‘You forget, I was a poor boy. I was as poor as some of those people down there in the village. There was only one way out for me. I only ever had one road. I didn’t have a choice.’
‘Yes, I cannot see you as anything other than a priest, by nature.’
‘It is true–no choice, but the only one for me.’
‘But when I hear Sister Molly go on and on, if she didn’t have a cross on her chest, you’d never know she was a nun.’
‘Have you ever thought that for poor girls anywhere in Europe there was only one choice? They became nuns to spare their families the cost of feeding them. And so the convents have been stuffed with young women who’d have been better off raising families or–or any kind of work in the world. Sister Molly fifty years ago would be going mad in a convent, because she should never have been in it. But now–did you know?–she said to her Superiors, I am leaving this convent and I shall be a nun in the world. And one day I expect that she will say to herself, I’m not a nun. I never was a nun. And she will simply leave her Order, just like that. She was a poor girl and she took the way out. That is all. Yes, and I know what you are thinking–it will not be so easy for those poor black sisters up the hill to leave as it is for Sister Molly.’
• • •
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.
Edna got into the driver’s seat and Clever got in beside her. He should be in the back seat, she thought, but without much heat. She listened while he chattered about Doctor Sylvia and the classes under the trees, the books, the exercise books, the biros, much better than the school. She became curious and instead of dropping the boy at the turn-off to make his way back to the Mission, drove him there and parked.
It was still only half past twelve. Sylvia was sitting at the dining table with the priest, having lunch, where she, Edna, had been not so long before. Invited to sit down for lunch, Edna was going to, but Sylvia said she had to get down to the village, Edna mustn’t take it personally. So Edna, a woman who liked her food, let the priest make her a sandwich of some tomato slices between unbuttered bread–yes, butter was hard to get at the moment, with the drought–and she followed Sylvia. She did not know what to expect, and was impressed. Everyone knew who Mrs Pyne was, of course, and smiles of welcome came her way. They brought her a stool, and forgot she was there. She sat with the sandwich pushed into her bag, because she suspected some of those present would be hungry, and she could not eat in front of them. Good Lord, she thought. Who could ever believe that I’d see a couple of bits of dry bread and a slice of tomato as a wicked luxury?
She listened to Sylvia reading, in English, slowly pronouncing every word, from an African writer she had never heard of, though she did know that blacks wrote novels, while the people listened as if . . . God, they might be in church. Then Sylvia invited a young man, and then a girl, to tell the others what the story was about. They got it right, and Edna realised she was relieved that they did: she wanted this enterprise to be a success and was pleased with herself that she did.
Sylvia was asking an old woman to tell them all
about a drought she remembered when she was a little girl. The old woman spoke a jolting fumbling English, and Sylvia told a young woman to repeat it in better English. That drought didn’t sound much different from this one. The white government had distributed maize in the drought areas, said the old woman, and there was some appreciative clapping which could only be a criticism of their own government. When the tale was finished Sylvia told the ones who could to write down what they remembered, and the ones who couldn’t to make a story which they could tell tomorrow.
It was two thirty. Sylvia set the old woman who had told the drought story over the others, about a hundred of them, and went with Edna back up to the house. Now there would be a cup of tea and she and Sylvia could sit and talk, she could have her talk at last . . . but oddly, it seemed the need to talk and to be heard had left her.
Sylvia said, ‘They are such good people. I can’t bear it, the way they are being wasted.’
They were standing outside the house, near the car.
‘Well,’ said Edna, ‘I suppose we are all of us better than we are given a chance to be.’
She could see from the way Sylvia turned to look hard at her, that this was not the kind of thing people expected to hear from her. And why not? ‘Would you like me to come and help you with your school–or the patients?’
‘Oh, yes, would you, would you really?’
‘Let me know when you need me,’ said Edna, and got into the car and drove off, feeling she had made a big step into a new dimension. She did not know that if she had said to Sylvia then and there, ‘Can I start now?’ Sylvia would have gratefully said, ‘Oh, yes, come and help me with this sick man, he’s got malaria so badly he’s shaking himself to death.’ But Sylvia decided that politeness had spoken out of Edna and did not think about her offer again.
As for Edna she felt all her life that she had missed an opportunity, a door had opened but she had chosen not to see it. The trouble was, she had been joking about do-gooders for years, and for her to become one, just like that . . . yet she had made the offer and had meant it. For a moment she had not been the Edna Pyne she knew but someone very different. She did not tell Cedric about driving the black woman into hospital: suppose he grumbled about the petrol, and how hard it was to get any. She did mention that she had seen the village where stuff stolen from the unfinished hospital was evidence. ‘Good for them,’ was his comment. ‘Better that than it lies rotting in the bush.’
The Sweetest Dream Page 43