouts. For those who have forgotten, let us put it this way: the whites in new Zimbabwe were not talking about the Selous Scouts as the blacks did, or as they were spoken of in our newspapers in Britain; we do know that one person’s thug and murderer is another’s hero.

This young man, who had distinguished himself in the Scouts, suffered a sudden conversion to fundamental Christianity, then took himself to Texas where he was trained as a preacher. He now preached to black and white in South Africa.

‘Pretty fiery stuff,’ says Harry, looking at me in a certain way.

‘Ah, you mean you go for it?’

‘I’ve been to some of their services. Quite a bit different from the good old Church of England. It quite sweeps you off your feet.’

‘Literally, so I hear. Have you been dancing in the aisles?’

‘Well, just about.’

‘Funny thing, his having that conversion, after that fighting. Would you agree it wasn’t pretty, what he was doing?’

‘You could say that, yes.’ A pause. ‘A conversion, you call it?’ he says, casual, pouring himself a drink, offering me one.

‘Yes. A sudden thing. Quite common really. People in great danger, scared stiff, they suffer conversion. They get God. The psychologists know about it.’

‘Interesting thing, that.’

‘Like astronauts.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘Or people just about to fall off a mountain peak or lost in a small boat in the middle of an ocean.’

‘Anyway, I didn’t have a conversion. I’ve always gone to church.’

He drinks, gulp after gulp, but carefully. It was as if he were listening to each mouthful as it went down. Suddenly I understood something: again, I could have seen it before: nothing is more exasperating than this, that you can flounder about in a mist, and then, all at once, everything is clear. What my brother and my father had in common was not genes: at least, genes were not why both were slow, hesitant, cautious, dream-logged men who seemed always to be listening to some fateful voice only they could hear: they were both men hurt by war. This thought was such a shock to me, illuminating all kinds of old puzzles, old questions, that I had to set it aside for the moment: Harry was obviously planning to say something difficult. His lips were moving together over words he was discarding as they came to him: his eyes stared inward. At last he lifted his head and made himself look at me.

‘You say we spent a lot of time together in the bush?’

‘Yes, every school holidays, sometimes all day. We used to take a bottle of cold tea and sandwiches and stay out from sunrise till after the sun went down.’

‘After that Japanese was here–funny chap he was–I read one of your short stories.’

‘Well, what did you think?’

‘It was about you and me in the bush. And the dogs. But it really got to me, that story. I couldn’t finish it. I didn’t remember anything, you see.’

‘What, nothing?’

‘No. I realized then I didn’t remember anything very much before I was about eleven or twelve. At least, I remembered quite a bit about school, but nothing about the farm.’

‘Nothing?’

‘You could say nothing.’

‘You don’t remember things like lying in the rocks on Koodoo Hill and watching the wild pig–they were only a few feet away? Or hiding in the long grass at the edge of the Twenty Acres to watch the duiker come down at sunset? Or climbing trees to hide so we could watch what went on in the bush?’

‘No, I don’t, I’m afraid.’

‘You don’t remember when that wild pig with piglets chased us up the tree and we threw bits of bark and leaves at her to make her go away? But she actually tried to climb the tree after us…stood with her feet on the trunk and grunted at us? And we were laughing so hard we nearly fell out of the tree?’

A long silence.

‘I blocked all that off too, didn’t I?’

‘It looks like it.’

‘Then there must have been a reason why I blocked everything off.’

‘I think there was.’

‘But you didn’t block off, you remembered it all.’

‘But perhaps we had different ways of surviving.’

‘That’s a strong word,’ he said, his eyes hard. ‘It’s the word I use.’

He sat thinking, drinking judiciously. At last he said, ‘I’ve told you, I know a thing or two about blocking things off…’ And now he kept his eyes on my face, to make sure I wouldn’t overstep some mark or other. ‘I’ll tell you something. If you’ve blocked things off, then there’s a reason for it. If you’ve any sense you let sleeping dogs lie. That’s where these psychologist chappies are wrong. In the Bush War things from the other war kept coming back, but I couldn’t see why I felt so upset.

Why did I block them off? But I could tell there was something pretty bad there, because if there wasn’t, why did they get to me? Anyway, I haven’t told you everything, and I’m not going to. There are things you should shut up about. And don’t think I regret the Bush War…I’m not going to mind kicking the bucket when my time comes. I’ve had that, lying wrapped in a blanket looking up at the stars and listening to the owls and the nightjars–not that there are many of them around these days. No, I’m glad I’m Taking the Gap.’ He turned away, because his eyes were full of tears. He poured himself another dose, and then looked at me again. ‘I’ve visited where I am going. It’s in the Transvaal. We think it is getting pretty bad here–the bush, but down there it’s all enormous ranches with miles and miles of beaten-down dirty over-grazed grass.
There’s no bush
.’

‘Makes sense, you’re going there, since that’s what you care about more than anything.’

‘At least I won’t have to watch it being destroyed here, and that is what is happening.’

‘It’s a tragedy,’ I said, not knowing I was going to. ‘Do you realize who would understand you best in this country? About the bush, I mean. The Africans, that’s who, and you won’t talk to them.’

‘What do you mean, I won’t talk to them? When I was out in the bush as a boy with the cook’s son, what do you think we did? What about the builder at the school? Solomon, his name was. We used to sit and jaw for hours and hours about life and everything. What about the chap who built this house with me?’

He waits for me to challenge him with some point of my dogma, and then says, ‘Anyway, it’s not true that only the Affs would understand me. Any old Rhodie would.’

‘Nonsense. Half the old Rhodies know as much about the bush as some poor black kid in Brixton knows about the English countryside.’

‘Of course I mean the right kind of Rhodie.’

‘People like you.’

‘If you like.

‘Nine o’clock,’ he says. ‘Time for bed.’ He gets up, goes to the door, turns and sees me reaching for my notebook. ‘Are you taking down things I say to use in evidence against me? I don’t care provided you write down the bloody stupid things you say, too.’

In the morning he drove me to a road that ran past a plantation of blue gums. When he was working at his old school, Ruzawi–for he went back as manager of the place, because there he could be out of doors all day–he asked to be allowed to plant trees. We left the car well-locked, though he was unhappy about it. ‘You can’t leave a car for five minutes without some skellum stealing it. Everything has to be locked up. Everything has to be barred. It’s like living inside cages.’

We walked through the enormous sweet-smelling eucalyptus trees.

‘I often come here. I come here whenever everything gets me down. At least I planted all these trees. But not long ago I began to think, what a pity I didn’t plant musasas. Indigenous trees. In those days who would have believed musasas could be under threat? You know those TV programmes they make, about animals? Every one ends with, This animal’s habitat is under threat. I can’t bear to watch them any more. If I had planted musasas they would just about be getting mature now. That would have been something, wouldn’t it…we could be walking here through musasas. A protected plantation.’ He laughed. ‘We make these wrong decisions,’ he said, and stood with his hand on the smooth creamy trunk of a blue gum. It was a diagnostic, affectionate hand, and he even patted the tree. Meanwhile Sparta and Sheba ran about among the leaves, noses down, after smells. Harry stroked the tree. ‘All the same, it’s a good place.’

He took me to where a notice, stuck on a board among rocks, said, ‘Please Remember to Bury your Rubbish.’ At the same moment we burst out laughing. ‘It’s the Scouts’ and Cubs’ camp site,’ he said. ‘That’s where they put up the tents. That’s where they build the fire. That’s where they sit in rows to eat. That’s the rubbish pit. That’s where the vans park when they bring cornflakes and sliced bread and orange squash from the supermarket.’

We laugh, staggering about in the dead leaves and the dust, while the dogs leap up to lick our faces.

GIVING LIFTS

Some miles on from my brother’s house, I drove–without so much as a premonitory catch of the breath–over the place where, a few days later, four other people and I were in a car accident so bad the only explanation for our all not being killed is that five guardian angels were on the alert.

The trip to Zimbabwe had been planned like this…I would spend two weeks with members of the family and then take off into the new Zimbabwe, allowing to happen to me what would: the only way to travel. Meanwhile I was impatient to talk to Africans, any African, to find out what lay behind the rhetoric of war. The black man in my brother’s kitchen was a friendly soul, but he was not likely to talk frankly to his employer’s sister. He had supported a lost cause, the Bishop Muzorewa, that was all I knew.

I had stopped the car to admire a particularly beautiful stretch of country. If, as a child, on the slow journeys to Marandellas I took in every turn and twist of the road, every heap of boulders, on the hurtling journeys to Macheke, as a young woman, I was always in a car full of people in emotional juxtapositions with each other, and we did not notice much outside the car. I did not remember this view. A beaten-up lorry came skidding to a stop near me, a black youth got down, and the lorry turned off on to a side road. The youth stood looking after the lorry for a long time. Then he turned, and saw me sitting there. He came slowly towards me, his face a plea. This was very different from the importunate clamour of the crowds at bus-stops. I opened the door and he got in beside me. At once he bent himself away from me, in a disconsolate curve, his hands limp between his thin knees. He was trembling in little spasms, as people do who have been cold for some time: it was a sharp, sparkling, highveld morning. He wore a suit, a white shirt, a tie, all clean and pressed, but the materials were cheap. I asked where he was going. He said it would be after Macheke.

I had hoped he would want to be set down before Macheke, called Mashopi in
The Golden Notebook
, because I had planned to stop, walk around, sort out memory from what I had made of it.