The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing Page A

remind the cannibals out there of Hugo. Who was back in the place along the wall, where he could not easily be seen. He was as still as if asleep, but his eyes were open. When I did light the candles he did not move or even blink.
    Looking back I see myself sitting in the long room with its comfortable old furniture, with Emily’s things in the little space she allotted for them, and the yellow beast lying quietly, suffering. And there for backdrop was the ambiguous wall, which could so easily dissolve, dissolving, too, all this extraneous life, and the anxieties and pressures of the time - creating, of course, its own. Shadowily present, there it stood, its pattern of fruits and leaves and flowers obliterated by the dim light. That is how I see it, see us, see that time: the long room, dimly lit, with me and Hugo there, thinking of Emily away across the street among crowds that shifted and ebbed and thinned and left - and behind us that other indefinite region, shifting and melting and changing, where walls and doors and rooms and gardens and people continually recreated themselves, like clouds.
    That night there was a moon. There seemed more light outside my room than in it. The pavements were crammed. There was a lot of noise.
    It was clear that the crowd had split into two parts: one part was about to take to the roads.
    I looked for Emily with these people, but could not see her. Then I did see her: she was with the people who were staying behind. We all -I, Hugo, the part of the crowd not yet ready to make the journey, and the hundreds of people at the windows all around and above - watched as the departing ones formed up into a regiment, four or five abreast. They did not seem to be taking much with them, but summer lay ahead, and the country they were heading for was still, or so we believed, not yet much pillaged. They were mostly very young, people not yet twenty, but included a family of mother and father with three small children. A baby was carried in the arms of a friend, the mother took an infant on her back in a sling, the father had the biggest child on his shoulders. There were leaders, three men: not the middle-aged or older men, but the older ones among the young people. Of these two went at the front with their women, and one came at the end with his: he had two girls attached to him. There were about forty people altogether in this band.
    They had a cart or trolley, similar to the ones that had been used at airports and railway stations. This had some parcels of root vegetables and grain on it, and the little bundles of the travellers. Also, at the last moment, a couple of youths, laughing but still shamefaced or at least self-conscious, pushed on to this trolley a great limp parcel which exuded blood.
    There were slim bundles of reeds on the cart - these were hawked from door to door by then; and three girls carried them as flaring torches, one at the front, one at the back, one in the middle, torches much brighter than the inadequate, when it was not altogether absent, street lighting. And off they went, along the road north-west, lit by the torches that dripped dangerous fire close above their heads. They were singing. They sang ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’ - without, or so it seemed, any consciousness of its ludicrous pathos. They sang ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’, and ‘Down by the Riverside’.
    They had gone, and left on the pavements were still a good many people. They seemed subdued, and soon dispersed. Emily came in, silent. She looked for Hugo - he had returned to his place along the wall, and she sat near him, and pulled his front half over her lap. She sat there hugging him, bent over him. I could see the big yellow head lying on her arm, could hear him, at last, purr and croon.
    Now I knew that while she wanted more than anything to be off into that savage gamblers’ future with the migrating ones, she was not prepared to sacrifice her Hugo. Or at least, was in conflict. And I dared