The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Lynda was inside herself, trying to be private, because she was arguing with someone.

  She was defending herself against someone, something: Martha realized, suddenly, that Lynda always lived in a world of sound, or near it, threatened by it. Trying to imagine this, Martha felt terror. Good God!-to come even for a while close to that sea of sound, close enough for it to threaten an invasion-was enough to frighten her. But Lynda was often inundated by it: sometimes she lived under the ocean of sound for days and days. And not only Lynda-how many people?

  There were people whose machinery had gone wrong, and they were like radio sets which, instead of being tuned in to one programme, were tuned in to a dozen simultaneously. And they didn’t know how to switch them off. Even to imagine the hell of it was enough to make one want to run, to cover one’s ears. Martha couldn’t run. She knew that sometime she must take risks and explore. Because she had not even begun to ask the questions. She did not know what questions to ask. Before knowing she would have to take risks.

  She lay, listening with her ordinary ears to ordinary sounds. Lynda’s mutter, her breathing, then her own breathing, became extraordinarily loud; then she heard sounds from the street outside as if they were in the room, footsteps, voices, a drill at work breaking up the street. Even the regular sliding rasp of her dress sleeve moving with her breath on the carpet became like an iron file on her nerves-then the outside sound went, deadened. The inner sea of sound came up, loudened: and as she came near it, or allowed it to come up into her, there came the enemy she remembered from so long ago, a need to laugh, to cry, to shout, a welter of emotion shaken out of her by stretched nerves. Yes-hysteria. This country, the country, or sea of sound, the wavelength where the voices babble and rage and sing and laugh, and music and war sounds and the bird song and every conceivable sound go on together-was approached, at least for her, or at least at this time, through hysteria. Very well then, she would be hysterical. She held herself tight, exactly as if she were about to switch on strong volts of electricity, while she listened hard and did not care that she would be hysterical-for who was her companion after all?-poor Lynda who would not be frightened. Martha was crying out-sobbing, grovelling; she was being racked by emotion. Then one of the voices detached itself and came close into her inner ear: it was loud, or it was soft; it was jaunty, or it was intimately jeering, but its abiding quality was an antagonism, a dislike of Martha: and Martha was crying out against it-she needed to apologize, to beg for forgiveness, she needed to please and to buy absolution: she was grovelling on the carpet, weeping, while the voice uttered accusations of hatred.

  Lynda had come from the wall and was kneeling by her, looking down. Leaning over Martha was a creature all bone, with yellowish, smelling flesh, with great anxious globes of water tinted blue stuck in its face. Lynda was saying: ‘Don’t Martha, don’t, don’t, don’t, Martha, ’ like a stuck gramophone.

  But for a moment Martha could not stop. Then she saw Lynda scramble off to the door, to the hatch between this and the upper world. She was going to fetch Mark. Now Martha sat up, snapping off the connection to the sea of sound. She was shaking all over, as if she were machinery built to carry voltage, but a bit of machinery had jarred loose. She said: ‘Lynda, it’s all right.’

  Lynda came back and said: ‘Are you sure? ’ With a peremptory nod, she said: ‘You mustn’t do that, Martha. I can’t bear it.’ And she sat down again in her place by the wall. Martha was angry: but she understood that yes, of course it was reasonable, Lynda was not as strong as she was. If she, Martha, were going to find out about the sound-ocean, then she must be alone, by herself.

  Lynda said: ‘You mustn’t get locked up, Martha. I can’t do it, but you can. And when you do it, you’ll do it for me too.’

  This message was perfectly intelligible to Martha. She nodded. Of course: Those who could had a responsibility for those who could not. She would do it for Lynda. But-first things first. Now she must be normal, because Lynda must not be upset by her losing control. It was a question of finding some place somewhere in which she could be alone, and not upset people. But later: when Lynda was willing to be better again.

  For once she asked, or stated, among the muttering words: Shall we stop now, Martha? Yes, I think so-soon. Not just yet-and on she went with her private conversation, or argument.

  Lynda’s antagonist, as Martha suddenly understood, having just had a small taste of him, it, her, before having to come back and be responsible, was the same as the jeering disliking enemy who-it was clear now-was not personal to Martha, but must be in a lot of people. Everyone? Everyone of this particular culture? One had to meet him, it, her, confront him, come to terms, or outflank him? There was a way round him? or not? Who was he? Why? These were the questions she would put to herself-when she was able to. But not now. First she must wait for Lynda.

  With her mind set ahead, to that time when she could explore on her own account, she listened to Lynda; postponing, as it were, herself, she tried to hear, to make sense of Lynda’s monologue. It was as if the louder isolated words were being thrown at her as clues, or hints. Mad was one. Doctor another. Scapegoat … frightened … alone … until it was like that game where one is given a dozen words and invited to make a story around them. She listened. Suddenly she began to understand-she realized this was one of the moments in one’s life after a period of days, or hours, of months, of years, of handling in one’s mind, brooding about, wrestling with, material-then suddenly it all begins to click into place, to make sense.

  Instead of passively idling, like an engine, while the current of Lynda’s talk went by, she became a part of it, and the clues or signals clicked into place: she understood what it was that Lynda was saying, what she had been saying, trying to say, poor Lynda, for years.

  For one thing, it occurred to Martha that the words or the atmosphere pervading them were not of Lynda now, but of a girl. A young girl. A young girl, inside this smelly bedraggled female argued with-the antagonist. Was it possible that Lynda had been forced to confront that antagonist in her (in everyone) too soon, or alone, and had never defeated him? Was it possible that one could be worsted in that battle and be forever, like Lynda, ‘ill’, ‘unfit for ordinary life’ because of having to confront that buried self-hater when one was not strong enough?

  All these years that Martha had been here, in this house, part of Lynda’s life, and her marriage, and her child, she had been a clod, and a lump, not understanding the first thing about Lynda which was-that she need never have been ill at all. She looked at this poor damaged creature, with the great eyes that, like Thomas’s once, were full of depths of light into which one could lean, like pools, or clouds or trees-and was invaded by great washes of understanding, insight, knowledge; ideas came in one after another so fast she could not keep up.

  What had happened to Lynda was something like this: her father was a young man in the London after the First World War, when to be young was to have value, and for the same reason as now-when life is threatened, the young acquire the glamour of pathos and are licensed for enjoyment. In gay party-going London, he had married Lynda’s pretty mother. For years they had been poor, as all their kind were, after that war, and they had a child, Lynda, who was the showpiece for the marriage which was not a success. They ‘adored’ her, and did not separate or divorce for her sake. Lynda had acquired, before she could talk, that sharpness, the acuteness, of the child with parents at loggerheads, who are putting on a front, and quarrel over a teapot rather than over the central difference, because quarrelling over a teapot is safe. Lynda’s antenna for atmospheres and tensions and what was behind words was her first-developed organ. The marriage, uncomfortably continuing, had settled into a pattern where Lynda’s mother spent a lot of time with her parents, country people: ‘It is nice for a child to grow up in the country.’ Lynda had been a country girl and ridden horses and when her parents met watched them, all her senses alert for storm signals. She knew exactly what they were thinki
ng about each other. When she was eleven her mother died. Lynda preferred to live with her grandparents rather than with her father in London; but her father wished to be a good father, and wanted to make a home for his daughter. He fell in love with a woman in every respect suitable for a second marriage, a First World War widow, charming, kindly, intelligent. But she had been afraid of marrying a man with a daughter, or had felt she ought to be, or at any rate had made too much of it, for Lynda had felt herself an obstacle to her father’s happiness. They spent a holiday together in Somerset, the three of them. Lynda said at the end of it that the new woman did not like her. She had told her father so, and her father was angry. He knew that his proposed wife did like Lynda; she had said she did and she was not an untruthful woman. But Lynda knew exactly what the woman was thinking: that she was spoiled and ‘difficult’.

  Lynda said that it didn’t matter, she would go on living with her granny and her grandpa. ‘They like me, ’ said she, ‘and I’ll be grown-up soon anyway.’ This had been said reasonably: Lynda had felt it to be reasonable. But her father had been angry, for he thought what she said was an accusation. A great scene of tears, confrontations, angers. Lynda was fourteen-a difficult age as everyone agreed. It was not true that Rosemary did not like her. They would all go for another holiday, this time in France and really get to know each other. And so they went for a holiday to France. Lynda was at very first silent and well-behaved. Then she became hysterical and cried out that she knew Rosemary hated her and wished her dead: she had heard her thinking so. This remark had sent her father into an angry panic. ‘What did she mean, she had heard her thinking so, was she mad? ’ and so on. Rosemary was frightened away altogether.

  For Lynda this was a time of great confusion about herself. She had been alone most of her childhood. At school she had had a friend or two, but was by nature solitary, and she had always known what people were thinking: she said this to the doctors who were called in. Didn’t everyone? For Lynda had not known that everyone could not hear what other people thought. She had assumed that people did. She had not known herself to be abnormal. Now she was told by one doctor after another that she was not well-she was suffering from hallucinations. She began to stand up for herself, to insist she was not lying, she was not imagining: then she began screaming and fighting. The doctor hated her, she said-she could hear what he was thinking. The doctor was not Dr Lamb, but an earlier version of him, much less worldly-wise and sophisticated, using methods quite different from anything used by Dr Lamb over a decade later. Lynda had been taken off to an expensive private mental home, and there treated with electric shocks. She had had half a dozen of them and they were discontinued. Then she had a course of insulin. Lynda was much improved, the doctor said. For Lynda had become cooperative. When told she was ill, she kept quiet. She had observed in the hospital that patients wishing to leave did as they were told and kept quiet about symptoms. So she tried to do the same. Yet from time to time she had outbreaks of violence-once when another patient was being dunked forcibly in and out of an ice bath, and she was trying to prevent this from happening. And once when they threatened her with the electric shock machine for being disobedient.

  Lynda was discharged back to a father doing his best not to resent having lost a wife because of his sick daughter; and ready to help Lynda to be normal. For a couple of years Lynda had fought a silent battle for ‘reality’. She thought she was worse when they said she was better. For one thing, the voices, once friendly and helpful, were now dreadful. It was as if she had an enemy who hated her in her head, who said she was wicked and bad and disobedient and cruel to her father. Before it had been as if she had had a friend close to her who had ‘told her things and kept her company’. But now she tried to behave well because of this cruel tormentor in her head. She kept quiet, paid a great deal of attention to her clothes (for she noted that ‘they’ took this as a good sign), was beautiful and lived in a state of terror.

  Then she had met Mark. She supposed she loved Mark; for listening to what he thought, she knew he was a good man. But she tormented herself because he did not know what she was like; she did not dare tell him about herself. And, worse than anything, since she had had the electric shock treatment, she had had periods of feeling dazed, of feeling shaky and out of control. And so she married Mark, and left her father who had handed her, bound and helpless, to the doctors, where she had struggled and fought and been bludgeoned into silence by drugs and injections, held down by nurses and dragged screaming to have electric shocks.

  She clung to Mark, ‘Oh save me, save me!’ but when he made love to her felt she was being assaulted, until, cracking again under the attacks of her inner enemy, who said she was cruel and unkind to Mark, found haven in the mental hospital with Dr Lamb who had been able to send away the voices for long periods at a time-with blessed drugs that kept her permanently in a state where she did not have to know that she was a freak.

  And so: Lynda need never have been ill.

  This fact, which was obvious when you came to it, had not been seen by the people closest to her, Mark, Martha; even when Martha had had in her possession some of the facts which made it obvious. There is something in the human mind which makes it possible for one compartment to hold Fact A which matches with Fact Β in another compartment; but the two facts can exist side by side for years, decades, centuries, without coming together. It is at least possible that the most fruitful way of describing the human brain is this: ‘It is a machine which works in division; it is composed of parts which function in compartments locked off from each other.’ Or: ‘Your right hand does not know what your left hand is doing.’

  The civilized human race knew that its primitive members (for instance, Bushmen) used all kinds of senses not used by itself, or not admitted: hunches, telepathy, ‘visions’, etc. It knew that past civilizations, some of them very highly developed, used these senses and capacities. It knew that members of its own kind claimed at certain times to experience these capacities. But it was apparently incapable of putting these facts together to suggest the possibility that they were calling people mad who merely possessed certain faculties in embryo.

  Suppose Lynda had been a fifteen-year-old in a society where ‘hearing voices’ was not sick, but a capacity some people had; a great many people, if they did not suppress it. Suppose she had met someone who could have suggested to her that when she heard her future stepmother saying she hated her, wanted to kill her, it could have been a bad mood, the kind of bad-tempered impulse anyone may have and then afterwards forget. This person might have asked Lynda, who was a reasonable girl wanting to be reasonable: ‘Would you like to be judged on your fantasies, Lynda? Think-are you what you imagine when you are at your worst? ’ Or suppose the doctor had been one of the doctors who are biding their time; who, knowing quite well what the truth is, have to hide their knowledge because of the prejudices of the profession they belong to; he could have supported her, consoled and advised her father, and-suggested she should keep quiet if she didn’t want to be locked up.

  But she had had no such luck; had been made a psychological cripple before she was twenty.

  Like hundreds of thousands of others. Probably millions. There will be no way of knowing how many. These crippled, destroyed people will become another of our statistics, like the ‘roughly’ forty million dead of the Second World War, or the X million who die when there is a famine, though they could be kept alive on what goes into the dustbins of America or Britain.

  Soon, probably in the next decade, the truth would have to be admitted. It will be admitted with bad grace, be glossed over, softened. And just as we now say ‘they burned and drowned witches for a couple of centuries out of a primitive and ignorant terror’, soon we will be saying: ‘When they stopped torturing and killing witches, they locked people with certain capacities into lunatic asylums and told them they were freaks, and forced them into conformity by varieties of torture which included electric shocks, solitary confinement, ic
e baths, and forcible feeding. They used every kind of degradation, moral and physical. As the methods of society for control and manipulation became more refined, it was discovered that the extremities of physical violence were less effective than drugs which deprived the victims of their moral stamina and ability to fight back; and more effective than the drugs, were techniques of persuasion and brain-washing. By these means these members of the population with capacities above normal (those people now considered to be in the main line of evolution) were systematically destroyed, either by fear, so that their development was inhibited from the start (the majority) or by classing them with the congenitally defective.

  Sometime quite soon Dr Lamb would say: ‘Yes, it seems we made a mistake.’ Dr Lamb? Probably someone in the heart of that profession. There is a sound principle that the place to look for the reaction to anything is at the heart of that thing. Meanwhile, it is wise to keep out of the way.

  Lynda, lying sobbing on the floor: ‘No doctor, no doctor, no, I’m not, it’s not true, you are, how do you know you aren’t, nobody said you could, you aren’t God, why do you say that when it’s not true, no, I’m not cruel, I’m not a murderer, I’m not wicked, I think terrible thoughts, doctor, oh I’m wicked, I want to kill people, I want to hurt people, please don’t give me that injection, please, please, don’t, doctor, my mind gets silly and fuzzy, please don’t, yes, yes, give me, give me, give me my pills, please, please, please … oh yes, punish me, I’m wicked, I want to kill you, I want to kill everybody, yes punish me …’ And on and on in a scream, if a toneless whisper of a scream can be a scream-a formalized scream then, Lynda remembering or living again, or using a ritual to forestall repetition: ‘No, no, no, no, I’m not, you’re wrong … yes, I’m wicked … Martha, shall we stop now? ’

  Lynda rolled over on her back and went to sleep where she lay. So did Martha.

  When they woke, they bathed, dressed, ate, and supported each other to the hairdresser, since their sense of reality, that is, their sense of how to conform to the outside world was still weak.