The Sweetest Dream (51 page)

‘And what ideas may they be?' Sylvia did manage to
interpolate, and heard only Molly's old refrain that the Pope was sexist
and did not understand the trials of women. Birth control, said
Sister Molly, that was the key, and the Pope might have the keys
of Heaven, and she did not want to argue with that, but he did
not understand this earth. Let him be brought up with a tribe of
nine brats and not enough money to put food into their mouths,
and he would sing to a different tune. And in a state of mild and
agreeable indignation, Sister Molly drove all the way to St Luke's
Mission where she left Sylvia with her boxes of books. ‘No, I'm
not coming in. Otherwise I'll have to visit the nun-house.' And
Sylvia heard, as she had been meant to, hen-house.

The priest's house, standing in the dust, the raggedy gum trees,
the sun marking the nuns' house and the half dozen roofs of the
school on its ridge–so paltry did all this seem, such a shallow
incursion on the old landscape–she was back home, yes she felt
that–and it could all be blown away by a breath. She stood
with the smell of wet earth in her nostrils and a warmth striking
up from it on to her legs. Then Rebecca appeared, with the
cry of, ‘Sylvia. Oh, Sylvia', and the two women embraced. ‘Oh,
Sylvia I have missed you too much.' But Sylvia was feeling
that what she was embracing matched her feelings of
evanescence, impermanence. Rebecca's body was like the frailest bundle
of light bones, and when Sylvia held her away to look into that
face, she saw Rebecca's eyes deep in her head, under the old faded
kerchief.

‘What's wrong, Rebecca?'

‘Okay,' said Rebecca, meaning, I shall tell you. But first she
took Sylvia's hand and led her into the house, where she sat her
down at the table with herself opposite. ‘My Tenderai is sick.'
No concealment, while the two pairs of eyes searched each other.
Two of Rebecca's children had died, another had been sick for a
long time, and now there was Tenderai. The source of the disease
was Rebecca's husband, still apparently in good health, if thin and
drinking. By all the rules of probability Rebecca should be HIV
positive, but without a test, who could know? And if she were,
what could be done? She was not likely to be sleeping around,
spreading the fatal thing.

Sylvia had been away a week.

‘Okay,' said Sylvia, in her turn, using this new, or newish
idiom, which now seemed to begin every sentence. She meant
that she had absorbed the information and shared Rebecca's fears.
She said, ‘I'll examine him and see. Perhaps it is just a temporary
disease.'

‘I hope it is,' said Rebecca, and then, putting behind her
family worries, said, ‘And Father McGuire is working too-too
hard.'

‘I heard. And what is this business about theft?'

‘It is a foolishness. It is about the cases of equipment at the
hospital we went to. They are saying you stole them.'

Now, Sylvia had been thinking, for in London her thoughts
had been with the mission, that it was only commonsense to
return to the ruinous hospital and take away anything that could
be used. But there was something more here, and Rebecca was
not coming out with it. She looked away into the air, and her face
was tight with embarrassment and the apprehension of trouble.

‘Please tell me, Rebecca. What is it?'

Rebecca still did not look at Sylvia, but said that it was all a
big foolishness. There was a spell on the cases–she used the
English word, and then added, ‘The
n'ganga
said bad things would
happen to anyone who stole anything from the hospital.' And
now she got up, and said it was time to get Father McGuire's
lunch, and she hoped Sylvia was hungry, because she had cooked
some special rice pudding.

While Rebecca had sat opposite, and in their minds had been
Tenderai and the other children, dead and living, between the
two women had been an absolute openness and trust. But now
Sylvia knew that Rebecca would not tell her more, for on this
subject Rebecca knew she would not understand.

Sylvia sat on her bed surrounded by brick walls, and looked
at the Leonardo women, whom she felt were welcoming her
home. Then she turned to the crucifix behind her bed, with a
deliberate intention of affirming certain ideas that had been
growing clamorous in her mind. Someone subscribing to the miracles
of the Roman Catholic Church should not accuse others of
superstition: this was her train of thought, and it was far from a criticism
of the religion. On Sundays the congregations that came to take
the Eucharist with Father McGuire were told that they drank the
blood and ate the flesh of Christ. She had slowly come to
understand how deeply the lives of the black people she lived among
were embedded in superstition, and what she wanted was to
understand it all, not to make what she thought of as ‘clever
intellectual remarks'. Of the kind Colin and Andrew would make,
she told herself. But the fact remained: there was an area where
she, Sylvia, could not go, and must not criticise, in Rebecca just
as much as any black casual worker, although Rebecca was her
good friend.

She would have to go over to the Pynes, if Father McGuire
would not help. At lunch she brought the subject up, while
Rebecca stood by the sideboard listening, and adding when the
priest appealed to her for confirmation, ‘Okay. It is true. And
now the people who took the things are falling ill and people are
saying it is because of what the
n'ganga
said.'

Father McGuire did not look well. He was yellow and the
hectic patches on his broad Irish cheekbones flared. He was
impatient and cross. This was the second time in five years he
was having to teach twice his normal hours. And the school was
falling apart and Mr Mandizi only repeated that he had informed
Senga of the situation. The priest went back to the school without
taking his usual nap, and Sylvia and Rebecca unpacked the books,
and made shelves from planks and bricks and soon all of one wall,
on either side of the little dressing-table, was covered with books.
Rebecca had wept to hear the sewing machines had been
impounded–she had hoped to make a little extra money sewing
on hers, but her tears when looking at and touching the books
were from joy. She even kissed the books. ‘Oh, Sylvia, it was so
wonderful you thought of us and brought us the books.'

Sylvia went down to the hospital, where Joshua sat dozing under
his tree, as if he had not left it in her absence, and where the little
boys clamorously welcomed her, and she attended to her patients,
many because of the coughs and colds that come with the sudden
changes of temperature at the start of the rains. Then she took the
car and went over to the Pynes, who filled a precise place in her life:
when she needed information, that is where she went.

The Pynes had bought their farm, after the Second World
War, in the Fifties, on that late wave of white immigration. They
grew mostly tobacco and had been successful. The house was on
a ridge, looking out over to tall tumbling hills that in the dry
season were blue with smoke and haze, but now were sharply
green–the foliage; and grey–granite boulders. The pillared
verandah was wide enough to have parties on, and before
Liberation parties had been many, but were few now, with so many
of the whites gone. The floor was polished red, and on it were
scattered low tables and dogs and some cats. Cedric Pyne sat
gulping tea, while he stroked the head of his favourite dog, a
ridgeback bitch called Lusaka. Edna Pyne, smart in her slacks and
shirt, her skin glistening with sun-creams, sat by the tea tray, her
dog, Lusaka's sister Sheba, as close as she could get by her chair.
She listened to her husband holding forth about the deficiencies
of the black government. Sylvia drank tea and listened too.

If she had had to hear Sister Molly out on the subject of the
Pope and his inveterate maleness; had had to listen every day to
Father McGuire saying he was an old man and he was no longer
up to it, he was going back to Ireland; if she had had to listen to
Colin lament his situation with Sophie, now she had to bide her
time again before she could introduce her own concerns.

The bones of the situation–the white farmers–were easy
to understand. They were the main targets of the blacks' hate,
were heaped with abuse every time the Leader opened his mouth,
but they earned the foreign currency which kept the country
going, mainly to pay the interest on loans insisted on by . . . in
her mind's eye Sylvia saw Andrew, a smiling debonair fellow
holding out a large cheque with lines of noughts on it, while
accepting with the other hand another cheque with an equal
number of noughts. This was the visual shorthand she had devised
to explain the machinery of Global Money to Rebecca, who had
giggled, sighed and said ‘Okay.'

Because of the Leader's socialism, acquired late in life with all
the force of a conversion, various policies he believed essential to
Marxism had acquired the force of commandments. One was that
no worker could be sacked, and that meant that every employer
carried a dead weight of workers who, knowing they were safe,
drank, did not work, lay about in the sun and stole everything–just like their betters. This was one item on the litany of complaints
that Sylvia had heard so often. Another was that they could not
buy spare parts for machines which broke down, and it was
impossible to buy new machines. Those that were imported went
straight to the Ministers and their families. These complaints, the
most frequent, were of less importance than the main one, which
like so many main, crucial, basic facts, was seldom mentioned
simply because it was too obviously important to need saying.
Because the white farmers were continually threatened with being
thrown out and their farms taken, they had no security, did not
know whether to invest or not, lived from one month to the next
in doubt. Now Edna Pyne broke in and said she was fed up, she
wanted to leave. ‘Let them get on with it and they'll know then
just what they've lost when we go.'

This farm, bought as virgin acres without so much as a cleared
field on it, let alone this big house, was now equipped with every
kind of farm building–barns, sheds, paddocks, wells, boreholes
and, a recent development, a large dam. All their capital was in
it. They had had none when they came.

Cedric said to his wife in a sharp rebuke that Sylvia had heard
before, ‘I'm not giving up. They're going to have to come and
throw me off.'

Now Edna's plaint began. Since Liberation it had been hard
to buy even basics, like decent coffee or a tin of fish. ‘They' could
not even keep a decent supply of mealiemeal coming for the
workers, she had to keep a storeroom filled to the roof with
meal for the next time when the labour force came up to beg
for food. She was sick of being reviled. They–the Pynes–were
paying school fees for twelve black children now, but none of
those government black bastards ever gave the farmers credit for
anything. They were all hot air and incompetence, they were
inefficient and only cared about how much they could grab for
themselves, she was fed up with . . .

Her husband knew she had to have her say out, just as she
knew that he did, whenever a fresh face appeared on that verandah,
and he sat in silence, looking out over the tobacco fields–in full
green–to where the rainy season's clouds were building for what
looked would be an afternoon storm.

‘You're mad, Cedric,' said his wife direct to him, an evident
continuation of many a private altercation. ‘We should cut our
losses and go to Australia like the Freemans and the Butlers.'

‘We aren't as young as we were,' said Cedric. ‘You always
forget that.'

But she was going on. ‘And the nonsense we have to put up
with. The cook's wife is sick because she has had the evil eye put
on her. She's got malaria because she doesn't like taking her pills.
I tell them, I keep telling them, if you don't take the malaria pills
then you'll get sick. But I'll tell you something. That
n'ganga
of theirs has got more to say about what goes on in this district
than any government official has.'

Sylvia interposed herself into this gushing stream: ‘That's what
I want to ask you. I need your advice.'

At once two pairs of blue eyes attended to her: giving
advice, that was what they knew they were equipped to do. Sylvia
outlined the story. ‘And so now I am a thief. And what is this
spell that was put on the new hospital?'

Edna allowed herself a weak, angry laugh. ‘And there it is
again. You see? Just stupidity. When the money ran out for the
new hospital . . .'

‘Why did it? Sometimes I hear it was the Swedes, then it was
the Germans, who was it?'

‘Who cares? Swedes, Danes, the Yanks, Uncle Tom
Cobbleigh–but the money vanished from the bank account in
Senga and they pulled out. The World Bank or Global Money
or Caring International or somebody, there are hundreds of these
do-gooding idiots, they are trying to find new funding but so far
no luck. We don't know what is happening. Meanwhile the cases
of equipment are just rotting, so the blacks say.'

‘Yes, I've seen them. But why send the equipment before the
hospital was even built?'

‘Typical,' said Edna Pyne, with the satisfaction of being proved
right, yet again. ‘Don't ask why, if it's bloody incompetence then
don't even ask. The hospital was supposed to be up and running
within six months, well I ask you, what rubbish, well what do
you expect from the idiots in Senga? So the local Big Boss, Mr
Mandizi as he calls himself, went to the
n'ganga
and asked him to
put it about that he had put a curse on anyone who stole from
the cases or even laid a finger on them.'