Free The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing Page A

friend. For Janet was destined differently. To tell the truth I did not realize how high the Whites were placed in the administrative circles; but then, they were not the only official family to half hide themselves in this way, living quietly, in an ordinary flat, apparently like everyone else but with access to sources of food, goods, clothes, transport, denied to most.
    Emily did not seem to mind Janet discarding her. There followed a period of weeks when she was every bit as self-absorbed as when she had been eating, dreaming, indolent, but now she was full of energy and self-denial, at least for food, and I watched. I watched endlessly, for I had never seen anything like this for concentration.
    For if she, Emily, had gone inwards, as much now in this new activity as she had when lazy and dreaming, at least now what she felt herself to be was all visible, presented to me in the shape of her fantastic costumes.
    Her first self-portraits … she had found an old dress, white with sprigs of pink flowers. Parts were stained and worn. These she cut away. Bits of lace and tulle, beads, scarves were added and removed to a kaleidoscope garment that changed with her needs. Most often it was a bride’s dress. Then it was a young girl’s dress - that ambiguous declaration of naivet é   more usually made by a maturer vision than that of the wearer, an eye that sees the fragility of certain types of young girls’ clothes as the expression of the evanescence of that flesh. It was nightdress when she wore its transparency over her naked body. It was evening dress, and sometimes when she did not intend this, for a hardness in her, the watchfulness of her defences, took away innocence from anything she wore, so that she might have flowers in her hands and in her hair, in an attempt at her version of Primavera, yet she had about her the look of a woman who has calculated the exact amount of flesh she will show at a dinner party. This dress was for me an emotional experience. I was frightened by it. Again, this was a question of my helplessness with her. I believed her capable of going out on the pavement wearing it. Now I judge myself to have been stupid: the elderly tend not to see - they have forgotten! - that hidden person in the young creature, the strongest and most powerful member among the cast of characters inhabiting an adolescent body, the self which instructs, chooses experience - and protects.
    And then, to see this creation now, at such a time of savagery and anarchy, this archetype of a girl’s dress - or rather, this composite of archetypes; the way this child, this little girl, had found the materials for her dreams in the rubbish heaps of our old civilization, had found them, worked on them, and in spite of everything had made her images of herself come to life … but such old images, so indestructible, and so irrelevant - all this was too much for me, and I retired from the scene, determined to say nothing, show nothing, betray nothing. And it was lucky I did. She wore the thing about the flat, a naked girl only just veiled; she wore it flauntingly, bashfully, daringly, fearfully; she was ‘trying on’ not a dress, but self-portraits, and I might as well not have been there, she took no notice of me. Well, of course, the pressures on everyone’s privacy had taught us how to absent ourselves into inner solitudes, we were all adept at being with others and not being with them.
    But I really did not know whether to laugh or to cry; I did a little of both, of course when she could not see me. For she was so ludicrous, as well as so brave and resourceful, with her straight, honest, hazel eyes - her English good-comrade’s eyes, unsubtle, judging, wary; with her attempts at make-up on a fresh little face, languishing away there behind harem veils, her body stiff in ‘seductive’ poses. This dress possessed her for weeks. Then one day she took scissors and cut off the bottom in a gesture of derisive impatience: