The Memoirs of a Survivor

by Doris Lessing

  When she brought him in she seemed tired. She was saddened. She was much closer to the commonplace level where I, as one of the elderly, lived. Her eyes saw me, as she sat eating her bean salad, her little hunk of bread, seemed really to see the room we sat in. As for me, I was full of apprehension: I believed her sadness was because she had decided her Hugo could not safely travel with the tribe - I thought her mad even to have considered it - and that she had decided to leave with them, to jettison him.

  After the meal she sat for a long time at the window. She gazed at the scene she was usually a part of. The animal sat, not beside her, but quietly in a corner. You could believe he was weeping, or would, if he knew how. He sorrowed inwardly. His lids lowered themselves as crises of pain gripped him, and he would give a great shiver.

  When Emily went to bed she had to call him several times, and he went at last, slowly, with a quiet, dignified padding. But he was in inner isolation from her: he was protecting himself.

  Next morning she offered to go out and forage for supplies. She had not done this for some time, and again I felt this was sort of token apology because she meant to leave.

  We two sat on quietly in the long room, where the sunlight had left because it was already midday. I was at one side of it, and Hugo lay stretched, head on paws, along the outer wall of the room where he could not be seen from the windows above him.

  We heard footsteps outside which stopped, then became stealthy. We heard voices that had been loud, suddenly soft.

  A young girl’s voice? - no, a boy’s; but it was hard to tell. Two heads appeared at the window, trying to see in the comparative dusk of the room: the light was brilliant outside.

  It’s here,’ said one of the Mehta boys from upstairs.

  ‘I’ve seen him at the window,’ said a black youth. I had observed him often with the others on the pavement, a slim, lithe, likeable boy. A third head appeared between the other two: a white girl, from one of the blocks of flats.

  ‘Stewed dog,’ she said daintily, ‘well I’m not going to eat it.’

  ‘Oh go on,’ said the black boy, ‘I’ve seen what you eat.’

  I heard a rattling sound; it was Hugo. He was trembling, and his claws were rattling on the floorboards.

  Then the girl saw me sitting there, recognized me, and put on the bright uncaring grin the pack allowed outsiders.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘We thought…’

  *No,’ I said. ‘I am living here. I haven’t left.’

  The three faces briefly turned towards each other, brown, white, black, as they put on for each other’s benefit we’ve made a mess of it grimaces. They faded outwards, leaving the window empty.

  There was a soft moaning from Hugo.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘They’ve gone.’

  The rattling sound increased. Then the animal heaved himself up and crept away, with an attempt at dignity, towards the door into the open kitchen, which was the farthest he could go from the dangerous window. He did not want me to observe his loss of self-possession. He was ashamed of having lost it. The moaning I had heard was as much shame as because he was afraid.

  When Emily came in, a good girl, daughter-of-the-house, it was evening. She was tired, had had to visit many places to find supplies. But she was pleased with herself. The rations at that time were minimal, because of the winter, just finished: swedes, potatoes, cabbage, onions. That was about it. But she had managed to find a few eggs, a little fish, and even - a prize - a strongly scented, unshrivelled lemon. I told her, when she had finished showing off her booty, what had happened. At once her good spirits went.

  She sat quiet, head lowered, eyes concealed from me by the thick, white, heavily lashed lids. Then, without looking at me, turning herself from me, she went to find her Hugo, to comfort him.

  And then, a little later, out she went to the pavement and stayed there until very late.

  I remember how I sat on and on in the dark. I was putting off the moment of lighting the candles, thinking that the soft square of light, which was how my window looked from across the street, would remind the cannibals out there of Hugo. Who was back in the place along the wall, where he could not easily be seen. He was as still as if asleep, but his eyes were open. When I did light the candles he did not move or even blink.

  Looking back I see myself sitting in the long room with its comfortable old furniture, with Emily’s things in the little space she allotted for them, and the yellow beast lying quietly, suffering. And there for backdrop was the ambiguous wall, which could so easily dissolve, dissolving, too, all this extraneous life, and the anxieties and pressures of the time - creating, of course, its own. Shadowily present, there it stood, its pattern of fruits and leaves and flowers obliterated by the dim light. That is how I see it, see us, see that time: the long room, dimly lit, with me and Hugo there, thinking of Emily away across the street among crowds that shifted and ebbed and thinned and left - and behind us that other indefinite region, shifting and melting and changing, where walls and doors and rooms and gardens and people continually recreated themselves, like clouds.

  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 middle-aged 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 su
rvival 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 button-hole-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 cooperation. 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 realized 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 by-products 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 undervaluing 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 refuse 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 swashbuckling 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 criticized: softness of this sort was superfluous to the demands of survival. Perhaps this was why he appealed to Emily.