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《Stories by Doris Lessing》
A MILD ATTACK OF LOCUSTS-1
THE NEW YORKER FI by Doris Lessing February 26, 1955
The rains that year were good; they were ing nicely just as the crops hem—or saret gathered when the men said they were not too bad. She never had an opinion of her own on matters like the weather, because even to know about a simple thing like the weather needs experience, which Margaret, born and brought up in Johannesburg, had not got. The men were her husband, Richard, and old Stephen, Richard’s father, who was a farmer from way back, and these two might argue for hours over whether the rains were ruinous or just ordinarily exasperating. Margaret had been on the farm for three years now. She still did not uand why they.. did not go bankrupt altogether, when the men never had a good word for the weather, or the soil, or the gover. But she was getting to learn the language. Farmers’ language. And she noticed that for all Richard’s and Stephen’s plaints, they did not go bankrupt. Nor did they get very rich; they jogged along, doing fortably.
Their crop was maize. Their farm was three thousand acres on the ridges that rise up toward the Zambezi escarpment—high, dry, wind-swept try, cold and dusty in winter, but now, i months, steamy with the heat that rose i, soft waves off miles of green foliage. Beautiful it was, with the sky on fair days like blue and brilliant halls of air, and the bright-green folds and hollows of try beh, and the mountains lying sharp and bare twenty miles off, beyond the rivers. The sky made her eyes ache; she was not used to it. One does not look so much at the sky iy. So that evening, when Richard said, “The gover is sendin?g out warnings that locusts are expected, ing down from the breeding grounds up north,” her instinct was to look about her at the trees. Is, swarms of them—horrible! But Richard and the old man had raised their eyes and were looking up over the mountaintop. “We haven’t had locusts in seven years,” one said, and the other, “They go in cycles, locusts do.” And then: “There goes our crop for this season!”
But they went on with the work of the farm just as usual, until one day, when they were ing up the road to the homestead for the midday break, old Stephen stopped, raised his finger, and pointed. “Look, look!” he shouted. “There they are!”
Margaret heard him and she ran out to join them, looking at the hills. Out came the servants from the kit. They all stood and gazed. Over the rocky levels of the mountain was a st..
reak of rust-colored air. Locusts. There they came.
At once, Richard shouted at the cookboy. Old Stephen yelled at the houseboy. The cookboy ran to beat the rusty plowshare, banging from a tree branch, that was used to summon the laborers at moments of crisis. The houseboy ran off to the store to collect tin s—any old bits of metal. The farm was ringing with the clamor of the gong, and the laborers came p out of the pound, pointing at the hills and shoutiedly. Soon they had all e up to the house, and Richard and old Stephen were giving them orders: Hurry, hurry, hurry.
And off they ran again, the two white men with them, and in a few minutes Margaret could see the smoke of fires rising from all around the farmlands. When the gover warnings came, piles of wood and grass had been prepared in every cultivated field. There were seven patches of bared, cultivated soil, where the new mealies were just showing, making a film ht greehe rich dark red, and around each patow drifted up thick clouds of smoke. The mehrowi leaves onto the fires to make the smoke acrid and black. Margaret was watg the hills. Now there was a long, low cloud advang, rust-colored still, swelling forward and out as she looked. The telephone was ringing—neighbors to say, Quick, quick, here e the locusts! Old Smith had already had his crop eaten to the ground. Quick, get your fires started! For, of course, while every farmer hoped the locusts would overlook his farm and go on to the , it was only fair to warhers; one must play fair. Everywhere, fifty miles over the tryside, the smoke was rising from a myriad of fires. Margaret answered the telephone calls and, between them, stood watg the locusts. The air was darkening—a strange darkness, for the sun was blazing. It was like the darkness of a veldt fire, when the air gets thick with smoke and the sunlight es down distorted—a thick, he. It pressive, too, with the heaviness of a storm. The locusts were ing fast. Now half the sky was darkened. Behind the reddish veils in front, which were the advance guard of the swarm, the main swarm showed in dense black clouds, reag almost to the sun itself.
Margaret was w what she could do to help. She did not know. Then up came old Stephen from the lands. “We’re finished, Margaret, finished!” he said. “Those beggars eat every leaf and blade off the farm in half an hour! But it’s only early afternoon. If we make enough smoke, make enough ill the sun goes down, they’ll settle somewhere else, perhaps.” And then: “Get the kettle going. It’s thirsty work, this.”
Saret went to the kit and stoked up the fire and boiled the water. Now oin roof of the kit she could hear the thuds and bangs of falling locusts, or a scratg slither as one skidded dowin slope. Here were the first of them. From down on the lands came the beating and banging and ging of a hundred petrol tins and bits of metal. Stephen impatiently waited while Margaret filled orol tin with tea—hot, sweet, and e-colored—and another with water. In the meantime, he told her about how, twenty years back, he had beeen out, made bankrupt by the locust armies. And then, still talking, he lifted the heavy petrol s, one in each hand, holding them by the wooden pieces set erwise across the tops, and jogged off down to the road to the thirsty laborers.
By now, the locusts were falling like hail on the roof of the kit. It sounded like a heavy storm. Margaret looked out and saw the air dark with a crisscross of the is, and she set her teeth and ran out into it; what the men could do, she could. Overhead, the air was thick—locusts everywhere. The locusts were flopping against her, and she brushed them off—heavy red-browures, looking at her with their beady, old men’s eyes while they g to her with their hard, serrated legs. She held her breath with disgust and ran through the door into the house again. There it was even more like being in a heavy storm. The iron roof was reverberating, and the clamor of beaten iron from the lands was like thunder. When she looked out, all the trees were queer and still, clotted with is, their boughs weighted to the ground. The earth seemed to be moving, with locusts crawling everywhere; she could not see the lands at all, so thick was the swarm. Toward the mountains, it was like looking into driving rain; even as she watched, the sun was blotted out with a fresh onrush of the is. It was a half night, a perverted blaess. Then came a sharp crack from the bush—a branch had snapped off. Then another. A tree down the slope leaned over slowly aled heavily to the ground. Through the hail of is, a man came running. More tea, more water were needed. Margaret supplied them. She kept the fires stoked and filled tins with liquid, and then it was four iernoon and the locusts had been p across overhead for a couple of hours.
Up came old Stephen again—g locusts underfoot with every step, locusts ging all over him—cursing and swearing, banging with his old hat at the air. At the doorway, he stopped briefly, hastily pulling at the ging is and throwing them off, and then he plunged into the locust-free living room.
“All the crops finished. Nothi,” he said.
But the gongs were still beating, the men still shouting, and Margaret asked, “Why do you go on with it, then?”
“The main swarm isn’t settling. They are heavy with eggs. They are looking for a place to settle and lay.
A MILD ATTACK OF LOCUSTS-2
If we stop the main body settling on our farm, that’s everything. If they get a ce to lay their eggs, we are going to have everythien flat with hoppers later on.” He picked a stray locust off his shirt and split it down with his thumbnail; it was clotted ih eggs. “Imagihat multiplied by millions. You ever seen a hopper swarm on the maro? Well, you’re lucky.”
Margaret thought an adult swarm was bad enough. Outside, the light on the earth was noale, thin yellow darkened with moving shadow; the clouds of moving is alterhied and lightened, like driving rain. Old Stephen said, “They’ve got the wind behind them. That’s something.”
“Is it very bad?” asked Margaret fearfully, and the old man said emphatically, “We’re fihis swarm may pass over, but ohey’ve started, they’ll be ing down from the north oer another. And then there are the hoppers. It might go on for three or four years.”
Margaret sat down helplessly and thought, Well, if it’s the end, it’s the end. What now? We’ll all three have to go back to town. But at this she took a quick look at Stephen, the old man who had farmed forty years in this try and been bankrupt twice before, and she knew nothing would make him go and bee a clerk iy. Her heart ached for him; he looked so tired, the worry lines deep from o mouth. Poor old man. He lifted up a locust that had got itself somehow into his pocket, a99liｂ?nd held it in the air by one leg. “You’ve got the strength of a steel spring in those legs of yours,” he told the locust good-humoredly. Then, although for the last three hours he had been fighting locusts, squashing locusts, yelling at locusts, and sweeping them i mounds into the fires to burn, he heless took this oo the door and carefully threw it out to join its fellows, as if he would rather not harm a hair of its head. This forted Margaret; all at once, she felt irrationally cheered. She remembered it was not the first time in the past three years the men had annouheir final and irremediable ruin.
“Get me a drink, lass,” Stephen then said, and she set a bottle of whiskey by him.
In the meahought Margaret, her husband was out in the pelting storm of is, banging the gong, feeding the fires with leaves, while the is g all over him. She shuddered. “How you bear to let them touch you?” she asked Stephen. He looked at her disapprovingly. She felt suitably humble, just as she had when Richard brought her to the farm after their marriage and Stephen first took a good look at her city self—hair waved and golden, nails red and pointed. Now she roper farmer’s wife, in sensible shoes and a solid skirt. She might eveo letting locusts settle on her, in time.
Having tossed down a couple of whiskeys, old Stephe bato the battle, wading now through glistening brown waves of locusts.
Five o’clock. The sun would set in an hour. Then the swarm would settle. It was as thick as ever overhead. The trees were ragged mounds of glistening brown.
Margaret began to cry. It was all so hopeless. If it wasn’t a bad season, it was locusts; if it wasn’t locusts, it was army worms or veldt fires. Always something. The rustling of the locust armies was like a big forest in a storm. The ground was invisible in a sleek brown surging tide; it was like being drowned in locusts, submerged by the loathsome brown flood. It seemed as if the roof might sink in uhe weight of them, as if the dht give in uheir pressure and these rooms fill with them—and it was getting so dark. Through the window, she looked up at the sky. The air was thinner; gaps of blue showed in the dark moving clouds. The blue spaces were cold and thin; the sun must be setting. Through the fog of is, she saw figures approag. First old Stephen, marg bravely along, then her husband, drawn and haggard with weariness, and behind them the servants. All of them were crawling with is. The sound of the gongs had stopped. Margaret could hear nothing but the ceaseless rustle of myriads of wings.
The two men slapped off the is and came in.
“Well,” said Richard, kissing her on the cheek, “the main swarm has gone over.”
“For the Lord’s sake!” said Margaret angrily, still half g. “What’s here is bad enough, isn’t it?” For although the evening air was no longer blad thick but a clear blue, with a pattern of is whizzing this way and that across it, everything else—trees, buildings, bushes, earth—was gone uhe moving brown masses.
“If it doesn’t rain in the night ahem here,” Stephen said, “if it doesn’t rain a them down with water, they’ll be off in the m at sunrise.”
“We’re bound to have some hoppers,” said Richard. “But not the main swarm. That’s something.”
Margaret roused herself, wiped her eyes, pretended she had not been g, ached them some supper, for the servants were too exhausted to move. She sent them off to the pound to rest.
She served the supper and sat listening. There was not one maize pla, she heard. Not ohey would get the planting maes out the moment the locusts had gohey must start all ain.
What was the use of that, Margaret wondered, if the whole farm was going to be crawling with hoppers? But she listened while they discussed the new gover pamphlet that told how to defeat the hoppers. You must have men out all the time, patrolling the farm, to watovement in the grass. When you find a patch of hoppers—small, lively black things, like crickets—then you dig trenches around the patch or spray them with poison from pumps supplied by the gover. The gover wanted every farmer to cooperate in a world plan for eliminating this plague forever. You must attack locusts at the source—hoppers, in short. The mealking as if they were planning a war, and Margaret listened, amazed.
In the night, it was quiet, with no sign of the armies that had settled outside, except that sometimes a branapped or a tree could be heard crashing down.
Margaret slept badly, in the bed beside Richard, who was sleeping like the dead. In the m, she woke to yellow sunshine lying across the bed—clear sunshine, with an occasional blotch of shadow moving over it. She went to the window. Old Stephen was ahead of her. There he stood, outside, gazing dowhe bush. And she gazed, astounded—aranced, much against her will. For it looked as if every tree, every bush, all the earth, were lit with pale flames. The locusts were fanning their wings to free them of the night dews. There was a shimmer of red-tinged gold light everywhere.
She went out to join the old man, stepping carefully among the is. The two stood and watched. Overhead the sky was blue—blue and clear.
“Pretty,” said old Stephen with satisfa.
Well, thought Margaret, we may be ruined, we may be bankrupt, but not everyone has seen a locust army fanning their wings at dawn.
Over the slopes in the distance, a faint red smear showed in the sky. It thied and spread. “There they go,” said old Stephen. “There goes the main army, off south.”
And now, from the trees, from the earth all around them, the locusts were taking wing. They were like small aircraft maneuvering for the takeoff as they tried their wings to see if they were dry enough. Off they went. A reddish-brown steam was rising off the miles of bush, off the farmlands—the earth. Again the sunlight darkened.
And as the clotted branches lifted, the weight on them lightening, there was nothi but the black spines of branches and tree trunks. No green—nothing. All m they watched, the three of them—Richard having finally got up—as the brown crust thinned and broke and dissolved, flying up to mass with the main army, now a brownish-red smear in the southern sky. The lands, which had been filmed with the green of the ender mealie plants, were stark and bare. A devastated landscape—no green, no green anywhere.
By midday, the reddish cloud had gone. Only an occasional locust flopped down. On the ground lay the corpses and the wouhe Afri laborers were sweeping them up with branches and colleg them in tins.
“Ever eaten sun-dried locust, Margaret?” asked old Stephen. “That time twenty years ago when I went broke, I lived on mealie meal and dried locusts for three months. They aren’t bad at all—rather like smoked fish, if you e to think of it.”
But Margaret preferred not even to think of it.
After the midday meal, the me off to the lands. Everything was to be replanted. With a bit of luck, another swarm would not e travelling down just this way. But they hoped it would rain very soon, t some new grass, because the cattle would die otherwise; there was not a blade of grass left on the farm. As for Margaret, she was trying to get used to the idea of three or four years of locusts. Locusts were going to be like the weather from now on—always immi. She felt like a survivor after a war; if this devastated and mangled tryside was not ruin—well, what then was ruin?
But the meheir supper with good appetites.
“It could have been worse” was what they said. “It could be much worse.” ?
MYSELF AS SPORTSMAN
THE NEW YORKER FI by Doris Lessing January 21, 1956
Nowadays, when I meet types who flush grouse or work salmon (I think these are the correct terms), I more often than not be heard saving, “All the same, food, spive me a flock of guinea fowl in open try.” From there, I pass on to casual mention of the higher fauna—deer and lions, and so on—and in no time the most hardened sportsmen are oozing envy of what sounds like a girlhood spent oual safari. I keep the truth to myself.
Not that I haven’t seen lions. I have entered them, and other iing animals, in the London Zoo, where I go to look at them from time to time. And on my home ground, which is Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia, fauna of every kind used to flourish and, for all I know, flourish yet. I do not care. I never did.
Along with my indiffereoward big and little game goes the fact that this whole plex is linked irretrievably with my sibling rivalry (for my brother) and my mase protest (against practically everything). It all started very, early, when my brother was given a .22 rifle— But perhaps it would be best to go even further back, to his bicycle, which he rode perfectly at the first attempt, whereas I could only look at it and shudder with fear. I decided it was not being firl to ride a boy’s bicycle, and stuck out for one of my own, knowing full well that the state of the family’s finances would put off the evil hour indefinitely.
In the light of this discreditable and evasive behavior, it is easy to uand what happened when the .22 rifle appeared, during one of my brother’s holidays from school. He picked it up, took aim at a small bird sitting on a twig a hundred yards away, judiciously pressed the trigger, and the bird fell dead. I remember he felt bad because the shot had not gohrough the eye. To him, therefore, sport immediately took on its proper colors; to fire at a sitting bird was altogether beh him, and unless he could get in a good oblique shot at a bird h widdershins a hundred and fifty yards off, with a strong wiween him and it, he would not shoot. As for duikerbok—small antelope, which are not only plentiful in our parts but very good to eat—he would not kill one unless he had first arranged an exhausting crawl through thick bush, preferably in heavy mud.
When, one day, he hahe rifle to me, I said I did not care for it. Why I did not stick to this simple truth I agine. I did point out that even people like Hunter Jim and Elephant Bill used shotguns for birds on the wing and deer on the run, and that it would never have eheir heads to use a .22 rifle, but my brother was not moved. I did not expect him to be.
After he had gone back to school, I crept to his room and took the .22 from the bed of oiled waste in which he had laid it away for the duration of the term. I spent a week or mingerly opening and shutting the thing, and putting bullets in and taking them out. When I could do this without fling, I went out into the bush with it.
There was a lot of bush all around our house—in fact, miles of it in every dire, wild, uninhabited, a perfect paradise for sportsmen. I remember clearly how, that first day, I mooned along, thinking about Guinevere and Anne of Green Gables, until a fine kudu bull (fauna of the most covetable sort, antelope the size of a horse) that had apparently been scrutinizing me from an anthill took to its hoofs and fled. I watched it go. (My brother, needless to say, had already shot half a dozen kudu through the eye under impossible handicaps.)
appeared a duiker, and I put the gun to my shoulder and fired repeatedly but without result, sihe creature had vanished before I could mao sight it.
That was a discing day, and those that followed it were er. One day, I was sitting on a ro a clearing when a guinea fowl trotted past, followed soon by about twenty uinea fowl, in single file. I lifted my gun and shot at each of them. It was exactly like shooting in a fun fair, with rabbits, or what you like, moving before you on a band. I missed all twenty of the guinea fowl, and thought how much easier it would be if only they were prepared to keep still. From this thought my success was born, and si was based entirely on the habits of guinea fowl, I shall now describe them—from a sportsman’s, not a naturalist’s, point of view.
Guinea fowl move in flocks of anywhere from ten to two huhey be heard a long way off, because of a k, k, king sound they make, like stones rubbing together under water. When disturbed, which they regularly are, si藏书网his king advertises their preseo every enemy for miles around, they set up a raucous plaint and ruremely fast in all dires. If they stuck to doing this, they would be practically invulnerable, but, no—curiosity is their downfall. More often than not, before they have run any distahey fly up into trees to see what is going on. Their wings are weak, and on the trees they are relut to launch themselves into space.
Having sidered these facts and all their implications, I set out one day with the rifle and wandered around until I heard the “k, k.” I crept toward it. Then I heaved a large sto it. There was a scurrying, and presently seventy-fuinea fowl flew up into trees all around me. I khere were seventy-four because I sat on a log ting them and deg which looked the you and fattest. I then carefully aimed at this one and fired. The bird started perceptibly, aled bad watched a leaf that had been dislodged from a frond three feet above its head float down to my feet. I tried again. How difficult it is to keep a gun barrel still became apparent to me only now that I had all the time in the world to practice it. I walked to a nearby tree and laid the barrel against its trunk for support.
The bird I had chosen was about four yards away. I kept the rifle steady long enough to shoot it in the crop. It fell, and I dispatched it with another shot, in the eye, a home with it. The family, naturally, assumed it had been shot on the wing, and in the eye at that—the first shot going unnoticed—and a letter with this news was at once sent to my brother.
Thereafter, my teique, while remaining substantially the same, developed small refis. For instahough a properly trained dog would have been useless to me, we did have a dog perfey purposes. I took him along. He went full pelt toward the “k, k” as soon as he heard it, and by the time I arrived, dozens of guinea fowl were already perched oree, watg the dog, who was boung and yelling below them, satisfactorily distrag their attention from me while I arranged myself and y bird at leisure.
A guinea fowl beset by a yapping dog tends to show uneasiness by turning slowly around and around on its perch, but it turns on its own axis and so presents a more or less stable target. There was one occasion when a bird sitting on a low bush was so fasated by the dog that I was able to lean over and pluck it off the branch by the legs. Then I wrung its neck. I have never before revealed this deplorable io a soul. When I took the fowl home, I explaihat the bullet had struck its beak and stu, and said carelessly that it sounded very like one of my brother’s more tortuous feats.
I knew very well that when my brother came home, that would be the end of me. And, in fact, on the evening of his arrival my brother took me into the bush, saying, “Now, let’s see you do it.”
The dog went yapping off after a flock of guinea fowl. I shot negligently at a bird rising into a tree, shrugged, and said self-critically, “Damned bad shot.” My brother, of course, saw at ohat all sport with that flock was at an end, but the dog tio whine pointedly under various plump birds while my brother and I walked off in search of airborargets.
This happened several times. My mother plaihat the larder was empty. Then, luckily, my brot a duiker that had presented a long shot downhill in bad light. We ate the duiker for a whole week (the main disadvantage of living in a sportsman’s paradise is the tedium of the diet) and I was able to say that it was altogether unsp to kill things while we were in no need of meat. But then there were ten days more of my brother’s holidays to get through, and my exposure was clearly immi. I tried to defer it by saying that I was incapable, for psychological reasons, of shooting anything while watched. I went off into the bush by myself, and my brother secretly followed and caught me i of shooting a sitting bird at four or five yards. I told him his behavior was sneaking and caddish, but he was too shocked to listen. He felt the blow to the family honor so profoundly that he said nothing that evening at supper. I think he was w how to break it to my father in the least traumatic way.
That night, my brother went out spot-shooting—hunting with a light. Spot-shooting the way he did it was not unsp, because he saw to it that the ces were substantially oher side.９9liｂ? Only crude types use the headlights of cars; my brother fixed a weak bicycle lamp to his forehead a forth into the night like a quixotic Cyclops. The usual practice is to fix the eyes of an animal with the light, then walk as close as possible to the hypnotized creature and shoot it. My brother’s method meant that the creature would be ied but not fixed. It would have plenty of opportunity to run away.
He returned from that expedition severely depressed. Apparently, he had seen two green eyes fifty yards off. They had not moved. He had shouted, but nothing had happened. He’d switched off his head lamp and fired between the eyes. They had not moved. He had fired again. It was obviously impossible that he could have missed, but he had fired three times more. Then he had walked up to his target vihat he would find five corpses piled up there. He had found, instead, two glow-worms on a log. The i was such a blow to his pride that he fot to discuss my case with my parents. This was, on the whole, lucky for the household, which, after my brother went back to school, I tio supply with meat until one happy day when I was able to leave for the city and the delights of civilization.
My talents as hunter were useful oher occasion. It happehat while iy I became engaged, or attached—the precise word for this relationship evades me—to a young man who was in every ortsman. His ceptions of honor were intricate, and caused me hours of introspe, as a result of which I cluded we were ill-matched. He, however, did not think so, and tried to persuade me that my reluce to join my fate eternally to his was the result of tender age; I was sixteen at the time.
Among other virtues, he had ideas about hunting, shooting, and fishing that be described only as classic. He had a large number of gold and silver medals for marksmanship, and was, naturally, eager to visit our farm, where he could prove himself. Since leaving Scotland ten years before, never once had he set foot on any shooting ground but a target range.
For a while, I made excuses, but at last they ran out, and we went home for a weekend visit. I took him guinea-fowl shooting, since I was famed for this, but, of course, I pressed the rifle into his hand with the self-denial proper to a good hostess. At once, he showed the correess of his upbringing by saying that no one had ever heard of shooting birds with a rifle. But he tried. He missed a good many guinea fowl running along the ground, which was hardly surprising, seeing the speed they get up. Then he missed a lot more flying up into the trees. He hit none. By that time, he was in a bad temper. He pushed the rifle bato my hand and said, “Well, then, you show me how to do it.”
The guinea fowl were by now all safely up irees. We threw sto them, and even shook the trees, but they wouldn’t budge. I could not shoot. We began walking home along a track through the bush while I prayed that no sed flock of birds would annouself. I planned, if I heard the “k, k,” to talk very loudly and drown it. Suddenly he shouted, “Look! Now’s your ce!”
Hundreds of feet away, a partridge dodged among the ruts of the road. I doubt whether even my brother could have hit it. A small puff of wind raised the dust. I saw my ce, and, muttering, “Damn this dust,” I fired at random into it.
The dust subsided. The partridge lay dead, shot through the head—a running shot, from behind, at a hundred ay yards. I ejected the cartridge in an effit sort of way, and my panion paced the distawice. I said nothing, of course; one does not boast.
He then began plaining that he was not used to the gun, that it was ten years since he had shot at a moving target, and so on. He tio excuse himself thus at supper. My father was silent. I imagihis was for the usual reason—that he was thinking of something else—but at last it came home to me that it was because his sense of decy was being ed.
A good sportsman, I remembered, never puts the blame for his failures on the weather, or luck, or anything but himself. I have never uood why, but then it’s a man’s world. day, my father said darkly that there was nothing like sport t out the ots in a man’s character, and, thus supported, I was able to break off the e, or attat, in the most honorable way. Soon after this, I acquired an inflexible principle—namely, that it is wrong to shoot f藏书网auna of any kind—and with that I laid down my gun. ?
THE STARE
The New Yorker Fi by Doris Lessing July 7, 1997
“Look at him,” says Helen. “I don’t say anything, and I go on looking.”
“What does he do then?” asks Mary, gazing at Helen as she so often does, as if Helen had the secret of something or other.
“Then he gives in,” says Helen, and laughs. The laugh, as always, takes Mary captive, and this time it seems to reverberate right through her, and Heleo be remembering something delicious, for she sits smiling.
Helen is the Greek wife of Tom, who is English. He saw her in a taverna in Naxos, where she was waiting on him and oher fn tourists as if she were doing them a favor, and he fell in love and persuaded her to return to England with him. irely fn ground to her, because she has relatives in the large Greek and Cypriot unity in Camden Town, and she visited them one summer. Mary is the English wife of Demetrios, and she was with a girlfriend on holiday in ándros when the handsome waiter in the café overlooking the sea fell in love with her. He, too, has relatives in London. Now he is a waiter in a Greek restaurant called the Argonauts; aends to have his owaurant soon. He will call it Dmitri’s, because Dmitri is what Mary calls him. Meanwhile they live in two rooms over the grocery owned by Helen’s Tom.
The two women spend ms together, gossiping or shopping, but now Helen has a baby and they often go to Primrose Hill and sit on a bench with the pram pushed into some shade. There are other wives, Greek and Cypriot, and some ms it is quite a little female unity, but Helen and Mary are reized as special friends. Some evenings the two couples make a foursome in one of the pubs, cafés, or restaurants, and on these evenings Mary often gratulates herself that she made all the right choices that brought her away from b Croydon, to be here among people who laugh easily, or start singing, and who might end an evening with impromptu dang, even oables. She might not have goo Greece that summer, might have said no to Demetrios when her parents put pressure on.
On this day Mary goes home excited aless and sits in front of her looking glass and examines herself. She oftehis. She is plump, pretty, with ruddy cheeks, black curls, and a lot of well-placed dimples, and Dmitri calls her his little blackberry. But she has gray eyes, and he says that if it weren’t for those cool English eyes he could believe she has Greek blood. His black eyes easily smolder, or burn, or reproach. Mary leans her forearms among the little bottles of st, the lipsticks, the eye paint, and tries out expressions. She puts a long unsmiling unblinking stare on her fad frightens herself with it. She shuts her eyes, so as to see that stare obbr>n Helen’s face, but fails, because Helen only smiles. Mary admires Helen. That is putting it mildly. Because of something Dmitri said, Mary actually went to the library and found a book called “Greek Myths for Children,” and there she read that a Helen ohousands of years ago, was a beauty, aarted a war because of her. In Greece parents called their little girls Helen, as if the name were just Betty or Joan. Helen told Mary that Mary was the Mother of God, but Mary said she wasn’t really intion.
And why should Mary want to try out Helen’s silent staring orios? That is the trouble. Mary is full of an unfortable dissatisfa with life and with herself and this is like an accusation against her husband. She does wonder why she feels like this but has decided that she is defending herself. He is distented because he wants to start a family, particularly now that he is seeing his friends Tom and Helen with their baby, but Mary says, “No, Dmitri, let’s wait a bit, what’s the hurry?” She really does mean to have a baby, and even soon, but she is afraid of being takehat’s what happens, she thinks, watg the women she sees every day. They have a baby and . . . well, I won’t be like that. And Helen isn’t, is she? She is exactly the same, as if that baby had arrived from somewhere out of the air, and she had caught it like a present someone had thrown to her. Mary is on the Pill and never fets to take it. Dmitri says things like “One of these days I’ll throw all that junk into the rubbish.” His rough void hot eyes at suents thrill Mary and remind her of earlier days.
She said to Helen, “Is Tom the same to you now?” Helen instantly uood and said, with the laugh that was like an admission that she had some secret fasating life Mary was too much of a clod to uand, “Of course, he’s English, isn’t he? He’s just the same as whearted together.” And she examined Mary in her frank way that Mary at first thought was “tactless,” and said, “You don’t uand something. Greek men are romantic when they are c. They kiss you a lot and they make pliments. But when you are married you are just his wife.”
The summer Mary went to ándros, Demetrios cou?９9ｌｉｂ.ed her with flowers and sted soaps and chocolates, and he said she was beautiful and he had never known anything like her. He kissed her in the moonlight, and one night he even covered her hands with kisses and hot tears, too. Mary khis was the most wonderful thing that had ever happeo her or probably would happen. It made her uneasy that this was so. What was Demetrios, then? Who did he think he was—was her secret feeling. And she watched him while he was asleep, thinking, But why? But she often remembered, too, how he had beehat summer, three years ago. Now he was as sensible as any Englishman. Like Tom, about whom Helen sighed, though smiling, saying it was lucky Tom liked his fun in bed, because otherwise she’d think he didn’t love her.
A likely story, thinks Mary, who wonders why Helen said yes to Tom. He was all right, not bad-looking. “He makes me laugh,” says Helen. But surely she must sometimes find him b?
But did Dmitri still love Mary?
That night, when he rolled toward her in bed, she said, “No, I don’t feel like it,” trying to make herself sound like Helen when she was teasing and taunting, but she knew she had not succeeded. She had never said no before: she liked her fun ioo. He was as surprised as if she had said she wanted a divorce. “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded. What he should have asked was “But what have I dohough she would not have known w９9ｌｉb? to reply if he had. She turned her ba him, knowing this hurt her as much as it did him: she could feel his baffled, hurt glare on her shoulders. He muttered something she was glad she had not heard. He lay awake and she did, too, but preteo be asleep.
m he kept sighing and giving her hard acg looks. It happehat it was Saturday, and that night the two couples went to drink in the garden of a pub, and then had di the restaurant where Dmitri was a waiter, but it was his night off. The women sometimes worked there as waitresses when they needed a bit extra for the housekeeping. Everyone khem, people waved or called greetings or came to admire the baby asleep in the pram. Mary saw how Helen hung on Tom’s arm and khey were going to make love the mihey got home. Wherios and Mary got home he said to her, “I hope you aren’t going to not feel like it tonight.” He was clumsy in his sarcasm, and that made it easy for her to say, “I might or I might not,” but in bed he at oacked her, as she tried to plain to herself, but it was no good saying she didn’t feel like it when it was evident to both of them that she did. “When are you going to give me a kid?” he said afterward, and he was doing something she always found frightening aing: he was sliding her wedding ring around and around her finger, as if he were thinking of throwing it away. “I’ll see,” she said, knowing she had never provoked him like this before. Then she found herself being raped. There was no other word for it. She was all slippery from the ret sex, so he could not know she was thrilled and quite dissolved and could easily have said then and there, “Yes, all right about the baby,” if he had not been groaning into her ear, “You bitch, I want a baby. Now, not in ten years.”
m she did not say one word at breakfast. He didn’t notice. He was taking his time with the toast and the jam and the coffee: he didn’t have to be at the restaurant until eleven. This was the best part of their day, the hours before he went to work. They talked or didn’t talk, ahe paper, and sometimes went back to bed. She khat when the baby came their ms would never be like this again. She had told him so, and he had said, “And so what.” This made her feel he didn’t love her. It was not until the end of this breakfast that he realized her silence was meant, and he lifted his head and looked at her, long and hard, and she looked coldly back. And then she went on with it, using the unblinking stare she had practiced before the mirror. “What the hell?” he said. “What . . . ?” She said nothing but sat in front of him and stared. It was driving him wild, she could see, aly she was excited, she was thrilled, and she answered not one word while he went on exclaiming and acg and asking what the hell she thought she was doing, and then he shouted “Bitch!” at her a off to work.
Mary sat with Helen outside a pub, in the sun, with the baby in the pram between them, and Mary thought, I don’t really mind a baby, I suppose. I’ll leave off the Pill and see what happens. But I’m not going to tell Dmitri, not yet. And I’m not going to give in to the baby.
“How long do you keep it up?” she asked, trying to sound casual, but Helen at onderstood and said, “Oh, it’s not much—I just like to see how long I keep it up. Because I want to give in and I don’t.”
Why did Helen find everything so easy? She was talking as if it all were nothing, just a joke. Why don’t I find things easy? Mary was thinking as she sat silent and dismal, looking at Helen’s long thin brown legs and her brown thin arms, and the way the black dress was on her, and her black shining hair loose on her shoulders. That dress would look like a bune. . . . The baby began grizzling, and Helen picked it up, no trouble at all, hardly looking, and she sang some Greek nursery song in her deep sexy voice. The baby stopped g. The soft little head was inches away from Mary, and the sweet intimate baby smell made her want to cry. Oh, no, she thought, oh, no—but Helen casually handed her the cuddlesome bundle and said, “I’m going to the toilet,” and off she strode, with the black linen swinging around her.
Mary thought, I suppose Dmitri will sing our baby Greek songs. Wherios and Helen spoke together in Greek Mary listened and she wasn’t thinking of the kebabs and taramasalata and the retsina and all that stuff they had right here in London but of the sun on the dark-blue sea and the hot rocks and the olive trees and the singing. Oftehe two Greeks talked together Tom and Mary—her knew more than a few words of Greek—exged smiles aowledging that these people they had married were sometimes strao them.
Mary did not speak to Demetrios that night when he came in, as usual, late, well after midnight, but she sat up in bed and stared at him while he stumbled around the room and swore and discarded his clothes anyhow and then flung himself on the bed with his back to her. She loo put her arms around him from behind and do what he loved her to, which was nibble his ear and then kiss and bite his neck. The first time she did this it had been like jumping over a feo the dark because she was taking the initiative, which she had not done—she liked being the one who said yes—and there was at once a storm of sex. But there wasn’t always: I’m not going to let you take me franted, said Dmitri, teasing her—she thought, but then saw this was his delicacy again, for he was sensitive, surprising her, when you’d think he was just a big rough noisy man. He knew she would be shy, afraid he would think she was asking for sex instead of sometimes just a cuddle, and that was why he kept her guessing. She had seen Helen giving Tom little touches and strokes that put a look of wonder and astonishment on his face, and she had tried them out on Dmitri—without Helen she would never have thought of doing anything like that. Now she lay beside Dmitri, rigid, and she was thinking that one night it was easy to put one’s arms around one’s husband and then be happy till m, and the night it was impossible to put a hand to touch him, let alone kisses and nibbles.
She kept the silence going all night, for she did not sleep, a m through breakfast. And now she was frightened. She sat staring at him while he averted his eyes but sometimes gla her in wonderment, in anger, and in fear. But as well as being scared she was dissatisfied, and her dissatisfa with everything and with him, like an accusation of him, was stronger every minute, because what she was doing was feeding it. He should be well, he should be kissing her hands and c them with tears and saying he was sorry.
That night she was careful to seem asleep when he came in from the restaurant. Perhaps he will kiss me, she thought: he often did, when she was asleep. She would put up her arms and pull him down into her. But he didn’t kiss her.
m at breakfast she could see herself sitting there, with her staring face like a radar dish following him around the room. He was not looking at her, though. She thought, He’s stupid. Just because I haven’t got a smile on my fad I’m not speaking—but I’m just the same inside, aren’t I? Meanwhile he was stumbling about and knog into things. He looked as if she had put a curse on him. He left his coffee and baraight out. m she woke before he did, and was about to slide quietly out of bed so as not to have to “put on the performance,” which was how she was now thinking of it, but he sat straight up in bed and she adjusted her face so that she was staring at him over the edge of the duvet. He let out a shout, as if he had had a nightmare, and then he began to sob, “You’re a cruel woman, Mary. You’re a cruel hard woman.” That night he sighed in his sleep and groaned and shouted out what sounded like imprecations in Greek. It frightened her. He could kill me, she thought, and, no, she wasn’t anywhere near being thrilled but decided, I’ll stop it. It’s enough. But she couldn’t stop. An implacable acg stare had fasteself on her face. And she thought, But I started it all food reason, didn’t I?
And the days passed. On an evening when the four were together Mary hoped the others would not notice that she was ign Demetrios and that he was doing anything to avoid looking at her. But Helen noticed, all right.
day Mary asked Helen, “How long do you go on with it?”
“I’ve never kept it up lohan a day. Well, I love him, don’t I?” She sounded a bit evasive.
It was now three weeks since Mary had begureatment. She was in a frenzy of panid did not go out at all but sat weeping, and then sat silent, staring, not at Dmitri, for he was not there, but at the wall. She did not know what was happening, but it was terrible. Had she lost her husband? He was not ing in till very late, because he had been drinking. When he did he stumbled around the room swearing at her—in Greek. Then one night he didn’t e home.
“What’s going on with you and Dmitri?” asks Tom, meeting Mary ireet. “Are you having a quarrel?”
“Nothing like that,” Mary says smiling, while she feels her life is falling apart.
Ihat night she put her arms around her drunk husband, from behind, and nuzzled up and said, “e on, Dmitri, don’t sulk.” “Go to hell!” he shouted, and blubbered noisily, in a way that made her hate him, and then he suddenly fell asleep. In the m she and out of bed and laid the breakfast, and when he came out of the bathroom, already putting on his jacket to go out, she held him at the door and said, “I’ve got a nice breakfast for you.”
At which he laughed, but it was like a bark, and he shook his fi her in clumsy sarcasm and said, “You’re talking. You don’t use words to me, so shut up, I don’t want to hear you.” He left.
Mary went to where Helen was with the baby. She was among a group of wives and babies. They were all laughing and talking and joggling their babies about. Was that really Helen? Was she ill or something? She looked thin, and even ugly, with her lumpy nursing breasts. And as she stood looking at Helen, thinking, But that’s not what Helen is like, she thought that these days Dmitri seemed to her a fat clumsy man with a red swollen drinker’s face. Mary went to join the group and saw that Helen was not moving up on the benake room for her. Mary pushed her way in, and her determination was such that one by ohe wome a off with their prams and pushchairs.
Now Mary told Helen the whole story, and she knew she sounded like a madwoman. Helen ushing the pram bad forth. She pushed it one way, jiggled it up and down, pulled it back toward her, jiggled it in a long thoughtful pause, and pushed it fain, and to Mary it seemed that the pram had bee part of the listening and judging.
“You’ve kept it up for three weeks?” Helen said at last, with a carefulhat told Mary she was trolling areme rea. Her face was severe. She might never have been Mary’s best friend. “Three weeks,” stated Helen. “No wonder he’s sick.”
“Is he sick?”
“’t you see for yourself?” said this new Helen, with her cold bleak faot beautiful at all. They were sitting on an ugly wooden bench outside a pub that needed painting, and wasn’t all that attractive, although there were little bay trees oher side of the door. The trees needed watering and they were dusty.
“Tom said that Demetrios was too drunk to work yesterday. He’ll lose his job if he’s not careful.”
The words “But you gave me the idea” could not get themselves off Mary’s tongue. She was asking herself—and she was in the grip of the panic that seemed to be her perma dition—why did I take what she said the way I did?
“You’d better try and make it up to him,” pronounced Helen, and she got up from the bend went off with her baby, not even smiling at Mary or saying, “See you tomorrow.”
I’ve lost Helen, too, thought Mary. She went to sit outside the restaurant where Dmitri worked. He had an hour’s break iernoon. When he came out she ran to him and put her hand on his arm and said, “Dmitri, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Dmitri.” She was g and he was turning away from her and saying, “So you’re sorry, and that’s all you have to say. What was all that for? I wanted a kid, that’s all. You’re a bad woman, Mary.” She could see he felt horror as he looked at her, quickly, for he was afraid that cold angry stare might appear again on her face. He tried to pull his arm away, but she held tight and said, “Please please please, please, Dmitri.” He stood there half turned away, with nervous side gla her, but avoiding her eyes, which afflicted him. She thinks, He will hate me forever, but pleads, “Please, Dmitri, e home now.” The two stood close on the pavement, and people going past moved well out of their way, and she was ging to him for dear life, for that was how it felt to her, because everything was at stake. She was weeping loudly, and he was hot and red and miserable.
Home was only a few minutes away. He went stumbling beside her and she kept tight hold of him, for he might run off and she would never see him again.
At home she tried to pull him into the bedroom, but he sat at the table with his head in? his hands. “What are you thinking now?” he asked. “We’ll have sex and then that’s the end of it?”
“I’ve stopped taking the Pill, Dmitri.”
“So you’ve stopped the Pill.”
“e to bed, please, Dmitri.”
“What a way to make a baby.”
She grabbed his hands to pull him up, and she was thinking, But when have I ever had to talk him into bed before? He let himself be pulled, and stumbled with her into bed. He was weeping, with rough ugly painful sobs. She had broken him. She was not feeling anything like her little thrill of victory or the pleasant fear of their sexual games. Inside herself she was babbling, “He’ll get over it, he’ll fet, and we’ll go back to hoere.” For now it seemed to her that how they had been was wonderful, and she could not uand why she had thrown it away.
Meanwhile it certainly was not a question of making love, or even of sex, because she was holding in her hand a small limp shrinking piece of flesh, and nothing like this had ever happened before.
“Don’t you do it again,” he was saying, in his new rough miserable voice. “Don’t you do it, I’m telling you. If you do I’ll kill you. I’ll just walk out and never e home, so don’t you do it.”
He lay down on the bed, but on his baot turned away. She insinuated herself inside his arm, lying as close as she could. “Oh, Dmitri, I’m so sorry.” She was weeping but she felt better, because she had decided to hear what he had said as a kind of fiveness. She was telling herself, “We’ll fet all this in a day or two and everything will be as it was.” ?天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》