Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  A she-cat she took in one cold night gave birth to four kittens. She gave three away. The she-cat, already old, died. There was one cat left, a black-and-white female, pretty and engaging but stupid. I think she was even feebleminded. She slept nearly all the time, was timid, and kept herself indoors. When she came on heat, she mated with a large black cat who had made it clear to the other cats that this garden was his territory. The woman believed him to have a home, but fed him when he seemed hungry. She did not want him in her room, but when the female had her first litter of two kittens, a tabby male and a black female, the father asked to come in so persistently that she allowed him, and he would sit by the box where the family was, and call to the little mother cat, and sometimes lick the kittens.

  The woman was intrigued by his paternal behaviour, and called me in to see it. We called the female cat his ‘wife’ – with a smile, but sometimes the woman showed embarrassment, with a laugh that was shame for the human race.

  The little black-and-white cat was a good mother as far as the feeding went. And she kept the kittens clean. But she seemed unable to instruct them in the use of a dirt box. It was the male cat who did that. He took them to the box, made them sit in it, and rewarded them with a male version of the ‘trill’ that a female cat uses to encourage offspring. He would give a gruff purr that sounded humorous to us, and then lick the kittens.

  He was not at all handsome. We believed him to be very old, since he was bony, with torn ears and a poor coat, in spite of the feeding he was getting in this new home, for that was what it had become. He was not importunate, or greedy. He would wait for our return from somewhere, and then, his yellow eyes on our face, like an equal, he asked with his demeanour to be let in.

  As for food, he waited, sitting quietly to one side while his ‘wife’ ate, never much, but thoughtless of her kittens, as if she hardly noticed them crowded at the dish with her. When she was filled, she went at once to her box. The male cat waited until the kittens had finished, and then he came in and ate. Often there was not much left, but he did not ask for more. He licked the dish clean, sat with the kittens, or watched them curl up around each other, and crouched near them, on guard.

  When the time had come for the kittens to be introduced into the garden, the mother cat did not seem to know it. She made no effort to take them out. There were steps into the garden. The male cat sat at the foot of the steps and gave his strange gruff purring call to the kittens, and they went to him. He took them around the garden, slowly, while they played and teased him and each other, but he introduced them to everything, every corner, and then showed them how to cover their excrement cleanly.

  This scene was watched by the woman, from her window, and by me, from mine.

  There was another young cat from a house nearby who was a natural climber. He was always at the top of a tree or putting one paw in front of another carefully as he balanced the ridge of a house.

  The kittens, seeing this dashing hero at the top of the big tree, shot up after him and couldn’t get down. He, ignoring them, jumped from the top of that tree down into the branches of the smaller tree, and from there to the ground – and vanished.

  The kittens were in a panic, crying and complaining.

  The black cat, who had watched all this from where he sat on the steps, now went thoughtfully to the bottom of the big tree, sat down, and looked up, considering the situation. There, above him, were the kittens, clinging tight, fur disordered, letting out their plaintive panicky wails.

  He issued instructions for a safe descent, but they were too distracted to listen.

  He climbed the tree and carried down one, then climbed it again and carried down the other.

  He spoke to them severely about their foolhardiness, with gruff purrs and cuffs to their ears.

  Then he went to the smaller tree, called them to him, and went up it slowly, looking back, and waiting for them to follow. First up went the tough little tiger, and then the pretty little black kitten. When the tree began to sway under his weight, he grunted, making them look up to him, and began to descend slowly backwards. They, with many complaints and cries of fear, did the same. Near the ground they jumped off, and chased each other around the garden, with relief that the lesson was safely over. But he called to them, and now went halfway up the big tree. They would not follow him. He remained there, halfway up, his four legs locked around the tree, looking down and urging them to join him. But not today. The next day, the lesson was resumed, and soon the kittens were able to climb the big tree and get themselves safely down.

  All day he was in the garden watching them, and when they went indoors to their mother he lay out on the wall, or sometimes followed them. He would sit by his ‘wife’, where she lay unobtrusively tucked up in her box, and look at her. He seemed to be wondering about her. This young animal was like an old woman, with no energy left for more than the minimum demands of life, or like a young one who has been very ill and left depressed. There was never anything in her of the fierce joyous possessive energy one may see in a young nursing cat. Sometimes he put his ugly old head close to hers and sniffed at her, and even licked her, but she did not respond at all.

  The kittens grew up and went to new homes.

  The autumn came on. Some brave hunter with an airgun took a shot at the black cat and there was a bad wound which was a long time healing, and left him with a limp. But he was stiff in walking anyway and we thought it age.

  When the winter came he did something he had not done before. He would sit on the steps, looking up at the woman’s window, or at mine, and soundlessly miaow. If the woman let him in he sat by the female cat for a while, but when she took no notice, lay down in a corner by himself. But the woman did not really want him there, so he would direct his soundless call to me instead. In my room he would wait until a blanket had been put down for him, near a stove, and there he slept, and in the morning he went to the door, purred his gruff thanks, wreathed my legs politely and went out. It was a bad winter. Sometimes he could hardly drag himself out, he was so stiff, and he stayed in my room on his blanket. He might crawl out for a few minutes to relieve himself. This seemed to be happening very often. I put a dirt box in the room, for there was deep snow outside. He used it often. There was a cold on his kidneys, I thought. Well, he was old. Discussing it with the woman, we decided that being so old he should not be harassed with doctors and attempts to keep him alive. Medicine was got for him, though.

  He was extremely thin, and did not eat.

  Once or twice he visited his ‘wife’ who seemed quite pleased to see him. But when he came back to my room she seemed hardly to notice.

  It was evident that he was in pain. Settling down on his blanket he did it gently, first one muscle and then another, and he would suppress a groan.

  Sometimes, moving himself, he held his breath, then let it out carefully, his yellow eyes looking at me as if to say, I can’t help it.

  I wondered if he was afraid, poor beast, that I would throw him out into the snow if he made a nuisance of himself, but no, I soon came to believe that this was the self-control of a noble creature, mastering pain.

  His presence in my room was always a quiet friendly force, and if I put my hand down to him gently, knowing he was afraid of sudden or rough movement, he gave a short grunt of thanks and acknowledgement.

  He did not get better. I wrapped him up carefully and took him to the cat doctor, who said he had a cancer.

  He said, too, that this was not an old cat, but a young one, who was a stray, had fended for himself, and become rheumatic from sleeping out in the cold and the wet.

  JOHOR:

  ADDITIONAL EXPLANATORY INFORMATION. II.

  [This is to be regarded as, in a sense, a continuation of Additional Explanatory information. I. Archivists.]

  It is a long time since Shikastans were able to bear their lives without drugs of some kind. I look back, and see that almost from when the flow of SOWF was cut down, they had to dull the pain of th
eir condition. Of course there have always been individuals, a few, for whom this was not true.

  Alcohol and the hallucinogens, the derivatives of opium, cocoa and tobacco, chemicals, caffeine – when have they not been used? By whom? I begin with the crude ones, the obvious comforters, and softeners of reality: but there is no need to infringe on areas of work done by colleagues and about which information is plentifully available in our archives.

  Of the emotional props there have been no end …

  But now, in this time, few retain their substance, their solidity. I can define what I mean exactly by saying that on this visit of mine now to Shikasta, I could use exactly the same words to describe – let us say – a religion, as I did: but that a major fact would be left out: this is a feeling, or atmosphere.

  The religions of Shikasta are no less, even though they have lost their power to tyrannize: new religious sects proliferate, and ecstatogenous sects most of all. But what has happened is that the skies of Shikasta have been lifted: they have sent men to their moon, and machines to their fellow planets, and most people believe that Shikasta is visited by spacecraft from other planets. The words, the languages, of religion – and all religions rely on emotional, image-breeding words – have become weightier and more portentous: yet at the same time transparent and slippery. A Shikastan saying Star, Galaxy, Universe, Sky, Heaven, uses the same words but does not mean the same things as did his fathers of only a century ago. A certainty has gone, a solidity. Religion, always the most powerful of the reality-blunters, has lost its certainties. Not long ago, a hundred years, it was possible for members of a religion to believe it was better than any other, and they were the only people in the whole world likely to be ‘saved’. But now this frame of mind can stand only as long as they keep their minds closed to their own history.

  The nationalisms of Shikasta, that pernicious new creed which uses much of the energies that once fed religions, are strong, and new nations are born every day. And with each, a generation of its young men and women steps forward ready to die for the chimera. And, whereas so recently, not more than a generation, or two generations, it was possible for a Shikastan to spend a life thinking not much further than a village, or a town, only just able to grasp the concept of ‘nation’, now, while ‘nation’ is strong, devouring, so is the idea of the whole world, as an interacting whole. To die for a country cannot have the conviction it did. So recently, a hundred years ago, or fifty, it was possible for the members of a nation to believe that this little patch of Shikasta was better than all others, more noble, free, and good. But recently even the most self-regarding and self-worshipping nation has had to see that it is the same as the rest, and that each lies, tortures, deludes its people, and bleeds them in the interests of a dominant class … and falls apart, as must happen in these terrible end days.

  Politics, political parties, which attract exactly the same emotions as religions did and do, as nations did and do, spawn new creeds every day. Not long ago it was possible for members of a political sect to believe that it was pristine and noble and best – but there have been so many betrayals and disappointments, lies, turnings-about, so much murdering and torturing and insanity, that even the most fanatic supporters know times of disbelief.

  Science, the most recent of the religions, as bigoted and as inflexible as any, has created a way of life, a technology, attitudes of mind, increasingly loathed and distrusted. Not long ago, a ‘scientist’ knew he was the great culminator and crown of all human thinking, knowledge, progress – and behaved with according arrogance. But now they begin to know their own smallness, and the fouled and spoiled earth itself rises up against them in witness.

  Everywhere ideas, sets of mind, beliefs that have supported people for centuries are fraying away, dissolving, going.

  What is there left?

  It is true that the capacity of Shikastans to restore the breaches in the walls of their certainties are immense. The exposed and painful nature of their existence, subject to myriad chances beyond their control or influence, their helplessness as they toss in the cosmic storms, the violences and discordances of their damaged minds – all this being intolerable, they still hide their eyes and pray, or add to the formulas in their laboratories.

  Each one of these alliances of an individual with some greater whole, the identification of an individual with a mental structure larger than himself, was a drug, a prop, a pacifier for children. These were greater even than alcohol and opium and the rest, but they are going, thinning, dissolving, and the insensate and furious, fanatical and desperate struggles that go on in the name of this or that creed or belief, the very fury, is a means of stilling self-doubt, numbing the terrors of isolation.

  What other ways have Shikastans used to ward off from themselves the knowledge about their situation which is always, always threatening to well up from their depths and overwhelm? What else can they clutch to them, like a blanket on a cold night?

  There are the varieties of pleasure, implanted in them for the sake of their survival, the needs for food and sex which, as the whole species is threatened, rage in an instinctive effort to save and preserve.

  There is something else, and stronger than anything: the well-being, the always renewing, regenerative, healing force of nature; feeling one with the other creatures of Shikasta and its soil, and its plants.

  The lowest, the most downtrodden, the most miserable of Shikastans, will watch the wind moving a plant, and smile; will plant a seed and watch it grow; will stand to watch the life of the clouds. Or lie pleasurably awake in the dark, hearing wind howl that cannot – not this time – harm him where he lies safe. This is where strength has always welled, irrepressibly, into every creature of Shikasta.

  Forced back and back upon herself, himself, bereft of comfort, security, knowing perhaps only hunger and cold; denuded of belief in ‘country’, ‘religion’, ‘progress’ – stripped of certainties, there is no Shikastan who will not let his eyes rest on a patch of earth, perhaps no more than a patch of littered and soured soil between buildings in a slum, and think: Yes, but that will come to life, there is enough power there to tear down this dreadfulness and heal all our ugliness – a couple of seasons, and it would all be alive again … and in war, a soldier watching a tank rear up over a ridge to bear down on him, will see as he dies grass, tree, a bird swerving past, and know immortality.

  It is here, precisely here, that I place my emphasis.

  Now it is only for a few of the creatures of Shikasta, those with steadier sight, or nerves, but every day there are more – soon there will be multitudes … once where the deepest, most constant, steadiest support was, there is nothing: it is the nursery of life itself that is poisoned, the seeds of life, the springs that feed the well.

  All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.

  She reaches for the child that plays on the floor but as she holds its fresh warmth to her face she knows that it is for the holocaust, and if by a miracle it escapes, then the substance of its inheritance is being attacked as the two of them stand there, close, the warmth of their mortality beating between them as the child laughs.

  He looks at the child, thinking of nature, the creative fire spawning new forms as we breathe. He has to, for he knows that the species dwindle everywhere on Shikasta, the stock of gene patterns is being destroyed, destroyed, cannot come back … He cannot rest in thoughts of the great creator, nature, and he looks out of the window at a landscape seen a thousand times, in a thousand different guises, but now it seems to thin and disappear. He thinks: Well, the ice stretched down as far as here,
not so long ago, ten thousand years, and look it has all remade itself! But an ice age is nothing, it is a few thousand years – the ice comes, and then it goes. It destroys and kills, but it does not pervert and spoil the substance of life itself.

  She thinks, but there are the animals, the noble and patient animals, with their languages we don’t understand, their kindness to each other, their friendship for us – and she puts down her hand to feel the living warmth of her little cat but knows that as she stands there they are being slaughtered, wiped out, made extinct, by senselessness, stupidity, by greed, greed, greed. She cannot rest in her familiar thoughts of the great reservoir of nature, and when her cat gives birth, she crouches over the nest and peers in, looking for the mutations which she knows are working there, will soon show themselves.

  He thinks, as the loneliness of his situation dazzles him, standing there and whirling among the stars, a species among myriads – as he has only recently come to know – that these thoughts are too grand for him, he needs to put his arms around his woman and to feel her arms around him, but as they turn to each other, there is tension, and fear, for this embrace may breed monsters.

  She stands as she has done for millennia, cutting bread, setting out sliced vegetables on a plate, with a bottle of wine, and thinks that nothing in this meal is safe, that the poisons of their civilization are in every mouthful, and that they are about to fill their mouths with deaths of all kinds. In an instinctive gesture of safety, renewal, she hands a piece of bread to her child, but the gesture has lost its faith as she makes it, because of what she may be handing the child.

  When he is at his work – if he has any, for he may be one who is being merely kept alive, not being used, or stretched, or developed through his labour – he, at his work, again and again, because the need is so old, renews himself in the thought that this work of his benefits others, that it links him with others, he is in a creative mesh and pulse with all the labourers of the earth … but he is checked, is stopped, the thought cannot live on in him, there is bitterness and anger, and then a weariness, disbelief: he does not know why, she does not know why, but it is as if they are pouring away the best of themselves into nothingness.