Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ quarrelled violently, and often. It is my belief and my experience that energetic and frequent sex breeds sudden storms of antagonism. Tolstoy wrote about this. So did D. H. Lawrence. Why should this be? We made love when we stopped the car in open and empty country, in dry ditches, in forests, in vineyards, in olive groves. And quarrelled. He was jealous. This was absurd, because I loved him. In a town in Murcia, where it was so hot we simply stopped for a whole day to sit in a cafe, in the shade if not the cool, he was convinced I was making eyes at a handsome Spaniard. This quarrel was so terrible that we went to a hotel for the night, because Jack, the doctor, said that our diet and lack of sleep was getting to us.

      We drove from Gibraltar up the costas, where there were no hotels, not one, only a few fishermen at Nerja, who cooked us fish on the beach. We slept on the sand, looking at the stars, listening to the waves. Nothing was built between Gibraltar and Barcelona then; except for the towns, there were only empty, long, wonderful beaches, which in a year or so would become hotel-loaded playgrounds. Near Valencia, a sign said, ‘Do Not Bathe Here – It Is Dangerous,’ but I went into the tall enticing waves, and one of them picked me up and smashed me onto the undersea sand, and I crawled out, my ears full of sand and grit. Jack took me to the local hospital, where the two doctors communicated in Latin, proving that it is a far from dead language.

      In high, windy Avila there were acres of wonderful brown jars and pots, standing on dry reeds. I bought the most beautiful jar I have ever owned, for a few pence.

      What struck me most then, and surprises me even now, is the contrast between the wild, savage, empty beauty of Spain and the stuffy stolidity of even the cheap hotels we could afford, between the poverty we saw everywhere and the churches loaded with gold and jewels, as if all the wealth of the peninsula had come to rest in them.

      We visited Germany, three times. The first was when I wanted to find Gottfried. Peter had gone the year before for a summer to visit his father. I had told Gottfried he must not have him do this unless he was sure he could keep it up. As usual he was contemptuous of my political acumen: of course he would be able to invite Peter whenever he liked. I said I wasn’t so sure; besides, Moidi Jokl said he was wrong. I turned out to be right. Germans who had spent the war abroad were suspect, and many vanished into Stalin’s camps. I was angry, partly for the ignoble reason that I had been insulted and patronized by Gottfried for years about politics but in fact had been more often right, and he wrong. I was angry because of Peter, who had had a wonderfully kind father who had apparently dropped him.

      Now I understand what happened. It was indeed a question of life and death. What I blame him for is for not smuggling out a little letter saying, I cannot afford to keep contact with the West; I might be killed for it. It would have been easy: there was a good deal of to-ing and fro-ing. Instead people would come back from some official trip to East Germany and say, I saw your handsome husband. He is a very important man. He sends you his love. ‘He is not my husband,’ I would say, ‘and it is Peter who needs his love.’ I hated East Berlin. For me it was like a distillation of everything bad about communism, but some comrades admired it. For years, right up to the time of the collapse of communism, they were saying, ‘East Germany has got it right. It is economically in advance of any other communist country. What a pity the revolution didn’t start in Germany.’

      Another trip was to Hamburg. Jack wanted to find a friend who had disappeared in the war. He failed. Hamburg had been badly bombed and was still full of ruins. It was February, dark, very cold, with a bitter wind coming off the North Sea. Jack said there was a trade-union festival, a traditional one; we should join in. In the gaps between buildings, among ruins, burned great bonfires, and around them leaped and staggered or swayed very drunk people, with bottles in their hands, singing or rather howling songs from the war and traditional workers’ songs. It was like Walpurgis Night. It was like Bosch. It was horrible. For years these scenes stayed in my mind, and then I returned to Hamburg after thirty years and told my publisher what I remembered, and he said, Impossible; nothing like that has ever happened here. You must be thinking of Berlin, or Munich.

      And indeed I saw the ruins in Berlin, miles of them, and I stood where the Brandenburg Gate had been. Much later, thirty years later, I went back and there was not a sign of ruins; you’d think the war had never happened. I met people who had been children just after the war in Berlin, and apart from being permanently hungry, what they remembered was playing in the bombed houses. They thought that was what a city was – streets sometimes whole, sometimes in ruins. Later they went to undamaged cities. One of these, who as a child had been half starved, had survived because his mother was working for the Americans; he saw a film with Orson Welles in it and said, ‘One day I’m going to eat as much as I like, and I’m going to be as fat as Orson Welles.’ And that indeed came to pass, and then he was in trouble with his doctor and had to go on a diet.

      I went on a trip with Jack to southern Germany. It is recorded in ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’. The mood in Germany was so bad then, so low, so angry. The experience depressed me, and so did writing the story. Some Germans have reproached me for writing it, but the point of the story is not Germany but Europe: it was all of us I was thinking of, Europe building itself up, knocking itself down, building, destroying, building…

      The nastiest of my recollections of Germany was of a woman coming up to me on a railway platform to complain that Germany had been divided. Her fatherland was cut in half. Did I know of this injustice? Was it fair? What had Germany done to be punished in this way? Other people came to join her, all assaulting me with voices full of the insincerity that goes with a consciously false position.

      Jack went to Germany partly out of political conviction. As a Marxist he refused to believe in national characteristics, national guilt, but this was the country that had murdered nearly all his family.

      I was full of conflict. I had been brought up on the First World War, and a good part of that was my father’s passionate identification with the ordinary German soldiers, who were victims of their stupid government, just like the Tommies. I had been married to a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. I had been brought up to believe that Hitler and the Nazis were a direct result of the Versailles Treaty and that if Germany had been treated with an intelligent generosity, there would have been no World War II. I believed – and still do – that the Second World War would have been prevented if we, Britain and France, had had the guts to stand up to Hitler early and had supported the anti-Nazi Germans, whom we consistently snubbed. Being in Germany then was so painful: I was divided, sorry for the Germans, and yet hearing German or seeing a sign in German still reminded me of the fear I felt in the war, though I believed this reaction to be stupid and irrational. There was a day, or rather a night, when, standing on a railway platform in Berlin and realizing that every person on it was a cripple from the War – legless men, armless men, eyeless men, and all drunk, in that particular way of being drunk in war or bad times, a bitter drunkenness – I said to myself, Enough, stop tormenting yourself: this is like voluntarily rubbing one’s nose in one’s own vomit. What am I doing this for? What good does it do to me – or the Germans? And I did not go back to Germany for decades. And then Germany was whole again, and that landscape of misery and destruction had vanished. Please God, for ever.

      And now I have to record what was probably the most neurotic act of my life. I decided to join the Communist Party. And this at a time when my ‘doubts’ had become something like a steady, private torment. Separate manifestations of the horror that the Soviet Union had become were discussed, briefly, in lowered voices – the equivalent of looking over one’s shoulder to see if anyone could hear. I do not remember one serious, sit-down, in-depth discussion about the implications of what we were hearing. Rather, sudden burstings into tears: ‘Oh, it’s so horrible.’ Sudden storms of accusation: ‘It’s just anti-Soviet propaganda anyway.’ Marital quarrels, even divorces.

      People complain that old Reds ‘try to justify themselves’. These are nearly all young people, for older ones understand exactly why it was natural to be a communist. To explain, to ‘bear witness’, is СКАЧАТЬ