Martha Quest. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ itself politically – Solly being a Zionist, while Joss was a Socialist. Solly was a lanky, tall youth, with a big head on a long thin neck, and big bony hands at the end of long arms; he was altogether knobbly and unintegrated, and his enormous, sombre black eyes brooded abstractedly on the world around him in a way that gave Martha a feeling of kinship to him; but this was perhaps not an altogether welcome relationship, reminding her, as it did, of her father. If she was to fight the morbid strain in herself, which was her father’s gift, then how could she admire Solly wholeheartedly, as she wished to do? On the whole, she was easier with Joss, who was short and compact and robust, with humorous direct eyes and a sarcastic practicality, as if he were always saying, ‘Well, and what’s the fuss about, it’s all quite easy!’

      Solly took the book, without any sign of the hostility of the previous meeting; and no sooner had she sat down than Mrs Cohen came in with a tray. The older Cohens were strictly kosher, and the sons were lax. For years Mrs Cohen had been scrupulously sorting her crockery and cutlery, washing them herself, forbidding the native servants even to touch them; but at the table, Joss and Solly, usually deep in bitter argument, would reach for the wrong knives, and stack the plates carelessly about them, while Mrs Cohen scolded and pleaded. By now she had learned to say, ‘I’m too old to learn new ways,’ and with a sorrowful tolerance, she continued to wash and sort her things, but made no comment if her sons misused them. It was a compromise in which Martha could see no sense at all; if her own parents had been guilty of unreasonable behaviour, how irritably would she have argued with them! In Mrs Cohen, however, it merely struck her as charming. The mere sight of the plump old Jewish woman, with her fine, dark sad eyes, made her feel welcomed; and she at once accepted, enthusiastically, when she was bidden, ‘You’ll stay eat with us?’ In a few moments they were talking as if she had never absented herself from the family for two years.

      Solly was leaving shortly to study medicine in Cape Town, and Mrs Cohen was urging him to live with her cousin there. But Solly wanted independence, a life of his own; and since this vital point was never mentioned, the argument went on endlessly about buses and transport and inconvenience; and it reminded Martha of her own home, where this kind of surface bickering was equally futile.

      Joss came in, gave Martha an ambiguous look, and forbore to comment, in a way which made her voice rise to a jaunty brightness. He was intending to study law, but was staying at home with his parents until they could move into town, which they planned to do. The store was to be sold. This solicitude for his father and mother only struck Martha as a kind of betrayal to the older generation; she found it extraordinary; even more strange that he sided with his parents against Solly’s desire to fend for himself. He sounded more like an uncle than a brother.

      They sat down to table, and Mrs Cohen asked, ‘And when are you going back to your studies, Matty? Your mother must be worrying herself.’

      Martha replied awkwardly, ‘My eyes aren’t better yet,’ and lowered them towards her plate. When she raised them, she found Joss critically studying her in the way she had feared.

      ‘What’s wrong with them?’ he inquired bluntly. She gave an uncomfortable movement with her shoulders, as if to say, ‘Leave me alone.’ But in this family everything was discussed; and Joss said to Solly, ‘Her eyes are strained, well, well!’

      Solly refused, this time, to make the alliance against her, and asked, ‘What’s it got to do with you?’

      Joss raised his brows, and said, ‘Me? Nothing. She used to be such a bright girl. Pity.’

      ‘Leave her alone,’ said Mr Cohen unexpectedly, ‘she’s all right.’ Martha felt a rush of warmth towards him, which as usual she could not express, but dropped her eyes, and even looked sullen.

      ‘Of course she’s all right,’ said Joss carelessly; but there was a note in his voice …

      Martha looked quickly at him, and at once interpreted his agreement as a reference to her own appearance; and this she half resented, and half welcomed. Since her incarnation as a fairly successful imitation of a magazine beauty, the Cohen boys were the first males she had tried herself against. But she had never said to herself that her careful make-up and the new green linen had been put on to impress them, and therefore she felt it as a false note that either should mention or even react to her appearance – a confusion of feeling which left her silent, and rather sulky. After the meal, Mr Cohen went back to the shop, and Mrs Cohen to her kitchen, with the mis-handled crockery; and the three young people were left together. Conversation was difficult, and soon Martha felt she should leave. But she lingered; and it was Solly who at last went out; and at once she and Joss were at ease, as she and Solly were, by themselves: it was three of them together that set up the jarring currents.

      At once Joss inquired, ‘And now what’s all this about not going to university?’

      The direct question, which she had never put to herself, left her silent; but he persisted. ‘You can’t hang about this dorp doing nothing.’

      She said, ‘But you are at home, too.’

      His look said that she must see this was no analogy; he tried not to sound bitter as he remarked, ‘My parents have no friends in the village. It’ll be different when they’re in town.’

      Again she was silent, feeling apologetic for herself and for her parents. She got up and went to the bookcase, to see what was new in it; but this represented the family: the Jewish classics, books on Palestine, Poland and Russia; this was the source of the rapidly diverging streams which were Solly and Joss; and these new books would be in their shared bedroom. Into this room it was impossible to go, since she was now Miss Quest; and the glance she directed towards Joss was troubled.

      He had been watching her, and, at the glance, he lifted from a table beside him a large pile of books and handed them to her. Again she felt that flush of delight; for he must have prepared them for her. He remarked calmly, ‘Take these, good for your soul.’

      She looked at the titles, and was at once indignant, as a child might be if a teacher urged her to study subjects she had mastered the year before.

      ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked sardonically. ‘Not up your street?’

      She said, ‘But I know all this.’ At once she wished the words unsaid, for they sounded conceited. What she meant was, ‘I agree with all the things these books represent.’

      He studied her, gave an incredulous grimace, and then fired the following questions at her, in the offhand indifferent manner of the initiate to a breed utterly without the law:

      ‘You repudiate the colour bar?’

      ‘But of course.’

      ‘Of course,’ he said sardonically. And then: ‘You dislike racial prejudice in all its form, including anti-Semitism?’

      ‘Naturally’ – this with a touch of impatience.

      ‘You are an atheist?’

      ‘You know quite well that I am.’

      ‘You believe in socialism?’

      ‘That goes without saying,’ she concluded fervently; and suddenly began to laugh, from that sense of the absurd which it seemed must be her downfall as a serious person. For Joss was frowning at the laugh, and apparently could see nothing ridiculous in a nineteen-year-old Jewish boy, sprung from an orthodox Jewish family, and an adolescent British girl, if possible even more conventionally bred, agreeing to these simple axioms in the back room of a veld store in a village filled with СКАЧАТЬ