The Four-Gated City. Doris Lessing

The churlish gracelessness that was the spirit of the time spoke through him as he said: ‘Well, if you don’t want the flat, there are plenty that do. You do realize your deposit isn’t returnable?’

      Life frayed into a series of little copings-with; dealings-with; details, details, journalists; newspapers; telephone calls; threatening letters.

      Paul had to be looked after, Francis had to be told – something. What?

      One thing became clear at once. Mark was going to be isolated. By refusing to condemn his brother, or inform, or to ‘co-operate’ with the police – very insistent they were that he should – he was tarred with Colin – a traitor.

      Margaret rang up. Having inquired about Paul she then started talking about the flat downstairs. Mark said his mother must have become unhinged by the crisis. She wanted Mrs Ashe, the widow from India, to live in the flat. She wanted this, apparently, so much, that she was prepared to bring Mrs Ashe herself, and settle her in. She went on ringing up about Mrs Ashe and the basement, until Mark lost his temper.

      She then wrote a letter about Mrs Ashe. It was an extraordinary letter, entreaty, threat, apology – Martha was ready to agree that Margaret was temporarily off balance. But they did not have time to worry about Margaret.

      Mark said: ‘I think it’s going to be a bad time.’

      It was already a bad time, all muddle and misery and suspicion and doubt.

       Part Two

      However, the Man Without Qualities was now thinking. From this the conclusion may be drawn that it was at least partly not a personal matter. What then was it? The world going in and out, aspects of the world falling into shape inside a head … Nothing in the least important had occurred to him. After he had been dealing with water by way of example, nothing else occurred to him but that water is something three times as great as land, even if one takes into account only what everyone recognizes as water – rivers, seas, lakes, and springs. It was long believed to be akin to air. The great Newton believed this, and most of his ideas are nevertheless still quite up to date. In the Greek view the world and life originated from water. It was a god, Okeanos. Later water-sprites, elves, mermaids and nymphs were invented. Temples and oracles were founded on its banks and shores. But were not the cathedrals of Hildesheim, Paderborn and Bremen built over springs – and here these cathedrals were to this day. And was not water still used for baptism? And were there not water-lovers and apostles of nature-cures whose souls had a touch of peculiarly sepulchral health? So there was somewhere in the world something like a blurred spot, or grass trodden flat. And of course the Man Without Qualities also had modern knowledge somewhere in his consciousness, whether he happened to be thinking about it or not. And there now was water, a colourless liquid, blue only in dense layers, odourless and tasteless (as one had repeated in school so often that one could never forget it again) although physiologically it also included bacteria, vegetable matter, air, iron, calcium sulphate and calcium bicarbonate, and this archetype of all liquids was, physically speaking, fundamentally not a liquid at all but, according to circumstances, a solid body, a liquid or a gas. Ultimately the whole thing dissolved into systems of formulae that were all somehow connected with each other, and in the whole wide world there were only a few dozen people who thought alike about even as simple a thing as water; all the rest talked about it in languages that were at home somewhere between today and several thousands of years ago. So it must be said that if a man just starts thinking a bit he gets into what one might call pretty disorderly company.

      ROBERT MUSIL; The Man Without Qualities

       Chapter One

      A bad time is announced by an event. A woman gasses herself because her will to survive is exhausted. This event is different in quality from previous events. It is surprising. But it should not have been surprising. It could have been foreseen. One’s imagination had been working at half-pressure … Martha had been here before.

      When a bad time starts, it is as if on a smooth green lawn a toad appears; as if a clear river suddenly floats down a corpse. Before the appearance of the toad, the corpse, one could not imagine the lawn as anything but delightful, the river as fresh. But lawns can always admit toads, and rivers corpses … Martha had been here before.

      When Sally said she was going back to her flat for a day or so, leaving her little boy, that was so unlike her, so improbable, that if Martha had been alert, she would have – but what? Called the police? The doctors? There was no set of words which Martha could imagine herself using. ‘Sally, you’re not thinking of …? Oh, please don’t! – You’ll feel better in a few days … Lie down for a little and we’ll get you a sedative. Sally, you’re a coward! How can you think of … And what about your little boy, he won’t be able to live without you –’

      (People are infinitely expendable, feel themselves to be, or feel themselves to be now.)

       ‘Sally, we’ll lock you up until you come to your senses!’

      Sally had gone back to her flat to become Sarah. What had she really felt when the family which had taken her in, had done so only under the passport of Sally? ‘They’ve always called me Sally,’ she said, once, exchanging with Martha a look which the family itself could not be expected to understand. If she had refused to be Sally, had insisted on remaining Sarah, would she then have had to make the journey alone to her empty home where she could turn on the gas?

      Before that double event; Colin’s departure, Sally’s death, the quality of life was different; seemed almost, looking back on it as – no, not happiness. Happiness, unhappiness, these were not words that could be used anywhere near this family, every member of which held the potentiality for – disaster? But that had been true before the double event. How then had it been possible for Martha to feel that ‘the holding operation’ could in fact hold off what had been so loudly heralded? Something had been bound to give. Yet to look back from the day after Sally’s death, to even the day before it, it was as if a bomb had gone off.

      So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality into which warlike events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains. Events and the life in which they are embedded have the same quality. But since it is not possible that events are not part of the life they occur in – it is not possible that a bomb should explode into a texture of life foreign to it – all that means is that one has not understood, one has not been watching.

      And, the bomb having exploded, the heralding (or so it seems) event having occurred, even then the mind tries to isolate, to make harmless. It was Martha’s concern, and Mark’s, to try and minimize the double event as if they felt it to be an isolated thing, without results, as it had had no causes. Or at least, that was what it seemed they felt; for with the little boy Paul playing upstairs, his mother dead, his father gone, they were discussing how to soften and make harmless. ‘How to break it’ – as Mark put it.

      Paul was going to be six next week. He had plans for his birthday. His mother had talked of a party. Some sort of a party there must be.

      ‘Is my mother going to be here?’ asked Paul.

      ‘I expect so,’ said Mark – and turned away from the child’s acutely-fearful black eyes. Paul had never been separated from his mother, not even for one day. And now his uncle said: ‘I expect so.’ Paul became very gay, manic. He rushed all over the big house, bouncing on the beds, teasing the cat, standing to look out of all the windows, one after another. Through one of them, he would see his mother come. He turned, saw Mark and Martha watching him; and pulled the heavy curtains so that he was hidden from them. He took the black cat