The Memoirs of a Survivor

by Doris Lessing

  As you can see, there is nothing I can think of to say about this wall that could lift it out of the commonplace. Yet, standing there and looking at it, or thinking about it while I did other things about the flat, the sense and feel of it always in my mind, was like holding an egg to one’s ear that is due to hatch. The warm, smooth shape on one’s palm is throbbing. Behind the fragile lime which, although it can be crushed between two fingers, is inviolable because of the necessities of the chick’s time, the precise and accurate time it needs to get itself out of the dark prison, it is as if a weight redistributes itself, as when a child shifts position in the womb. There is the faintest jar. Another. The chick, head under its wing, is pecking its way out, and already the minutest fragments of lime are collecting on the shell where in a moment the first black starry hole will appear. I even found I was putting my ear to the wall, as one would to a fertile egg, listening, waiting. Not for the sounds of Mrs White’s, or the Professor’s, movements. They might have just gone out or just come in; the ordinary sounds of the corridor might in fact be there. No, what I was hearing was from somewhere else. Yet they were ordinary sounds in themselves: furniture being shifted; voices, but from very far off; a child crying. Nothing clear. But they were familiar, I had been hearing them all my life.

  One morning I stood with my after-breakfast cigarette -I allowed myself this one real cigarette a day - and through clouds of blue coiling smoke looked at how the yellowness of the sun stretched in a foreshortened oblong, making the wall itself seem higher in the middle than at its ends. I looked at the glow and the pulse of the yellow, looked as if I were listening, thinking how, as the seasons changed, so did the shape and extent and position of this patch of morning light - and then I was through the wall and I knew what was there. I did not at that first time achieve much more than that there were a set of rooms. The rooms were disused, had been for some time. Years, perhaps. There was no furniture. Paint had flaked off the wall in places and lay in tiny shards on the floorboards with scraps of paper and dead flies and dust. I did not go in, but stood there on the margin between the two worlds, my familiar flat and these rooms which had been quietly waiting there all this time. I stood and looked, feeding with my eyes. I felt the most vivid expectancy, a longing: this place held what I needed, knew was there, had been waiting for - oh yes, all my life, all my life. I knew this place, recognized it, and before I had actually absorbed the information through my eyes that the walls were much higher than mine, there were many windows and doors, and that it was a large, light, airy, delightful flat, or house. In a further room I glimpsed a painter’s ladder; and then, just as the sunlight faded out on my wall when a cloud absorbed the sun. I saw someone in white painter’s overalls lifting a roller to lay white paint over the faded and stained surface.

  I forgot this occurrence. I went on with the little routines of my life, conscious of the life behind the wall, but not remembering my visit there. It was not until a few days later that I again stood, cigarette in hand, in the mid-morning hour, looking through drifting smoke at the sunlight laid there on the wall, and I thought: Hello! I’ve been through there, of course I have. How did I manage to forget? And again the wall dissolved and I was through. There were more rooms than I had suspected the first time. I had a strong sense of that, though I did not see them all. Nor did I, on that occasion, see the man or the woman in overalls. The rooms were empty. To make them habitable, what work needed to be done! Yes, I could see that it would take weeks, months … I stood there marking fallen plaster, the corner of a ceiling stained with damp, dirty or damaged walls. Yet it was on that morning when I was beginning to understand how much work needed to be done that I saw, just for the ghost of a second - well, what? But I can hardly say. Perhaps it was more of a feeling than something seen. There was a sweetness, certainly - a welcome, a reassurance. Perhaps I did see a face, or the shadow of one. The face I saw clearly later was familiar to me, but it is possible that that face, seen as everything ended, appears in my memory in this place, this early second visit: it had reflected itself back, needing no more to use as a host or as a mirror than the emotion of sweet longing, which hunger was its proper air. This was the rightful inhabitant of the rooms behind the wall. I had no doubt of it then or later. The exiled inhabitant; for surely she could not live, never could have lived, in that chill empty shell full of dirty and stale air?

  When I again knew myself to be standing in my living-room, the cigarette half burned down, I was left with the conviction of a promise, which did not leave me no matter how difficult things became later, both in my own life, and

  in these hidden rooms.

  • • • • •

  The child was left with me in this way. I was in the kitchen, and, hearing a sound, went into the living-room, and saw a man and a half-grown girl standing there. I did not know either of them, and advanced with the intention of clearing up a mistake. The thought in my mind was that I must have left my front door open. They turned to face me. I remember how I was even then, and at once, struck by the bright, hard, nervous smile on the girl’s face. The man -middle-aged, ordinarily dressed, quite unremarkable in every way - said: ‘This is the child.’ He was already on the way out. He had laid his hand on her shoulder, had smiled and nodded to her, was turning away.

  I said: ‘But surely…’

  ‘No, there’s no mistake. She’s your responsibility.’

  He was at the door.

  ‘But wait a minute…’

  ‘She is Emily Cartright. Look after her.’And he had gone.

  We stood there, the child and I, looking at each other. I remember the room had a wash of sun: it was still morning. I was wondering how the two had got in, but this already seemed irrelevant, since the man had gone. I now ran to the window: a street with a few trees along the pavement, a bus-stop with its familiar queue of people waiting, waiting; and on the wide pavement opposite, underneath the trees there, some children from the Mehtas’ flat upstairs playing with a ball - dark-skinned boys and girls, all dazzling white shirts, crisp pink and blue dresses, white teeth, gleaming hair. But the man I was looking for - not a sign.

  I turned back to the child; but now I took my time over it, and was wondering what to say, how to present myself, how to handle her - all the pathetic little techniques and tricks of our self-definition. She was watching me, carefully, closely: the thought came into my mind that this was the expert assessment of possibilities by a prisoner observing a new jailer. Already my heart was heavy: anxiety! My intelligence was not yet making much of what was happening.

  ‘Emily?’ I said tentatively, hoping that she would choose to answer the questions in my mind.

  ‘Emily Mary Cartright,’ she said, in a manner that matched her bright impervious voice and smile. Pert? At any rate a hard, an enamelled presence. I was trying to get past, or around it; I was conscious that I was desperately making signals - my smile, gestures - that might perhaps reach something softer and warmer which must be there behind that cold defence of hers.

  ‘Well, will you sit down? Or can I make you something to eat? Some tea? I do have some real tea, but of course…’

  ‘I’d like to see my room, please,’ she said. And now her eyes were, quite without her knowing it, an appeal. She needed, she needed very much, to know what walls, what shelter, she was going to be able to pull around her, like a blanket, for comfort.

  “Well I said, ‘I haven’t thought yet, I don’t quite … I must…’ Her face seemed to shrivel. But she preserved her bright desperation. ‘You see,’ I went on, ‘I wasn’t expecting … let’s see now.’ She waited. Stubbornly, she waited. She knew that she was to live with me. She knew that her shelter, her four walls, her den, the little space that was hers and which she could creep into was here somewhere. There’s the spare room,’ I said. ‘I call it that. But it isn’t very…’ But I went, and I remember how helplessly and unhappily I did, into the little front lobby, and through it to the spare room.

  The flat wa
s on the front of the building, the south side. The living-room took up most of the space: its size was why I had taken the flat. At the end away from the entrance lobby, so that you had to walk through the living-room to get to it, was the kitchen, on the corner of the building. This was quite large, with cupboards and storage space, and was used for eating as well. From the entrance lobby went two doors, one to the living-room, one to the room I called a spare room. This room was connected with the bathroom. My bedroom was in the front of the building, reached from the living-room. The bathroom, lobby, spare room, took up the same space as my bedroom, which was not large. It will be seen that the spare room was very small. It had a small high window. It was stuffy. There was no way of making it attractive. I never used it except for keeping things in or, with apologies, for a friend staying the night.

  ‘I’m- sorry that it is so small and dark … perhaps we should …’

  ‘No, no, I don’t mind,’ she said, in the cool, jaunty way which was so much hers; but she was looking at the bed with longing, and I knew she had found her refuge, hers, here it was at last. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Oh yes, you don’t believe me, you don’t know what…’ But she left the possibility of an explanation of what she had been experiencing, and waited, her whole body expressing how she wanted me to leave.

  ‘And we’ll have to share the bathroom,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I’ll be ever so tidy,’ she assured me. Tm really very good, you know, I won’t make a mess, I never do.’

  I knew that if I were not in this flat, if she did not feel she must behave well, she would be between the blankets, she would already be far away from the world.

  ‘I won’t be a tick,’ she assured me. ‘I must get tidy. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

  I left her and waited for her in the living-room, first standing by the window looking out, wondering perhaps if fresh surprises were on the way. Then I sat down, rather, I imagine, in the attitude of The Thinker, or some such concentrated pose.

  Yes, it was extraordinary. Yes, it was all impossible. But after all, I had accepted the ‘impossible’. I lived with it. I had abandoned all expectations of the ordinary for my inner world, my real life in that place. And as for the public, the outer world, it had been a long time since that offered the normal. Could one perhaps describe that period as ‘the ordinariness of the extraordinary? Well, the reader should have no difficulty here: these words are a description of the times we have lived through. (A description of all life? -probably, but it is not much help to think so.)

  But these words convey perfectly the atmosphere of what was happening when Emily was brought to me. While everything, all forms of social organization, broke up, we lived on, adjusting our lives, as if nothing fundamental was happening. It was amazing how determined, how stubborn, how self-renewing, were the attempts to lead an ordinary life. When nothing, or very little, was left of what we had been used to, had taken for granted even ten years before, we went on talking and behaving as if those old forms were still ours. And indeed, order of the old kind - food, amenities, even luxuries, did exist at higher levels, we all knew that; though of course those who enjoyed these things did not draw attention to themselves. Order could also exist in pockets, of space, of time - through periods of weeks and months or in a particular district. Inside them, people would live and talk and even think as if nothing had changed. When something really bad happened, as when an area got devastated, people might move out for days, or weeks, to stay with relatives or friends, and then move back, perhaps to a looted house, to take up their job, their housekeeping - their order. We can get used to anything at all; this is a commonplace, of course, but perhaps you have to live through such a time to see how horribly true it is. There is nothing that people won’t try to accommodate into ‘ordinary life’. It was precisely this which gave that time its peculiar flavour; the combination of the bizarre, the hectic, the frightening, the threatening, an atmosphere of siege or war - with what was customary, ordinary, even decent.

  For instance, on the newscasts and in the papers they would pursue for days the story of a single kidnapped child, taken from its pram perhaps by some poor unhappy woman. The police would be combing suburbs and the countryside in hundreds, looking for the child, and for the woman, to punish her. But the next news flash would be about the mass death of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. We still believed, wanted to believe, that the first, the concern about the single child, the need to punish the individual criminal, even if it took days and weeks and hundreds of our hard-worked police force to do it, was what really represented us; the second, the catastrophe, was, as such items of news had always been forpeople not actually in the threatened area, an unfortunate and minor - or at least not crucial - accident, which interrupted the even flow, the development, of civilization.

  This is the sort of thing we accepted as normal. Yet for all of us there were moments when the game we were all agreeing to play simply could not stand up to events: we would be gripped by feelings of unreality, like nausea. Perhaps this feeling, that the ground was dissolving under our feet, was the real enemy … or we believed it to be so. Perhaps our tacit agreement that nothing much, or at least, nothing irrecoverable, was happening, was because for us the enemy was Reality, was to allow ourselves to know what was happening. Perhaps our pretences, everyone’s pretences, which in the moments when we felt naked, defenceless, seemed like play-acting and absurd, should be regarded as admirable? Or perhaps they were necessary, like the games of children who can make play-acting a way of keeping reality a long way from their weaknesses? But increasingly, all the time, one had to defeat the need, simply, to laugh: oh, not a good laughter, far from it. Rather bellows and yells of derision.

  For instance again: in the same week as a horde of two hundred or so hooligans had surged through our neighbourhood, leaving a corpse on the pavement across the street from my windows, leaving smashed windows, looted shops, the remains of bonfires, a group of middle-aged women, self-appointed vigilantes, were making formal protests to the police about an amateur theatricals group some youngsters had set up. This group had written and put on a play describing the tensions inside an ordinary family living in a block of flats like ours, a family which had taken in half a dozen refugees from the eastern counties. (As long as travellers were with the migrating gangs they were ‘hooligans’, but when they hived off to find shelter with some family or household they were ‘refugees’.) A household that had held five people suddenly held twelve, and the resulting frictions led to adultery and an incident where ‘a young girl seduced a man old enough to be her grandfather’ as the good women indignantly described it. They managed to organize a not-very-well-attended meeting about the ‘decay of family life’, about ‘immorality’, about ‘sexual indulgence’. This was comic, of course. Unless it was sad. Unless - as I’ve suggested - it was admirable; a sign of the vitality of the said ‘ordinary life’ which would in the end defeat chaos, disorder, the malevolence of events.

  Or what can one say about the innumerable citizens’ groups that came into existence right up to the end, for any ethical or social purpose you could think of: to improve old-age pensions, at a time when money was giving way to barter; to supply vitamin tablets to school children; to provide a visiting service for housebound invalids; to arrange formal legal adoption for abandoned children; to forbid the news of any violent or ‘unpleasant’ event, so as not to ‘put ideas into young people’s heads’; to reason with the gangs of hooligans as they came through the streets, or alternatively, to birch them; to go around and about the streets, exhorting people ‘to restore a sense of decency to their sexual practices’; to agree not to eat the meat of cats and dogs; and so on, and on, and on - there was really no end to it. Farce. Spitting into a hurricane; standing in front of a mirror to touch up one’s face or straighten a tie as the house crashes around one; extending the relaxed, accommodating hand of the Royal handshake to a barbarian who will certainly bend and take a good bite
out of it… these similes come to mind. Analogies were being made then, of course, in the conversations that were our meat and drink, and by the professional comedians.