by Iris Murdoch
Today, however, Rosa had no ear for Kitty’s music nor any yearning to catch Kitty’s eye. She sat staring after Jan as she swayed slowly to and fro, hand in hand with the machine. Jan was as slim and as fresh and as gay as a silk handkerchief passed through a ring. His flesh was of an extraordinary whiteness and his eyes were of an unflecked blue, like the sky in summer or like a crystal-clear lagoon whose colour is built up from its depth, without content, planes or distances. His hair was a burnished brown, and as it swept on to his pallid neck it looked like a chestnut bursting from its white case.
He very closely resembled his elder brother Stefan, who also worked in the factory. The Lusiewicz brothers were engineers, and among those who had immigrated lately under the SELIB scheme and acquired their skills in England. Although it would have been difficult to mistake Jan for Stefan, who had very slightly more irregular features, the resemblance between the brothers was generally admitted to be uncanny — as if Stefan’s face were a reflection of Jan’s in water, just a little softer and hazier in line. The women who worked in the factory, who ran into hundreds, were divided into Janists and Stefanists, some exalting the neatly chiselled face of the younger, others praising the more rugged face of the older, brother. But all were agreed that it was very hard indeed to say which of them was the more charming. They were both expert at their jobs and had soon graduated out of the enslaved group of machine-minders, to which Rosa still belonged, into the comparative freedom of the technical staff.
As Rosa watched Jan disappear round a corner fifty yards away down the workroom, she jumped violently to see his face materialize a few inches from her. It was Stefan.
‘So. You come. Yes?’ he said. ‘It is for tonight, yes?’
Rosa nodded and again her tongue moved. Stefan’s smile was like porcelain in the sun and his eyes caressed Rosa. He placed himself close up to Kitty so that the rhythmical return of the tray brought Rosa’s bare arm into momentary contact with his. As the machine parted them again, Stefan faded away, his mouth opening in a laugh which fell inaudibly into the general noise.
‘Oh, Kitty,’ said Rosa. ‘Kitty, Kitty!’
Kitty Kitty bang click, said Kitty, like a clever parrot repeating its own name.
The Lusiewicz brothers were Rosa’s secret. She had discovered them when they first came to the factory about eighteen months ago, soon after their arrival in England, when they were a bewildered helpless pair of very young men. As no one else seemed to be interested in them at that time, Rosa had dutifully, almost sulkily, undertaken to be their protector. At that time they were dejected and colourless, like half-starved, half-drowned animals; and in a moment they had become completely dependent on her. They spoke practically no English and would sit together upon a bench, looking up at Rosa with their blue eyes full of confusion and sorrow. They would speak rapidly to each other in Polish. Then one of them, usually Stefan, would try to say something to Rosa in English. One mangled mispronounced word would come out, together with many gestures and an accompaniment in Polish from Jan. Rosa had never before seen a language appear so much like an instrument of torture.
She had protected them, guided them, given them money, and taught them English. During this period she saw them every day at the factory, gave them an English lesson almost every evening, and spent a large part of her week-ends in showing them London. They became her children and her secret. She had tried at first to make Hunter take an interest in them. Stefan was a bit younger than Hunter. But this was unsuccessful. For some reason Hunter had disliked them. Then after a while Rosa found herself becoming oddly secretive and possessive about the pair. She did not mention them again to those of her friends to whom she had described them in the early days. When people asked her, ‘What happened to those two gloomy Poles you were looking after?’ she would reply,‘ Oh, they’re all right, I think. They can manage for themselves now. I haven’t seen them lately.’ Even from Hunter she concealed the fact that she still saw the Lusiewicz brothers as often as ever.
The brothers had meanwhile been achieving a startling degree of success. They had both had some training in engineering before they arrived and they rapidly showed a remarkable aptitude with machines. They learnt to speak English with confidence and charm, though with a quaint and repetitive vocabulary and an ineradicable contempt for the definite article. Their appearance improved. Their hair, which had hung in muddy strands down on to their collars, began to arch up like a plant revived and gleam with brown fire: and the exceptional pallor of their skin now put the onlooker more in mind of Grecian marbles than of the symptoms of anaemia or undernourishment. Their blue eyes became filled with gaiety and ferocity and joy, and their mouths with laughter. At the factory, their beauty, their awkward English, which they soon learnt to make into an instrument of seduction, and their curious resemblance to each other soon commended them to the women, touched by an appearance of helplessness which was now comprehensible enough to be charming and by the mysteries of consanguinity. To the men, their mechanical skill and willingness to learn soon commended them just sufficiently to compensate for the irritations caused by their success with the women. They became popular.
Rosa watched this flowering with interest and pleasure at first, and later with sadness. There was no doubt that their arrival had transformed the factory for her. Rosa had been working in the factory for about two years. Before that she had been a journalist. Before that she had taught history in a girls’ school. She disappointed her mother by failing to be a fanatical idealist, and she disappointed herself by failing to be a good teacher. In journalism she had succeeded a little beyond her expectations and even her wishes, but had never recovered from the gloom and cynicism with which she had entered the trade. She had come to the factory in a mood of self-conscious asceticism. Work had become for her something nauseating and contaminated, stained by surreptitious ambitions, frustrated wishes, and the competition and opinions of other people. She wanted now at last to make of it something simple, hygienic, stream-lined, unpretentious and dull. She had succeeded to the point of almost boring herself to death. Rosa did not imagine that the factory represented anything other than an interlude in her life; but then she had also ceased to imagine that her life would ever consist of anything but a series of interludes.
There had been a time when Rosa had been used to have one extraordinary thing happen to her after another. But since she had gone to the factory nothing had happened to her at all. It was as if whatever god she had invoked when she decided, in what her friends pointed out to be such a deplorably destructive and negative mood, upon this course of action had indeed taken her at her word. Her life became simple, with the simplicity hardly of beauty or goodness but of a monochromatic tedium. Where beauty and goodness were concerned, Rosa had of course had no particular expectations from her new life; she was far from sharing her late mother’s urge to get in touch with the People. Deep in her heart, however, although she had not admitted it to anyone, she had hoped that she would get to know some of her workmates; she had even hoped that, somehow or other, she might be able to help them. But none of this had come about. She was on amiable terms with the men and women with whom she worked, but she remained at a distance from them, eccentric, solitary, only just failing to be an object of suspicion. At this Rosa had been not at all surprised and only a little disappointed. Life became impersonal and mechanical; and this even pleased her too, satisfying some deep and perhaps despairing desire for peace.
Rosa never wanted other human beings to come too near. Her intimacy with the person closest to her, Hunter, inspired in her at times a certain horror. She was obscenely near to Hunter. For him she had no exterior. The shell of conventions and pretentions which enclose and define a person did not pass between Hunter and Rosa but encased the pair of them together. One’s closeness to oneself, she thought, is made tolerable by the fact that one can alter oneself, the structure is alive. But for this other proximity there was no remedy; and this inspired in Rosa such a fear of a
ny proximity as to console her for her increasing solitude. She would have welcomed the intangibility which was being forced upon her if it had not been that she was becoming throughly bored. So the time had passed and nothing had happened: nothing, that is, except the advent of the Lusiewicz brothers.
The brothers had treated Rosa at first with an inarticulate deference which resembled religious awe. They were like poor savages confronted with a beautiful white girl. For them she was from the start ‘English Lady’; and they were very proud, as they told her later, that they had seen at once that she was ‘Lady, not like those other ones, but lady.’ She had had great difficulty in persuading them to call her by her Christian name. Their dependence upon her was complete and their respect for her abject. Rosa even became worried at the degree of her power over them. They asked her permission for the simplest things, they made no choice without her opinion, they were her slaves. Rosa feared this power, but she enjoyed it too. There were days when, contemplating the grace and vitality of her protégés, she felt as if she had received a pair of young leopards as a present. It was impossible not to adore them, it was impossible not to be pleased to own them.
The brothers lived in a cheap room in Pimlico. It was an L-shaped room, full of shabby furniture which had originally been stored there by a junk merchant who had died many years ago, and no one since then had felt inspired to clear the room. The brothers, in whom there was apparent, as soon as they had overcome their initial animal terror enough to display ordinary human characteristics, an exceptional degree of parsimony, were pleased with their junk-filled room, which they were able to rent for eight shillings a week, and whose bric-à-brac, once a senseless jumble, they soon set in order, giving to each decrepit object a proper use and significance.
The brothers had brought with them their very old and bedridden mother. This old lady they stowed in the recess of the L, where she lay upon a mattress on the floor. The brothers occupied another larger mattress in the main part of the room. Social life normally took place upon the floor, since although there were a number of chairs, none of them was quite satisfactory for sitting on, and although there was a bed, even a large one, it consisted of the empty frame only. This large bed-frame was the central feature of the room. The iron side-pieces had long ago rusted into the head and foot boards, and it would now have been a work of considerable difficulty to take it apart. This, however, would not have deterred the brothers if they had not almost at once decided that the bed did very well as it was. Its presence was a joke of which they seemed never to get tired. As the centre part of the frame was entirely gone, it was necessary to step over the side pieces one after the other in order to cross the room. On the other hand, these iron bars were useful as seats, or for leaning against, or for hanging up washing — and so the bed was left intact. An unsavoury lavatory on the first landing provided water for the brothers and for all the other, extremely secretive inhabitants of the house.
It was not Rosa who had discovered this place. How the brothers had discovered it she never found out. They were proud of having found it and would only say again and again, ‘We do it alone!’ which in those days meant not with Rosa. The Pimlico room had given Rosa a shock when, in the early days of her acquaintance with the brothers, she had first come to visit it. The decrepitude of the objects, hardly one of which was unbroken, together with the spotless cleanliness imposed by the brothers, who had even managed to rid their room of the smell which pervaded the rest of the house, made it a strange scene. The clean-scrubbed colours and the air of neat deliberate management brought out with an odd emphasis the fact that nothing was quite the right shape.
Most of all, Rosa had not expected the old mother. The brothers had said nothing about her either to Rosa or to anyone else at the factory — and Rosa felt more inclined to attribute this omission to deliberate secrecy than to the lack in their vocabulary of so fundamental a word. The old woman spoke no English, and how much she was aware at all of where she was and what was going on around her Rosa was unable to decide. Sometimes, when Rosa was talking to the brothers, she would lie for hours with her eyes closed. But occasionally Rosa had found her watching her, with an intent and puzzled expression; perhaps she imagined that Rosa was someone else, a niece, or a friend from long ago whose name she could not recall. On the other hand, perhaps, she knew very well indeed what was going on. Rosa wondered, and when she knew the brothers a little better she asked them, but they were short on the subject. ‘She think it is still in Poland,’ said Jan. ‘She never know that it is not.’
‘Never,’ said Stefan. They stood looking down at her. Their mother seemed to fill them with a mixture of tenderness, irritation, and savagery. When Rosa, who was rather shocked at the way in which the old woman was stored there in the corner of the room, had offered to help them to make her more comfortable, they had refused all her suggestions almost with anger. They would not even let Rosa approach near to the place where she lay. ‘She is our mother,’ said Stefan. ‘It is enough.’
When Rosa had realized that the brothers had a mother, her first reaction had been one of uneasiness, almost of jealousy. She thought of her at once as a being to be reckoned with, someone to be coaxed, cajoled, humoured, satisfied, and handled. Soon, however, although the old woman never ceased to inspire in her a kind of awe which nearly amounted to terror, she fell into paying her no more attention, for practical purposes, than if she had been another quaint piece of furniture. When, as sometimes happened, they were alone together in the room, Rosa would keep her distance, but would settle down to study the face of the old idol without embarrassment.
It was indeed like being in the presence of a native god, in which one does not believe but which can terrify one all the same. The mother was yellow in colour and her skin resembled leather. On her face and neck it was crossed with innumerable deep wrinkles until it was almost impossible to descry her features, so many other dark lines distracted the eye. Her checks were furrowed with deep cracks, like a vessel that had been broken and stuck roughly together again. The lower part of her face had fallen in, so that her mouth and chin hung like a flabby bag from the bony protuberances above. Only her plentiful grey hair still seemed to be alive, and her eyes, which were large and dark and moist, and lived in their jagged caves like a pair of jellyfish, their wet and lustrous surface constrasting oddly with the extreme aridity of their surroundings. She always lay propped up on three pillows, and slept so at night too, as far as Rosa could see. She spoke seldom, but when she did address one or other of her children in Polish her voice sounded quite strong and not at all like the babble of someone who was senile. Once or twice when they were alone together Rosa had addressed her in English, but she had made no response of any kind beyond continuing to stare with her large wet eyes. So Rosa would sit contemplating her and she would contemplate Rosa, with as little relationship between them as if they had belonged to two different historical epochs.
Rosa was surprised to find that she was not disposed to pity the old woman, and that she was soon able to take her cue from the brothers, who mostly ignored their mother altogether. They very seldom addressed a remark to her when Rosa was there. At times, however, the presence of the mother seemed to induce in them a strange frenzy of excitement. Then they would stand staring at her with a kind of astonishment. Rosa learnt to know this mood, which would begin with both the brothers tense and quivering, and would rise rapidly to an orgiastic climax, like some native festival.
‘She is earth, earth,’ Stefan would say in solemn tones to Rosa. ‘She is our own earth.’
‘She is our land,’ said Jan. ‘Sometimes we dance on top of her, we do the dance of our land. Eh, old woman!’ he shouted suddenly, prodding her with his foot. The mother would smile up at them toothlessly and then continue to stare with her mouth open.
‘She decay inside,’ said Stefan. ‘All is decay. I cannot explain. You smell it soon.’
‘One day we burn her up,’ said Jan. ‘If we insure her we burn he
r up long time ago. She so dry now, like straw, she burn in a moment. One big flame and all gone.’
‘We burn you, yes, you old woman, we put fires in your hair!’ Stefan would shout, and the old mother would smile again and her eyes would begin to glow feverishly as she looked up at her tall sons.
‘You old rubbish! You old sack!’ cried Jan. ‘We soon kill you, we put you under floorboards, you not stink there worse than here! We kill you! We kill you!’ And he would make as if to jump on to her stomach. Then the pair of them would begin to dance about the room, shouting things out in Polish, and the old mother would arch herself up on the pillows as if at any moment she might get up and join in the dance.
Then quite suddenly the excitement would be over, and the two brothers would sit down one on each side of the bed frame and mop their brows. This performance alarmed Rosa very much on the first occasion, but she soon got used to it.