The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
I watched anger, dislike, suspicion, move over his face. He was watching me sideways, eyes narrowed. I knew that now he was going to fight, out of the personality that would hate me for taking something away from him. I also knew that when he was “himself,” he would think about what I had said, and being responsible, he would, in fact, do what I asked.
Meanwhile he said, sullen: “So you’re kicking me out.”
I said: “That’s not what I said”—speaking to the responsible man.
He said: “I don’t toe your particular line so you’re going to kick me out.”
Without knowing I was going to do it, I sat up and shrieked at him: “For Christ’s sake, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it.” He ducked back, instinctively. I knew that for him a woman shrieking in hysteria meant that he would be hit. I thought how odd it was we two should be together at all, so close we should have become each other, for I had never hit anyone in my life. He even moved to the end of the bed, and sat ready to run off from a woman shrieking and hitting. I said, not shrieking, but crying: “Can’t you see that this is a cycle, we go around and around?” His face was dark with hostility, I knew he was going to fight against going. I turned away from him, wrestled down the sickness in my stomach, and said: “Anyway, you’ll go by yourself when Janet comes back.”
I hadn’t known I was going to say it, or that I thought it. I lay thinking about it. Of course it was true.
“What do you mean?” he asked, interested, not hostile.
“If I had had a son, you’d have stayed. You’d have identified with him. At least for a time, till you worked yourself through that. But since I’ve got a girl you’ll go because you’ll see us as two women, two enemies.” He slowly nodded. I said: “How odd, I’m always afflicted by feelings of doom, fate, inevitability. But it was chance I had a girl and not a boy. Just pure chance. So it’s chance you’ll leave. My life will be changed, completely, because of it.” I felt easier, less caged, holding on to chance. I said: “How strange, having a baby is where women feel they are entering into some sort of inevitable destiny. But right in the heart of where we feel most bound is something that’s just chance.” He was watching me, sideways, unhostile, with affection. I said: “After all, no one in the world could make my having had a girl and not a boy into anything but chance. Imagine Saul, if I’d had a boy, we’d have had what you Yanks call a relationship. A long relationship. It might have turned into anything, who knows?”
He said quietly: “Anna, do I really give you such a bad time?”
I said, with precisely his brand of sullenness—borrowed from him at a moment when he was not using it, so to speak, for now he was gentle and humorous: “I haven’t done time with the witch-doctors not to know that no one does anything to me, I do it to myself.”
“Leaving the witch-doctors out,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. He was smiling, concerned for me. For that moment he was all there, the good person. Yet already I could see behind his face the black power; it was coming back into his eyes. He was fighting with himself. I recognised that fight as the fight I had had while sleeping, to refuse entrance to alien personalities wanting to invade me. His fight got so bad he sat, eyes shut, sweat on his forehead. I took his hand, and he clutched at it, and he said: “O.K. Anna, O.K. O.K. Don’t worry. Trust me.” We sat on the bed, clutching at each other’s hands. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, then kissed me, and said: “Put on some jazz.”
I put on some early Armstrong. I sat on the floor. The great room was a world, with its glow of caged fire, and its shadows. Saul was lying on the bed, listening to the jazz, a look of pure contentment on his face.
Just then I couldn’t “remember” sick Anna. I knew she was there in the wings, waiting to walk on, when some button was touched—but that was all. We were silent a long time. I wondered, when we began to talk, which two people would be talking. I was thinking that if there were a tape recorder of the hours and hours of talk in that room, the talk and the fighting and the arguing and the sickness, it would be a record of a hundred different people living now, in various parts of the world, talking and crying out and questioning. I sat and wondered what person would start crying out when I began talking, and I said:
“I’ve been thinking.” This is already a joke when one of us says, “I’ve been thinking.” He laughed and said: “So you’ve been thinking.”
“If a person can be invaded by a personality who isn’t theirs, why can’t people—I mean people in the mass—be invaded by alien personalities.”
He lay, popping his lips to the jazz, plucking at an imaginary guitar. He didn’t reply, merely grimaced, saying: I am listening.
“The joint is, comrade…” I stopped, hearing how I used the word, as we all do now, with an ironical nostalgia. I was thinking that it was first cousin to the jeering voice of the projectionist—it was an aspect of disbelief and destruction.
Saul said, laying aside his imaginary guitar: “Well comrade, if you’re saying that the masses are infected with emotions from outside, then I’m delighted, comrade, that you’re holding fast to your socialist principles in spite of everything.”
He had used the words comrade and masses ironically, but now his voice switched to bitterness: “So all we have to do, comrade, is to arrange that the masses are filled, like so many empty containers, with good useful pure kindly peaceful emotions, just the way we are.” He spoke well beyond irony, not quite in the voice of the projectionist, but not far off it either.
I remarked: “That’s the sort of thing I say, that kind of mocking, but you hardly ever do.”
“As I crack up out of that 100 per cent revolutionary, I notice I crack up into aspects of everything I hate. That’s because I’ve never lived with my eye on becoming what is known as mature. I’ve spent all my life, until recently, preparing myself for the moment when someone says: ‘Pick up that rifle’; or, ‘run that collective farm’; or, ‘organise that picket line.’ I always believed I’d be dead by the time I was thirty.”