Doris Lessing - The Cleft

Now, exhausted with running, half stifled with the weed, she moaned and gasped and then at last they were in the valley where the males lived. They were on the wrong side of the river. They swam her across it at a place where the waves ran less fiercely: that was no hardship to a girl who had swum and played in water since she was born. Then she was standing in the middle of a large group of Monsters, whom she had seen as babes, mutilated, or in the few moments between birth and being snatched away by the eagles. They were of all sizes, some children, some already past middle age, and these were the ones worst damaged, when they had been ‘pets’. All of them naked, and seeing them there, the monsters, with their squirts pointed at her, she spat the weed out of her mouth and screamed, and this time it was a real scream, as if she had been doing it all her life. One of her captors stuffed the weed back, and another tied her hands with strands of weed – all this clumsily and slowly, because this was the first time hands had been tied, and never had there been a captive, or prisoner.

And now instincts that had ranged free and untrammelled and often unrecognised spoke all at once in this crowd of males, and one of the captors threw down this soft, squirming female, and in a moment had his squirt inside her. In a moment he was off her and another had taken his place. The mass rape went on, it went on, they were feeding hungers it seemed they could never sate. Some lads who had gone off into the forest to find fruit came back, saw what was going on, and soon enough understood it and joined in. Then she no longer squirmed and kicked and moaned but lay still, and they understood, but not at once, that she was dead. And then, but not at once, that they had killed her. They dispersed then, not looking at each other, feeling shame, though they did not know what it was, and they left her there. The night was long and fearful and they were by now sickened by what had happened. If questions that had been tormenting them in some cases for years were being answered, by their flaccid squirts, their feelings of rest, relaxation and assuagement, they had killed, and they had never killed purposelessly.

In the morning light she lay there on the grass by the river – dirty, smeared, smelling bad of their ex cretions, the wide empty eyes accusing them.

What were they to do?

Carry her to where the eagles would find her? But something forbade them to do this.

In the end they carried her stiff soiled body to the river bank where the water ran faster and pushed her in, and watched her being swirled away downstream towards the sea.

This was the first murder committed by our kind (I except the exposing of crippled newborn infants) and it taught them in that act what they were capable of; they learned what their natures could be.

This murder was not recorded in their recitals of their history and they tried to forget it, and in the end did, just as the Clefts, when they did remember how they had tortured and tormented the Squirts, softened the tale and made it less, and then soon chose to believe there had been one monstrous babe they had hurt – just one.

We would not know about this murder if a very old dying man had not become obsessed with his memories, with this terrible day of rape and killing, so long ago – he had been a boy – and he could not stop repeating and repeating what he knew. Not possible to ignore what he was saying, and some young ones, hearing, shocked, distressed, preserved the tale, which they could not forget, and in their old age told it to the younger ones. This was, I believe, the beginning of the Squirts’ oral annals, their Memories, at first coming into being almost by accident, but then valued and preserved. The female kept records – and I cannot bring myself to write down all that is there; and the male kept records: and I do bring myself to write down what is there.

Over among the Clefts, they noticed the absence of one of their own, wondered, fretted, in their soft lazy way, mentioned her absence, looked to see if she had fallen into one of the near pools, wondered again …

When the Squirts’ distress had subsided, there remained a doubt which did not get less. Though the murdered girl had not been able to say much that was coherent, from the words she did say they knew that the language they used was poor compared with hers and, forced to worry over the question, find a reason, they at last understood that all they said had developed from the speech of small children who had made that first brave quest over the eagles’ mountain. Their language was a child’s, and it was even pitched high, like children’s talk. Yes, they had new words, for the tools and utensils they had invented, but they talked together like children.

How were they to learn more, and better? Their dread of the Clefts, their fear of themselves and what they had done, made it impossible to go back to the shore, and find another Cleft and learn from her.

What were they to do?

It was a Cleft who did something. We do have to ask why it happened. After a period of time so long it is not possible to measure it, when no Cleft had had the curiosity to leave their maternal shore, one did just that. She walked towards the mountain where she knew the eagles took the Monsters, climbed the mountain, passed the eagles’ nests, stood there on the height, and looked down and saw … we know what she saw, it is recorded.

Down there in the valley were a company of Monsters, moving about in activities she could not understand, or at the edge of the great river, and she had never seen a river, only the little rivulets that seeped down the cliffs. She was shocked into a fear that nearly took her running back to her shore. She could not see from where she stood the horrid bundles that made a Squirt what he was. They were at ease down there, those terrible creatures, and their voices floated up to her, talking as the Clefts did, but in high childish tones. Why was she there at all? We do not know. Something in the stuff and substance of life had been agitated – by what? For ages – we use this dubious definition of time – no one had wanted to walk to the place that she could see down there … Just as not so very long ago the Clefts had – for no reason they could conjecture – begun to give birth to these Monsters, so now a Cleft was doing what not once one of them had done before: left her kind, driven by something that was no part of old Cleft nature.

She walked further, down the side of the mountain, and stopped. What were those strange pointed shapes down there? She thought at first they were alive, a kind of creature. They were the reed shelters the Squirts had evolved, a kind of reed that grew thick in the marsh that was the mouth of a river not far from here. The reeds were pale, and shone in the sunlight, and she saw that in their entrances sat Squirts, at their ease.

She made herself go forward, but slowly, but did not know how to signal that she did not mean harm. These were the creatures the Clefts had tormented and tortured and even mutilated. She herself had taken part in the work. They had seen her now, and were crowding together, facing her; she could see their faces turned upwards, staring, frightened.

She went on down. Two enormous eagles were sitting apart from the crowding Squirts, and they were as tall as she was. Each was teasing at a great fish. As she watched, a boy came out of the river with a fish, which he deposited in front of the eagles, and he saw her and ran to his fellows.

They were not threatening her, but now they were smiling nervously, uncertain, as she was. She stood there in front of them, not knowing what to do, and they stood looking at her.

She was staring at their fronts, where the protuberances were. They did not seem so horrible now. She had seen baby Monsters, with their enormous swellings: out of proportion to the rest of them, as she realised.