To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One - Doris Lessing

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and Cousin Jessie waved at a taxi. I got on a bus.

      When I got home, the telephone was ringing. It was Beatrice. She said she had got my telegram, but she wanted to see me in any case. ‘Did you know Stalin was dying?’ I said.

      ‘Yes, of course. Look, it’s absolutely essential to discuss this business on the Copper Belt.’

      ‘Why is it?’

      ‘If we don’t tell people the truth about it, who is going to?’

      ‘Oh, well, I suppose so,’ I said.

      She said she would be over in an hour. I set out my typewriter and began to work. The telephone rang. It was comrade Jean. ‘Have you heard the news?’ she said. She was crying.

      Comrade Jean had left her husband when he became a member of the Labour Party at the time of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, and ever since then had been living in bed-sitting rooms on bread, butter and tea, with a portrait of Stalin over her bed.

      ‘Yes, I have,’ I said.

      ‘It’s awful,’ she said sobbing. ‘Terrible. They’ve murdered him.’

      ‘Who has? How do you know?’ I said.

      ‘He’s been murdered by capitalist agents,’ she said. ‘It’s perfectly obvious.’

      ‘He was seventy-three,’ I said.

      ‘People don’t die just like that,’ she said.

      ‘They do at seventy-three,’ I said.

      ‘We will have to pledge ourselves to be worthy of him,’ she said.

      ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose we will.’

       Wine

      A man and woman walked towards the boulevard from a little hotel in a side street.

      The trees were still leafless, black, cold; but the fine twigs were swelling towards spring, so that looking upward it was with an expectation of the first glimmering greenness. Yet everything was calm, and the sky was a calm, classic blue.

      The couple drifted slowly along. Effort, after days of laziness, seemed impossible; and almost at once they turned into a café and sank down, as if exhausted, in the glass-walled space that was thrust forward into the street.

      The place was empty. People were seeking the midday meal in the restaurants. Not all: that morning crowds had been demonstrating, a procession had just passed, and its straggling end could still be seen. The sounds of violence, shouted slogans and singing, no longer absorbed the din of Paris traffic; but it was these sounds that had roused the couple from sleep.

      A waiter leaned at the door, looking after the crowds, and he reluctantly took an order for coffee.

      The man yawned; the woman caught the infection; and they laughed with an affectation of guilt and exchanged glances before their eyes, without regret, parted. When the coffee came, it remained untouched. Neither spoke. After some time the woman yawned again; and this time the man turned and looked at her critically, and she looked back. Desire asleep, they looked. This remained: that while everything which drove them slept, they accepted from each other a sad irony; they could look at each other without illusion, steady-eyed.

      And then, inevitably, the sadness deepened in her till she consciously resisted it; and into him came the flicker of cruelty.

      ‘Your nose needs powdering,’ he said.

      ‘You need a whipping boy.’

      But always he refused to feel sad. She shrugged, and, leaving him to it, turned to look out. So did he. At the far end of the boulevard there was a faint agitation, like stirred ants, and she heard him mutter, ‘Yes, and it still goes on …’

      Mocking, she said, ‘Nothing changes, everything always the same …’

      But he had flushed. ‘I remember,’ he began, in a different voice. He stopped, and she did not press him, for he was gazing at the distant demonstrators with a bitterly nostalgic face.

      Outside drifted the lovers, the married couples, the students, the old people. There the stark trees; there the blue, quiet sky. In a month the trees would be vivid green; the sun would pour down heat; the people would be brown, laughing, bare-limbed. No, no, she said to herself, at this vision of activity. Better the static sadness. And, all at once, unhappiness welled up in her, catching her throat, and she was back fifteen years in another country. She stood in blazing tropical moonlight, stretching her arms to a landscape that offered her nothing but silence and then she was running down a path where small stones glinted sharp underfoot, till at last she fell spent in a swathe of glistening grass. Fifteen years.

      It was at this moment that the man turned abruptly and called the waiter and ordered wine.

      ‘What,’ she said humorously, ‘already?’

      ‘Why not?’

      For the moment she loved him completely and maternally, till she suppressed the counterfeit and watched him wait, fidgeting, for the wine, pour it, and then set the two glasses before them beside the still-brimming coffee cups. But she was again remembering that night, envying the girl ecstatic with moonlight, who ran crazily through the trees in an unsharable desire for – but that was the point.

      ‘What are you thinking of?’ he asked, still a little cruel.

      ‘Ohhh,’ she protested humorously.

      ‘That’s the trouble, that’s the trouble.’ He lifted his glass, glanced at her, and set it down. ‘Don’t you want a drink?’

      ‘Not yet.’

      He left his glass untouched and began to smoke.

      These moments demanded some kind of gesture – something slight, even casual, but still an acknowledgement of the separateness of these two people in each of them; the one seen, perhaps, as a soft-staring never-closing eye, observing, always observing, with a tired compassion; the other, a shape of violence that struggled on in the cycle of desire and rest, creation and achievement.

      He gave it her. Again their eyes met in the grave irony, before he turned away, flicking his fingers irritably against the table; and she turned also, to note the black branches where the sap was tingling.

      ‘I remember,’ he began; and again she said, in protest, ‘Ohhh!’

      He checked himself. ‘Darling,’ he said dryly, ‘you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.’ They laughed.

      ‘It must have been this street. Perhaps this café – only they change so. When I went back yesterday to see the place where I came every summer, it was a pâtisserie, and the woman had forgotten me. There was a whole crowd of us – we used to go around together – and I met a girl here, I think, for the first time. There were recognized places for contacts; people coming from Vienna or Prague, or wherever it was, knew the places – it couldn’t be this café, unless they’ve smartened it up. We didn’t have the money for all this leather and chromium.’

      ‘Well, go on.’

      ‘I keep remembering her, for some reason. Haven’t thought of her for years. She was about sixteen, I suppose. Very pretty – no, you’re quite wrong. We used to study together. She used to bring her books to my room. I liked her, but I had my own girl, only she was studying something else, I forget what.’ He paused again, and again his face was twisted with nostalgia, and involuntarily she glanced over her shoulder down the street. The procession had completely disappeared, not even the sound of singing and shouting remained.

      ‘I remember her because …’ And, after a preoccupied silence: ‘Perhaps it is always the fate of the virgin who comes and offers herself, naked, to be refused.’

      ‘What!’ she exclaimed, startled.

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