Mara and Dann. Doris Lessing

and, moreover, had known from the first. She reached her arms out towards him across the water, but let them fall, and smiled, and said, ‘You’ve come back.’

      He did not say anything. He was looking at her as she was at him, at every little bit, taking in, finding out … But why didn’t he say anything? He did not smile, he did not seem to have heard. He only frowned and examined her. Five years he had been gone. He had been ten years old, and now he was fifteen. He was a man. The Rock People married when they were thirteen or fourteen and could have children by Dann’s age.

      ‘I heard you were still here,’ he said. ‘Before that I thought you must be dead.’

      ‘Everyone is dead, except for me and Daima.’

      He stood up. He took up from the ground a whitish rough tunic of the kind servants had worn back home. He shook the dust out of it and slid it over his head. For the first time, it occurred to her that she was naked. She put on her brown tunic, hating it, as she always did. And he was making a face as he saw it. He was remembering that – and what else?

      She wanted to ask, ‘What did you see?’ – but you asked that about a place, a feather, a tree, a person, not five years.

      ‘Where have you been?’ she asked, and he laughed. That was because it was a stupid question. He had not laughed or even smiled till now. ‘Have you been here all this time?’

      ‘Yes,’ she said.

      ‘Just here, nowhere else?’

      ‘Yes.’ And she knew that part of what she wanted to know had been answered. His smile was scornful, and she was seeing her life as he did when he smiled: she had done nothing, been nowhere, while he …

      ‘Who told you I was here?’

      ‘Travellers said.’

      She thought that he was speaking Mahondi as if he had forgotten how to. She spoke it with Daima, so she had not forgotten.

      ‘You haven’t been meeting many Mahondis,’ she stated.

      That laugh again: short, ‘That’s it, yes. Not many.’

      ‘I’m going back to see how Daima is. She is dying.’ She dipped her cans and began walking back. She did not know if he would come with her. She could not read his face, his movements; she did not know him. He might just walk off again – disappear.

      They went carefully past the fast drying waterholes of the smaller watercourse, where the scorpions were fighting, and where from the trees insects were dropping to the earth to get to the waterholes – where scorpions tore them apart with their pincers.

      ‘All the insects and the scorpions are getting bigger here,’ she said.

      ‘And everywhere. And down South.’

      The phrase down South did not go easily into her mind. She had often said, ‘up north,’ ‘down south’ – but south to her had meant their old home and her family. She was thinking that, to him, who knew so much more, south must mean much more. Nearly everything of what she said or thought was from their old home, from the What Did You See? game, from Daima’s memories. It was as if she had been living off all that ever since.

      They took some time to get to the village. It was because she was slow. He kept getting ahead of her, stopping to wait for her, but then when they set off in no time he was ahead again.

      In the village she told him which houses had the dead in them, which cisterns had corpses – but they must be dried up now, or skeletons.

      At Rabat’s house he stopped, remembering. He slid back the door, peered in, went to the corner where Rabat lay, and stood looking down. Then he lifted the corpse by its shoulder, stared into the face, let Rabat drop, like a piece of wood. Except, thought Mara, any piece of wood we found we’d treat more carefully than how he has just handled Rabat. And she had learned another thing about him: the dead were nothing to him; he was used to death.

      At their house Mara slid back the door and listened. She thought at first that Daima had died. There was no sound of breathing, but she heard a little sigh, and then a long interval, and another sigh.

      ‘She’s going,’ Dann said. He did not look at Daima but went into the inner rooms.

      Mara lifted water to Daima’s lips but the old woman was past swallowing.

      Dann came back. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

      ‘I’m not going while she is alive.’

      He sat down with his arms folded at the rocky table, put his head on his arms – and was at once asleep. His breathing was steady, healthy, loud.

      Mara sat by the old woman, wiping her face with a wet cloth, then her arms and her hands. She kept taking gulps of water herself, each one a delicious surprise, since it had been so long since she could simply lift a cup and take a mouthful without thinking, I must only take a few drops. Mara thought, If I don’t eat soon I will simply fall over and die myself. She left Daima and went to the storeroom. There were still some roots. She sliced one, licking the juice off her fingers. Then she reached up out of the dry cistern a can that had some of the white flour in it, which she had saved so that one day she would have the strength to leave. It had been three seasons since anyone had come with flour to barter. It smelled a bit stale, but it was still good. She mixed it with water, patted it flat, and put it out on the cistern top, where she knew it would cook in that flaming heat in a few minutes. When she went back to Daima, the old woman was dead.

      Dann still slept.

      Mara put her hand out towards his shoulder, but before she touched him he was on his feet, and a knife was in his hand. He saw her, took her in, nodded, sat down and at once drew towards him the plate of sliced root, and began eating. He ate it all.

      ‘That was for both of us.’

      ‘You didn’t say.’

      She got another root, sliced that, and ate it while he watched. Then she brought in the flat bread from the cistern top, broke it in two and gave him half.

      ‘This is almost the last of the flour,’ she said.

      ‘I have a little with me.’

      When he had finished eating he went to bend over Daima, staring. She probably hadn’t changed very much since he left, except that her long hair was white.

      ‘Do you remember her?’ she asked.

      ‘She looked after us.’

      ‘Do you remember our home?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Do you remember the night Gorda rescued us and arranged for us to be brought here to Daima?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Nothing?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Do you remember the two people who brought us?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Do you remember Mishka? And her baby, Dann? You called him Dann?’

      He frowned. ‘I think I do. A little.’

      ‘You cried when you had to say goodbye to Mishkita.’

      And now he sighed, and looked long and hard at her. He was trying to remember? He didn’t want to remember? He did not like it, her trying to make him remember?

      It was painful for Mara: her body, her arms – her arms particularly – knew how they had sheltered Dann, how he had clung and hugged her, but now he seemed to remember nothing at all. Yet those memories were the strongest she had, and looking after Dann had been the first and most important thing in her life. It was as if all that early time together had become nothing.

      But she thought, If I did let my arms reach out now it wouldn’t be Dann, but only this strange young man with the dangerous thing between his legs. I could not just hug him or kiss him now.

      Then