Free Landlocked by Doris Lessing Page B

change in me?’
    ‘Yes, I have.’
    ‘Thank you for saying so. It is true.’
    ‘Athen, have you seen Maisie?’
    Athen let Martha’s hand go and frowned. ‘I know why you ask me that, Martha.’
    More shouts from outside the cinema.
    ‘I must talk about this with you, Martha.’
    They ran towards the cinema and the waiting group.
    There was a girl in the group—a red-haired girl in a white dress. Whose? Not Solly’s, this evening; so that meant she must be Joss’s, or Thomas Stern’s. Probably Thomas’s—he liked thin girls. As Martha decided this, Thomas took both her hands—Martha’s, announced that she looked terrible, very pale, and much too thin, and that while he was always her slave on principle, tonight, because of her irresistible look of illness—she was irresistible. So she must be Joss’s girl? No time to find out, no time even to be introduced—Martha and the red-haired girl smiled goodwill, and then the group joined the crowd that was being sucked into the cinema, quickening as it went, like bathwater into a hole. The manager stood by the box office, his smile benign, but not enough to conceal his disappointment at the absence of his best customers. He kept darting glances at the entrance in case at the last minute the familiar blue-grey uniforms would appear, and all his seats be filled. But there were, after all, many RAF present, in ordinary clothes, like Athen,and soon the manager was smiling and urging his flock into the dark with smiles, a pressure of the hand, a pat on the shoulder. To Martha, who after all he had been welcoming for five or six years now, he said jovially: ‘And how are you these days, Mrs…?’ But he was unable to remember her current married name.
    The programme had started. Across the screen that was lifted high in the big dark space over the crowded floor, moved a file of soldiers which, seen in the confusion, the jerking about of finding seats, then sitting, then finding places for handbags and jackets, looked like the columns which, in one Allied uniform or another, had marched, flown, parachuted across that screen for the last five years. But suddenly they understood the great, staring hollow-cheeked face they looked at was a German, and the uniform he wore, which was worn into rags, was a German uniform. The announcer’s voice had a note they had not heard before. It was jeering: ‘And so here he is, the Ubermensch, the Superman, the ruler of the world, here he is, and take a good look at him.’ The German on the screen was eighteen? A starved twenty-year-old? A bit of rag fluttered wildly on his shoulder, and he shivered so that it seemed as if the whole cinema shivered with him. He stared into the cinema-crowd with eyes quite empty of expression. So he had stared a few days ago into the camera which took pictures of the defeated armies—he had stared probably not knowing what the machine was doing there or what it wanted. He stared, his cheek-bones speaking of death, into the faces of a thousand full-fed people, his victorious enemies, in a little town in the centre of Africa.
    The cinema was very silent. They were shocked, or in a state of mild shock, for a few moments. Then they began to realize, slowly. For the five years of the war, they had seen the faces of the enemy at a distance—and seen aircraft spinning down in flames and smoke; seen corpses like photographs in the newspaper—pictures of corpses; seen the posturing faces of enemy leaders, seen massed troops, massed tanks, armies, men in the mass, men on the move in columns, men in uniforms. Now they saw this face, close,close; and it was a shock, because the minds of the men who organized newsreels, war films, ‘propaganda’ had taken care that this face, the face of a shocked, frightened boy, should not stare, as close as a lover, into the face of a cinema audience.
    ‘Yes, take a good look,’ went on the commentator in the same calculatingly sneering sarcastic tone, ‘you’ll not see