Going Home. Doris Lessing

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      On the morning after my arrival the sun was warm all about the house, the leaves of the creeper on the verandah laid a black sun-pattern on the wall, the pigeons cooed under the roof, the roses blazed on the lawn. In the next garden, the garden boy was cutting wisps of grass even with a pair of rusted old scissors, and a plump black girl was strolling up and down, looking good-naturedly bored, holding a white child by either hand. Daddy was leaving for the office in one car; Mummy was off downtown in the other.

      I would now get out of bed, knowing that all the housework was done and the breakfast ready. Imagine that I lived here for so many years and took this comfort for granted! Even worse, that for a period of months before I left, due to a moral compulsion I now think misguided, I insisted on doing all my housework myself.

      ‘If I’ve got to live in this paradise for the petty bourgeoisie, then at least I shall take what advantages I can – if I’ve got to be bored, then I shall at least be comfortable.’ Thus a friend of mine, an old revolutionary from Central Europe, sucked into Rhodesia by some current of war. Until that moment he had been living on principle in one room, studying and absorbing statistical information about Africa against the day when he could go home to Europe and civilization and the class war. He lived in complete isolation from the white citizenry, who filled him with contempt. He then got himself a temporary job, a pleasant flat and a servant, and continued to study. Two years later he came to see me one evening. ‘Please sit there and don’t say anything. I want to talk and listen to what I am saying. I am in a moral crisis.’ So I sat and made a sounding board. He was saying that no one but a fool could help making money here if he were white; he intended to spend five years making money and beating these white savages at their own game. Then he would take the money and clear out. This brief résumé of what he said can give no idea of the prolonged and dialectical subtlety of his argument. Having proved his case to his satisfaction he became silent, frowning at me. Then, in a quite different voice, with a small, unhappy smile, he said: ‘This is a damned corrupting country. We should get out quick. We should all get out. No one with a white skin can survive it. People like us are too few to change anything. Now get out,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out by the first train.’

      Three years later I met him in Bulawayo; he had made a lot of money and was about to get married. He was in a buoyant, savagely sardonic mood which I was easily able to recognize. ‘I want you to meet my fiancée,’ he said. She was a pretty, indolent girl, the daughter of a manufacturer, and on her finger was the apotheosis of all diamond rings, which my friend J. insisted on showing to me, telling me exactly how much it cost, and how much cheaper he had got it than was probable, while she sat fondly smiling at him. He spoke in a voice that was a deliberate parody of a Jewish big-time huckster.

      I hoped that this time I would run into him somewhere; but it seems he is now in Johannesburg, with four children and a whole network of businesses.

      At breakfast that first morning I felt myself at home because four of us were having that conversation which I have been taking part in now for fifteen years: would he, would she, they or you, be given papers, passports, permits? This time it was about whether I would get into the Union of South Africa.

      I had worked out a plan to get in, not illegally, but making use of certain well-known foibles of the Afrikaner immigration officials. But sitting there at breakfast in that comfortable house, it all sounded too melodramatic; and the conversation became, as it often does, a rather enjoyable exercise in the balance of improbabilities.

      And besides, it was pleasant to be back in a country where everyone knows everyone else, and therefore gossip is not merely personal, but to do with the processes of government; a country where, unlike Britain, which is ruled by the Establishment of which one is not a member, one is close to the centres of administration simply because one is white. Here, journalists get their information straight from the CID, with whom they have sundowners, and everybody has a friend who is a Member of Parliament or a Cabinet Minister. In this part of the world there are no secrets.

      The information at my disposal was, then, that since Sir Percy Sillitoe of the British Intelligence had paid a helpful visit to the political CID of both Central Africa and the Union of South Africa, these departments are now closely linked and coordinated, not only with each other, but with their counterparts in Britain and America.

      ‘In short,’ we concluded, ‘we are seeing a process whereby the countries of what is known as the free world have less and less in common with each other, and are linked only by that supra-national organization, the departments of the political police.’

      But alas, the warmth of the sunlight, the smell of the roses, and the well-being that sets in when one knows there is no cooking, washing-up or housework to do for two months, had already done their work. I failed to draw the correct conclusion from this formulation, and decided to take my chance on getting into South Africa by the ordinary routes.

      After all, I said, I could hardly be called a politically active person. For the business of earning one’s living by writing does not leave much time for politics; and in any case, it is one of my firmest principles that a writer should not become involved in day-to-day politics. The evidence of the last thirty years seems to me to prove that it has a disastrous effect on writing. But I do not stick to this principle. For one thing, my puritan sense of duty which nothing can suppress is always driving me out to meetings which I know are a waste of time, let alone those meetings which are useful but which would be better assisted by someone else; for another, I find political behaviour inexhaustibly fascinating. Nevertheless, I am not a political agitator. I am an agitator manquée. I sublimate this side of my personality by mixing with people who are.

      My friend N. listened to my hair-splitting with irritation and said that the CID would not be able to follow these arguments, and from their point of view I was an agitator. Much better not go to the Union at all, but stay here with my friends. And besides, Central Africa was in a melting-pot and at the crossroads and the turnings of the ways, whereas South Africa was set and crystallized and everyone СКАЧАТЬ