198
DORIS LESSING
What was it? Well, I was drunk, for one thing, and Hans
sitting there all frightened scared me, but it was good, it was good,
I promise you. A kind of chronicle of Blagspruit it was, the lives of
the citizens-well, need I elaborate, since the lives of citizens are
the same everywhere in the world, but worse in Suid Afrika, and
worse a million times in Blagspruit. The Manu Script gave off a
stink of church and right-doing, with the sin and the evil underneath,
it had a medieval stink to it, naturally enough, for what is worse than
the
Kerk
in this our Land?- but I'm saying this to you, remember,
and I never said it, but what is worse than the stink of the
Kerk
and
the god-fearing in this our feudal land?
But the poem.
As
far as I can remember, because I was full as a
tick, it was a sort of prose chronicle that led up to and worked
into the poems, you couldn't tell where they began or ended. The
prose was stiff and old-fashioned and formal, monk's language, and
the poems too. But I knew when I read it it was the best I'd read in
years-since I read those poems of his ten years before, man, not
since then. And don't forget, God help me, I'm an editor now, and
I read poems day and night, and when I come on something like
Hans' poems that night I have nothing to say
but-Coed.
Right. I was working away there an hour or more because of
that damned black ornamented script, then I put it down and I
said: "Hans, can I ask you a question?" And he looked this way and
that over his shoulder first, then leaned forward, the lamplight
shining on his pate, and he asked in a low trembling sinner's voice:
"What do you want to ask me, Martin?"
I said, "Why this complicated handwriting? What for? It's
beautiful, but why this monkey's puzzle?"
And he lowered his voice and said: "It's so that Esther can't
read it."
I said: "And what of it, Hans? Why not? Give me some more
brandewyn
and tell me."
He said: "She's a friend of the Predikant's cook, and her Sister
Mary works in the Mayor's kitchen."
I saw it all. I was drunk, so I saw it. I got up, and I said:
"Hans, you're right. You're right a thousand times.
If
you're going
to write stuff like this, as true and as beautiful as God and all his
