The Sweetest Dream (58 page)

 • • •

When Sylvia walked down to the village after lunch every day
she found that outside every hut, or under the trees, or on logs
or on stools, the people were reading, or, with an exercise book
propped in front of them or on their knees, they laboured to learn
to write. She had told them she would come from one to half
past two and supervise classes. She would have said from twelve,
but she knew Father McGuire would not let her skip lunch. But
she did not need to sleep, after all. Within a couple of weeks
something like sixty books were transforming the village in the
bush where children went to school but did not get an education,
and where most adults might have done four or five years at
school. Sylvia had driven herself to the Pynes who were going
into Senga, had gone with them, and bought a quantity of exercise
books, biros, pencils, an atlas, a little globe, and some textbooks
on how to teach. After all, she had no idea how a professional
would go about it, and the teachers in the school on the rise
where the dust these days was lying in heaps or blowing about in
clouds had had no training in how to teach either. She had also
gone to the depot to find her sewing machines, but they had not
been heard of.

She sat outside Rebecca's hut, where a tall tree threw deep
shade in the middle of the day, and taught up to sixty people, as
well as she could, hearing them read, setting writing models, and
propped the atlas on a shelf on a tree trunk to illustrate geography
lessons. Among her pupils might be the teachers from the school
who helped her, but were learning as they did.

The doves cooed in the trees. It was the sleepy time of the
day for all of them, and Sylvia's need for sleep dragged down her
lids, but she would not sleep, she would not. Rebecca handed
around water in stainless steel and aluminium basins stolen from
the abandoned hospital. Not much water: the drought was biting,
women were getting up at three and four in the morning to walk
to a further river, the near one having run low and foetid, carrying
jugs and cans on their heads. Not much washing was going on:
clothes were certainly not being washed. It was as much as the
women could do, to keep enough water for drinking and cooking.
The smell from the crowd was strong. Sylvia now associated that
smell with patience, with long-suffering, and with contained
anger. When she took a sip from Rebecca's stolen basins she felt
as she should do, but did not, when she drank the blood of Christ
at Communion. The faces of the crowd, of all ages from children
to old men and women, were rapt, hushed, attentive to every
word. Education, this was education, for which most had
hungered all their lives, and had expected to get when it had been
promised by their government. At two thirty Sylvia called up
from the crowd some boy or girl more advanced than the others,
set them to read some paragraphs from Enid Blyton–a great
favourite: from
Tarzan
–another; from the
Jungle Book
, which
was more difficult, but liked: or from the prize of them all,
Animal
Farm
which was their own story, as they said. Or the atlas was
passed around at a page they had just done, to hammer in what
they knew.

She visited the village anyway, every morning after making
sure her hospital was going well. She brought with her either
Clever or Zebedee, for one of them had to be left in charge of
the patients. She had patients in the huts, the ones with the slow
lingering diseases, over whom she and the
n'ganga
would exchange
looks that acknowledged what they were careful not to say. For
if there was one thing this bush doctor understood as well
and better than any ordinary doctor, it was the value of a
cheerful mind; and it was evident that most of his
muti
, spells, and
practices were elaborated for this one purpose: to keep going an
optimistic immune system. But when she and this clever man
exchanged a certain kind of look, then it meant that before long
their patient would soon be up among the trees in the new
graveyard, which was in fact the AIDS or Slim cemetery, and well
away from the village. The graves were dug deep, because it was
feared the evil that had killed these people could escape and attack
others.

Sylvia knew, because Clever had told her–Rebecca herself
had not–that this sensible and practical woman, on whom both
she and the priest relied, believed that her three children had died
and a fourth was ill because her younger brother's wife, who had
always hated her, had employed a stronger
n'ganga
than the local
one to attack the children. She was barren, that was the trouble,
and believed that Rebecca was responsible, having paid for charms
and potions and spells to keep her childless.

Some believed she was childless because in her hut were to
be found more stolen things from the abandoned hospital than
any other. The object known to be most dangerous among the
stolen goods was the dentist's chair that had once been in the
middle of the village, where children played over it, but it had
been taken away and thrown into a gulley, to get rid of its malign
influences. Vervet monkeys played over it, without harm, and
once Sylvia had seen an old baboon sitting in it, a piece of grass
between his lips, looking around him in a contemplative way,
like a grandfather sitting out his days on a porch.

 • • •

Edna Pyne got into the old lorry to drive to the Mission because
she was being pursued by what she called her black dog, which
even had a name. ‘Pluto is snapping at my heels again,' she might
say, claiming that the two house dogs Sheba and Lusaka knew
when this shadowy haunter was present and growled at it. Cedric
would not laugh at this little fantasy when she made a joke of it all,
but said she was getting as bad as the blacks with their superstitious
nonsense. Even five years ago Edna had had women friends, on
nearby farms, whom she could drive over to visit when she was
down, but now none was left. They were farming in Perth (
Australia), in Devon; they had ‘taken the gap' to South Africa–they
had gone. She hungered for women's talk, feeling she was in a
desert of maleness, her husband, the men working in the house and
garden, the people coming to the house, government inspectors,
surveyors, contour ridge experts, and the new black busybodies
always imposing more and more regulations. All were men. She
hoped to find Sylvia free for a bit of a chat, though she did not
like Sylvia as much as Edna knew she deserved: she was to be
admired, yes, but she was a bit of a nut. When she got to Father
McGuire's house, it seemed empty. She went into the cool dark
inside, and Rebecca emerged from the kitchen with a cloth in
her hands that should have been cleaner. But the drought was
limiting the cleanliness in her own house too: the borehole was
lower than it had ever been.

‘Is Doctor Sylvia here?'

‘She is at the hospital. There's a girl in labour. And Father
McGuire has taken the car and gone to visit the other Father at
the Old Mission.'

Edna sat as if her knees had been hit. She let her head fall
back against the chair, and shut her eyes. When she opened them
Rebecca stood in front of her still, waiting.

‘God,' said Edna, ‘I've had enough, I really have.'

‘I shall make you some tea,' said Rebecca, turning to go.

‘How long do you think the doctor will be?'

‘I don't know. It's a difficult birth. The baby's in the breech
position.'

This clinical phrase made Edna open her eyes wide. Like most
of the old whites she had a mind in compartments–that is, more
than most of us. She knew that some blacks were as intelligent as
most whites, but by intelligent she meant educated, and Rebecca
was working in a kitchen.

When the tea tray was put in front of her and Rebecca turned
to leave, Edna heard herself say: ‘Sit down, Rebecca.' And added,
‘Do you have time?'

Rebecca did not have time, she had been chasing after herself
all morning. Since her son, the one who went to fetch the water
for her from the river, was with his father, who had drunk last
night to the point of raging insanity, she, Rebecca, had had to
carry water down from this kitchen, having asked permission from
the Father, not once but five times. The water in the house well
was low: water seemed to be creeping back down into the earth
everywhere, always harder to reach. But Rebecca could see that
this white woman was in a state, and needed her. She sat and
waited. She was thinking it was lucky Mrs Pyne was here with
her car because the Father had taken the car and Sylvia had said it
might be necessary to run the patient into hospital for a caesarean.

Words that had been bubbling and simmering inside Edna for
hours, for days, now came out in a hot, resentful accusing
self-pitying rush, though Rebecca was not the right auditor for them.
Nor was Sylvia, if it came to that. ‘I don't know what to do,'
Edna said, her eyes wide and staring, not at Rebecca but at the
edge of blue beads on the fly net over the tea tray. ‘I'm at my
wits' end. I think my husband has gone mad. Well, they are mad,
aren't they, men, aren't they, wouldn't you agree?' Rebecca who
last night had been dodging blows and embraces from her raving
husband smiled and said that yes, men were sometimes difficult.

‘You can say that again. Do you know what he's done? He's
actually bought another farm. He says that if he didn't one of the
Ministers'd grab it, so why not him. I mean, if you people got
it, that would be all right, but he says he can pay for it, it was
offered to the government and they didn't want it so he's buying
it. He is building a dam there, near the hills.'

‘A dam,' said Rebecca, coming to life: she had been drowsing
as she sat. ‘Okay . . . a dam . . . okay.'

‘Well, the moment he's built it one of those black swine'll
grab it, that's what they do, they wait until we do something
nice, like a dam, and then they grab. So what are you doing this
for, I ask him, but he says . . .' Edna was sitting with a biscuit in
one hand and a cup in the other. Her words were tumbling out
too fast to let her drink. ‘I want to leave, Rebecca, do you blame
me? Well, do you? This is not my country, well you people say
so and I agree with you but my husband says it is his as much as
yours, and so he's bought . . .' A wail escaped her. She set down
the cup, then the biscuit, shook a handkerchief from her handbag
and wiped her face with it. Then she sat silent a moment, leaned
forward and frowningly rubbed the blue bead edging between
her fingers. ‘Pretty beads. Did you make that?'

‘Yes, I made it.'

‘Pretty. Well done. And there's another thing. The
government criticises us all the time, they call us all these names. But in
our compound there's three times the number of people that
should be there, they come in every day from the communal land,
and we feed them, we are feeding all these people because they
are starving on the communal land in the drought, well you know
that, don't you, Rebecca?'

‘Okay. Yes. That is true. They are starving. And Father
McGuire has set up a feeding point at the school, because the
children come up to school so hungry they just sit and cry.'

‘There you are. But your government never has a good word
for any of us.'

She was crying, a dismal weeping, like an over-tired child.
Rebecca knew this woman was not weeping for the hungry people
but because of what Rebecca called all-too-much. ‘It's
all-too-much,' she would say to Sylvia, ‘too-much for me to bear.' And
she would sit herself down, and put her hands up to her face and
rock and set up a regular wailing, while Sylvia fetched pills–sedatives–which Rebecca obediently swallowed down.

‘I sometimes think that everything is too much, it gets on top
of me,' wept Edna, but actually sounded better. ‘Bad enough
before the drought, but now the drought and the government
and everything . . .'

Here Clever appeared in the doorway to say to Rebecca that
Doctor Sylvia said he must run over to the Pynes and ask someone
to bring a car to take the woman in labour to the hospital.

And there was Edna Pyne! His face lit up and he actually did
a little dance right there on the verandah. ‘Okay. Now she won't
die. The baby's stuck,' he informed them, ‘but if she can get to
hospital in time . . .' He darted off down the hill and soon Sylvia
appeared, supporting a woman draped in a blanket.

‘I see I'm some use after all,' said Edna, and went to help
Sylvia hold up the woman, who was sobbing and moaning.

‘If only they'd get on with that new hospital,' said Sylvia.

‘Dream time.'

‘She's scared of the caesarean. I keep telling her it's nothing.'

‘Why can't you do the operation?'

‘We make these mistakes. The one awful stupid ridiculous
unforgivable mistake I made was not to do surgery.' She spoke
in a flat dry voice, but Edna recognised it as the same as her
emotional outburst: Sylvia was letting off steam and no notice
should be taken. ‘I'm sending Clever with you. I've got a really
sick man down there.'

‘I hope I'm not going to have to deliver a baby.'

‘Well, you'd do as well as anyone. But Clever's very good.
And I've given her something to delay the baby a little. And her
sister's going too.'

At the car a woman was waiting. She extended her arms, the
woman in labour went into them and began wailing.

Sylvia ran back down to her hospital. The car set off. It was
bad road, and the drive took nearly an hour, because the patient
cried out when the car went over a bump. Edna saw the two
black women into the hospital, an old one built under the whites,
meant to serve a few thousand people but now expected to care
for half a million.