Yes, emptied, this town would stand slowly desiccating, filling with drifts of dust, white, pink, yellow, until…
In Europe, it was more than two years since the war ended, and cities still stood in ruins and people in the cities expected a hungry winter. Last winter had been disastrously cold and now the world grain harvests were one-fourth less than had been expected.
Chance, luck, had kept this city whole and peopled, and now allowed its citizens to sleep at night with full stomachs. Chance might just as easily…forty-four million people had died in the last war. (But what was the use of saying forty-four million, as Athen—presumably now dead—had pointed out, when one could not feel more than, let’s say, half a million, and even that with difficulty, after long strain.) During five years of Martha’s time, of days when, for the most part, she had been bored, waiting for life to start, forty-four million humans had died, had been murdered by their own kind. The world was peopled by a race of murderers who had done their best to annihilate each other—but Martha, by chance, had not been where the fighting was; she had been in this city where lived a couple of hundred thousand, the sort of figure one would not bother to tack on to a figure like a million—though a million were not enough to bother about, ‘about’ forty million people had been killed in the years 1939 to 1945.
Suppose that in the newspapers tomorrow headlines said that two hundred thousand people in a city on the central plateau of Africa had suddenly vanished into the earth. They’d say, how awful. If in this city, white and black began murdering each other, then it would be another city in the grip of war, that’s all, just as these mornings one read that in Israel another British soldier had been shot in ambush by men presumed to be members of the Irgun or Stern gangs.
Since Thomas had left a few weeks ago, Martha’s life had been turned inside out. Once her life was a day-time life, she woke to a day in which she would probably see Thomas. But now the days had lost their meaning, and it was at night that she came awake and lived. She walked through the streets of the little town, watching it empty. First, a hurrying and emptying before the curfew hour of nine, when black people must be behind their own doors. Then, again at eleven, cars sped home in streams of moving light from the cinemas. After eleven, most windows were dark. But the town was all light—reflected from roofs, from glittering masses of foliage, and now, in October, from the jacaranda trees whose masses of blossom looked like crystallized light—the sober trunks lifted millions of tiny bells of hard, cool light. Above, starlight and moonlight, great spaces of remote light; below squatted the town with its windows low and square and yellow, and the street lamps shedding a thick, low, yellow where Martha walked as if wading through stale water. Martha walked, walked, down one street, up another, into the avenues, down one avenue, up another—one could hop from intersection to intersection like a child playing hopscotch, one could walk from the centre of the city to its edge in a slow hour and see no one but an occasional patrolling black policeman. A quiet city this, here, in its white reaches, a city without violence, where an occasional policeman was enough to impose order on straight, regularly crossing streets.
Thomas had not written after a first letter in which he had said he was no writer, and in any case, what was there to say she did not know. He thought of her, he said. He knew she thought of him. ‘Last week I nearly wrote. I was visiting my teacher. I told you about him. He is a clerk in Tel Aviv now, but he was the Rabbi in Sochaczen. I wanted to be educated. The local school was not enough. He was supposed to teach me religion. I wanted him to teach me Latin and science. He said to me, what do you want with Latin and science? All the idiots in Europe have been learning Latin for hundreds of years. And science—do you know how electricity works yet? Can you mend a fuse? Every day I sat on his doorstep and said: teach me. He said, so you want science? For most people, Copernicus is not yet born. I tell you, you want to learn science? Then every morning you wake and think: the sun is a great mass of white light, and in the sun’s light a dozen small particles of substance spin around. You live in a small bit of sun-substance and you spin around the sun. Now feel it. I said to him: Teach me about Einstein. He said: Every time in the day you come to yourself, think where you are—imagine the earth and the planets and you on a planet spinning around. When you wake in the dark at night, think how your half of the earth is turned away from the sun and how the slopes of the Hindu Kush are just coming into the light. He said, think how in the dark sea, the fishes sink to the depths of the sea, and as the light comes, they rise to the surface to the light. Think of the birds moving all over the earth, backwards and forwards, summer and winter. That’s science. He said, think of the trees breathing in at night, out at day. Feel it. Feel the earth turning under you and the planets moving around together. When you feel this, feel it with every bit of you, so that every minute this is how you feel life, then come to me and we will talk about Einstein. I said all right then, teach me Latin. He taught me Latin, and he said I was a child of pre-Copernicus. He said it was evolution, that the next thing for man was to feel the stars and their times and their spaces. Otherwise he was a maggot in dirt. When the war started, he was first in a Russian prison camp, and then he walked hundreds of miles in snow, and his feet rotted under him. At last he got to Israel. I said to him: And how’s evolution with you, my teacher? And he said to me: Is that you, Thomas Stern? Are you still working hard at your Latin? Well, Martha?’
A person who has gone away is still here as long as one can hear what he says; Martha could hear what Thomas said. She argued with him. Ten times a day she caught herself in discussion with Thomas.
When he went away, it was, he said, to visit his wife (who had now returned) and his wife’s relations in Israel. Presumably he would in due course come back after the most ordinary occurrence, a visit to relatives.
But what Martha was saying to Thomas was: ‘Thomas, you shouldn’t do it, it won’t achieve anything.’
Thomas said: ‘After a war in which six million Jews were murdered by Europeans—that is, murdered by the most civilized and advanced section of the human race, or so we believe we are—British policemen with guns prevent Jews from reaching safe soil in Israel. Yes—do you agree?—do you think that is an unfair way of putting it? Am I being a propagandist when I say that? But Martha says to me, don’t be violent, Thomas, it won’t achieve anything.’
She said to him: ‘Thomas, if you do this, you’ll put yourself outside everything you believe.’
‘Are you telling me what I believe, Martha? What difference does it make what I believe? In the last decade forty million human beings were murdered and so many millions crippled, wounded, starved, stunted and driven mad that we’ll never count them. You’re following me, Martha? Right. Tell me, what difference did it make, Thomas Stern learning Latin and my teacher telling me about the stars?’
‘But, Thomas, you know what I’m saying is true—violence does not achieve anything.’
‘Two years ago the British and the Americans dropped an atom bomb on the Japanese out of military curiosity, so it turns out, because the war could have been brought to an end without that, our enemies were suing for peace, though of course, our rulers did not tell us that at the time. We dropped two atom bombs on them just to see how this brave, new weapon would work. You’re with me, Martha? But Martha doesn’t believe in violence.’
‘No, and neither do you.’
‘There’s a civil war in China, at this moment millions of people are involved in a civil war in China, but Martha does not believe in violence.’
‘It doesn’t matter how much you give me lectures, Thomas—the fact that I’m right is proved because all I can say is this—you know yourself you shouldn’t do it.’
‘And there’s the Soviet Union too—but I’m not going to criticize my own side. That’s a joke, Martha—that’s the kind of joke non-violent, idealistic people make.’
‘You shouldn’t do it, Thomas.’
‘Martha doesn’t believe in vi
olence—go on, tell me about it, I’m listening. Martha doesn’t believe in violence.’
Where the tree stood in the middle of the street lay thick shadow. A street lamp a few paces off intensified the shade, lacing the tree’s leaves with black and gold. Under it, one stood in dark, looking up into mixed lights and thicknesses of dark, one looked out along a street that ran light like a river. Insects crawled around invisibly on the bark, sometimes a night bird arrived on the tree and, sensing the human, lifted its wings and went off down the street to the safer, thicker clump. The tense, fighting smell of October, like cordite; a tension like the invisible balances of electricity; a smell of dry leaves were the sap rose fast towards the rains which lay surely ahead, even though the skies were dry still and the clouds as fast and skittish as running horses. A few days after Thomas had left, Martha heard herself arguing with him, and knew why he had gone. She knew suddenly; though of course she had known perfectly well all the time, but had not wanted to know. Thomas had gone to Israel to get his own back on Sergeant Tressell.
Sergeant Tressell would live out his own life in this city (unless it was suddenly bombed, perhaps by accident?—or engulfed by an earthquake) working in a well-ventilated office from eight until four, dying at the age of sixty with thrombosis, leaving behind him a well-insured widow and two children. In Israel a British soldier would fall dead (if he had not already done so) in Sergeant Tressell’s place. Martha could see Thomas with a gun in his hand. When she understood how she argued with him, all day, half the night, she listened again to what he said, to what she said, and then she saw him holding a gun. She could see him, being just as careful as was necessary, no more, standing behind a window with the sun on its panes, waiting to shoot at soldiers who would soon pass in an open truck. Or perhaps he would stand, was standing, gun in hand, behind a rock by a road where a patrol would soon come.
‘But, Thomas, what’s the point of it?’
‘So, Martha,’ she heard him say, conversational rather than aggressive, as if he were conducting a discussion in the current affairs group: ‘So, you don’t believe in violence, is that it?’
Suppose one has loved a man or (however one wants to put it) been influenced by him, or (if you like) touched by him, but certainly in one’s deepest self, and this man then picks up a gun and murders another man out of revenge, what does it mean, saying: I don’t believe in violence?
Having lived through a war when half the human race was engaged in murdering the other half, murdering more vilely, savagely, cruelly, than ever in human history, what does it mean to say: I don’t believe that violence achieves anything?
Every fibre of Martha’s body, everything she thought, every movement she made, everything she was, was because she had been born at the end of one world war, and had spent all her adolescence in the atmosphere of preparations for another which had lasted five years and had inflicted such wounds on the human race that no one had any idea of what the results would be.
Martha did not believe in violence.
Martha was the essence of violence, she had been conceived, bred, fed and reared on violence.
Martha argued with Thomas: What use is it, Thomas, what use is violence?
She watched the light shift glittering in the leaves overhead, watched the tarmac throw off tiny gleams of salty light, saw the roofs shift and balance whitely under the turning sky, felt her mind fill with emptiness. If Thomas were here, standing with her under this tree, what would she say? Nothing, she would put her arms around him. She would put her hand in his and feel the life running through it under her palm. That was all.
The soul of the human race, that part of the mind which has no name, is not called Thomas and Martha, which holds the human race as frogspawn is held in jelly—that part of Martha and of Thomas was twisted and warped, was part of a twist and a damage. She could no more dissociate herself from the violence done her, done by her, than a tadpole can live out of water. Forty-odd million human beings had been murdered, deliberately or from carelessness, from lack of imagination; these people had been killed yesterday, in the last dozen years, they were dying now, as she stood under the tree, and these deaths were marked on her soul, and when Johnny Capetnakis from the Piccadilly restaurant (as it might very well have been) lifted Athen’s head on a bayonet and stuck it up in a row of other heads in the market squares of the cities of Greece (so the newspaper had announced, casually almost, a week ago—Government troops with the connivance of America and Britain were displaying the heads of traitors, Athen’s, and his friends’ quite likely, in the market towns of Greece) well, when that happened, it happened in Martha’s soul and in Thomas’s and in—But standing silent under the tree, knowing this was true, her mind could not stand it, it became numbed, a dry, painful sorrow like a useless remorse began running in her blood and she felt her pulses beat like warnings of time passing, the blood flowed as if ebbing out into dry sand, and she wished that Thomas were here, for if he were, she could put her hand into his hand and not have to be alone. He would stand here, close, and he would say simply: ‘Well, Martha? So I’m back.’
From the big tree it was half a mile to the flat she shared with Anton, half a mile to her parents’ house near the park. Instead of walking straight home, she walked right around the big trees of the park and stood outside the Quests’ garden. Her father’s bedroom would be dark—it was dark, these days, by eight in the evening. Sometimes Martha stood outside the fence and looked at the dark window and thought: that couple in there, that man and that woman, when they conceived me, one was in shellshock from the war, and the other in a breakdown from nursing its wounded. She, Martha, was as much a child of the 1914–1918 war as she was of Alfred Quest, May Quest.
Sometimes the light came on, and Martha could see her mother’s shadow move across the curtains, back and forth, and then the shadow went away and the light went out. Martha heard what they said to each other, could see their gestures and the expressions on their faces without being in the room. Once, very quietly, she crept like a burglar into the big garden towards the lit window. She held the yapping, little white dog’s jaws closed with one hand and stood in a flower bed under the window, the cold scent of violets rising from where her shoes sank into a damp soil. She could see over the sill and past the edge of the curtains. Her father sat up in bed, a pink wool bedjacket of her mother’s around his shoulders. He was staring around him, wide-eyed, not blinking at all—the way a child stares when suddenly awakened. His mouth was half-open and had fallen in, because his teeth were in the glass by the bed. Her mother, nearly asleep, wearing an old brown dressing-gown that had been her husband’s, bent to put a spoon of liquid into the old man’s mouth. When Mrs Quest straightened and turned to the window, Martha saw her face: under wisps of white hair that stuck out wildly, her eyes glared desperately, reddened by sleep, in a red, swollen face. She looked a half-savage old woman, a wild, sorrowful old female, trapped, caged, standing there holding a little silver teaspoon in one hand and a sticky medicine bottle in the other. Over the odour of crushed violets came the sour smell of the medicine.
Martha dropped the twisting little dog and ran to the gate through shrubs and flowers. The dog yapped, yapped; and Mrs Quest came out on to the veranda and said in a sad, rough voice: ‘Kaiser, Kaiser, come here at once!’
Cruelty: Martha hated that dog so much she wanted to strangle it. That dog aroused in her waves of pure, red hate. Martha could not easily visit her father because of her cruelty. She wished him dead, which was bad enough; but she watched her mother satirically when the exhausted old woman announced two, three times in a month that her husband could not last another week. The young man, Jonathan, had been waiting to get married until a time when the sadness of that house would not lie over his love like a sickness, but they could not wait for ever, and so soon there would be a hurried, almost apologetic wedding. It was no longer a house of young people, they were all sorted out into couples, married or engaged, and Mrs Quest once again spent he
r energies nursing. In that house people sat around, waiting for an old man to die. Martha was afraid to visit her father, because she wished to wipe that house and everything in it out of existence, it was so terrible and so ugly. But she went nearly every day. Before she set out to see her father she took herself in hand, held herself quiet: the house was more than ever like a nightmare, all her most private nightmares were made tangible there, and that is why she stood outside it at night, looking at it like a stranger. In this way she focused it, targeted it, held it safe so that later, when she got home and went to bed, she would not actually dream of it because she had forced the dream into her consciousness: she had already experienced, awake, the quicksand which swallowed so easily love and the living.