Mara and Dann. Doris Lessing

wished she dared wash her dress there, and let it dry on her. Dann was silent. Mara saw on his face something she had not seen before: it was anger, or pain, or fear – but she could not decipher it. He only stared at the dirty little lake, and at the dried mud, and then over the lake to the mountains. She was afraid to ask, What’s wrong? – but he turned his head towards her, and she understood that if he could cry, could sob, could allow weakness, then that is what he would be doing now. It was pain she was looking at. ‘Why?’ he whispered. ‘Why? I don’t understand. It was all water. When I ran away that time, it was water from here all around to the mountains. Why should everything go dry, why does the rain just stop, why? – there must be a reason.’ And he came stepping across the hard mud ridges and took her by the shoulders and peered deep into her face, as if she must know the reason.

      She said, ‘But those cities, the ones near the Rock Village, they had people in them for thousands of years, Daima said, and now they are just nothing.’ And as she spoke, she thought that she used the word thousands because Daima did, yet she still did not know more than the ten fingers on her hands, the ten toes on her feet. Long ago she had been taught more than that, in the school at home, but in her mind it was the same as if she said hundreds or thousands, and yes – there was another word – millions. He let his hands fall and said, ‘We walk over all these bones, all the time.’ She knew that tears wanted to come into those sharp, clever eyes of his, which were beautiful when he sat thinking, or had just woken; but his mouth was tight. ‘When I came this way to get you I saw skulls, people’s skulls, piles – I couldn’t count them.’ And now his face was so close to hers she could feel the heat from it on her cheeks. And his eyes seemed to press into hers. ‘Why is it happening, Mara? Why don’t we understand anything? No one knows why anything happens.’

      And then he let her go, turned away, picked up the end of his pole and waited for her to lift hers. ‘There was a boat,’ he said. ‘That was only a week ago.’ His voice sounded ordinary again. They went on, carefully, well beyond the edge of wet, for in both their minds was the thought that if a water dragon or a lizard had survived it could be up and out of that water to get one of them. The water stingers rattled as they moved, so you could hear them. She was thinking, I say words like day or week, or year, and never think what I am saying, but behind these words are what they are. I know what a day is because the sun shines in it, and then there is dark, and I say night. But why a week, and why a year? She was tormented, haunted, by memories that refused to come properly into her mind: she had been taught these things, she was pretty sure. And now she did not know what a year measured, or why the rain fell or did not fall, or that the stars were … Of course she had known about the stars: she remembered her father holding her up to look at them, and saying, ‘That one there is …’ But she had forgotten all the names.

      They were at a place where once there had been a wooden jetty; but now the wood had rotted and all wood was so scarce that it was of stone that the causeway was made, leading to the water’s edge. A boat was coming. Mara had never seen one. It was a fisherman’s boat, Dann said, a big one, and a crowd of people were approaching over the dried mud, about twenty of them. Two men had long oars, and stood at the front and at the back of the boat. She and Dann went on with the others. There was a rail around the boat and she held on tight. They were all standing close together, and the smell of the crowd was thick and sour. The boat was low in muddy water. At the last moment a man and a woman came stumbling to the boat. They were the couple who had been robbed last night. It seemed they hadn’t found food anywhere else, because they were hardly strong enough to stand. Dann glanced at them indifferently, as he did at the others. Water stingers were watching them, their eyes and pincers sticking up out of the water. Everyone kept an eye on them: a stinger could knock someone in with its tail. Now the boat was in the middle of the little lake, and from down here the mountains seemed high. Yet the ones behind them were where Dann and she had come in a morning.

      Mara had not known there could be so many different kinds of people. There was a woman with a thick body like the Rock People, but her hair was a frizzle of bright red. She was with a man who was yellowish brown, a thin, sick man, and his hair was in shags of white, though he wasn’t old. There were three that could be Mahondis, tall and thin, but their hair was like the Rock People’s, a pale mass. She and Dann were the only Mahondis, but no one seemed to notice them or mind, and this was because, they decided, they both wore the long, loose, once white robes that everyone knew were slaves’ or servants’ dress. What would Mara and Dann’s parents think if they could see their children now? Would they even recognise us? – and Mara tried to remember her mother’s face, and her father’s, but could not. Their voices – yes, and they laughed a lot, she was sure. And they smelled: her father had a warm, spicy smell she had thought was the smell of kindness, and her mother a teasing, sweet smell … Meanwhile Mara was standing in a press of people who smelled of dirty sweat and feet. The water was muddy. The boat was hardly moving. The boatmen were shouting at Dann to use his carrying pole to push the boat along. Then they passed an oar through the crowd to her. They thought she was a boy, being so thin and bony inside that robe, and with her still bare pate. Only the men were being given oars and paddles. The sun was scorching down. It was midday. Over the mud shores the heat waves oiled and shimmered. As the oars and poles plunged into thick water, bones were disturbed and appeared for a moment, and sank, and, worse, corpses of beasts came up, emitting the most fearful stench, and went down, leaving the air poisonous. But the boat was making progress. Soon they were out of the lake and into the stream that fed it – a narrow, shallow flow that had once been a big river – and the boat had to be pushed along with poles. It was farther to the mountains than it had seemed from where they embarked, and by the time they reached them it was mid-afternoon. There was a jetty of rotting wood, and the boatmen ordered everyone off. Grumbling, the people got on to the shore. The boatmen held out their hands, and into them were put a fruit, a little bag of flour, a flap of bread. Mara and Dann offered two yellow roots, which the boatmen turned over and over, not having seen them before, apparently. To save argument the two jumped quickly on to the jetty. Mara was beside the woman they had robbed. She saw the mass of black hair just in front of her eyes and thought, But that’s like the fur of a sick animal. It should be standing out and strong, but it was limp and dull. The woman was swaying, she could hardly keep herself up. Mara pulled out from her sack one of the yellow roots and held it out to her. She was thinking, But she’ll need a knife – when Dann was there, with his knife, and was cutting the root in two. The movement was so quick, and Dann’s eyes narrow and sharp – she looked and saw the crowd was pressing in around them, all eyes on her sack, and on Dann’s, and on his knife – which was why he had been so quick to cut the root in half: he wanted everyone to see the knife. The woman began sucking at the juice, moaning and crying, and her companion snatched at the other half and chewed at it. Dann pulled Mara away, and they ran up into the mountain, not stopping until they were among rocks. Mara was thinking that Dann believed they were going to be killed, because of the sacks, and the water. And she waited for him to scold her, or say something, but he didn’t. And she was thinking, Those two, when Dann was stealing their little bag, if they had woken up and seen him, would he have killed them – all for a little dried fruit and a bit of bread?

      Dann said, ‘You must have a knife. And make sure that everyone sees you have got it.’

      They climbed to where they could look down on the lake, and the river running in from this end and out the other side, and the great basin of dried mud and dust. The mountains on the other side where they were yesterday stood up high and blue and fresh. ‘That cloudburst must have been there,’ she said, ‘somewhere in those mountains. And the flash flood went down the other way, it didn’t come this side. Otherwise that lake would be bigger. And it would be fresh.’

      ‘It hasn’t rained here for a long time,’ he said. And the sullen, restless note was in his voice again. And she was thinking, If that cloudburst had happened just a little way this side of those mountains, the flood would have come this way, not down past the Rock Village, and I would be dead now. And Dann said, angrily, ‘Everything is just chance. It’s just luck – who stays alive and who dies.’ And then, again, ‘You must have a knife.’

      They searched until they found a place where they could lie among rocks and look out. Several times they heard people from the boat go past, farther down. ‘They think the stream