Mr Tomlinson shrugged again, giving it up. ‘Well,’ he said, practically, ‘what do you mean to do?’
‘If you say he has talent, I’ll send him to the university and he can study Art.’
After a long pause, Mr Tomlinson murmured: ‘What a fortunate boy he is.’ He meant to convey depths of disillusionment and irony, but Mr Macintosh said: ‘I always did have a fancy for him.’
He took Mr Tomlinson back to the city, and as he dropped him on his veranda, presented him with a cheque for fifty pounds, which Mr Tomlinson most indignantly returned. ‘Oh, give it to charity,’ said Mr Macintosh impatiently, and went to his car, leaving Mr Tomlinson to heal his susceptibilities in any way he chose.
When Mr Macintosh reached his mine again it was midnight, and there were no lights in the Clarkes’ house, and so his need to be generous must be stifled until the morning.
Then he went to Annie Clarke and told her he would send Tommy to university, where he could be an artist, and Mrs Clarke wept gratitude, and said that Mr Macintosh was much kinder than Tommy deserved, and perhaps he would learn sense yet and go back to his books.
As far as Mr Macintosh was concerned it was all settled.
He set off through the trees to find Tommy and announce his future to him.
But when he arrived at seeing distance there were two figures, Dirk and Tommy, seated on the trunk talking, and Mr Macintosh stopped among the trees, filled with such bitter anger at this fresh check to his plans that he could not trust himself to go on. So he returned to his house, and brooded angrily – he knew exactly what was going to happen when he spoke to Tommy, and now he must make up his mind, there was no escape from a decision.
And while Mr Macintosh mused bitterly in his house, Tommy and Dirk waited for him; it was now all as clear to them as it was to him.
Dirk had come out of the trees to Tommy the moment the two men left the day before. Tommy was standing by the fanged root, looking at the shape of Dirk in it, trying to understand what was going to be demanded of him. The word ‘artist’ was on his tongue, and he tasted it, trying to make the strangeness of it fit that powerful shape struggling out of the wood. He did not like it. He did not want – but what did he want? He felt pressure on himself, the faint beginnings of something that would one day be like a tunnel of birth from which he must fight to emerge; he felt the obligations working within himself like a goad which would one day be a whip perpetually falling behind him so that he must perpetually move onwards.
His sense of fetters and debts was confirmed when Dirk came to stand by him. First he asked: ‘What did they want?’
‘They want me to be an artist, they always want me to be something,’ said Tommy sullenly. He began throwing stones at the tree and shying them off along the tops of the grass. Then one hit the figure of Dirk, and he stopped.
Dirk was looking at himself. ‘Why do you make me like that?’ he asked. The narrow, strong face expressed nothing but that familiar, sardonic antagonism, as if he said: ‘You, too – just like the rest!’
‘Why, what’s the matter with it?’ challenged Tommy at once.
Dirk walked around it, then back. ‘You’re just like all the rest,’ he said.
‘Why? Why don’t you like it?’ Tommy was really distressed. Also, his feeling was: What’s it got to do with him? Slowly he understood that his emotion was that belief in his right to freedom which Dirk always felt immediately, and he said in a different voice: ‘Tell me what’s wrong with it?’
‘Why do I have to come out of the wood? Why haven’t I any hands or feet?’
‘You have, but don’t you see …’ But Tommy looked at Dirk standing in front of him and suddenly gave an impatient movement: ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, it’s only a statue.’
He sat on the trunk and Dirk beside him. After a while he said: ‘How should you be, then?’
‘If you made yourself, would you be half wood?’
Tommy made an effort to feel this, but failed. ‘But it’s not me, it’s you.’ He spoke with difficulty, and thought: But it’s important, I shall have to think about it later. He almost groaned with the knowledge that here it was, the first debt, presented for payment.
Dirk said suddenly: ‘Surely it needn’t be wood? You could do the same thing if you put handcuffs on my wrists.’ Tommy lifted his head and gave a short, astonished laugh. ‘Well, what’s funny?’ said Dirk, aggressively. ‘You can’t do it the easy way, you have to make me half wood, as if I was more a tree than a human being.’
Tommy laughed again, but unhappily. ‘Oh, I’ll do it again,’ he acknowledged at last. ‘Don’t fuss about that one, it’s finished. I’ll do another.’
There was a silence.
Dirk said: ‘What did that man say about you?’
‘How do I know?’
‘Does he know about art?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Perhaps you’ll be famous,’ said Dirk at last. ‘In that book you gave me, it said about painters. Perhaps you’ll be like that.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ said Tommy, roughly. ‘You’re just as bad as he is.’
‘Well, what’s the matter with it?’
‘Why have I got to be something? First it was a sailor, and then it was a scholar, and now it’s an artist.’
‘They wouldn’t have to make me be anything,’ said Dirk sarcastically.
‘I know,’ admitted Tommy grudgingly. And then, passionately: ‘I shan’t go to university unless he sends you too.’
‘I know,’ said Dirk at once, ‘I know you won’t.’
They smiled at each other, that small, shy, revealed smile, which was so hard for them because it pledged them to such a struggle in the future.
Then Tommy asked: ‘Why didn’t you come near me all this time?’
‘I get sick of you,’ said Dirk. ‘I sometimes feel I don’t want to see a white face again, not ever. I feel that I hate you all, every one.’
‘I know,’ said Tommy, grinning. Then they laughed, and the last strain of dislike between them vanished.
They began to talk, for the first time, of what their lives would be.
Tommy said: ‘But when you’ve finished training to be an engineer, what will you do? They don’t let coloured people be engineers.’
‘Things aren’t always going to be like that,’ said Dirk.
‘It’s going to be very hard,’ said Tommy, looking at him questioningly, and was at once reassured when Dirk said, sarcastically: ‘Hard, it’s going to be hard? Isn’t it hard now, white boy?’
Later that day Mr Macintosh came towards them from his house.
He stood in front of them, that big, shrewd, rich man, with his small, clever grey eyes, and his narrow, loveless mouth; and he said aggressively to Tommy: ‘Do you want to go to the university and be an artist?’
‘If Dirk comes too,’ said Tommy immediately.
‘What do you want to study?’ Mr Macintosh asked Dirk, direct.
‘I want to be an engineer,’ said Dirk at once.
‘If I pay your way through the university then at the end of it I’m finished with you. I never want to hear from you and you are never to come back to this mine once you leave it.’
Dirk and Tommy both nodded, and the instinctive agreement between them fed Mr Macintosh’s bitter unwillingness in the choice, so that he ground out viciously: ‘Do you think you two can be together in the university? You don’t understand. You’ll be living separate, and you can’t go around together just as you like.’
The boys looked at each other, and then as if some sort of pact had been made between them, simply nodded.
‘You can’t go to university anyway, Tommy, until you’ve done a bit better at school. If you go back for another year and work you can pass your matric. and go to university, but you can’t go now, right at the bottom of the class.’
Tommy said: ‘I’ll work.’ He added at once: ‘Dirk’ll need more books to study here till we can go.’
The anger wa
s beginning to swell Mr Macintosh’s face, but Tommy said: ‘It’s only fair. You burnt them, and now he hasn’t any at all.’
‘Well,’ said Mr Macintosh heavily. ‘Well, so that’s how it is!’
He looked at the two boys, seated together on the tree trunk. Tommy was leaning forward, eyes lowered, a troubled but determined look on his face. Dirk was sitting erect, looking straight at his father with eyes filled with hate.
‘Well,’ said Mr Macintosh, with an effort at raillery which sounded harsh to them all: ‘Well, I send you both to university and you don’t give me so much as a thank you!’
At this, both faced towards him, with such bitter astonishment, that he flushed.
‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Well, well …’ And then he turned to leave the clearing, and cried out as he went, so as to give the appearance of dominance: ‘Remember, laddie, I’m not sending you unless you do well at school this year …’
And so he left them and went back to his house, an angry old man, defeated by something he did not begin to understand.
As for the boys, they were silent when he had gone.
The victory was entirely theirs, but now they had to begin again, in the long and difficult struggle to understand what they had won and how they would use it.
Events in the Skies
I once knew a man, a black man, who told me he had been brought up in a village so far from the nearest town he had to walk a day to reach it. Later he knew this ‘town’ was itself a village, having in it a post office, a shop, and a butcher. He had still to experience the white men’s towns, which he had heard about. This was in the southern part of Africa. The villagers were subsistence farmers, and grew maize, millet, pumpkins, chickens. They lived as people have done for thousands of years except for one thing. Every few days a little glittering airplane appeared in the sky among the clouds and the circling hawks. He did not know what it was, where it came from, or where it went. Remote, unreachable, a marvel, it appeared over the forest where the sun rose, and disappeared where it went down. He watched for it. He thought about it. His dreams filled with shining and fragile emanences that could sit on a branch and sing or that ran from his father and the other hunting men like a duiker or a hare, but that always escaped their spears. He told me that when he remembered his childhood that airplane was in the sky. It connected not with what he was now, a sober modern man living in a large town, but with the tales and songs of his people, for it was not real, not something to be brought down to earth and touched.
When he was about nine his family went to live with relatives near a village that was larger than either the handful of huts in the bush or the ‘town’ where they had sometimes bought a little sugar or tea or a piece of cloth. There the black people worked in a small gold mine. He learned that twice a week an airplane landed in the bush on a strip of cleared land, unloaded parcels, mail, and sometimes a person, and then flew off. He was by now going to a mission school. He walked there with his elder brother and his younger sister every morning; leaving at six to get there at eight, then walked back in the afternoon. Later, when he measured distances not by the time it took to cover them, but by the miles, yards, and feet he learned in school, he knew he walked eight miles to school and eight back.
This school was his gateway to the life of riches and plenty enjoyed by white people. This is how he saw it. Motorcars, bicycles, the goods in the shops, clothes – all these things would be his if he did well in school. School had to come first, but on Saturdays and Sundays and holidays he went stealthily to the edge of the airstrip, sometimes with his brother and sister, and crouched there waiting for the little plane. The first time he saw a man jump down out of its high uptilted front his heart stopped, then it thundered, and he raced shouting exuberantly into the bush. He had not before understood that this apparition of the skies, like a moth but made out of some substance unknown to him, had a person in it: a young white man, like the storemen or the foremen in the mines. In the village of his early childhood he had played with grasshoppers, pretending they were airplanes. Now he made little planes out of the silver paper that came in the packets of cigarettes that were too expensive for his people to smoke.
With these infant models in his hands the airplane seemed close to him, and he crept out of the bush to reach out and touch it, but the pilot saw him, shouted at him – and so he ran away. In his mind was a region of confusion, doubt and delight mixed, and this was the distance between himself and the plane. He never said to himself, ‘I could become a pilot when I grow up.’ On the practical level what he dreamed of was a bicycle, but they cost so much – five pounds – that his father, who had one, would need a year to get it paid off. (His father had become a storeman in a mine shop, and that job, and the move to this new place, was to enable his children to go to school and enter the new world.) No, what that airplane meant was wonder, a dazzlement of possibilities, but they were all unclear. When he saw that airplane on the landing strip or, later, that one or another in the skies, it made him dream of how he would get on his bicycle when he had one, and race along the paths of the bush so fast that …
When he had finished four years at school he could have left. He already had more schooling than most of the children of his country at that time. He could read a little, write a little, and do sums rather well. With these skills he could get a job as a boss boy or perhaps working in a shop. But this is not what his father wanted. Because these children were clever, they had been invited to attend another mission school, and the fees meant the father had to work not only at the store job in the daytime, but at night as a watchman. And they, the children, did odd jobs on weekends and through holidays, running errands, selling fruit at the back doors of white houses with their mother. They all worked and worked; and, again, walking to and from the new school took the children four hours of every day. (I once knew a man from Czechoslovakia who said he walked six miles to school and six miles back in snow or heat or rain, because he was a poor boy, one of eleven children, and this is what he had to do to get an education. He became a doctor.)
This man, the African, at last finished school. He had understood the nature of the cloudy region in his mind where the airplane still lived. He had seen much larger planes. He knew now the shining creature of his childhood was nothing compared to the monsters that went to the big airports in the cities. A war had come and gone, and he had read in the newspapers of great battles in Europe and the East, and he understood what airplanes could be used for. The war had not made much difference to him and his family. Then his country, which until that point had been loosely ruled by Britain in a way that affected him personally very little (and he knew this was unlike some of the countries further south), became independent and had a black government. By now the family lived in the capital of the country. They had a two-room house in a township. This move, too, this bettering, was for the children. Now the brother took a job in a store as a clerk, and the sister was a nurse in the hospital, but he decided to go on learning. At last he became an accountant and understood the modern world and what had separated that poor black child he had been from the airplane. These days he might smile at his early imaginings, but he loved them. He still loved the little airplane. He said to himself: ‘It was never possible for me to fly an airplane, it never occurred to me, because black men did not become pilots. But my son …’
His son, brought up in a town where airplanes came and went every day, said, ‘Who wants to be a pilot? What a life!’ He decided to be a lawyer, and that is what he is.
My friend, who told me all this, said, ‘My son would never understand, never in his life, what that little plane meant to me and the kids in the bush.’
But I understood. On the farm where I grew up, once a week I watched a small airplane appear, coming from the direction of the city. It descended over the ridge into the bush on to the airstrip of the Mandora Mine, a Lonrho mine. I was transported with delight and longing. In those days, ordinary people did not fly. A lucky c
hild might get taken up for a ‘flip’ around the sky, price five pounds. It was a lot of money, and I did not fly for years.
Last year I met a little Afghan girl, a refugee with her family in Pakistan. She had lived in a village that had water running through it from the mountains, and it had orchards and fields, and all her family and her relatives were there. Sometimes a plane crossed the sky from one of the larger cities of Afghanistan to another. She would run to the edge of the village to get nearer to that shining thing in the sky, and stand with her hands cradling her head as she stared up … up … up … Or she called to her mother, ‘An airplane, look!’
And then the Russians invaded, and one day the visiting airplane was a gunship. It thundered over her village, dropped its bombs, and flew off. The house she had lived in all her days was rubble, and her mother and her little brother were dead. So were several of her relatives. And as she walked across the mountains with her father, her uncle, her aunt, and her three surviving cousins, they were bombed by the helicopters and the planes, so that more people died. Now, living in exile in the refugee camp, when she thinks of the skies of her country she knows they are full of aircraft, day and night, and the little plane that flew over her village with the sunlight shining on its wings seems like something she once imagined, a childish dream.
About the Author
DORIS LESSING, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of recent decades. A Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature, she has been awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award and the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature, as well as a host of other international awards. She lives in north London.
By the same author
NOVELS
This Was the Old Chief's Country Page 47