Doris Lessing - The Memoirs of a Survivor

That night there was a knock on the door, and four of the children stood there: they were wild-eyed and excited. Emily simply shut the door on them and locked it. Then she put heavy chairs against it. A scuffling and whispering — the footsteps retreated.

Emily looked at me, and mouthed over Hugo's head — it took me a few moments to work it out: Roast Hugo.

'Or roast Emily,' I said.

A few minutes later we heard screams coming from along the street, then the sound of many rushing feet, and children's shrill voices in triumph — all the sounds of a raid, a crime. We pushed aside our heavy curtains and were in time to see, through a glimmer from the snow that was being lit by a small moon, Gerald's gang, but without Gerald, dragging something up the front steps. It looked like a body. It need not have been anything of the kind, could have been a sack or a bundle. But the suspicion was there, and strong enough to make us believe it.

We sat on through the night quietly by our fire, waiting, listening.

There was nothing to prevent one or all of us becoming victims at any moment.

Nothing. Not the fact that Gerald, by himself or with a selection of the children, or even some of the children by themselves, might come down to visit us in the most normal way in the world. They brought us gifts. They brought flour and dried milk and eggs; sheets of polythene, cellotape, nails, tools of all kinds. They gave us fur rugs, coal, seeds, candles. They brought… the city around was almost empty, and all one had to do was to walk into unguarded buildings and warehouses and take what one fancied. But most of what was there were things no one would ever use again or want to: things that, in a few years time, if some survivor found them, he would have to ask: What on earth could this have been for?

As these children did already. You would see them squatting down over a pile of greeting cards, a pink nylon fluted lampshade, a polystyrene garden dwarf, a book or a record, turning them over and over: What was this for? What did they do with it?

But these visits, these gifts, did not mean that in another mood, on another occasion, they would not kill. And because of a whim, a fancy, an impulse.

Inconsequence…

Inconsequence again, as with the departure of little June. We sat there and brooded about it, talked about it, listening — far above our heads there was the neigh of a horse, and sheep baa-ing; birds whirled up past our windows on their way to the top of the building where there were the pickings of a farmyard for the effort of hopping through a broken window, was a vegetable garden, and even some trees. Inconsequence, a new thing in human psychology. New? Well, if it had always been there, it had been well channelled, disciplined, socialised. Or we had become so used to the ways we saw it shown that we did not recognise it.

Once, not long ago, if a man or woman shook you by the hand, offered you gifts, you would have reason to expect that he, she, would not kill you at the next meeting because the idea had just that moment come into his head… this sounds, as usual, on the edge of farce. But farce depends on the normal, the usual, the standard. Without the norm, which is the source of farce, that particular form of laughter dries up.

I remembered June, when she first robbed my flat and I asked Emily: 'But why me?' The reply was: Because you are here, she knows you. Even: Because you are a friend.

We could believe that the children from upstairs might come down one night and kill us because we were their friends. They knew us.

One night, very late, sitting around the fire as it burned low, we heard voices outside the door and outside the window. We did not move or look for weapons. The three of us exchanged looks — it cannot be said that they were amused, no: we did not have so much philosophy, but I do claim these glances were of the order of humour. That morning we had given food to some of those brats who were outside now. We had sat eating with them. Are you warm enough? Have another piece of bread. Would you like some more soup?

We could not protect ourselves against so many: thirty or more in all, whispering beyond the door, below the window. And Gerald? No, that we could not believe. He was asleep, or away on some expedition.

Hugo turned himself, placing himself between Emily, whom he would defend, and the door. He looked at me, suggesting I should put myself between her and the window: of course it was Emily who must be defended.

The scuffling and whispering went on. There were some blows on the door. More scuffles. Then a burst of sound — shouts, and feet rushing away. What had happened? We did not know. Perhaps Gerald had heard of what they were doing, and had come to stop them. Perhaps they had simply changed their minds.

And next day some of the children, with Gerald, came down to us and we spent a pleasant time together… I can say it, I can write it. But I cannot convey the normality of it, the ordinariness of sitting there, chatting, sharing food, of looking into a childish face and thinking: Well, well, it might have been you who planned to stick a knife into me last night!

And so it all went on.

We did not leave. If someone had asked: Do you mean to say that you two people are staying here, in danger, instead of leaving the city for the country where things are safe or safer, because of that animal, that ugly, bristly old beast there — you are prepared to die yourselves of hunger or cold or of being murdered, simply because of that beast! — then we would have said: Of course not, we are not so absurd, we put human beings where they belong, higher than beasts, to be saved at all costs. Animals must be sacrificed for humans, that is right and proper and we will do it too, just like everybody else.

But it was not a question of Hugo any longer.

The question was, where would we be going? To what? There was silence from out there, the places so many people had set off to reach. Silence and cold… no word ever came back, no one turned up again on our pavements and reported: 'I've come back from the north, from the west, and I ran into so and so and he said…'

No, all we could see when we looked up and out were the low packed clouds of that winter hurrying towards us: dark cloud, dark cold cloud. For it snowed. The snow came down, the snow was up to our windowsills. And of all those people who had left, the multitudes, what had happened to them? They might as well have walked off the edge of a flat world… On the radios, or occasionally from the loudspeaker of an official car — which, seen from our windows seemed like the relic of a dead epoch, came news from the east: yes, it seemed that there was life of a sort down there still. A few people even farmed, grew crops, made lives. 'Down there' — 'out there' — we did hear of these places, they were alive for us. And where we were was alive; the old city, near-empty as it was, held people, animals, and plants which grew and grew, taking over streets, pavements, the ground floors of buildings, forcing cracks in tarmac, racing up walls… life. When the spring came, what a burst of green life there would be, and the animals breeding and eating and flourishing.

But north and west, no. Nothing but cold and silence. We did not want to leave. And with whom? Emily, myself, and our beast — should we go by ourselves? There were no tribes leaving, no tribes even forming, and when we looked from our windows there was no one out there on the pavements. We were left in the cold dark of that interminable winter. Oh, it was so dark, it was such a low thick dark. All around us, the black tall towers stood up out of the snow that heaped around their bases, higher every day. No lights in those buildings now, nothing; and if a windowpane glinted in the long black nights, then it was from the moon, exposed momentarily between one hurrying cloud and another.