The Cleft

by Doris Lessing

  ‘Yes, go, but come back when the light goes.’

  Was he lonely, left so often alone and part disabled, because of his crippled leg? May we use that word, and other words from our lexicons of feeling? We assume that because these people had shapes like ours, were so much like us, that they felt the same. Perhaps no one had taught them loneliness? Is that such a ridiculous question? Or sorrow? There is not much in the records, for instance, of love, the way we use the word, or jealousy – nothing about jealousy, yet it is so common an emotion that we may watch birds quarrelling over a mate. The whole region of speculation is difficult for me. It teases, challenges, and leaves me wondering. We know how our exemplars, the Greeks, felt – their plays tell us.

  If those old long-ago people had written plays we would know how they felt. There is no record of them so much as making marks on bark or on stone. They told their histories into the ears of the Memories and perhaps never thought that when they said, for instance, ‘Horsa longed for his “other” land,’ that people coming so many ages later would not know what they meant by ‘longing’, ‘wanting’, ‘dreaming’.

  ‘Were you sad, Horsa?’

  ‘Sad?’

  ‘Well, let’s try this. When you think about that magic shore of yours, what is it you feel about it? Do you think, “There will be my kind of people at last, and they will say, ‘Horsa, there you are, why have you taken so long? We were waiting for you.’?” Is it that you feel you are excluded from some general happiness?’

  ‘Happiness?’

  When we send these shouts into the past, they have to be questions. But there need not be answers.

  If I am sitting next to a person of my own generation, and I say, ‘Do you remember?’ – the words I use mesh with events in this person’s memory, and the air between us is, as it were, alive and listening. Say the same words to someone of a younger generation and it is like throwing stones into the sea.

  Questioning Horsa, nothing comes back.

  Perhaps, if he could hear me, he might say, ‘No, you don’t understand. You see, I know everything there is to know about our land, every tree, plant, bird, animal. But that other shore I saw there, gleaming like a dawn. I know nothing about that place. I have to know – don’t you understand that?’

  Perhaps that is what he would say, and yes I do understand that, and a lot more about him he would not understand. But my questions are from an old Roman reaching the end of his life – and we have no idea, none, about what they thought, or felt.

  Names can help. We know that Maire and Astre – who were as remote to Horsa as he and his kind are to us – brought the heavens into their lives by using the names of stars. Horsa was the name of a star before it acquired Egyptian names, Greek names, our Roman names.

  If we knew what that star meant then, perhaps we might hear Horsa speaking at last. Or imagine we did.

  Horsa waited for his young men to return, and his thoughts were heavy and hard to bear. It says so in the stories. It was because of what he would have to tell Maronna. This was one occasion when he could not run off, find another valley, a new glade in the forest. It was not that he did not regret the little boys who had vanished into the caves. But he could not help thinking that wombs were quickly filled and then babies were born and – look, a new crop of babes. And so the sooner the men got to the women, the better.

  Meanwhile he looked out over the top of the trees – he was on a little hill – and he gazed at The Cleft, which looked so different from this angle, and he saw white clouds coming out of The Cleft, and heard the thud-thudding of several explosions. He knew at once what had happened. Those mad men, his brave young men, had been unable to resist throwing a boulder or two down into the pit.

  And now groups of the hunters, of those who could not keep out of the caves, came running to Horsa, and, too, the boys who had been rescued from the well in the cave. They stood around Horsa, looking at him, waiting for his anger, his recriminations, but all he said was, ‘And now it is time we went to the women.’

  Slowly, at first, they all set off, but Horsa could not keep up and soon he was far behind, with the rescued boys.

  ‘Will Maronna be angry with us?’ they asked, and he said, ‘Well, what do you think?’

  The further they went, the more they could see the damage that was done by the explosions. White lay ever more thickly over the trees and then, when they reached it, the rocky shore where the women would be waiting for them. The powdered bones of so many generations were making a thick layer from where drifts of white went off into the air as the breezes blew. And then there were the women, in the distance, and the boys set up a howl, because they feared those white ghosts who were wailing and crying.

  In front of Horsa had pressed the young males, but they were hanging back now, afraid of the women. They were close together, for protection. The sea breezes lifting the white powder from the women made them look as if they were smoking. The Cleft that had dominated all that landscape was half its size, and it shed little avalanches of yet more white dust. The sea had a white crust and the waves lifted it, crinkling against the beach. The white looked solid enough to walk on. Some women trying to rid themselves of the white powder at the edge of the sea found themselves even more crusted thick and they were trying to rub the stuff off them, crying out in horror and rage. Yet a little further the sea was clear.

  When Maronna saw Horsa, at first she did not recognise this limping man, and then she went for him, screaming, ‘Why did you do it? The Cleft! You’ve killed The Cleft. Why?’ She knew the men were responsible, and that meant Horsa was responsible. Her accusations were hysterical, her ugly screams distorted her white-streaked face.

  ‘It’s our place, you’ve destroyed our place.’

  ‘But Maronna, there are better places. I keep telling you. There is a much better place a little further along. We’ve just passed it.’

  ‘We’ve been here always, always. We are born here. You were born here. You were born in that cave up there.’ And now she began to sob pitifully, her rage abating, and he loosely held her, and thought that he would never understand females. Why had Maronna, or some previous Maronna, not moved long ago? This shore had always been cramped and crowded. And if they moved just a little way … it was a good thing The Cleft had been blown up if that meant the women would at last have a decent beach.

  ‘Come on, Maronna, you can’t stay here,’ and he summoned his young men by pointing along the shore behind him. They understood him, because they had all many times discussed how foolish the women were not to move to a more spacious shore.

  With his arm round Maronna, Horsa led the company, quite a large one we have to deduce, of the mateable women, who would soon be mothers again, and just behind them were the little boys rescued from the cave, as close to Maronna as they could get: they had forgotten, in all those months of being so much with men, that women did mean comfort, warmth, kindness. Behind them came the three girls who had run here from the forest: they had not told Maronna about the bad things on the trip. All the women wept and looked back at their desecrated shore. Then they were not looking back: the sea was no longer white, but blue with a white film, and then it was itself, its own colour. They had left the world of powdered bone behind. At once all the women plunged into the sea, their element, their mother – at least so some of them believed – and they emerged glistening like healthy seals. And here we have another little clue as to how they looked. ‘They stood wringing out their long hair.’ The males stood watching, and then at once began the long-awaited mating. Maronna and Horsa went ahead down the beach. For how long? For how far? ‘It was quite a distance’ is what we have. And, ‘A comfortable walk for healthy women.’

  Horsa pulled Maronna to stand with him on rocks so similar to the ones they had left behind – for ever. Rocks, and rock pools and lively splashing waves and beyond them a long shining beach of clean white sand: there was no beach at the women’s old shore.

  ‘And look,’ said Hor
sa, pointing up at the cliffs that overshadowed this beach. ‘Caves. Just as good as the ones you used.’

  Maronna, who after all had all the qualities that enabled her to rule the women, stood silent, looking at the beach: she understood very well what advantages were there.

  The rescued little boys, having washed themselves, came running up to Maronna and Horsa.

  But, as we know, there were few of them.

  Maronna stepped back from the shelter of his arms and said, ‘Where are the other boys? When are they coming?’

  And here it was, the dreaded moment. Horsa stood in front of his accuser, head bowed, his arms loose at his sides, palms towards her – and this posture told her what she would hear. Horsa trembled as he stood, and his crutch, the stick, shook too.

  Maronna was already tearing her wet hair with both hands. Remember, she usually had hair ‘piled on top of her head’. Now it flowed down, excepting for where the white powder clogged it. She tugged and tore at it, trying to make this pain bad enough to still the anguish she felt.

  ‘Where are they, Horsa, where?’

  He shook his head and she screamed, ‘They are dead, then? You have killed our little boys. Oh, I might have known. What did I expect, really? You are so careless, you don’t care …’ And so they stood, facing each other, on the edge of the splendid beach which would soon house all the women and the children and the visiting men too. She was so full of anger, while he stood there, limp, guilty, in the wrong. Maronna screamed and went on screaming, and at last her voice went hoarse, and she stood silent, looking, but really looking at him. He was trembling, he was limp with the grief he now genuinely did feel, because her agony of grief was telling him what an enormity he had committed. And she saw this, understood it. She saw, and really took in that pitiful leg, the shrivelled, twisted leg.

  Tenderness is not a quality we associate easily with young men. Life has to beat it into us, beat us softer and more malleable than our early pride allows. Horsa saw Maronna, as he had not before. Perhaps he had felt her more than seen her, as an always accusing critical presence. He saw this trembling girl, still streaked with the white powder, though her face was washed with tears. She was in such distress, so helpless: he grew up in that moment, and stood forward to take her in his arms as she opened her arms to him. ‘Poor child,’ she was whispering. ‘Poor boy,’ she crooned, and now he broke down and wept and the great Horsa was a little boy again. It was sweet, yes, I am sure I may safely say that. To become a little child in your mother’s arms, petted and forgiven … and for all we know, or they knew, Maronna was Horsa’s mother.

  The greater the capitulation to the female, the greater there will be the recoil: and I have to write this, too. Who has not seen it, known it, understood?

  There, in Maronna’s arms, loved and forgiven, somewhere in Horsa’s restless mind had started the thought: Tell her about the wonderful place I found, yes I will. She’ll want to see it too, I am sure of it. She will understand, yes, she’ll come with me, we’ll go together, I’ll make a ship better than any we’ve made, and we’ll land together on that shore and …

  I had not expected to say any more on this subject, for one thing I am old now, and the scholarly life is not easy for me. But the eruption of Vesuvius has made me think again about The Cleft, and its comparatively modest explosion. Vesuvius killed people at a great distance from it, as far away as Pompeii, and it seems a noxious powder was the cause. Nothing survives its touch. But The Cleft too had poisonous fumes, and its outburst of whitish powder killed no one. Yet The Cleft was quite close to the shore where the women and children were. This in itself must surely provoke questions? There is a great deal it seems we do not know, though we Romans like to behave as if we know everything. Pliny, my old friend, was in pursuit of knowledge – and died for his efforts. For some days the sea near the women’s shore washed in waves crusted with bone dust, on rocks that acquired a hard patina which did not disappear, so the records say. And a little further down the coast the sea ran in blue and clean. A pretty minor affair, the destruction of The Cleft – and yet it leaves questions that in their own way are as difficult as the ones we ask over the great volcano, which we must assume will one day blow again.

  The white rocks near The Cleft looked as if they had been covered with guano, and it occurs to me now to wonder if a careful search around all the coasts of the islands of our sea might reveal once whitened rocks that we would agree were the site of that old story, Clefts and Monsters. But the outburst of Vesuvius tells us we may not assume permanence for the coastlines of islands or even the islands themselves. And suppose we did decide that this set of bleached rocks was what we were after – this would be of only a sentimental interest. Those historians – and they called themselves so, seeing themselves as the recorders of the very long ago – wrote from their villages in the forests as of chronicles of events that had their end when The Cleft exploded. (Villages – how many? Where? Of how many people?) The village historians wrote with charcoal sticks on the inside of bark. They no longer spoke their stories into receiving ears. None of these old bark records remain, but what followed them, marks on reed scrolls, still remain – a few. The explosion of The Cleft is both the end of a tale and the beginning of the next. Historians who wrote long ages before me agreed on that – and so let it be.

  Also by Doris Lessing

  NOVELS

  The Grass is Singing

  The Golden Notebook

  Briefing for a Descent into Hell

  The Summer Before the Dark

  Memoirs of a Survivor

  Diary of a Good Neighbour

  If the Old Could …

  The Good Terrorist

  Playing the Game: a Graphic Novel (illustrated by Charlie Adlard)

  Love, Again

  Mara and Dann

  The Fifth Child

  Ben, in the World

  The Sweetest Dream

  The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot

  and the Snow Dog

  ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’ Series

  Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

  The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five

  The Sirian Experiments

  The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

  Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

  ‘Children of Violence’ Novel-sequence

  Martha Quest

  A Proper Marriage

  A Ripple from the Storm

  Landlocked

  The Four-Gated City

  OPERAS

  The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five

  (Music by Philip Glass)

  The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)

  SHORT STORIES

  Five

  The Habit of Loving

  A Man and Two Women

  The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories

  Winter in July

  The Black Madonna

  This was the Old Chief’s Country (Collected African Studies, Vol. 1)

  The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Studies, Vol. 2)

  To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories, Vol. 1)

  The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories, Vol. 2)

  London Observed

  The Old Age of El Magnifico

  Particularly Cats

  Rufus the Survivor

  On Cats

  The Grandmothers

  POETRY

  Fourteen Poems

  DRAMA

  Each His Own Wilderness

  Play with a Tiger

  The Singing Door

  NON-FICTION

  In Pursuit of the English

  Going Home

  A Small Personal Voice

  Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

  The Wind Blows Away Our Words African Laughter

  Time Bites

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Under My Skin: Volume 1

>   Walking in the Shade: Volume 2

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  www.4thestate.co.uk

  Copyright © Doris Lessing 2007

  The right of Doris Lessing to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  ePub edition September 2008 ISBN-9780007283163

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