Shikasta

by Doris May Lessing Little Dorrit

  I said to him, "Ben, you have got to. Now. Trust me."

  He sighed, and shut his eyes, and held on with both hands to my forearm.

  Behind us the lines of waiting people stretched, winding away into a distance. I could not see their ends. Once they would have held a dozen or twenty souls. But as the wars of Shikasta, the hungers of Shikasta, the diseases of Shikasta, ate up people, now there were opportunities, and opportunities again... some in those lines had been there when I entered Zone Six on this same visit, and had in the meantime gone in to Shikasta, had succumbed to some hazard - illness, accident, war - and were here again. How many brave faces did I see then, as I held fast to Ben, and he to me, as we went forward into the whirling, tinted mists. The throngs of waiting souls fell behind, disappeared into cloudy dark. We stood, the two of us together, in an opalescent mist. There was a singing hush, a stillness that throbbed. And throbbed...

  At that moment it was necessary to collect oneself as at no other time. We had nothing to sustain us but the imprint of the Signature, which would emerge, like a brand on flesh that could show itself only in heat or under pressure. It was as if we had chosen deliberately to obliterate ourselves, trusting to an intangible we had no alternative but to trust.

  We were like those brave souls on Shikasta who, believing that they stand for what is right and just, choose to defy wicked and criminal rulers, in the full knowledge that the penalty will be a deliberate destruction by corrupted doctors of their minds, their familiar understanding of themselves, through drugs, psychological torture, brain damage, physical deprivation. But they trust, within their deepest selves, that they have resources which will sustain them through everything. We were like people jumping from a height into a pit of poisonous shadows, trusting that we would be caught...

  In a thundering dark we saw lying side by side two clots of fermenting substance, and I slid into one half, giving up my identity for the time, and Ben slid into the other, and lay, two souls throbbing quietly inside rapidly burgeoning flesh. Our minds, our beings, were alert and knowing, but our memories had already slid away, dissolved.

  I have to acknowledge - I can do no other - that this is a moment of fearful dismay. Even of panic. The terrible miasmas of Shikasta close around me and I send this report with my last conscious impulse.

  DOCUMENTS RELATING to

  GEORGE SHERBAN (JOHOR)

  RACHEL SHERBAN'S JOURNAL

  I see I must plunge in. The more I think about it, the harder it gets. Facts are best. I told George I was actually starting this, and he said, Get your facts straight first.

  I have two brothers, George and Benjamin, two years older than me. They are twins. Not true twins. I am Rachel. I am fourteen.

  Our father is Simon. Our mother is Olga. Our name is Sherban, but it was Scherbansky. Our grandfather changed it when they came to England from Poland in the last war. (Second World.) Our grandparents laugh when they say no one could pronounce Scherbansky. I used to get angry when they said this. I do not think the English are funny. They are stupid. My grandfather is Jewish. My grandmother not.

  I see that our education has been far from ordinary. I am seeing a lot of things for the first time, as I think how to write this. Well of course that's the point I suppose.

  First. Our family was in England where we were all born. Both our parents worked at a big London hospital. He did organising. She was a doctor. But they decided to leave England and got work in America. It was because England was so bureaucratic and stick-in-the-mud. They did not say this was why they left England never to return. Not to work. After America we went to Nigeria and then Kenya and then Morocco. Which is here. Usually our parents work together in a hospital or project. We always know about their work. They tell us what they are doing and why. They take a lot of trouble telling us. As I think about this so as to write it I see that this doesn't happen much to other children. Sometimes my mother Olga has to work somewhere by herself. I go with her. Even when I was a small child. It is funny I took it for granted. I must ask her why I was with her so much. I have asked her. She said, "In countries that have not become bureaucratic there is a lot of latitude." Then she said, "Anyway, they like children, this isn't England."

  Our parents criticise many things about England. Yet they have sent us there quite a bit.

  I have learned all sorts of things, but have not been regularly at school. I know French, Russian, Arabic, Spanish. And English, of course. My father has taught me mathematics. My mother tells me books to read. I know a lot about music because they are always playing music.

  My brothers were sometimes with my mother, but these days mostly with Simon. When he went to seminars to give lectures or conferences he took them too. Sometimes our parents had us in school properly for a year or two years.

  In Kenya this happened. I have just seen it. The headmaster was a friend of ours. He kept shifting us from class to class, pretending we didn't fit in, or had gone beyond a class or something. But what he was doing was making sure we learned a lot of different things. He did this with other children from outside Kenya and some of the black children too. He is a Kikuyu. We learned a lot of geohistory there, and geo-economics. We have had tutors all the time too. There is one thing to be said for being educated in this mad way, you don't get bored. But if I am supposed to tell the truth, then it is true that often I longed to be in one place and stay there and have friends for a long time. We seem to have a lot of friends, but they are often in another country. In fact more often than not.

  We children have been sent for holidays to England three times. We stay in London, and then go to a family in Wales. They are farmers. We learn how to look after animals and about crops. My brother George was there for a whole year, December to December, to learn about the cycle of the seasons. Benjamin was critical about George going there, and didn't go himself, but he could have done. He was in a bad phase then. More than usual, I mean!

  I was sorry when George went, I did not see him for a whole year.

  I must tell the truth again. I have been jealous too much. When I was small I was jealous of the twins. They were together such a lot. When they were they often did not take any notice of me. George did more than Benjamin.

  Benjamin always wanted to be with George when he was younger. People used to think Benjamin was younger than George. They are so different. Benjamin is not cheerful and confident like George. George was always telling Benjamin, Yes, you can do this. Yes, you can do that. Benjamin used to sulk and went away by himself. But when he came back he used to make George take notice of him.

  And George always did. That is why I was jealous.

  That is why I am still jealous.

  When George was away for a year, I thought Benjamin would take notice of me, but he didn't. I didn't care all that much because really it is George I want to take notice of me.

  Now I shall write down the facts I remember about when we were children.

  I shall write what I think now about things that happened then. Not what I thought then.

  When we were in New York we had a small apartment and we three children were in one room. One night I woke up and saw George standing by the window looking out. We were high up, twelve stories. It looked as if he was talking to someone. I thought he was playing, and wanted to join in. He made me be quiet.

  In the morning I said at breakfast that George was at the window in the night. Mother was worried about it.

  Later George said to me, Rachel, don't tell them, don't tell them.

  When Mother or Father asked about it I said I was teasing.

  But there were a lot of times I woke and George was awake. He was usually at the window. I did not pretend to be asleep. I knew he wouldn't be angry. I once asked him, Who are you talking to? He said he didn't know. A friend, he said. He seemed troubled. Not unhappy.

  He was sometimes unhappy though. Not in the way Benjamin was. When Benjamin was in a bad mood all of us had to take notice and be upset too.

 
George used to get silent and go off into a corner. He pretended to be looking at a book. I could see he had been crying. Or wanted to. He knew I knew, just as he knew I knew about his being awake so much in the night. He just shook his head at me. That's all. Not like Benjamin. Benjamin used to quarrel and he hit me sometimes.

  Once in Nigeria something happened. The boys had a room to themselves and I was alone. I hated this. I missed George so much. Sharing a room I was close to him and now I wasn't. He came into my room one night. I was asleep and woke up. He was sitting on the floor on some straw matting, leaning against my mosquito net. I put my head out of the net. There was moonlight outside and on the floor and I could see his face all shining because he had been crying. Not making a noise. He said to me, Rachel, this is a terrible place, it is a terrible place, it is a terrible... His voice was stuffed up and I could not understand at first. I tried to comfort him, saying Well, the family would move again, our parents had said we were going to Kenya. He did not say anything. Later I saw he was not talking about Nigeria. I can see that he came into my room because he was lonely, but I wasn't any help to him at all.

  I see that he was very lonely then. I know Benjamin did not understand a lot of the things he said. And it is only now I understand some of them.

  I have suddenly understood that Benjamin was so blustery and raucous often because he knew George was wanting him to understand but he couldn't.

  I was eight when we went to Kenya.

  George slept outside on the verandah of the house. The climate was different from Nigeria, healthy. He liked to be under the stars. I knew that he was awake often, and he did not want our parents to know how much. I sometimes crept out of the window of my room on to the verandah and sure enough he would be sitting on the verandah wall, staring out. This was outside Nairobi in some hills. Our house looked over a lot of country. It was beautiful. Sometimes we sat for a long time on the wall, and it was often moonlight or half-moonlight. Once an African came past very silent and he saw us and stopped to look. Then he said: Ho, ho, little ones, what are you doing there, you should be asleep. Then he went off laughing. George liked that. When I got sleepy George lifted me down from the wall. He pretended to stagger because I was heavy, but he didn't really think I was heavy. He staggered all over the verandah with me and we nearly killed ourselves not being able to laugh out loud. Then he helped me back through the window into my room. I loved those times with George, even though we never said much. Sometimes we sat there a long time and never said one word.

  Once he did say something I remember. That afternoon our parents had had visitors. They were all people with important jobs in Kenya. There were black people, white people, brown people. I did not think of that sort of thing then because I was a child and I was used to everyone being different. Sometimes we have been the only white family in some places but I don't remember thinking much about it.

  It was a party, a celebration of something. We children had helped serve drinks and food and stuff. Our parents always made us do jobs like that. Benjamin often did not like to do it. He used to say we had servants and why didn't they do it.

  During the party George caught what I was thinking, and he smiled his special smile at me. This meant: Yes I know, and I agree. I had been thinking how silly they were, the grownups, not our parents, but the others, they were showing off the way grownups do.

  Sitting in the moonlight that night on the wall, George said, There were thirty people there.

  I already knew from his tone what he meant.

  I was thinking, as I did so often then, that I knew exactly what he meant, but Benjamin usually didn't. But then he said something I hadn't expected. I remember that night because I cried a lot. For two reasons. One was that I did not always know what he was thinking, any more than Benjamin did. The other was that George was so lonely thinking that kind of thought.

  George said, Passing teacups and glasses of booze and saying please and thank you...

  Well, I was laughing at that, seeing what he saw.

  But then he said, Thirty bladders full of piss, and thirty backsides full of shit, and thirty noses full of snot, and thousands of sweat glands pouring out grease...

  I was upset, because he was speaking in a rough angry voice. And when I heard this voice, I was always ready to believe it was me he was angry with.

  He went on and on, A room full of shit and pee and snot and sweat. And cancers and heart attacks and bronchitis and pneumonias. And three hundred pints of blood. And please and thank you and yes Mrs. Amaldi, and No Mr. Volback, and Please Mrs. Sherban, and Oh dear me Minister Mobote, and I am more important than you are, Chief Senior Register Doctor.

  I could see he was angry. He was restless too, as he sometimes was, knotting himself together, and tying his legs around each other.

  He was furious. He started crying.

  He said: This is a terrible place, a terrible place.

  I did not like it, and I went to bed, and I cried in bed.

  Next day he was nice to me and he played with me a lot and I was not sure at all about liking that, because he was treating me like a baby.

  I have not yet written down the facts of how we look. We are all different. It is because of the mix of the genes, our parents say.

  George first. He is thin and tall. He has black eyes. His hair is black and straight. His skin is white but not like the white of white people from Europe. It is an ivory colour. In Egypt and here in Morocco there are plenty of people who look like him. It is our Indian grandparent coming out in his skin.

  Now Benjamin. He takes after Simon. He is rather heavy. He gets fat easily. He has brown hair and blue-grey eyes. His hair curls. He is always sunburned, a reddish-brown.

  Now me. I am more like George. I am not thin unfortunately. I have black hair. I have brown eyes, like Mother. My skin is olive even when I am not sunburned. In England no one notices me because I am not unusual. They think I am Spanish or Portuguese. Here no one notices me because I am not unusual. Everyone notices Benjamin.

  What happened to us children that changed everything was when George spent the year on the farm in Wales. Olga and Simon said I was wrong to "pine" after George. And they made me do a lot of things in that year, two languages, French and Spanish, and taking guitar lessons. I wasn't pining. I was lonely. And when he came back I was still lonely. He was thirteen when he went to Wales, and fourteen when came back. He was grown up. I did not understand that, but I do now.

  During the whole of that year, Benjamin was difficult. He did not work well at school. He moped a lot. When George came back though, he tried to win Benjamin over and after a time he did. But I can see now that George had grown up, but Benjamin hadn't. Benjamin has always done everything to get George's attention. I don't think our parents know how much. That isn't because they are too busy to notice. Well, sometimes they are too busy. They spend a lot of time thinking about us and how to bring us up well. But a sister sees things that parents don't see. I suppose they have forgotten. I think they remember the overall thing, but not the smallness of things happening every day.

  I see now that one of the reasons they wanted George away was to free Benjamin from George. Apart from George learning the cycle of the seasons. But that made things worse, the way I see it. Benjamin felt George had been given something he hadn't been. Yet he didn't want to go to Wales, and scorned George for being a farmer's boy. Benjamin is a bit of a snob.

  I see there are a lot of facts I have taken no notice of at all. I wonder if you have to spend your whole life suddenly understanding facts that were perfectly obvious all the time.

  When George came back he asked me several times, What has happened? Tell me what has happened? So I told him about Spanish and French and played him my guitar.

  He was impatient, but he tried not to show it. He said, No, I don't mean just you. So I told him about Benjamin, though he knew about Benjamin, he spent so much time with him, and then when he was quiet, and I knew that that wasn't it, I
said about our mother organising the big new hospital, and our father helping her. That was better, but it wasn't right. For he said, Rachel, our family isn't everything, we aren't all that important. So I got panicky. I do, when I know he is disappointed in me. I gabbled on about Mother and Father and what they had said, but he lost interest. He went on being kind to me, when he had time. But he was very restless just then. He could not keep still ever. He was with a group of boys at the college a lot and they were wild and noisy and I could not believe this was George. But I did understand that they talked about things I wasn't interested in then.

  I started to listen when my parents discussed the state of the world and I enrolled in the Current Events classes at the school, and I listened a lot to the News and Information programmes.

  I see that our family is different from most others in this way. Everywhere we go, everyone is passionately for some Party or other. Or pretends to be. It is easy to see when they are pretending. Our parents often say people who pretend must not be blamed. It is surviving, and that is more important than waving flags. Sometimes when they say that people are shocked. But I know they think politics is a mistake. They think that political people are on the wrong track. All they are interested in is doing things, like reorganising hospitals and making things work. They don't often say this, except with us or close friends. They don't say it so much actually, it's what they don't say that makes it obvious. But everywhere politics is so important, and I can see that this must have been a big problem for them, now I think about it. I mean, it must be like saying you were an atheist in the Middle Ages.

  Facts. England. The first two times we children visited it were before the Dictatorship, and there was nothing much to notice but things being inefficient. But the third time, food was short, even though it was on a farm, and Mr. Jones and Mrs. Jones were worried. I have been asking Simon and Olga and they say that a lot of people were in prison and people got arrested suddenly and then vanished. Well, there's nothing new in that. And the people who couldn't get work, particularly the young ones, were rampaging about. That was before they were put in armies and kept in camps. Wales and Scotland were the same, although they were Independent. The Dictatorship was trying to be all English, and not to have so many foreigners. When George went for his year farming, it was hard to arrange. Travel got difficult after the Dictatorship and anyway, people couldn't afford it. Mother says that it was only because of special contacts that George was allowed in. Although we are all English. I mean, visits are all right, but difficult, but living there for a whole year was nearly impossible. I have underlined the special contacts because I see more and more how important that is.