The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing

‘It is evening,’ he pointed out. The Captain stood frowning for a moment. Then he sat down on the grass, and poured out two brandies.

      ‘Ciao,’ said Michele.

      ‘Cheers,’ said the Captain. Three weeks, he was thinking. Three weeks with this damned little Itie! He drained his glass and refilled it, and set it in the grass. The grass was cool and soft. A tree was flowering somewhere close – hot waves of perfume came on the breeze.

      ‘It is nice here,’ said Michele. ‘We will have a good time together. Even in a war, there are times of happiness. And of friendship. I drink to the end of the war.’

      Next day, the Captain did not arrive at the parade-ground until after lunch. He found Michele under the frees with a bottle. Sheets of ceiling board had been erected at one end of the parade-ground in such a way that they formed two walls and part of a third, and a slant of steep roof supported on struts.

      ‘What’s that?’ said the Captain, furious.

      ‘The church,’ said Michele.

      ‘Wha-at?’

      ‘You will see. Later. It is very hot.’ He looked at the brandy bottle that lay on its side on the ground. The Captain went to the lorry and returned with the case of brandy. They drank. Time passed. It was a long time since the Captain had sat on grass under a tree. It was a long time, for that matter, since he had drunk so much. He always drank a great deal, but it was regulated to the times and seasons. He was a disciplined man. Here, sitting on the grass beside this little man whom he still could not help thinking of as an enemy, it was not that he let his self-discipline go, but that he felt himself to be something different: he was temporarily set outside his normal behaviour. Michele did not count. He listened to Michele talking about Italy, and it seemed to him he was listening to a savage speaking: as if he heard tales from the mythical South Sea islands where a man like himself might very well go just once in his life. He found himself saying he would like to make a trip to Italy after the war. Actually, he was attracted only by the North and the Northern people. He had visited Germany, under Hitler, and though it was not the time to say so, had found it very satisfactory. Then Michele sang him some Italian songs. He sang Michele some English songs. Then Michele took out photographs of his wife and children, who lived in a village in the mountains of North Italy. He asked the Captain if he were married. The Captain never spoke about his private affairs.

      He had spent all his life in one or other of the African colonies as a policeman, magistrate, native commissioner, or in some other useful capacity. When the war started, military life came easily to him. But he hated city life, and had his own reasons for wishing the war over. Mostly, he had been in bush-stations with one or two other white men, or by himself, far from the rigours of civilization. He had relations with native women; and from time to time visited the city where his wife lived with her parents and the children. He was always tormented by the idea that she was unfaithful to him. Recently he had even appointed a private detective to watch her; he was convinced the detective was inefficient.

      Army friends coming from L—where his wife was, spoke of her at parties, enjoying herself. When the war ended, she would not find it so easy to have a good time. And why did he not simply live with her and be done with it? The fact was, he could not. And his long exile to remote bush-stations was because he needed the excuse not to. He could not bear to think of his wife for too long; she was that part of his life he had never been able, so to speak, to bring to heel.

      Yet he spoke of her now to Michele, and of his favourite bush-wife, Nadya. He told Michele the story of his life, until he realized that the shadows from the trees they sat under had stretched right across the parade-ground to the grandstand. He got unsteadily to his feet, and said: ‘There is work to be done. You are being paid to work.’

      ‘I will show you my church when the light goes.’

      The sun dropped, darkness fell, and Michele made the Captain drive his lorry on to the parade-ground a couple of hundred yards away and switch on his lights. Instantly, a white church sprang up from the shapes and shadows of the bits of board.

      ‘Tomorrow, some houses,’ said Michele cheerfully.

      At the end of the week, the space at the end of the parade-ground had crazy gawky constructions of lath and board over it, that looked in the sunlight like nothing on this earth. Privately, it upset the Captain; it was like a nightmare that these skeleton-like shapes should be able to persuade him, with the illusions of light and dark, that they were a village. At night, the Captain drove up his lorry, switched on the lights, and there it was, the village, solid and real against a background of full green trees. Then, in the morning sunlight, there was nothing there, just bits of board stuck in the sand.

      ‘It is finished,’ said Michele.

      ‘You were engaged for three weeks,’ said the Captain. He did not want it to end, this holiday from himself.

      Michele shrugged. ‘The army is rich,’ he said. Now, to avoid curious eyes, they sat inside the shade of the church, with the case of brandy between them. The Captain talked endlessly about his wife, about women. He could not stop talking.

      Michele listened. Once he said: ‘When I go home – when I go home – I shall open my arms …’ He opened them, wide. He closed his eyes. Tears ran down his cheeks. ‘I shall take my wife in my arms, and I shall ask nothing, nothing. I do not care. It is enough, it is enough. I shall ask no questions and I shall be happy.’

      The Captain stared before him, suffering. He thought how he dreaded his wife. She was a scornful creature, gay and hard, who laughed at him. She had been laughing at him ever since they married. Since the war, she had taken to calling him names like Little Hitler, and Storm-trooper. ‘Go ahead, my Little Hitler,’ she had cried last time they met. ‘Go ahead, my Storm-trooper. If you want to waste your money on private detectives, go ahead. But don’t think I don’t know what you do when you’re in the bush. I don’t care what you do, but remember that I know it …’

      The Captain remembered her saying it. And there sat Michele on his packing-case, saying: ‘It’s a pleasure for the rich, my friend, detectives and the law. Even jealousy is a pleasure I don’t want any more. Ah, my friend, to be together with my wife again, and the children, that is all I ask of life. That and wine and food and singing in the evening.’ And the tears wetted his cheeks and splashed on to his shirt.

      That a man should cry, good Lord! thought the Captain. And without shame! He seized the bottle and drank.

      Three days before the great occasion, some high-ranking officers came strolling through the dust, and found Michele and the Captain sitting together on the packing-case, singing. The Captain’s shirt was open down the front, and there were stains on it.

      The Captain stood to attention with the bottle in his hand, and Michele stood to attention too, out of sympathy with his friend. Then the officers drew the Captain aside – they were all cronies of his – and said, what the hell did he think he was doing? And why wasn’t the village finished? Then they went away.

      ‘Tell them it is finished,’ said Michele. ‘Tell them I want to go.’

      ‘No,’ said the Captain, ‘no. Michele, what would you do if your wife …’

      ‘This world is a good place. We should be happy – that is all.’

      ‘Michele …’

      ‘I want to go. There is nothing to do. They paid me yesterday.’

      ‘Sit down, Michele. Three more days and then it’s finished.’

      ‘Then I shall paint the inside of the church as I painted the one in the camp.’

      The Captain laid himself down on some boards and went to sleep. When he woke, Michele was surrounded by the pots of paint he had used on the outside of the village. Just in front of the Captain was a picture of a black girl. She was young and plump. She wore a patterned blue dress and her shoulders came soft and bare out of it. On her back was a baby slung in a band of red stuff. Her face was turned towards the Captain and she was smiling.