The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

  There was a terrible joy in the dream. When I woke up the room was dark, the glow of the fire very red, the great white ceiling filled with restful shadow, and I was filled with joy and peace. I wondered how such a terrible dream could leave me rested, and then I remembered Mother Sugar, and thought that perhaps for the first time I had dreamed the dream “positively”—though what that means I don’t know.

  Saul had not moved. I was stiff and moved my shoulders, and he woke up, frightened, and called out: “Anna!” as if I were in another room or another country. I said: “I’m here.” His prick was big. We made love. In the love-making was the warmth of the love-making of the dream. Then he sat up and said: “Jesus, what time is it?” and I said: “Five or six, I suppose,” and he said: “Christ, I can’t sleep my life away like this,” and rushed out of the room.

  I lay on the bed, happy. Being happy, the joy that filled me then was stronger than all the misery and the madness in the world, or so I felt it. But then happiness began to leak away, and I lay and I thought: What is this thing we need so much? (By we, meaning women.) And what is it worth? I had it with Michael, but it meant nothing to him, for if it did, he wouldn’t have left me. And now I have it with Saul, grabbing at it as if it were a glass of water and I were thirsty. But think about it, and it vanishes. I did not want to think about it. If I did there would be nothing between me and the little dwarf-plant in the pot on the window sill, between me and the slippery horror of the curtains, or even the crocodile waiting in the reeds.

  I lay on the bed in the dark, listening to Saul crashing and banging over my head, and I was already betrayed. Because Saul had forgotten the “happiness.” By the act of going upstairs, he had put a gulf between himself and happiness.

  But I saw this not merely as denying Anna, but as denying life itself. I thought that somewhere here is a fearful trap for women, but I don’t yet understand what it is. For there is no doubt of the new note women strike, the note of being betrayed. It’s in the books they write, in how they speak, everywhere, all the time. It is a solemn, self-pitying organ note. It is in me, Anna betrayed, Anna unloved, Anna whose happiness is denied, and who says, not: Why do you deny me, but why do you deny life?

  When Saul came back he stood efficient and aggressive, his eyes narrowed, and he said: “I’m going out.” And I said: “All right.” He went out, the prisoner escaping.

  I lay where I was, exhausted with the effort of not caring that he had to be the escaping prisoner. My emotions had switched off, but my mind ran on, making images, like a film. I was checking the images, or scenes, as they went past, for I was able to recognize them as fantasies common to a certain kind of person now, out of common stock, shared by millions of people. I saw an Algerian soldier stretched on a torture bed; and I was also him, wondering how long I could hold out. I saw a communist in a communist jail, but the jail was certainly in Moscow, but this time the torture was intellectual, this time the holding out was a fight inside the terms of Marxist dialectic. The end-point of this scene was where the communist prisoner admitted, but after days of argument, that he took his stand on individual conscience, that moment when a human being says: “No, that I can’t do.” At which point the communist jailor merely smiled, there was no need to say, Then you have confessed yourself to be at fault. Then I saw the soldier in Cuba, the soldier in Algeria, rifle in hand, on guard. Then the British conscript, pressed into war in Egypt, killed for futility. Then a student in Budapest, throwing a home-made bomb at a great black Russian tank. Then a peasant, somewhere in China, marching in a procession millions strong.

  These pictures flicked in front of my eyes. I thought that five years ago the pictures would have been different, and that in five years they would be different again; but that now they were what bound people, of a certain kind, unknown to each other as individuals, together.

  When the images stopped creating themselves, I checked them again, named them. It occurred to me that Mr Mathlong had not presented himself. I thought that a few hours ago I had actually been the mad Mr Themba, and with no conscious effort on my part. I said to myself I would be Mr Mathlong, I would make myself be this figure. I set the stage in every possible way. I tried to imagine myself, a black man in white-occupied territory, humiliated in his human dignity. I tried to imagine him, at mission school, and then studying in England. I tried to create him, and I failed totally. I tried to make him stand in my room, a courteous, ironical figure, but I failed. I told myself I had failed because this figure, unlike all the others, had a quality of detachment. He was the man who performed actions, played roles, that he believed to be necessary for the good of others, even while he preserved an ironic doubt about the results of his actions. It seemed to me that this particular kind of detachment was something we needed very badly in this time, but that very few people had it, and it was certainly a long way from me.

  I fell asleep. When I woke it was getting on for morning. I could see my ceiling lying pale and stagnant, disturbed by lights from the street, and the sky was a full purple, wet with a wintry moonlight. My body cried out with being alone because Saul was not there. I did not sleep again. I was dissolved in the hateful emotion, the woman-betrayed. I lay with my teeth clenched, refusing to think, knowing that everything I thought would come out of the solemn wet emotion. Then I heard Saul come in, he came in silent and furtive and went straight upstairs. This time I didn’t go up. I knew that this meant he would resent me in the morning, because his guilt, his need to betray, needed the constant reassurance of my going to him.

  When he came down it was late, nearly lunch-time, and I knew this was the man who hated me. He said, very cold: “Why do you let me sleep so late?” I said: “Why should I have to tell you what time to get up?” He said: “I have to go out to lunch. It’s a business lunch.” I knew from how he said it it was not a business lunch, and that he had said the words in that way so that I should know it was not.

  I felt very ill again, and I went into my room and set out the notebooks. He came in and stood by the door, looking at me. He said: “I suppose you’re writing a record of my crimes!” He sounded pleased that I was. I was putting away three of the notebooks. He said: “Why do you have four notebooks?” I said: “Obviously, because it’s been necessary to split myself up, but from now on I shall be using one only.” I was interested to hear myself say this, because until then I hadn’t known it. He was standing in the door, holding on to the frame of the doorway with both hands. His eyes were narrowed at me in pure hate. I saw the white door with its old-fashioned unnecessary mouldings, very clear. I thought how the mouldings on the door recall a Greek temple, that’s where they come from, the pillars of a Greek temple; and how they in turn recall an Egyptian temple, and how that in turn recalls the bundle of reeds and the crocodile. There he stood, the American, clutching this history in both hands for fear he would fall, hating me, the jailor. I said, as I had said before: “Don’t you think it’s extraordinary that we are both people whose personalities, whatever that word may mean, are large enough to include all sorts of things, politics and literature and art, but now that we’re mad everything concentrates down to one small thing, that I don’t want you to go off and sleep with someone else, and that you must lie to me about it?” For a moment he was himself, thinking about this, and then he faded away or dissolved and the furtive antagonist said: “You’re not going to trap me that way, don’t you think it.” He went upstairs, and when he came down again, a few minutes later, he said cheerfully: “Gee, I’ll be late if I don’t go. See you later baby.”

  He went off, taking me with him. I could feel part of myself leaving the house with him. I knew how he went. He stumbled down the stairs, stood a moment before facing the street, then walked carefully, with the defensive walk of Americans, the walk of people ready to defend themselves, until he saw a bench, or perhaps a step somewhere and sat on it. He had left the devils behind him in my flat, and for a moment he was free. But I could feel the cold of loneliness com
ing from him. The cold of loneliness was all around me.

  I looked at this notebook, thinking that if I could write in it Anna would come back, but I could not make my hand go out to take up the pen. I telephoned Molly. When she answered I realised I could not communicate what was happening to me, I could not talk to her. Her voice, cheerful and practical as always, sounded like the quacking of a strange bird, and I heard my own voice, cheerful and empty.

  She said: “How’s your American?” and I said: “Fine.” I said: “How’s Tommy?” She said: “He’s just signed up to do a series of lectures all over the country about the life of the coal-miner, you know, the Life of the Coal-miner.” I said: “Good.” She said: “Quite so. He is simultaneously talking about going to fight with either the F.L.N. in Algeria or in Cuba. I had a bunch of them here last night, and they’re all talking of going off, it doesn’t matter which revolution, provided it is a revolution.” I said: “His wife wouldn’t like that.” “No, that’s what I said to Tommy, when he confronted me, all aggressive, suggesting I would stop him. It’s not me, it’s your sensible little wife, I said. You have my blessing, I said, any revolution anywhere regardless, because obviously none of us can stand the lives we are leading. He said I was being very negative. Later he rang me up to say unfortunately he could not go off to fight just at this time, because he was going to do the series of lectures on The Life of the Coal-miner. Anna, is it only me? I feel as if I’m living inside a sort of improbable farce.” “No, it isn’t only you.” “I know, and that makes it even worse.”

  I put down the instrument. The floor between me and the bed was bulging and heaving. The walls seemed to bulge inwards, then float out and away into space. For a moment I stood in space, the walls gone, as if I stood above ruined buildings. I knew I had to get to the bed, so I walked carefully over the heaving floor towards it, and lay down. But I, Anna, was not there. Then I fell asleep, although I knew as I drifted off this was not an ordinary sleep. I could see Anna’s body lying on the bed. And into the room, one after another, came people I knew who stood at the foot of the bed, and seemed to try and fit themselves into Anna’s body. I stood to one side, watching, interested to see who would come into the room next. Maryrose came, a pretty blonde girl, smiling politely. Then George Hounslow, and Mrs Boothby, and Jimmy. These people stopped, looked at Anna, and moved on. I stood to one side, wondering: Which of them will she accept? Then I was conscious of danger, for Paul came in, who was dead, and I saw his grave whimsical smile as he bent over her. Then he dissolved into her, and I, screaming with fear, fought my way through a crowd of indifferent ghosts to the bed, to Anna, to myself. I fought to re-enter her. I was fighting against cold, a terrible cold. My hands and legs were stiff with cold, and Anna was cold because she was filled with the dead Paul. I could see his cool grave smile on Anna’s face. After a struggle, which was for my life, I slipped back into myself and lay cold, cold. In my sleep I was in Mashopi again, but now the ghosts were ordered around me, like stars in their proper places, and Paul was a ghost among them. We sat under the eucalyptus trees in the dusty moonlight, with the smell of sweet spilt wine in our nostrils and the lights of the hotel shone across the road. It was an ordinary dream, and I knew that I had been delivered from disintegration because I could dream it. The dream faded in a lying pain of nostalgia. I said to myself in my sleep, hold yourself together, you can do it if you get to the blue notebook and write. I felt the inertia of my hand, which was cold and unable to reach out for the pen. But instead of a pen I held a gun in my hand. And I was not Anna, but a soldier. I could feel the uniform on me, but one I didn’t know. I was standing in a cool night somewhere, with groups of soldiers moving quietly behind me around the business of getting a meal. I could hear the clink of metal on metal, rifles being stacked together. Somewhere before me was the enemy. But I didn’t know who the enemy was, what my cause was. I saw my skin was dark. At first I thought I was an African or a Negro. Then I saw dark glistening hair on my bronze forearm which held a rifle on which moonlight glinted. I understood I was on a hillside in Algeria, I was an Algerian soldier and I was fighting the French. Yet Anna’s brain was working in this man’s head, and she was thinking: Yes I shall kill, I shall even torture because I have to, but without belief. Because it is no longer possible to organise and to fight and to kill without knowing that new tyranny arises from it. Yet one has to fight and organise. Then Anna’s brain went out like a candle flame. I was the Algerian, believing, full of the courage of belief. Terror came into the dream because again Anna was threatened with total disintegration. Terror brought me out of the dream, and I was no longer the sentry, standing guard in the moonlight with the groups of his comrades moving quietly behind him over the fires of the evening meal. I bounded off the dry, sun-smelling soil of Algeria and I was in the air. This was the flying dream, and it was a long time since I had dreamed it, and I was almost crying with joy because I was flying again. The essence of the flying dream is joy, joy in light, free movement. I was high in the air above the Mediterranean, and I knew I could go anywhere. I willed to go east. I wanted to go to Asia, I wanted to visit the peasant. I was flying immensely high, with the mountains and seas beneath me, treading the air down easily with my feet. I passed over great mountains and below me was China. I said in my dream: I am here because I want to be a peasant with other peasants. I came low over a village, and saw peasants working in the fields. They had a quality of stern purpose which attracted me to them. I willed my feet to let me descend gently to the earth. The joy of the dream was more intense than I have experienced, and it was the joy of freedom. I came down to the ancient earth of China, and a peasant woman stood at the door of her hut. I walked towards her, and just as Paul had stood, bending, by the sleeping Anna a short time before, needing to become her, so I stood by the peasant woman, needing to enter her, to be her. It was easy to become her. She was a young woman, and she was pregnant, but already made old by work. Then I realised that Anna’s brain was in her still, and I was thinking mechanical thoughts which I classified as “progressive and liberal.” That she was such and such, formed by this movement, that war, this experience, I was “naming” her, from an alien personality. Then Anna’s brain, as it had done on the hillside in Algeria, began to flicker and to wane. And I said: “Don’t let terror of dissolution frighten you away this time, hold on.” But the terror was too strong. It drove me out of the peasant woman, and I stood to one side of her, watching her walk across a field to join a group of men and women working. They wore uniforms. But now terror had destroyed the joy, and my feet would no longer tread down the air. I trod down and down, frantic, trying to climb up and over the black mountains which separated me from Europe, which now, from where I stood, seemed a tiny meaningless fringe on the great continent, like a disease I was going to re-enter. But I could not fly, I could not leave the plain where the peasants worked, and fear of being trapped there woke me. I woke into the late afternoon, the room full of dark, the traffic roaring up from the street below. I woke a person who had been changed by the experience of being other people. I did not care about Anna, I did not like being her. It was with a weary sense of duty I became Anna, like putting on a soiled dress.

  And then I got up and switched on the lights, and heard movements upstairs, which meant Saul had come back. As soon as I heard him my stomach clenched up, and I was back inside sick Anna who had no will.

  I called up to him and he called down. His voice being cheerful, my apprehension went. Then he came down, and it returned, for he had on his face a consciously whimsical smile, and I wondered, which role is he playing? He sat on my bed and he took my hand and looked at it with a consciously whimsical admiration. I knew then, that he was comparing it with the hand of a woman he had just left, or a woman he wanted me to believe he had just left. He remarked: “Perhaps I like your nail varnish better after all.” I said: “But I’m not wearing nail varnish.” He said: “Well, if you were I’d probably like it better.” He kept turning my
hand over, looking at it with amused surprise, watching me to see how I took the amused surprise. I took my hand away. He said: “I suppose you’re going to ask me where I’ve been.” I said nothing. He said: “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” I said nothing. I felt as if sucked into a quicksand, or pushed on to a conveyor belt that would carry me into grinding machinery. I walked away from him to the window. Outside was a dark glistening rain and the roofs were wet and dark. The cold struck on the window panes.

  He came after me, put his arms around me and held me. He was smiling, a man conscious of his power with women, seeing himself in this role. He wore his tight blue sweater and the sleeves were rolled up. I saw the light hair glistening on his forearms. He looked down into my eyes and said: “I swear I’m not lying. I swear. I swear. I haven’t had another woman. I swear.” His voice was full of dramatic intensity, and his eyes were focused in a parody of intensity.

  I did not believe him, but the Anna in his arms believed him, even while I watched the two of us playing out these roles, incredulous that we were capable of such melodrama. Then he kissed me. At the moment I responded he broke away, and he said as he had said before, with his characteristic sullenness at such moments: “Why don’t you fight me? Why don’t you fight?” I kept replying: “Why should I fight? Why do you have to fight?” And I had said this before, we had done all this before. Then he led me by the hand to the bed and made love to me. I was interested to see who he was making love to, for I knew it was not me. It appeared that this other woman needed a great deal of admonition and encouragement in love and is childish. For he was making love to a childish woman and she had flat breasts and very beautiful hands. Suddenly he said: “Yes, and we’ll make a baby, you’re right.” When it was finished he rolled away, gasping, and exclaimed: “By Christ, that would be the end, a child, you’d really finish me.” I said: “It wasn’t me who offered to give you a child, this is Anna.” He jerked his head up to look at me, and he dropped his head back and laughed, and said: “So it is. It is Anna.”