The Memoirs of a Survivor

by Doris Lessing

  Now I was thankful Hugo was there. He was not a difficult animal (I nearly said person!) to share a home with. He did not seem to sleep much: he kept watch. I believe this was how he saw his function: he was to look after her. He preferred Emily to feed him, but would eat if I put his food down. He wished to be her only friend and love; yet was courteous with me - I am afraid that is the only word for it. He looked forward to his trip out of doors on his heavy chain in the evenings, was disappointed if Emily could not take him, went obligingly with me. He ate the nasty substances that were being sold as dog food, but preferred the remains from our plates and showed that he did.

  Not that there was ever much left: Emily ate and ate, and she had taken to wearing her little shirts outside her bursting trousers. She stood glooming at herself in front of the mirror, her jaws moving over sweets or bread. I said nothing; I made a point of saying nothing, even when she challenged me: ‘It suits me to be fat, don’t you think?’ Or: I’ll make better eating when cooked for the feast.’ But whatever she said, however she joked, she ate. She lay on the floor, her hand automatically conveying bread, more bread, cake, potato mixtures, fruit dumplings, to her mouth, while her eyes followed the lines of print in some old book she had picked up but would soon let drop while she stared in front of her, her eyes glazed. Hour after hour. Day after day. Sometimes she would jump up to make herself some beverage or other, and offer me a cup, then she forgot me. Her mouth was always in movement, chewing, tasting, absorbed in itself, so that she seemed all mouth, and everything else in her was subordinated to that; it seemed as if even the intake of words through her eyes was another form of eating, and her daydreaming a consumption of material, which was bloating her as much as her food.

  And then, suddenly, it all went into reverse. Of course it did not seem sudden at the time. It is now, looking back, that it is all so obvious: even, I am afraid, banal and mechanical, as the inevitable does seem - in retrospect.

  Some youths from our blocks of flats took to hanging about on the opposite pavement and the waste lot, under the scorched trees. These youths were sharing in lost glory and adventure: memories of the time when migrating tribes had lit fires and feasted there. They pointed out to each other the blackened parts of the pavement, told and retold episodes from the epic. At first there were two or three, then half a dozen, then … Emily had forsaken her dreaming to watch them. Not that you could make out from her face anything but scorn of them. I remember I felt pity for the raucous adolescent boys, so desperately wanting to be noticed and looked at, who were so forlorn and unappetizing in their lumpish bodies; pity for her, the fat girl looking out of her window, the princess in disguise. I marvelled that such a short time, a few years, would transform these grubs into beauties. But I was wrong: time had so speeded up that years were not needed any longer … one evening Emily sauntered out and stood in front of the building with a look like a jeer, while her body pleaded and demanded. The boys ignored her. Then they made some comments about her figure. She came indoors, sat thoughtfully in her sofa corner for some hours - and stopped eating.

  She lost weight fast. She was living on herb teas and yeast extracts. And now I watched the reverse process, a shape emerging whole and clear while increments of lard melted away around it.

  I began to remonstrate: you must eat something, you should set yourself a proper diet. But she did not hear me. I was distant from her need to make herself worthy of the heroes of the pavement… quite a few of them now that the days were lengthening and spring healed the scarred trees.

  We were watching, though I still did not recognize this, the birth of a gang, a pack, a tribe. It would be pleasant to be able to say now that I was aware of the processes going on in front of me. Now I judge myself to have been blind. How else do things work always unless by imitation bred of the passion to be like? All the processes of society are based on it, all individual development. For some reason it was something that we seemed to have a conspiracy to ignore or not to mention, even while most singlemindedly engaged in it. There was some sort of conspiracy of belief that people -children, adults, everyone - grew by an acquisition of unconnected habits, of isolated bits of knowledge, like choosing things off a counter: ‘Yes, I’ll have that one,’ or ‘No, I don’t want that one!’ But in fact people develop for good or for bad by swallowing whole other people, atmospheres, events, places - develop by admiration. Often enough unconsciously, of course. We are the company we keep.

  In front of my eyes, on that pavement, for weeks, for months, I could have watched as in a text book or a laboratory the genesis, growth and flowering of society’s new unit. But I did no such thing, for I was absorbed in Emily, my concern for her. Those processes went on, and I observed them; details did stand out for me; I watched for the effects of this or that event on Emily. It is only now, looking back, I see what an opportunity I missed.

  Emily was not the only young girl preparing herself to take her place as a woman among other women. Janet White, for instance: before her parents stopped her, Janet passed a dozen times a day outside our windows in front of the jeering boys. There was a period when boys and girls, on opposite sides of the road, stood in hostile battalions exchanging taunts and abuse.

  Then it was noticeable that they jeered less, stood more often in silence, or quietly talked among themselves, though always watching the other groups while pretending not to.

  Inside the flat Emily remembered the sheepskins. Again she arranged them around her, belted them tight, swaggered about in them with her hair loose.

  She came to me: ‘I found that sewing machine. Can I use it?’

  ‘Of course. But don’t you want to buy clothes? That thing is so old. It must be thirty-five years old.’

  ‘It works.’

  The money I had given her was still in the drawer. This she now took out and quickly, almost secretively, walked the five or six miles to the centre of the city where the big shops were with the goods for the official class, or for anyone who could afford them. Nearly always the same thing. She came back with some good cloth from the pre-crisis time. She came back with sewing cottons and a tape measure and scissors. She also visited the secondhand shops and the market stalls, and the floor of her room was heaped with loot, with booty. She invited Janet White in from the pavement, having of course first politely asked my permission, and the two nymphs squeezed themselves into the tiny room, and chattered and competed, and arranged their images this way and that before the long mirror -a ritual which was repeated when Janet White in her turn went off on her foray to capture materials and old clothes … repeated in Janet’s room along the corridor. And this led to her being forbidden the street and the pleasures of the tribe and warned not to take Emily for a friend. For Janet was destined differently. To tell the truth I did not realize how high the Whites were placed in the administrative circles; but then, they were not the only official family to half hide themselves in this way, living quietly, in an ordinary flat, apparently like everyone else but with access to sources of food, goods, clothes, transport, denied to most.

  Emily did not seem to mind Janet discarding her. There followed a period of weeks when she was every bit as self-absorbed as when she had been eating, dreaming, indolent, but now she was full of energy and self-denial, at least for food, and I watched. I watched endlessly, for I had never seen anything like this for concentration.

  For if she, Emily, had gone inwards, as much now in this new activity as she had when lazy and dreaming, at least now what she felt herself to be was all visible, presented to me in the shape of her fantastic costumes.

  Her first self-portraits … she had found an old dress, white with sprigs of pink flowers. Parts were stained and worn. These she cut away. Bits of lace and tulle, beads, scarves were added and removed to a kaleidoscope garment that changed with her needs. Most often it was a bride’s dress. Then it was a young girl’s dress - that ambiguous declaration of naiveté more usually made by a maturer vision than that of the wearer, an eye
that sees the fragility of certain types of young girls’ clothes as the expression of the evanescence of that flesh. It was nightdress when she wore its transparency over her naked body. It was evening dress, and sometimes when she did not intend this, for a hardness in her, the watchfulness of her defences, took away innocence from anything she wore, so that she might have flowers in her hands and in her hair, in an attempt at her version of Primavera, yet she had about her the look of a woman who has calculated the exact amount of flesh she will show at a dinner party. This dress was for me an emotional experience. I was frightened by it. Again, this was a question of my helplessness with her. I believed her capable of going out on the pavement wearing it. Now I judge myself to have been stupid: the elderly tend not to see - they have forgotten! - that hidden person in the young creature, the strongest and most powerful member among the cast of characters inhabiting an adolescent body, the self which instructs, chooses experience - and protects.

  And then, to see this creation now, at such a time of savagery and anarchy, this archetype of a girl’s dress - or rather, this composite of archetypes; the way this child, this little girl, had found the materials for her dreams in the rubbish heaps of our old civilization, had found them, worked on them, and in spite of everything had made her images of herself come to life … but such old images, so indestructible, and so irrelevant - all this was too much for me, and I retired from the scene, determined to say nothing, show nothing, betray nothing. And it was lucky I did. She wore the thing about the flat, a naked girl only just veiled; she wore it flauntingly, bashfully, daringly, fearfully; she was ‘trying on’ not a dress, but self-portraits, and I might as well not have been there, she took no notice of me. Well, of course, the pressures on everyone’s privacy had taught us how to absent ourselves into inner solitudes, we were all adept at being with others and not being with them.

  But I really did not know whether to laugh or to cry; I did a little of both, of course when she could not see me. For she was so ludicrous, as well as so brave and resourceful, with her straight, honest, hazel eyes - her English good-comrade’s eyes, unsubtle, judging, wary; with her attempts at make-up on a fresh little face, languishing away there behind harem veils, her body stiff in ‘seductive’ poses. This dress possessed her for weeks. Then one day she took scissors and cut off the bottom in a gesture of derisive impatience: something had not worked, or had worked for her and it was all over, not needed. She threw the jaded bundle into a drawer and began on a new invention of herself.

  There was a late, and prolonged, cold spell. There was even a little snow. In my flat warmth was a much-coaxed visitor, and like everyone else we were wearing almost as many clothes indoors as we did out. Emily took the sheepskins and made a long dramatic tunic. This she belted with some scarlet chiffon and she wore it over an old shirt she had taken from my cupboard. Without asking. I cannot say how delighted I was when she did this. It showed she felt she had some rights with me, at last. The child’s right to be naughty, for one; but it was more than that: an elderly or a mature person finds some young one simply taking something, a personal thing, particularly if it is a strong expression or statement of a phase of life (as a pink-sprigged white dress is for a young girl) and what a release it is, a shock, cold water on shrinking flesh if you like, but a liberation. This is more mine than yours - says the act of the theft; more mine because I need it more, it fits my stage of life better than it does yours, you have outgrown it… and perhaps the exhilaration it releases is even a hint of an event still in the future, that moment when the person sees in the eyes of people the statement - still unconscious, perhaps: You can hand over your life now, you don’t need it any longer, we will live it for you, please go.

  The shirt had been among my clothes for thirty years, had once been a sophisticated thing, was of fine green silk. Now it went under Emily’s sheepskin swagger, and just as I was wrestling with the need to say: For heaven’s sake, you can’t wear that brigand’s outfit out of doors, it is an invitation to assault I - she allowed the contraption to fall apart, for it was only tacked and pinned together, no more permanent than a daydream.

  And so we went on. She did not go out of the flat, not in any of her fantasies; and I observed that these were becoming more utilitarian.

  Chrysalis after chrysalis was outgrown, and then, because of her shame at having wasted so much, she asked abruptly and gracelessly but in her over-polite and awful way for some more money, and went off by herself to the markets. She came back with some secondhand clothes that in one giant’s step took her from being a child with fantastic visions of herself into a girl - a woman, rather. She was thirteen then, not yet fourteen; but she might as well have been seventeen or eighteen, and it had happened in an explosion of days. Now I thought that probably the heroes of the pavement would be beneath her; that she, a young woman, would demand what nature would in fact have chosen for her, a young man of seventeen, eighteen, even more.

  But the crowd, the pack, the gang - not yet a tribe, but on its way to being one - had suffered forced growth, as she had. A few weeks had done it. While snow had bleached the pavements and heightened the black of tree branches frilled and dangling with new green - had shrunk away and returned again, while Emily had mated herself in imagination with romantic heroes and chief executives and harem tyrants, a dozen or so young men had emerged from their disguises as louts and yokels, and at evening stood around under the trees swaggering in colourful clothes, and the girls of the neighbourhood had come out to join them. Now sometimes as many as thirty or more young people were being watched in the lengthening afternoons of early spring from hundreds of windows. By now it had dawned on the neighbourhood that a phenomenon we had believed could belong only to the regions ‘out there’ was being born before our eyes, in our own streets, where until now it had seemed that at worst nothing could happen but the passage of some alien migrations.

  We heard that the same thing was to be observed in other parts of our city. It was not only on our pavements that the young people were gathering in admiration and then emulation of the migrating tribes; and, while emulating, became. We all knew, we understood, and it was spoken of in the tea-shops and pubs and at all the usual gathering places: it was discussed, making news, making things happen. We knew that soon our young people would leave; we made the ritual noises of wonder and alarm; but now it was happening everyone knew it had been bound to happen, and we marvelled at our lack of foresight… and at the shortsightedness of others, whose neighbourhoods were still without this phenomenon and who believed they were immune.

  Emily began showing herself off. First from our window, making sure she had been seen, and then on the pavement outside, strolling there as if unaware of the young people across the road. This period took longer than I expected, or than she needed to be accepted. I think, now it came to the point, she was afraid of taking this big step away from shelter, from childhood, from the freedom of fantasy: for now she looked like the other girls and must behave and think like them. And how did they look? Well, the key to the clothes of the migrating ones was of course practicality; it had to be: utility stylized. Trousers, jackets, sweaters and scarves, everything thick and strong and warm. But from the markets, the rubbish dumps, the old warehouses, came what seemed an endless supply of old ‘fashionable’ clothes that could be adapted or at any rate transformed into bits and pieces of all kinds. So what they looked like was gipsies, of the old sort, and for the same reason. They had to be warm and free to move; their feet would have to carry them long distances. But an exuberancy of fancy kept them colourful, and warm weather brought them out like butterflies.

  There came a day when Emily walked across the street and added herself to the crowd there, as if it were quite easy for her to do this. Almost at once she accepted a cigarette from the boy who seemed to be the strongest personality there, allowed it to be lit for her, and smoked with ease. I had never seen her smoke. She was there while the light

  faded out of the sky aroun
d the tall buildings with their little glimmering windows. She was there long afterwards. The young people were a half-visible mass under the branches. They stood talking softly, smoking, drinking from bottles they kept lodged in their jacket pockets; or they sat on the little parapet that surrounded the paving of the nearest blocks of flats. That space of pavements and waste lot, with the trees and the weeds, bounded on one side by the little parapet, on the other by an old wall, had become defined, like an arena or a theatre. The crowds there had claimed it, shaped it: we would not again be able to see that space as anything but where the tribe was forming.

  But Hugo was not there. She had hugged him, kissed him, talked to him, whispered into his ugly yellow ears. But she had left him.

  He sat on a chair at the window and watched her, making sure that the curtains concealed him.

  Coming suddenly into the room a stranger would have to say: ‘That’s a very yellow dog!’ Then: ‘Is it a dog, though?’ What I saw of him, though Emily never did, for he was turned to face her entrance from the moment she crossed the street to come home, was a straw-yellow dog sitting with its back to the room, absolutely still, hour after hour, its whip-tail sticking out through the bars of the chair, all of him expressing a sad and watchful patience. A dog. A dog’s emotions - fidelity, humility, endurance. Seen thus from the back, Hugo aroused the emotions most dogs do: compassion, discomfort, as if for a kind of prisoner or slave. But then he would turn his head and, expecting to see the warm abject lovingness of a dog’s eyes, fellow-feeling vanished away: this was no dog, half humanized. His strong green eyes blazed. Inhuman. Cat’s eyes, a genus foreign to man, not sorry and abject and pleading. Cat’s eyes in a dog’s body - cat’s eyes and face. This beast, whose ugliness drew one’s eyes as good looks do, so that I was always finding myself staring at him, trying to come to terms with him and understand the right he assumed to be there in my life - this aberration, this freak, kept watch over Emily, and with as much devotion as I did. And it was Hugo who was hugged, caressed, loved when she returned at night smelling of smoke, of drink, and full of the dangerous vitality she had absorbed from the wild company she had been part of for so many hours.