Read Online The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing - Free Book Online
Authors: Doris Lessing
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Fiction - General, Time travel, Modern fiction, Mothers and daughters
Ads: Link
everything, hers had nothing interesting to wear, people her age were left with ancient fashion magazines and dreams of the delicious and dead past… and so it went on, and on.
And now it wasn’t only that she was older and her body showing it: she was putting on weight. She would lie all day on the sofa with her yellow dog-like cat, or cat-like dog, she would lie hugging him and petting him and stroking him, she would suck sweets and eat bread and jam and fondle the animal and daydream. Or she sat at the window making her sharp little comments, eating. Or she would supply herself with stacks of bread and jam, cake, apples, and arrange a scene in the middle of the floor with old books and magazines, lying face down with Hugo sprawled across the back of her thighs: there she would read and dream and eat her way through a whole morning, a whole day, days at a time.
It drove me quite wild with irritation: yet I could remember doing it myself.
Suddenly she would leap up and go to the mirror and cry out: ‘Oh, dear, I’ll be getting so fat you’ll think I’m even more ugly than you do now!’ Or: ‘I won’t be able to get into any clothes even when you do let me buy some new ones, I know you don’t really want me to have new ones, you just say so, you think I’m being frivolous and heartless, when so many people can’t even eat.’
I could only reiterate that I would be delighted if she bought herself some clothes. She could go to the secondhand markets and shops, as most people did. Or, if she liked, she could go to the real shops - just this once. For buying clothes or materials in the shops was by that time a status symbol; the shops were really used only by the administrating class, by - as most people called them - The Talkers. I knew she was attracted by the idea of actually going to a real shop. But she ignored the money I had left in a drawer for her, and went on eating and dreaming.
I was out a good deal, busy on that common occupation, gathering news. For while I had, like everyone else, a radio, while I was a member of a newspaper circle - shortage of newsprint made it necessary for groups of people to buy newspapers and journals in common and circulate them -I, like everyone else, looked for news, real news, where people congregated in the streets, in bars and pubs and tea-houses. All over the city were these groups of people, moving from one place to another, pub to tea-house to bar to outside the shops that still sold television. These groups were like an additional organ burgeoning on the official organs of news all the time new groups, or couples, or individuals added themselves to a scene, stood listening, mingling, offering what they themselves had heard - news having become a sort of currency - giving in exchange for rumour and gossip, gossip and rumour. Then we moved on, and stopped; moved on and stopped again, as if movement itself could allay the permanent unease we all felt. News gathered in this way was often common talk days or even weeks before it was given official life in the newscasts. Of course it was often inaccurate. But then all news is inaccurate. What people were trying to do, in their continual moving about and around, nosing out news, taking in information, was to isolate residues of truth in rumour, for there was nearly always that. We felt we had to have this precious residue: it was our due, our right. Having it made us feel safer and gave us identity. Not getting it, or enough of it, deprived us, made us anxious.
This is how we saw it then. Now I think something different: that what we were doing was talking. We talked. Just like those people above us who spent their lives in their eternal and interminable conferences, talking about what was happening, what should happen, what they fondly hoped they could make happen - but of course never did -we talked. We called them The Talkers … and ourselves spent hours of every day talking and listening to talk.
Mostly, of course,
And now it wasn’t only that she was older and her body showing it: she was putting on weight. She would lie all day on the sofa with her yellow dog-like cat, or cat-like dog, she would lie hugging him and petting him and stroking him, she would suck sweets and eat bread and jam and fondle the animal and daydream. Or she sat at the window making her sharp little comments, eating. Or she would supply herself with stacks of bread and jam, cake, apples, and arrange a scene in the middle of the floor with old books and magazines, lying face down with Hugo sprawled across the back of her thighs: there she would read and dream and eat her way through a whole morning, a whole day, days at a time.
It drove me quite wild with irritation: yet I could remember doing it myself.
Suddenly she would leap up and go to the mirror and cry out: ‘Oh, dear, I’ll be getting so fat you’ll think I’m even more ugly than you do now!’ Or: ‘I won’t be able to get into any clothes even when you do let me buy some new ones, I know you don’t really want me to have new ones, you just say so, you think I’m being frivolous and heartless, when so many people can’t even eat.’
I could only reiterate that I would be delighted if she bought herself some clothes. She could go to the secondhand markets and shops, as most people did. Or, if she liked, she could go to the real shops - just this once. For buying clothes or materials in the shops was by that time a status symbol; the shops were really used only by the administrating class, by - as most people called them - The Talkers. I knew she was attracted by the idea of actually going to a real shop. But she ignored the money I had left in a drawer for her, and went on eating and dreaming.
I was out a good deal, busy on that common occupation, gathering news. For while I had, like everyone else, a radio, while I was a member of a newspaper circle - shortage of newsprint made it necessary for groups of people to buy newspapers and journals in common and circulate them -I, like everyone else, looked for news, real news, where people congregated in the streets, in bars and pubs and tea-houses. All over the city were these groups of people, moving from one place to another, pub to tea-house to bar to outside the shops that still sold television. These groups were like an additional organ burgeoning on the official organs of news all the time new groups, or couples, or individuals added themselves to a scene, stood listening, mingling, offering what they themselves had heard - news having become a sort of currency - giving in exchange for rumour and gossip, gossip and rumour. Then we moved on, and stopped; moved on and stopped again, as if movement itself could allay the permanent unease we all felt. News gathered in this way was often common talk days or even weeks before it was given official life in the newscasts. Of course it was often inaccurate. But then all news is inaccurate. What people were trying to do, in their continual moving about and around, nosing out news, taking in information, was to isolate residues of truth in rumour, for there was nearly always that. We felt we had to have this precious residue: it was our due, our right. Having it made us feel safer and gave us identity. Not getting it, or enough of it, deprived us, made us anxious.
This is how we saw it then. Now I think something different: that what we were doing was talking. We talked. Just like those people above us who spent their lives in their eternal and interminable conferences, talking about what was happening, what should happen, what they fondly hoped they could make happen - but of course never did -we talked. We called them The Talkers … and ourselves spent hours of every day talking and listening to talk.
Mostly, of course,
Similar Books
