The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ novel’s attitude was as if humanity (the earth and its people) were a variety of living organism, a body, and war was a boil breaking out on it – and could be expected to break out. It was written out of the attitude, implicit, not described, that war was bound to happen, that nothing could have prevented it, and that forms of war would erupt again. This was not at all the atmosphere of the late ‘forties when governments, politicians and the Press talked, not only as if war, the next one, was preventable, but as if the actions they were engaged in would prevent it.

      But Mark saw the activities of Press, politicians, and generals as the dust games of children. As he had thrown away in a couple of paragraphs, as being too obvious to need more, throughout the ‘thirties the coming war had been organized, planned for, expected; the nations had intrigued and aligned and deployed and bargained – but the salient fact of that war, the one which had shaped it, no one had foreseen, which was that Bolshevik Russia would be fighting alongside Britain and America. This although the powerful energies of the most powerful groups in our nation and in America, had been working in the opposite direction. No need even to develop that: it was so obvious. It had not mattered what they planned, since human beings were the prisoners of events. Yet, the moment the war had worked its way to its end, as a disease runs its course, governments, generals, newspapers, again started making plans, authoritative statements, and prognostications, proving that they were incapable of seeing the most obvious fact when it was in front of their noses. They were not to be taken seriously.

      And Mark could not see that this attitude, at that time, was likely to offend. For him it was all self-evident. And Martha, explaining, came to represent that naïvety, that inability to draw conclusions from obvious facts, that he found so hard to understand.

      Meanwhile, Martha was making a discovery – unexpected. ‘Matty’ was being summoned back into existence. ‘Matty’ had not been in evidence in this house, she had made no appearance. Another person had: and it took time to see that this was merely an aspect of the hydra, Matty. This was – at first Martha christened her ‘The Communist’ but had to widen it to ‘The Defender’, since it was a mask shared, for instance, by Marjorie’s sister Phoebe. This person got shrill, exclamatory, didactic, hectoring, and went off at a word into long speeches. ‘I’m not interested in speeches!’ Mark had said, early on in his relationship with this orator. Martha had not been aware she made speeches. Between the clumsy self-denigrating clown, and ‘The Defender’ was a link: Martha was beginning to see it. She had plenty of opportunity for study of it, since the novel stung ‘The Defender’ into such lively existence.

      At Mark’s statement that in a hundred years’ time (if anyone was alive in a hundred years’ time), people would not describe the Second World War as people did in 1950 – the year that had just started, Martha said: ‘Well, of course not.’

      But they would not judge it as a victory of good over evil, they would not see Hitler’s armies as worse than those they fought. They would say, only: war expressed itself thus and thus in the years between 1939 and 1945. Moralizing was never more than the justification of willing belligerents.

      But here Martha suffered. Mark had, during the last year of the war, seen one of the concentration camps opened – just as Thomas’s friend had done, writing Thomas a letter which had been the cause of Thomas’s subsequent development. Or so it had seemed.

      ‘What am I supposed to say?’ Mark inquired. ‘Those bloody Huns? Or what?’

      ‘Well what do you say?’ demanded Martha.

      ‘If I go on and say something about Russia, we’ll swap atrocities. I can’t stand that conversation! You say, gas chambers. I say, collectivization of the peasants. You say, master race. I say, Purges. You say, Freedom. I say, Freedom. What is the point?’

      At which ‘The Defender’, night after night, had argued, quoted figures, emphasized, while he sat listening. ‘So there’s no progress, it doesn’t matter what attitudes one takes up, one might just as well have fought for Hitler?’

      ‘If one is going to draw up a balance sheet of atrocities – of course.’ ‘What then?’ ‘That’s all.’

      ‘Ah no. I’ve been here before. When? I must have been twenty – not much more. Nothing mattered, a tale told by an idiot. That was a man called Mr Maynard.’

      ‘We’ve got some second cousins called Maynard. Was he from Wiltshire?’

      ‘I don’t know. But I do know fighting him was the best thing I ever did.’

      ‘Fighting,’ said Mark with distaste.

      ‘Well then, if that’s true why bother about Colin?’

      But here it was Mark turned away, fiddled with drawers, pencils, the lamp-switch, became angry, bitter. Watching her own enemy personalities at war, she was easier able to see his.

      One, that cool observer who was able to see events as they might appear a hundred years from now. Always? Mark had gone through that war able to see it like that? Hmmm – possibly.

      And, at the mention of his brother, a cold angry man, the brother to ‘The Defender’.

      ‘Progress,’ muttered this angry man – hardly to Martha, more to himself, a conversation with himself possibly, of the kind one has alone, when other people are asleep. ‘That’s not my thing. I don’t care about it. If things do improve, then it’s not because one nation fancies itself better or more humane than another. That’s a farce – it always was. The way people see themselves – that’s for children. Look what’s going on now! The Cold War! What a phrase. What kind of thinking is it? The tune changes, from one year to the next – well why not, it always does – but am I expected to take it seriously? Is Colin? Colin’s stand is that he was an ally of the Soviet Union for years and during all that time he was fighting to share scientific information – they all were, the scientists ‘Because the governments of this country and America were doing everything not to share it, because they hated being allied to Russia.’

      ‘Granted. Of course. But the same went for the Russians. But Colin is a scientist. He’s not a politico. He stands for the internationalism of science. So, the tune has changed and suddenly he’s a traitor. Well, I stand by my brother.’

      ‘Then it’s childish to be upset about words like traitor.’

      ‘Upset! I’m scared stiff. I never thought that would be possible – in this country. As far as I can see Colin isn’t scared. As far as he is concerned it’s all perfectly clear – they are in the right and that’s that.’ By ‘they’ Mark meant Colin and his superior, the man now awaiting trial. ‘They say America wants to start a war with Russia. America wants to destroy Russia. Before Russia gets the atom bomb. Well, of course America wants to destroy Russia, you’ve only to read the newspapers. Colin says, it’s about communism. I think, nations need to go to war. If it wasn’t Russia it would be another country. But if they were able to supply Russia with information about the bomb, so they could make one, Russia would get equal with America, and then America would be afraid to start a war.’

      ‘Is that what Colin says he’s been doing? Because if so you should keep quiet about it.’

      ‘No, it’s not what he says he has done. It’s what he says is logical. It’s his point of view. He’s entitled to it.’

      ‘All the same, you’d better keep quiet.’

      ‘Why? This is my country. Or I used to СКАЧАТЬ