The Golden Notebook (66 page)

flash through me. I thought, sanely, for a moment that during that week he had been relaxed and happy as he was capable of being, so why did I react to that entry with hurt? But I was hurt and miserable, as if the entry cancelled out the week for both of us. I went downstairs and thought of Saul with a woman. I sat watching myself thinking of Saul with a woman. I thought: He's right to hate me and to prefer other women, I'm hateful. And I began to think longingly of this other woman out there, kind and generous and strong enough to give him what he needed without asking for anything in return. I remember Mother Sugar and how she 'taught' me about the obsessions of jealousy being part homosexuality. But the lesson at the time seemed rather academic, nothing to do with me, Anna. I wondered if I wanted to make love with that woman he was with now. Then there was a moment of knowledge. I understood I'd gone (*18) right inside his craziness: he was looking for this wise, kind, all-mother figure, who is also sexual playmate and sister; and because I had become part of him, this is what I was looking for too, both for myself, because I needed her, and because I wanted to become her. I understood I could no longer separate myself from Saul, and that frightened me more than I have been frightened. For with my intelligence I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he would begin to run. I knew this with my intelligence, and yet I sat there in my dark room, looking at the hazed wet brilliance of the purple London night sky, longing with my whole being for that mythical woman, longing to be her, but for Saul's sake. I found I was lying on the floor, unable to breathe because of the tension in my stomach. I went to the kitchen and drank more whisky, until the anxiety eased a little. I went back to the big room, and tried to get back to myself by seeing Anna, a tiny unimportant figure in the ugly old flat in an ugly decaying house, with the wastes of dark London around her. I could not. I was desperately ashamed, being locked in Anna's, an unimportant little animal's, terrors. I kept saying to myself: Out there is the world, and I care so little that I haven't even read the newspapers for a week. I fetched the week's newspapers, and spread them around me on the floor. During the week things had developed-a war here, a dispute there. It was like missing several instalments of a serial on the films but being able to deduce what had happened in them from inner logic of the story. I felt bored and stale, knowing that, without having read the newspapers at all, I could have made a pretty good guess, from political experience, at what had happened in that week. The feeling of banality, the disgust of banality, mingled with my fear; and then suddenly I moved forward into a new knowledge, a new understanding; and this knowledge came out of Anna's, the frightened little animal's, sitting on the floor, cowering. It was 'the game,' but it came out of terror. I was invaded by terror, the terror of nightmares, I was experiencing the fear of war as one does in nightmares, not the intellectual balancing of probabilities, possibilities, but knowing, with my nerves and imagination, the fear of war. What I was reading in the newspapers strewn all round me became real, not an abstract intellectual fear. There was a kind of shifting of the balances of my brain, of the way I had been thinking, the same kind of realignment as when, a few days before, words like democracy, liberty, freedom, had faded under pressure of a new sort of understanding of the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power. I knew, but of course the word, written, cannot convey the quality of this knowing, that whatever already is has its logic and its force, that the great armouries of the world have their inner force, and that my terror, the real nerve-terror of the nightmare, was part of the force. I felt this, like a vision, in a new kind of knowing. And I knew that the cruelty and the spite and the I, I, I, I of Saul and of Anna were part of the logic of war; and I knew how strong these emotions were, in a way that would never leave me, would become part of how I saw the world. But now, writing it, and reading what I've written, there's nothing there, just words on paper. I can't communicate, even to myself when I read it back, the knowledge of destruction as a force. I was lying limp on the floor last night, feeling like a vision the power of destruction, feeling it so strongly that it will stay with me for the rest of my life, but the knowledge isn't in the words I write down now. Thinking how war would explode, chaos would follow, I was cold and sweating with fear, and then I thought of Janet, the delightful rather conventional little girl at her girls' school, and I was angry, so angry that anyone anywhere could harm her, that I stood upright, able to fight off the terror. I was exhausted, the terror had gone away from me, to be contained in lines of print in newspapers. I was limp with exhaustion, and no longer needing to hurt Saul. I undressed and got into bed and I was sane. I realised the relief Saul must feel, when the hands of madness let go his throat and he thinks: It's gone for a time. I lay thinking of him, warm and detached, strong. Then I heard his step outside, furtive, and at once my switch was turned, I felt a surge of fear and anxiety. I didn't want him to come in, or rather I didn't want the owner of the furtive listening feet to come in. He stood for a time outside my door listening. I don't know what time it was, but judging from the light in the sky, it was early morning. I heard him tiptoe very, very carefully upstairs. I hated him. I was appalled that I could hate him so soon. I lay, hoping he would come down. Then I crept upstairs to his room. I opened his door, and from the dim light from the window I saw him curled up neat and tidy under the blankets. My heart wrenched with pity. I slipped into bed beside him, and he turned and grabbed me close. I knew he had been stumbling about the streets, ill and lonely, from the way he held me. This morning I left him sleeping and made coffee and tidied the flat, and made myself read the newspapers. I don't know who will come down the stairs. I sit here, reading the newspapers, but no longer with the nerves of knowledge, only with my intelligence, and I think how I, Anna Wulf, sit here waiting, not knowing who is going to come down the stairs, the gentle brotherly affectionate man, who knows me, Anna; or a furtive and cunning child; or a madman full of hate. That was three days ago. These last three days I have been inside madness. When he came downstairs he looked very ill; his eyes were sharp bright wary animals inside circles of brownish bruised flesh; his mouth was tight, like a weapon. He had a jaunty soldier air, and I knew all his energies were absorbed in simply holding himself together. All his different personalities were fused in the being who fought only for survival. He gave me repeated glances of appeal, of which he was not aware. This was only a creature at the limits of itself. In response to the need of this creature, I felt myself tense and ready to take stress. The papers were lying on the table. When he came in I had pushed them away, feeling the terror I had been in the night before was too near, too dangerous to him, although I didn't feel it myself at that moment. He drank coffee and began talking about politics, glancing at the pile of papers. This was compulsive talking, not the I, I, I talking of his triumphant accusation and defiance of the world, but talking to hold himself together. He talked, talked, his eyes not implicated with what he was saying. If I had tape-recordings of such times, it would be a record of jumbling phrases, jargon, disconnected remarks. That morning it was a political record, a hotchpotch of political jargon. I sat and listened as the stream of parrot-phrases went past, and I labelled them: communist, anti-communist, liberal, socialist. I was able to isolate them: Communist, American, 1954. Communist, English, 1956. Trotskyist, American, early 19-fifties. Premature anti-Stalinist, 1954. Liberal, American, 1956. And so on. I was thinking, If I were really a psychoanalyst, I'd be able to use this stream of gibberish, catch at something in it, focus him, for he is a profoundly political man, and that is where he is at his most serious. So I asked him a question. I could see how something in him was checked. He started, came to himself, gasped, his eyes cleared, he saw me. I repeated the question, about the collapse of the socialist political tradition in America. I wondered if it were right, to check this flow of words, since it was being used to hold himself together, to stop himself collapsing. Then, and it was as if a piece of machinery, a crane perhaps, accepted a great strain, I saw his body tense and concentrate and he began speaking. I say he, taking for granted that I can pinpoint a personality. That there is a he who is the real man. Why should I assume that one of the persons he is is more himself than the others? But I do. When he spoke then it was the man who thought, judged, communicated, heard what I said, accepted responsibility. We began discussing the state of the left in Europe, the fragmentation of socialist movements everywhere. We had of course discussed all this before, often; but never so calmly and clearly. I remember thinking it was strange that we were able to be so detachedly intelligent when we were both sick with tension and anxiety. And I thought that we were talking about political movements, the development or defeat of this socialist movement or that, whereas last night I had known, finally, that the truth for our time was war, the immanence of war. And I was wondering if it was a mistake to talk about this at all, the conclusions we reached were so depressing, it was precisely this depression that had helped to make him ill. But it was too late, and it was a relief to have the real person there opposite me, instead of the gabbling parrot. And then I made some remark, I forget what, and his whole frame quivered as he went into a different gear, how else can I put it?-he took a shock somewhere inside himself and switched back into another personality, this time he was the pure, socialist, working-class boy, a boy, not a man, and the stream of slogans started again, and his whole body jerked and gesticulated in abuse of me, for he was abusing a middle-class liberal. I sat there and thought how odd, that while I knew it was not 'him' talking at that moment, and that his abuse was mechanical and out of an earlier personality, yet it hurt me and made me angry, and I could feel my back start to ache and my stomach clench in response to it. To get away from the reaction I went into my big room, and he followed me shouting: 'You can't take it, you can't take it, bloody Englishwoman.' I took him by his shoulders and shook him. I shook him back into himself. He gasped, breathed deeply, put his head down on my shoulder for a moment, then staggered to my bed and collapsed on it, face down. I stood by the window, looking out, trying to calm myself by thinking of Janet. But she seemed remote from me. The sunlight-it was a pale winter sun, was remote. What went on in the street was remote from me, the people passing were not people, they were marionettes. I felt a change inside me, a sliding lurch away from myself, and I knew this change to be another step down into chaos. I touched the stuff of the red curtain, and the feel of it on my fingers was dead and slippery, slimy. I saw this substance, processed by machinery, dead stuff, to hang like dead skin, or a lifeless corpse at my windows. I touched the plant in a pot on the window sill. Often when I touch the leaves of the plant, I feel a kinship with the working roots, the breathing leaves, but now it seemed unpleasant, like a little hostile animal or a dwarf, imprisoned in the earthenware pot and hating me for imprisoning it. So I tried to summon up younger, stronger Annas, the schoolgirl in London and the daughter of my father, but I could see these Annas only as apart from me. So I thought of the corner of a field in Africa. I made myself stand on a whitish glitter of sand, with the sun on my face, but I could no longer feel the heat of that sun. I thought of my friend Mr. Mathlong, but he, too, was remote. I stood there, trying to reach the consciousness of a hot yellow sun, trying to summon Mr. Mathlong, and suddenly I was not Mr. Mathlong at all, but the mad Charlie Themba. I became him. It was very easy to be Charlie Themba. It was as if he stood there slightly to one side of me, but part of me, his small spiky dark figure, his small, intelligent, hotly indignant face looking at me. Then he melted into me. I was in a hut, in the Northern Province, and my wife was my enemy, and my colleagues on the Congress, formerly my friends, were trying to poison me, and somewhere out in the reeds a crocodile lay dead, killed with a poisoned spear, and my wife, bought by my enemies, was about to feed me crocodile flesh, and when it touched my lips I would die, because of the furious enmity of my outraged ancestors. I could smell the cold decaying flesh of the crocodile, and I looked through the door of the hut and saw the dead crocodile, rocking slightly on warm decaying water, in the reeds of the river, and then I saw the eyes of my wife peering through the reeds that made my hut, judging to see if she could safely enter. She came bending through the hut door, her skirts held to one side with the sly lying hand I hated, and in the other hand a tin plate where shreds of stinking flesh lay ready for me to eat. Then in front of my eyes I saw the letter written by this man to me and I snapped out of the nightmare as if I had walked out of a photograph. I was standing at my window, sweating with terror because of being Charlie Themba, mad and paranoic, the man hated by the white men and disowned by his comrades. I stood there, limp with cold exhaustion, and tried to summon Mr. Mathlong. But while I could see him, clearly, walking rather stooped across a sunlit space of dust from one tin-roofed shanty to another, smiling courteously, with his unfailing gentle, rather amused smile, he was separated from me. I clutched on to the window curtains, to stop myself falling, and felt the cold slipperiness of the curtains between my fingers like dead flesh and I shut my eyes. My eyes shut, I understood through waves of sickness that I was Anna Wulf, once Anna Freeman, standing at the window of an old ugly flat in London, and that behind me on the bed was Saul Green, wandering American. But I don't