The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  All this was still going on when Martha kissed Mark goodbye (but only temporarily, for she would certainly drop into Radlett Street from time to time), and left for her period of ‘retreat’.

  Very extraordinary indeed was the human mind. Mark, a man of integrity if there was ever one, had worked for nearly twenty years with a man whose actions (he did not have beliefs) contradicted everything Mark held dear; but, for some reason Mark had not thought that this was so, or had not-what? Troubled? Cared? If Jimmy Wood was arrested tomorrow on charges of almost pathological indifference to any ordinary ideas of decency, then Mark would be (or should be) arrested with him. But of course Jimmy would not be arrested, nor suffer in any way at all, because he was merely ‘contributing to human knowledge’. All the same, if the case were to be put to Mark as a hypothetical one, with himself in it, but masked, he would hate and despise himself. But for twenty years he had gone along with it, had not ‘put two and two together’.

  Martha, living cheek by jowl with Lynda for years, and in what she had imagined to be the closest sympathy with her, had not seen what was screaming out to be seen-though Lynda had so little belief in its being seen by anyone, even Martha, that its manifestation was mostly in moments of self-defence seen by others (and even herself) as aggressive violence; could only communicate it through ‘gibberish’ to be deciphered by someone (Martha) who at last had reached the same place in experience.

  It was at least interesting that these discoveries, hers in connection with Lynda, Mark’s in connection with Jimmy Wood, and the reflections they gave rise to, coincided with Martha’s determination to challenge her own mind.

  Alone in the empty room, high over noisy streets that were full of humanity, yet held in a carpeted space where no one would come if she did not call them, she-was extremely afraid. She had not expected it. Quite one thing to say: Yes of course it’s dangerous, very risky; another to actually go into danger.

  And she did not really know how to do it, except that she knew from the past that if she did not eat, slept very little, kept alert, she sharpened and fined down. But both times in the past had been unplanned, she had not intended anything.

  Now she stopped eating, though she drank tea and coffee, and stopped sleeping, and walked up and down, up and down, on the heavy carpet which protected Molly and Rose under her feet from annoyance.

  She knew there were areas she was likely to have to go through: there would be the stratum of sound for instance. She was more than likely to become hysterical: she had in the past. There were rewards-oh yes, she remembered there were, though not clearly at all, except as a fact. Looking back on that time when she was first in London, and then again on the recent time with Lynda, what she remembered was an intensity of packed experience-which she longed to have again. But there was nothing in particular that she expected.

  She walked, she walked, she walked up and down, smoking, drinking coffee, waking herself as she drifted off to sleep.

  She was thinking of poor Lynda-washes of soft pity came with it. She thought of Mark, poor Mark alone in his house without his friend Martha, and without Lynda who (though he did not know it) he was going to lose altogether very soon-Lynda was leaving him. Oh poor Mark. How cruel she, Martha, was; how unkind to do this, to say: Mark, it’s your bad luck you have nothing but eccentric women, but I’m off for a brief trip into a totally uncharted interior! No, she had not said that, she had concealed and softened. All the same, how could she treat Mark so-and how appallingly had she always treated poor Mark! How coldly, how finally, all those years ago, had she dismissed him from her life, from love, poor Mark who had had such a bad time with Lynda, poor Mark who had so little warmth in his life and who had been sent off by her, Martha, into a series of minor love affairs which bored him … it was all her fault! She was callous and …

  As she entered the country of sound she encountered head-on and violently the self-hater … yes, of course, she had half-expected it, was even hoping to; but oh, how powerful an enemy he was, how dreadfully compelling, how hard to fight … the days passed. Someone observing Martha would have seen a woman lying on the floor, beating her head on it, weeping, crying, complaining, calling out to a large variety of deities, official and unofficial; accusing an unknown assailant of cruelty and of callousness; lying prone on the floor for a few moments, apparently asleep, then jumping up as if galvanized by conscience or command into some kind of frenzied but absurd activity, such as sweeping the floor, or energetically washing up coffee cups in the kitchen, or even doing violent exercises, while tears streamed down her face and she muttered and argued: not a sight to instruct or to edify. A sight, rather, to frighten, or upset-but this would depend on who came in. This turned out to be a man not yet met by her who lived on the second floor and who had heard she was ‘on a trip’ and had come to see if she was all right. Martha found to her surprise that she was not so far gone that she did not instantly pull herself together and converse with calm and with sense. She said it was LSD (anything for a quiet life as she muttered to herself) and that she was well used to it. Off he went, and she resumed.

  She was completely in the grip of this self-hating person, or aspect of herself. Remorse? No, it was more that her whole life was being turned inside out, so that she looked at it in reverse, and there was nothing anywhere in it that was good; it was all dark, all cruel, all callous, all ‘bad’. Oh, she was bad, oh she was wicked, oh, how very evil and bad and wicked she was.

  Time passed.

  It was the most banal and ordinary of considerations that saved her-she had been here for two weeks, and she was squandering precious time. After all, for a human being in this our society of the nineteen-sixties, to achieve three months of perfect solitude and without interference, was so rare … and here she was squandering it. Because, right ahead of her (and she now saw how very lucky that was) was Rita’s visit, for which she must be normal and competent.

  It could not be said that she was able to defeat the self-hater all at once, or completely-no. He, she (it?) was too strong. But push him aside she did, for periods, writing as she did so on sheets of paper that she had arranged for this purpose on a table in a corner of the room.

  The self hater. This is where Lynda was defeated. She is never free of this.

  Beside this entry were a whole forest of underlinings, exclamation marks, and signs of all kinds that Martha put there in a sort of despair: they were there to remind her, afterwards, that this series of words said so very little of what she wanted to say, were a thin scratching on a rock, a pathetic shorthand, for what she knew. For the complexity of what was going on (later she said it was as if she had crammed a dozen years of intensive living into a few weeks) and the speed at which she was learning, was such that she was all the time in the grip of an anguished fear she would forget, forget, forget all this she was learning. For she remembered that one did forget. Oh yes, one forgot appallingly. This was the third time for instance that she was charting the country of sound (although this time she was accompanied by the self-hater), and she only remembered when she was doing it what she had learned before.

  However, defective though her experiments were, terrified though she was, totally inadequate in every way for what she was trying to do, she was encountering previously known states of mind (regions, boxes, areas, wavelengths, countries, places) and in them were recognizable features. So this was not all chaos, it was not just a jumble: one could, in fact, make some kind of sense of all this by using one’s ordinary faculties of memory, judgement, comparison, understanding. In short, one could use one’s common sense here, in this uncommon area, just as one could in ordinary life.

  And, using one’s common sense …

  But, looking at Martha from outside (a woman lying crying on the carpet, or sitting in an intense thought which knotted her muscles), it might be hard to credit her with the calmness of mind which she was in fact using … better perhaps to skip the detailed blow by blow account of this ‘work’ which Martha
was doing, and to rely on her notes.

  Which of course must be inadequate; but then so would an attempt at a description.

  The woman lying on the carpet crying: which would be more subjective? -to see thus, describe her thus, or to describe the contents of her thought?

  The woman scribbling with agonized speed, to get everything down fast before it flew by: more subjective to describe her knotted pose, her clenched face, or to transcribe the notes?

  Better, perhaps, the notes, like small signposts, or footmarks, for other people who may or may not find them useful.

  The first entry after the one about the self-hater was: Why couldn’t Lynda get out from under? I can make him weaken, I can fíght him off. Strong emotions, thought, can make a kind of gtoove in the brain, and if you do that you can’t get out of it? I am scared. Suppose I can never send him away?

  But soon sheets and sheets of paper were scrawled and scribbled over as the notes and remarks accumulated, were put down so fast that she did not have time to make them more legible.

  You’ve got to be alert enough to catch a thought as it is born. That is how to distinguish. There are different qualities in thoughts. (The word qualities was ringed around and boxed and made to stand out in Martha’s attempt to remember it, to emphasize it.) Very slight differences in quality. One should be able to learn how to tell an overheard thought or words from the self-hater, for instance.

  Yes. Into a mind comes different qualities of … Hearing a thought of Lynda is different. How? No emotion. Remember this, remember it. Words trickling through your head with no emotion: that’s likely to be overheard, someone else’s thought. There is emotion in the self-hater. Go away, go away, oh please God go away, I can’t bear it, just imagine, people live all their lives with you in their heads, poor, poor, poor Lynda, how does she bear it, a life sentence in hell. Go away.

  Suddenly, yes, today’s been Jack. This is where Jack was defeated. His body got taken over. His body is fine. Body is neutral. Something to use. Body can’t be bad. A bad low cunning mind uses his body. His body says, I don’t want to be cruel. If his body wanted to be cruel, then what he does anyway would be enough. (This underlined and scored and emphasized.) It is his mind likes hurting. A nasty little mind, like boys pulling wings off flies.

  For two days Martha jibbed. She would not go on. She was being brought face to face with certain aspects of her own character-to do with sadism, masochism, the pleasure in hurting. Physically. But going on in this way seemed to be the price of going on at all-the jeering, hating, mocking tormentor in her head sulked, and like a schoolchild said: Oh if you won’t play I’m going to go … and went, or was silent. Martha, crying, weeping, in an agony of shame and reluctance to remember, at last went on.

  She wrote: For days now … very well then, now I know. Next time I read that a man has strangled and raped a child, I know. Or why the death penalty was once public and is still desired by most of the British public. DON’T FORGET THAT YOU KNOW.

  She wrote: Three days on, I think. The Tortured and the Torturer. Am being both. Am not just the pain-maker. Pictures on the television set: smoke from a gas-chamber in concentration camp. Then fírst separate but becoming the same, the ragged bit of refuse (me) pushed into the gas-chamber and the uniformed woman (me) who pushed.

  Very economical this editor in my brain. He cuts film beautifully…

  On the screen half a dozen personalities, symbolized. For instance, one of them, Carroll’s old knitting sheep. Beside it, clumsy trampling horny bull The bull of Bashon. (Very funny, you make very bad puns No, no, no, of course, some of them are brilliant.) Bash-on. Ha ha.

  Must be days later. Suddenly understood. He (who) is showing me characteristics (mine) and their opposites (mine). I am so dense. It was perfectly obvious a week ago, if only I’d got it. And now remember it.

  For some time now Martha was stuck. What was happening was something like this. She would discover herself uttering sloganlike phrases, or feeling emotions, which were the opposite of what she, the sane and rational Martha believed. For instance, she would find herself using the languages of anti-semitism, first the sly subtle approaches to anti-semitism, which then worsened, so that for a few hours she was sounding like Goebbels. In a panic she floundered about in a total loss of her own personality. For she would retrieve from her own depths a phrase or an idea which embodied what she thought, but it would at once be swallowed by its shadow. This plunged her into a violent state of fright and shame. Then she saw this was more like an embarrassment, almost a social embarrassment, as if she were being caught out in a social gaffe, which she was afraid of people discovering. She became ashamed (really ashamed) of her own triviality. Before this could be understood, and worked through, she was switched off into a hatred against black people. Then, fast, she watched herself using the languages and emotions of hatred of black people for white people, and of white people for black; of Germans and of Jews, and of Arabs and of the English-etc. etc. Until her chattering mind and the ‘television set’ was like a hate programme arranged for the pleasure of some international lunatic.

  Why is it that it takes so long for me to understand something perfectly obvious? I’m so stupid. Of course: I am switched in to Hating, which is the underside of all this lovely liberalism. But just because we are all such lovely liberals it doesn’t mean … well why does he (who?) tell me that? Don’t I know it already? … Why, I don’t … it’s because I keep forgetting I can’t say, reasonable, civilized, etc. etc. Thinking that I am. I am what the human race is. I am ‘The Germans are the mirror and catalyst of Europe’ and also: ‘Dirty Hun, Filthy Nazi ‘.

  Oh God, I’m so tired, I’m so tired. How many volts all the time?

  Shrieking self-pity and hysteria.

  Is this what all those books call ‘the pairs of opposites’?

  Love, hate, black, white, good, bad, man, woman.

  Somewhere here in came Bob Parrinder. Martha was lying crying on the floor. His pretty girl-friend stood behind in the door, with her baby in her arms. She wore tight faded jeans, brown sweater, a mass of long drowning hair. He smiled. Martha looked up at this immensely tall, tall, tall man whose head was near the ceiling. She sat up, and it lowered.

  He was sympathetic. His eyes were hungry to share. He was here, Martha understood, because of some argument or tiff or something with his girl-if he came to her, Martha, commanded her in some way, it would prove something to the girl? The girl, Martha thought, wasn’t really a very nice girl. (Ten minutes, or ten hours ago she had abolished words like nice, nasty.) Martha did not like the slow, stupid, obstinate face. She did not like the young man’s usurping of authority either, but she thought: Underneath all that nonsense, he is nice, he’s a person.

  Martha, sitting with her legs stretched out, her arms behind her, resting her weight on her palms, said to him: ‘Do you know what it is you are really wanting? ’

  The man now kneeled by her, became a very thin, gently-smiling man with soft-falling fair hair. But she knew he wanted to dominate and control.

  ‘Are you sure, ’ he said, ‘that you oughtn’t to have a rest or something? ’

  ‘Yes, I am, ’ said Martha crossly.

  ‘Well, if you are sure …’

  ‘Do you know what it is you really want? ’ inquired Martha. For now it seemed extremely urgent that she should tell him, that he should understand, and that he should by this be saved from his own varieties of foolish behaviour. She could do this by simply telling him. (Just as if what she had been learning, basically, was not that one has to experience to understand.)

  ‘No, you tell me, ’ he said, smiling.

  ‘You want someone to boss you. To dominate you.’

  His mouth fell in out of his smile and became determined not to show annoyance.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I know so.’

  At the door, the indolent girl crossed her legs differently, and laughed, so as to demonstrate her agreement.
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  ‘That is quite true, I think, Bob, ’ she said, in purest Kensington.

  ‘It is not at all true.‘

  ‘Yes, ’ said Martha. ‘All you young block leaders, you simply can’t wait to hand yourselves and your disciples over to the nearest guru or gauleiter. Blind leading the blind.’

  ‘I am sure you’d feel better for a cup of soup or something. Olive, how about some of that soup we made for lunch? ’

  ‘Do you want some soup? ’ Olive asked Martha.

  The baby began to complain. Olive parked him on one beautiful hip, and jiggled the hip. It looked like a kind of dance-a onesided or crippled shimmy. Her breasts swayed and marched, one, two, one, two.

  Martha fell back on the floor and laughed. She laughed, and laughed.

  Stopping laughing, she noted that Bob waited, smiling, to be told why she laughed. Behind his head, a ceiling moulding looked like a square halo. She laughed again.

  ‘Do you know what a halo is? ’ she inquired. For she had understood in exactly that moment what a halo was.

  ‘Certain people have haloes. They have white light or yellow light around their heads. Instead of dirty-breath green or angry red or efficiency grey.’

  ‘That’s interesting, ’ he smiled.

  The baby began to half-laugh, half-cry the way babies do when they are being jollied along by mother or somebody and they feel obliged to laugh but really they are angry and would like to have been allowed to hit, or bite, or scratch. A sobbing laugh. A laughing sob.

  ‘I don’t want to be rude, ’ said Martha, with extreme, and indeed finicky politeness, ‘but I haven’t got all that much time, because Rita is coming soon. She’s Maisie’s daughter. No, of course, you wouldn’t know Maisie. And I’ve got to get through this lot without putting myself into a loony-bin-time’s running out.’