The Memoirs of a Survivor Read Free Page A

to one side, so that there was a large expanse of this wall quite empty: I had not put up pictures or hangings. The ‘white’ of the walls had darkened and did not give off much light unless the sunlight lay on it. Once there had been wallpaper. It had been painted over, but under the paint outlines of flowers, leaves, birds were still visible. When in the mornings the sun did fall on part of that wall, the half-obliterated pattern showed so clearly that the mind followed suggestions of trees and a garden into a belief that the wash of light was making colour - greens, yellow, a certain shade of clear shell pink. It was not a high wall: the ceilings of the room were a comfortable height.
    As you can see, there is nothing I can think of to say about this wall that could lift it out of the commonplace. Yet, standing there and looking at it, or thinking about it while I did other things about the flat, the sense and feel of it always in my mind, was like holding an egg to one’s ear that is due to hatch. The warm, smooth shape on one’s palm is throbbing. Behind the fragile lime which, although it can be crushed between two fingers, is inviolable because of the necessities of the chick’s time, the precise and accurate time it needs to get itself out of the dark prison, it is as if a weight redistributes itself, as when a child shifts position in the womb. There is the faintest jar. Another. The chick, head under its wing, is pecking its way out, and already the minutest fragments of lime are collecting on the shell where in a moment the first black starry hole will appear. I even found I was putting my ear to the wall, as one would to a fertile egg, listening, waiting. Not for the sounds of Mrs White’s, or the Professor’s, movements. They might have just gone out or just come in; the ordinary sounds of the corridor might in fact be there. No, what I was hearing was from somewhere else. Yet they were ordinary sounds in themselves: furniture being shifted; voices, but from very far off; a child crying. Nothing clear. But they were familiar, I had been hearing them all my life.
    One morning I stood with my after-breakfast cigarette -I allowed myself this one real cigarette a day - and through clouds of blue coiling smoke looked at how the yellowness of the sun stretched in a foreshortened oblong, making the wall itself seem higher in the middle than at its ends. I looked at the glow and the pulse of the yellow, looked as if I were listening, thinking how, as the seasons changed, so did the shape and extent and position of this patch of morning light - and then I was through the wall and I knew what was there. I did not at that first time achieve much more than that there were a set of rooms. The rooms were disused, had been for some time. Years, perhaps. There was no furniture. Paint had flaked off the wall in places and lay in tiny shards on the floorboards with scraps of paper and dead flies and dust. I did not go in, but stood there on the margin between the two worlds, my familiar flat and these rooms which had been quietly waiting there all this time. I stood and looked, feeding with my eyes. I felt the most vivid expectancy, a longing: this place held what I needed, knew was there, had been waiting for - oh yes, all my life, all my life. I knew this place, recognized it, and before I had actually absorbed the information through my eyes that the walls were much higher than mine, there were many windows and doors, and that it was a large, light, airy, delightful flat, or house. In a further room I glimpsed a painter’s ladder; and then, just as the sunlight faded out on my wall when a cloud absorbed the sun. I saw someone in white painter’s overalls lifting a roller to lay white paint over the faded and stained surface.
    I forgot this occurrence. I went on with the little routines of my life, conscious of the life behind the wall, but not remembering my visit there. It was not until a few days later that I again