African Laughter by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page B

get over this one.’ His wife had died the year before, and he had taken it hard. ‘I have to warn you,’ says Harry, ‘I’m not the man I was. I feel as if a part of me’s been shot clean away.’
    ‘All right,’ I say.
    Meanwhile I had realized there was something new. Harry became a little deaf when he was not yet twenty. The gunfire in the Mediterranean only made worse what was already bad enough. For a time after the War he was very deaf, in spite of an operation by one of the great ear specialists. You had to shout, and what you said had to be simple. Now he had an efficient hearing-aid. He was talking at his own real pace, in his own style: a cautious man, slow to react, but not cut off by silence from what he saw around him.
    ‘When you’re young you think you’re going to get over anything that happens to you,’ I say.
    ‘Did you think that? I don’t believe I ever thought about it. Well, you don’t get over some things. There are things that happen…and not the obvious things either. Did I tell you I went to the farm?’
    This was rhetorical, for how could he have told me?
    As he mentioned the farm, a silent No gripped me. In 1956, I could have gone to see the farm, the place where our house had been on the hill, but I was driving the car and could not force myself to turn the wheel off the main road north, on to the track that leads to the farm. Every writer has a myth-country. This does not have to be childhood. I attributed the ukase, the silent No to a fear of tampering with my myth, the bush I was brought up in, the old house built of earth and grass, the lands around the hill, the animals, the birds. Myth does not mean something untrue, but a concentration of truth.
    ‘You aren’t thinking of going back?’ asks Harry. ‘I was, yes.’
    ‘Then don’t. I’m warning you. There are farms all over the place now. And I couldn’t even find the hill at first.’
    ‘Couldn’t find the hill?’
    ‘I drove past the turn-off because I couldn’t see the hill. Then I realized I was expecting to see the old house up there, and so I went back. To cut a long story short, they sliced the top off our hill.’
    ‘Sliced off…’
    ‘Yes, There is a plateau up there. It is flat. God knows what it cost them, cutting it off and levelling it.’
    I am filled with anguish. Harry gives me a cautious glance and hesitates.
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘Right, but you won’t like it.’
    ‘But it was a steep hill. I know things look big when you’re a child, but it was a good-sized hill, wasn’t it? I used to sit at the door at the back and look down on the hawks circling over the big field.’
    ‘And at the bottom of the hill we had to change into second gear to get up it at all.’
    ‘And the car used to slant so steeply we used to joke it would fall over backwards.’
    ‘And when we rode down the hill on our bicycles we went flying so fast…’
    ‘And we looked down over everything, barns, the cattle kraals, the Ayreshire track.’
    ‘You still do that, look down, but wait, they planted fruit trees and you’d never believe it once was just wild, just the bush.’
    We look at each other in horror.
    ‘Fruit trees? What happened to the big muwanga tree? The grove of acacias? Do you remember, we called them butterfly trees? The caterpillar tree–it was always full of caterpillars, it looked as if it had felted over and the cocoons were inside the felt…’
    ‘I don’t remember the caterpillars. But I told you, just don’t go back. I don’t know how to explain it, but it did me in. When I got back here from that trip, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t get over it. And the animals are all gone. The birds are gone. I kept dreaming about the old house. And then Monica died. I feel everything is gone.’
    ‘Let’s go for a walk now,’ I say.
    And so we go walking, through bush, but now the bush is something that fills spaces between farms and homesteads. It is a suburban bush.
    ‘Do you ever think how