by A. S. Byatt
The other letter was from a group designating themselves as the Anti-University of North Yorkshire. They say they are instituting periodic and intermittent gatherings to discuss what isn’t discussed by the Establishment, and they want me to talk—or otherwise communicate, in any way that pleases me, at any time of my own choice—about psychic regression-therapy, for instance, as an example, without restricting me. Changing the mental set of the establishment they say is urgent, is desperate. The University letterhead is red and black and has rearing dragons, symbolic mound with tree (a cedar?), and something I think is a fountain. The Anti-University communication is on greenish paper and is decorated with a kind of spotted-Dick effect of painted unlidded eyes—I never know if they are the Evil Eye, or an eye designed to stare down the Evil Eye, or an Evil Eye to counteract the Evil Eye.
They are not so far apart in their arcane symbolism, it strikes me. Maybe not in their undertakings, also. The Vice-Chancellor says his keynote speakers are Hodder Pinsky and Theobald Eichenbaum. He is a brave man. Both are thought to be raving determinists, and even if Pinsky’s political views are impeccably Left, his psychology isn’t. And there are nasty smells about Eichenbaum’s German past.
Anyway, it is clearly my duty, and will be my pleasure, to accept both invitations. It wd obviously be convenient, and dramatically amusing, to accept both at the same time. But my courage may fail me. As you will know, those of my profession are reluctant to speak in gatherings not composed of our own faithful. I feel it is a matter of honour to overcome this flocking instinct.
A man must act in the world that exists (universe and anti-universe) and a properly analysed man shd feel no fear of philosophers or neuroscientists. Or of activists. I shall come North and prospect. I shall hope to discuss yr Lamb with you.
It is difficult indeed to imagine the effect of such a history on the survivor. You say the boy was eleven. You say he has never spoken of his parents (or sister). He was almost certainly in a pre-pubertal state at the time of those horrific events, and his coming-to-know them must have coincided with the outbreak of war—and the general perturbation of an entire population, which may have been a blessing in disguise. It is even possible that he remembers nothing. That is, that he is in a state of intense denial. And if we disturb that deadness, and take him back to that horror and beyond it, do we have the skills and the love to help him make a place in the world? He has not made his own—or he would not be where he is, hearing voices, seeing whatever he sees.
I should like to meet him.
We as a profession believe in truth and knowledge. But my first flinching feeling, at that history, is, better for him to forget. But that cannot be right?
Yours ever,
Elvet
Joshua Ramsden had not forgotten. He remembered everything, he thought, and never spoke of it, had never spoken of it, to anyone. This was the sentence he said to himself, when he was thinking in words, which meant that he knew in words that he did remember, but was not having to go through the act, or perhaps the infliction, of memory.
In fact, remembering everything was different from total recall. The things he remembered were lumps, or raw gobbets, of what his body—eyes, ears, nose, nerves—had taken in. They would rise up at him, or swim up inside him, without warning, after all this long stretch of time, interrupting his breath, and the beating of his heart, arousing dancing malevolent inkspots in his vision. He felt these memories like bright lights through holes in a blanket, or slimy underwater roots grasped through mud. The rest—the blanket of time, the mud of consecutive events—he had put together in safe words, which he used for protection against the glare and touch of the horror. He knew that once the bodily process of memory had been set in action, he was helpless to stop it. One gobbet was threaded to another, like a dreadful necklace. Age had made the throttling grasp of the necklace a very little more bearable, because he could confidently expect the moment of forgetting again. The horror lay in wait for him like a malignant bully, cunning enough to wait to pounce when he was again inattentive and unprotected.
What often started it was the flesh of his thighs. He had still been in short trousers, a big boy whose trousers were tight. Covered with puppy fat. He remembered standing there with all that solid flesh juddering and dancing, alive and uncontrollable, hot, cold, wet. Over all those years he had been so sorry, and was still, for that lumpen boy with great naked thighs who did not know what to do.
He remembered also, in his body, their flesh. They were lying side by side. Someone had crossed their dead hands on their breasts, and someone had closed their eyes but neither the bodies nor the faces were peaceful. Their mouths were open. His mother’s mouth was twisted. Her false teeth had slipped. One of her breasts, much scratched, slipped puffily through a tear in her pink nightdress. His sister’s eyelids and brow were horribly bruised and swollen. His mother’s hands were helplessly clawing, in their clumsy propped position. His sister’s thin feet looked as they always did, blue-veined, transparent, white. He was so sorry that this woman should have been fixed in his mind with extruded teeth. He was so unbearably sorry for his sister’s feet. He was so sorry for the stains on the nightdress, and the candy-striped pyjamas.
His body remembered the smell, sweetish, corrupt, and every change in that smell during the time he stayed alone in that house with those two.
He came to understand that this remembering had destroyed much of the plump boy’s past in his mind, eradicating it more ruthlessly than electric shock therapy, which jangled, stabbed and fragmented. Nothing “came to mind” when he tried to recall the woman, or the little girl, who had become the things on the bed. He remembered, with the pity he extended to all memories of that awkward, stumbling boy, later attempts to imagine them doing things like walking, or eating, or touching him. Not immediately, but after about a year, he had created puppet mother, puppet sister, smiling and usual, and had seen them for what they were, wavering shades who automatically called up the solid flesh, the artificial teeth, the flaccid toes and fingers.
Most of all he pitied the moments when the boy might have known what was there, and was innocent and ignorant. He could see him coming home, letting himself into the house, after his first-ever night staying with a friend from school. He remembered that his mother had let him go, without reference to his father, who was strict and might have forbidden him. The boy had not had many friends—it was difficult, because he was not allowed out to play, because he spent his weekends in religious classes, in Chapel. But another boy had invited him, and he had gone. He could not remember the boy’s name. Or his face. He remembered saying “thank you” politely to the boy’s mother, when he left, and he remembered her saying “come again soon.” He remembered feeling cautiously pleased with himself—he had done nothing odd or foolish, he had been made welcome, he had behaved like a real boy and not been found out in any failing. He remembered this because part of himself had gone on being pleased with this success, had still basked in the warm smile of the other boy’s mother, had still hoped—expected—to take up the now-impossible invitation. He had had to teach the naive plump boy to remember all the time that all that was now over and done with for ever and ever. It was like missing a step—no, like expecting another step, when you were already at the foot of the stairs. All the veins shrilled and had to be made quiet.
Over and over he watched in his memory as the plump boy called in the hall “I’m back,” and ran, with the energy of confidence, up the stairs to look for them, to tell them about it. The pathetic ignorance of him.
When he had found them, for some reason, he decided to wait until his father came back. After a time, he wandered (must have wandered, this part was occluded) into his own bedroom, where he lay on his bed and must—it seemed to the remembering man—have passed into a deep sleep.
When the plump boy woke, it was deep night, and very dark. Swimming up out of sleep, he thought, he really thought, the poor fool, that he had had a bad dream. His room, his thi
ngs, seemed for the last time ordinary to him, daily, in their shadowy solidity in the darkness. His dressing-gown was his dressing-gown, his skeleton leaves skeleton leaves, his money-box in the shape of a pillar-box simply a red tin. He stayed in there with his things for a time (from then on no remembered time was measurable, only the succession of night and day). The man could not remember, when the boy went out of his bedroom to check whether he had dreamed, whether his father was back, what the boy had hoped, expected, or felt. He saw him in his memory creep along a landing, with vacancy roaring around the strip of linoleum he trod on, he saw him—the poor thing—tremble so violently he could not open the bedroom door he must have closed.
When he did, they were still there, of course. And his father, from whom help might have come, was not.
He saw himself standing, with his back to the death-bed, staring out into the night. He saw the pitiful shaking boy, and he saw himself. That is, his present self inhabited that memory.
It was very dark out there. The dark was not uniform. There was liquid ink, there was sluggish pitch, there was sooty veiling. It was as though the outside was woven of strips, of moving belts, of surging waves of black-crested blackness, some creeping, some sliding, some hurtling. The window was no protection, the house and its bricks were flimsy. What howled and pranced out there, what swallowed and gulped, was what was real. Inside his head was a jar or cave full of that soft and violent black which was trying to get out and mingle with the rest of the mass. The bony fence of his skull, the warm mat of his hair, were crumbling and flimsy like the bricks, the mortar, the roof-tiles of the poor house.
He saw the moon. It was the last, slender sickle-edge of the waning moon. He saw on the rushing blackness the globe of black matter that was the unlit face of the moon.
He saw the glass of the window-pane. It was a sash-window. In or through the glass of the window-pane he saw the face of the poor boy at the window. It was a nobler face than the blemished, puffy face he avoided in his mirror. It had fine, sloping planes, and smoke-dark eyes under frowning brows. Its hair was colourless. He could not now remember, when his hair had not been white, what colour it had been. He remembered the moment of seeing the other, standing there on dark air, as the moment when he had been bleached. The other was wearing white, too, a white which gleamed slightly amongst the blackness, and had wonderful folds and flutes which at their deepest opened on infinity. The other stood easily out there in the turbulence. He said, the poor boy heard him say
“Hold out your arms.”
So he held out his arms.
And was given to hold a sooty sphere, dreadfully dense, warm as though it had been taken like a cinder from a furnace that had gone out.
“You will have to carry it,” said the other. “This is how it is.”
He couldn’t hold it up, it was so thick, so heavy.
“You can. We must,” said the other. The other pointed at the side of the ball of dark, and he saw that a sliver of light ran round from pole to pole. It was a mild, cold, pale light. It was like a window into an empty shining, it was like a strip of daylight through a dark curtain, it was like a slash in the rind of darkness.
“This is what is,” said the other.
He did not know how long he stood there, holding up what was too heavy to hold, but holding it, whilst outside the inordinate roared and precipitated itself. He knew that if he could hold it up, he could continue to exist out there, where he now had to be.
At dawn, the other told him to go downstairs. When he reached the kitchen, the other told him to go further down. So he went down the stone steps into the coal cellar.
His father looked as though he had tried to burrow his way to the centre of the sloping hill of coal. The early light came in through a circular hole in the pavement above the coal-hole, which was its only window, and the orifice through which the sacks of coal were emptied. So the cool dawn light came down the slope of glistening black chunks, spangling here and there off their sheen. The whole floor of the place was spread with coal-dust, which also glittered, less silver than the coal, more iridescent with rose, purple, green, indigo, like pools of oil in the street. His father had smeared this dust over his face and hands, into his thick white eyebrows and his bushy moustache. His eyelashes were full of soot. He was wearing the black suit which he wore to preach on Sundays. He wore also a white shirt, now smudged and sootstained, but no collar and tie. He had a huge Adam’s apple, which had always throbbed dynamically in the pulpit and which now trembled and twitched, under the coal-dust, black over dull red. He was sitting with his knees under his chin. He coughed. He had always, Joshua remembered, been asthmatic. Now his lungs were full of dust and ashes. He cleared his throat, several times, and then spoke, in a husky squeak.
“Where have you been?”
Like any accusing parent. Like this one, who believed the outside world contaminated an inner purity.
“I stayed out. I stayed overnight.”
He could not remember if he had said, or thought and suppressed, the dreadful sentence, “Mummy said I could stay out.”
“You should have been here,” said the scarecrow on the coalhill.
The man remembered again the boy’s vulnerable thighs at this point. They too were now streaked with coal-dust. He did not meet his father’s eye. He looked down into the dust, hearing a dodged or deferred death sentence, as he would have heard a dodged or deferred smacking.
Because he could not meet his father’s eye, he stared at his red neck, his Adam’s apple, above the disorder of the collarless shirt.
“Get on with you,” said the man in the coal. “There may have been a purpose to it.”
He stood, like thick clay, heavy as the smudged ball of dark he had held up at the window.
“Go away,” said the man. “Get the police.”
He couldn’t move or speak.
“I told you—” said his father, and wheezed and coughed and spluttered.
The boy turned and clambered up the stairs on all fours. He went out into the street, which looked like a street in which boys walked with satchels to school, and mothers went shopping and posted letters, and little girls dragged at their mothers’ hands and lingered by doorsteps or peered down gratings into coal-holes. He took his instruction literally. He walked and walked, along the sooty streets, until he saw, at the High Street crossing, a policeman. He went to this man’s side, and tugged at his pocket. The policeman was very tall, and his helmet made him taller. He waved his arms, directing the flow of traffic. The man could not remember the policeman’s face.
“My father says you have to come.”
He couldn’t remember the policeman’s answer.
“My father says you have to come to our house, now.”
Something in his voice, something in his dirty face, must have convinced the man, for he came.
He must have gone back to the house with the policeman, but of this he had no memory. He did not sleep in that house again, but where he had slept, before his Auntie Agnes came for him, he could not remember. He remembered a pervasive surging and sickness of dark in his body, a knowledge that he would only gain consciousness to lose it completely, so must be numb, must not feel or know.
Of the subsequent time, some of his memories were dreams, or fantasies, and some were not. He had known, he was sure, all the time, what would happen, and then what had happened, to his father, though how he had known he was not sure. His Auntie Agnes, in fact a remote cousin of his mother, had taken him away to where she lived in a mining village in County Durham. She treated the boy as though he was in some way dirty and had a bad smell around him. She stood at a distance, and perpetually ordered him to tidy and wash himself. She had a small, round, querulous, frowning face, and iron-grey hair in curled rolls above her ears. He could not remember that she had ever spoken to him about the events that were the cause of his being there.
The days of his father’s trial, condemnation and execution had passed, as far as she was ab
le to make them, like all other grim northern school-days. Hitler’s tanks had rolled across Poland and Belgium, and were tearing into France. Because of the popular obsession with News, the boy, now known as Lamb, had seen newspapers. He remembered places where he had seen newspapers—a bus shelter, the village store—because he had vomited in both, and had been spanked for dirtiness. His father’s face and Adolf Hitler’s had been on the same page. “Ramsden Refuses Insanity Plea. ‘The Lord commanded me to do it. A Holocaust is Coming.’ ” “I was ordered to take a short cut to Salvation.” And much later, “Ramsden Will Not Appeal. ‘I am prepared to hang.’ ” He had remembered his father’s neck in the cellar. Neither aunt nor newspaper had made it possible for him to know when the hanging took place. Had he wanted to know? He had flinched from knowing. At times his aunt turned the radio off, quickly, quickly, when she heard him coming, immediately after the War news, and he supposed she was keeping it from him, keeping him from hearing it. He had never spoken to anyone at all of those weeks and months. He had occasionally, as a grown man, wanted to discuss with someone his aunt’s iron resolve to preserve the normal, metronomic regularity of his tedious days. For in her limited way she was admirable. She wanted to make him dull, ordinary, unexceptionable. No flicker of expression in her pasty little mask had betrayed to the boy that this day was different, this day was obscene.
