Doris Lessing - Landlocked

He came a step nearer and stood looking close into their faces – first Anton, then Martha. Now they understood that he was saying what he had been feeling, or thinking, while Athen made his speech.

‘There’s very little work to do in the camp now. That’s a bad thing – I have nothing to do but read. It’s like living in a bad nightmare – a thousand empty huts, because all the men are demobbed, but someone’s made a slip-up somewhere, and the camp’s being kept open. All the machinery is running – the mess is open, all the health people like me operating away at full efficiency, all the blacks standing at attention waiting to take orders. No one to give orders, no one to eat in the mess, no one in the hospital, no one using my fine, efficient latrines – it’s a ghost camp. And I sit in my fine, well-ventilated hut reading … for instance, I’ve got the latest about the concentration camps. We haven’t heard the truth about them, that’s obvious, it’s too terrible to tell, so we’ll get the truth in bits.’

Again he looked at them, waiting.

‘No comment? Well, I have the advantage over you, because you don’t sit all day on a bed in a ghost camp full of food that’s rotting in its cases because there’s no one to eat it. Well then, how about dropping the atom bombs on Japan, how about that?’

‘We discussed that at the time,’ Anton said. To begin with, the socialists had supported the bombs being dropped. Or rather, the thing had been accepted. It seemed that nothing much worse had happened than had been happening for years. Certainly Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the words they later became – symbols for the beginning of a new, frightful age. Nor had there been a special meeting or even a private discussion since about the atom bombs. Yet people’s minds had changed, were changing. Without anything formal being said, or decisions being taken, the incident of the atom bombs was isolating itself, growing in meaning and intensity. But some people still agreed that it was right the atom bomb should have been used – Anton for one.

‘What’s your point?’ said Anton. ‘That war isn’t the prettiest of human activities?’

Thomas looked steadily at Anton, then smiled at Martha. ‘Oh, I haven’t any point. That is the point. Anyway, I’ve got thirty miles to drive. And it has been storming over the mountains, my wife said, so the rivers will be up if I don’t get a move on.’

‘Well then,’ said Anton.

‘Yes. And there’s India. How about the famine in India? It’s all right, isn’t it – I say, how about the famine in India? But the famine in Germany – that’s not the same thing at all, is it?’

‘What are you getting at?’ said Anton, his pale blue eyes like ice. ‘Are you telling me that I’m a German?’

‘No. Of course not. Well, I seem to be talking to myself.’ Off he went, walking fast. At the corner of the street he turned and half-shouted: ‘Did you read, they’re going to transfer one million people from East to West Germany?’

‘Come on,’ said Anton to Martha, impatiently. ‘Let’s get home.’

Thomas was saying, or shouting: They walk. ‘They put their belongings in handcarts and walk hundreds of miles guarded by soldiers. Like cattle.’ Now he did go off finally, and they saw him lift his hand and wave it, in a sort of mock salute.

‘Yes,’ said Anton. ‘So now we all discover that the war has made a lot of mess everywhere. What is the use of such discoveries?’

He took Martha’s elbow to steer her safely through the people who were coming out of the Old Vienna Tea Rooms. ‘Good night, good night,’ they all said to each other.

Martha and Anton walked in silence to find the car. Amicably they drove back to their flat.

Their relations were admirable since Anton had a mistress. He believed that Martha had a lover.

Or apparently he did. Yet there was something odd about this, because while he would say to her: ‘I’m meeting Millicent after work,’ and she replied: ‘Oh, good, I’ll see you later then,’ she never said who she would be meeting or what she would be doing. It was assumed that she would be meeting somebody. Who? Once or twice Anton had joked it must be Solly, and he had never mentioned Thomas.

It occurred to Martha that this curious man both believed that she had a lover, because it was easy if they both had someone else, and yet knew she had not. She would never understand him.

They lay side by side in their twin beds in the little bedroom.

Anton remarked that in his opinion Professor Dickinson by no means exaggerated the future.

Martha agreed with him.

Anton said that he had again written letters to his family in Germany. Soon, surely, there must be some news. It wasn’t possible that everyone could have been killed.

Martha suggested it might be the moment to get their Member of Parliament to make enquiries.

‘Yes,’ said Anton. ‘If I don’t hear soon, I shall have to approach the authorities. It will be a strange thing,’ he added, ‘living in Germany again. Sometimes I feel almost British.’ This last in a ‘humorous’ tone and Martha laughed with him.

Recently he had taken to saying humorously that he and Martha were having to stay together so long, that they were getting into the habit of it – perhaps Martha would like to come with him back to Germany?

Martha laughed, appropriately, at such times. But she knew quite well that Anton would not at all mind being married to her. It was taking her a long time to understand that some people don’t really mind who they are married to – marriage is not really important to them. Martha, Millicent, Grete – it doesn’t matter, not really.

Martha thought, incredulously: We have nothing in common, we have never touched each other, not really, where it matters; we cannot make love with each other, yet it would suit Anton if I stayed with him and we called it a marriage. And that other marriage with Douglas – he thought it was a marriage. As far as he was concerned, that was a marriage!

What an extraordinary thing – people calling this a marriage. But they do. Now they’ve got used to it, they can’t see anything wrong with this marriage – not even my parents. They’ll be awfully upset when we get divorced.

She thought, as she went to sleep: When I get to England, I’ll find a man I can really be married to.

Don’t make any mistake about this. Real love is a question of compromise, tolerance, shared views and tastes, preferably a common background of experience, the small comforts of day-to-day living. Anything else is just illusion and blind sex.

From an officially inspired handbook for young people on Sex, Love, Marriage.

Six inches of marred glass in a warped frame reflected beams of orange light into the loft, laid quivering green from the jacaranda outside over wooden planks and over the naked arm of a young woman who lay face down on a rough bed, dipping her arm in and out of the greenish sun-lanced light below her as if into water. At the same time she watched Thomas’s head a few feet below her through cracks in the floor: a roughly glinting brown head, recently clutched by fingers which now trailed through idling light, bent politely beside a large navy-blue straw hat. Thomas’s voice, warm from love-making, answered questions about roses put in a voice that said it was going to get as much attention from the expert as her visit warranted. The two heads moved out of her range of vision into the garden.

Martha turned on her back to stretch her body’s happiness in cool, leaf-smelling warmth. Through the minute window the tree blazed out its green against violent sun-soaked blue, against black, thunderous clouds which at any moment would break and empty themselves.