Doris Lessing - The Four-Gated City (Children of Violence)

DORIS LESSING

THE

FOUR-GATED

CITY

BOOK FIVE
of the Children of Violence series

Dedication

Once upon a time there was a fool who was sent to buy flour and salt. He took a dish to carry his purchases.

Make sure, said the man who sent him, not to mix the two things-I want them separate.

When the shopkeeper had filled the dish with flour and was measuring out the salt, the fool said: Do not mix it with the flour; here, I will show you where to put it.

And he inverted the dish, to provide, from its upturned bottom, a surface upon which the salt could be laid.

The flour, of course, fell to the floor.

But the salt was safe.

When the fool got back to the man who had sent him, he said: Here is the salt.

Very well, said the other man, but where is the flour?

It should be here, said the fool, turning the dish over.

As soon as he did that, the salt fell to the ground, and the flour, of course, was seen to be gone.

A dervish teaching story, from
The Way of the Sufi , by I DRIES S HAH

Tabe of Contents

In its being and its meaning, this coast represents not merely an uneasy equilibrium of land and water masses; it is eloquent of a continuing change now actually in progress, a change being brought about by the life processes of living things. Perhaps the sense of this comes most clearly to one standing on a bridge between the Keys, looking out over miles of water, dotted with mangrove-covered islands to the horizon. This may seem a dreamy land, steeped in its past. But under the bridge a green mangrove seedling floats, long and slender, one end already beginning to show the development of roots, beginning to reach down through the water, ready to grasp and to root frmly in any muddy shoal that may lie across its path. Over the years the mangroves bridge the water gaps between the islands; they extend the mainland; they create new islands. And the currents that stream under the bridge, carrying the mangrove seedling, are one with the currents that carry plankton to the coral animals building the offshore reef, creating a wall of rocklike solidity, a wall that one day may be added to the mainland. So this coast is built .

RACHEL CARSON ; The Edge of the Sea

In front of Martha was grimed glass, its lower part covered with grimed muslin. The open door showed an oblong of browny-grey air swimming with globules of wet. The shop fronts opposite were no particular colour. The lettering on the shops, once black, brown, gold, white, was now shades of dull brown. The lettering on the upper part of the glass of this room said Joes Fish and Chips in reverse, and was flaking like stale chocolate.

She sat by a rectangle of pinkish oilcloth where sugar had spilled, and on to it, orange tea, making a gritty smear in which someone had doddled part of a name: Daisy Flet Her cup was thick whitey-grey, cracked. The teaspoon was a whitish plastic, so much used that the elastic brittleness natural to it had gone into an erosion of hair lines, so that it was like a kind of sponge. When she had drunk half the tea, a smear of grease appeared half-way down the inside of the cup: a thumb mark. How hard had some hand - attached to Iris, to Jimmy? - gripped the cup to leave a smear which even after immersion in strong orange tea was a thumbprint good enough for the police?

Across the room, by another pinkish rectangle, sat Joes mother Iris, a small, fattish, smeared woman. She was half asleep, catnapping. She wore an overall washed so often it had gone a greyish yellow. A tired soured smell came from her. The small fattish pale man behind the counter where the tea-urn dominated was not Joe, who had gone off to the war and had never returned home, having married a woman and her caf in Birmingham. He was Jimmy, Joes mothers partner. Jimmy wished to marry Iris, but she did not want to marry again. Once was enough she said. Meanwhile they lived together and proposed to continue to live together.

Although both were now resting, this being a slack time in the caf, and had announced, as if they were turning a notice on a door to say CLOSED, that they were resting, both observed Martha. Or rather, their interest, what was alert of it, was focused on what she would do next, but they were too good mannered to let this appear. About an hour before she had asked if she might use the telephone. She had not yet done so. From time to time the two exchanged remarks with each other, as thickly indifferent as words coming out of sleep, sleep-mutters; but yet it was open to Martha to join in if she wished, to comment on weather and the state of Jimmys health, neither very good. Today he had a pain in his stomach. Really they wanted to be told, or to find out, why the telephone call was so important that Martha could not make it and be done. The air of the small steamy box which was the caf vibrated with interest, tact, curiosity, sympathy-friendship, in short; all the pressures which for a blissful few weeks since Martha had been in England, rather, London, she had been freed from.

For a few weeks she had been anonymous, unnoticed, - free. Never before in her life had she known this freedom. Living in a small town anywhere means preserving ones self behind a mask. Coming to a big city for those who have never known one means first of all, before anything else, and the more surprising if one has not expected it, that freedom: all the pressures are off, no one cares, no need for the mask. For weeks then, without boundaries, without definition, like a balloon drifting and bobbing, nothing had been expected of her.

But since she had taken the room upstairs over the caf, had been accepted into the extraordinary kindness and delicacy of this couple, she had made a discovery: Matty was reborn. And after how many years of disuse? Matty now was rather amusing, outspoken, competently incompetent, free from convention, free to say what other people did not say: yet always conscious of, and making a burnt offering of, these qualities. Matty gained freedom from whatever other people must conform to, not so much by ignoring it, but when the point was reached when conformity might be expected, gaining exemption in an act of deliberate clumsiness-like a parody, paying homage as a parody does to its parent-action. An obsequiousness in fact, an obeisance. Exactly, so she understood, had the jester gained exemption with his bladder and his bells; just so, the slave humiliated himself to flatter his master: as she had seen a frightened African labourer clown before her father. And so, it seems, certain occupants of recent concentration camps, valuing life above dignity, had made themselves mock those points of honour, self-respect, which had previously been the focus-points of their beings, to buy exemption from the camp commanders.

Between Matty and such sad buffoons, the difference was one of degree. Somewhere early in her childhood, on that farm on the highveld, Matty had been created by her as an act of survival. But why? In order to prevent herself from being-what? She could not remember. But during the last few years before leaving home (now not where she was, England, previously home, of a sort, but that town she had left), Matty had not existed, there had not been a need for her. Martha had forgotten Matty, and it was painful to give her house-room again. But here she was, just as if she had not been in abeyance for years, ready at the touch of a button to chatter, exclaim, behave with attractive outrageousness, behave like a foolish but lovable puppy. In this house. With Jimmy and Iris. (Not with Stella down the river, not at all.) Here. Why? For some days now Martha had been shut inside this person, it was Martha who intruded, walked into Matty, not the other way about. Why? She was also, today, shut inside clothes that dressed, she felt, someone neither Martha, nor Matty.