Doris Lessing - The Sweetest Dream

This youth was very sick, with probably only a few months to live: everyone knew he had had a curse put on him.

Rebecca read in their faces, and said quietly, ' He is well enough to guard the books. And he can enjoy the books and so he will not be so unhappy. '

' There are not enough books for everyone. '

‘Yes, there are enough. Tenderai will make them take a book out for one week, and bring it back. He will cover the books in newspaper. He will make everyone pay...’And, as Sylvia was about to protest, ' no, just a little bit, perhaps ten cents. Yes, it is nothing, but it is enough to tell everyone the books are expensive and we must all look after them. '

She got up. She did not look well. Sylvia scolded her that she worked too hard, with her sick children who woke her at night, and she said again now, ' Rebecca, you work too hard. '

‘I am strong, I am like you, Sylvia. I can work well because I am not fat. A fat dog lies in the sun with the flies crawling over it and sleeps but a thin dog is awake and snaps at the flies.'

The priest laughed. ‘I shall use that for my sermon on Sunday. '

'You're welcome, Father.' She made her curtsy to him as taught her at school, due to anyone older. She pressed her thin hands together and smiled at him. Then to Sylvia she said, 'I'll get some boys to come and carry your books down to the hut, and the planks and bricks. Put your books on your bed, so they don't take them too. '

She went out.

'What a pity Rebecca couldn't run this poor country instead of the incompetents we' re saddled with. '

‘Do we really have to believe that a country gets the government it deserves? I don't think these poor people deserve their government.'

Father McGuire nodded, then spoke. ‘Have you thought that perhaps the reason these gross clowns have not had their throats cut is because the povos would like to be in their place, and know they would do the same if they had the chance?'

Sylvia said, ‘Is that really what you believe?'

' It is not for nothing that we have the prayer, ' ' Lead us not into temptation' ' . And there is the other, its companion, ' ' Thank you, Lord, for delivering me from evil' ' . '

‘Are you really saying that virtue is merely a question of not being tempted?'

'Ah, virtue, now there's a word I find it hard to use.'

Sylvia, it was clear, was not far off tears, and the priest saw it. He went to a cupboard, returned with two glasses and a bottle of good whisky – she brought it back with her. He poured generously for himself and for her, nodded at her and drank his down.

Sylvia looked at the golden liquid making patterns in the lamplight, a rich oily swirl that settled into a pond of amber. She took a sip. ‘I have often thought I could become an alcoholic. '

‘No, Sylvia, you could not. '

‘I understand why in the old days they had sundowners. '

‘Why the old days? The Pynes have their sundowners on the dot.'

'When the sun goes down I often think I'd give anything to drink a bottle empty. It's so sad, when the sun sets.'

'It is the colour in the sky, reminding us of the splendours of the Lord that we are exiled from. ' She was surprised: he did not usually go in for this kind of thing. ‘I have many times wished myself away from Africa but I have only to see the sun go down over those hills and I’d not leave for anything in the world. '

' Another day gone and nothing achieved,’ said Sylvia. ‘Nothing changed. '

‘Ah, so you' re a world-changer, after all. '

This struck into a sensitive area. She thought: Perhaps Johnny's nonsense got into me and spoiled me. ‘How could one not want to change it?'

‘How could one not want it changed? But wanting to change it oneself – no, there's the devil in that.'

‘And who could disagree, after what we have learned?'

‘And if you have learned that, then you have done better than most. But it is too potent a dream to let its victims go. '

' Father, when you were a young man, are you telling me that you never had a fit of shouting in the streets and throwing stones at the Brits?'

‘You forget, I was a poor boy. I was as poor as some of those people down there in the village. There was only one way out for me. I only ever had one road. I didn't have a choice. '

‘Yes, I cannot see you as anything other than a priest, by nature. '

' It is true – no choice, but the only one for me. '

‘But when I hear Sister Molly go on and on, if she didn't have a cross on her chest, you' d never know she was a nun. '

‘Have you ever thought that for poor girls anywhere in Europe there was only one choice? They became nuns to spare their families the cost of feeding them. And so the convents have been stuffed with young women who ' d have been better off raising families or – or any kind of work in the world. Sister Molly fifty years ago would be going mad in a convent, because she should never have been in it. But now – did you know? – she said to her Superiors, I am leaving this convent and I shall be a nun in the world. And one day I expect that she will say to herself, I'm not a nun. I never was a nun. And she will simply leave her Order, just like that. She was a poor girl and she took the way out. That is all. Yes, and I know what you are thinking – it will not be so easy for those poor black sisters up the hill to leave as it is for Sister Molly. '

When Sylvia walked down to the village after lunch every day she found that outside every hut, or under the trees, or on logs or on stools, the people were reading, or, with an exercise book propped in front of them or on their knees, they laboured to learn to write. She had told them she would come from one to half past two and supervise classes. She would have said from twelve, but she knew Father McGuire would not let her skip lunch. But she did not need to sleep, after all. Within a couple of weeks something like sixty books were transforming the village in the bush where children went to school but did not get an education, and where most adults might have done four or five years at school. Sylvia had driven herself to the Pynes who were going into Senga, had gone with them, and bought a quantity ofexercise books, biros, pencils, an atlas, a little globe, and some textbooks on how to teach. After all, she had no idea how a professional would go about it, and the teachers in the school on the rise where the dust these days was lying in heaps or blowing about in clouds had had no training in how to teach either. She had also gone to the depot to find her sewing machines, but they had not been heard of.

She sat outside Rebecca's hut, where a tall tree threw deep shade in the middle of the day, and taught up to sixty people, as well as she could, hearing them read, setting writing models, and propped the atlas on a shelf on a tree trunk to illustrate geography lessons. Among her pupils might be the teachers from the school who helped her, but were learning as they did.

The doves cooed in the trees. It was the sleepy time of the day for all of them, and Sylvia's need for sleep dragged down her lids, but she would not sleep, she would not. Rebecca handed around water in stainless steel and aluminium basins stolen from the abandoned hospital. Not much water: the drought was biting, women were getting up at three and four in the morning to walk to a further river, the near one having run low and foetid, carrying jugs and cans on their heads. Not much washing was going on: clothes were certainly not being washed. It was as much as the women could do, to keep enough water for drinking and cooking. The smell from the crowd was strong. Sylvia now associated that smell with patience, with long-suffering, and with contained anger. When she took a sip from Rebecca's stolen basins she felt as she should do, but did not, when she drank the blood of Christ at Communion. The faces of the crowd, of all ages from children to old men and women, were rapt, hushed, attentive to every word. Education, this was education, for which most had hungered all their lives, and had expected to get when it had been promised by their government. At two thirty Sylvia called up from the crowd some boy or girl more advanced than the others, set them to read some paragraphs from Enid Blyton – a great favourite: from Tarzan – another; from the Jungle Book, which was more difficult, but liked: or from the prize of them all, Animal Farm which was their own story, as they said. Or the atlas was passed around at a page they had just done, to hammer in what they knew.