Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

by Doris Lessing

  He watched them leave: it was a wonderful thing, to see men going soft with idleness come back into strength and confidence.

  Then he went to the great hall where Leta was waiting for the soldiers who knew medicine. They were coming in and sitting around her, on the floor.

  She had her baskets of plants and was holding them out to be recognised, so she could be told what was known about them.

  Griot was at his table watching. What a wealth of talent and skills were there, among the refugees; he was every day surprised by them. And as always he wondered secretly about all those people, so various and so clever, some able to read and write, some of them powerful in their own countries—yet here they were, taking orders from him, Griot. Why should they? They arrived at the Centre, more dead than alive; he fed them and gave them their red fleecy blankets, and they never questioned his authority. His, and Dann’s.

  He sat and watched Leta. She spoke of her skills and heard of theirs. There were about sixty people there, men and women from so many different places along the coast and beyond. You’d think they had known each other always. What a picture he was seeing, the crowd of soldiers, their red shoulder blankets uniting them, and light coming from some high source up there in the top of the building; it struck Leta’s hair that glittered and shone. Her whiteness and that hair made a centre for the crowd. Some of them were doctors in their own countries. Leta was deferring to them.

  ‘Oh, no, no, I’m not a doctor, I’m just a plant woman; I know only what I’ve picked up.’

  It all went on until the light left the top of the building where the apertures were, and soldiers brought in the rush lights and the fish-oil lamps. The confabulation ended when it was time for the evening meal.

  Griot returned to Dann’s room and found him asleep. But Dann did not seem so limp, so gone in sleep that you could imagine him dead, or near death.

  Leta said she could stay a few days. Most of the time she was with Dann; now he always sat up and was awake when she was there.

  Soldiers came to Griot with a formal request which was not the usual kind of thing—permission to use the drill ground for a feast, permission to view this or that part of the Centre: the old rooms and their treasures had a fascination for some of the soldiers. The two men were embarrassed and, having spoken, said, ‘No harm is meant. We hope that the plant woman will take it in the spirit of the request.’

  They wanted permission to touch Leta’s hair. How could Griot be surprised, whose hand had seemed to creep out towards those tresses of its own accord?

  He went in to Dann, who was lying down, but now not so lost to the world, and said, ‘Sir, some of the soldiers have asked formally—they weren’t being impertinent—to have a feel of Leta’s hair.’ Leta was there; Griot would have been uncomfortable, asking her direct.

  Not uncomfortable enough: Leta’s always pale face froze into a stiff whiteness and her lips trembled. Dann sat up, all concern, and said, ‘It’s all right, Leta, they don’t understand…’ And he went off into Mahondi, which Leta spoke, as she did, adequately, many other languages. An impassioned exchange, which Griot’s skimpy Mahondi did not allow him to follow. Why such a reaction? He caught a word, a phrase or two: ‘brothel’ and ‘Mother’s house’.

  Griot remembered that at the Farm Kira had taunted Leta about the brothel, and her cleverness with languages. ‘Tools of your trade, Leta,’ Kira had jeered. And to Griot, ‘Didn’t you know that Leta was a whore in Bilma?’

  Not only had Griot not known, he didn’t know what a whore was, or a brothel. The child soldier had, when he ransacked his memory for it, run errands for a house where the girls gave sex in return for food. But that was his present understanding: then he had thought only that they were kind and the house welcoming and always ready to feed him.

  It had not lasted: he had to run away again. He had seen rape and thought it not much more than the rough-housing that went with fighting and looting. Then babies had been born and he had understood from that what rape led to, what sex was for. He had never heard the word whore until Kira used it. Brothel? A certain level of social order must be reached before the word can make sense. When he was a boy soldier in Agre he had relations with a female soldier but thought it a mere relieving of physical needs, and believed that was how she saw it too. Now there was a female soldier from Kharab he sometimes had sex with if there was a corner somewhere they could find privacy—not easy in that overcrowded camp. The whole question of sexual need, seen as something to be supplied like food or clothing, had not presented itself to him, until Kira’s scorn of Leta. But when he thought about it, a brothel made sense. A sensible idea, surely? Yet Kira had only to use the word brothel for Leta to shrink, and now she was in tears. Leta and Dann had switched to Charad and Griot followed easily.

  ‘They must have heard, or they wouldn’t treat me like this.’

  ‘They don’t see it like that, Leta. I am sure of it. You are a bit of a wonder—surely you must see that?’

  She kept shaking her head, imploring him with her great greeny-bluish eyes, that changed with the light. No one he had ever known had eyes like Leta’s.

  Dann said, ‘There’s a rumour in the camp that you have magic power, and that you keep it in your hair.’

  She thought this over and then said, ‘I see. Very well. But it must be done in this room, and with you here—and you too, Griot, please.’

  The two soldiers on guard went out, ordered by Dann, and came back with half a dozen soldiers. Leta sat on a pile of cushions and looked at them, as if it were hurting her to do this.

  ‘Very well,’ she said.

  A youth stepped forward, grinning with eagerness, shyness, and there was a touch of fear there too. He touched the gleaming strands that lay on Leta’s shoulders. He rubbed the gold between his fingers. He let out his breath, which he had been holding, in a sigh of wonderment. And stepped back. Another soldier took his place. A single gold hair had caught in the first soldier’s red blanket, and now he picked it off and stood admiring it. The second soldier touched Leta’s hair: his face was tense with the ordeal.

  Leta sat with a bent head and did not look at them.

  The third soldier was bold. He stroked Leta’s hair with his flat palm and breathed, ‘So pretty, so pretty.’ And stepped back. The three were smiling, bashful and pleased, like boys. Griot was smiling, because he knew these three would go back and say they had touched the magic hair and were alive to tell the story. Dann was concerned, his eyes full of sorrow, for Leta. A fourth soldier, a fifth. Outside the doors lines of soldiers stretched across the drill ground, and then another began forming beside it. Leta could not see this from where she sat, with bent head.

  The soldiers coming in were smiling because the four that had left smiled. There was a gaiety to this occasion, a lightness; a gloom was being lifted.

  They lived in a greyness that some had never known before, had found here as if it were the air of their exile. All along that coast and over the marshes mists and fogs moved or, if the view was clear, globules of wet were like the pearly droplets on the retina. When an arrow of sunlight did shoot through a cloud of vapour it painted colour where it struck and the soldiers stopped what they were doing to stand smiling, as if they saw an apparition that promised an end of this expulsion from their own lands. Inside their sheds and huts the air seemed as heavy as water, so that often lamps would be brought in when it was daylight, in an effort to lift the dark. Then the glow of light was precious, a reminder that they were not natives of this land of grey air and whining winds. And such was the effect of Leta to the soldiers; the bright shine of her hair was more than itself, was light in a dull place: just like a shaft of sunlight on a dark day. Her hair was like distilled light near that very white skin—no one saw an Alb for the first time without thinking That must be some kind of skin disease. Yet this woman had brought healing, and all the medicine men in the camps commended her, said they had learned from her. Conflicting emotions had to seethe, be
cause of that shining pale hair; gaiety and the curiosity that is not far from cruelty was beginning to show on those faces. A soldier laughed. Leta shrank. More laughter. Leta was trembling.

  Dann said, ‘The ones that have finished, leave.’

  Leta looked up and saw what seemed to her hundreds of soldiers and their excited faces. She exclaimed and stood up.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Dann.

  This order reached the outside and there was a mutter, then a grumble, then a roar of disappointment, and Leta stood shrinking, a creature hunted by the laughter she was hearing.

  ‘Leta, it was a good thing you did that,’ said Dann, and Griot admitted the next two duty guards and shut the door.

  Leta was crying. Griot did not understand, but Dann went to her and put his arms round her. ‘Poor Leta,’ said Dann, and then, ‘Don’t you see, you are so strange to them?’

  ‘I suppose I must expect always to be chosen for my hair. But I’ll go grey one day and then I’ll be like everybody else.’

  Outside, the disappointed soldiers were going back to their huts, and Leta said to the two new guards, standing at the wall, ‘Well, do you two want to touch my hair?’

  Bashful but eager smiles, and awkwardly, like boys, they came and touched her hair, but gently; they were pleased and grateful, and for the first time Leta smiled and said, ‘You’re good boys. It’s all right.’

  Leta stayed on a few days, nearly all the time with Dann.

  Now he would say to her, ‘Do you remember…’ And the listeners had no idea if what they were hearing was true or the wildest invention.

  ‘Do you remember how you used that cunning little knife of yours to cut the gold coins out of my flesh?’

  ‘Yes, they were so close to the surface, they were just under the skin.’

  ‘And do you remember how we saw the snow on the mountain? It was the first time we had seen snow and we ran about in the moonlight—and all the time Kulik could have killed us.’

  When Leta left she and Dann embraced, Dann standing up, a tall thin rail of a man, but not now trembling with weakness.

  ‘Dear Dann.’

  ‘Dear Leta.’

  ‘And if it gets too bad, may I bring the child here, to be safe?’

  ‘Mara’s child?’

  ‘Yes, Mara’s, Tamar.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Griot sent an escort of soldiers with Leta, ordered to keep her in their sight until she was with Shabis and in his care.

  Griot was at his table in the great hall and thought how alone he was; it was all too much for him, he couldn’t do it all. Then Dann came from his room, sat down with Griot and said, ‘And so, Griot, here I am.’ It had been a long time since he had done this.

  Griot talked, telling him everything, and when he got to the raids planned to take beasts and meat birds, Dann said, ‘So now we are attacking Tundra?’

  ‘How am I going to feed all these people? There were nine new ones yesterday. They say there’s a new war started up. The reed forests of Nilus are on fire, and there are many new dead.’

  Dann put his head in his hands, then lifted it to look at Griot in a way that made him exclaim, ‘What is it, sir? I don’t understand.’

  ‘No, Griot, you don’t. Those reed forests—they may burn for years. And the cities there…and so it goes on, and on, and again, and again.’

  ‘I hope they don’t all come here. Someone’s going to have to feed and clothe them.’

  ‘Suppose you don’t? Suppose you simply—don’t?’

  ‘Sir? General? Dann, sir?’

  ‘Oh, never mind. And it’s just as well you can’t see how I am thinking—because it’s a kind of poison, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s what Ali says, sir.’

  ‘Ali?’

  A small brown man, working by himself down the hall, lifted his head, hearing his name, and stood up.

  Dann looked at him casually, then with attention.

  Ali came slowly towards Dann, his thin hands clasped together on his chest, smiling. ‘Do you remember me, sir?’

  Dann slowly smiled. ‘Yes, it was on the road. We talked, and I told you to come here.’

  Ali stood in front of Dann and bowed. He lifted Dann’s right hand and laid his forehead on it, then kissed the back of it and said, ‘General, we have been waiting for you to get better.’

  His eyes were full of tears and so, Griot saw with surprise, were Dann’s.

  ‘My king is dead,’ said Ali. ‘My heart is free. And now I shall serve you, sir. Until my death, or yours.’

  ‘Until my death or yours,’ responded Dann, who seemed unsurprised by the formula, for it was that. As were the other phrases: Ali’s oath of loyalty was a series of known phrases for this occasion. But beyond the formality of the occasion was something more. These two men seemed to be sharing some sort of recognition, as if they had known each other long ago, and yet they could not have done. This was no matter of a few words spoken on a road. The hair was lifting on the back of Griot’s neck and he was thinking, What is it? What is happening?

  ‘Sir,’ Ali was saying, ‘while you were away we found marvels here. Griot will tell you. And when you are ready, there are things for you to see.’ He indicated how, down the length of the hall, near the pillars, were set tables and at each a soldier worked over the deciphering of the scripts. If Dann had noticed them before, taken in all this activity, he had not been curious enough to ask about it.

  Ali saluted and went back to his table, and Dann sat down again.

  ‘So, Griot, now tell me.’

  Griot told about the hidden place and what had been found; how Ali and others were clever, and knew old languages; so he went on, while Dann rested his head on his hand and nodded and listened, then said, ‘So, Griot, here we go again, with more of the long, long ago, the here-we-go-again, the around-and-around-and-around-we-go…’

  ‘Sir, all I know is, if we start thinking like that, then we might as well put our heads under our blankets and never take them out again.’

  ‘Well, yes, Griot.’

  ‘And we have these people to feed, sir.’

  Dann put back his head and laughed. A long time since Dann had laughed. Griot now had tears in his eyes and he said, ‘Dann, sir, to see you better again—to see you better…’

  Up got Dann, carefully, a hand on the table for balance, and said, ‘Griot, when I was in bed, wishing I were dead, I kept thinking, at least I’ve got Griot. I can rely on Griot. So, thank you, Griot.’ He went to where Ali was sitting and joined him.

  Ali talked and Dann listened, then Griot followed the two as Ali took Dann into the hidden ways that led to the secret place and shining shape of the non-glass inner room. Ali talked and Dann listened, as they moved around the transparent shape where the pages were, to be seen and not touched, until Dann had had enough and the three men returned to the misty outside air. Dann sat with Ali and Griot was at his table, just in earshot, if there were no soldiers coming to petition him.

  Griot could understand most of what they said, but now he was understanding how ignorant he was, how many words he did not know, for as they talked, their words kept going into gibberish to him.

  When Griot had been a boy soldier in Agre he did go to classes but there were many he did not attend; he had been engaged, with all of himself, with watching and admiring the young Captain Dann.

  But Dann never missed a class. Yet, like Griot, he was learning how little he knew, compared with a really learned person, who had been educated in a king’s school for scribes and translators. Ali knew of countries Dann had never heard of and, often, their languages.

  Ali told Dann that behind that enclosing non-glass were books in many languages, and at first he had despaired of finding one he knew well enough to read, so ancient and crabbed were the scripts. Sometimes there were patterns of words he knew must have descended to him through the twists and turns of time, emerging so far from their past selves they remained out of his reach. And some
times out of the reach of the other learned people he brought in to decipher the books. Ali believed that whoever had set up that great square bubble of a room had meant to preserve for the future specimens of what was being thought, and written, then, but it was a time so far in the past that Ali knew nothing except that it had existed.

  Once in that long ago, before the whole of northern Ifrik began to melt into water and marsh, long before, even when the Ice had covered Yerrup, there had been sand everywhere. When the Ice threatened and the pale-skinned inhabitants had fled south they brought with them books in many languages, some old to them, even then. At first these books were in the cities they built, replicas of the cities of Yerrup now under the Ice, and then there were wars and invasion and danger, and the books were buried in the sand. There, and quite by chance, since anyone who knew anything about the old sand libraries was dead and forgotten, some people excavating for new foundations—this was before the Ice began to melt again and the earth started to turn into marsh—came on enormous pits, crammed full of old books, preserved by the dry sand. Whoever had found them tried to save them.

  Ali said he believed the need to preserve these records of the past—and remember that these were the only records of that past—built the Centre: probably that was the main reason for building the Centre. For not only books and papers were found in the sandpits but every kind of artefact and machine. All these were put into the Centre, which then spread much further than it did today, before all its northern and western peripheries had gone under the marshes. But the books, the records, were put into the hidden secret heart of the Centre and presumably—this had to be deduced—there were people who understood at least something of the old languages, because they were not placed at random but in their categories. So well had that work been done that in all that time—and there was no way of calculating how long, no way of marking it, save by saying, ‘There was no Ice over Yerrup, then the Ice came down and now the Ice is going’—the transparent shell which was not-glass had stood there intact, while the Centre crumbled around it. But the records and books remained safe, in the not-glass case that must be airless, because otherwise they would have crumbled long ago.