The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘What for? Why don’t you live in the country. You can live there like a human being.’

      ‘Joanna can lend you some money, Martha. A fiver?’

      ‘Yes,’ said Joanna. ‘But if I were you I’d get on to the first train out of London.’

      ‘But you look all in. Man – why don’t you lie down on the bed and sleep a little. Joanna and I can go out for some supper – Joanna?’

      ‘I’ve got to go,’ said Joanna, sipping her thick black coffee and watching Martha.

      Martha thought: neither of them heard what I said. Joanna dislikes Jack now because she’s been subjected to my being hysterical, and Jack is feeling: Martha’s upset.

      Jack now lowered himself to the floor. First he put his cup down on it, and then felt the floor, as it were greeted earth: the way an African villager might touch the earth with one hand, assessing it, before squatting down. Jack squatted, his hand flat on the floor beside him. Martha thought: If he and I were alone, we would make love, and what I said, what I felt, would be answered with how he made love. This seemed to her an extraordinary discovery.

      ‘What sort of work do you want?’ said Joanna.

      ‘It’s not the work as such I care about. But I do know exactly what I want.’ For she did. In the last few minutes, something had happened, a balance had shifted. She knew.

      ‘I want,’ said Martha, ‘to live in such a way that I don’t just – turn into a hypnotized animal.’

      Jack, smiling with affectionate hope that he would soon know what Martha was so excited about, kept his palm flat on the floor – earth. But Joanna was saying with abrupt hostility: ‘Oh no. I had quite enough of all that during the war.’

      ‘What do you mean?’ asked Jack, turning the antennae of his sensitivity towards Joanna.

      ‘I know what I mean. And I’ve had enough of it. I simply won’t have any more,’ said Joanna.

      ‘It was on the boat. I understood on the boat,’ said Martha.

      ‘Martha didn’t like the trip over,’ Jack explained to Joanna. ‘But all the same, Martha, it must have been all right, just sitting there with your girl friend and watching everyone. When I came back as a passenger it was the same …’ Now he was talking like a host, soothing Martha’s smarts away. ‘But I spent all my time in the gym. I wasn’t going to mix myself up.’

      ‘Oh, but I did, I did, and that’s the point.’

      ‘You said you sat with that sick girl and watched – it’s always awful, a lot of people crammed together, just animals.’

      ‘No.’ Martha was in the grip of a necessity to explain, even to claim an ally in Joanna, and in the face of Joanna’s hostile negation of her, Martha’s, vital discovery. ‘Before I left … home? I used to dream about the sea. All the time. It was an obsession. When I got off the train at Cape Town, I thought, the sea, but we were put straight on to the boat, and the sea was harbour water full of ships.

      And the boat – I swear everything was designed to make you forget the sea was anywhere near. And if you stood at night on the deck and looked at it, or walked around the deck, someone would say, Moon-gazing! Or: I’ve got to get my weight down too. You know … hundreds of people, some of them had been waiting the whole war for this trip. There was this girl. She was sick. Dying I think. A blood disease. She was a pale thin girl – sickly. We teamed up. But she didn’t accept me. I was healthy, you see. I kept catching her eye on me, sceptical and hostile – like you sometimes, Joanna.’ ‘I wasn’t aware of it.’

      ‘Yes. Yes. Where was I, yes. We two were a challenge to the men, not joining in. She thought that’s why I was doing it. Well, and perhaps – or put it around the other way, it was that that dragged me back in again, so perhaps she was right. In a way. But all the time she was polite, and rather cynical, watching to see how long I’d stick it out with her, instead of joining with the others.’

      Joanna said: ‘You should have locked yourself in your cabin.’ She said it fierce and angry.

      ‘I was sharing a cabin with four others. Not everyone can afford private cabins – oh damn it, that’s childish.’

      ‘Yes it is,’ said Joanna.

      ‘I know how Martha feels,’ said Jack. ‘There’s been times in my life I could have killed you for your money. And that’s the truth. There were times in Port Elizabeth I used to look at the rich tourists and I tell you, if I could have killed you safely I would.’

      ‘But I wasn’t there,’ said Joanna, almost amused.

      ‘On that boat I used to think that for millions of people I was a rich person. All over Africa, there are people who know that a trip on a passenger boat is heaven – always beyond them. Imagine that. Because I’d only been on the boat a couple of days and I realized that really everyone was hating it. I used to wake early and watch the other three women wake up – lying half asleep, not wanting to wake up, then groaning awake and reaching for cigarettes. Bodies on bunks, wishing they could sleep all day, but the day had started. The whole ship full of groaning people not really wanting to get up, and shaved and washed and dressed. And the holiday clothes. The women had spent months or fortunes on those clothes, just for that trip. Then breakfast. Everyone eating enormous meaty breakfasts, making jokes about greed. They didn’t want to eat it, but they had to, because it was there and they had paid for it. The stewards running around after us like a lot of nursemaids, and people making jokes, you know, about the stewards earning so little. The one thing South Africans, all of us from down there, understand – it’s making jokes defensively and throwing money at people. After breakfast, people making jokes as they went down to the lavatories. And an hour later, around came the stewards with soup. And everyone had soup. Then the real drinking started: at last they could begin to drug themselves. They were knocked over the head already by all that food, but now the alcohol. And then lunch: two hours of food, everyone eating and eating and drinking. And then down to sleep. Thank God they could get rid of two hours of being alive in sleep. But some of them were running around in the sun playing games and making jokes about keeping their weight down. And then tea. People coming up from their bunks in different clothes. Tea and masses of cakes. And then dark came and the sexing up and the drinking. All over the boat, people sexing it up and not liking their partners much because what they were doing didn’t come up to the months and months of fantasies about the trip. And music coming out of every pore of the ship. Everyone on the boat but the crew drugged with food and drink and sex. And then bed. But going to bed very fast, either because you were sexing it up with someone or because you were a bit drunk. Back to the pyjamas and the nightdresses. Back to oblivion – thank God.’

      ‘Well?’ said Joanna, in a fine, steady anger. Her eyes shone, her cheeks glowed very pink.

      ‘I spent my time in the gym,’ said Jack.

      ‘Yes. But it was like a – I can’t explain. Everything was just like ordinary life, only more so. It was a nightmare, sitting with that girl. Her name was Lily Maxwell and she came from one of the mining suburbs outside Johannesburg. I swear we were the only two people among the passengers who weren’t – hypnotized. We sat and watched. But for me, it was a new feeling, and for her – she had lived with it for a long time. She was dying. I think so, anyway. She was sitting looking at living people. She was quite alone, all the time, you see. And I was with her, but she was waiting for me to crack. Cynically. She knew I would. She СКАЧАТЬ