The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ don’t want to settle down. I can feel resignation creeping up already. And this house. It ought to be painted again. I simply don’t want to start—painting and putting up curtains. Why is everything such hard work here? It isn’t in Europe. One sleeps a couple of hours a night and is happy. Here, one sleeps and makes an effort…’

      ‘Yes, yes,’ said Anna laughing. ‘Well, I’m sure we’ll be making the same speech to each other for years, every time we come back from somewhere.’

      The house shook as a train went past, close, underground. ‘And you ought to do something about that ceiling,’ added Anna, looking up at it. The house, laid open by a bomb towards the end of the war, had stood empty for two years, receiving wind and rain through all its rooms. It had been patched up again. When the trains passed, grains of substance could be heard trickling behind clean surfaces of paint. The ceiling had a crack across it.

      ‘Oh hell,’ said Molly. ‘I can’t face it. But I suppose I shall. Why is it, it’s only in this country everybody one knows seems to put a good face on things, everyone is bravely carrying a burden.’ Tears were smudging her eyes, and she blinked them away and turned back to her oven.

      ‘Because this is the country we know. The other countries are the places we don’t think in.’

      ‘That’s not altogether true and you know it. Well. You’d better be quick with the news. I’m going to serve lunch in a minute.’ It was now Molly’s turn to exude an atmosphere of being alone, of not having been met. Her hands, pathetic and stoical, reproached Anna. As for Anna she was thinking: If I join in now, in a what’s-wrong-with-men session, then I won’t go home, I’ll stay for lunch and all afternoon, and Molly and I will feel warm and friendly, all barriers gone. And when we part, there’ll be a sudden resentment, a rancour—because after all, our real loyalties are always to men, and not to women…Anna nearly sat down, ready to submerge herself. But she did not. She thought: I want to be done with it all, finished with the men vs women business, all the complaints and the reproaches and the betrayals. Besides, it’s dishonest. We’ve chosen to live a certain way, knowing the penalties, or if we didn’t we know now, so why whine and complain…and besides, if I’m not careful, Molly and I will descend into a kind of twin old-maidhood, where we sit around saying to each other, Do you remember how that man, what-was-his-name said that insensitive thing, it must have been in 1947…

      ‘Well, let’s have it,’ said Molly, very brisk, to Anna, who had stood silent for some time now.

      ‘Yes. You don’t want to hear about the comrades, I take it?’

      ‘In France and Italy the intellectuals talk day and night about the Twentieth Congress and Hungary, the perspectives of and the lessons of and mistakes to be learned from.’

      ‘In that case, since it’s the same here, though thank God people are getting bored with it, I’ll skip it.’

      ‘Good.’

      ‘But I think I’ll mention three of the comrades—oh, only in passing,’ said Anna hastily, as Molly grimaced. ‘Three fine sons of the working class and trade union officials.’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Tom Winters, Len Colhoun, Bob Fowler.’

      ‘I knew them, of course,’ said Molly quickly. She always knew, or had known, everyone. ‘Well?’

      ‘Just before the Congress, when there was all that disquiet in our circles, what with this plot and that, and Yugoslavia, etc., it so happened that I met them, in connection with what they naturally referred to as cultural matters. With condescension. At that time I and similar types were spending a lot of time fighting inside the Party—a naive lot we were, trying to persuade people it was much better to admit that things stank in Russia than to deny it. Well. I suddenly got letters from all three of them—independently, of course, they didn’t know, any of them, the others had written. Very stern, they were. Any rumours to the effect that there was any dirty work in Moscow or ever had been or that Father Stalin had ever put a foot wrong were spread by enemies of the working class.’

      Molly laughed, but from politeness; the nerve had been touched too often.

      ‘No, that isn’t the point. The point is, these letters were interchangeable. Discounting handwriting of course.’

      ‘Quite a lot to discount.’

      ‘To amuse myself, I typed out all three letters—long ones at that, and put them side by side. In phraseology, style, tone, they were identical. You couldn’t possibly have said, this letter was written by Tom, or that one by Len.’

      Molly said resentfully: ‘For that notebook or whatever it is you and Tommy have a secret about?’

      ‘No. To find out something. But I haven’t finished.’

      ‘Oh all right, I won’t press you.’

      ‘Then came the Congress and almost instantly I got three more letters. All hysterical, self-accusatory, full of guilt, self-abasement.’

      ‘You typed them out again?’

      ‘Yes. And put them side by side. They might have been written by the same person. Don’t you see?’

      ‘No. What are you trying to prove?’

      ‘Well, surely the thought follows—what stereotype am I? What anonymous whole am I part of?’

      ‘Does it? It doesn’t for me.’ Molly was saying: If you choose to make a nonentity of yourself, do, but don’t stick that label on me.

      Disappointed, because this discovery and the ideas that had followed from it were what she had been most looking forward to talking over with Molly, Anna said quickly: ‘Oh all right. It struck me as interesting. And that’s about all—there was a period of what may be described as confusion, and some left the Party. Or everyone left the Party—meaning those whose psychological time was up. Then suddenly, and in the same week—and that’s what’s so extraordinary, Molly…’ In spite of herself, Anna was appealing to Molly again—‘In the same week, I got three more letters. Purged of doubt, stern and full of purpose. It was the week after Hungary. In other words, the whip had been cracked, and the waverers jumped to heel. Those three letters were identical too—I’m not talking about the actual words, of course,’ said Anna impatiently, as Molly looked deliberately sceptical. ‘I mean the style, the phrases, the way words were linked together. And those intermediary letters, the hysterical self-abasing letters, might never have been written. In fact I’m sure Tom, Len and Bob have suppressed the memory that they ever wrote them.’

      ‘But you kept them?’

      ‘Well I’m not going to use them in a court of law, if that’s what you mean.’

      Molly stood slowly wiping glasses on a pink and mauve striped cloth, and holding each one up to the light before setting it down. ‘Well I’m so sick of it all I don’t think I want ever to bother with it again.’

      ‘But Molly, we can’t do that, surely? We were communists or near-communists or whatever you like for years and years. We can’t suddenly say, Oh well, I’m bored.’

      ‘The funny thing is I’m bored. Yes, I know it’s odd. Two or three years ago I felt guilty if I didn’t spend all my free time organizing something or other. Now I don’t feel СКАЧАТЬ