Four Gated City by Doris Lessing

place: it was bent and set hard in a crook.’
    This scar was a long white weal that slanted down into the armpit. Martha stroked it with her fingers while he remembered that afternoon in a sea full of rubbish and the dead and the dying: she stroked and thought of it with him. Then he, having kissed the fingers that held the memory, contained it, ran his fingers along the minute marks on her groin and upper thighs made by pregnancy, tiny silver marks on white skin, and she thought of a small baby, any baby born to any woman, and its absolute perfection. That is why women cry when their children fall for the first time and scar a knee or an elbow: that perfect body, with not a mark on it, well, now it is claimed by the world-that is the moment when a woman cedes her child away from her, to time. She thought of Caroline,the perfect little female body that had issued from her body which now held and always would the scars of pregnancy, and it was hard to tell whether she was Martha, or her mother who had given birth to her, or Caroline, who would give birth; and meanwhile Jack touched and understood the scars, lifting his head to look at them, and on his face was the awe of his love of the flesh and his terror at what ate it.
    She lay and watched the strong bony boy’s face with the boy’s brown eyes just above hers, and the face dissolved into time: his hard straight mouth and the eyes were those of the little tyrant, his father; his nose, his falling brown hair, his mother’s, the frightened farm girl’s; and when he smiled, letting his head fall back on the pillow beside hers, she slid down her hand to the back of thighs which under the pads of her fingers were grooved and marred, and his brown eyes narrowed into a tension of memory. He was the son of a farmer in the Orange Free State, a small poor farmer with a large family: two sons, a cowed wife, and three daughters whom he adored and terrorized, and (so Jack claimed) had raped, just once, all three of them. The marks he had left on Jack and the other boy were across the backs of their thighs. He whipped them with his leather thong all through their childhood, and the moment Jack got free of him was when he went to the local Indian store and bought a pair of long khaki trousers: man’s trousers. He was twelve, and he had to roll up the bottoms more than a foot. Then he had gone to the veranda where his father was sitting at sundown with his silent wife, and had stood there-a man. And when the father had stood up, anger swelling in the veins of his neck, Jack had picked up a big stone from the earth outside the house, and had stood there, stone poised at shoulder level ready to throw. Not one word had been said. There he had stood, a thin child in a man’s long trousers that hid the scarred backs of his thighs for ever from his father; the setting sun was hot on his back and made for a long shadow right across the sand to the brick veranda where the man his father stood up to go inside and fetch his whip. But he stopped, because as he moved, the stone in the boy’s hand moved while the narrowed brown eyes (replicas of his own) took aim. The man had sat down. He had not beaten the older son again, but went on beating the younger. He did this until Jack took the eleven-year-old into the local store and with money he had stolen from the tobacco bag hidden under his father’s mattress, bought him a pair of man’strousers. The two boys had confronted the father together. And again, not a word. Never a word spoken while the two boys stood side by side at evening looking in at the veranda where their parents sat drinking coffee. The mother had gone indoors, unable to stand it: and four females had stood in the room behind, watching the scene outside, too afraid even to cry.
    A year later Jack left the farm early one morning when the sun was coming up over the edges of the sand, taking with him money he had stolen from under the mattress. He boarded the train to Port