The Memoirs of a Survivor

by Doris Lessing

  And Hugo? The truth is she did not have time for him, and I was thinking that if he had been what kept her here before, this was not true now.

  I believe that he gave up hope altogether during that rime when Emily was hardly ever with us, and only flew in to see June. One day I saw him sitting openly at the window, all of his ugly stubbornly yellow self visible to anyone who chose to look. It was a challenge, or indifference. He was seen, of course. Some youngsters crossed the street to look at the yellow animal sitting there, gazing steadily back at them with his cat’s eyes. It occurred to me that some of the youngsters there, the real children of five or six years old, might never have seen a cat or a dog as a ‘pet’ to love and make part of a family.

  ‘Oh, he is ugly,’ I heard, and saw the children make faces and drift off. No, there would be nothing to help Hugo when the time came for him; no one could say: ‘Oh, don’t kill him, he’s such a handsome beast.’

  Well… Emily came in one evening and saw the blaze of yellow at the window. Hugo was vividly there, illuminated by a flare from the late sunset, and by the candles. She was shocked, knowing at once why he should have chosen to disobey the instincts of self-protection.

  ‘Hugo,’ she said, ‘oh my dear Hugo …” He kept his back to her, even when she put her hands on either side of his neck and brought her face down into his fur. He would not soften, and she knew he was saying that she had given him up, and did not care for him.

  She coaxed him off the high seat and sat with him on the floor. She began to cry, an irritable, irritating, sniffing sort of weeping that was from exhaustion. I could see that. So could June, who watched without moving. And so could Hugo. He licked her hand at last and laid himself patiently down, saying to her by the way he did this: It is to please you. I don’t care to live if you don’t care for me.

  Now Emily was all conflict, all anxiety. She kept rushing hack and forth from my flat to that house, between there and the pavement. June, she had to see June, to bring her the bits of food she liked, to make the gesture of getting her into bed at a decent hour, for, left to herself, June would be in that sofa-corner until four or six in the morning, doing nothing, except perhaps to mark the interior movements of her illness, whatever that might be. And Hugo, she had to make a point of fussing over Hugo, of loving him. It was as if she had set herself the duty of paying attention to Hugo, measured, like a medicine or a food. And there was myself, the dry old guardian, the mentor - a pull of some sort, I suppose. There were the children, always sending after her if she stayed away from that house for too long. She was worn out; she was cross and sharp and harried and it was a misery to see her at it.

  And then, suddenly, it was all over.

  It was solved: June left.

  She got herself out of the sofa one day and was on the pavement again. Why? I don’t know. I never knew what moved June. At any rate, in the afternoons she was again with the crowds out there. She did not seem to be more part of one group than another: her flat, pale, effaced little person was to be seen as much in other clans as in the one that Gerald held together. She was seen, but only once or twice, in the women’s group. And then the women’s group had gone and June had gone with them.

  And yes, we did not believe it, did not even, at first, know what had happened. June was not in my flat. She was not on the pavement. She was not in Gerald’s house. Emily ran frantically about, asking questions. At that point she was stunned. June had left, just like that, without even leaving a message? Yes, that’s what it looked like: she had been heard to say, so someone reported, that she felt like moving on.

  It was this business of June’s not having said goodbye, of not leaving a message, that Emily could not swallow. June had not given any indication at all? - we talked it over, the crumbs we had between us, and at last we were able to offer to the situation the fact that June had said on the day she left: ‘Well, ta, I’ll be seeing you around, I expect.’ But she had not directed this particularly, to Emily or to me. How could we have understood this was her farewell before going away for good?

  It was the inconsequence of the act that shocked. June did not believe we were worth the effort of saying goodbye? She had not said a real goodbye because she thought we would stop her? No, we could not believe that was it: she would have stayed as readily as she had left. The shocking truth was that June did not feel she was worth the effort: her leaving us, she must have felt, was of no importance. In spite of the fact that Emily was so devoted, and anxious and loving? Yes, in spite of that. June did not value herself. Love, devotion, effort, could only pour into her, a jug without a bottom, and then pour out, leaving no trace. She deserved nothing, was owed nothing, could not really be loved and therefore could not be missed. So she had gone. Probably one of the women had been kind to her, and to this little glow of affection June had responded, as she had to Emily’s. She had gone because she could leave one day as well as another. It did not matter, she did not matter. At last we agreed that the energetic and virile woman who led that band had captured the listless June with her energy, at a time when Emily did not have enough to go around.

  Emily could not take it in.

  And then, she began to cry. At first the violent, shocked tears, the working face and blank, staring eyes of a child, which express only: What, is this happening to me! It’s impossible! It isn’t fair! - Floods of tears, noisy sobs, exclamations of anger and disgust, but all the time the, as it were, painted eyes, untouched: Me, it is me sitting here, to whom this frightful injustice has occurred … a great fuss and a noise and a crying out, this kind of tears, but hardly intolerable, not painful, not a woman’s tears …

  Which came next.

  Emily, eyes shut, her hands on her thighs, rocked herself back and forth and from side to side, and she was weeping as a woman weeps, which is to say as if the earth were bleeding. I nearly said as if the earth had decided to have a good cry - but it would be dishonest to take the edge off it. Listening, I certainly would not have been able to do less than pay homage to the rock-bottom quality of the act of crying as a grown woman cries.

  Who else can cry like that? Not an old woman. The tears of old age can be miserable, can be abject, as bad as anything you like. But they are tears that know better than to demand justice, they have learned too much, they do not have that abysmal quality as of blood ebbing away. A small child can cry as if all the lonely misery of the universe is his alone - it is not the pain in a woman’s crying that is the point, no, it is the finality of the acceptance of a wrong. So it was, is now and must ever be say those closed, oozing eyes, the rocking body, the grief. Grief - yes, an act of mourning, that’s it. Some enemy has been faced, has been tackled, but a battle has been lost, all the chips are down, everything is spent, nothing is left, nothing can be expected … yes, in spite of myself, every word I put down is on the edge of farce, somewhere there is a yell of laughter - just as there is when a woman cries in precisely that way. For, in life, there is often a yell of laughter, which is every bit as intolerable as the tears. I sat there, I went on sitting, watching Emily the eternal woman at her task of weeping. I wished I could go away, knowing it would make no difference to her whether I was there or not. I would have liked to give her something, comfort, friendly arms - a nice cup of tea? (Which in due time I would offer.) No, I had to listen. To grief, to the expression of the intolerable. What on earth, the observer has to ask - husband, lover, mother, friend, even someone who has at some point wept those tears herself, but particularly, of course, husband or lover - “What in the name of God can you possibly have expected of me, of life, that you can now cry like that? Can’t you see that it is impossible, you are impossible, no one could ever have been promised enough to make such tears even feasible … can’t you see that?’ But it is no use. The blinded eyes stare through you, they are seeing some ancient enemy which is, thank heavens, not yourself. No, it is Life or Fate or Destiny, some such force which has struck that woman to the heart, and for ever will she sit, rocking in
her archaic and dreadful grief, and the sobs which are being torn out of her are one of the pillars on which everything has to rest. Nothing less could justify them.

  In due course, Emily keeled over, lay in a huddle on the floor and, the ritual subsiding into another key altogether, she snuffled and hiccuped like a child and finally went to sleep.

  But when she woke up she did not go back to the other house, she did not go out to the pavement. There she sat, coming to terms. And there she would have stayed for good, very likely, if she had not been challenged.

  Gerald came over to see her. Yes, he had been in before, and often, for advice. Because his coming was nothing new, we did not know that his problem, our problem, was anything new. And he didn’t, at this stage.

  He wanted to talk about ‘a gang of new kids’ for whom he felt a responsibility. They were living in the Underground, coming up in forays for food and supplies. Nothing new about that, either. A lot of people had taken to a subterranean existence, though they were felt to be a bit odd, with so many empty homes and hotels. But they could be actively wanted by the police, or criminal in some way, feeling the Underground to be safer.

  These ‘kids’, then, were living like moles or rats in the earth, and Gerald felt he should do something about it, and he wanted Emily’s support and help. He was desperate for her to rouse herself, and to energize him with her belief and her competence.

  He was all appeal; Emily all listlessness and distance. The situation was comic enough. Emily, a woman, was sitting there expressing with every bit of her the dry: You want me back, you need me - look at you, a suitor, practically on your knees, but when you have me you don’t value me, you take me for granted. And what about the others? Irony inspired her pose and gestures, set a gleam of intelligence that was wholly critical on her eyelids. On his side he knew he was being reproached, and that he certainly must be guilty of something or other, but he had had no idea until this moment of how deeply she felt it, how great his crime must be. He was searching his memory for behavior which at the time he had committed it he had felt as delinquent, and which he could see now - if he really tried and he was prepared to try - as faulty … is this, perhaps, the primal comic situation?

  He stuck it out. So did she. He was like a boy in his torn jersey and worn jeans. A very young man indeed was this brigand, the young chieftain. He looked tired, he looked anxious; he looked as if he needed to put his head on someone’s shoulder and be told, There, there! He looked as if he needed a good feed and to have his sleep out for once. Is there any need to describe what happened? Emily smiled at last, drily, and for herself - for he could not see why she smiled, and she would not be disloyal to him in sharing it with me; she roused herself in response to the appeal which he had no idea he was making, the real one, for he went on logically explaining and exhorting. In a short time they were discussing the problems of their household like two young parents. Then off she went with him, and for some days I did not see her, and only by fits and starts did I come to understand the nature of this new problem, and what was so difficult about these particular ‘kids’. Not only from Emily did I learn: when I joined the people on the pavement everybody was talking about them; they were everyone’s problem.

  A new one. In understanding why this was, we householders had to come to terms with how far we had travelled from that state when we swapped tales and rumours about ‘those people out there’, about the migrating tribes and gangs. Once, and only a short time ago, to watch - and fearfully - a mob go past our windows was the limit of our descent into anarchy. Once, a few months ago, we had seen these gangs as altogether outside any kind of order. Now we wondered if and when we should join them. But above all the point was that when studied, when understood, their packs and tribes had structure, like those of primitive man or of animals, where in fact a strict order prevails. A short time with people living this sort of life, and one grasped the rules - all unwritten, of course, but one knew what to expect.

  And this was precisely where these new children were different. No one knew what to expect. Before, the numerous children without parents attached themselves willingly to families or to other clans or tribes. They were wild and difficult, problematical, heartbreaking; they were not like the children of a stable society: but they could be handled inside the terms of what was known and understood.

  Not so this new gang of ‘kids’. Gangs, rather: soon we learned that there were others; it was not only in our district that such packs of very young children defied all attempts at assimilation. For they were very young. The oldest were nine, ten. They seemed never to have had parents, never to have known the softening of the family. Some had been born in the Underground and abandoned. How had they survived? No one knew. But this was what these children knew how to do. They stole what they needed to live on, which was very little indeed. They wore clothes - just enough. They were … no, they were not like animals who have been licked and purred over, and, like people, have found their way to good behavior by watching exemplars. They were not a pack either, but an assortment of individuals together only for the sake of the protection in numbers. They had no loyalty to each other, or, if so, a fitful and unpredictable loyalty. They would be hunting in a group one hour, and murdering one of their number the next. They ganged up on each other according to the impulse of the moment. There were no friendships among them, only minute-by-minute alliances, and they seemed to have no memory of what had happened even minutes before. There were thirty or forty in the pack in our neighbourhood, and for the first time I saw people showing the uncontrolled reactions of real panic. They were going to call the police, the army; they would have the children smoked out of the Underground…

  A woman from the building I lived in had gone out with some food to see ‘if anything could be done for them’, and had met a couple on a foray. She had offered them food, which they had eaten then and there, tearing it and snap ping and snarling at each other. She had waited, wanting to talk, to offer help, more food, even perhaps homes. They finished the food and went off, without looking at her. She had sat down: it was in an old warehouse near the Underground entrance, where grass and shrubs were growing up through the floor, a place both sheltered and open, so that she could run for it if she had to. And she did have to … as she sat there, she saw that all around her were the children, creeping closer. They had bows and arrows. She, unable to believe, as she put it, ‘that they really were past hope’ had talked quietly to them, of what she could offer, of what they risked living as they did. She understood, and with real terror, that they did not understand her. No, it was not that they did not understand speech, for they were communicating with each other in words that were recognizable, if only just - they were words, and not grunts and barks and screams. She sat on, knowing that an impulse would be enough to lift a bow up and send an arrow her way. She talked for as long as she could make herself. It was like, she said, talking into a vacuum - it was the most uncanny experience of her life. ‘When I looked at them, they were only kids, that was what I couldn’t get into my thick head, they were just children … but they are wicked. In the end I got up and left. And the thing that was worst of all was when one of them came running after me and tugged at my skirt. I couldn’t believe it. I knew he would have stuck a knife into me as easily. He had his finger in his mouth, and he was pulling at my skirt. He was grinning. It was just an impulse, do you see? He didn’t know what he was doing.

  The next minute there was a yell and they were all after me. I ran, I can tell you, and I only escaped by nipping into that old Park Hotel at the corner and I shook them off by barricading myself into a room on the fourth floor until dark.’

  These were the children Gerald had decided must be rescued by his household. Where would they all fit in? Well, somewhere, and if they didn’t, there was that other big house just across the road, and perhaps Emily and he could run the two houses between them?

  There was much resistance to the idea. From everybody. Emily too. But Ge
rald wore them down: he always did, because after all it was he who maintained them, got food and supplies - he who took responsibility. If he said it could be done, then perhaps … and they were just ‘little kids’, he was right about that. ‘Just little kids, how can we let them rot out there?’

  I believe that the others in the house comforted themselves with ‘they won’t come anyway’. They were wrong. Gerald could make people believe in him. He went down the Underground, heavily armed and showing it. Yes, he was terrified … they crept from holes and corners and tunnels, they seemed able to see without much light whereas he was half blinded by the flare of the torch. He was alone down there, and he was an enemy, since everybody was, offering them something they did not even know the words for. But he was able to make them follow him. He walked back from the Underground like a Pied Piper, and the twenty or so children who followed him ran and shouted all over the house, flinging open doors and slamming them, putting their fists through the precious polythene in the windows. Smelling food being cooked, they stood crowded together waiting for it to come their way. They saw people sitting down, children their own ages with the adults, a sight that was astonishing to them. They were subdued, it seemed; or at least their reflexes were temporarily put out. Or perhaps they were curious? They would not sit down at table - they never had, they would not sit down on the floor in an orderly way to be served, but they did stand snatching at food which was passed to them on trays, and bolted it down, their bright, hard eyes watching everything, trying to understand. When there was not enough food to fill their aroused expectations, they ran shrieking and jeering through the house, destroying everything.