The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ are having no servants or slaves here, Kira.’

      Then she began prefacing her commands with a sarcastic please – fetch her this and get her that. When she got him to wait on her she smiled, and smirked – like a child, Griot thought.

      Mara was not well either, and it annoyed Griot – and, he could see, the others – that she consoled and helped Kira but got no kindness in return.

      Then there was a fearful row, not long before the women were due to give birth, with Kira shrieking that if Griot wanted to stay he must do as he was told. Griot knew that his labour was needed at the Farm, and tried to stick it out but then Kira actually tried to hit him and he left, apologising to Shabis and Mara. He went to the Centre, and there was Dann. That Dann did not greet him with the inward upwelling of feeling – you could call it rapture or at least intense happiness – which Griot felt, seemed to Griot only right: he had been one of Dann’s soldiers, that was all. But to be with Dann, working for him, serving him, seemed to Griot not only a reward for his long worship of Dann, but it had a special rightness, like a gift from – Fate, or whatever you called it. Griot had not gone in for gods and deities, though he had seen many different kinds in his short life, but now he was wondering if there wasn’t one who had a specially kind eye out for him. Otherwise, how to account for his good fortune – landing in Agre, under officer Dann, hearing about Dann at the Farm, then finding him here at the Centre, which was so wonderfully equipped to accommodate Griot’s plans.

      He could say – he was prepared to – that Dann’s going away for so long was hardly a kindness to Griot, but then he had made good use of the time, moulding and making his army, examining the resources of the Centre.

      He could have said that Dann being so very ill was hardly a beneficent provision of Fate, or whatever little god it was – Griot was modest, he awarded himself only a minor deity – but having nursed Dann now for weeks he at least knew his hero had faults. However, those he decided to see as signs or guarantees of a future largeness of destiny.

      And now he was going back to the Farm, and it was Kira he thought of, but carefully warding off misfortune with the kind of wary respect a spiteful and anarchic person does demand.

      He left the soldiers at the inn, not wanting to burden the Farm with their lodging and food, always short, he knew, and said he would be back in a day or so.

      As he walked up to the house, the Western Sea noisy on the right hand, two dogs came down to greet him: they knew him. On the veranda Kira stood, fatter than she had been, a large woman in a purple gown, her hair curled and oiled, a flower in it, watching his approach.

      ‘Good greetings to you,’ he said, getting in first, to establish the note he intended for his stay.

      ‘Have you come to see me?’ she demanded.

      Now this was really odd of her, and it set Griot back.

      ‘No, Kira, I’ve come to see Shabis.’

      ‘Oh, no one comes to visit me,’ she complained and he noted that peevishness was still the rule.

      Down the side of the house, on a level sandy place, two little girls were playing, and the two Albs were with them.

      Daulis was on the veranda, and his greeting smile was genuine. Griot sat, and the two dogs lay down beside him. To see these creatures tamed in the service of people was to know Ruff’s wildness, and the large freedoms of the snow dogs, who owed only some of their allegiance to people. Griot thought for the first time how easily those great white beasts could become a pack and turn on their guardians. Could Ruff turn on Dann? Hard to think that.

      Kira settled her billows of purple skirt into a chair and enquired, ‘And how is my dear Dann?’

      Griot was not going to tell Kira how Dann was, knowing she would take advantage of it if she could. Yet, with people coming this way from the Centre on their way down the coast, she must have heard, or would hear.

      ‘Dann has been on a long visit to the Bottom Sea,’ he said and, as she pressed for more, he kept fending her off, saying, ‘He went fishing with the fishing fleet.’ ‘He saw the ice mountains from up close,’ and then Shabis came and Griot stood, waiting for his greeting, knowing from that kindly face that Shabis was pleased to see him – and that he was muting his greeting because of Kira.

      Shabis nodded at Griot to sit, and sat himself. He looked older and his loss of Mara had sapped him of some vital substance, some buoyancy that had infused his whole being when Mara had been with him. He was a tall, too thin man, and greying. It had to be acknowledged that this soldier was very far from what he had been.

      Griot wanted to talk to Shabis alone, and now began an unpleasant little game, where Kira prevented Dann and Shabis from going aside to talk. When at last they went into the house to evade her she went with them and all that evening during the meal she kept up a chatter designed to prevent her being forgotten, even for a moment.

      And she had changed: Griot’s covert glances at that pretty face, with its many little tricks of lip and eye and look and smile, told him that whatever had been there to like, and admire, had gone: and her voice, too, had changed.

      Everything had changed since Griot had left. Mara had been some sort of centre for this family, but it was not one now. She had held it together. And she had kept Kira out of its centre, where she tried to be.

      The two little girls, both delightful and – well, like little girls, Griot supposed, who had had no contact with children since he had been one – were well behaved, but Griot noted that Tamar, Mara’s child, stayed close to her father, and when she looked at Kira she was apprehensive.

      Kira ordered not only her own child, Rhea, to do this and that, sit up, not fidget, not eat so fast and so on, but Tamar too, though the two Albs, Leta and Donna, were in charge of them. At last Shabis said, ‘That’s enough, Kira,’ a rebuke with an authority that went far beyond the present situation. Kira pouted, and sulked.

      When the time came for goodnights, Tamar was going past Kira, who said, ‘What’s this, no kiss for Kira?’

      The child blew Kira a kiss, but she was not going to be allowed to get away with that. Griot saw how they all, Shabis, Leta, Daulis and Donna, watched as the child ran up to Kira and lifted her face up for a kiss – Tamar was pretending to laugh but she was frightened. And Kira made a great ugly face – a joke, of course – and when she bent to the kiss, made the face even more threatening, so that the child broke away and ran to Leta.

      ‘What a little cry-baby,’ said Kira.

      The little girls were taken off by the two Albs – into separate rooms, as Griot saw – and Kira said, ‘Another of those long boring evenings. Do tell us something interesting, Griot.’

      Griot said, ‘I’m sorry, Kira. I have to leave in the morning early and I must talk to Shabis.’

      ‘Then talk away.’

      Griot looked for help to Shabis, who rose and said, ‘Come, we’ll go for a walk. It’s quite light still.’

      ‘I want to walk too,’ said Kira.

      ‘No,’ said Shabis. ‘Stay where you are.’

      ‘Oh, Shabis,’ cajoled Kira, but Shabis frowned. Griot saw that Kira had wanted to move into Mara’s place, still wanted to, but it had not happened, and that was the reason СКАЧАТЬ