That night there was a moon. There seemed more light outside my room than in it. The pavements were crammed. There was a lot of noise.
It was clear that the crowd had split into two parts: one part was about to take to the roads.
I looked for Emily with these people, but could not see her. Then I did see her: she was with the people who were staying behind. We all — I, Hugo, the part of the crowd not yet ready to make the journey, and the hundreds of people at the windows all around and above — watched as the departing ones formed up into a regiment, four or five abreast. They did not seem to be taking much with them, but summer lay ahead, and the country they were heading for was still, or so we believed, not yet much pillaged. They were mostly very young, people not yet twenty, but included a family of mother and father with three small children. A baby was carried in the arms of a friend, the mother took an infant on her back in a sling, the father had the biggest child on his shoulders. There were leaders, three men: not the middleaged or older men, but the older ones among the young people. Of these two went at the front with their women, and one came at the end with his: he had two girls attached to him. There were about forty people altogether in this band.
They had a cart or trolley, similar to the ones that had been used at airports and railway stations. This had some parcels of root vegetables and grain on it, and the little bundles of the travellers. Also, at the last moment, a couple of youths, laughing but still shamefaced or at least self-conscious, pushed on to this trolley a great limp parcel which exuded blood.
There were slim bundles of reeds on the cart — these were hawked from door to door by then; and three girls carried them as flaring torches, one at the front, one at the back, one in the middle, torches much brighter than the inadequate, when it was not altogether absent, street lighting. And off they went, along the road north-west, lit by the torches that dripped dangerous fire close above their heads. They were singing. They sang Show Me the Way to Go Home — without, or so it seemed, any consciousness of its ludicrous pathos. They sang We Shall Not be Moved, and Down by the Riverside.
They had gone, and left on the pavements were still a good many people. They seemed subdued, and soon dispersed. Emily came in, silent. She looked for Hugo — he had returned to his place along the wall, and she sat near him, and pulled his front half over her lap. She sat there hugging him, bent over him. I could see the big yellow head lying on her arm, could hear him, at last, purr and croon.
Now I knew that while she wanted more than anything to be off into that savage gamblers' future with the migrating ones, she was not prepared to sacrifice her Hugo. Or at least, was in conflict. And I dared to hope. Yet, even while I did, I wondered why I thought it mattered that she should stay. Stay with what? Me? Did I believe it mattered that she should stay where she had been left by that man? Well, my faith in that was beginning to dim: but her survival mattered, presumably, and who could say where she was likely to be safest? Did I believe that she should stay with her animal? Yes, I did; absurdly, of course, for he was only a beast. But he was hers, she loved him, she must care for him; she could not leave him without harm to herself. So I told myself, argued with myself, comforted myself — argued, too, with that invisible mentor, the man who had dropped Emily with me and gone off: how was I to know what to do? Or how to think? If I was making mistakes, then whose fault was it? He had not told me anything, or left instructions; there was no way at all of my knowing how I was expected to be living, how Emily should be living.
Behind the wall I found a room that was tall, not very large, and I think six-sided. There was no furniture in it, only a rough trestle around two of the sides. On the floor was spread a carpet, but it was a carpet without its life: it had a design, an intricate one, but the colours had an imminent existence, a potential, no more. There had been a fair or a market here, and this had left a quantity of rags, dress materials, scraps of Eastern embroideries of the kind that have tiny mirrors buttonhole — stitched into them, old clothes — everything in that line you can think of. Some people were standing about the room. At first it seemed that they were doing nothing at all; they looked idle and undecided. Then one of them detached a piece of material from the jumble on the trestles, and bent to match it with the carpet — behold, the pattern answered that part of the carpet. This piece was laid exactly on the design, and brought it to life.
It was like a child's game, giant-sized; only it was not a game, it was serious, important not only to the people actually engaged in this work, but to everyone. Then another person bent with a piece chosen from the multi-coloured heap on the trestles, bent, matched and straightened again to gaze down. There they stood, about a dozen people, quite silent, turning their eyes from the patterns of the carpet to the tangle of stuffs and back again. A recognition, the quick move, a smile of pleasure or of relief, a congratulatory glance from one of the others… there was no competition here, only the soberest and most loving co-operation. I entered the room, I stood on the carpet looking down as they did at its incompleteness, pattern without colour, except where the pieces had already been laid in a match, so that parts of the carpet had a bleak gleam, like one that has been bleached, and other parts glowed up, fulfilled, perfect. I, too, sought for fragments of materials that could bring life to the carpet, and did in fact find one, and bent down to match and fit, before some pressure moved me on again. I realised that everywhere around, in all the other rooms, were people who would in their turn drift in here, see this central activity, find their matching piece — would lay it down, and drift off again to other tasks. I left that tall room whose ceiling vanished upwards into dark where I thought I saw the shine of a star, a room whose lower part was in a bright light that enclosed the silent concentrated figures like stage-lighting. I left them and moved on. The room disappeared. I could not find it when I turned my head to see it again, so as to mark where it was. But I knew it was there waiting, I knew it had not disappeared, and the work in it continued, must continue, would go on always.
***
This time seems now to have gone on and on, yet in fact it was quite short, a matter of months. So much was happening, and every hour seemed crammed with new experience. Yet in appearance all I did was to live quietly there, in that room, with Hugo, with Emily. Inside it was all chaos… the feeling one is taken over by, at the times in one's life when everything is in change, movement, destruction — or reconstruction, but that is not always evident at the time — a feeling of helplessness, as if one were being whirled about in a dust-devil or a centrifuge.
Yet I had no alternative but to go on doing exactly what I was. Watching and waiting. Watching, for the most part, Emily… who had been a stranger, so it seemed, for years. But of course this was not so, it was anxiety for her that stretched the hours. The yellow beast, melancholy, his sorrow swallowed — I swear this was so, though he was no more than animal — in the determination to be stoic, not to show his wounds, sat quietly either at the window in a place behind the curtains where he could easily dodge back and down, or stretched along the wall, in a mourner's position, his head on his forepaws, his green eyes steady and open. He lay there hour after hour, contemplating his — thoughts. Why not? He thought, he judged, as animals can be seen to do, if observed without prejudice. I must say here, since it has to be said somewhere about Hugo, that I think the series of comments automatically evoked by this kind of statement, the ticker-tape remarks to do with 'anthropomorphism' are beside the point. Our emotional life is shared with the animals; we flatter ourselves that human emotions are so much more complicated than theirs. Perhaps the only emotion not known to a cat or a dog is — romantic love. And even then, we have to wonder. What is the emotional devotion of a dog for his master or mistress but something like that sort of love, all pining and yearning and 'give me, give me'. What was Hugo's love for Emily but that? As for our thoughts, our intellectual apparatus, our rationalisms and our logics and our deductions and so on, it can be said with absolute certainty
that dogs and cats and monkeys cannot make a rocket to fly to the moon or weave artificial dress materials out of the byproducts of petroleum, but as we sit in the ruins of this variety of intelligence, it is hard to give it much value: I suppose we are under-valuing it now as we over-valued it then. It will have to find its place: I believe a pretty low place, at that.
I think that all this time, human beings have been watched by creatures whose perceptions and understanding have been so far in advance of anything we have been able to accept, because of our vanity, that we would be appalled if we were able to know, would be humiliated. We have been living with them as blundering, blind, callous, cruel murderers and torturers, and they have watched and known us. And this is the reason we refused to acknowledge the intelligence of the creatures that surround us: the shock to our amour propre would be too much, the judgement we would have to make on ourselves too horrible: it is exactly the same process that can make someone go on and on committing a crime, or a cruelty, knowing it: the stopping and having to see what has been done would be too painful, one cannot face it.
But people need slaves and victims and appendages, and of course many of our 'pets' are that because they have been made into what we think they should be, just as human beings can become what they are expected to be. But not all, not by any means; all the time, through our lives, we are accompanied, everywhere we go, by creatures who judge us, and who behave at times with a nobility which is… we call it human.
Hugo, this botch of a creature, was in his relations with Emily as delicate as a faithful lover who is content with very little provided he is not banished from the beloved presence. This is what he had imposed on himself: he would not make demands, not ask, not be a nuisance. He was waiting. As I was. He watched, as I did.
I was spending long hours with him. Or I sat at the times when the sunlight was on the wall, waiting for it to open, to unfold. Or I went about the streets, taking in news and rumours and information with the rest, wondering what to do for the best, and deciding to do nothing for the time being; wondering how long this city would stand, eroded as it was in every way, its services going and gone, its people fleeing, its food supplies worsening, its law and order consisting more and more of what the citizens imposed on themselves, an instinctive self — restraint, even a caring for others who were in the same straits.
There seemed to be a new sharpness in the tension of waiting. For one thing, the weather — the summer had come hot and dry, the sun had a dusty look. The pavement opposite my window had filled up again. But there was less interest now in what went on out there: the windows held fewer heads, people had become used to it all. Everyone knew that again and again the street's edge would half-empty as another tribe took off, and we acknowledged with mixed feelings the chance that had chosen our street as a gathering place for the migrations from our part of the city: parents at least knew what their children were doing, even if they did not like it. We became accustomed to watching a mixed lot of people collect along the pavement with their pathetic bits of baggage, and then depart, singing their old wartime songs, or revolutionary songs that seemed as inappropriate as sex songs are to old age. And Emily did not leave. She would run after them a little way with some of the other girls, and then come home, subdued, to put her arms around her Hugo, her dark head down on his yellow coat. It was as if they both wept. They huddled together, creatures in sorrow, comforting each other.
The next thing was that Emily fell in love… I am conscious that this seems a term inappropriate to the times I am describing. It was with a young man who seemed likely to lead the next contingent out and away from the city. He was, despite his swash-buckling clothes, a thoughtful young man, or at least one slow to judgement; an observer by temperament, perhaps, but pushed into action by the time? He was, at any rate, the natural guardian of the younger ones, the distressed, the forlorn. He was known for this, teased for it, sometimes criticised: softness of this sort was superfluous to the demands of survival. Perhaps this was why he appealed to Emily.
I believe her trust in him was such that she even thought of taking Hugo out to the mob for another trial, but this must have gone from her to Hugo, for he felt it: he shivered and shrank, and she had to put her arms around him, and say: 'No, I won't Hugo, I promise I won't. Did you hear? — I promised, didn't I?'
Well, then, so there it was, she was infatuated. It was 'the first love' of tradition. Which is to say that half a dozen puppy loves, each one as agonising and every bit as intense and serious as later 'adult' loves had passed; this love was 'first' and 'serious' because it was returned, or at least acknowledged.
I remember I used to wonder if these young people, living as they had to from hand to mouth, who would never shut themselves off in couples behind walls unless it was for a few days or hours in a deserted house somewhere, or a shed in a field, would ever say to each other: I love you. Do you love me? Will our love last? — and so on. All of which phrases seemed more and more like the keys or documents of possession to states and conditions now obsolete.
But Emily was suffering, she was in pain, as one is at that age, as fresh as a new loaf and loving a hero of twenty-two. Who had inexplicably, even eerily, chosen her. She was his girl, chosen from many, and known as such. She was beside him on the pavement, went with him on expeditions, and people felt pleasure and even importance when they called to her: 'Gerald says…' 'Gerald wants you to…'
From pain she would soar at once to exaltation, and stood there beside him, flushed and beautiful, her eyes soft. Or fling herself down in the sofa-corner, to be by herself for a bit, or at least away from him, for it was all too much, too powerful, she needed a respite. She was radiant with amazement, not seeing me or her surroundings, and I knew she was saying to herself: But he's chosenme, me… and this did not mean And I'm only thirteen! That was a thought for people my age. A girl was ready for mating when her body was.
But these young people's lives were communal, and mating was far from being the focus or pivot of a relationship when they chose each other. No, any individual consummations were nothing beside this act of mingling constantly with others, as if some giant rite of eating were taking place, everyone tasting and licking and regurgitating everyone else, making themselves known to others and others known to them in this tasting and sampling — eyeing each other, rubbing shoulders and bodies, talking, exchanging emanations.
But while Emily was part of this communal act, the communal feast, she was at the same time feeling as girls tradi — tionally did. She wanted, I knew, to be alone with Gerald: she would have liked that experience, the old one.
But she never was alone with him.
What she wanted was inappropriate. She felt in the wrong, even criminal, at least very much to be blamed. She was an anachronism.
I did not say anything, for our relations were not such that I could ask, or she likely to volunteer.
All I knew was what I could see for myself: that she was being filled over and over again with a violence of need that exploded in her, dazzling her eyes and shaking her body so that she was astonished — needs which could never be slaked by an embrace on the floorboards of an empty room or in the corner of a field. All around her the business of living went on, but Gerald was always at the heart of it: wherever she turned herself in some task or duty, there he was, so efficient and practical and busy with important things, but she, Emily, was possessed by a savage enemy, was raging with joy and grief. And if she betrayed what she felt by a wrong look or a word, what then? She would lose her home here, among these people, her tribe… And this was why she had so often to slip away indoors, to creep near her familiar Hugo, and put her arms around him. At which he might give a muffled groan, since he knew very well the use she was making of him.
There was this juxtaposition: Emily lay with her cheek on rough yellow fur, one still-childish hand enclosing a ragged ear, her tense body expressing emptiness and longing. The wall beside me opened, reminding me again how easily and unexpe
ctedly it could, and I was walking towards a door from which voices came. And frenetic laughter, squeals, protests. I opened the door on that world whose air was irritation, confinement, littleness. A brightly-coloured world: the colours were flat and loud as in old calendars. A hot close place, everything very large, over-lifesize, difficult: this was again the child's view that I was imprisoned in. Largeness and smallness; violence of emotion and its insignificance — contradictions, impossibilities, were built into and formed part of the substance of whatever one saw when that particular climate was entered. It was a bedroom. Again, a fire burned in the wall behind a tall metal guard. Again it was a thick, heavy, absorbing room, with time as its air, the tick of a clock felt as a condition of one's every moment and thought. The room was full of a hot light: a reddish light barred and crossed with shadow lay over the walls, across the ceiling, and on the immensely long soft white curtains that filled a wall opposite the two beds: father's and mother's beds, husband's bed and wife's bed.
The curtains for some reason filled me with anguish, the soft weight of them. They were of white lawn or muslin that had a raised spot woven in, and were lined and lined again. A white that was made for lightness and transparency to let in sun and night-air had been taken hold of and thickened and made heavy and hung up in shrouds to shut out air and light, to reflect hot flame-light from the metal-barred fireplace.
On one side of the room the mother sat with her boy-infant, always in his damp wool. Her arms were about him, she was absorbed in him. In a large chair set against the curtains the soldier-like man sat with his knees apart, gripping between them the small girl who stood shrieking. On his face, under the moustache, was a small tight smile. He was 'tickling' the child. This was a 'game', the bedtime 'game', a ritual. The elder child was being played with, was being made tired, was being given her allowance of attention, before being put to bed, and it was a service by the father to the mother, who could not cope with the demands of her day, the demands of Emily. The child wore a long nightie, with frills at wrists and at the neck. Her hair had been brushed and was held by ribbon. A few minutes ago she had been a clean neat pretty little girl in a white nightdress, with a white ribbon in her hair, but now she was hot and sweating, and her body was contorting and twisting to escape the man's great hands that squeezed and dug into her ribs, to escape the great cruel face that bent so close over her with its look of private satisfaction. The room seemed filled with a hot anguish, the fear of being held tight there, the need for being held and tortured, since this was how she pleased her captors. She shrieked: 'No, no, no, no… helpless, being explored and laid bare by this man.
The Memoirs of a Survivor Page 8
