Mara and Dann

by Doris Lessing

  ‘That little river has been dry for a couple of years. The big river has been nearly dry. I’ve got enough water in my tank in there to last us, if we are careful. I’m going back to the pool tomorrow when everyone goes. And I want you to keep Dann here.’

  ‘You think Kulik meant to drown him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps he began by a joke and then…It would be very easy to keep him under a little too long.’

  ‘Why did he want to kill Dann? A little boy?’

  ‘Little boys grow up. And so do little girls, Mara. Be careful all the time. Not that you have to keep in the house. I’m going to teach you how to milk the animal, and how to let the milk go sour and make cheese. And how to find the roots too – and that is very important. You have to be out and about and do your share. I might die, Mara. I’m an old woman. You have to know everything I know. I’ll show you where the money is. But remember: it is easy to slip a scorpion into a fold of cloth or throw a stone from behind a wall so that it looks as if it has come off a roof, or put a child in a cistern and pull the rock lid over. A child did die like that once. One of theirs, though. No one could hear it cry out because the lid was a fit.’

  ‘That means someone meant to kill it.’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘That means that they fight each other – the Rock People.’

  ‘Yes, they do. There are families who won’t speak to each other.’

  Suddenly Mara giggled, and Daima seemed surprised. Mara quickly said, ‘We haven’t enough water. We only have a little food. But they quarrel.’ And looked at Daima to see if she had understood.

  Daima said, very dry, but smiling, ‘I see you are growing up fast. But that is the point. The harder things are the more people fight. You’d think it was the other way about.’

  Next morning Daima said to Dann that he could go out and play just outside the doorway, where they could see him. He went out and stood poking a stick at the dust. He seemed half asleep. Mara thought that if their mother could see this dirty little child with his matted hair, she would not know him. Above all she would not know this listlessness. Soon there were footsteps, and voices, and two men came, and stopped a few paces away to stare openly through the doorway, where Daima and Mara could be seen sitting at the table. Dann was staring at them, and then began moving closer to them, step by step, his eyes going from one face to the other. The two men stood looking at him, surprised, then uneasy, then angry. They spoke to each other in low, angry voices. And still Dann moved towards them, step by step, staring. ‘Shooooo,’ said one man, and the other shook a stick at him, as if Dann were an animal.

  ‘What’s the matter with the child?’ asked Daima. ‘Stop him.’

  ‘I know what’s wrong,’ said Mara, and she did, though at first she hadn’t. The faces of the two were so alike you could hardly tell them apart: two angry faces looking down at the child, their lips thin and tight with dislike of him. Mara ran out and grabbed Dann just as one man picked up a stone to throw at him. ‘Dann,’ she said, ‘no, no, no.’ And to the man, ‘No, please, don’t.’ And still Dann stared, twitching with fear, his whole body shaking in his sister’s hands.

  ‘You keep those brats of yours to yourself,’ one man said loudly into the doorway to Daima.

  And they went off, the two men, as similar from the back as from the front: heavy and slow, both with the same way of poking their heads forward.

  Mara held the child as he sobbed, limp against her shoulder; and she said to Daima, past his head, that there had been two men with similar faces, and one had threatened to beat them and kept them without water, and the other was kind and gave them water – and now they seemed to Dann the same: the two brothers, Garth and Gorda.

  Daima said, ‘Those two out there grew up with my two. I know them. They are bullies and they are sly. Dann must keep away from them, and you too, Mara.’

  And now Mara began explaining to Dann that two people can look the same but be quite different inside, in their natures, that he was confused because of what had happened…And as she talked, she was thinking that all that had been less than a week ago.

  While Mara talked, Dann was staring out of the door, where the two men had stood. She did not know if he had heard her. She went on, though, talking and explaining, because often he surprised her, coming out later with something that showed he had understood.

  ‘Let’s play the game,’ she tried, at last. ‘What did you see? – ’ then, at home, with the bad people? ‘What did you see? – ’ later, with the man who gave us water? Slowly Dann did begin to answer, but his eyes were heavy and his voice was heavy too. Mara persisted, while Dann did reply, but he was talking only about the bad man, the bad man, with the whip. At last Mara stopped. It looked as if the child had muddled it all up: the scene that had gone on for hours, in their own home, when they had to stand hungry and thirsty, being threatened by the whip, and the other one in the rock room when Gorda came in. ‘Don’t you remember how he was kind and gave us water?’ But no, Dann did not remember, and he said, ‘Those two men out there, with the stick, why did they have the same face?’

  He stuck his thumb in his mouth and the loud sucking began, and then he slept, while Mara sat rocking him and Daima went off to the river with her containers.

  When she came back she washed them both again, while they stood in the shallow basin; and this time she washed their hair too, though it would not stay nice and shiny for long, with the dust swirling about everywhere.

  Then Daima took the children out to where she said the milk beast was waiting – she had told Rabat she would milk it. Dann was clinging tight to Mara, so she could hardly walk. And she kept close to Daima because the milk beast was so enormous, and frightened her. Its back was level with Daima’s head, and she was tall. It was a black and white beast, or would have been if the dust wasn’t thick on it. It had pointed, hard hooves. Its eyes were clever and knowing; and Mara had never seen eyes like them, for instead of a soft coloured round with white around, these eyes were a strong yellow and had a black bar down them, and long lashes. She thought the animal looked wicked, but Daima had already slipped a loop of rope over its horns, and then the rope over a post, and she was kneeling right under the beast’s belly, where there was a bag that had teats sticking out like enormous pink fingers. Daima had a basin under the milk bag and she was using both hands to make the milk come out. It shot into the basin, which rang out like a bell, and meanwhile the beast stood still, chewing with quick movements of its jaws. It turned its head and put its nose on Daima’s neck, and then into Mara’s neck, and she cried out, but Daima said, ‘Don’t mind Mishka, she won’t hurt you. Now, sit down here.’ Mara squatted by Daima, feeling Dann right behind her, because he was afraid of the beast but needed her more. ‘Use both hands on one teat,’ said Daima. The hot, slippery teat filled Mara’s hands, and she squeezed, and a little milk came out; but Daima showed her how to do it and soon the milk was spurting. ‘There, you’ve got the knack,’ said Daima. ‘And she knows you now.’ Daima finished off the milking, until the bag hung empty, and the beast bleated and went off when Daima took the rope from her horns, picking her way among the humps and mats of grass to a group of milk beasts standing together under a thorn tree. They belonged to different people but they spent all their days together, and their nights too, in a shed, because the dragons came after them.

  Daima had two cans of milk, one full and one partly full. They went to Rabat’s house and gave her the part-full can. She looked sharply into the can to see if she had her promised share, then smiled in the way Mara hated and said, ‘Thank you.’

  Now it was the hot part of the day, and they sat in the cool half dark of the big room. Dann was sitting on the floor, his thumb in his mouth, pressed against Mara’s legs.

  Mara saw that Daima’s eyes were full of tears, and then that tears were running down the creases in Daima’s cheeks. ‘It is funny,’ said Daima, speaking as if Mara were grown up, ‘the way the same things h
appen.’

  ‘You mean, your children, and then Dann and me?’

  ‘They wanted to play with the other children, but Kulik came and said, Keep your brats to yourself.’

  Mara left Dann, and climbed up on Daima’s lap and put her arms around her neck. This made Daima cry harder, and Mara cried, and then the little boy began tugging at Mara’s legs to be lifted up, and soon both children were on Daima’s lap and they were all crying.

  Then Mara said, ‘But your children are all right. They grew up. No one hurt them.’

  ‘Plenty tried to. And when I’d got them through it all, they went away. I know they had to. I wanted them to.’ Daima sat weeping, not trying to stop herself.

  ‘I won’t go away, I promise,’ said Mara. ‘I’ll never leave you alone with these horrible Rock People, never, never.’

  ‘I won’t go away,’ piped up Dann. ‘I won’t leave you.’

  ‘I’ll leave you first,’ said Daima.

  Dann cried out, but Mara said, ‘She didn’t mean that she would leave us. She didn’t mean that.’

  And the rest of the day was spent reassuring Dann that Daima did not mean to abandon them.

  Now Daima said it was time to show Mara how to do everything. How to look after the milk beast, Mishka. How to make milk go sour in a certain way. How to make cheese. How to look in the grasses for the tiny plants that showed where the sweet yellow roots were, deep below. Which green plants could be picked to cook as vegetables. How to make candles. And soon Daima said Mara should know where the money was hidden.

  ‘If you were going to hide money, Mara, where would you put it?’

  Mara thought. ‘Not in the room where the water tank is, or anywhere near where the food is. And not in this room, because people can come in so easily. Not in the thatch, because grass can burn. Not somewhere out of the house, because people would see when you went to look for it. And not in one of the empty rooms, because people would expect that.’

  A long pause.

  ‘Where, then?’ persisted Daima. But Mara could not guess.

  In a corner of this room stood a bundle of big floor candles. The biggest ones were as thick as Mara’s chest. One that looked just like all the others was quite smooth at the bottom; but when you scraped off a layer and pulled out a plug of candle, there was a hole, and in it a leather bag with coins in it. They were gold, quite small but heavy, and there were fifty of them. Mara remembered that at home the People wore big, heavy ornaments of this stuff, gold, and she herself had been given when she was born a bracelet made of these same coins, which she knew was very valuable. Where was it now? But her old life in the great, airy palace in its gardens seemed every day more of a dream and harder to remember. And she had had another name. What was it? She asked Daima if she knew what her name and Dann’s had been, but Daima said no, she didn’t, and anyway it wasn’t a bad idea to forget them. ‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you,’ she said.

  Often Mara climbed on Daima’s lap, but when Dann was asleep, because she didn’t want him to know that she often felt like a baby too. She hugged Daima, and felt the bones in the hard arms and the hard lap. Daima was not soft anywhere. Mara laid her face in Daima’s bony shoulder and thought about her mother, though it was hard now to remember her face, and how she was soft everywhere and had a sweet, spicy smell, who had hugged her with arms that had bracelets on them, and long black hair where Mara could bury her face. Daima smelled dry and sour and dusty. Dust, the smell of dust, the feel of dust on everything: soft pads of dust underfoot, dust piling up in the grooves the door slid along in, dust on the rocks of the floor, which had to be swept out every day into the dust outside. Films of dust settled on the food even while they ate it, and often winds whirled dust and grass up into the air and the sunlight became spotty and dirty-looking.

  ‘Perhaps it will rain,’ Mara implored Daima, who said, ‘Well, perhaps it will.’

  Soon Mishka began giving much less milk. Some mornings there was hardly any. There was something in the way Rabat smiled and looked that made Mara ask if perhaps Rabat was going out at night to steal milk. Daima said yes, she thought so. She said to Mara, ‘Don’t be too hard. She has nothing to eat.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she go out and dig up roots, the way we do?’

  Daima sighed and said that it was no good expecting people to do what they couldn’t do.

  ‘Why can’t she?’

  Daima lowered her voice, though they were alone, and said, ‘She’s a bit simple-minded.’ And then, lower still, ‘That’s why the others have never wanted anything to do with her. And why she was glad to be friends with me.’ She gave the grim smile that Mara had learned to dread. ‘Two outcasts.’

  ‘Will Mishka give more milk when it rains?’

  ‘Yes, but she is getting old and it is time she was mated. Her milk will dry up altogether soon if she isn’t.’

  ‘Why can’t she be mated?’

  ‘Kulik owns the only male milk beast, and he won’t let it mate with ours.’

  Mara was in such a tumult of feelings: she had just taken in that Daima’s only friend all these years was a loony woman; and now, how cruel Kulik was.

  She went off into the room where her rock bed was, and lay on it, and turned her face to the wall and thought hard. She knew she could not tell Daima what she wanted to do, because she would say no. She waited until Daima had gone out with Dann to take some water to Mishka, and then she went through the village, smiling politely at people, to where she knew most of the men were in the hot midday. Against a disused rock house was a long seat made of rocks, shaded by some old thatch that had slipped down the roof. Along this bench sat about ten men, their hands on their knees, apparently half asleep. Among them was Kulik.

  It was difficult to walk towards them, seeing how their faces grew hard as she got near. This is the look she had seen on the faces of Rock People all her life when any of the People were near. Their eyes were narrowed, their mouths tight and angry.

  She made herself smile, but not too much, and stood in front of Kulik. She said, ‘Please, our Mishka needs to be mated.’ In spite of herself, her voice was weak and her lips trembled.

  First there were looks between the men, who were surprised. Then they laughed: ugly, short laughter, like barks. Then they all stared at her, their faces hard again. Kulik, however, had a grin on his face, and his teeth showed.

  Mara said, her voice stumbling, ‘My little brother, he needs the milk.’

  Kulik narrowed his eyes, stared hard, kept his thin, ugly grin, and said, ‘And what do I get in exchange?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ve got anything. I could get some roots for you.’

  More laughter from the men.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of roots,’ said Kulik. Then slowly, and with his face so full of hatred for her she could hardly keep standing there in front of him, ‘Down on your knees, Mahondi brat, down on your knees and beg.’

  At first Mara was not sure what he wanted her to do, but she dropped to her knees in the dust, and when she looked at him she could hardly see through her tears.

  ‘Now bend right down, three times,’ said Kulik.

  Mara had to think again, but she bent down once, twice, three times, trying to keep her hair out of the dust. On the last time she felt Kulik’s big hand on her head, grinding her face down into the dirt. Then he let go. She straightened to her knees and, since he did not say anything, stood up. The dust was falling past her eyes from her head.

  She said, ‘Please will you let Mishka be mated?’

  And now a big roar of astonished laughter from all of them – except Kulik, who did not laugh this time but only grinned, and sat forward and said, almost spitting as he talked into her face, ‘You bring her when she is ready. I’m sure you know all about that from your hard work on the farms.’

  ‘I do know,’ said Mara. ‘I learned about how to mate animals.’

  ‘That would come in useful, to give orders to your slaves.’

 
‘Please,’ said Mara, ‘please.’

  ‘Bring your animal. But you must come alone. I’m not dealing with that old bag Daima. Alone, do you hear?’

  Mara was angry that he’d called Daima an old bag, but she made herself smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘And if the kid turns out to be male, I shall have it.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you – ’ and she ran off.

  She told Daima what she had done, and Daima caught her hand to her heart and had to sit down. ‘Mara,’ she said, ‘Mara … That was so dangerous. I’ve known Kulik kill someone who stood up to him.’

  ‘What is a Mahondi?’

  ‘We are Mahondis. The People are Mahondis. Did he call you a Mahondi? Well, you are one. And me. And Dann.’

  ‘And he wants the kid if it is male. That means, we can keep it if it is female and have milk from her when she grows up.’

  ‘There are too many females,’ said Daima. ‘We can’t feed what we have. He wants another male because his is old and he can keep control of who has milk and who doesn’t.’

  ‘Perhaps Mishka will have twins.’

  ‘Don’t wish for that. We would have to kill one. How could we keep them fed? You know yourself how hard it is to find food for them.’

  When Daima said that Mishka was ready, Mara put the rope around her horns and went through the houses to where the men sat.

  She stood in front of Kulik with the beast and said, ‘Here is Mishka. I’ve come by myself, as you said.’

  ‘What makes you think I haven’t changed my mind?’ said Kulik, and went on grinning there, a long time, to keep her afraid in case he had changed his mind.

  ‘You promised,’ said Mara at last, not crying, for she was determined not to.

  ‘Very well, you come with me.’

  He got up, in his heavy, slow way – like an animal that has decided to tread all over you, Mara thought – and went towards the enclosure where his male milk beast was, all by itself. Mishka began to jump and rush about at the end of her rope.

  Kulik turned his head to grin back and say, ‘Can’t wait for it, can she? – you are all the same.’