The Sweetest Dream

by Doris Lessing

  Now there did appear a kind of smile. ‘Yes, it would be a good thing if we–got on.’

  ‘I take it you didn’t get on with the one who left. By the way, was he a white doctor or a black doctor?’

  ‘A black doctor. Well, perhaps not a real doctor. But he drank too much. He was a skellum.’ ‘A what?’ ‘A bad man. Not like you.’ ‘I hope that at least I won’t drink too much.’ ‘And I hope so too, doctor.’ ‘My name is Sylvia.’ ‘Doctor Sylvia.’

  He was still stooping and swaying, and now his face was set in a scowl. This was as if he had decided: Now I must show antagonism.

  ‘Doctor Sylvia is going up to Father McGuire,’ she said. ‘He told me to be there when it got dark, for supper.’

  ‘And I hope Doctor Sylvia will enjoy her supper.’ He went off on a path into the bush, laughing. Then she heard him singing. A rousing song, she thought: it was a revolutionary song from the war, insulting to all whites.

  Father McGuire sat at the table, a hissing paraffin lamp beside him, drinking orange juice. A glass of it waited for her.

  ‘We do have electricity, but there’s a power cut,’ he said.

  Rebecca appeared with a tray and the information that Aaron sent a message that he would stay with his friend that night down at the hospital.

  ‘Why, does he live here?’

  The priest, not looking at her, said that Aaron had a family in the village but he was going to sleep in this house at nights now.

  Rebecca’s face and his told her that here was a situation they were embarrassed about, so she enquired. It was an absurd thing, said Father McGuire, a ridiculous thing, and he could only apologise, but the young man would be living in the house for the sake of appearances. Sylvia had not understood. The priest seemed impatient, even offended at her, making him spell it out. ‘It is not considered suitable,’ he said, ‘for a priest to have a female living with him.’

  ‘What?’ said Sylvia. She was annoyed, as he was.

  Rebecca commented that people always talked, and that was a thing to be expected.

  Sylvia said bitterly, and primly, that people had dirty minds, and Father McGuire said placidly that yes, that was so.

  He then went on to say, but after a pause, that it had been suggested Sylvia should live with the nuns up the hill.

  ‘What nuns?’

  ‘We have the good sisters, in a house up the hill. But since you are not a religious, I thought you would be better here.’

  So much was not being said, and Sylvia sat looking from him to Rebecca.

  ‘Our good sisters are supposed to be helping in the hospital, but not everyone is cut out for the dirty work of nursing.’

  ‘They are nurses?’

  ‘No, I would not say that. They have done courses in basic nursing. But I suggest you arrange for them to wash bandages and dressings and bedclothes. Well now, you will not be having stores of disposable dressings? No. You should arrange for Joshua to convey what needs to be washed to the sisters’ house every day. And I will instruct them that they should do this work as a service to God.’

  ‘Joshua will not like doing that, Father,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘And you would not like doing it either, Rebecca, so we are in difficulties.’

  ‘It is Joshua’s work, not mine.’

  ‘And so here is a little difficulty for you to sort out, Sylvia, and I shall be waiting with interest to see how you do it.’

  He got up, said goodnight and went to his bed, and Rebecca, without looking at Sylvia, said goodnight and left.

  • • •

  It was a month later. The hole in the shed wall was mended, and there was a lock and a key. Around two of the grass shelters were blinds made of the hessian used to bale tobacco, which could be adjusted to keep out wind and dust, if not heavy rain. A new hut had been built, with grass walls and grass roof, a big one, with holes cut in the walls to let in light. It was cool and fresh inside. The floor was of stamped earth. In it the really sick people could shelter. Sylvia had cured cases of long-standing deafness, caused by nothing worse than old impacted wax. She had cured cataracts. She had got medicines from Senga and was able to do something for the malaria cases, but most of them were old sufferers. She set limbs and cauterized wounds and sewed them up, and gave out medicines for sore throats and coughs, sometimes using, when they ran out, old wives’ cures remembered by Father McGuire from Ireland. She had a maternity clinic, and delivered babies. All this was satisfactory enough, but she was in permanent frustration because she was not a surgeon. She needed to be. Bad and urgent cases could be driven to a hospital twenty miles away but sometimes delays were damaging, or fatal. She ought to be able to do caesareans and appendixes, amputate a hand, or open up a badly fractured knee. There was a shadowy area where it was hard to say if she was on the right side of the law or not: she might slice an arm to get at an ulcer, open up a suppurating wound to clean it, using surgeons’ instruments. If only she had known how badly she would need a surgeon’s skills then, when she was taking all kinds of courses that were not useful to her now . . .

  She was also doing the kind of work that did not come the way of doctors in Europe. She had toured nearby villages to inspect water supplies, and found dirty rivers and polluted wells. Water was running low at this time of the year, and often stood in stagnant pools that bred bilharzia. She taught women from these villages how to recognise some diseases and when to bring sufferers in. More and more people came in to her, because she was being seen as a bit of a miracle worker, chiefly because of ears syringed free of wax. Her reputation was being spread by Joshua, for it helped his reputation, tarnished by association with the bad doctor. He and Sylvia were ‘getting on’, but she was overlooking his often violent accusations of the whites. Sometimes she cracked with, ‘But, Joshua, I wasn’t here, how could I be to blame?’

  ‘That is your bad luck, Doctor Sylvia. You are to blame if I say so. Now we have a black government what I say goes. And one day this will be a fine hospital, and we’ll have our own black doctors.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘And then you can go back to England and cure your own sick people. Do you have sick people in England?’

  ‘Of course we do.’

  ‘And poor people?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As poor as we are?’

  ‘No, nothing like.’

  ‘That is because you have stolen everything from us.’

  ‘If you say so, Joshua, then so it is.’

  ‘And why aren’t you at home looking after your own sick people?’

  ‘A very good question. I often wonder the same thing.’

  ‘But don’t leave just yet. We need you until we get our doctors.’

  ‘But your own doctors won’t come and work in poor places like this. They want to stay in Senga.’

  ‘But this won’t be a poor place. It will be a fine rich place, like England.’

  Father McGuire said to her, ‘No, listen to me, my child, I’m going to talk to you seriously, as your confessor and adviser.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  This had become a little comic turn: while it was not true to say she had shed her Catholicism, she was certainly having to redefine her beliefs. She had become a Catholic because of Father Jack, a lean austere man, consuming himself with an asceticism that didn’t suit him. His eyes accused the world around him, and his movements were all vigilance against error and sin. She had been in love with him, and she believed he was not indifferent to her. So far, he had been the love of her life. Father Jack had stood for priesthood, for the Faith, for her religion, and now she was in this house in the bush with Father McGuire, an easy-going elderly man who loved his food. You would think that on a diet of porridge and beef and tomatoes and mostly tinned fruit, seldom fresh, that it was not possible to be a gourmet. Nonsense. Father Kevin shouted at Rebecca if the porridge wasn’t right, and his beef had to be just so, medium rare, and the potatoes . . . Sylvia was fond of Kevin McGuire, he
was a good man, as Sister Molly had said, but what she had responded to was the passionate abstinence of a very different man, and to the glories of Westminster Cathedral and–once–a brief trip to Notre Dame which burned in her memory like everything she loved most made visible. Once a week on Sunday evenings at a little church made of unadorned brick, furnished with local native stools and chairs, the people of the district came for Mass, and it was conducted in the local language, and danced . . . the women got up from their seats and powerfully danced their worship, and sang–oh, beautifully, yes, they did–and it was a noisy convivial occasion, like a party. Sylvia was wondering if she had ever really been a true Catholic, and if she was one now, though Father McGuire, in his role as her mentor, reassured her. She asked herself if in the little chapel where the dust drifted in, the service had been conducted in Latin, and the worshippers had stood and kneeled and responded, according to the old way, she would have liked that better. Yes, she would, she hated the Mass as conducted by Father Kevin McGuire, she hated the fleshy dancing, and the exuberance of the singing which she knew was a loosening of the bonds of their poor restricted lives. And she certainly did not like the nuns in their blue and white habits, like schoolgirls’ uniforms.

  He said to her, ‘Sylvia, you must learn not to take things so hard.’

  She burst out, ‘I can’t bear it, Father. I can’t endure what I see. Nine-tenths of it is unnecessary.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. But that is how things are. It is. How they are now. They will change, I am sure. Yes, surely they will change. But, Sylvia, I see in you the stuff of martyrs, and that is not good. Would you go to the stake with a smile, Sylvia? Yes, I believe you would. You are burning yourself up. And now I am going to prescribe for you, just as you do for these poor people. You must eat three proper meals a day. You must sleep longer–I see the light under your door at eleven or twelve, or later. And you must take yourself off for a walk every evening into the bush. Or go and visit. You can take my car and see the Pynes. They are good people.’

  ‘But I don’t have anything in common with them.’

  ‘But, Sylvia, aren’t they good enough for you? Did you know they sat the war out in that house–under siege they were. Their house was set on fire over their heads. They are brave people.’

  ‘But in the wrong cause.’

  ‘Yes, that is so, yes surely it was, but they aren’t devils just because the new newspapers say all white farmers are.’

  ‘I’ll do my best to be better. I know I get too involved.’

  ‘You and Rebecca–both of you are like little rock rabbits in a drought year. But in her case she has six children and none of them get enough to eat. You don’t feed yourself out of some sort of. . .’

  ‘I’ve never eaten that much. I don’t seem to care about food.’

  ‘A pity we couldn’t share out some characteristics between us. I like my food, God forgive me, I do.’

  • • •

  Sylvia’s life had become the circuit from her little room to the table in the main room, down to the hospital, then back, around and around. She had scarcely even been in the kitchen, Rebecca’s domain, had never entered Father McGuire’s room, and knew that Aaron slept somewhere at the back. When the priest was not at the supper table, and Rebecca said he was sick–yes, he often got sick–Sylvia went into his room for the first time. There was a strong smell of fresh and stale sweat, the sour odours of sickness. He was up on his pillows, but sliding sideways, his head loose on his shoulders. He was very still, though his chest heaved. Malaria. This was the quiescent part of the cycle.

  Small windows, one cracked, stood open above wet earth, from where came freshness, to compete with the smells. Father McGuire was cold, he was damp, his sweaty nightshirt clung to him, his hair was matted. Hot season or not, he could catch cold. Sylvia called Rebecca and the two women heaved the protesting man to a chair, a grass one, which settled under his weight. Rebecca said, ‘I want to change the bed when Father is sick but he always says No, no, leave me.’

  ‘Well, I am going to change it.’

  The change was accomplished, the patient lay back, and then, while he complained his head ached, Sylvia gave him a blanket bath. Rebecca averted her eyes from the evidence of the Father’s manhood and kept muttering that she was sorry. ‘I am so so sorry, Father, I am so so sorry.’

  A fresh nightshirt. Lemonade. A new cycle began, with the savage shakings and sweats of malaria, while he clenched his teeth and clutched at the iron rails at the top of his bed. The ague, the quartan fever, the tertian fever, the shakes, the rigours, the seizures, the trembles, of the disease that not so long ago had bred in the London marshes, in the Italian marshes, and had been brought home from anywhere in the world where there were swampy places, had not been witnessed by Sylvia until she had come here, though she had read it up on the plane. And now it seemed there was never a day when some wan depleted person did not collapse on the reed mats under the grass roofs and lie shaking.

  ‘Are you taking your pills?’ Sylvia shouted–it makes you deaf, malaria does, or the pills do–and Father McGuire said he took them but, since he had the shakes three or four times a year, believed he had gone past the help of pills.

  When he had finished with this bout, he was newly soaked, and the bed was changed again. Rebecca showed her weariness as she carried out the sheets. Sylvia asked if there was not a woman in the village who could help with the washing? Rebecca said they were busy. ‘Then what about your sisters?’ she said to the sick man. He said, ‘I don’t think Rebecca would like that.’ Rebecca was jealous of her position, and did not want to share it. Sylvia had given up trying to understand these complicated rivalries, so now suggested Aaron. The priest attempted a jest, that Aaron was an intellectual now and could not be asked to do such work: he was at the beginning of a study with Father McGuire that would make him a priest.

  Would Aaron be too good to go through and around the trees and shrubs to look for mosquito larvae? ‘I think you will find he is too good for that.’ ‘Then, why not the nuns?’ Sylvia refrained from saying that they did not seem to do much, but Father McGuire said they wouldn’t know larvae when they saw some. ‘Our good sisters are not all that keen on the bush.’

  Mosquitoes lay their eggs in any water they can find. The black wrigglers, as energetic in this phase of their lives as they will be when seeking whom they may devour, can be in the furl of an old dried pawpaw leaf, or in a rusted biscuit tin lid hidden under a bush. Yesterday Sylvia had seen the wrigglers in a tiny hollow excavated by a rivulet escaping from a flood, under the arching roots of a maize plant. The sun was sucking up the water as she watched, the wrigglers were doomed, so she did not kill them, but two hours later there was a downpour, and if they had not been washed out on to the earth to die, they were triumphantly completing their cycle.

  Father McGuire seemed semi-conscious. She thought that he was worse than he knew–long term; he would get over this attack soon. Because he was ruddy-faced, a certain underlying pallor, even yellowness, was not easily seen. He was anaemic. Malaria does that. He should take iron pills. He should take a holiday. He should . . .

  Outside in the night white shapes swirled in the wind from approaching rain: the big wash Rebecca had done earlier. Sylvia sat by the dozing man, waiting for the next paroxysm, and looked round the room, her attention free.

  Brick walls, like hers, the same split-reed ceiling, the brick floor. In a corner a statue of the Virgin. On the walls the Virgin again, conventional representations inspired, if distantly, by the Italian Renaissance, blue and white and with downcast eyes, and surely out of place here in the bush? But wait, on a stool of dark wood, and of the same dark wood, a native Mary, a vigorous young woman, was nursing a baby. That was better. Hanging from a nail on the wall near the bed, where the priest could reach it, was a rosary of ebony.

  In the Sixties, the tumults of ideology that afflicted the world had taken a local shape in the Catholic Church, in a bubbling unrest that
had attempted to dethrone the Virgin Mary. The Holy Mother was out, and with her went rosaries. Sylvia had not had a Catholic childhood, had never dipped her fingers into the Holy Water stoups, or wound pretty rosaries around them, or crossed herself or swapped Holy cards with other little girls. (‘I’ll give you three St Jeromes for one Holy Mother.’) She had never prayed to the Virgin, only to Jesus. Therefore, when she joined the Church, she did not miss what she had never known, and only slowly, when meeting older priests or nuns or church members, had learned that a revolution had taken place which had left many in mourning, and particularly for the Virgin. (She would be reinstated, decades later.) Meanwhile, in places of the world where eyes vigilant for heresy or backsliding did not reach, priests and nuns kept their rosaries and their Holy Water, their statues and pictures of the Virgin, hoping that no one would notice.

  For someone like Rebecca, who had a little card of the Holy Mother nailed on to the central pole of her hut, this ideological argument would have seemed too silly to think about: but she had never heard of it.

  On the wall in Sylvia’s room was tacked, straight on to the brick, a large reproduction of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, and some other smaller Virgins. It could be easy to conclude from that wall that this was a religion that worshipped women. The crucifix was a paltry thing in comparison. Rebecca sometimes sat on the bottom of Sylvia’s bed, her hands folded, looking at the Leonardo, sighing, tears running. ‘Oh, they are so beautiful.’ You could say that the Virgin had slipped through the interstices of dogma by the way of Art. Sylvia had not known that she cared particularly for the Holy Mother but did know she could not live without reproductions of the pictures she loved best. Fish moth were attacking the edges of the posters. She must ask someone to bring her new pictures.

  She fell asleep on her chair, looking at Father McGuire’s insipid statuette and wondering why anyone could choose that if they could have a real statue, a real picture. She would not dream of saying this to Father McGuire who had been brought up in Donegal, in a small house with many children in it, and had come here to Zimlia straight from theological college. Did he not like the Leonardo then? He had stood a long time in the doorway of Sylvia’s room, because Rebecca had told him, ‘Father, Father, come and see what Doctor Sylvia has brought us.’ His hands folded together on his stomach, and enlaced by his rosary, rose and fell as he stood there, and looked. ‘Those are the faces of angels,’ he pronounced at last, ‘and the painter must have seen them in a vision. No mortal woman ever looked like that.’