The Golden Notebook (68 page)

with the smell of sweet spilt wine in our nostrils and the lights of the hotel shone across the road. It was an ordinary dream, and I knew that I had been delivered from disintegration because I could dream it. The dream faded in a lying pain of nostalgia. I said to myself in my sleep, hold yourself together, you can do it if you get to the blue notebook and write. I felt the inertia of my hand, which was cold and unable to reach out for the pen. But instead of a pen I held a gun in my hand. And I was not Anna, but a soldier. I could feel the uniform on me, but one I didn't know. I was standing in a cool night somewhere, with groups of soldiers moving quietly behind me around the business of getting a meal. I could hear the clink of metal on metal, rifles being stacked together. Somewhere before me was the enemy. But I didn't know who the enemy was, what my cause was. I saw my skin was dark. At first I thought I was an African or a Negro. Then I saw dark glistening hair on my bronze forearm which held a rifle on which moonlight glinted. I understood I was on a hillside in Algeria, I was an Algerian soldier and I was fighting the French. Yet Anna's brain was working in this man's head, and she was thinking: Yes I shall kill, I shall even torture because I have to, but without belief. Because it is no longer possible to organise and to fight and to kill without knowing that new tyranny arises from it. Yet one has to fight and organise. Then Anna's brain went out like a candle flame. I was the Algerian, believing, full of the courage of belief. Terror came into the dream because again Anna was threatened with total disintegration. Terror brought me out of the dream, and I was no longer the sentry, standing guard in the moonlight with the groups of his comrades moving quietly behind him over the fires of the evening meal. I bounded off the dry, sun-smelling soil of Algeria and I was in the air. This was the flying dream, and it was a long time since I had dreamed it, and I was almost crying with joy because I was flying again. The essence of the flying dream is joy, joy in light, free movement. I was high in the air above the Mediterranean, and I knew I could go anywhere. I willed to go east. I wanted to go to Asia, I wanted to visit the peasant. I was flying immensely high, with the mountains and seas beneath me, treading the air down easily with my feet. I passed over great mountains and below me was China. I said in my dream: I am here because I want to be a peasant with other peasants. I came low over a village, and saw peasants working in the fields. They had a quality of stern purpose which attracted me to them. I willed my feet to let me descend gently to the earth. The joy of the dream was more intense than I have experienced, and it was the joy of freedom. I came down to the ancient earth of China, and a peasant woman stood at the door of her hut. I walked towards her, and just as Paul had stood, bending, by the sleeping Anna a short time before, needing to become her, so I stood by the peasant woman, needing to enter her, to be her. It was easy to become her. She was a young woman, and she was pregnant, but already made old by work. Then I realised that Anna's brain was in her still, and I was thinking mechanical thoughts which I classified as 'progressive and liberal.' That she was such and such, formed by this movement, that war, this experience, I was 'naming' her, from an alien personality. Then Anna's brain, as it had done on the hillside in Algeria, began to flicker and to wane. And I said: 'Don't let terror of dissolution frighten you away this time, hold on.' But the terror was too strong. It drove me out of the peasant woman, and I stood to one side of her, watching her walk across a field to join a group of men and women working. They wore uniforms. But now terror had destroyed the joy, and my feet would no longer tread down the air. I trod down and down, frantic, trying to climb up and over the black mountains which separated me from Europe, which now, from where I stood, seemed a tiny meaningless fringe on the great continent, like a disease I was going to re-enter. But I could not fly, I could not leave the plain where the peasants worked, and fear of being trapped there woke me. I woke into the late afternoon, the room full of dark, the traffic roaring up from the street below. I woke a person who had been changed by the experience of being other people. I did not care about Anna, I did not like being her. It was with a weary sense of duty I became Anna, like putting on a soiled dress. And then I got up and switched on the lights, and heard movements upstairs, which meant Saul had come back. As soon as I heard him my stomach clenched up, and I was back inside sick Anna who had no will. I called up to him and he called down. His voice being cheerful, my apprehension went. Then he came down, and it returned, for he had on his face a consciously whimsical smile, and I wondered, which role is he playing? He sat on my bed and he took my hand and looked at it with a consciously whimsical admiration. I knew then, that he was comparing it with the hand of a woman he had just left, or a woman he wanted me to believe he had just left. He remarked: 'Perhaps I like your nail varnish better after all.' I said: 'But I'm not wearing nail varnish.' He said: 'Well, if you were I'd probably like it better.' He kept turning my hand over, looking at it with amused surprise, watching me to see how I took the amused surprise. I took my hand away. He said: 'I suppose you're going to ask me where I've been.' I said nothing. He said: 'Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies.' I said nothing. I felt as if sucked into a quicksand, or pushed on to a conveyor belt that would carry me into grinding machinery. I walked away from him to the window. Outside was a dark glistening rain and the roofs were wet and dark. The cold struck on the window panes. He came after me, put his arms around me and held me. He was smiling, a man conscious of his power with women, seeing himself in this role. He wore his tight blue sweater and the sleeves were rolled up. I saw the light hair glistening on his forearms. He looked down into my eyes and said: 'I swear I'm not lying. I swear. I swear. I haven't had another woman. I swear.' His voice was full of dramatic intensity, and his eyes were focused in a parody of intensity. I did not believe him, but the Anna in his arms believed him, even while I watched the two of us playing out these roles, incredulous that we were capable of such melodrama. Then he kissed me. At the moment I responded he broke away, and he said as he had said before, with his characteristic sullenness at such moments: 'Why don't you fight me? Why don't you fight?' I kept replying: 'Why should I fight? Why do you have to fight?' And I had said this before, we had done all this before. Then he led me by the hand to the bed and made love to me. I was interested to see who he was making love to, for I knew it was not me. It appeared that this Other woman needed a great deal of admonition and encouragement in love and is childish. For he was making love to a childish woman and she had flat breasts and very beautiful hands. Suddenly he said: 'Yes, and we'll make a baby, you're right.' When it was finished he rolled away, gasping, and exclaimed: 'By Christ, that would be the end, a child, you'd really finish me.' I said: 'It wasn't me who offered to give you a child, this is Anna.' He jerked his head up to look at me, and he dropped his head back and laughed, and said: 'So it is. It is Anna.' I went to the bathroom and was very sick, and when I came back I said: 'I've got to go to sleep.' I turned away from him and went to sleep, to get away from him. But I went towards him, in sleep. It was a night of dreams. I was playing roles, one after another, against Saul, who was playing roles. It was like being in a play, whose words kept changing, as if a playwright had written the same play again and again, but slightly different each time. We played against each other every man-woman role imaginable. As each cycle of the dream came to an end, I said: 'Well, I've experienced that, have I, well it was time that I did.' It was like living a hundred lives. I was astonished at how many of the female roles I have not played in life, have refused to play, or were not offered to me. Even in my sleep I knew I was being condemned to play them now because I had refused them in life. In the morning I woke beside Saul. He was cold, and I had to warm him. I was myself, and strong. I came straight to the trestle table and laid out this notebook. I wrote for a long time before he woke. He must have been awake and watching me for some time before I saw him. He said: 'Instead of making a record of my sins in your diary, why don't you write another novel?' I said: 'I could give you a dozen reasons why not, I could speak on the subject for several hours, but the real reason is that I have a writer's block. That's all. And it's the first time I've admitted it.' 'Perhaps,' he said, his head on one side, smiling with affection. I saw the affection and it warmed me. Then, as I smiled back, his smile cut off, his face went sullen, and he said with energy: 'Anyway, knowing you are here spinning out all these words, it drives me crazy.' 'Anyone could tell us two writers shouldn't be together. Or rather, that a competitive American shouldn't be with a woman who has written a book.' 'That's right,' he said, 'It's a challenge to my sexual superiority, and that isn't a joke.' 'I know it isn't. But please don't give me any more of your pompous socialist lectures about the equality of men and women.' 'I shall probably give you pompous lectures because I enjoy it. But I won't believe in them myself. The truth is, I resent you for having written a book which was a success. And I've come to the conclusion I've always been a hypocrite, and in fact I enjoy a society where women are second-class citizens, I enjoy being boss and being flattered.' 'Good,' I said. 'Because in a society where not one man in ten thousand begins to understand the ways in which women are second-class citizens, we have to rely for company on the men who are at least not hypocrites.' 'And now we've settled that, you can make me some coffee, because that is your role in life.' 'It will be a pleasure,' I said, and we had breakfast in good humour, liking each other. After breakfast I took my shopping basket and walked along the Earl's Court Road. I enjoyed buying food and groceries, and enjoyed knowing that I would cook for him later. Yet I was also sad, knowing it would not last long. I thought: He'll be gone soon, and then it will be over, the pleasure of looking after a man. I was ready to come home, yet I stood at the corner of a street in a thin grey rain, among poking umbrellas and pushing bodies, and wondered why I was waiting there. Then I walked across the street into a stationer's shop, and went to a counter loaded with notebooks. There were notebooks there similar to these four I have. Yet they were not what I wanted. I saw a large thick book, rather expensive, and opened it, and it had good thick white paper, unlined. The paper was pleasant to touch, a little rough, but silky. It had a heavy cover, of dull gold. I had never seen a similar notebook, and I asked the assistant what it was manufactured for, and she said that an American customer had ordered it to be especially made for him, but had not come back for it. He had paid a deposit, so it wasn't as expensive as I expected it to be. Even so, it was expensive, but I wanted it, and I brought it home with me. It gives me pleasure to touch it and look at it, but I don't know what I want it for. Saul came into my room, prowling around and around, restless, and he saw the new notebook, and pounced on it. 'Oh this is pretty,' he said. 'What is it for?' 'I don't know yet.' 'Then I want it,' he said. I nearly said: 'All right, have it,' watching in myself a need to give spouting like water from a whale. I was annoyed at myself, because I wanted it, yet so nearly gave it to him. I knew this need to comply was part of the sadistic-masochistic cycle we are in. I said: 'No, you can't have it.' It cost me a great deal to say it-I even stammered. He took the book up and said, laughing: 'Gimme, gimme, gimme.' I said: 'No.' He had expected me to give it, because he had made a joke of the gimme, gimme; and now he stood glancing at me sideways, and murmuring, not laughing at all, gimme, gimme, gimme, in a child's voice. He had become a child. I saw how the new personality, or rather, the old one, entered him like an animal entering a thicket. His body curved and crouched, became a weapon; his face, which when he is 'himself,' is good-humoured, shrewd, sceptical, was the face of a little murderer. He whipped around, holding the book, ready to run for the door; (*19) and I saw him clearly, the slum kid, member of a gang of slum kids, lifting something from a shop counter, or running from the police. I said: 'No, you can't have it,' as I would have done to a child, and he came to himself, slowly, all the tension going out of him; and he laid the book down, good-humoured again, even grateful. I thought how odd it was, that he should need the authority of someone who could say no, and yet it was my life he had drifted into, I who find it so hard to say no. Because now I had said no, and he laid the book down, every line of him expressing the deprived child who had had something he very badly wanted denied to him, I felt stricken. I wanted to say: Take it, for God's sake, it's not important. But now I couldn't say it, and I was frightened at how quickly this unimportant thing, the new pretty book, had become part of the fight. He stood for a while, by the door, forlorn; while I watched him straighten himself, and saw how a thousand times in his childhood he had straightened himself, stiffened his shoulders, and 'put it under his belt,' as he had told me everyone must do when they had trouble. Then he said: 'Well, I'll go up and work.' He went slowly upstairs, but did not work, for I heard him prowling about upstairs. The tension started again, though for a few hours I had been free of it. I watched the hands of pain lay hold of my stomach and fingers of pain jab into the muscles of my neck and the small of my back. Sick Anna came back and inhabited me. I know it was the prowling footsteps upstairs that had summoned her. I put on an Armstrong record, but the naive good-humour of the music was too remote. I changed it for Mulligan, but the self-pity of that was the voice of the illness in my flat, so I switched off the music and thought: Janet will be home soon, and I must stop this, I must stop. It's been a dark cold day, not even a winter's gleam of sun; and now it's raining outside. The curtains are drawn and both paraffin stoves are lit. Now the