The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ because, ‘He isn’t the real thing. He likes Indians and goes in for humanity and Buddhism—I ask you!’ He was drinking himself to death, so Jimmy said; but I think this was put in simply to round off the picture; because he would also show us poems written by the old man; and he was probably secretly very proud of him. He was an only child, born when his mother, whom he adored, was already over forty. Jimmy was the same physical type as Paul—at first glance. A hundred yards off, they were recognizably of the same human tribe, hardly to be distinguished. But close to, their resemblances emphasized their total difference of fibre. Jimmy’s flesh was heavy, almost lumpish; he carried himself heavily; his hands were large but podgy, like a child’s hands. His features, of the same carved clear whiteness as Paul’s, with the same blue eyes, lacked grace, and his gaze was pathetic and full of a childish appeal to be liked. His hair was pale and lightless, and fell about in greasy strands. His face, as he took pleasure in pointing out, was a decadent face. It was over-full, over-ripe, almost flaccid. He was not ambitious, and wanted no more than to be a Professor of History at some university, which he has since become. Unlike the others he was truly homosexual, though he wished he wasn’t. He was in love with Paul whom he despised and who was irritated by him. Much later he married a woman fifteen years older than himself. Last year he wrote me a letter in which he described this marriage—it was obviously written when he was drunk and posted, so to speak, into the past. They slept together, with little pleasure on her side, and none on his—‘though I did put my mind to it, I do assure you!’—for a few weeks. Then she got pregnant, and that was the end of sex between them. In short, a not uncommon English marriage. His wife, it appears, has no suspicion he is not a normal man. He is quite dependent on her and if she died I suspect he’d commit suicide, or retreat into drink.

      Ted Brown was the most original. A boy from a large working-class family, he had won scholarships all his life and finally to Oxford. He was the only genuine socialist of the three—I mean socialist in his instincts, in his nature. Willi used to complain that Ted behaved ‘as if he lived in a full-blown communist society or as if he’d been brought up in some damned kibbutz’. Ted would look at him, genuinely puzzled: he could not understand why that should be a criticism. Then he’d shrug and choose to forget Willi in some new enthusiasm. He was a lively, slight, lank, black-shock-haired, hazel-eyed, energetic young man, always without money—he gave it away; with his clothes in a mess—he had no time for them, or gave them away; without time for himself, for he gave that away to everyone. He had a passion for music, about which he had taught himself a good deal, for literature, and for his fellow human beings whom he saw as victims with himself of a gigantic and almost cosmic conspiracy to deprive them of their true natures. Which of course were beautiful, generous, and good. He sometimes said he preferred being homosexual. This meant that he had a succession of protégés. The truth was he couldn’t stand that other young men of his class hadn’t had his advantages. He would seek out some bright mechanic in the camp; or, at the public meetings in town some youth who seemed to be there out of real interest and not because he had nothing better to do; seize hold of him, make him read, instruct him in music, explain to him that life was a glorious adventure, and come to us exclaiming that ‘when one finds a butterfly under a stone one has to rescue it’. He was always rushing into the hotel with some raw, bemused young man, demanding that we should jointly ‘take him on’. We always did. During the two years he was in the Colony, Ted rescued a dozen butterflies, all of whom had an amused and affectionate respect for him. He was collectively in love with them. He changed their lives. After the war, in England, he kept in touch, made them study, directed them into the Labour Party—by then he was no longer a communist; and saw to it that they did not, as he put it, hibernate. He married, very romantically and against every kind of opposition, a German girl, has three children, and teaches English at a school for backward children. He was a competent pilot, but was typical of him that he deliberately made himself fail the final tests, because he was at the time wrestling with the soul of a young ox from Manchester who refused to be musical and insisted on preferring football to literature. Ted explained to us that it was more important to rescue a human being from darkness than to add another pilot to the war effort, fascism or no fascism. So he stayed on the ground, was sent back to England, and served in the coal-mines, which experience permanently affected his lungs. Ironically enough the young man for whom he did this was his only failure.

      When ejected from the coal-mine as unfit, he somehow got himself to Germany in the role of an educator. His German wife is very good for him, being practical and competent and a good nurse. Ted now needs looking after. He complains bitterly that the state of his lungs forces him to ‘hibernate’.

      Even Ted was affected by the prevailing mood. He could not endure the wranglings and bitterness inside the Party group, and the split when it came was the last straw. ‘I’m obviously not a communist,’ he said to Willi, sombrely, with bitterness, ‘because all this hair-splitting seems to me nonsense.’ ‘No, you obviously are not,’ replied Willi, ‘I was wondering how long it’d take you to see it.’ Above all Ted was disquieted because the logic of the previous polemics had led him into the sub-group led by Willi. He thought the leader of the other group, a corporal from an aircamp and an old Marxist, ‘a dried-up bureaucrat’, but he preferred him as a human being to Willi. Yet he was committed to Willi…which leads me to something I’ve not before thought about. I keep on writing the word group. Which is a collection of people. Which one associates with a collective relationship—and it is true we met day after day for months, for hours every day. But looking back, looking back to really remember what happened, it is not at all like that. For instance I don’t think Ted and Willi ever really talked together—they jibed at each other occasionally. No, there was one time they made contact and that was in a flaming quarrel. It was on the verandah of the hotel at Mashopi, and while I can’t remember what the quarrel was about I remember Ted shouting: ‘You’re the sort of man who’d shoot fifty people before breakfast and then eat six courses. No, you’d order someone else to shoot them, that’s what you’d do.’ And Willi in reply: ‘Yes, if it were necessary I would…’ And so on, for an hour or more, and all this while the ox-wagons rolled by in the white dust of the sandveld, the trains rocked by on the way from the Indian Ocean to the capital, while the farmers drank in their khaki in the bar, and groups of Africans, in search of work, hung about under the jacaranda tree, hour after hour, waiting patiently for the moment when Mr Boothby, the big boss, would have time to come and interview them.

      And the others? Paul and Willi together, talking about history—interminably. Jimmy in argument with Paul—usually about history; but in fact what Jimmy was saying, over and over again, was that Paul was frivolous, cold, heartless. But Paul and Ted had no connection with each other, they did not even quarrel. As for me, I played the role of ‘the leader’s girl-friend’—a sort of cement, an ancient role indeed. And of course if any of my relationships with these people had had any depth, I would have been disruptive and not conciliatory. And there was Maryrose, who was the unattainable beauty. And so what was this group? What held it together? I think it was the implacable dislike and fascination for each other of Paul and Willi, who were so much alike, and bound to such different futures.

      Yes. Willi, with his guttural, so-correct English, and Paul, with his exquisite, cool enunciation—the two voices, hour after hour, at night, in the Gainsborough hotel. That is what I remember most clearly of the group during the period before we went to Mashopi and everything changed.

      The Gainsborough hotel was really a boarding-house; a place people lived in for long stretches. The boarding-houses of the town were mostly converted private houses, more comfortable certainly, but uncomfortably genteel. I stayed in one for a week and left: the contrast between the raw Colonialism of the city, and the primness of the boarding-house full of English middle-class who might never have left England, was more than I could stand. The Gainsborough hotel was newly-built, a large, rattling, ugly place full of refugees, clerks, secretaries, and married people who couldn’t find a house or a flat; the town was jostling full because of the war, and rents were soaring.

      It was typical of Willi that he had not been in the hotel a week before he had special privileges, and this in spite of being a German, and technically an enemy СКАЧАТЬ