The Memoirs of a Survivor

by Doris Lessing

  And then?

  • • • • •

  There was a new development in the life on the pavement. It was bound up with Gerald; with, precisely, his need to protect the weak, his identification with them, that quality which could not be included in the little balance sheets of survival. There were suddenly children out there, nine, ten, eleven years old, not attached to families, but by themselves. Some had parents they had run away from, or whom they did see, but only occasionally. Some had no parents at all. What had happened to them? It was hard to say. Officially of course children still had parents and homes and that kind of thing, and if not, they had to be in care or custody; officially children even went to school regularly. But nothing like this was the practice. Sometimes children attached themselves to other families, their own parents being unable to cope with the pressures, not knowing where to find food and supplies, or simply losing interest and throwing them out to fend for themselves as people had once done with dogs and cats that no longer gave pleasure. Some parents were dead, because of violence, or epidemics. Others had gone away out of the city and left their children behind. These waifs tended to be ignored by the authorities unless attention was specifically drawn to them, but people might feed them or take them into their own homes. They were still part of society, wished to be part, and hung around where people lived! They were quite unlike those children whom I will have to describe quite soon, who put themselves outside society altogether, were our enemies.

  Gerald noticed that a dozen or so children were literally living on the pavement, and began to look after them in an organized way. Emily of course adored him for this, and defended him against the inevitable criticism. It was mostly of old people that it was said they should be allowed to die -I can tell you that this added a new dimension of terror to the lives of the elderly, already tenuous - that the weaker had to go to the wall: this was already happening, and was not a process that should be checked by sickly sentiment. But Gerald took his stand. He began by defending them when people tried to chase them away. They were sleeping on the waste lot behind the pavement, and complaints started about the smell and the litter. Soon would happen what we all feared more than anything at all: the authorities would have to intervene.

  There were empty houses and flats all around; about half a mile off was a large empty house, in good condition. There Gerald took the children. It had long ago lost its electricity supply, but by then hardly anyone paid for electricity. The water was still connected. The windows had been broken, but shutters were made for the ground floor and they used old bits of polythene for the upper-floor windows.

  Gerald had become a father or elder brother to the children. He got food for them. Partly, he begged from shops. People were so generous. That was an odd thing: mutual aid and self-sacrifice went side by side with the callousness. And he took expeditions off to the country to get what supplies could still be bought or purloined. And, best of all, there was a large garden at the back of the house, and he taught them how to cultivate it. This was guarded day and night by the older children armed with guns or sticks, or bows and arrows or catapults.

  There it was: warmth, caring, a family.

  Emily believed herself to have acquired a ready-made family.

  Now began a new, queer time. She was living with me, ‘in my care’ - a joke, that, but it was still the reason for our being together. She was certainly living with her Hugo, whom she could not bear to leave. But every evening, after an early supper (and I even arranged for this meal to be at a time which would more easily accommodate her new life) she would say: ‘I think I’ll be off now, if you don’t mind.’ And without waiting for an answer, but giving me a small guilty, even amused smile, she went, having kissed Hugo in a little private ceremony that was like a pact or promise. She came back, usually, at mid-morning.

  I was worried, of course, about pregnancy; but the conventions of our association made it impossible to ask questions, and in any case I suspected that what I regarded as an impossible burden that could drag her down, destroy her, would be greeted by her with: “Well, what of it? Other people have had babies and managed, haven’t they?’ I was worried, too, that her attachment to this new family would become so strong that she would simply wander off, away from us, from Hugo and me. There we were, the two of us, waiting. Waiting was our occupation. We kept each other company. But he was not mine, not my animal, most definitely he was not that. He waited, listening, for Emily: his green eyes steady and watchful. He was always ready to get up and meet her at the door - I knew she was coming minutes before she appeared, for he smelled or heard or intuited her presence when she was still streets away. At the door the two pairs of eyes, the green, the brown, engaged in a dazzling beam of emotion. Then she embraced him, fed him, and bathed. There were no baths or showers in Gerald’s community yet. She dressed herself and at once went out to the pavement.

  This period, too, seemed to go on interminably. That summer was a long one, the weather the same day after day. It was hot, stuffy, noisy, dusty. Emily, like the other girls, had reverted with the hot weather to earlier styles of dress, shedding the thick garments that had to be worn for utility. She pulled out the old sewing machine again and made herself some bright fanciful dresses out of old clothes from the stalls, or she wore the old dresses themselves. Very strange those pavements looked, to someone my age, with decades of different fashions on display there all at the same time, obliterating that sequence of memory which goes: ‘That was the year when we wore…’

  Every day, from early afternoon onwards, Gerald, with the children from the community house, would be on the pavement, so Emily was separated from her ‘family’ only for a couple of hours each day when she paid her visit home to dress and bath, and for an hour or so each evening, when she took a meal with me. Or rather, with Hugo. I think, too, that coming home for this brief time was a necessity to her emotionally: she needed a respite from her emotions, her happiness. In that other house it was all a great crescendo of joy, of success, of fulfilment, of doing, of making, of being needed. She would return from it like someone running in laughing from a heavy storm, or from too-loud band music. She would alight on my sofa smiling, poised ready for flight, basking, friendly to the whole world. She could not prevent herself smiling all the time, wherever she was, so that people kept looking at her, then came to talk to her, touch her, share in the vitality that flowed off her, making a pool or reservoir of life. And in that radiant face we could still see the incredulous: But why me? This happening to me!

  Well, and of course such intensity could not last. At its peak it was already threatened: she kept collapsing into little depressions and fatigues and irritations when the elation of only an hour or so before seemed impossible. Then up she would swoop again into joy.

  Soon I saw that Emily was not the only girl Gerald favoured, she was by no means the only, one helping him with that household. I saw she was not sure of her position with him. Sometimes she did not go to his house, but stayed with me; and I believed this was because she was trying to ‘show’ him, or even confirm for herself that she still had some independence of will.

  From the rumour markets I heard that the young man Gerald was ‘seducing all those young girls, it is shocking’. Funny, to hear all those old words, seduce, immoral, shocking and so on; and that they had no force in them was proved by the fact that nothing was done. When citizens are moved one way or another they show it, but no one really cared much that young women of thirteen, fourteen, had sexual relations. We had returned to an earlier time of man’s condition.

  And what was Emily feeling now? Again, her emotions had not accommodated change. Only a few weeks, even days, after it was passed, she saw herself as the widow of a dead bliss, a paradise: she would have liked that time to have gone on for ever when she felt herself to be a sun drawing everybody in towards her, when she shed light and warmth on them, a joy which she manufactured with her lover Gerald. But not finding herself first, or alone, with him, f
inding herself uncertain and unsupported there, where she felt her centre to be, she lost her bloom, her lustre; she became peaked, she sat about listlessly, and had

  to force herself up into activity. I was pleased that this had happened: I could not help it. I still felt she should be with me, because that man - guardian, protector or whatever he was - had asked me to care for her. And if she was being let down by Gerald - which was how she felt it - then this was painful but at least she would not go off with him when he took his turn to lead off a tribe. If he now would leave at all, having made this new community.

  I waited, watched … walking through a light screen of leaves, flowers, birds, blossom, the essence of woodland brought to life in the effaced patterns of the wallpaper, I moved through rooms that seemed to have aged since I saw them last. The walls had thinned, had lost substance to the air, to time; everywhere on the forest floor stood slight tall walls, all upright still and in their proper pattern of angles, but ghosts of walls, like the flats in a theatre. They soared into boughs, lost themselves in leaves; and the sunlight lay shallow and clear on them where the leafy shadow patterns did not. Earth had blown in, and fresh grass and flowers grew everywhere.

  I walked from room to room through the unsubstantial walls, looking for their occupant, their inhabitant, the one whose presence I could feel strongly even now, when the forest had almost taken the place over.

  Someone … yes, indeed, there was somebody. Close … I walked soft over the grass along the slant of an eggshell wall making not a sound, knowing that at the end, where the intersecting wall had fallen and decayed long ago, I would easily and at last turn my head and see - whoever it was … a strong, soft presence, an intimate, whose face would be known to me, had always been known to me. But, when I came to the end of the wall, a small stream lay bubbling there through grass, so clear that the fishes on their ground of bright pebbles looked up with their round eyes at me as if there was no water between me and them, as if they hung in air at my feet.

  Straying through room after room all open to the leaves and the sky, floored with the unpoisoned grasses and flowers of the old world, I saw how extensive was this place, with no boundaries or end that I could find, much larger than I had ever understood. Long ago, when it had stood up thick and strong, a protection from the forest and from the weather, how very many must have lived here, multitudes, yet all had been subdued to the one Presence who was the air they breathed - though they did not know it, was the Whole they were minuscule parts of, their living and their dying as little their personal choice or wanting as the fates and fortunes of molecules in a leaf are theirs.

  I walked back again, towards the border region on whose other side was my ‘real’ life, and found that here was a set of rooms still solid, still unthinned, with floors and ceilings intact, but as I looked I saw how the floorboards were beginning to give, had collapsed in some places; then that there were ragged holes in them, then that in fact these were not really floorboards, only a few rotting planks lying about on earth that was putting out shoots of green. I pulled the planks away, exposing clean earth and insects that were vigorously at their work of re-creation. I pulled back heavy lined curtains to let the sunlight in. The smell of growth came up strong from the stuffy old room, and I ran from there, and pushed my way back through fine leafy screens, leaving that place, or realm, to clean growth and working insects because -I had to. After all, it was never myself who ordained that now I must interrupt my ordinary life, since it was time to step from one life into another; not I who thinned the sunlight wall; not I who set the stage behind it. I had never had a choice. Very strong was the feeling that I did as I was bid and as I must; that I was being taken, was being led, was being shown, was held always in the hollow of a great hand which enclosed my life, and used me for purposes I was too much beetle or earthworm to understand.

  Because of this feeling, born of the experiences behind that wall, I was changing. A restlessness, a hunger that had been with me all my life, that had always been accompanied by a rage of protest (but against what?) was being assuaged. I found that I was more often, simply, waiting. I watched to see what would happen next. I observed. I looked at every new event quietly, to see if I could understand it.

  • • • • •

  What happened next was June.

  One afternoon, when Emily had been home with me and Hugo a full day and a night, had not gone at all to the communal household, a little girl came to the door asking for her. I say ‘a little girl’ conscious of the absurdity of the phrase with its associations of freshness and promise. But after all, she was one: a very thin child, with strong prominent bones. Her eyes were pale blue. She had pale hair that looked dirty hanging to her shoulders and half hiding an appealing little face. She was small for her age, could have been eight or nine, but was in fact eleven. In other words she was two years younger than Emily, who was a young woman and loved - precariously - by the king, Gerald. But her breasts were stubby little points, and her body altogether in the chrysalis stage.

  ‘Where is Emily?’ she demanded. Her voice - but I shall only say that it was at the extreme away from ‘good English’, the norm once used for announcements, news, or by officialdom. I could hardly understand her, her accent was so degraded. I am not talking about the words she used, which were always sharp enough when one had uncoded them, were stubborn and strong attempts to lay hold of meanings and ideas every bit as clear and good as those expressed in tutored speech. The peremptoriness of the ‘Where is Emily?’ was not from rudeness; but because of the effort she had to put into it, the determination to be understood and to be led to Emily, or that Emily should be brought out to her. It was, too, because she was a person who had not been brought up to believe she had rights. Yet she set herself towards goals, she wanted things and achieved them: she would reach her Emily without the help of words, skills, manners - without rights.

  ‘She’s here,’ I said. ‘And please come in.’

  She followed me, stiff with the determination that had got her here. Her eyes were everywhere, and the thought came into my mind that she was pricing what she saw. Or, rather, valuing, since ‘pricing’ was somewhat out of date.

  When she saw Emily, today a languid, suffering young woman on a chair by the window, her two bare feet set side by side on her attendant yellow beast, the child’s face lit with a heartbreakingly sweet smile all confidence and love, and she ran forward, forgetting herself. And Emily, seeing her, smiled and forgot her troubles - love-troubles and goodness knows what else, and the two girls went into the tiny room that was Emily’s. Two girls in a young girls’ friendship, despite one being already a woman, and one still a child, with a child’s face and body. But not, as I discovered, with a child’s imaginings, for she was in love with Gerald. And, after having suffered jealousy because of the favourite Emily, by turns hating and denigrating her or feverishly and slavishly admiring her, now she was her sister in sorrow when Gerald was being loved, served, by another girl, or girls.

  It was morning when she came; and at lunchtime the two emerged from the bedroom and Emily asked with her unfailing visitor’s manners: ‘If you don’t mind, I would like to ask June to have a sandwich or something.’

  Later in the day the two tired of the stuffy room, and came into the living-room, and sat on the floor on either side of Hugo and talked while they patted and petted him. June was wanting advice and information on all kinds of practical matters, and particularly about the garden, which was Emily’s responsibility, since Emily understood about all that kind of thing.

  She did? I knew nothing of this in Emily, who with me had not showed the slightest interest in such matters, not even in the potted plants.

  I sat listening to their talk, reconstructing from it the life of their community … how very odd it was that all over our cities, side by side with citizens who still used electric light, drew water for which they had paid from taps, expected their rubbish to be collected, were these houses which were as if t
he technological revolution had never occurred at all. The big house fifteen minutes’ walk away had been an old people’s home. It had large grounds. Shrubs and flowerbeds had been cleared and now there were only vegetables. There was even a little shed in which a few fowls were kept - another illegality that went on everywhere, and to which the authorities turned a blind eye. The household bought -or acquired in some way - flour, dried legumes, honey. But they were about to get a hive of bees. They also bought the substitutes ‘chicken’ and ‘beef and ‘lamb’ and concocted the usual unappetizing meals with them. Unappetizing only to some: there were plenty of young people who had eaten nothing else in their lives, and who now preferred the substitute to the real thing. As I’ve said, we learn to like what we get.

  The place was a conglomeration of little workshops: they made soap and candles and wove materials and dyed them; they cured leather; they dried and preserved food; they reconstructed and made furniture.

  And so they all lived, Gerald’s gang, thirty of them now, with pressure always on them to expand, since so many people wanted to join them and had to be refused: there was no space.

  It was not that I was surprised to learn of all this. I had heard it all before in various forms. For instance, there had been a community of young adults and small children not far away where even the water system and sewage had broken down. They had made a privy in the garden, a pit with a packing-case over it, and a can of ashes for the smell and the flies. They bought water from the door, or tapped the mains as they could, and cadged baths from friends: there was a time when my bathroom was being used by them. But that group drifted off somewhere. All over our city were these pockets of life reverting to the primitive, the hand-to-mouth. Part of a house … then the whole house … a group of houses… a street… an area of streets. People looking down from a high building saw how these nuclei of barbarism took hold and spread. At first the observers were all sharp hostility and fear. They made the sounds of disapproval, of rectitude, but they were in fact learning as they, the still fortunate, watched these savages from whose every finger sprouted new skills and talents. In some parts of the city whole suburbs had reverted. Miles of people, all growing their potatoes and onions and carrots and cabbages and setting guard on them day and night, raising chickens and ducks, making their sewage into compost, buying or selling water, using empty rooms or an empty house to breed rabbits or even a pig - people no longer in neat little families, but huddled together in groups and clans whose structure evolved under the pressures of necessity. At night such an area withdrew itself into a dangerous obscurity where no one dared go, with its spare or absent street lighting, its potholed pavements and rutted streets, the windows showing the minuscule flickering of candles or the shallow glow of some improvised light on a wall or a ceiling. Even in the daytime, to walk there seeing wary faces half visible behind shutters, knowing that bows and arrows, catapults, or even guns were held trained for use on you if you transgressed -such an expedition was like a foray into enemy territory, or into the past of the human race.