The Sweetest Dream (66 page)

‘And I hear there's a new headmaster at last?'

‘Yes, but you see, Sylvia, they don't like coming out to these
far-out places, and this one's already had his problems with the
drink.'

‘I see.'

‘But he has a big family and he will have this house.'

They both knew there was more to be said, and at last he
asked, ‘And now, what are you going to do with those
boys?'

‘I should not have set up their expectations and I did. Though
I never actually promised them anything.'

‘Ah, but it is the great wonderful rich world there that is the
promise.'

‘And so, what should I do?'

‘You must take them with you to London. Send them to a
real school. Let them learn doctoring. God knows this poor
country will be needing its doctors.'

She was silent.

‘Sylvia, they are healthy. Their father died before there was
AIDS. Joshua's real children will die, but not these two. He's
waiting to see you, by the way.'

‘I am surprised he is still alive.'

‘He is alive only to see you. And he is quite mad now. You
must be prepared for that.'

Before giving her a candle to take to her room, he held his
high to look into her face, and said, ‘Sylvia, I know you very
well, my child. I know you are blaming yourself for everything.'

‘Yes.'

‘It is a long time since you have asked me to confess you, but
I do not need to hear what you have to say. In the state of mind
you are in, when you are low from the illness, you must not trust
what you are thinking about yourself.'

‘The devil lurks in the absence of red corpuscles.'

‘The devil lurks where there is bad health–I hope you are
taking your iron pills.'

‘And I am trusting you to take yours.'

They embraced, both needing to weep, and turned away to
go to their rooms. He was leaving early, and said he probably
wouldn't see her, meaning he didn't want to go through another
parting. He was not going to say, like Sister Molly: See you
around.

Next morning he was gone: Aaron had taken him to the
turn-off where he would be picked up by the Old Mission's
car.

Zebedee and Clever were waiting for Sylvia on the path to
the village. Half the huts were empty. A starving dog was nosing
about in the dust. The hut where Tenderai had looked after the
books stood open, and the books had gone.

‘We tried to look after them, we tried.'

‘Never mind.'

The village before she had left had been afflicted, it had been
threatened, but it had been alive: now its spirit had gone. It was
Rebecca who had gone. In institutions and villages, in hospitals
and in schools, often it is one person who is the soul of the place,
though he or she may be the janitor, a chairman, or a priest's
servant. When Rebecca died, the village died.

The three went up through the bush to where the graves
were, getting on for fifty of them now, Rebecca's and her son
Tenderai's among the newest, two oblongs of red dust under a
big tree. Sylvia stood, looking, and the lads, seeing her face, came
to her and she held them close and now she did weep, their faces
on her head: they were taller than she was.

‘And now you must see our father.'

‘Yes, I know.'

‘Please do not be cross with us. The police came and took
away the medicines and the bandages. We told them you paid
for them, with your money.'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘We told them it was stealing, they were your medicines.'

‘Really, it doesn't matter.'

‘And the grandmothers are using the hospital for the sick
children.'

Everywhere in Zimlia old women and sometimes old men
whose grown-up children had died were left trying to feed and
keep young children.

‘How are they feeding them?'

‘The new headmaster said he will give them food.'

‘But they are too many, how can he feed them all?'

They stood on a small rise, opposite the one where the priest's
house stood, looking down into Sylvia's hospital. Three old
women sat in the shade under the grass roofs, with about twenty
small children. Old, that is, by third world standards: in luckier
countries these fifty-year-old women would be dieting and finding
lovers.

Under Joshua's big tree lay a heap of rags, or something like
a big python, mottled with shadow. Sylvia knelt beside him and
said, ‘Joshua.' He did not move. There are people who, before
they die, look as they will after they are dead: the skeleton is
so close under the skin. Joshua's face was all bone, with dry
skin sunk into the hollows. He opened his eyes and licked
scummy lips with a cracked tongue. ‘Is there water?' asked
Sylvia, and Zebedee ran to the old women, who seemed to be
protesting, why waste water on the nearly dead? But Zebedee
scooped a plastic cup through water that stood in a plastic
pail open to dust and any blown leaves, and brought it to his
father, knelt, and held the cup to the cracked lips. Suddenly
the ancient man (in late middle age by other standards) came
alive and drank desperately, the cords of his throat working.
Then he shot out a hand like a skeleton's and grasped Sylvia's
wrist. It was like being held in a circlet of bone. He could not
sit up, but he raised his head and began mumbling what she knew
must be curses, imprecations, his deep-sunk eyes burning with
hatred.

‘He doesn't mean it,' said Clever. ‘No, he doesn't,' pleaded
Zebedee.

Then Joshua mumbled, ‘You take my children. You must
take them to England.'

Her wrist was aching because of the tight bone bracelet.
‘Joshua, let me go, you're hurting me.'

His grip tightened, ‘You must promise me, now-now, you
must promise.' His head was lifted up off his nearly-dead body as
a snake lifts its head when its back is broken.

‘Joshua, let my wrist go.'

‘You will promise me. You will . . .' And he mumbled his
curses, his eyes hard on hers, and his head fell back. But his eyes
did not close, nor did he stop his mumbled hatred.

‘Very well, I promise, Joshua. Now let me go.' His grip did
not relax: she was wildly thinking that he would die and she
would be handcuffed to a skeleton.

‘Don't believe what he says, Doctor Sylvia,' whispered
Zebedee. ‘He doesn't mean what he says,' said Clever.

‘Perhaps it is just as well I don't know what he's saying.'

The bone handcuff fell off her wrist. Her hand was numb.
She squatted beside the near-corpse, shaking her hand.

‘Who is going to look after him?'

‘The old women are looking after him.'

Sylvia went to the women and gave them money, nearly all
she had, leaving enough to get back to Senga. It would keep these
children fed for a month, perhaps.

‘And now get your things, we're leaving.'

‘Now?' They fell back from her, with the shock of it; what
they had longed for was here, was close–and it was a separation
from everything they knew.

‘I'll get you clothes, in Senga.'

They went running down to the village, and she walked up
the hill between the oleanders and the plumbago to the house,
where everything she was going to take was already in her little
hold-all. To Rebecca's niece she said that if she wanted her books,
she could take them. She could take anything she wanted. But
what the girl asked for was the picture of the women on the wall.
She liked those faces, she said.

The lads appeared, each with a carrier bag–their possessions.

‘Have you had anything to eat?' No, clearly they had not. She
sat them at the table, and cut bread and set the jam-jar between
them. She and Rebecca's niece stood watching them fumble with
the knives, spreading the jam. All that had to be learned. Sylvia's
heart was as heavy with dismay as it was going to be: these two–orphans, for it was what they were–were going to have to
take on London, learn everything, from how to use knives and
forks, to how to be doctors.

Sylvia rang Edna Pyne, who said that Cedric was sick, she
couldn't leave him–she thought bilharzia.

‘Never mind, we'll take the bus into Senga.'

‘You can't go on those native buses, they're lethal.'

‘People do.'

‘Rather you than me.'

‘I'm saying goodbye, Edna.'

‘Okay. Don't fret. In this continent our deeds are writ in
water. Oh dear, what am I saying, in sand then. That's what
Cedric is saying, he's got the blues, he's got my black dog. “Our
deeds are writ in water,” he says. He's getting religion. Well,
that's all it needed. Goodbye, then. See you around.'

The three were where the road to the Pynes and the Mission
joined one of the main roads north. It was a single belt of tarmac,
much potholed, and as eaten away at the edges as the poster
Rebecca's niece had taken off the wall that morning. The bus was
due, but would be late: it always was. They stood waiting and then
sat waiting, on stones placed there for that purpose under a tree.

Not much of a thing, you'd think, this road, curving away
into the bush, its grey shine dimmed where sand had blown over
it, but along it, a host of the smartest cars in the country had sped
not long ago to the Comrade Leader's wedding to his new wife–the Mother of the Country having died. All the leaders of the
world had been invited, comrades or not, and they had been
conveyed on this bush road or by helicopter to a Growth Point
not far from the birthplace of the Comrade Leader. Near it, among
trees, two great marquees had been erected. Inside one trestle
tables offered buns and Fanta to the local citizens, while the other
had a feast laid out on white cloths, for the elite. But the church
service where the marriage was being solemnized went on too
long. The povos, or plebs, having consumed their buns, surged
into the tent for their betters, and consumed all the food, while
waiters futilely protested. Then they vanished back into the bush
to their homes. More food had to be flown by helicopter from
Senga. This event, so aptly illustrating . . . but one that is so like
a fairy tale does not have to be annotated.

Along this road, in not much more than ten years, the
bullyboys and thugs of the Leader's Party would run with machetes
and knives and clubs to beat up farm workers who wanted to
vote for the Leader's opponents. Among them were the young
men–former young men–to whom Father McGuire had given
medicine in the war. Part of this army had turned off from this
road on to the minor road to the Pynes' farm, which they did
not appear to know had already been forcibly acquired by Mr
Phiri, though the Pynes had not yet left. About two hundred
drunks arrived on the lawn in front of the house and demanded
that Cedric Pyne should kill a beast for them. He killed a fat ox–the drought having relaxed its grip–and on the front lawn a
great fire was built and the ox was roasted. The Pynes were
dragged down from the verandah and told to chant slogans praising
the Leader. Edna refused. ‘I'm damned if I'm going to tell lies
just to please you,' she said, and so they hit her until she repeated
after them, ‘Viva Comrade Matthew.' When Mr Phiri arrived to
take possession of the two farms, the garden of the house was
black and fouled and the house well was full of rubbish.

Along this road eight years ago Sylvia had been driven, dazed
and dazzled by the strangeness of the bush, the alien magnificence,
listening to Sister Molly warn her against the intransigence of the
male world: ‘That Kevin now, he hasn't caught on that the world
has changed around him.'

By this road, not far from here, in a hilly area full of caves
and rocky clefts and baobabs, is a place where the Comrade Leader
was summoned at intervals by spirit healers (
n'gangas
,
witch-doctors, shamans) to night sessions where men (and a woman or
two), who may be working in a kitchen or a factory, painted,
wearing animal skins and monkey hair, danced themselves into a
trance and informed him that he must kill or throw out the whites
or he will displease the ancestors. He grovelled, wept, promised
to do better–then was driven back to town to take up his
residence again in his fortress house, to plan for his next trip to
meet the world's leaders, or a conference with the World Bank.

The bus came. It was old, and it rattled and shook and emitted
clouds of black greasy smoke that trailed for miles behind it,
marking the road. It was full, yet a space appeared and admitted
Sylvia and her two–what were they, servants?–but the people
on the bus, prepared to be critical of this white woman travelling
with them–she was the only white among them–saw her put
her arms around the lads, who pressed up close to her, like
children. They were doleful, trying not to cry, afraid of what they
were facing. As for Sylvia, she was in a panic. What was she
doing? What else could she have done? Under the rattling of the
bus she asked them, low, ‘What would you have done if I hadn't
come back?' And Clever said, ‘I don't know. We have nowhere
to go.' Zebedee said, ‘Thank you for coming to fetch us. We
were too-too afraid you wouldn't come for us.'

From the bus station they walked to the old hotel that had
been so thoroughly diminished by Butler's, and she took a room
for the three of them, expecting comments, but there were none:
in the hotels of Zimlia a room may have half a dozen beds in it
to accommodate a whole family.

She went with them to the lift, knowing that they had never
seen one, nor, probably, heard of them, explained how they
worked, walked along a corridor where a dusty sun was laying
patterns, and in the room showed them the bathroom, the
lavatory: how to turn taps and cistern handles, open and shut
windows. Then she took them to the restaurant and ordered
sadza
for them, saying they must not use their fingers to eat it, and then
a pudding, and with the aid of a kindly waiter, they managed that
too.