African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  The garden was all a fluster and a flurry of returning birds. Then silence, and the sky was empty.

  The old man turned, slowly, taking his time; he lifted his eyes to smile proudly down the garden at his grand-daughter. She was staring at him. She did not smile. She was wide-eyed and pale in the cold shadow, and he saw the tears run shivering off her face.

  Plants and Girls

  THERE was a boy who lived in a small house in a small town in the centre of Africa.

  Until he was about twelve, this house had been the last in the street, so that he walked straight from the garden, across a railway line, and into the veld. He spent most of his time wandering by himself through the vleis and the kopjes. Then the town began to grow, so that in the space of a year a new suburb of smart little houses lay between him and the grass and trees. He watched this happening with a feeling of surprised anger. But he did not go through the raw new streets to the vlei where the river ran and the little animals moved. He was a lethargic boy, and it seemed to him as if some spell had been put on him, imprisoning him forever in the town. Now he would walk through the new streets, looking down at the hard glittering tarmac, thinking of the living earth imprisoned beneath it. Where the veld trees had been allowed to stay, he stood gazing, thinking how they drew their strength through the layers of rubble and broken brick, direct from the breathing soil and from the invisibly running underground rivers. He would stand there, staring; and it would seem to him that he could see those fresh, subtly running streams of water moving this way and that beneath the tarmac; and he stretched out his fingers like roots towards the earth. People passing looked away uncomfortably. Children called out: “Mooney, Mooney, mooning again!” Particularly the children from the house opposite laughed and teased him. They were a large, noisy family, solid in the healthy strength of their numbers. He could hardly distinguish one from another; he felt that the house opposite was filled like a box with plump, joyous, brown-eyed people whose noisy, cheerful voices frightened him.

  He was a lanky, thin-boned youth whose face was long and unfinished-looking; and his eyes were enormous, blue, wide, staring, with the brilliance of distance in them.

  His mother, when he returned to the house, would say tartly: “Why don’t you go over and play with the children? Why don’t you go into the bush like you used to? Why don’t you. . . .”

  He was devoted to his mother. He would say vaguely, “Oh, I don’t know,” and kick stones about in the dust, staring away over the house at the sky, knowing that she was watching him through the window as she sewed, and that she was pleased to have him there, in spite of her tart, complaining voice. Or he would go into the room where she sat sewing, and sit near her, in silence, for hours. If his father came into the room he began to fidget and soon went away. His father spoke angrily about his laziness and his unnatural behaviour.

  He made the mother fetch a doctor to examine the boy. It was from this time that Frederick took the words “not normal” as his inheritance. He was not normal; well, he accepted it. They made a fact of something he had always known because of the way people looked at him and spoke to him. He was neither surprised nor dismayed at what he was. And when his mother wept over him, after the doctor left, he scarcely heard the noise of her tears; he smiled at her with the warm childish grin that no one else had ever seen, for he knew he could always depend on her.

  His father’s presence was a fact he accepted. On the surface they made an easy trio, like an ordinary family. At meals they talked like ordinary people. In the evenings his father sometimes read to him, for Frederick found it hard to read, although he was now halfway through his teens; but there were moments when the old man fell silent, staring in unconcealable revulsion at this son he had made; and Frederick would let his eyes slide uncomfortably away, but in the manner of a person who is embarrassed at someone else’s shortcomings. His mother accepted him; he accepted himself; that was enough.

  When his father died he was sorry and cried with his fists in his eyes like a baby. At the graveside the neighbours looked at this great shambling child, with his colourless locks of hair and the big red fists rubbing at his eyes, and felt relieved at the normal outburst of grief. But afterwards it was he and his mother alone in the small suburban house; and they never spoke of the dead father who had vanished entirely from their lives, leaving nothing behind him. She lived for her son, waiting for his return from school, or from his rambles around the streets; and she never spoke of the fact that he was in a class with children five years his junior or that he was always alone at week-ends and holidays, never with other children.

  He was a good son. He took her tea in the mornings at the time the sun rose and watched her crinkled old face light up from the pillow as he set down the tray by her knees. But he did not stay with her then. He went out again quickly, shutting the door, his eyes turned from the soft, elderly white shoulders, which were not, for him, his mother. This is how he saw her: in her dumpy flowered apron, her brown sinewy arms setting food before him, her round spectacles shining, her warm face smiling. Yet he did not think of her as an old lady. Perhaps he did not see her at all. He would sometimes put out his great lank hand and stroke her apron. Once he went secretly into her bedroom and took her hairbrush off the dressing-table and brushed the apron, which was lying on the bed; and he put the apron on and laughed out loud at the sight of himself in the mirror.

  Later, when he was seventeen, a very tall, awkward youth with the strange-lighted blue eyes, too old to be put to bed with a story after supper, he wandered about by himself through that area of ugly new houses that seemed to change under the soft brightness of the moon into a shadowy beauty. He walked for hours, or stood still gazing dimly about him at the deep starry sky or at the soft shapes of trees.

  There was a big veld tree that stood a short way from their gate in a space between two street-lamps, so that there was a well of shadow beneath it which attracted him very much. He stood beneath the tree, listening to the wind moving gently in the leaves and feeling it stir his hair like fingers. He would move slowly in to the tree until his long fingers met the rough bark; and he stroked the tree curiously, learning it, thinking: under this roughness and hardness moves the sap, like rivers under the earth. He came to spend his evenings there, instead of walking among the houses and looking in with puzzled, unenvious eyes through the windows at the other kind of people. One evening an extraordinarily violent spasm shook him, so that he found himself locked about that harsh strong trunk, embracing it violently, his arms and thighs knotted about it, sobbing and muttering angry words. Afterwards he slowly went home, entering the small, brightly lighted room shamedly; and his great blue eyes sought his mother’s, and he was surprised that she did not say anything, but smiled at him as usual. Always there was this assurance from her; and as time went past, and each night he returned to the tree, caressing and stroking it, murmuring words of love, he would come home simply, smiling his wide childish smile, waiting for her to smile back, pleased with him.

  But opposite was still that other house full of people; the children were growing up; and one evening when he was leaning against the tree in deep shadow, his arm loosely about it, as if around a tender friend, someone stopped outside the space of shadow and peered in saying: “Why, Mooney, what are you doing here by yourself?” It was one of the girls from that house, and when he did not reply she came towards him, finally putting out her hand to touch his arm. The touch struck cruelly through him, and he moved away; and she said with a jolly laugh: “What’s the matter? I won’t eat you.” She pulled him out into the yellowy light from the street-lamp and examined him. She was a fattish, untidy, bright girl, one of the middle children, full of affection for everything in the world; and this odd, silent youth standing there quite still between her hands affected her with amused astonishment, so that she said, “Well, you are a funny boy, aren’t you?” She did not know what to do with him, so at last she took him home over the street. He had never been inside her h
ouse before, and it was like a foreign country. There were so many people, so much noise and laughter, and the wireless was shouting out words and music. He was silent and smiling in this world which had nothing to do with himself.

  His passive smile piqued the girl, and later when he got up saying: “My mother’s waiting for me,” she replied, “Well, at any rate you can take me to the movies tomorrow.”

  He had never taken a girl out; had never been to the movies save with his parents, as a child is taken; and he smiled as at a ridiculous idea. But next evening she came and made him go with her.

  “What’s the matter, Mooney?” she asked, taking his arm. “Don’t you like me? Why don’t you take girls out? Why do you always stay around your mother? You aren’t a baby any longer.”

  These words he listened to smiling; they did not make him angry, because she could not understand that they had nothing to do with him.

  He sat in the theatre beside the girl and waited for the picture to be over. He would not have been in the least surprised if the building and the screen and the girl had vanished, leaving him lying under a tree with not a house in sight, nothing but the veld—the long grasses, the trees, the birds and the little animals. Afterwards they walked home, and he listened to her chattering, scolding voice without replying. He did not mind being with her; but he forgot her as soon as she had gone in at her gate. He wandered back across the street to his own gate and looked at the tree standing in its gulf of shadow with the moonlight on its branches. He took two steps towards it and stopped; another step, and stopped again; and finally turned with a bolting movement, as if in fear, and shambled quickly in to his mother. She glanced up at him with a tight, suspicious face; and he knew she was angry, though she did not speak. Soon he went to bed, unable to bear this unspoken anger. He slept badly and dreamed of the tree. And next night he went to it as soon as it was dark, and stood holding the heavy dark trunk in his arms.

  The girl from opposite was persistent. Soon he knew, because of the opposition of his mother, that he had a girl, as ordinary young men have girls.

  Why did she want him? Perhaps it was just curiosity. She had been brought up in all that noise and warm quarrelling and laughter; and so Frederick, who neither wanted her nor did not want her, attracted her. She scolded him and pleaded with him: “Don’t you love me? Don’t you want to marry me?”

  At this he gave her his rambling, confused grin. The word marriage made him want to laugh. It was ridiculous. But to her there was nothing ridiculous in it. In her home, marriages took place between boys and girls, and there were always festivals and love-making and new babies.

  Now he would take her in his arms beside the tree outside the gate, embracing her as he had embraced the tree, forgetting her entirely, murmuring strangely over her head among the shadows. She hated it and she loved it; for her, it was like being hypnotised. She scolded him, stayed away, returned; and yet he would not say he would marry her.

  This went on for some time; though for Frederick it was not a question of time. He did not mind having her in his arms under the tree, but he could not marry her. He was driven, night after night, to the silent love-making, with the branches of the tree between him and the moon; and afterwards he went straight to his room, so as not to face his mother.

  Then she got ill. Instead of going with the girl at night, he stayed at home, making his mother drinks, silently sitting beside her, putting wet handkerchiefs on her forehead. In the mornings the girl looked at him over the hedge and said, “Baby! Baby!”

  “But my mother’s sick,” he said, finding these words with difficulty from the dullness of his mind. At this she only laughed. Finally she left him. It was like a tight string snapping from him, so that he reeled back into his own house with his mother. He watched the girl going in and out of her house with her sisters, her brothers, her friends, her young men; at night he watched her dancing on the verandah to the gramophone. But she never looked back at him. His mother was still an invalid and kept to her chair; and he understood she was now getting old, but it did not come into his head that she might die. He looked after her. Before going off to the office at the railways, where he arranged luggage under the supervision of another clerk, he would lift his mother from her bed, turn away from her while she painfully dressed herself, support her into a chair by the window, fetch her food, and leave her for the day. At night he returned directly to her from work and sat beside her until it was time to sleep. Sometimes, when the desire for the shadowy street outside became too strong, he would go out for a little time and stand beside his tree. He listened to the wind moving in the branches and thought: It’s an old tree, it’s too old. If a leaf fell in the darkness he thought: The leaves are falling—it’s dying; it’s too old to live.

  When his mother at last died, he could not understand that she was dead. He stood at her graveside in the efficient, cared-for cemetery of this new town, with its antiseptic look because of the neatness of the rows of graves and the fresh clean sunlight, and gazed down at the oblong hole in the red earth, where the spades had smoothed the steep sides into shares of glistening hardness, and saw the precisely fitting black box at the bottom of the hole, and lifted his head to stare painfully at the neighbours, among whom was the girl from opposite, although he did not see her.

  He went home to the empty house that was full of his mother. He left everything as it was. He did not expand his life to fill the space she had used. He was still a child in the house, while her chair stood empty, and her bed had pillows stacked on it, and her clothes hanging over the foot.

  There was very little money. His affairs were managed by a man at the bank in whose custody he had been left, and he was told how much he could spend. That margin was like a safety line around his life; and he liked taking his small notebook where he wrote down every penny he spent at each month’s end to the man at the bank.

  He lived on, knowing that his mother was dead, but only because people had said she was. After a time he was driven by his pain down to the cemetery. The grave was a mound of red earth. The flowers of the funeral had died long ago. There was a small headstone of granite. A bougainvillaea creeper had been planted on the grave; it spread its glossy green branches over the stone in layers of dark shining green and clusters of bleeding purple flowers. The first time he visited the cemetery he stood staring for a long time. Later he would sit by the headstone, fingering the leaves of the plant. Slowly he came to understand that his mother lay underneath where he sat. He saw her folded in the earth, her rough brown forearms crossed comfortably on her breast, her flowered apron pulled down to her fat knees, her spectacles glinting, her wrinkled old face closed in sleep. And he fingered the smooth hard leaves, noting the tiny working veins, thinking: They feed on her. The thought filled him with panic and drove him from the grave. Yet he returned again and again, to sit under the pressure of the heavy yellow sunlight, on the rough warm stone, looking at the red and purple flowers, feeling the leaves between his fingers.

  One day, at the grave, he broke off a branch of the bougainvillaea plant and returned with it to the house, where he set it in a vase by his bed. He sat beside it, touching and smoothing the leaves. Slowly the branch lost its colour and the clusters of flowers grew limp. A spray of stiff, dead, pale leaves stood up out of the vase; and his eyes rested on it, brilliant, vague, spectral, while his face contracted with pain and with wonder.

  During the long solitary evenings he began again to stand at his gate, under the stars, looking about him in the darkness. The big tree had been cut down; all the wild trees in that street were gone, because of the danger from the strong old roots to the bricks of the foundations of the houses. The authorities had planted new saplings, domestic and educated trees like bauhinia and jacaranda. Immediately outside his gate, where the old tree had been, was one of these saplings. It grew quickly: one season it was a tiny plant in a little leaning shed of grass; the next it was as high as his head. There was an evening that he went to it, leaning h
is forehead against it, not thinking, his hands sliding gently and unsurely up and down the long slim trunk. This taut supple thing was nothing he had known; it was strange to him; it was too slight and weak and there was no shadow around it. And yet he stood there night after night, unconscious of the windows about him where people might be looking out, unconscious of passers-by, feeling and fumbling at the tree, letting his eyes stray past to the sky or to the lines of bushy little saplings along the road or to the dusty crowding hedges.

  One evening he heard a bright, scornful voice say: “What do you think you’re doing?” and he knew it was the girl from opposite. But the girl from opposite had married long ago and was now an untidy, handsome matron with children of her own; she had left him so far behind that she could now nod at him with careless kindness, as if to say: Well, well, so you’re still there, are you?

  He peered and gawked at the girl in his intense ugly way that was yet attractive because of his enormous lighted eyes. Then, for him, the young and vigorous creature who was staring at him with such painful curiosity became the girl from opposite. She was in fact the other girl’s sister, perhaps ten years her junior. She was the youngest of that large, pulsing family, who were all married and gone, and she was the only one who had known loneliness. When people said, with the troubled callousness, the necessary callousness that protects society against its rotten wood: “He’s never been the same since the death of his mother; he’s quite crazy now,” she felt, not merely an embarrassed and fundamentally indifferent pity, but a sudden throb of sympathy. She had been watching Frederick for a long time. She was ready to defend him against people who said, troubled by this attraction of the sick for the healthy, “For God’s sake what do you see in him, can’t you do better than that?”