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

persuade them to take him close again. He asked many questions, and learned very little. He was up against their lack of curiosity. He often could not believe it when he asked something and heard, ‘We’ve never needed to know that,’ or some such evasion.

      The bitterness of his ignorance grew in him. He could not bear it, the immensity of what he didn’t know. The pain was linked deep in him with something hidden from him. He never asked himself why he had to know what other people were content to leave unknown. He was used to Mara, who was like him, and longed to understand. Down here on this lovely island, where he was a stranger only in this one thing – that these people did not even know how ignorant they were – he thought of Mara, missed her and dreamed of her too. Marianthe said to him that he had been calling out for a woman, called Mara. Who was she? ‘My sister,’ he said and saw her politely sceptical smile.

      How it isolated him, that smile, how it estranged her. He thought that back in the Centre Griot would not smile if Dann talked of Mara, for he had lived at the Farm.

      The pain Dann felt was homesickness, but he did not suspect that: he had never had a home that he could remember, so how could he be missing one?

      He must leave. Soon, he must leave, before Marianthe’s disappointment in him turned to worse. But still he lingered.

      He liked being with the girls who helped Marianthe with the inn’s work. They were merry, teased and caressed him, and made fun. ‘Oh, why are you so serious, Dann, always so serious, come on, give me a smile …’ He thought that Kira could be one of them – but even as he did, knew her presence would end the laughter. Well, then, suppose she had been born here, in this easy pleasant place, rather than as a slave, with the threat of being taken for breeding by the Hadrons, would she then have been kind and loving, instead of always looking for an advantage, always ready to humiliate? Was he asking, then, if these girls, whose nature was to caress and charm, had been born for it? But here Dann was coming up against a question too hard for him: it was a matter of what people were born with. Had Kira been born hard and unkind? If these girls had been born into that city, Chelops (now gone into dust and ashes), would they have been like Kira? But he could not know the answer, and so he let it go and allowed himself to be entertained by them.

      Now a thought barged into his mind that he certainly could not welcome. If Mara had been born here, would she, like these girls, have had adroit tender hands and a smile like an embrace? Was he criticising Mara? How could he! Brave Mara – but fierce Mara; indomitable and tenacious Mara. But no one could say she was not stubborn and obstinate – she could no more have smiled, and yielded and teased and cajoled than … these girls could have gone a mile of that journey she and he had undergone. But, he was thinking, what a hard life she had had, never any ease, or lightness, never any … fun. What a word to apply to Mara; he almost felt ashamed – and he watched Marianthe’s girls at a kind of ball game they had, laughing and playing the fool. Oh, Mara, and I certainly didn’t make things easier for you, did I? But these thoughts were too difficult and painful, so he let them go and allowed himself to be entertained.

      He stood with Marianthe at her window, overlooking the northern seas, where sometimes appeared blocks of ice that had fallen from the cliffs – though they always melted fast in the sun. Below them was a blue dance of water that he knew could be so cold, but with the sun on it seemed a playfellow, with the intimacy of an invitation: come on in, join me … Dann asked Marianthe, holding her close from behind, his face on her shining black curls, if she would not like to go with him back up the cliffs and walk to the Centre, and from there go with him to see that amazing roar and rush of white water … even as he said it, he thought how dismal she would find the marshes and the chilly mists.

      ‘How could I leave my inn?’ she said, meaning that she did not want to.

      And now he dared to say that one day he believed she would have to. That morning he had made a trip to the town at the sea’s edge that had waves washing over its roofs.

      ‘Look over there,’ he said, tilting back her head by the chin, so she had to look up, to the distant icy gleams that were the ice mountains. Up there, he said to her, long long ago had been great cities, marvellous cities, finer than anything anywhere now – and he knew she was seeing in her mind’s eye the villages of the islands; you could not really call them towns. ‘It is hard for us to imagine those cities, and now anything like them is deep in the marshes up there on the southern shore.’ Marianthe leaned back against him, and rubbed her head against his cheek – he was tall, but she was almost as tall – and asked coaxingly why she should care about long ago.

      ‘Beautiful cities,’ he said, ‘with gardens and parks, that the ice covered, but it is going now, it is going so fast.’

      But she mocked him and he laughed with her.

      ‘Come to bed, Dann.’

      He had not been in her bed for three nights now and it was because, and he told her so, she was in the middle of her cycle, so she could conceive. She always laughed at him and was petulant, when he said this, asking how did he know, and anyway, she wanted a child, please, come on Dann.

      And this was now the painful point of division between them. She wanted a child, to keep him with her, and he very much did not.

      Marianthe had told her woman friends and the girls working at the inn, and they had told their men, and one evening, in the big main room, one of the fishermen called out that they had heard he knew the secrets of the bed.

      ‘Not of the bed,’ he said. ‘But of birth, when to conceive, yes.’

      The room was full of men and women, and some children. By now he knew them all. Their faces had on them the same expression when they looked at him. Not antagonistic, exactly, but ready to be. He was always testing them, even when he did not mean to.

      Now one fisherman called out, ‘And where did you get all that clever stuff from, Dann? Perhaps it is too deep for us.’

      Here it was again, a moment when something he said brought into question everything he had ever said, all his tales, his exploits.

      ‘Nothing clever about it,’ Dann said. ‘If you can count the days between one full moon and the next full moon, and you do that all the time, then you can count the intervals between a woman’s flows. It is simple. For five days in the middle of a woman’s cycle a woman can conceive.’

      ‘You haven’t told us who told you. How do you know? How is it you know this and we don’t?’ A woman said this, and she was unfriendly.

      ‘Yes, you ask me how I know. Well, it is known. But only in some places. And that is the trouble. That is our trouble, all of us – do you see? Why is it you can travel to a new place and there is knowledge there that isn’t in other places? When my sister Mara arrived at the Agre Army – I told you that story – the general there taught her all kinds of things she didn’t know but he didn’t know about the means of controlling birth. He had never heard of it.’

      Dann was standing by the great counter of the room where the casks of beer were, and the ranks of mugs. He was looking around at them all, from face to face, as if someone there could come out, there and then, with another bit of information that could fit in and make a whole.

      ‘Once,’ he said, ‘long ago, before the Ice came down up there’ – and he pointed in the direction of the ice cliffs – ‘all the land up there was covered with great cities and there was a great knowledge, which was lost, under the Ice. But it was found, some of it, and hidden in the sands – when there were sands and not marshes. Then bits and pieces of the old knowledge travelled, and it was known here and there, but never as a whole, except in the old Centre – but now it is in fragments there too.’

      ‘And how do you know what you know?’ came a sardonic query, from the eldest of the fishermen. Real hostility was near now; they were all staring at him and their eyes were cold.

      Marianthe, behind the counter, began to weep.

      ‘Yes,’ said one of the younger fishermen, ‘he makes you cry; is that why you like him, Marianthe?’

      That