The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five

by Doris Lessing

  Which she did. She found Al·Ith walking about her rooms, singing to the child, and talking to it—a difficult sort of talk that made Dabeeb uneasy. And then she saw that Al·Ith had crouched with the child in her lap, near a window that looked out and up to the great mountains. She was showing the mountains to the baby! And Dabeeb took time off from her duties to run down the hill and tell this news to the other women.

  When all that was done, Al·Ith, with the light coming up gold and rose on the snow peaks, took the swaddling layers off the baby, with the intention of wiping it gently clean, as she had always done before — but she found herself licking and nuzzling the child, like a mare with a foal, or a dog with its newborn young. She was quite dismayed and surprised, but at the same time found herself enclosed in a loving spell with this new child, and licking it clean, as an animal does, seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. And the child seemed to think so, too, for he responded to her face moving close to him, and the touch of her hair as she licked him all over, and even quite roughly, as an animal might do to start the blood and the vitality moving more swiftly.

  And, all that done, she covered the child up again, and held it close, thrilled through and through with the wildest emotions of love and possession — but she had not felt anything like this before, and was most uneasy that she did so now. It was not what she ought to be feeling. She was faint with loving and wanting this child, as if — as she had heard one of the women croon earlier — ‘she could eat him all up.’

  Well, this was Zone Four, these were Zone Four ways, and so, presumably, there was nothing to be done about it.

  But where was Ben Ata? Where was Ben Ata? Where was he? How could he leave her and betray her thus? How could he abandon and starve his child? What sort of a monster was he, to go off just at the moment when she, and the child, needed him most?

  Meanwhile, Ben Ata was riding back across country, unsatisfied in every way. His night with the woman had left him only the more curious about Al·Ith, whom he was seeing as a creature of secrets kept deliberately from him. If he had been in any state to narrow down his unease to a definition, he would have said that he could not reconcile an animality (though that was not a word he would use to Al·Ith herself) felt, obviously, as a source of strength and rightness, with an intelligence that he knew overmatched his. But he was not analytical, only tormented with contradictions. His night’s companion had told him — simply through the fact that he had for the first time allowed his understanding to inhabit an impulsive coupling — that throughout his apprenticeship to this marriage he had been, simply, a brute, and he was not in the habit of accepting such words about himself. He had seen that he had fathered children more casually than a beast does. He had been quite proud of the Children’s Army, in which his own offspring had been placed together with those of his officers. He would often, on parades, or on similar occasions, allow his eye to sweep over those young faces, and try to pick out those that resembled him. He expected these boys — some of them young men now and in every way fulfilling expectations — to become ornaments to his armies.

  But he had not been a father.

  He had not suspected that there could be a different view of the matter.

  It seemed to him that he had spent most of his life blind to his own nature.

  And more, and worse, many things said or suggested, by the woman from whom he had parted when light came and she left him to attend to her children, had told him that his kingdom was in every way poorer and more brutal than he had ever suspected, and his people more dissatisfied.

  Yet it had never occurred to him to even wonder about it.

  He had done and behaved as he had always done, and as his father had, and his father — for all he knew, but then he had not thought about that either.

  It was dusk when he arrived back in the camps at the foot of the hill, and he saw that the soldiers and the wives and children were looking at him with smiles and showed every sign of being inclined to cheer. This he saw, in his mood of bitter dissatisfaction with himself, as hypocrisy or even treason. He did not respond but rode unsmiling up the hill, his thoughts full of Al·Ith and his intention to understand her, meaning by this that he would not in the future be deceived by her. Yet he longed for her — longed for something that was more than what last night’s woman had given him. He was not thinking of the child at all.

  On the verandah that framed the pavilion, he saw a woman with a baby in her arms, and thought wearily that before he could be alone with his wife he would have to get rid of all those females. Then he thought that this particular woman must be Dabeeb, and his annoyance softened: he had every intention of making love with her at the first appropriate opportunity, for he wanted to understand her, too. Dabeeb nearly always had a baby or a child somewhere about her: so he had become accustomed to seeing her. Then, as he approached, he had a moment of dizzying confusion, for he thought this was not Dabeeb but Al·Ith.

  In fact it was Dabeeb. The last few weeks of continual attention on her mistress had thinned her and refined her. Her joy at this birth had lit a flame in her that had its source in the belief of all the women that this child would in some way redeem them all, and through them, the kingdom as a whole. And, being close to Al·Ith, she had taken into herself something of the higher pulses of that land which towered over this one.

  She was radiant. But as Ben Ata bent over her to grasp her, to look into her face, and demand — in one shattering and truthful moment — that Al·Ith reveal to him everything she had been keeping back from him, he saw that this was Dabeeb. Even more confused, he went on past without looking at the baby she was holding out to him.

  A woman stood in the archway into the main room, arms folded. Again cursing inwardly that his life was filled with women, women, women, he was about to go past her when he saw this was Al·Ith. He was stopped dead, and could not speak.

  Al·Ith was heavy, lightless, even coarse. Her eyes puzzled and narrowed at him. There was about her an aroma of blood. Only her black glossy hair recognized him.

  ‘Where have you been!’ she said, in a voice that he could not accept from her. Having swung back and forth from emotion to emotion, each unwelcome, he could not now face another one, which was a suspicion that this female had in some way given up her charm, her light, her fire, by some magical means to her servant Dabeeb.

  When it occurred to him that she was no longer heavy and pregnant. Then, slowly, that she must have given birth. And then, that the baby he had just passed was his own.

  All this was too much, and he strode straight through into his own apartments, and sat at a table with his head in his hands.

  Al·Ith did not at first move. In her mind she was back in her own land, trying to match anything at all in her experience with what had just happened.

  She did not meet Dabeeb’s eyes, which were urging her to go after her husband and to take the baby with her. She had seen that Ben Ata had approached Dabeeb with an urgent desperation, a query, that she now believed, having seen it so often, was due to herself. This was ‘love,’ in this Zone: desperation, questioning, an unfulfilment.

  Al·Ith was being possessed by a sharp searing pain she had never felt before. It was as if she were being deprived of air, or as if she had been made to step out over a cliff. She did not know what this amazing new anguish was, but it made her dizzy. She abruptly went into her own apartments and, like Ben Ata, sat with her head in her hands.

  She did not like what she felt, though she did not recognise it. There was no end to the miseries and humiliations of this nasty place.

  The pain she was feeling squeezed her heart, shortened her breath, and made her reluctant to open her eyes, for the room swam around her when she did.

  Now it was dark outside, and Dabeeb brought the child in, because he was hungry and needed feeding. She pulled at Al·Ith’s sleeve, and Al·Ith listlessly took the baby. He began to cry. Dabeeb expected Al·Ith to bare her breast, but Al·Ith did not. She was thinking t
hat the pain she felt — an evil one, she knew — would poison the baby, who was not only deprived of the food of his father’s presence, but would be additionally ill-influenced by herself. She could not say this to Dabeeb, who was a savage in these matters, for all her kindness. She stood up, with difficulty, for she felt ill, and walked up and down with the baby, to quiet it. But he cried miserably.

  Dabeeb was wondering if she ought not to go to Ben Ata to tell him to come to his wife, when he appeared. His face, as he saw Al·Ith walking there with the baby, was that of a child. He had been stunned, shocked, with a pain of complete loss and deprivation. But now to him Al·Ith seemed complete and perfect holding the baby, and he thought her exhaustion and even her drowsiness beautiful and right. If he had approached a doorway into a building that held everything he had ever wanted in his life, expecting to be made welcome, but had found it shut in his face, he couldn’t have felt worse. He leaned against the arched entrance, folded his arms, and moodily watched his wife, his face white, and thin.

  Dabeeb was not in the slightest discomposed. She knew exactly what was happening. Both were jealous. It was all quite in order. Her understanding of natural things being in every way as complete as Al·Ith’s in a higher region of nature, she trusted perfectly that all would shortly be well. With every one of her own births, her dear husband had found some woman, usually the nearest to the birth, irresistible — and she had been jealous. And he had seen her as completed by the baby, and was like a small boy in consequence. Surely Al·Ith could see this for herself? Sometimes this great queen was quite remarkably slow-witted, though it was not her place to say it or even think it.

  Reposing on nature, humble in her faith in it, Dabeeb discreetly bade the pair good night and departed down the hill to tell the women that everything was normal.

  ‘Why won’t you look at me, Al·Ith?’

  ‘Because you have betrayed me, betrayed me — and the child!’ said Al·Ith in her new tight shrill voice, which quite astounded her.

  He believed, of course, that in some dark way she had come to know about his escapade of the last night, and at once looked sheepish, which she saw — and then understood the reason. For she had long ago understood that this bumpkin look of his went with guilt about sex. Now she quite simply loathed him, and even more loathed herself for caring anything for him. She had sunk so far away from anything she really was that she could not stop herself listening to see if the drum was beating — if it had by some supremely good timing chosen this moment to stop, so that she could simply call up her horse and ride away out of this realm of low and seething mists.

  As for him, he could feel that he was writhing about like a country urchin, and was amazed, because he did not feel guilt at all. On the contrary, he was now quite proud of what he had learned by spending a night with a woman even if it was just once, as though she were deserving of equal respect with himself.

  Al·Ith said, ‘Your child … this is your son …’ in a choked, feeble voice.

  Ben Ata understood that this was indeed a son, as of course he had fully expected, because nothing of this enforced marriage could make sense otherwise, but although he had known it, he was flooded with joy. He did not know how to express it, though he wanted to take them both together in his arms. He strode across, and clumsily put his arms around mother and baby. He was beaming. The baby, however, set up a yell, and Al·Ith simply pulled herself away and sat down with her back to him.

  ‘All right,’ he said bitterly, ‘you do things differently in your country.’

  She did not reply, but exposed a breast, which the baby at once fastened his mouth on. Silence. Ben Ata walked around to the other side, ignoring Al·Ith’s back, which was meant to shut him out, and beamed down at the sight. He was now so happy, that he could not believe Al·Ith really meant her coldness.

  And after a few minutes she sighed, and seemed to soften.

  ‘With us,’ she said, ‘the child’s fathers are present to greet the child. To … to feed him …’

  The words ‘the child’s fathers’ had simply fallen flat. As if the very air of this place refused them. As soon as they were out Al·Ith regretted them, fearing that he would see them as a deliberate provocation. But it was worse than that. He was staring at her in bewilderment. ‘But surely even in your country, it is a woman who feeds the child?’

  ‘Not with milk,’ she said, in a cold sarcastic voice she really could not believe was hers. ‘There are other foods, Ben Ata. Believe it or not. This child isn’t just a — lump of flesh.’

  The feeding was not going well: so much anger and reproach and irritation were surging through the room and reaching Arusi through the air, and through the milk he was imbibing, and through the body of his mother. He kept letting go of the nipple to cry a little, and to writhe uncomfortably about, and when he did this, Al·Ith’s large breast — which Ben Ata could not recognize as Al·Ith’s at all, and could not own as his — spurted milk, which soaked Al·Ith’s already jaded blue dress. All this Ben Ata found quite appalling. Yet he was still smiling, and longed for her friendship.

  ‘I suppose you all sit around together,’ said he, attempting sarcasm, though in fact he was interested, ‘and enjoy happy memories?’

  ‘Oh, go away,’ she said, ‘just get out of here. Go to — Dabeeb!’

  This surprised him: he could not understand how she had seen this intention in him — after all, he hadn’t shown it. He was also a little afraid of her, as he had been in the beginning.

  But he did not go. He turned his back on the scene for a little while, staring moodily out of the window up at the massed, now dark mountains, which seemed ominous tonight, and hostile. He listened to the gulping sound of the baby, which after a while stopped. Silence. He turned at last, cautiously, to see Al·Ith sitting peaceably, the child asleep on her lap, and now her look at him seemed pleasant, and even welcoming.

  ‘Come and see him,’ she whispered.

  He approached eagerly and, to achieve a level with Al·Ith and his baby, knelt down by her chair. They were both smiling. She freed the baby from a wrapper that was tight around it, and let the little limbs fall free. Together they minutely examined this child of theirs, feature by feature, limb by limb.

  Arusi was a solid, strong baby. His hands and feet showed he would be big, and tall. He already had a soft thatch of glistening brown hair.

  ‘He will be built like you,’ she whispered, ‘but he will have a look of me — he has the eyes of our country.’

  And then she exposed him entirely, so that he could see he was a son, and that he was in every way whole and good.

  Then she wrapped him up gently, only his face free, and said, ‘Now hold him.’

  His teeth clenched at the enormity of this challenge, he took the little creature, and, then, smiling with pride, because he was able to do it, stood up.

  ‘Now walk with him,’ whispered Al·Ith, beaming herself now, delighted, all confidence.

  Ben Ata walked up and down for a while, and when he seemed inclined to hand the child back, she said, ‘No, no, hold him. Think of him. Make him know you are there, with him.’

  Ben Ata understood, and did as she said. Later, after they had eaten a little — for neither had eaten, so they felt, for days — and the baby had fed again, she put the child between them in the bed and insisted that this was necessary, for this night. ‘So that he can know us both,’ said she.

  And so the two of them spent that night, sleeping soundly, with the baby between them both, and Al·Ith felt restored again, because at last Arusi was being nourished by his father.

  And that night was quite wonderful for Ben Ata, who felt that he was being admitted to the ways of her Zone and her thoughts, which he knew he must aspire to — for the sake of all his people.

  But next day was a different matter. For one thing, all the women were back again, overrunning everything, and their beaming smiles at him, as if he had accomplished something marvellous, made him think about the oth
er children he had fathered — after all, this was hardly his first child! And then. Al·Ith alone with him, wanting to share the child, was not the woman who seemed harassed, and worried and preoccupied, and even ugly again — for he had to acknowledge that in order to believe her beautiful he was forced to remember her as she had been during their ride through the forests, and this now seemed a long time ago.

  Yet while she seemed busy every minute of the day with the child, she was looking for him all the time, her eyes always searching for him: where was he, what was he doing?

  What he was doing was, in fact, dreaming of how he could escape, and he did go off to his troops in the afternoon, listening to her shrill accusations with as much shame for her, as she was feeling — and he knew it, and was sorry for her — on her own account.

  Besides, he wanted to see Dabeeb. He did not know why this was, nor much care. He told himself he would like an account of the birth from the chief midwife, but really he did not care about that very much. He found Dabeeb, as he fully expected — she had not come near Al·Ith all day — in her own home that evening, when he returned from the war games where, of course, since he was a great general, Jarnti was fully occupied looking after everything. Ben Ata and Dabeeb, having made sure the children were asleep — sharing in this concern made him feel most responsible and adult — at once went to bed, where they enjoyed each other with relish. Dabeeb did weep a bit, and moan that she was wicked, and better still, that he was, and that men were all alike — but this being very much what he had experienced all his life, in one form or another, he was reassured and felt exonerated. Above all, he was not being made to feel guilty because of insensitivity or lack of proper feeling: he had been beginning to believe that this new Ben Ata who had been given birth to by Al·Ith had destroyed in him all joy for ever.