The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  ‘Like Zena?’ said Lynda.

  ‘He said, we were corrupt. No, everybody. He said, we are all so corrupt, that we’ve got past seeing it. He said, the two World Wars, particularly the Second World War, your War, have corrupted everybody … I said, but what will happen to Zena? He said, the worms are having fun.’

  ‘That’s very German, ’ said Mark with an instant distaste.

  ‘What does that mean?’ said Paul, cold. ‘My mother was German! She lived in Germany … German, Jewish …’ He saw them struck and pressed on:’ Well, go on then, tell me? I think your generation simply invented Jewishness for purposes of your own …’ He was getting hysterical now, yet knew he had a point, and hammered on, his fists banging together - ‘Germany, Germany-but it’s just across the channel there, it’s a couple of hundred miles away, and the rest of the world didn’t stop them, so why Germany, Germany?’

  ‘Don’t get so … worked up.’ begged Lynda, ‘it’ll start me off again.’

  ‘Yes.’ said Paul, bitter. ‘You can say that-but Zena can’t. Karl said “Your young friend will likely come to drugs. She is the type”. RIP.’

  ‘All right, ’ said Mark.‘But you sound as if it’s our fault. Do you realize that? If you go to Hamburg and we watch over Zena, that won’t help-she knows perfectly well…” He stopped.

  ‘All right, I know, ’ said Paul, cold again. ‘You think that I want to leave her. But I don’t. It’s just that I…’ Floods of tears suddenly. ‘Oh Christ, ’ he said, ‘the others …’ He jumped up and jammed a chair against the door, and when it wouldn’t jam, stood with his back to it.

  Mark came over, set him aside, stood on guard. Paul, in anguish, stood at the window with his back to them fighting not to cry.

  ‘He said it, ’ said Paul at last, holding his voice steady. ‘He said: “You have to understand that there are people you can do nothing with-they are beyond ordinary life …” but I’ve been thinking, that’s what I understood …’ He turned to face them. ‘There are, there must be, as many people who can’t cope with ordinary life-as ordinary people. Well, just think of the people we know for a start… and that’s what Karl meant by corruption, I saw it after he went off-he went off to some posh dinner. He meant, corrupt. Broken. Spoiled. Unable to cope. RIP.’

  Feet on the stairs. Jolly voices-here came the ‘children’. Mark stood aside from the door. Paul said, lowering his voice and speaking fast, to get it all in: ‘I know what you think-I’ll go to Munich and have a good time and too bad for Zena-but I’m not going to do it … do you hear me? I don’t know how I’ll manage, but I’ll look after her. I’ll do it somehow … or at any rate, ’ he concluded, ‘if I go, I only go for two days, well, three days, and she can stay here till I get back?’

  ‘Well, she has before, hasn’t she?’

  The door opened, admitting the others.

  Paul hastily removed his face to a darkened corner. In a moment, he was able to turn, smiling, a bit swollen, perhaps. Crying is a funny thing: what’s it for?

  He remained quiet for the rest of the evening, watching everyone curiously, and betraying his state of mind by this distance: for our fellow human beings only seem remarkable when in a heightened state oneself. Long afterwards he would refer to that night: You remember, the night I decided to hell with all of you: Or: Karl Holdt’s night.

  Patty came in, accompanied by her young man who had decided he had been hasty: he was subdued, though the resentment felt by the young when forced into being targets of emotion they haven’t bargained for, showed in inadequately controlled glances and tones of voice. Also, he was curious about Patty, trying to sense his way to understanding the change in her. In the half-dozen hours, since he had gone off from Hyde Park, Patty had passed the point of no return: which did not mean she might not again succumb to this, or another youth. In her manner was already the irony which is the beginning of that ambiguous austerity where possessing no loves of the flesh, you possess them all since there are no eyes, mouths, you have not kissed, having become all eyes, mouths, hands, kisses.

  They were a dozen or so people in the little room, all in the mood of let-down that accompanies the end of an exalted public occasion. They were aware that for four days they had slept very little, eaten haphazardly if at all, had been wakefully energetic, had accomplished in every twenty-four hours five or six times what they did normally; and tomorrow they would re-enter the cage of habit. Last year, four youths who had joined the March ‘for a laugh’ had gone off to enlist in the army a week later, because’they wanted to be taken out of themselves’. At the supper-table Francis had dismayed them by saying that he could see why: sometimes he thought he would do the same. He sounded serious. Jill was upset by this. Snuggling up to him she had said:’ We won’t let you go for a soldier.’ She said it with indulged petulance, ‘spoiled-child’ style. But also as if she had the right to say it. So the older people noted. Francis did not, or so it seemed. It looked as if he thought he was humouring a young girl. Gwen and Jill, on either side of their cousin, no longer looked like rather smudged water-colour sketches of the same girl who was also the model for Phoebe, Marjorie or even unborn and unachieved variants of the same. Gwen was still a freshly plump girl. Jill was thin, rather beautifully haggard: a woman who looked adoringly at Francis.

  Jimmy Wood had been there for supper; and had come upstairs to the study, one felt for the same reason that he had gone, just for one day, to the March: he was passing it, he had said, and it had come into his head to join in.

  Jimmy sat on the floor beside Brandon, the American, who looked like a fresh-faced farm boy, and who, like Jimmy, smiled all the time. But Brandon’s smile provoked comparisons with Jimmy’s pink stretch, for his looked as if he were saying:’ Don’t hit me.’

  He had joked at supper that in his own country, an outsider because radical, he had never felt more of an outsider than this week-end, surrounded by radicals who ‘believed-correct me if I’m wrong-that political protest is a question of stating a problem.’

  He had said it twice-but the words had sunk among the foam of chatter about people, food, the events of the day. ‘You are ever so intellectual, ’ Gwen said to him, and he had said quick and annoyed:’ No, that’s the whole point.’

  He now came back to it with:’ Sir, I’d like to return to what I said.’

  Mark, a gentleman farmer, always disinclined for debate, or rather, disinclined since the death of the unconstituted committees, said:’ Go ahead, ’ but offered him a dollop of brandy as if dipping a child’s dummy in soothing syrup.

  Brandon saw this and said politely:’ No, I would really like to-why do you fix your room up like this? Because the way it looks to me is, it’s just stating the problem.’

  ‘It’s hard enough to do that, surely?’ said Mark, stiff. It was clear to his coevals that he was about to slide off, even go to bed, anything rather than this kind of talk.

  Lynda said suddenly:’ No, Mark, because he’s saying something you think—it’s just the language he’s using.’

  ‘Thank you, ’ said the boy to the woman, with the courtesy of his nation.

  ‘All right, ’ said Mark-’tell me.’

  ‘I thought I had-but that proves my point. I state something-1 think it’s achieved a change. Like the March-it’s a statement. “We don’t want war.” End of statement. But nothing will have changed tomorrow when everyone goes back to work.’

  Groans of protest all around the room.

  ‘Yes, ’ said Francis.‘But what else-we don’t know what to do. If we did, we’d do it.’

  ‘But if this statement wasn’t made, what could happen in its place?’ persisted Brandon, smiling. ‘Do you see what I mean?’

  As for Martha she realized that she was present at someone else’s moment of insight: those rare moments when a door creaks open, light grows on a fact or object known to the point where one has not seen them for years. Brandon was in the grip of an attempt to convey such a moment. He leaned forward,
his blue farm-boy’s eyes alight, vibrating with energy.

  He said:’ In the States I make a statement. The statement is: I want the right to be a political being. It’s been knocked out of America by McArthy, but I want the right. That’s a statement. Perhaps it will breed other statements. Other people will say: I want the right to be political, to have my own views. Right! Do you get me?’

  ‘No, ’ said Mark seriously. He was trying.

  Most of the others had already gone off into inattention: their glazed eyes showed it.

  ‘I come here, ’ said Brandon. ‘I make a statement: Things stink in the States. You’re doing us and yourselves a disservice by ignoring it. That’s a statement. It could breed other statements, people who say things stink, etc. But then what. Do you see?’

  ‘Like breeds like, ’ said Martha. An intellectually-bred remark as far as she was concerned, for she was not feeling as he felt: he turned fast to see her, to catch the words, but because they had no understanding behind them, there was no spark. He agreed for the sake of politeness:’ Yes. But more. It seems as if there’s always just enough energy to state the fact, the problem. And not much more. The stating of it exhausts the possibilities. Do you get me? Do you follow?’

  ‘Well, ’ said Mark, ‘let’s see. Suppose your statement did breed other statements and it again became possible to dissent in the States, would that disprove what you are saying?’

  ‘Not if that was all. Not if the statement only bred statements of the same kind.’

  Oh, ’ said Lynda suddenly, ‘I get you. Oh yes, only too well. Oh yes. But then that means …’ Her eyes filled with tears; to hide it, she lit a cigarette.

  ‘Yes, ’ said Brandon excitedly, ‘Yes.’

  The others looked on. Emotion flickered between the two, and some of it leaked to Martha.

  There was a slight opening in her mind. She said:’ It’s like Jimmy. He writes books about telepathy and so on-now it’s mutants. But having made the statement that’s it. He can’t go that other step onwards … Jimmy, do you realize how odd that is?’

  Jimmy turned his round spectacles to her, and she looked at his wet, pink smile.

  ‘The possibilities interest me, ’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but you take something for granted-where do the ideas come from?’

  ‘Oh, ’ he said, smiling, ‘that’s easy-I’ll show you if you like.’

  ‘Other space fiction, ’ said Mark.

  ‘Oh no, ’ said Lynda, ‘it’s everywhere-all around you if you can look, from the Bible to poetry to every edition of every newspaper or if it comes to that how one is oneself…” The last words got lost, because they didn’t have anything to hear them with.

  ‘Do you get your plots from the Bible?’ said Jill to Jimmy, teasing him.

  ‘I don’t know anything about the Bible, ’ he said.

  ‘Where?’ said Martha.

  ‘If you come out to factory some time I’ll show you.’

  ‘All right.’

  It nearly fizzled out there, in Jimmy. But Brandon took it up again:

  ‘And there’s this room, ’ he said. ‘What makes you think that stating it doesn’t exhaust what you can do?’

  ‘Ah, ’ said Mark suddenly, ‘now I do get you. Yes.’ His voice came to life and he looked at the young man with new interest. ‘Yes. But you see, that’s as far as I know how to get.’

  ‘Thank you, ’ said Brandon seriously. ‘Most people wouldn’t have taken so much trouble to try and follow.’

  ‘Yes, ’ said Mark, ‘But now you can’t leave it there. I did have to do this-you know, set out a problem, get the shape of it. But now-what? I sit here by myself, and just take it in.’

  ‘And then?’ asked Brandon seriously.

  ‘Ah, that’s what I am waiting for.’

  ‘Anybody else here?’ asked Brandon.

  ‘Me, ’ said Francis. ‘I come here by myself.’

  ‘And I, ’ said Paul.

  ‘And I, ’ said Martha.

  ‘So far you’re just stating the problem, ’ said Brandon.

  They were silent.

  ‘Because there isn’t so much time, is there?’ he pressed on gently, smiling.

  ‘I don’t know if it is just stating, ’ said Lynda. ‘Because you assume that to think something is the end of that-a thought being self-contained, an end. Well, it isn’t.’

  He turned, smiling, to her. Now it was he who was outside.

  ‘Yes, ’ said Lynda. ‘Well, that’s what one has to experience I suppose.’

  And now the conversation had run out into the sands. Brandon was too interested in Lynda to set the currents going again. He leaned forward and looked at her: he respected her, he knew she said something important to her and therefore probably to him-but that the words she had used were dead for him.

  ‘But, ’ she said, ‘that is as bad-because whether thought, or idea is ended, in this room-which is how you see it; or goes out-changes other thoughts, the way I see it, it’s still if you like “stating a problem”. The only way that would be of some use would be, not just throwing a pebble into a pool anyhow, so that ripples go out, but one doesn’t know how, but knowing how to throw it so that the ripples go out exactly as one foresaw. Do you see?’ She was speaking rather breathlessly, and smoking hard, holding the cigarette between fìnger and thumb of hand gloved in apple-green silk. The exertions of the day had strained her: she looked haggard.

  Brandon decided that she was a nut. ‘They said she was a nut case, ’ he thought, and he leaned back, smiling politely.

  Martha tried to explain Lynda to Brandon.

  ‘It’s like this March, ’ she said. Brandon timed towards her, and so did the others. But her voice had gone dead for them: their attention was gone-she knew it by the way her voice fell muffled into a pool of politeness.

  ‘When Phoebe and Patty and people like them did all that peacemarching and committee work all through the Cold War, the last thing they foresaw was the Aldermaston Marches. That’s what Lynda is saying, and it’s the same whether it is an action, walking from one place to another, or a thought, or one of Mark’s books. Mark writes a book. Then he watches what happens like one watches ripples from a bank after a watervole has dived in.’

  ‘You can watch a thought in your head, ’ said Lynda. ‘You see the impulse that starts it. Then the thought trickles across your mind, strongly or weakly according to the strength of the first impulse. But the impulse needn’t necessarily have bred that particular thought. Perhaps it could have bred another thought.’

  ‘What Lynda is saying, ’ said Martha, ‘is that your statement, “I want freedom to say what I like as a political being", could breed similar statements or it could breed another McArthy who says “I won’t let you say what you like”.’

  They could hear that downstairs someone was arriving. Jill and Gwen exchanged glances. So short a time ago such glances had been loud, like histrionic sighs, had been meant to be observed, had said for the world to hear: Oh, our awful mother! Now they were private and signalled private collusions.

  Gwen said aloud:’ I’ll go home. Can Jill stay?’

  Jill was looking at Francis, who said affectionately to little Jill:

  Of course you can. Can’t she, Martha?’

  Phoebe came in on the crest of a wave of triumphant emotion which had begun days before, and culminated tonight in watching on television the biggest March of them all. It had been extremely well organized. The Press, the television, the police, had been helpful.

  Everyone she had met for days (and this meant people from all over the world) had been left-wing and assumed, as she did, that soon there would be a Labour Government. After the final speeches in Trafalgar Square, she had gone off with a couple of dozen people, most below forty, all Labour Party, all able, well-informed, energetic. They had been talking about the future; there was no doubt that the Tories, after a disastrous decade in power, would soon be out; and here, among themselves, was the stuff of an ef
ficient and progressive administration.

  When she came into the study she was flushed, her eyes shone, she was drunk on pure spirits of hopeful confidence.

  Between her and the people in the study, who had been dropping temperature for some hours, there was no connection.

  ‘Goodness, ’ she said smiling, ‘you are a dozy-looking lot.’

  She wanted to know what they had been talking about. Brandon said:’ Whether or not political action achieves anything.’

  ‘Well, ’ said Phoebe dryly, ‘you must all be very tired!’

  ‘Any change, ’ said Brandon, ‘whether or not things get changed.’

  ‘How very intellectual, ’ she said. Because she was disappointed, because she was unwilling to lose the exultation she had been riding, she made it sound like a reprimand.

  Jimmy Wood got up and said it was late and he had to be up early tomorrow.

  Everyone got up from where they were sitting. Phoebe exclaimed that she did not want to break the party up.

  In five minutes there was no young person left in the study, except Gwen, suddenly pale with exhaustion and standing by the door pointedly waiting to be taken home by her mother.

  Phoebe got up and left.

  Her voice could be heard saying: ‘I don’t know why it is, but I’m always made to feel like a wet-blanket when I come anywhere near you.’

  Gwen’s reply was inaudible.

  Mark picked up off the floor a dropped leaflet, ‘Aldermaston to London, The Easter March’, with the black and white symbol, and stuck it on a wall, connecting it by an orange sticker with other facts, one being the Defence Estimates for the United States in 1961-a figure so enormous that it was meaningless to the ordinary mind, like distance expressed in light-years.

  Part Four

  If you take a cell from the gut of a toad and transplant it into the toad’s head, the gut cell has encoded in it all the information it needs to bea head cell.

  A Schools broadcast

  From realm to realm man went, reaching his present reasoning, knowledgeable, robust state-forgetting earlier forms of intelligence. So, too, shall he pass beyond the current forms of perception … There are a thousand other forms of Mind…