Doris Lessing - Walking in the Shade - Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962

When we were being driven back to the airport, at night, this happened. In the back of our car were Oksana, Arnold, and I, while Douglas Young sat by the chauffeur. A man staggered out into the headlights on a half-dark road. The car swerved but hit him. We all jumped out. A peasant lay bleeding, spread-eagled. He was very drunk. Oksana, transformed into an angel of vengeance, said we should leave him on the road, to punish him. We insisted on bringing him into the car, where he lay in Arnold’s arms, dazed, incoherent, bleeding. Arnold wept, while cradling him with a passionate protectiveness. It was all of the Soviet Union he held there, the millions of the dead, the women without men, the pathetic war-wracked streets. I knew this was what he felt, because I did too. Oksana kept up a high, vindictive scolding all the way to the airport: ‘How dare you do this, these are distinguished foreign guests, how dare you insult our great country, you will be punished for this, you should be ashamed.’ Douglas Young translated, in a satiric voice. This was the most bizarre of all the scenes on that trip, a summing-up and a caricature – the drunk, bleeding man, the Soviet nanny-shrew, Arnold’s weeping, Douglas’s Scottish voice, deliberately exaggerated, full of bitterness, full of anger, an indictment, and I interrupting Oksana: ‘But you will take him to the hospital when we get to the airport, promise? You will, won’t you?’

At the airport, there was Boris Polevoi, who had come on his motorcycle to say goodbye to us, all smiles and good comradeship. A friendly fellow, he was, and he promised to see that the drunk was taken to the hospital. ‘A likely story,’ we agreed. ‘Lucky not to be shot,’ said Douglas, and Arnold did not protest.

We were delighted we were leaving, we all concurred.

We stopped off at Prague for two days on the way back, to go to the Karlovy Vary Film Festival and to visit a picture gallery. I remember very little about Czechoslovakia, probably because I was exhausted by then, but there is one incident: The six of us were trailing through the gallery, when I was left behind in a room by myself, looking at a picture I liked. The attendant came up to me and whispered, ‘I love you. I must marry you. Take me to England.’ He was desperate, pleading; he clutched my arm and said, ‘Please, please, tell them you love me, take me with you.’ And then in came the interpreter to retrieve her charge from this dangerous straying from the flock, and the little attendant – he was old, or so I thought then, thin, sad, all anguished dark eyes – quickly pointed to a picture as if explaining it to me. His eyes followed me as I went out; there went his chance of escape from his life, intolerable for some reason I would never know. When I told Jack about this later, he said, with that mix of bitterness, pain, anger, that was his characteristic, ‘Poor bastard, poor little bastard.’ And then, ‘Well, why not marry him. But don’t imagine you’ll get rid of him so quickly.’ Jack had married a girl in Czechoslovakia to rescue her from the Nazis, in a scheme organized by the Party, but afterwards she was difficult about divorcing him. At last she agreed to meet him, and he reproached her: ‘I was doing you a good turn, and you’ve given me so much trouble.’ She said to him, with bitterness, ‘But you didn’t even take me out to lunch after the wedding. I’ll never forgive you.’

‘Just think,’ said Jack. ‘If I had the foresight I’d have given her a rose, or some flowers, and saved myself all this trouble.’ This was a reference to an early very famous Soviet story. Sentiment at weddings had been banned, and a pair of young lovers, like all Soviet couples then, went through the minimalist registry office ceremony. Despite their allegiance to Soviet principles, they felt sad, bleak, deprived. Someone gave them flowers: a defiant gesture. Everyone felt better.

As soon as we reached London, the six of us became a unit again. This was because of the press conference. It is truly impossible to re-create the snarling, hating atmosphere of the Cold War. We were confronted by journalists who hated us so much they could scarcely be polite. They demanded to be told ‘the truth’. The inevitable reaction was that we defended, where we could; Naomi and Douglas too. If they hated us, we hated them. This was by no means the only time in my life I have reflected that journalists can be their own worst enemy.

After that I refused invitations to go on Peace or Cultural Delegations – it was the beginning of the era of delegations to all the communist countries. I remember invitations to China, Chile, Cuba, others. Writers considered sympathetic, or at least not hostile, to communism were always being invited. The trouble is not that you fall for the official Party Line but that you like the people you meet, become one with them in sympathetic imagination, identify with their sufferings. This must be a version of what happens when terrorists capture hostages, who soon become one with their hosts, by osmosis. The communist governments always used the prestige of their visitors to impress their captive populations, but the said populations were in fact too wise to be impressed. Debates about whether one should or should not go to oppressive countries as official visitors went on then, go on now. When I went to China for the British Council in 1993, with Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd, Western journalists who operated in the East approached me to say I was wrong to go. But some Chinese, in London including one who had been in Tiananmen Square, did not understand when asked if I should go. ‘Why should you not go?’

‘Because the people will think we admire the Chinese government.’

‘No one will think that. But it is important for the writers and intellectuals to see writers from the West. They feel isolated.’

No sooner had I got back to London than I was sent my Party card and approached by John Sommerfield to join the Communist Party Writers’ Group. By now I was regretting my impulse to join the Party. I did know it was a neurotic decision, for it was characterized by that dragging helpless feeling, as if I had been drugged or hypnotized – like getting married the first time because the war drums were beating, or having babies when I had decided not to – pulled by the nose like a fish on a line. Going to the Soviet Union had stirred up emotions much deeper than the political. My thoughts and my emotions were at odds. I was a long way off seeing, as I do now, that ‘supporting the Soviet Union was only a continuation of early childhood feelings – war, the understanding of suffering, identification with pain: the knowledge of good and evil. I only knew that here was a deeply buried thing which was riding me like a nightmare.

What I was thinking – attempts at cool objectivity – was something else. I told an ex-Party friend of mine this experience: On parting with Oksana, so poor, so hardworking, with so few clothes or trinkets, I wanted to give her a little gilt-mesh bracelet, from Egypt. It was nothing much. She went pale with … could that be terror? Surely not. She stammered out frantic fearful refusals. What was that all about? I asked my expert friend, who said with the furious impatience we use for people who are still in positions we have just outgrown – he had only very recently left the Party – ‘Don’t be so naive. If she was seen with that bracelet, she would be accused by the KGB – who were of course instructing her every day – of taking bribes from the decadent evil Western capitalist world. It could get her sent to a labour camp.’

And why was it so many of the writers we met insisted on talking about the royal family? They went on and on: how interested they were in our Queen, such a good institution – for Britain, of course, not for them – and how much they admired us. Why on earth should writers in the Soviet Union care about the British royal family? ‘Obviously,’ was the reply, ‘they could not say openly how much they hate communism. They said it indirectly, hoping you would have the gumption to understand.’