Landlocked (27 page)

Sergeant Tressell would live out his own life in this city (unless it was suddenly bombed, perhaps by accident?—or engulfed by an earthquake) working in a well-ventilated
office from eight until four, dying at the age of sixty with thrombosis, leaving behind him a well-insured widow and two children. In Israel a British soldier would fall dead (if he had not already done so) in Sergeant Tressell’s place. Martha could see Thomas with a gun in his hand. When she understood how she argued with him, all day, half the night, she listened again to what he said, to what she said, and then she saw him holding a gun. She could see him, being just as careful as was necessary, no more, standing behind a window with the sun on its panes, waiting to shoot at soldiers who would soon pass in an open truck. Or perhaps he would stand, was standing, gun in hand, behind a rock by a road where a patrol would soon come.

‘But, Thomas, what’s the point of it?’

‘So, Martha,’ she heard him say, conversational rather than aggressive, as if he were conducting a discussion in the current affairs group: ‘So, you don’t believe in violence, is that it?’

Suppose one has loved a man or (however one wants to put it) been influenced by him, or (if you like) touched by him, but certainly in one’s deepest self, and this man then picks up a gun and murders another man out of revenge, what does it mean, saying: I don’t believe in violence?

Having lived through a war when half the human race was engaged in murdering the other half, murdering more vilely, savagely, cruelly, than ever in human history, what does it mean to say: I don’t believe that violence achieves anything?

Every fibre of Martha’s body, everything she thought, every movement she made, everything she was, was because she had been born at the end of one world war, and had spent all her adolescence in the atmosphere of preparations for another which had lasted five years and had inflicted such wounds on the human race that no one had any idea of what the results would be.

Martha did not believe in violence.

Martha was the essence of violence, she had been conceived, bred, fed and reared on violence.

Martha argued with Thomas: What use is it, Thomas, what use is violence?

She watched the light shift glittering in the leaves overhead, watched the tarmac throw off tiny gleams of salty light, saw the roofs shift and balance whitely under the turning sky, felt her mind fill with emptiness. If Thomas were here, standing with her under this tree, what would she say? Nothing, she would put her arms around him. She would put her hand in his and feel the life running through it under her palm. That was all.

The soul of the human race, that part of the mind which has no name, is not called Thomas and Martha, which holds the human race as frogspawn is held in jelly—that part of Martha and of Thomas was twisted and warped, was part of a twist and a damage. She could no more dissociate herself from the violence done her, done by her, than a tadpole can live out of water. Forty-odd million human beings had been murdered, deliberately or from carelessness, from lack of imagination; these people had been killed yesterday, in the last dozen years, they were dying now, as she stood under the tree, and these deaths were marked on her soul, and when Johnny Capetnakis from the Piccadilly restaurant (as it might very well have been) lifted Athen’s head on a bayonet and stuck it up in a row of other heads in the market squares of the cities of Greece (so the newspaper had announced, casually almost, a week ago—Government troops with the connivance of America and Britain were displaying the heads of traitors, Athen’s, and his friends’ quite likely, in the market towns of Greece) well, when that happened, it happened in Martha’s soul and in Thomas’s and in—But standing silent under the tree, knowing this was true, her mind could not stand it, it became numbed, a dry, painful sorrow like a useless remorse began running in her blood and she felt her pulses beat like warnings of time passing, the blood flowed as if ebbing out into dry sand, and she wished that Thomas were here, for if he were, she could put her hand into his hand and not have to be alone. He would stand here, close, and he would say simply: ‘Well, Martha? So I’m back.’

From the big tree it was half a mile to the flat she shared with Anton, half a mile to her parents’ house near the park. Instead of walking straight home, she walked right around the big trees of the park and stood outside the Quests’ garden. Her father’s bedroom would be dark—it was dark, these days, by eight in the evening. Sometimes Martha stood outside the fence and looked at the dark window and thought: that couple in there, that man and that woman, when they conceived me, one was in shellshock from the war, and the other in a breakdown from nursing its wounded. She, Martha, was as much a child of the 1914–1918 war as she was of Alfred Quest, May Quest.

Sometimes the light came on, and Martha could see her mother’s shadow move across the curtains, back and forth, and then the shadow went away and the light went out. Martha heard what they said to each other, could see their gestures and the expressions on their faces without being in the room. Once, very quietly, she crept like a burglar into the big garden towards the lit window. She held the yapping, little white dog’s jaws closed with one hand and stood in a flower bed under the window, the cold scent of violets rising from where her shoes sank into a damp soil. She could see over the sill and past the edge of the curtains. Her father sat up in bed, a pink wool bedjacket of her mother’s around his shoulders. He was staring around him, wide-eyed, not blinking at all—the way a child stares when suddenly awakened. His mouth was half-open and had fallen in, because his teeth were in the glass by the bed. Her mother, nearly asleep, wearing an old brown dressing-gown that had been her husband’s, bent to put a spoon of liquid into the old man’s mouth. When Mrs Quest straightened and turned to the window, Martha saw her face: under wisps of white hair that stuck out wildly, her eyes glared desperately, reddened by sleep, in a red, swollen face. She looked a half-savage old woman, a wild, sorrowful old female, trapped, caged, standing there holding a little silver teaspoon in one hand and a sticky medicine bottle in the other. Over the odour of crushed violets came the sour smell of the medicine.

Martha dropped the twisting little dog and ran to the gate
through shrubs and flowers. The dog yapped, yapped; and Mrs Quest came out on to the veranda and said in a sad, rough voice: ‘Kaiser, Kaiser, come here at once!’

Cruelty: Martha hated that dog so much she wanted to strangle it. That dog aroused in her waves of pure, red hate. Martha could not easily visit her father because of her cruelty. She wished him dead, which was bad enough; but she watched her mother satirically when the exhausted old woman announced two, three times in a month that her husband could not last another week. The young man, Jonathan, had been waiting to get married until a time when the sadness of that house would not lie over his love like a sickness, but they could not wait for ever, and so soon there would be a hurried, almost apologetic wedding. It was no longer a house of young people, they were all sorted out into couples, married or engaged, and Mrs Quest once again spent her energies nursing. In that house people sat around, waiting for an old man to die. Martha was afraid to visit her father, because she wished to wipe that house and everything in it out of existence, it was so terrible and so ugly. But she went nearly every day. Before she set out to see her father she took herself in hand, held herself quiet: the house was more than ever like a nightmare, all her most private nightmares were made tangible there, and that is why she stood outside it at night, looking at it like a stranger. In this way she focused it, targeted it, held it safe so that later, when she got home and went to bed, she would not actually dream of it because she had forced the dream into her consciousness: she had already experienced, awake, the quicksand which swallowed so easily love and the living.

When she got home, the light was on, very often, though it might be one, two, three in the morning. Anton would be reading. He would look up to smile as sha came in:

‘And how are you, Matty?’

‘Fine. And you?’

They smiled. She began to undress. Sometimes he put down his book and that meant they would talk.

‘It’s a marvellous night, Anton,’ she said, casually, a little
childishly—as if she walked because of the marvellous night.

‘They certainly know how to have fine nights in this country.’

‘Yes, we’ll miss them when we leave.’

‘I thought of walking home too, but Mr Forster was kind enough to give me a lift.’

‘It’s not going to rain yet, the clouds aren’t heavy enough.’

‘The farmers will start their grumbling soon if the rains don’t break. On Mr Forster’s farm he says the seedbeds are all ready.’

‘Oh, he has a farm too, has he?’

‘He doesn’t stint himself for much, I can promise you that.’

Most evenings Anton spent at his new friends’, the Forsters, who entertained a great deal. Most week-ends there were swimming parties and tennis parties. Anton had learned to play tennis.

‘I would not have thought,’ he said, with his new, almost diffident smile, ‘that the sports were in my line.’

But sport was, it turned out; and so were dinner parties and tea parties and sundowner parties.

‘Heard anything about your naturalization?’ she might enquire as she got into bed.

‘I dropped into the office after work today. They say it might be another four or five months.’

Recently, Anton’s going back to Germany had not been much talked about. At last, after persistent enquiries and dozens of letters, most of which were returned marked Addressee Unknown, a letter had arrived from an aunt in Hamburg—a refugee from the Russian zone. She had previously lived in Dresden. She had survived, she said, the bombing of Dresden, but it looked as if the bombing of Hamburg had been as bad. Her sons had been killed on the Russian front but her daughter was alive and her daughter’s husband was alive and not much wounded. They had a new baby. She was living in a basement shared by three families, under the rubble of the flats which had stood over it, but the flats would be rebuilt soon. If he, Anton, wanted to
come home to Germany, then she had no suggestions to make. She was an old woman now, and she was sorry but she had no suggestions.

Martha’s sleep was thin and shallow; often she woke believing she had not slept at all, for her dreams had been so vivid. She dreamed, of course, of war—of her father, and of Thomas with a gun in his hand. She dreamed, when she dreamed of herself, as standing on the high, dry place while ships sailed away in all directions, leaving her behind. On this high, dry plateau where Martha was imprisoned, for ever, it seemed, everything was dry and brittle, its quality was drought. Far away, a long way below, was water. She dreamed, night after night, of water, of the sea. She dreamed of swift waves like horses racing. She woke, again and again, with the smell of the sea in her nostrils, and a tang of salt on her tongue. Then she sank back to sleep to hear waves crashing on rocks, to hear the slap and the suck of waves on distant shores. The sea was her sleep now, she went off to sleep returning to her old nurse, the sea. She was becoming obsessed with the sea, which she had not seen, did not remember. She had only to shut her eyes and waves lifted and crashed across her eyelids and an enormous, longing joy took possession of her. She no longer thought: I’m going to England soon; she thought: I’m going to the sea, I’m going to get off this high, dry place where my skin burns and where I can never lose the feeling of tension and I shall sit by a long, grey sea and listen to the waves break, I shall hear the waves break and sink in a small hiss of foam.

In that ugly city bedroom where Anton and Martha lay side by side in twin beds, the sound of wind moving in dry leaves came into her sleep and she sat up in bed, incredulous that she was still here—the sea had been running in her sleep so strongly that it filled the air around her, and she could not hear the dry wind in the trees, she heard waves hissing on a grey, chalky shore.

The rains had come and would soon be over. Thomas was back, but Martha had ceased to hear what he said some time ago, and her argument with him was a monologue: she talked in
his
voice as if believing what he believed.

When he came she heard of it from Jack Dobie.

‘Thomas is back.’

‘Oh, I didn’t know.’

These days, Martha worked mostly for Jack. And Thomas, so Jack said, was thinking of working with him too. ‘We’ve got schemes afoot—I’ll show those bastards yet, even if they have chucked me out of Parliament!’

Eventually, Martha and Thomas met by chance in the Piccadilly. Martha was with Jack who, sensing the situation, went off to talk to the new owner, Johnny’s successor.

‘Well, Martha?’

‘Well, Thomas?’

He was considerably thinner, and much browner. Martha realized that meeting him in the street she wouldn’t have known him. She thought, if I had just met him I’d think: what a tense, suspicious man—what’s wrong with him? He was eating fried eggs and chips, not looking at what was on his plate. His eyes, now sharply, startlingly blue against his burnt skin, examined her from a distance.

And herself—she was in a phase least likely to appeal to him, though she hadn’t thought about it until feeling his inspection of her—she had not, so to speak, looked into the mirror recently. She was heavy again, almost lumpish. She was a heavy, pale young woman with a mass of thick hair. That night she was wearing an orange linen dress she did
not much like, but she had not known she was going to meet Thomas.

She thought: He probably wouldn’t have known me either, and it’s only a few months.

‘We’ve both changed,’ she said.

He nodded, after a bit: he was abstracted. Then, feeling she wanted more from him, he attempted to joke: ‘You look like one of the kibbutz girls.’

‘What, I’m not to your taste!’

Already he had gone away, but he made an effort to come back: ‘You looked prettier when
I
had you.’

She was not going to say that now she had no one. She sat smiling, feeling the change in him: but she did not know how to define it.

‘Yes, girls like you need a lot of serious love-making to keep you in shape.’

This, the sort of jest lovers make, offered to her out of—well, courtesy, politeness, made her understand that she must let the personal lapse, and immediately.

It had jarred—badly. They both looked uncomfortable.

She said: ‘Are you a Zionist now?’ meaning it as a serious query. She understood that had jarred too, it rang false: perhaps anything either of them said now would sound false.

His eyes fastened hard on her face, abrupt, surprised—she said: ‘I’m sorry, I was just making conversation, I suppose.’

After a moment, he shifted his legs under the table, let his eyes move away from her face, and began playing with the magnificent cruet in the table’s centre.

‘Seeing this art-work, it makes me feel I’m at home,’ he remarked, apologetically.

That was better, it was suddenly easier to be together.

He took out a glass stopper and sniffed, amused, at the raw vinegar. ‘Somewhere in the world there must be a factory to make this horrible vinegar especially for Dirty Dick’s,’ he said.

‘And for Black Ally’s.’

‘Before my time.’

He sat holding the glass stopper in his hand. Across the room Jack was talking to the new owner, a handsome, fat Greek who was a cousin of Johnny’s from Johannesburg. He looked across at Martha and Thomas to see if they were ready for him to join them. He went on talking to the Greek, keeping an eye on them.

‘You see, Martha,’ said Thomas conversationally, suddenly coming back to be with her—as she felt it—‘we were wrong all the time, things aren’t how we thought.’

‘Why?’ she asked, after waiting for him to explain.

A moment’s immobility. Then a rough, dismissing movement, an irritated movement. ‘That’s all!’ Then he looked up, saw her face, and said, shrugging: ‘If you don’t feel it, then I can’t tell you.’

‘All right,’ she said carefully, after a pause.

He sat frowning, playing with the little glass bottles. Then Jack came back, seeing that the two sat there, not speaking. Having first tried to sense whether it was safe to say it, he joked: ‘Well, I’m glad you’re back home, Thomas, now there’s a chance for me.’

Thomas laughed, in relief, so did Martha, Jack joined in. Then they began talking about Jack’s plans for work with Thomas, and how Martha could help; they were all relieved to get away from the personal.

A night or so later, Martha had this dream: it was a small town somewhere, but she did not know where; and there was an atmosphere of impending events: a great stir and a bustle in the town, something was going to happen.

Then Martha knew: someone was going to be hanged.

She thought: I must try and save this person, but first, who is it? Me, perhaps? But she was talking to a group of people she recognized to be officials of some kind, and presumably she would not be doing that if she were a criminal, or at fault with them.

Then she was inside a big barn or shed where the execution would take place. There was a wooden scaffold already erected there. It was rough, there was something informal, or at least, makeshift, about it all because it was war-time. And there was a feeling about the dream older
than the present—or rather, the recent—war, World War II. Was it a war in the past? Or the last war, but a village or a town that had an older feel to it, an atmosphere almost, of the Middle Ages?

Suddenly Martha knew it was Thomas who would be hanged—she had known it all the time. She knew, too, that she must not save him, because he had extracted a promise from her not to come near him, she must not interfere. ‘I must work out my own destiny,’ he had said, at some point.

She stood a few paces behind Thomas, and thought: If he turns and sees me here he will be furious, I’m breaking my promise. But it’s all right: he will
not
turn and see me, it’s not part of the play, the order of events, that he should turn and see me. Her hands kept stretching out towards him, palms up, to help him, but they fell again, empty.

Then, through the door of the big barn, she saw, coming up a hill on a country road with a backdrop of solemn blue mountains, a small procession of people in black; first came a large, black-robed man with a silver cross swinging on his breast—he was the Mayor of this town, and he was followed by various officials, one of them holding up a silver cross and another swinging a censer and another reading aloud from a small, black book.

Thomas went out of the door towards them. He was not driven out, he went. He walked through the great open doors of the barn and the people outside fell away on either side as he appeared. He was not bound in any way, and his hands were free.

He stood, while the party headed by the Mayor came forward, but he was not looking at them. Martha was just behind him, she was wringing her hands, and her heart was aching with a dry, useless anguish.

Thomas looked different. He looked more Semitic, or Eastern. He was darker, thinner, and his blond hair had darkened and was curly. Chips of wood and straw were tangled in his hair. His eyes searched this way, that way, moving all the time up at the sky, down at the earth. But not for escape, no, they were movements of eyes in deep thought. Thomas was dishevelled, his clothes were torn,
there was dust on his head as well as straw, and wood chips. He was isolated from this crowd of people, but he was not aware of them or of Martha or of anything: his red-eyed stare was introspective. He stood, waiting, with the heavy sunlight on him, in a sombre, savage…but what? What was this mood, or way of thinking, or mode of being, she could not name? The look on his face—that was the point of this dream, that was why she was dreaming it: she had to discover the meaning of this sombre, dark look. Why did Thomas stand there, looking at the sky, looking—almost abstractedly—at the group of officials who were coming to hang him, as if he did not care about them? Surely he ought to be running away, or protesting, or struggling?

She
was weeping,
she
was protesting,
she
was anguished. But Thomas turned red-rimmed, sombre eyes around him, as if he—as if
…as if what?
What was the look on his face?

The necessity to understand that look woke Martha up. Awake, she stared at Thomas’s face, needing as badly to understand it as she had asleep.

Then the dream faded…and came back, sharply, at odd moments. The look on Thomas’s face would return before her eyes, as she worked, or talked to people, or when she woke up in the morning. She got no closer to understanding it. The dream went further away, she forgot it, finally she forgot it altogether, except that when she thought of Thomas, or saw him, the question the dream had left with her stood in her mind, unanswered.

Thomas worked now with Jack Dobie.

Thomas knew a certain amount about medicine, or at least, public hygiene, because of his war experience. Returning from Israel, he told his wife that she must not expect his help on the farm, that she must rely on Michel Pevsner. He told his brother that someone else must grow plants and shrubs for the shop in town. It appeared that Rachel Stern accepted it, or at least, made no protest. The brother was angry, but made no impression on Thomas who was intent on his own path, whatever that was.

Jack Dobie was no longer in Parliament because of the
cold war. Or rather, the cold war had given Jack’s unpopularity a final turn of the screw.

His white trade unionist constituents had put up with him during the war, when his brand of socialism was fashionable; they had been pleased to have him, to give their own reaction a gloss of socialism, as long as socialism did not cost them anything. They had tolerated, too, but only just, his campaigns over India.

A few months ago, India got independence, and Jack tried to organize a meeting to celebrate. None of the big official halls was available to him, even though at that time he had still been in Parliament. Finally, the independence of the continent of India had been celebrated in a dingy little hall near the Coloured area, by Jack Dobie, Mrs Van, Johnny Lindsay in his wheelchair, and a few Indian tradesmen, some schoolteachers and the children from the Indian school. Then the whispering campaigns and the poison letters began again. There were two criticisms of him. One: Jack Dobie was not interested in his own constituents, only in a lot of blacks thousands of miles away in India—why didn’t Jack do something for his own blacks, weren’t there enough blacks in Zambesia, if he wanted to nurse blacks? The other: Jack was only interested in blacks, he hated his own kind, the white people, why should white people elect a kaffir-lover anyway? So Jack was out of Parliament. He was very hurt, but he pretended not to be.

Now he was a fitter on the railways again. He used his position as ex-Member of Parliament (after all, he might be elected again, next time, he said, though he knew it was unlikely) to raise money, rouse public opinion. He and Thomas went around the Reserves, often behind the authorities’ backs, reported on conditions, agitated, wrote letters to officials and to newspapers, and generally made nuisances of themselves. Jack did all this briskly, almost gaily. But Thomas worked with a grim concentration, seven days a week, nothing seemed to exist for him now, except this work. He drove to distant Reserves where few white people ever went, he spent time there, advised on wells, polluted rivers, food supplies, hygiene. Then he came out with files
full of facts and figures that it was Martha’s task to put into shape. The Native Affairs Departments, the Native Commissioners, knew about Thomas, and hated him. But he was quick and wily, he made friends with the Africans who trusted him and who did not give him away. He was always a step ahead of furious officials, who, in any case, were in a bad position, because of the amount of information he was able to make public.

Martha did not see Thomas. He sent material to her by post. ‘Dear Martha. This is the Ndosi Reserve. This stuff speaks for itself. Sort it out. As ever, Thomas.’

At first she thought he was avoiding her. Then she understood he was avoiding people.

Martha was being paid by some Foundation located by Mrs Van, and worked at home again. There was no longer the protection of the shed in the garden, so she tried to work in the afternoon, when most of the unoccupied women slept.

Betty Krueger, Marie du Preez, Marjorie Black.

Marie was now the wife of a very successful builder, and she enjoyed her new wealth. But Piet had new friends, all rich ex-artisans, and Marie was bored. ‘Say what you like, Matty, but those were good days, weren’t they, when we actually did things?’—as if those days were decades, instead of three, four years before.

Betty Krueger’s delicate charms had all vanished into an obsessed maternity. She had two small boys, and she might just as well have had a dozen. No one could go near that house with pleasure, certainly not Boris Krueger, who had escaped into money-making: he now made a great deal of money and worked hard for it—out of the house from eight in the morning until eleven at night.

Marjorie Black, whose humorous grumblings had sounded almost tentative, as if about a temporary condition; her lively earnestness licensed by herself to express a smiling defiance, an amused self-criticism—Marjorie was silent, almost grim. She snapped out at her husband, her children, and then smiled, sighed, apologized. She said to Martha she was ashamed—she slept badly, and was
ashamed of that; she slept in the afternoons and she despised women who did; she found her husband intolerably conservative and dull—but she hated women who married men for their solidity and then complained.

In short, they were all, already, in their late twenties or early thirties, middle-aged women neurotic with dissatisfaction, just as if they had never made resolutions not to succumb to the colonial small-town atmosphere.

And the terrible thing was, they could never forget it: they watched their own deterioration like merciless onlookers. These days, all over the world, there are people like these, mostly women: the states of mind that once only afflicted people on death-beds or at moments of acute crisis are their permanent condition. Lives that appear to them meaningless, wasted, hang around their necks like decaying carcasses. They are hypnotized into futility by self-observation. It is as if self-consciousness itself has speeded up the process, a curve of destruction. At thirty-five they drink too much, or are in nervous breakdown, or are many times divorced. And it is these people who are at twenty the liveliest, the most intelligent, the most promising.