NF (1957) Going Home by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page B

it. Power. Much more effective than all these dams and things. Do you think they have thought of that yet?’
    ‘Bound to.’
    ‘You’re not much good, are you? No imagination. Not a scrap of imagination between the lot of you, that’s your trouble.’
     
    Walls are by nature and definition flat; and having lived for so long in London, when I hear the word wall I see a flat surface, patterned or coloured smooth.
    But the wall that faced my bed was not flat.
    When the workmen had flung on the mud, naturally it was a little bumpy because no matter how you smooth on mud over poles, if there is a knot on the pole where a branch was chopped off, or if the pole had a bit of a bend in it, then the mud settled into the shape of bump and hollow. Sometimes, because of the age of the wall, a bit of mud had fallen out altogether and had had to be replaced, much to my regret, for the exposed poles showed themselves riddled with borer holes and other interesting matters. Once there was a mouse-nest in the space between two poles. There were five tiny pink mice which fitted easily into about an inch of my palm. The mother mouse ran away, and I diluted cow’s milk and tried to drop it off the end of a bit of cotton into the minute mouths. But a drop is always a drop; and for a baby mouse as if someone had flung a bucket of milk into its face. I nearly drowned those mice, trying to work out a way to make a drop of milk mouse-size. But it was no use, they died; and the jagged space in the wall was filled in with new mud.
    The wall had been colour-washed a yellowish-white; but for some reason I have forgotten, after the brown mud had been filled in, it was not painted over, so that there was a brown patch on my wall.
    I knew the geography of that wall as I knew the lines on my palm. Waking in the morning I opened my eyes to the first sunlight, for the sun shot up over the mountain in a big red ball just where my window was. The green mosquito gauze over the window had tarnished to a dull silver, and my curtains were a clear orange; and the sun came glittering through the silver gauze and set the curtains glowing like fire. The heat was instant, like a hot hand on your flesh. The light reached in and lay on the white wall, in an irregular oblong of soft rosy red.The grain of the wall, like a skin, was illuminated by the clear light. There were areas of light, brisk graining where Tobias the painter had whisked his paint-brush from side to side; then a savage knot of whorls and smudged lines where he had twirled it around. What had he been thinking about when his paint-brush suddenly burst into such a fury of movements? There was another patch where he had put his hand flat on the whitewash. Probably there had been something in his bare foot, and he had steadied himself with his hand while he picked his sole up to look at it. Then he had taken out whatever was in his foot and lifted his brush and painted out the handmark. Or thought he had. For at a certain moment of the sunrise, when the sun was four inches over the mountains in the east, judging by the eye, that hand came glistering out of the whitewash like a Sign of some kind.
    It took about five minutes of staring hard at the walls where the light lay rosy and warm for it to turn a clear primrose-yellow. This meant that the sun had contracted and was no longer red and swollen, but yellow and its normal size, and one could no longer look at it without hurting one’s eyes.
    High near the roof, above the clear yellow sun-pattern, there were a series of little holes in the wall. These were the homes of some hornets, who like dried mud to live in. I don’t know if hornets are like birds, returning to their nests, but there were always hornets at work on that wall. They were elegant in shape, and a bright, lively black, and they buzzed and zoomed in and out of the room through the propped-open door. One would fit itself neatly inside a hole and begin working inside it, and you listened to